Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(36)
Whereas his father eventually put his bad grades and chemistry genius to work at Anchor Steam Brewing. He drives a Dodge Ram and an Indian motorcycle. He has a diamond-shaped scar on his forehead from when he struck an open cabinet during a Christmas party. He fell to the linoleum with a shocked look on his face and blood welling from between his fingers, one of the most terrifying moments of Patrick’s life, when for the first time he saw his father hurt and embarrassed by the group of people hovering over him.
About halfway through college—he took six years to graduate—he ran out of money and signed on with the National Guard to pay his tuition, and today he serves as a staff sergeant with the California National Guard currently stationed at Combat Outpost Tuonela in the eastern Republic. He supervises a platoon of men, twenty-five soldiers of the seven thousand deployed from California. Years ago, he served a tour—back when Patrick’s grandparents were still alive—but that was before the conflict escalated, before the marches and rock-slinging riots protesting U.S. occupation, before newspaper headlines were inked in the blood of soldiers killed in IED blasts, tooth-and-claw street battles.
His father jokes, by Skype, by email and instant message, that he didn’t have any gray hair before his unit was activated, but now it’s coming in strong. He writes that he feels like an old man among all these kids, most of them not much older than Patrick. He writes about his conflicted feelings, how he wishes he were home but how he knows they’re doing good. “It’s only a few rotten eggs over here. They get all the news. The rest of the citizens, and that’s the majority by a long shot, are happy we’re here. Remember that just because you’re lycan doesn’t mean you’re a monster. Really remember that.”
He writes that he hears small-arms fire on patrol and lycans baying outside the compound at night. He writes that a bomb exploded near the Humvee in which he was riding. The truck flipped twice, when it banked a hard right and rolled down an embankment, but somehow they got away with nothing but a few cuts and ringing ears. “Made my heart jump. Too many close calls for kids I’m responsible for. Stay safe, buddy. Love ya.”
For this he has gone on leave as an assistant brewmaster at Anchor, where he spends much of his days in white coveralls, moving among the big-bellied copper vats, the clouds of yeasty steam, checking and double-checking on fermentation, hosing down tanks, dollying barrels, jotting down temperatures and yeast-cell concentrations in a notebook, giving the occasional tour for gangs of tourists wearing fanny packs and white sneakers. His hair smells of malt. He often talks about whole grains and oaken casks and in everyday conversation uses words like hydrometer, glycol, sparge paddle.
There is so much to tell about his father, but before Patrick can piece together more than a few sentences, the door at the top of the landing creaks open and footsteps boom down the stairs and his voice dies away when he sees who it is—the redheaded girl, Malerie.
He feels, then, a hole open up in his stomach through which all his blood seems to drain.
She does not look at Patrick, not at first, but walks directly to Max and snakes an arm around his neck and kisses him loudly on the cheek. His face pinches and reddens. He shrugs off her arm and glances around, as though embarrassed by her affection. An electric guitar shrieks, the only sound in the room, until Max says to Patrick, “This is my girlfriend, Malerie.”
It is only then that she looks at him—with a blank expression—and says, “Nice to meet you.” She raises her hand in a half wave, her fingernails as red as a stop sign.
Chapter 14
CLAIRE IS HERE. It hardly seems possible, after all this time, but the sign at the side of the road reads LA PINE, POPULATION 5,799. Its letters glow with the silvery light thrown by the full moon.
She is here because of her father’s note, because an acronym on a stupid greeting card finally helped her read what he had written. She studied the constellations he sketched and jotted down the first letter of each. From this she built the words, Go to Miriam Ten Twenty Battle Creek Rd La Pine Oregon.
No wisdom beyond that. No clue as to why, out of all the people in the world, he chose his sister, a woman who is more a blank-faced mystery than an aunt, who ten years ago was excised from the family for reasons not entirely clear, who might not even be at the address listed, and even if she is, might not want anything to do with Claire.
She headed west, constantly studying her creased map, realizing sadly one afternoon that she had achieved her dream, making it more than five hundred miles from home. She caught rides with a lesbian couple driving a minivan with three pugs barking and snorting in the backseat, with a rancher with hay in his hair and heavy gloves and a tin of chewing tobacco on his dashboard. She slept on porches, in barns and sheds and campers, under pine boughs. She woke up one morning to hail and another to what sounded like hail but turned out to be a group of children clacking sticks together, pretending them into swords. “You’re dead, lycan monster,” one of them cried, slashing at his friend’s belly.
When she couldn’t bum a ride, she walked. Sometimes during the day and sometimes at night, the night so monstrously dark in the Plains, its star-sprinkled blackness broken by the occasional red halo of light emitted by towns with names like Snakebite, Elkhorn. Always the wind blew, flapping her pants, ruffling the oily strands of hair that hang from beneath her wool cap.
In a pole barn she found a workbench with a pegboard hanging from the wall behind it. Wrenches and screwdrivers and hammers and pliers surrounded two Craftsman toolboxes, one red, one black, with their lids thrown open. A set of socket wrenches. A ratchet. She picked up a few of the hammers, tested their weight, decided on a ball-peen with a rubber grip, and slid it into her backpack—and then her eyes paused on a pair of heavy-duty wire cutters.