Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(40)

The headlights illuminate a modest cabin, and parked next to it, a black Ramcharger. They roll to a stop. When a bright white light explodes from the cabin, Claire feels a flare in her chest, believing it to be a porch lamp, someone welcoming them. Then she realizes what it is, a motion detector, and feels instead like an intruder.

“This isn’t your house,” the boy says.

“No.”

“But you know who lives here?”

“Yes,” she says, and then, “No.”

The heater wheezes. She unclips her seat belt.

“Do you want me to come with you?” the boy says and she says no and he says, “I’ll wait and make sure somebody answers.”

“Don’t worry. Somebody’s home.” And indeed, she feels something, as though she has come upon a place where deer slept in the woods, the flattened grass still warm. Someone is here, if not in the cabin, then nearby.

She swings open her door and shoulders her backpack. She needs the boy to leave, to forget about her. She supposes she shouldn’t have shared the address with him—not knowing what kind of trouble her aunt might be in—just as she shouldn’t have approached the open door of the semi. She needs to be more careful. She has lost her trust in the world. There are too many monsters. “You can go now.”

“Just knock and—”

“Go.” The word comes out more forcefully than she intended, and the boy’s face tightens with concern. It occurs to her that he is kind and handsome, that this sort of thing used to matter to her. “Thank you,” she says. “But I’m fine.”

He stares at her another moment, then nods, but instead of driving off he retrieves a notebook from the backseat and a pen from his pocket. He scrawls his name and phone number on a piece of paper he rips out and hands to her. “Just in case.”

She scrunches it into her pocket, and when his hand rises to the gearshift she closes the door on him. The Jeep swings around and putters down the driveway, soon lost from sight except as a ghostly sphere of light floating through the trees.

Her mind feels unnervingly heightened. It is the moon, she suspects, the moon and the attack and the chance that she has finally made it, that she will soon be safe. She shivers not from the cold but from nerves. Anyone else, she supposes, would be in shock right now. She is beyond shock.

A gravel path is the only thing that separates her from the cabin. The longer she looks at it, the longer it seems to grow, taunting her, daring her forward. She squints into the harsh light of the motion detector mounted at the peak of the roof. If the porch beneath it was brightly lit, then maybe she would feel a greater sense of urgency, but the windows are dark, meaning no one is home or someone is sleeping, maybe her aunt or maybe not, and if not, then what? She will have no one; she will be nowhere. She has no defense against these thoughts that flit through her mind like ragged-winged moths.

She tries to command her feet to move—to get it over with already—and at first her body falters, not listening to her. She leans forward and that does it, the weight pulling her onward, one step and then another. Her shadow rolls alongside her, a small black ball, maybe all that remains of the old Claire shackled to her. She crunches down the path and climbs the front porch and knocks at the front door. And waits. She hears no footsteps inside and no crickets in the forest, only the hush of a breeze that carries the smell of snow down from the mountains.

Again she raps her knuckles against the door, more insistent this time, until her knuckles feel like they might split. Someone is here—someone has to be here. She feels it. “Hello,” she says.

From behind her comes a voice: “I’m right here, Claire.”





Chapter 15



AUGUSTUS NURSES CHASE through the next few weeks. The living room becomes a makeshift hospital. An air mattress replaces the bloodstained tarp. He smears disinfectant and changes bandages. He draws a warm bath and seasons it with alcohol and tincture of iodine. He buys OxyContin off one of his neighbors, a doctor and campaign donor, and dopes away the pain with 160 mg doses. He serves Chase Gatorade to get his electrolytes up, brings him platters of eggs and toast when he has an appetite. All the while Augustus wears a mask, goggles, and latex gloves. Every day he disposes of the black plastic garbage bag that grows big bellied with soiled bandages and washcloths and latex gloves he peels off as carefully as if they were a diseased condom.

He tells the staff, the reporters, that Chase is at a strategy retreat. When they ask if the rumors are true, if he has taken ill, Augustus laughs and says, “He’s, as always, the picture of health.”

When Chase sleeps—and he sleeps often, sometimes sixteen hours a day—Augustus sits at the kitchen table with his laptop open, a pen and yellow legal tablet arranged next to it. He plugs into Google different word combinations involving lycans, lobos, prions. He knows he ought to know more, but as with AIDS, the disease feels so other that he has learned only to fear it in the abstract. Here are some of the things he discovers:

The earliest documentation of a lycan can be found in the cave systems of Revsvika, on the island of Moskenes?y, Lofoten. You must worm through a tunnel only a few feet wide until you come to an open cavern full of shamanistic pictographs, one of them a man with the head of a wolf. His hands—with long claws in place of fingers—are held above his head as if in benediction. And at his feet lies the carcass of what appears to be a sheep. Carbon dating estimates the drawing as seventh century.