Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(48)

And there was the black-and-white photo of her father, standing before the Chicago federal courthouse, fully transformed, his arms outstretched and his head thrown back in lamentation, standing on a stage before hundreds of people pumping their fists in the air. In his claw of a hand he clutched a burning American flag.

It was beyond surreal, the equivalent of an adult looking up to see Santa and his reindeer track their way across a winter sky; terrifying, almost comical if not for the severe expression on Miriam’s face when Claire dropped the book to her lap and said, “This is hard to process.” The book was called The Revolution and its cover bore the image of a man casting a wolf’s shadow. She flipped it over to study the photo on its back cover. A curly-haired man glowered back at her. “Who wrote this anyway?”

“Jeremy Saber. My husband,” Miriam said before departing the room and leaving Claire with a mouthful of unanswered questions.

And now Miriam is correcting her stance, educating her in the design and temperament of each weapon, the .357 Smith & Wesson, the Browning pump-action. Another hour and her arm is trembling and her ears are throbbing. She levers the final smoking cartridge and when she lowers the shotgun, the pine tree seems to mimic her, groaning and splintering and slowly bowing until it rests on its side.

“Wow,” Claire says. “I am such a badass now.”

“Not really.”

“Look at that tree! I destroyed it.”

“A tree doesn’t move. A tree doesn’t fight back.”

Claire rolls her eyes.

Miriam studies her a moment, hardening her gaze; then—before Claire can register what is happening—her aunt crouches, snaps up a Glock, rolls forward, and blasts three pinecones off the branches of three different trees. Then she brings the pistol to her mouth and sucks the smoke rising from the muzzle and blows it in Claire’s face.

Claire stands in stunned silence, then gives a hard swallow. “How do you do that?”

“Do what?”

“React like that? Like you see something coming before anybody else can?”

“How many times have you changed?”

“Maybe ten.” Exactly nine.

“In your life?” Miriam shows her teeth when she says this.

“I don’t like how it feels.”

“Claire.” She says the word like a curse. Her mouth quivers as though too full of words ready to come spilling out. But she doesn’t say anything more. She marches into the cabin and closes herself away in her room. Thirty minutes later, her door jars open and she grabs Claire by the forearm with enough force to leave a bruise and says, “You are going to learn.”



*



Patrick can’t get her out of his head, the girl from the other night. The girl he saved. He saved her. It feels good to think about her that way. After the whole world wanted to call him a hero—for doing nothing, for hiding while everyone on board the plane was ripped to pieces—he cherishes the possibility that he might be capable of something truly good, that the words written about him in articles and spoken to him by reporters might be genuine even if misplaced.

Every time the thought or sight of Malerie makes him feel wrong, his mind circles back to the girl for whom he did something unequivocally right. And every time his phone buzzes, he expects it to be her, her voice hesitant but warm. “I wanted to thank you again,” she would say, and he would ask her if she wanted to meet up and she would say yes and he would buy her coffee and they would sit by the sun-soaked window and when their feet touched beneath the table by accident they would smile and make eyes at each other through the steam rising from each of their cups brought simultaneously to their mouths for a taste.

He is thinking about her now—even as Malerie stands before him in Max’s basement.

She says it was easy. No trouble at all.

She went to work like always—through the glass-doored entry, between the cash registers, past the photo department, to the office door that opened into a room lit with harsh fluorescent light. She punched her three-digit code into the clock and tossed her purse in her locker and changed into the shapeless dark blue scrubs she hates to wear. Lands’ End. The seams irritate her skin and the sizing is all jacked up so they don’t fit right. Anyway. She has three primary functions as a pharmacy tech—functions, that’s her boss’s language. She fills or she works the drop-off or pickup window.

Filling is boring. She hates filling. She rips the patient leaflets off the printer, checks the promised times to make sure they’re in order, and fills, fills, fills, the pills clattering like hail into their containers, the containers then slipped into plastic totes, the totes dropped on a conveyor belt where the pharmacists can grab them and verify the product.

Max tells her to get on with it, they don’t have all night.

Tonight is Halloween and in the basement everyone is dressed in too-big cammies bought from the army surplus—all except for Malerie, who wears a devil costume, plastic horns and a red Lycra bodysuit from which a barbed tail dangles. She stands before them, her posture bent at the hip. In her hand, a small piece of lined notebook paper with handwriting crisscrossing it. Patrick sits crushed on the couch between Max and a hulking guy named Cash who smells like beef jerky.

Malerie rolls her eyes at Max and continues her story. All this week she’s been filling, which she hates, because you don’t get to talk to anyone. She likes old people and old people like her. They’re sweet. That’s why she was happy to get bumped to the drop-off window. So she could talk to people—and do the job Max asked her to do. The job that, by the way, could easily get her ass fired. Not that she wasn’t willing to stick her neck out. “Anything for Max,” she says, her eyes on Patrick.