Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(51)

She can’t help but think, when she turns to run, that she would like to stay. For once she would like to be the one to watch.





Chapter 19



SNOW DUSTS THE CLEARING. Their footsteps track a dark stream through it. A minute ago, Miriam led Claire from the cabin, telling her nothing except to strip, and then motioning with her hand to follow. The sun glows through the clouds like a hazy specter but offers no warmth, and when they stand there, Miriam seeming to stare into her, Claire begins to shiver, naked except for her underwear.

Finally Miriam says, “Enough bullshit. It’s time.”

“I don’t know.”

“Think of the Tall Man. Think of what he did to your parents.”

Claire’s throat tightens. “Don’t.”

Her voice is low and slow, almost a chant. “Think of the bullets cutting through their flesh. Think of them trying to cry out. Think of the footsteps pursuing you. Think about after. After you left. The breath of those men rasping through your house, filling it up. Think of their hands ripping open drawers, digging through them.”

“Stop.” She feels something deep inside her—maybe fear or fury—springing open like a black umbrella. Tears make icy trails down her cheeks.

“Go back to that night.”

The clouds hang low, a dark ceiling that seems to press downward as if it might collapse under the weight of the sun. Her body no longer shivers—it tremors. She can hear the scuff of her feet shifting beneath her.

“Go back to that night. Instead of running, I want you to fight. I want you to kill those men.”

The new Claire likes this idea very much. She knows that if one of those men—in their black body armor—were before her now, she would, without hesitation, claw the skin from his face, revealing a red skull with bulging eyeballs and a tongue that trembles when it screams. She imagines the warm blood gushing when she brings her mouth to his soft white belly, hollowing him out.

And then, as if a key has toothed its way past the rusted tumblers and sprung a stubborn lock, she gives in. She begins to transform.

“Good,” Miriam says, but her voice sounds far away.

It is different this time. She doesn’t resist the feeling, doesn’t push back. She summons it and lets it grip her completely. Her heartbeat spikes with the rush of adrenaline. Her skin goes warm and prickles with hair. Her bones make noises not unlike a series of wet gasps. When her gums recede, she tastes the coppery blood flooding her mouth. For the briefest moment the sun breaks through the clouds and her shadow appears suddenly before her, tethered to her feet and shifting like a tree in a hard wind.

She has more energy sizzling through her than her body can contain. And a door seems to have swung open in her mind to allow everything in at once. A vole scurries through the underbrush. An owl breaks a bone with its beak. Sagebrush rattles against the breeze. She hears and smells and sees it all. It is as if, up to this point, her brain was muffled, everything experienced through a filter of wet wool. And now so many senses emerge from the blur. She has changed—she has opened up and tuned in to some dead transmission that has suddenly buzzed to life inside her and allowed in all the richness of the world.

It is then that she hears the car engine.

In the near distance, maybe a quarter mile away, a faint rumble. When the vehicle turns down their driveway, the gravel rattling its undercarriage, she jerks around and tears off in the direction of it—driven by some animal impulse that responds to trespass. It is the Tall Man, she is certain. Miriam wanted her to fight. Miriam wanted her to kill. And now Miriam is going to get her wish.

Claire doesn’t hear, or doesn’t care to hear, her aunt yelling “No!” behind her.



*



Patrick drives the road that winds out of La Pine and toward the Cascades, feeling sweet abandon, the best kind of risk. He saved her. He keeps going back to that. He saved her, and when you save somebody that means your life and hers are irrevocably linked. The feeling inside him must be similar to what a parent feels, a fawning sense of creation, ownership.

He brakes, signals, steers down the rutted driveway, bumping along the washboard, following the lines of the ponderosa pines. Fifty yards in, a deer bounds in front of him, so fast his foot hasn’t even reached the brake before it is gone, diving into the woods, its raised tail a white flash. He skids to a stop just as two more follow, slower, trotting, their heads low, their hooves tocking the gravel. He laughs with relief.

The laugh is cut short when he catches a glimpse of movement out his driver’s-side window and the Jeep lurches. He assumes he isn’t so lucky after all—another deer has come vaulting out of the woods and struck him.

Then the nylon shell rips open. The fog of his breath is sucked away by the breeze rushing freely into the Jeep. He looks up and there she is. He knows her instantly, despite her changed appearance, like someone recognized through a Halloween mask. The bloodshot eyes and bleeding mouth. A lycan.

He feels a jolt of fear, as if run through with electricity, when she reaches for him, snatches his shoulder. He barely feels her claws pierce his skin, too overwhelmed by the sight of her, as if he has somehow fallen back in time, back into his hiding place on the plane, only this time the lycan has found him. This time he will be as dead as everyone else.

He cannot breathe. He cannot move. She can do with him what she will. Her arm pulls back, he assumes for a slash, but no, she is retreating from him, dropping from the Jeep, stumbling away, breathing heavily and observing him with eyes that glow with recognition. She is crying. He isn’t sure why, maybe as a side effect of transforming, but she is crying and her tears are red and trailing down her face.