Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(52)

She turns away from him and launches herself into the woods and vanishes from sight.

He takes the first sucking breath he might have taken in a minute. His head buzzes with blood and his hand is over his heart and his foot is jammed against the brake so hard his leg is cramping up.

Before he can decide whether to knock the gearshift into park or reverse, the door swings open. He is staring into the muzzle of a pistol. His eyes have trouble focusing on the woman beyond it, her face as narrow as a blade. “Kill the ignition and get on the ground,” she says.



Earlier that day, he stood in his room, his closet door hanging ajar. In his hand was the T-shirt. The one he was wearing that day on the plane. A continent of blood dried across it. They cut it off him and tossed it in a plastic biohazard bag that he later swiped on impulse and hid away. He doesn’t know why. Maybe the same thing that compels people to keep a lost tooth in an envelope or an appendix in a glass jar. It seemed important. He held the shirt up, stiff and rust colored, like a second skin he had outgrown. It smelled like metal and sharpened his breathing and made him feel stabbed through with shame. He balled it up, bits of blood flaking off it, and shoved it into the back corner of his closet and covered it with a magazine.

Now he has another shirt to add to the collection, its fabric ripped and spotted red along his left shoulder. A smear of dirt runs along the belly from when the woman shoved him and he stumbled and fell and caught himself with an outstretched hand.

“Why did you come back? What are you doing here?” she says and kicks him in the hip. “Speak.”

Pricks of pain bother his shoulder when he pushes himself into a seated position. The woman is standing over him with the pistol an inch from his eye, and then closer still, so that his vision waters and he can smell the gun oil. His voice comes out strangled when he says he wanted to check on her, that’s all, to see if she was all right.

She cocks her head, searching his face. “Bad choice.” She motions with the gun, tells him to get up, walk ahead of her. With the Jeep ticking behind them, they start off in the direction of the cabin. He puts his hands in his pockets and she says, no, keep them out and keep walking. A cold wind blows and a gray dust devil rises from the gravel and twists its way toward him and batters him with its grit.



The cabin, smaller than he remembers it, raised foundation, railed-in porch. The woman tells him to open the door and he does and a slab of light falls across the floor, punched through with his shadow, and then the woman’s, when she comes up behind him and nudges him forward, the pistol biting his spine.

The girl is waiting for him. The girl, no longer transformed. Lights off, curled up on the couch, her posture hunched over, as though she has a hook inside her. She wears a gray hooded sweatshirt and black sweatpants. Her sandy hair is chopped short now, and though he doesn’t like that look on everybody, he likes it on her. Her nose and cheeks are dusted with freckles that get lost in the fresh bruises darkening her face—the effect of transforming. She sucks at her mouth and runs a tongue along her teeth. A dime of blood has dried beneath her lips and she knuckles it away.

“It hurts,” she says to the woman.

“Get used to it.”

The air smells stale. Dust and grease and body odor. The woman snaps on a lamp and splashes the room with light, and it is then that he notices the boarded-up windows, making the small room seem even smaller, a couch, a chair, a coffee table, a bureau, and barely space for their three bodies. The woman closes the door behind them, twists the deadbolt into place. The high ceiling with exposed rafters is the only thing that fights the claustrophobia.

The girl looks at him for the first time since he entered the cabin, her eyes red puddles. “Why did you come back?”

“I wanted to see you.”

A small smile dies as soon as it forms. “You shouldn’t have.”

The woman, still behind him, says, “I told you you were stupid to bring him here.”

“Too late for that.”

He feels the gun at his ear. It seems to give off its own noise, an undersound, like a struck tuning fork. “But not too late to put a bullet in his head.”



Some silent message seems to pass between the girl and the woman. They leave him in the living room—the woman first patting him down, telling him he cannot run fast enough to escape her, so don’t bother—and retreat to the back of the cabin, thunking closed a door behind them.

He can hear their voices snapping back and forth, but not what they say. His initial fear has faded, replaced by a sickening confusion. She is a lycan. She scratched him, but he thinks—he hopes—the disease spreads only through blood, through sex.

She is what his father fights. She is what Max rails against. She is what brought down three planes and their passengers. The face of the plague, the creature made monstrous in so many novels and films and cop dramas and comic books—

But now she’s just a girl with choppy hair, wearing a sweatshirt and sweatpants, who walks past him, opens the door, and says, “Come on.” When he doesn’t follow, she stops there, hand on the knob, framed in a rectangle of daylight, and looks back at him. “Come on already.”

They walk from the cabin and into the dark breadth of trees. The ground is dusted with snow. She doesn’t look back at him—she just assumes he will follow—and he does. He glances over his shoulder, just before the cabin disappears from sight, and sees the woman standing on the porch, watching them go.