Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(57)
“No,” he said.
Her lips lingered for a beat on his cheek. “Now you have.”
Then she began to talk, her words coming fast, as if they’d been dammed up. She said she moved here from Wisconsin. Or maybe moved was the wrong word. She came here from Wisconsin. And how, growing up, for the longest time, that was all she wanted, to get out, away from the snow and boredom, off on her own for the first time. But now she wishes she hadn’t gotten her wish after all.
She went quiet then and he supposed he ought to say something. “Isn’t that how it always works? In the stories about genies, people end up screwing themselves up with all their wishing.”
She nodded. “It’s better not to wish.”
They stood there, in the middle of the woods, under a sky simmering with clouds, half looking at each other. He kicked at a buried rock that coughed out of the frozen ground. It sparkled with quartz. His father knew everything there was to know about rocks, minerals, and the two of them used to go hounding on the weekends, the bed of the truck full of shovels and picks. On their front porch he kept a geode the size of a child’s skull, carved open to reveal a violet crystal core. Sometimes they would visit old hardrock mines in California, and when they moved through the tunnels framed with old timbers, his father would tell him about silver. It is designated by the chemical symbol Ag, for argentum, Latin for shining. It has the highest electrical and thermal conductivity of any metal. The father of medicine, Hippocrates, believed that it had medical abilities, the power to heal, to fight infection and disease, and it was used widely in medicines and ointments during the world wars—and now most famously in Volpexx. When his father held a flashlight to a vein of silver, it shimmered like an underground river.
When Patrick thinks about all the years those minerals were rolled and grinded and baked by the earth, the precious veins hidden away by a hard ugly shell, until one day along comes somebody with a pile of dynamite to ravage a mountainside and reveal its glimmering guts—he thinks maybe that was what the girl, Claire, had done. Cracked him wide open.
He is not sure why he wakes up. But when his dreams blur away he discovers he is sitting upright in bed. Still fully clothed. His laptop in sleep mode beside him. The light of a streetlamp pours through the venetian blinds and decorates the wall with shadowed bars.
And then he hears it. A quiet padding and scratching in the hallway. His door is closed, but beyond it, he is certain he can distinguish the sound of something trying not to make a sound. He swings his legs out of his bed. He cringes when the box spring creaks. He creeps forward, depressing his weight slowly. He brings his ear close to the door and tries to open it up to accept every sound in the world. In the distance a train rattles along to some midnight destination. A long, lonely whistle cries out—the noise hushed by the snow but still loud enough to eat up anything he might have heard in the hallway. He waits for it to pass—the seconds dragging on—and then it is gone, a fading grumble.
The loaded silence of the house takes over. And there it is again, the sound. Click-click-click. Like someone teasing chalk across a chalkboard. Close. Right outside. The knob does not move, but the door clatters softly in its frame, barely displaced, the way it would if a window opened or someone braced a hand against it.
He keeps a baseball bat beneath his bed. He can’t understand why he didn’t grab it on his way across the room. He feels naked and small. He raises his trembling hand and lays it flat against the wood, not pushing back, not yet, but ready if the door bursts inward. Two inches of wood, not even, the door hollow core. On the other side of it, he imagines a shadow figure mirroring his own, its arm also outstretched, its mouth tusked with teeth.
His mind flips through a Rolodex of possibilities. It could be Claire’s hard-faced aunt, convinced he would expose them. Could be Malerie, her eyes raccooned by mascara, gone all Fatal Attraction on him with a butcher knife in her hand. Could be some lycan, connected to the cell that took down the planes, come to finish him off. Or it could be nothing. It could be he is imagining things.
He waits for a long time, so long he fades in and out of sleep, so long he can’t be sure he ever heard anything, before his free hand rises to the knob and depresses the spring lock. The noise is a startlingly loud snap, the tumblers falling into place like the hammer of a gun.
Whatever is on the other side of his door lurches back. He hears, moving across the landing and then dropping quickly down the stairs, what must be claws click-click-click-clicking their way to the entryway, where the hardwood turns to tile, the noise changing its timbre then, louder, more echoey.
His phone is on the night table—and he grabs it and nearly powers it on to call the cops. He could call them and he could stay here, stay safe—the door locked, his back against the wall. He shoves the handheld in his pocket instead. No more hiding. Not with his mother downstairs. He retrieves the baseball bat and strangles his hands around the grip and swings open the door and steps into the dark throat of the hallway.
Chapter 23
OVER THE CASCADES rolls a bruise-black cloud bank. From it, snow falls. Big flakes. It clings to Claire’s hair, her clothes, fills an outstretched palm when she steps outside, early this morning, for a walk.
Miriam is sleeping off a hangover. Sometimes her aunt seems like an alien, cold and unfamiliar with human emotion, but every now and then, she’ll do something that surprises Claire. Pour some tea and say, in a Cockney accent, “You want a little sugar with that, guvnah?” Or snort out a laugh when paging through a novel. Or go silent and drink whiskey and lock herself away in her room. From behind the door Claire will discern a high, keening sound and the occasional sniff that sounds like a tissue tugged from a box.