Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(61)
She can see that the ribbed lava tube reaches for twenty yards before elbowing to the left. She guesses she is deep underground—the air is still and musty, smelling of mud and sulfur—in one chamber of many that network the ground.
She has called out for help a few times before with no response. But this time, after fifteen minutes, someone comes. She hears first his whistle. A low-noted song that comes from a long way off and that she does not recognize until the distance closes. “All around the mulberry bush, the monkey chased the weasel.” The slowness of the song is maddening. It reverberates with an eerie echo, sounding like many more than one whistler coming toward her. “The monkey thought ’twas all in good fun.” And with that he steps into view, his body slowly bending around the corner when he whistles the final notes. “Pop goes the weasel.”
His hair is the color of electricity. That’s the first thing she notices. The way it glows weirdly in the light thrown by the strand of LEDs. And then his size, as small and muscular as a gymnast. He wears black boots and black jeans and a black leather jacket. Now in the room with her, he has his hands in his pockets and kicks his way through the sand, kicking a small wave onto her when he comes to a stop a few feet away.
“Hello, little missus,” he says, his voice high and vaguely accented, maybe British.
“Little,” she says. “Look who’s talking.”
He smiles without humor. “Got a mouth on you, do you? Just like your bitch of an aunt.” He takes his right hand out of his pocket. It is a small hand, made even smaller by his missing two fingers, the ring and pinky, the place where they ought to be mucked over with scar tissue. But it grows bigger a moment later when it curls into a fist and comes speeding toward her, filling her vision.
She hears a muffled thud and realizes it is her head impacting the cave wall.
When she comes to, her nose is throbbing and swollen, crusted with blood. She cannot breathe through it. She is on the floor, her head pillowed by the sand that crumbles off her cheek when she raises her head to observe the three men standing nearby.
There is the man who hit her—who seems more sprite than man, someone out of a fairy tale—someone you’d come across on a dark forest path who would try to trick you or knife you. And there, next to him, the man who stole her away. The giant. As unreasonably wide as he is tall, his head nearly touching the cave’s ceiling. Long red hair, long red beard obscuring what little face she could see, two small eyes that seemed to look nowhere and everywhere. A black leather duster flaps loosely around him like a set of baggy bat wings. Hands that could palm and crush a basketball. She knows their strength from when they clamped hold of her, dragged a bag over her head, tossed her over his shoulder, where she spent the better part of a day jostling through the woods.
The third man she recognizes but at first cannot place. He has a broad face with a pile of brown curls surrounding it. His cheeks are dirtied with week-old whiskers. He wears jeans and a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, his arms tattooed with running wolves whose bodies melt into each other in a surging wave of hair and paws and fangs. He is pacing, raking a hand through his hair. “You’re out of control.”
Peroxide Hair has his arms crossed. His voice is high and reedy when he says, “Some say the same of you.”
Then the man with the sleeve tats says something Claire doesn’t understand, something about a hot springs, about the foolishness and impulsiveness of his actions, about how he has put everyone at risk. Then his eyes fall on her. “Don’t touch her.”
“Not even for a squeeze? A peek at her little cunnie?”
And now she places the man with the tattoos, the brooding photo on the back of the book, The Revolution. Jeremy. Miriam’s husband. Her uncle. His eyes are wide with barely controlled rage. “Don’t touch her, Puck.”
“Supposing I do?”
“I’ll touch you back.” He cocks his arm and the wolves inked there seem to crouch, readying to leap.
The giant—so still until now, seeming a part of the cave, a stalagmite mounded over thousands of years of dripping from some poisonous source—comes alive and steps between Puck and Jeremy—her uncle? can she really think of him like that?—who appears suddenly so small.
*
In that moment, halfway down the basement steps and ready to bolt back up them, Patrick did not know that sixteen years ago, a homeless man crashed onto the trail and tackled and bit his mother as she was hiking John Muir Woods—a man who turned out to be an unmedicated lycan—the sort of encounter that these days happened so rarely, like a grizzly attack, but when it did happen ended up highlighted in the news and played into everyone’s worst fears and set off two days’ worth of television interviews and newspaper editorials about stricter regulation and enforcement.
Nor did Patrick know that his parents divorced because of it, that her infection became more divisive to their marriage than politics or religion, that Volpexx spiraled her into a gray-skinned, sour-stomach depression, that she once swept Patrick’s cereal bowl off the table and hurled his milk glass against the wall because he wouldn’t stop whining, that she eventually decided life would be easier and safer for him if she just went away. But she was better now. Still infected, of course, but better mentally, able to manage her urges and transform only in contained circumstances, so that she knew it was safe for Patrick. She wouldn’t have ever let him come otherwise.