Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(62)
He did not know, either, that the man she has been seeing for the past two years is a physician, that he was infected with lobos when treating a patient who, in a fevered delirium, bit him, that his mother met him in an Internet chat room for lycan singles, that they have fallen in love and that he freed her from Volpexx by falsely reporting her blood tests.
That comes later.
After Patrick races from the house in Juniper Creek and kicks through the snowy woods and leaps into his Jeep and slams the gas and drives for hours, directionless, not going anywhere, just moving, hurrying away from what he has discovered, checking the rearview constantly as if worried what might race out of the shadows behind him, until his heart stops pounding and his balled-up muscles loosen and his eyes shutter with exhaustion and he pulls into a truck stop where sleep finally drags a black bag over his head.
After he wakes with his face against the steering wheel, after he drives home, the inside of his windshield glazed with the frost of his breath, he finds his mother waiting for him on the living room couch. She wears a sweatshirt and jeans and her face is weirdly absent of makeup, puffy and unfamiliar, splotchy with bruises.
It is a struggle to keep from shaking. “You don’t look good,” he finally says.
“That’s how I always look.” Without the makeup, she meant. Without the mask. “You don’t look so good yourself.” She tries to smile and he tries to smile back.
“I didn’t sleep much.”
“I don’t imagine you did.” Her face seems to crease and pale. She pats the cushion next to her and tells him to come, come sit, she’ll explain everything.
He skips school. It would be impossible to concentrate. It would be impossible to look anyone in the eye. It would be impossible to make his way through the swarm of bodies, to suffer through droning lectures and math quizzes and a lunchtime conversation with Max when he has lost, in the space of a few hours, all sense of who he is.
He spends the morning with his mother and the afternoon alone. He goes for a drive, and the rumble of the engine makes his entire body shake and a bitter taste fills his mouth like week-old coffee. The sun sets so early these days. In Old Mountain, in the deepening gloom, he passes a construction site for yet another new development. Trucks with generators and hydraulic lifts spotlight the frames of half-built homes and cast skeletal shadows. Everyone is working overtime, chasing the final days of November.
In the middle of town rises a cinder cone called Lava Butte. At the last minute, he yanks the wheel and heads up the road that curls around and around to the summit, because what the hell, when you needed perspective, you were supposed to go up high, right? The road hasn’t been plowed and his wheels slip and scud over the ice pack.
He parks and sits on the hood of the Jeep and watches the sun die and the moon rise and the stars blink to life. Below him the city glimmers like a pond reflecting the sky above, making this butte an island looking over the drowned.
His mother, when he asked what it felt like to transform, gave him a smile with a troubling quiver. It feels good, she said. Not the first few times. The first few times you wake up with a suck of air, naked and blue lipped and curled up in a ball and covered in bruises and scratches and blinking confusedly in the morning sun. You feel hungover, unsure of what’s happened, of where you’ve been, what you’ve done. And then—snap—a memory from the night before.
But later, when you’ve gained control, later it feels like being a child again, which is the only time you’re ever truly alive, unrestrained, driven by hunger.
Below him, in the near distance, he can see the construction site, glowing blue like an underwater city. He can hear the distant rumble of tractors and payloaders, the whine of circular saws and clatter of hammers and shouts of foremen and beep of back-up alarms. Yet another subdivision. The town looks less like itself every day. The town Max grew up in—that his father grew up in, and his grandfather before them both—is a new kind of creature that has condos in place of mills, roundabouts instead of intersections, white and Mexican and Asian and black and lycan. Everything is getting eaten up and spit out differently. Patrick sees for the first time how small Max is, how impossible his resistance to change.
Patrick isn’t much for reading, let alone the plays his English teacher is always shoving down their throats, but the last guy they read, whatever his name was, was all right. No annoying symbolism and pointed pushy message, just a bunch of smart-asses saying things that made his head spin, like: “It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.” A line he streaked a highlighter through.
His phone buzzes and he rushes to check it, hoping for a message from his father, whom he still hasn’t heard from. No luck. It’s Max.
His thumb hesitates over the phone. The wind is cold and blustery, as high up as he is, and for a moment he wonders if he’ll go spinning away, as light as a leaf. He opens the message. “Hunting season,” it reads. “Be ready at dawn. Will pick you up.”
Chapter 25
NEAL’S DAUGHTER HAS sunk unkindly into middle age. She looks as old as if not older than his wife. Her face, at one time more a fleshy moon, has grown sharply defined. She is beginning to go gray, the gray standing out so brightly against hair that is otherwise the glossy black of a gun barrel. He notices this most on weekends, the only time he is home to see her rise from bed, usually in the early afternoon, dragging herself to the kitchen to make coffee. Her eyes are dark craters. Her back hunched. Moving like a thing half-alive.