Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(65)
“Are you?”
“We are.” Two angry red lines run from his ears to his eyes, the skin pinched by the stems of his glasses. “Because once you develop the vaccine, you will be both the governor’s benefactor and beneficiary.”
Chase has given up his search. At the edge of the woods, he leans against a tree with a glassy-eyed look and smokes a cigarette. Neal approaches him and holds up the ball and says, “Found what you were looking for,” and Chase draws on his cigarette and blinks confusedly through the smoke and then reaches out his hands, palms up, as though he hopes Neal will join him in prayer.
Chapter 26
TIME PASSES. How much, Claire doesn’t know, whether minutes or hours or days, with no light except the glow of the LED strand, no company outside of the black stone and black sand, so that she is nearly unconscious, somewhere between sleeping and waking, the cold making her body and mind numb, and even when she tries to collect her thoughts they flutter away like the bats roosting among the cracks. In the corner sits a bucket and a roll of toilet paper. Her feet remain handcuffed, but her arms are free. “I don’t want to make you miserable,” her uncle said when he snapped them into place. “But I need to know I can trust you before I take these off.” She feels no emotion, no panic or anger or fear, just blankness, when she stares at a block of basalt, at the porous holes and knuckly bumps of its black surface like a landscape of its own, like a hidden world within this world, no different from the community that exists in these lava tubes.
She isn’t sure how many lycans there are, maybe dozens, maybe more, but she understands from the electricity flowing through the tunnels and the conversations overheard and the many men who have brought her food—on a tray, no less, with a plate and a glass and silverware and a napkin, venison sausage and a beet vinaigrette salad, rice and rosemary chicken, food that could not have been cooked without a working kitchen—that this is more than a camp; it is a kind of undertown.
She wakes to Puck standing over her. “You shouldn’t be here,” she says.
“Why not?”
“Because my uncle told you not to bother me.”
“Some uncle. Handcuffs on your ankles. Nothing but a pot to piss in.”
“I never said I liked him.”
He has been smiling all along, but now the smile grows wider. He holds up his disfigured hand, the one missing its pinky and ring finger, a gummy nub of tissue. The remaining fingers carry thick yellow nails. “Compliments of your aunt. Do you want to know how it happened?” He does not wait for her response. “The slut always walks around in next to nothing. Little tank tops and such. Wanting everyone looking at her, wishing for a peek, hoping for a squeeze. So that’s what she gets. I come up behind her one day when she’s working in the kitchen, cutting some vegetables, and I give her a nice rub. Hands on her shoulders. Real friendly. Not in the least inappropriate. Just wanting to ease some tension. She’s a tense person, your aunt. And what does she do to repay my kindness? Flips around without warning, swings the knife, cuts me to the bone. I’m not one to take my punishment sitting down. We got into a bit of a row.”
She notices his crotch bulging with an erection. His eyes go someplace far away before focusing in on her once again. “I could take those cuffs off, you know? It wouldn’t be much trouble at all.” He takes a step toward her and the cave seems suddenly very small.
All the men carry walkie-talkies on their belts, and his sizzles to life then. A voice calling for him. He unclips it and says, “What?” as if the word were a curse.
There is a shipping problem. A delay. The nitro. They need his help. “Will be right there,” he says and then bites down on the antenna and stares at her.
“I’m going to tell Jeremy about this,” she says, just to say something, to stop the penetrating silence of his stare.
His teeth unclip from the antenna. “Child.” His hair is so white it might be aflame. “You seem to think he’s in charge. He would like that. He would very much like that. But he’s not, not at all. Despite the fact that he’s always rubbing it in my face what a big shit he is.”
“If he’s not in charge, then who is?”
His expression goes slack and his eyes seem to pulse, to widen. “Balor.”
*
The .30-06 was a birthday gift when Patrick turned fourteen. It was his father’s, a Mossberg. Walnut forearm, checkered stock, bluish metal, worn leather strap. Holding it, breathing in the smell of gun oil, brings him back to California. Rising well before dawn, his father opening his door, gently saying up and at ’em, a breakfast of eggs and bacon waiting at the table. Blaze-orange jackets and hats. A thermos of coffee set between them on the bench seat of the truck. The empty highway, the gravel side roads, the thick black forest into which they hiked when the horizon began to brighten pinkly with dawn.
He shipped the rifle, along with a few boxes of books and clothes, back in August. That was one of the things his father stressed, how good the hunting was up in Oregon, as though Patrick were headed off on vacation.
Now the rifle is in the bed of a Chevy Silverado and he is crushed into the club cab. There are five of them in the truck, all wearing a blend of camo and denim and blaze orange. Max drives. When they picked Patrick up, he asked where they were going and Max said, “On a wolf hunt.” He says he has a feeling about the hot springs. It’s too random of a place to attack otherwise. Why not a mall or a park or a church service? He figures some lycans came across the bathers by accident, saw an opportunity. They’re in, they’re out, just as the snow starts falling to cover their tracks, and a few days later, when the bodies are discovered, they’re holed up, nowhere to be found.