Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(66)

Before Patrick can respond, Max snaps on the radio. Nobody talks, not that they could, the speakers blasting some punk band called Slovak, the electric guitar sounding like knives on knives, the words garbled into screaming that makes Patrick’s ears feel as though they might bleed. At one point he asks if they can turn it down a little.

“Max?” he says. “Max?”

Nothing. The other Americans stare straight ahead as if so intent on the music blasting from the stereo they do not recognize his voice. Not for the first time, he wonders what he is doing in their company.

They follow paved roads that branch off into cinder and dirt slippery with snow. They drive past houses and single-wides that give way to timber broken up by five-acre clear-cuts. They pass logging trucks, the trees in their beds whittled down to pencils. The Forest Service road they follow angles steeply upward, deeply rutted and choked with weeds, the trees growing closer, the braches occasionally reaching out like icy claws to screech on the windshield until finally they come to a place where a landslide washes out the road and they park beside the tide of boulders and frozen mud.

“Here we are,” Max says and kills the ignition.



*



A few years ago, at her friend Stacey’s, Claire was sunbathing in the backyard when a shadow fell across her—she felt the cool of it like a wet towel—and she opened her eyes to find Stacey’s younger brother hovering over them with an air rifle in one hand and a rabbit in the other. He had killed it in the woods near the house. He flopped its body at the girls and they said gross and threatened to rip out his hair and paint his toenails if he kept bothering them. And then something came over Claire—she wasn’t sure what—and she stole the air rifle from his hands. There was a robin singing in a nearby tree and she stalked toward it, wearing her purple bikini, rifle at her shoulder. She fired. There was a snap sound. The robin dropped from the tree and lay still. Stacey’s brother whooped, but she was quiet when she crouched by the bird and scooped it up. It weighed nothing. Its eyes were glassy—its beak swelling with a bubble of blood. She had never felt so horrible in her life and swore she would never kill anything again—that is, until later that afternoon, when she ate a steak her father had grilled. But still, she felt horrible and preferred not to think about killing as a part of life.

Yet here she is, trying to decide how best to kill Puck—or whoever comes along first; she isn’t picky—and all the different ways she might escape. She needs to stay sharp. She needs to be ready, as Miriam taught her.

So she does as Miriam taught her and transforms. Lets the wolf turn over inside her, at first to test her strength, to see if she can snap the chain, and then to pass the time. She isn’t sure how much noise she makes—she isn’t sure how she gets from one side of the cave to the other—she isn’t sure how her clothes tear or a gash appears in her forehead. Whenever she settles down—when her heartbeat slows and her breathing calms and her body resumes its original form—her memory of the past few minutes is like a cloudy dream.

Her ankles bleed from yanking at the cuffs. But the pain doesn’t bother her. If there is anything the past few months have taught her, it is that the familiarity of pain makes it easier to manage, her body like one big nerve deadened by affliction.

Her senses grow heightened. She notices the whisper of a bat’s wing, the faraway char of meat cooking, the small shifts in the air as the cave breathes. She knows someone is coming—like an image glimpsed in a lamplit window or a conversation overheard in the buzz of a bar—she knows this long before she hears the footsteps in the sand. Soon he will turn the corner. Soon he will be within reach. If it is Puck, and if he comes close enough, she will go for his neck and his eyes. She will kill him.



*



It takes Patrick time to make sense of what he sees. The circumference of strewn carcass—the hair and the blood and the bone—reaches fifteen feet across. And then he recognizes the head of a doe, still attached to the spine, a little ways off. A beetle lumbers out of its mouth and creeps along its snout to sample the black pool of its eye.

He is alone. Ten minutes ago, he and the others split up, stalking different sections of the woods. It wasn’t long before their footsteps fell away. Now the wind rises and a drift of ice-polished leaves twirls up into a small cyclone before falling apart with a rattle. There are piles of snow here and there, but much of it has melted and frozen again. He isn’t sure whether he should call out or not, tell the others to come see. But what would a dead deer prove? A cougar could have done this as well as a lycan.

His phone buzzes and he pulls it out, surprised he gets service this far from town. The message, from Malerie, reads, “I was protecting you. But I guess you don’t need my protection.”

He has no idea what to make of this and considers ignoring her altogether but feels enough concern to fire off a question mark in response. Before he can think any further, he hears a thrashing, faint and far ahead, something pressing through the undergrowth. He clicks off the safety of his rifle and starts forward, taking care not to step on a stick or crunch through an ice puddle or kick through a bush. After a minute the sound dies away and he pauses, cocking his head until he hears it again, tracking it. In this stop-and-go manner he proceeds for a good five minutes.

He tries to steady his breathing. It could be one of the Americans after all. It could be anyone, anything. He can feel his heartbeat in his fingertips. He imagines the trees parting like a curtain to reveal the lycan from the plane, crouched on a stump like a gargoyle, with a grin full of far too many teeth. Patrick wonders what chance he will stand this time, with no body to drape over him, nowhere to hide. He of course wishes he could run as fast as his legs will carry him, until the forest is a brown blur, back to the truck. But every time he feels rooted in place, ready to turn and flee, he thinks of his father, who would not run.