Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(67)

The sound, he realizes, has not moved. It comes from roughly the same place—now thirty paces ahead, where the ground angles downward into a coulee. He hears the faint trickle of water, and—interrupting it—a splash.

He reaches the lip of the coulee, where the land drops and the trees angle upward like arms crooked at the elbow. He sees, at the bottom of it, through a willow cluster, in the spring-fed stream, the mule deer. Two big bucks facing off.

He lifts the rifle and glasses them with his scope. He tries to count their points and cannot, their crowns tangled together in combat. The larger of the two weeps blood from where a tine punctured its eye. A red trail oozes from its ear—and several more from its neck—where it has been speared. The animals are silent except for the occasional snort, the splash of a hoof when they redistribute their weight, whip their heads around. The water, as dark as blackberry wine, rushes along beneath them, but mostly they are still, seeming to rest against each other. Patrick then realizes their antlers are locked, so tightly entwined they cannot release.

His finger slides off the guard and caresses the trigger as he imagines the racks mounted in his bedroom. He can see them so clearly, it is as though they are already there, anchored above his bed and casting their shadows like forking branches on the wall when he walks in and flips on the light.

He fires. The larger deer collapses. The creek runs over its body like a boulder and makes a foaming collar around its raised neck. Their crowns remain locked and the smaller of the bucks stands frozen in place with its head bowed toward the river as if for an endless drink.

His handheld buzzes. The deer isn’t going anywhere, so he checks the message before reloading. Malerie again. “I know about your mother,” she writes, “and now Max does 2.”

He nearly drops the phone, forgetting all about the woods and the deer and everything else, all his attention crushed down to a single sentence that makes his chest seem to collapse so that he can barely draw a breath, when his mind makes a swift series of calculations—Malerie, Walgreens, the list of names—and still he doesn’t really understand what this means until he looks up and sees Max standing on the other side of the coulee, rifle in hand, looking at him.



*



Claire pretends to sleep. She hears the footsteps grow near, hears breathing. She imagines Puck standing there, his hair fluorescent, watching her, maybe toying with his belt or zipper. Her blood goes hot, that catch-flame feeling that precedes transformation. She opens her eyes slightly, just enough to spy through her lashes, and discerns a shadow far larger than she expected. She flinches—sure that the giant is leaning over her, the black flaps of his leather duster opening, spreading as wide as buzzards’ wings—ready to cry out.

But it is only her uncle. He holds up his hands as if she were the threat. “Hey, hey,” he says. “It’s all right.” His face is broad and kind, haloed by thick brown curls, and though she wants to hate him, it’s hard to feel anything but relief when he digs in his pocket and removes a key and nods at her cuffs. “I thought I’d show you around. As long as you promise not to try anything stupid?” At first she doesn’t respond and his hand closes around the key and hides it from view. Only then does she nod, and he says, “Good.”

Her feet, once free, still feel bound, every step she takes somehow wrong. Her leg muscles are at first heavy and unresponsive, and she touches her toes and does a few lunges and jumps up and down before telling Jeremy she is ready.

In the sand their footsteps make sounds like paper shredding. She follows him through the tunnel, which forks and then forks again. She makes an effort to remember the way—in case she should ever get the opportunity to escape—left, left, for starters.

“This is home,” he says, this network of lava tubes, an underground village protected by vast rocky armor. In some places the walls glimmer and trickle, slick with moisture, and in other places they go chalky with calcite and lichen. She follows him up a kind of stairway, flattopped rocks stationed in the black sand, and the tunnel opens up into a vast chamber, as big as a ballroom. She cannot make out the ceiling—the LED lights cast an uncertain glow beyond which hangs the deepest darkness—but from it hang roots, like tentacles, hundreds of them dangling all around them. Jeremy takes hold of one and swings a few feet and trippingly looks back at her with a grin. “Try it.”

She will not.

“You’re upset at me?” he says.

“What do you think?”

“I’m sorry we’ve had to meet this way.”

She asks whose fault that is. She says he’s her uncle, but until a month ago, she didn’t even know he existed. She doesn’t know anything about him.

“That’s not my fault. That’s your parents’. They didn’t want anything to do with us, not the other way around.”

“I don’t know anything about you,” she says again, and he says, “What do you want to know?”

“Nothing,” she says, and then, “Where do you get your power? Electricity, I mean.”

“That’s what you want to know? Where we get our power?”

It is. So he explains how the dams on the Columbia River produce electricity that gets outsourced to California. Many high-voltage and secondary lines are strung across the Cascades, and no, to answer her question, it’s not possible to tap into a twenty-five-thousand-volt structure to run computers or small appliances. Power is stepped down as it goes to homes through multiple levels of transformers that lower the voltage. Less than a half mile away from where they stand, there is a PacifiCorp maintenance shed with a residential transformer in it that brings the voltage down to 120. “That’s our keg to tap.”