Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(7)

Her father shouts from downstairs, shouts at the television he has been watching most of the day, and the white sand of her dream rises in a sparkling swirl, replaced by the white snow brushing past her window.



Earlier that day, she met her friend Stacey at Starbucks, and then they walked to the park, where they drank their flavored coffees on the swings, halfheartedly kicking their legs, their sneakers nosing the gravel. The cold front was just beginning to move in, the sky a churning gray that blotted out the sun, and the swings around them began to creak alive as if inhabited by ghosts. “It’s not fair,” she said. “Our last days of summer—we’re getting robbed.”

When she came home, her nose pink and dripping from the cold, she found her mother sitting on the couch and her father pacing in front of the fireplace, the mouth of it crackling and spitting with fire. She could tell she had interrupted a conversation. The two of them stared at her, her father with his mouth open, his hand raised midgesture. The flames in the fireplace snapped and bent sideways against the wind and then licked their way upright when she closed the door. “What?” she said.

Her mother is slender and sharp edged, her graying hair cut short around a rectangular face. That morning she was wearing jeans and a red hooded sweatshirt with a UW Badger imprinted on its breast. Her legs were crossed and moving like scissors. “Something has happened,” she said and looked to her husband to explain.

Claire’s father sometimes appeared mismatched next to his wife, oversize and always moving, shouting, sometimes with anger but more often with enthusiasm punctuated by throaty laughter. He is a thickly built man, broad shouldered and big gutted, but with a kind face that looks like a child’s, only creased around its edges like a photograph lost at the bottom of a drawer. He works independently as a carpenter—his shed built onto the back of their garage—and his fingernails are always bruised and his hair always carries wood shavings in it like dandruff.

He told her, in a gruff, halting way, about the attacks. The three planes. One had crashed outside of Denver, a fiery smear in a wheat field. The other two had landed, in Portland and Boston, the pilots locked safely in the cockpit, but with only one passenger still alive, on Flight 373, a boy, a teenager not yet identified. No one knew much else.

Her parents took her to the kitchen, where the TV was muted, the same footage cycling over and over, a faraway shot of a plane parked on a runway surrounded by emergency vehicles flashing their lights. The red banner along the bottom of the screen read that nationwide all flights had been grounded, that a lycan terrorist cell was suspected, and that the president promised a swift and severe response.

Her parents stood to either side of her, studying her, waiting for her to respond.

She understood how awful this was, but it felt so distant and unreal, like a film, someone else’s nightmare, that she had difficulty processing it emotionally. She could only say, “That’s terrible,” like an actor trying out a line. Her father’s face hardened. He had told her before—once when she said she didn’t feel like visiting her grandfather in hospice—that she was empathy proof. “Typical teenager,” he had said, and she had hated him for it.

She could tell he was thinking the same thing now. A blush crept up his throat like a rash.

“Why are you so upset?” she said. “I mean, I get it—it’s horrible that these people died—but you’re acting like you killed them or something.”

Her parents shared a look full of meaning unavailable to her.

She retreated to her room for the rest of the afternoon, yelling down once, leaning over the railing, asking her mother if she was going to make dinner or what? Her mother had spoken so quietly, Claire barely caught her response: “I’m not hungry.”

She could hear the television at times, and then, when it fell silent, her father’s voice as he spoke on the phone, whispering harshly into the receiver.

Not long ago, he came to her room. Normally he just barged in with a “Hello, hello,” but tonight he knocked and waited.

She cracked the door open and said through the crack, “What?” her hand on the knob.

He took a step forward and then back, thinking better of it, clearing his throat and asking if he might come in. He wanted to talk to her about something.

She sighed and plopped onto the bed and he wandered around as if trying to decide where to sit, before joining her, his weight depressing the mattress another few inches and making her lean toward him. He had a pensive look on his face and a white envelope pinched between his fingers that he handed to her.

“What’s this?”

“I don’t know what’s going to happen. Maybe nothing. But if something does happen, I want you to open this.”

She blew out a sigh. “Don’t be so dramatic.” She took the envelope and tossed it, and it twirled like a broken-winged bird onto her desk. Her father kept his eyes on it. He wouldn’t look at her. She noticed a wood chip tangled in the hair above his ear and she plucked it out and he absently touched the place it had been.

“Dad,” she said, and he said, “Yeah?”

She couldn’t believe that anyone would care about them. They were boring. They lived in the middle of nowhere. They hadn’t done anything to anyone. “You think they’re going to—what?—like, put every lycan in the country in jail? This has nothing to do with us.”