Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(71)

“No,” Miriam says. “Are you?”

He can’t tell for sure, since her back is to him, but he thinks he detects a smile in her voice. He is in her cabin once again, feeling no less like a prisoner than last time, but something has changed, her attitude toward him softer. He sits at a round wooden kitchen table and she stands at the sink, wearing camo pants and a black tank top that reveals black wings tattooed across her shoulders, their color the color of her hair.

Next to the table sits an openmouthed trash bag full of driver’s licenses. A dozen of them, like a strewn deck of cards, are spread across the table, all bearing photos of young women who look an awful lot like Claire.

Miriam fills a bowl with hot soapy water and carries it steaming to the table. She sweeps away the licenses and arranges a chair opposite him and dips a washcloth into the bowl and wrings it out with a splash. “Hold still,” she says and begins to clean him. The washcloth is as rough as a cat’s tongue. He closes his eyes and tries not to wince at the pressure against his swollen, cracked skin. All the while she hums, something barely audible, a lullaby. Before long the water in the bowl is flat and pink. She pats him dry with a hand towel and then unpeels several Band-Aids to hold together the places his skin split.

He has his arm wrapped tightly around his chest, hugging his ribs. “Better take off your shirt,” she says, and he tries, but it hurts too much to lift his arms over his head. She helps him peel away the shirt to reveal a torso colored with angry red welts, a purplish black bruise along his rib cage.

He can see in her fingernails the telltale thickness of a lycan. He remembers Max talking about that, about the different ways you could detect infection, and fingernails were one of them, as thick as teeth, as thick as bone. His mother’s are not so noticeable since she keeps them painted and filed. He can feel her nails on his skin now when she runs a hand along his ribs. “Maybe broken,” she says, “maybe not. Either way, you’ll live.” She retrieves a bottle of ibuprofen from the bathroom and rattles out four pills, which he swallows with a tall glass of water.

Then she asks if he is ready to listen and he says he supposes so. She begins to talk. “Some of this you might already know. Some of this you will not.” The light shifts and the shadows darken, when she tells him at length about the Resistance, about their ideology and activity over the past few decades, about her abandonment of them, about their harassment and the eventual kidnapping, the place in the snow where Claire’s tracks ended, taken over by an abominably larger set she recognized.

“The bad guys,” he says.

“Definitely the bad guys,” she says.

“Did they leave you a note?”

“They didn’t need to leave me a note. I know where to find them and their message was clear. Come back to us. Or else.”

She tells him she was scouting the woods near their hideout when she heard the gunshot, when she found him enclosed in a knot of bodies. She tells him she plans to return there. She tells him that they will be expecting her and that there are many of them, but despite this, despite their force, she will get Claire back. And she tells him, finally, that he is going to help her.

“How soon are we going to do this?”

“We are going to do this now.”

He feels afraid, very much so, but that is not why he hesitates. He hesitates because he has not said anything about the plane attacks and wonders if he should, wonders if she was somehow involved despite her disavowal. And he hesitates, too, because the beating has left him weak and addled. He worries he’ll be useless. When he squeezes his hands into fists, they tremble like tools capable of breaking down when he needs them most.

Miriam is leaning toward him, her arms resting on her thighs. Her face is so pointed it is like its own kind of weapon. “You care about her?”

He is surprised by how automatic his response is. “Yes.”

“I suppose you wouldn’t have come back for her, right? You wouldn’t have gone for your little walk in the woods if you didn’t feel something for her, right?”

Her voice and expression are so stony he can’t tell whether she is messing with him or not. “Right.”

“I want you to know that she’s not safe. The longer we wait, the more likely it is that something will happen to her.”

He tries to harden his face when he says, “Okay,” but really he feels small enough to put in his own pocket. The whole world seems suddenly against him, and he doubts, when he thinks of the Americans in town, or the lycans in the mountains, that he is up to the fight. His headache, at least, is fading to a hum, the ibuprofen numbing him.

Her hand drops to the table and caresses the pistol. “You know how to use one of these?”

“A little.” Never pistols, only revolvers and rifles really, hunting deer or blasting pop bottles at the rock quarry.

She thumbs the safety off, then on. Ejects the magazine and slams it back home. “Seventeen rounds, double-stack magazines. Keep track. Finger on the guard unless you’re ready to kill. Otherwise, bam, bam.”

She rises and returns with two Magnum flashlights, two penlights, four folding knives with Teflon grips, a sheathed machete, a twelve-gauge pump shotgun, stacking them on the table. She goes to the cupboard next to the stove as if to withdraw a pot but instead grabs a half dozen clips of ammo. Then she creaks open the hall closet and pulls from the shelves several holsters, each with a backing plate of saddle leather, worn tucked inside the waistband.