Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(74)

He has a knife in one pocket, clips of ammo in another. His belt creaks and his backpack clinks and his breath quivers out clouds. The noise seems impossibly loud. He trips several times over debris and knobs of basalt, always catching his balance, and Miriam looks back at him in irritation. He whispers sorry and feels fear and the fear feels something like wasps under his skin, a thrumming of wings, a prickle of legs and stingers.



*



One moment she is watching Puck. The next moment, darkness. She wonders, at first, if she is dead. If he has somehow already closed the distance between them and ripped her heart from her chest. If a rock has come loose from the ceiling and clubbed her skull. Or if her body has finally decided enough is enough and simply given up.

Then she hears his long, agonized wail, an animal in pain, and realizes that she is not dead, not yet. But death is close. Death has never been more of a possibility—buried as she is in a sulfuric dark beneath hundreds of thousands of pounds of rock. This will be her grave if she does not act quickly.

She recalls her last image of the chamber and wonders if she has moved since, if she is still facing the open tunnel. She steps sideways, her hand outstretched, until her fingers jam against rock. She scrabbles her hands along the wall and then shoots them out before her, as if sweeping the air free of cobwebs. She raises her knees high with every step, trying to avoid any debris on the floor, not worrying about her hurried stomping, knowing Puck cannot hear her over his own noise, as he alternately whimpers and bawls.

She is moving along the tunnel now. Her eyes are wide open but her fingers are her way of seeing, nosing through the dark like many moles that feel her way forward. The wailing behind her grows softer and then silent, and it is the silence that worries her. She tries to be as quiet as she can, but every other step she kicks a rock or sends something crumbling from the wall.

She remembers the way—left and then left again—noticing the shifts in air, the cold drafts when the tunnel forks. She nearly trips over the first step of the staircase. She clumsily climbs, wishing she knew how many steps awaited her, expecting any minute for something to come rushing out of the dark to seize and caress her. Another minute and her foot falls flat where she expects another step. The walls open up into a chamber. Her breathing and her footsteps sound softer here. She knows it would be wiser to follow the wall, to travel the chamber’s circumference, but she cannot recall if there were other corridors that intersected here and she cannot risk wandering off into some channel that takes her deeper underground. She knows the computer room lies directly ahead. She decides to trust her eyeless sense of direction and starts forward. She smells the earthiness of the roots dangling from the ceiling, the roots that startle a scream out of her when they seem suddenly to swarm her, licking her face like dry tongues.

The cave is as black as bile. As black as ink. The black of a place sealed by stone and buried deep beneath the earth—a place no one should ever go. Penetrating, infectious, a black that soaks into her and drowns her lungs and leadens her muscles and makes her want to shrink into a ball and wait for the worst to happen because the worst seems an inevitability when lost in the dark with something fanged in pursuit.

She stops to listen. There is movement in the darkness. A rustling. Then footsteps. The noise, the soft padding over rocks, the shooshing through sand, grows louder, closer. The darkness invites the worst of her imagination, and instead of Puck creeping toward her, she imagines the man in the clown mask, his eyes black pools, his lips the red of fresh meat. When he found her, when he sniffed her out, his mouth would open as large as this chamber before swallowing her.

She feels the wolf welling inside her, willing her to let go, but so far she resists. She does not trust her wild mindlessness once transformed and worries she might end up, panicked as she is by the dark, clawing at the walls until her fingers peel away to bone.

She keeps trying to see. As if, by force of will, she will develop extrasensory sight. The strain makes her eyeballs ache as if full of too much blood. She hears Puck bark out a laugh, but it’s difficult to place him, whether five or fifteen or fifty yards away, the noise echoing off the curved walls and toothy ceiling of this chamber and carrying through the many rooms and pits and corridors that reach into the darkness all around her.

Then she screams when right next to her she hears a voice damp and bubbling with blood: “I can smell you, pretty.”



*



By his best guess they have been underground an hour. They have heard things—sand whispering, bats fluttering, rocks coming loose from the ceiling with a click and then slamming the cave floor with an echoing boom. At one point, something with red eyes scuttled through their flashlights’ beams, never to be seen again.

He taps Miriam on the shoulder and she flinches at his touch. He asks how much farther and she says, “How much farther to what?” her annoyance obvious even at a whisper.

“To where they’re keeping Claire.”

“I have no idea. She could be in one of twenty different places.”

His flashlight sweeps the kitchen into sight. He is surprised, not for the first time, with their civility. He doesn’t know what he expected—straw and animal skins for bedding, a fire pit with gnawed bones stacked around it—but certainly not this. Glasses and knives and pots wink back at him. The fridge is messy with magnetic poetry. A can of Diet Coke is tipped over on a counter with a small brown puddle around its mouth. The smell of chili hangs in the air.