Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(78)
She thinks about tearing open the envelope but feels too exposed. She tucks it into her backpack, along with her laptop, a spiral notebook. Her cowboy boots—slick black ones, Stetsons, a treat Miriam bought her before the move to Montana—clomp against the tile floors. The bulletin boards that line the walls are busy with flyers advertising bands, sketch comedy shows, student council candidates, lycan support groups. They flutter when she passes them on her way to the glass entry. She jars against the first door, already locked, and then hurries out the other.
The night is cool and bugs orbit the lampposts and make their pools of light appear like crazed water. She zips her fleece snugly around her. In front of the union sits a fountain with four wolves arranged around it, their mouths bubbling out arcs of water that splash into a greenly lit pool. The union is aglow with spotlights. She learned during orientation that it has been here as long as the university, since 1875, and appears on the homepage of the website and on the cover of the catalogue, all columns and Palladian windows and triangular pediments, its classical style so different from the rest of campus, the Nixon-era architecture, square, featureless, riot-proof buildings with cinder-block walls and windows that won’t open.
She follows the concrete path through the central quad to her dormitory. She keeps her hand closed around the knife in her pocket and her eyes on the bushes and pine trees clustered here and there, black shadows oozing around them. A blue-light security phone glows in the near distance, one of dozens positioned throughout campus. All she has to do is slam the red call button and one of the many guards patrolling campus will rush to her aid. They carry nets and Tasers and tranquilizers and pistols. This is supposed to make her feel better, but she does not. Dead dogs show up on campus every week. She has seen pentagrams spray-painted across the sides of buildings, choke chains hung from trees like tinsel. It has always been like this, she hears, but since the plane attacks and the courthouse square bombing, with anti-lycan sentiment at its peak, the campus is more than ever in the crosshairs. The other night Fox News ran a segment that questioned whether it was a training camp for terrorists.
Funny, given the reasons she enrolled. “You’ll be safer there.” That’s what Miriam told her. Safe with a new name. Safe with a new life. Safe among her own kind. Miriam owed that to her brother. She knew a network of lycans and sympathizers who helped open a bank account for Claire with a credit union and secure the required documents, the transcripts, the driver’s license and birth certificate and lycan registration. “Not good enough to get you on a plane, but good enough to get you into William Archer.” She helped dye her hair chestnut brown. She bought her the black-frame glasses from Urban Outfitters. For the next few years, Claire—no, Hope—needed to lie low and stay safe and abandon herself to her studies. “Forget the boy,” Miriam said. She rarely referred to him by his name, Patrick. To her he was “the boy.” And the boy betrayed them. The boy enlisted after his father disappeared in the Republic. Claire wanted to hate him for it, as Miriam did, but could not muster the energy.
Miriam would be in touch. She had business to attend to, and when Claire asked if that business had anything to do with Jeremy’s capture following the Pioneer Square bombing, Miriam said nothing—and has said nothing since August, the last time they saw each other at the Amtrak station in Portland, where Miriam gave her a stiff hug and said so long.
“Not too long, I hope,” Claire said.
This is October. Soon the cold will come and the bugs and leaves and grass will wither and brown and go white with the cover of snow. The campus is located near Missoula, in a bowl-shaped valley that butts up against the Rockies. Its location, combined with the architecture, makes the campus appear like a military compound.
A half-moon glows. The sky is a spackling of stars and a plane winks through them and makes her think of far-off places, Patrick. Damn him. Every now and then they email. Every now and then she would google his name and battalion, check for casualties, but only when she couldn’t help it. Her breath fills the air before her with ghostly steam that she then passes through. Her dorm is one of five, arranged like a pentagon with a bench-lined atrium at its center.
Her glasses fog over as she enters the building. Rather than wipe them off, she perches them on her head. The lenses are clear glass—she can see fine—but she knows that she ought to be more careful, knows that if she gets in the habit of absentmindedness, she will end up in trouble one of these days. She climbs the stairs and glances both ways down the empty hallway before keying open her door. She finds the light on but the room empty. Andrea is off somewhere, likely upstairs drinking with friends, despite this being a weeknight. Claire feels a mixture of relief and emptiness, the emptiness gnawing her out so that by the time she closes the door and shrugs off her backpack she feels like a chitinous husk that might crumble against the slightest pressure.
A stripe of moonlight runs across the wall. She squints into it when she collapses her blinds to keep the night at bay.
The wall next to Claire’s bed is blank except for tack holes and the gummy spots where tape once held posters in place. The books on her shelves are alphabetized. Her clothes are folded in drawers, the socks balled and arranged in colored stripes of white, brown, gray and black. She didn’t used to be this way. But after everything that has happened to her, she has decided if life is going to be messy, she needs everything else in perfect order. She knows it is only a stupid gesture toward stability and she doesn’t care: it makes her feel better.