Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(8)

He opened his hands and stared at them as if the answer might lie in the rough design of his palms. “There are things you don’t know.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He smiled sadly, throwing an arm around her and drawing her close. Her nose filled with the smells of sap and Old Spice. “I’m probably worrying for no reason. But hey, better safe than sorry.”

Her mother’s voice called from downstairs. “Howard? Your phone is buzzing.”

“Yeah,” he yelled. “Coming.” He stood and the bed sprang back into its shape, the coils of the box spring creaking with relief. He walked to the desk and laid one of his square-tipped fingers on the envelope and tapped it twice. “Indulge me, okay?”

“Fine.”



Now Claire shoves aside her college catalogues and purses her lips and picks up the envelope, turning it over, testing its weight with the tips of her fingers. She doesn’t know if there is money in it. Or a letter. Or both. She doesn’t know whether she should open it now, or if not now, then when? How will she know?

Nor does she know what’s happening outside right this minute, as the small brigade of vehicles—the armored vans, the black sedans with government plates—appears at the end of her block with their headlights off. She lives in a wooded neighborhood, each house set back on a half-acre lot. There are no streetlights, no sidewalks. The vehicles purr to a stop. Their doors swing open but do not close. Any noise that might bring Claire to the window—the stomp of boots along the asphalt, the clatter of assault rifles and ammunition clips—is muffled by the steady snowfall, a white shroud thrown over the night.

She doesn’t know about the Tall Man—in the black suit and black necktie, his skull as hairless as a stone—who stands next to his black Lincoln Town Car. She doesn’t know that he has his hands tucked into his pockets or that the snow is melting against his scalp and dripping down his face or that he is smiling slightly.

She doesn’t know that her father and mother are sitting at the kitchen table, drinking their way through a bottle of Merlot, not holding but squeezing each other’s hands in reassurance as they watch CNN, the coverage of what the president called “a coordinated terror attack directed at the heart of America.”

So she doesn’t know that, when the front door kicks open, splintering along its hinges, her father is holding the remote in his hand, a long black remote that could be mistaken for a weapon.

She doesn’t know that he stands up so suddenly his chair tips over and clatters to the floor, that he screams, “No,” and holds out his hand, the hand gripping the remote, and points it at the men as they come rushing through the entryway, the dark rectangle of night, with snow fluttering around them like damp shredded paper.

She only knows—when she hears the crash, the screams, the rattle of gunfire—that she must run.



She hasn’t changed often, only a handful of times. Not only because it is forbidden, because she could be jailed for it, but because she doesn’t like the way it makes her feel. So grotesquely other. And bruised for days afterward, her body’s sudden shifting like the growing pains that make children twist under their sheets and cry out at night. But her parents have occasionally insisted she do so, when they have taken her to Canada. Full-moon retreats, they call them.

She can smell the men now, deodorant and aftershave, cigarettes and gum. Gun oil. The sulfur of their weapons’ discharge. She can hear their harsh breathing, their voices calling out, “Clear!” from different corners of the house. She can feel their footsteps pounding up the stairs, toward her.

Her skin itches horribly, as if bubbling over with hives, and then the hair bristles from it in a rush. Her gums recede and her teeth grind together in a mouth not yet big enough for them. Her bones stretch and bend and pop, and she yowls in pain, as if she is giving birth, one body coming out of another. She always cries. Tears of blood. This time her tears and mewling come from the pain—and also the dawning realization that everything, in an instant, has changed.

But these thoughts are fleeting. The wolf in her has no time for them. Her mind sharpens to a singular focus. Survival is what matters. There is nothing else, no love or sadness or fear or worry, only a needle stab of adrenaline that surges through her, sends her loping toward the window, toward the reflection she barely recognizes, hunched and misshapen and growing larger by the second. Then she crashes through herself, through the window.

The glass shatters, and shards of it bite at her. There is no roof to scuttle across, no lattice or gutter to climb down. There is instead the blackness of the night, the emptiness of the air she falls through, flipping and twisting as the wind shrieks in her ears and the ground rushes up to meet her. Splinters of glass, mixed up with the snow, sparkle all around her.

Two inches have already accumulated, but that isn’t enough to cushion a fall from a second-story window. She lands on all fours, rolling and thudding forward, sliding across the short expanse of lawn, smearing away the snow in a ragged teardrop to reveal the green grass beneath. A tree at the edge of the lawn offers a hammer blow to her chest. Her breath is gone. Her wrist blazes as if stabbed through with a hot poker. Glass bites at her. The night seems to close upon her for a moment—and then she draws in a sucking gasp.

Her window throws a square of light broken up by triangles and hexagons of yellow and orange that spotlight her body, the spotlight blackened a moment later when the men charge into her room and pursue her exit.