Neal says no at the same time that Augustus says maybe. “Maybe,” Augustus says again, and the waiter says he’ll be back to check on them in a minute.
Neal selects a black tea and drops it in the cup and pours steaming water over it.
“Long day,” Augustus says.
“Yes.” He lets the tea steep another moment and then raises the cup for a drink.
“And a long night ahead?”
Neal says nothing, the teacup hanging before his lips, the steam warming his chin and making the image of the man before him warp. Augustus smiles, his teeth as small and white as corn kernels, and says, “Your poor daughter.”
The tea is hot in his hand. “What do you know of my daughter? Has she done something?” The steam trembles with his words.
“No.” Augustus laughs, a sharp little bark. “She hasn’t done a thing.” He sips from his beer and uses his napkin to dab the foam mustache from his upper lip. “Excuse me for prying. But she was bitten? Was that how she became infected?”
“No,” Neal responds automatically, though he isn’t sure why he is talking about this very private matter with a stranger. “She was exposed in another way.” He doesn’t elaborate. The disease had been sexually transmitted. Fifteen years old and sexually active and not using protection. The thought still makes him close his eyes with shame. He wishes she had been bitten instead—then maybe he wouldn’t blame her for what happened, her recklessness the cause of their life’s ruin.
“I’m sorry.”
The tea is bitter. He sets it down with a rattle and tears two sugar packs into it. “You’ll forgive me. I don’t follow politics. What is it that you do again?”
“Like I said, I’m chief of staff to the governor.”
“Yes, but what do you do?”
“I suppose I do what I have always done. I am a consultant. The presumption of my job is that management or boards or whoever—a politician, say—might not be…capable in all situations.” The lamplight makes his glasses glow. “I am the external competency.”
“I see.” He takes another drink of his tea, better now, and then stands to pull on his jacket and says sorry, he really ought to be going. He needs to get home to his family. If Augustus insists, the secretary can make an appointment during regular business hours and—
Augustus talks over the top of him. “Since your center is, as I see it, severely underfunded—even more so lately, with the budget cuts. And since I can be of service in this matter—if I feel so inclined. And since your daughter suffers from the very ailment we are both interested in curing, I don’t think you have any choice but to sit down and listen.” He drinks again from his beer, an ale as dark as the night. “Sit down, please.”
Neal does, slowly dropping back into his chair, his jacket still on.
The waiter appears again. “Have we made up our minds, gentlemen?”
“No, we have not,” Augustus says. “Not yet.” And the waiter wanders away again.
Neal listens to what Augustus has to say. Halfway through he realizes his tea has gone cold. And a few minutes after that he quiets his cell phone when it rings, not bothering to glance at the caller ID, knowing it is his wife wondering where he is. Except for occasionally nodding his head and smiling sadly, he hardly moves until Augustus stops talking, and then the two of them sit in silence for a long time, Neal avoiding eye contact, staring into his teacup as if there might be some message encoded in its leaves.
Augustus sips loudly from his glass. “Gosh, this beer is good.”
Neal does not like this man very much, but he can’t help but like what he has to say. He looks out the window. Dripping beards of moss hang from the trees. The river twists off into the distance. He sees their reflections hanging in the glass and studies the profile of the man studying him. It’s easier to look at him this way, avoiding his fixed gaze.
“Sometimes,” Neal says, “I think it would be easier if she had died.”
“Easier on her? Or easier on you?”
“Yes.”
Chapter 22
THE TEMPERATURE SHARPENS and the wind picks up and the sun cuts a shorter arc across the sky. Patrick has not answered the phone, though Malerie has called him more than a dozen times in the past few days. Three voice mails, the first cheery babble, the second a long sigh, the third asking him what the hell was going on. “Patrick? Seriously. You better call back.” Here her voice grew cruel. “Or maybe it’s time Max finds out about us.”
He doesn’t know what he’ll do after the long weekend, the Sabbath on Monday, when she seeks him out at school—tell her the truth? That he had fun? More than fun—the swell of her breasts, the vacuum of her mouth, the thrill of sneaking around—but he’s just not feeling it anymore? Screwing around with her is no way to repay the kindness Max has shown him?
He is sitting upright in bed, a pillow braced behind his back, with the laptop warming his thighs. Outside, the sky is a dying purple. The lamp in his room is dim and at odds with the bright glow the screen makes. His eyes ache. He feels mildly nauseous, mixed up inside.
He browses the news sites. First the nationals, hunting for updates about the Lupine Republic. He knows there will be casualties, and there are, but every one of them brings him a sick kind of relief, because he knows some must die—that there is a quota to fill—and one man dying means his father goes on living. He reads an editorial titled “Extremist Groups Do Not Define Lycans,” all about how a small percentage of radicals are defining the larger population of peaceable lycans in the U.S. and in the Republic. He reads about a raid in Florida, a terrorist cell that had been building a fertilizer bomb. He reads about the lycan no-fly, now more than three months old and facing legal opposition from the ACLU. He reads about how the security threat level has dropped from red to orange but airports and train stations will maintain increased security and random passenger checks.
Then Patrick hits up the local papers, the Oregonian, the Old Mountain Tribune, to read up on the governor, whom everyone seems to have a loudmouthed opinion on. Here is an article about Chase Williams advocating nuclear energy and endorsing a power plant along the Columbia, and here is an editorial that claims the governor’s plans will only tighten the collar on the uranium-rich Lupine Republic.
He spots a headline that reads “Blood Bath at Blood Bath.” Yesterday, a naked woman—identified as Alice Slade—was discovered along the shoulder of the Santiam Pass, naked and hypothermic and babbling about wolves in the woods. After hospitalization and questioning, it was discovered that an alleged lycan attack took place at the remote Blood Bath Hot Springs north of Sisters. She is believed to be the wife of local insurance agent Craig Slade, whose corpse was found at the springs, along with eleven others, some of them mangled beyond recognition.
He clicks on an ad for a new phone plan. He clicks on an ad for Victoria’s Secret. Click, click, click. He opens ESPN and checks the scores on the Saturday football games. He tries to instant-message a few pals from back home—to catch up; he’s been neglectful—but everyone is away from their computers. He watches a video for the Marines in which a young soldier slays a dragon with a sword. He downloads a few college applications—UCLA, UC Davis, UC Irvine—to fill out later, the deadlines a few months away.
Then he stares out the window, watching the stars brighten in the sky. The wind rises and makes the glass shudder. Snow is expected tonight, the first winter storm. When he turns back to his computer, he opens Google and plugs in Blood Bath Hot Springs and finds it on the map and sees it is no more than an hour’s drive from here. He thinks of the girl, Claire. In truth he has thought of little else lately. She is always flitting at the edge of his mind like a moth with a sinister pattern on its wings.
She finally told him her name in the woods. He didn’t initially respond, not knowing what to say. Nice to meet you? Though they had already met, and the circumstances then and now were hardly nice.
“And you’re Patrick,” she said, still not looking at him, trom
ping ahead. “Don’t worry, Patrick. I’m not going to kill you. Though I think my aunt might have if we didn’t get away from her.”
When he drove out there, he had planned their conversation, readying every smooth response. But now everything had changed. She was not who he thought she was. And when he reached for that store of memories now, his hand passed through it, all the words evaporated. She was a lycan. And not just a lycan but unmedicated. An illegal, a resister. Max calls them a plague. The governor calls them the biggest threat to this country, a threat he is working brutally to remedy. Even as Patrick was aware of this, he could not catalogue his feelings, nor could he reconcile the political rhetoric with the sight of the pretty girl walking before and then slowing next to him.
“Thank you again,” she said. “Maybe that’s why you’re back. Because I didn’t thank you.”
“That’s not why I’m back.”
“Well, thank you.” She leaned suddenly toward him and he stiffened and threw up his hands, thinking she would bite him—her mouth open, only inches from his face—and he noticed then the blackness of his fingertips, stained from the spray paint that soaked through his gloves the other night. He dropped his hands and said, “Sorry.”
She did not seem offended, studying him another moment before she said, “Ever kissed a lycan before?” She seemed as surprised by the question as he.
“No,” he said.
Her lips lingered for a beat on his cheek. “Now you have.”
Then she began to talk, her words coming fast, as if they’d been dammed up. She said she moved here from Wisconsin. Or maybe moved was the wrong word. She came here from Wisconsin. And how, growing up, for the longest time, that was all she wanted, to get out, away from the snow and boredom, off on her own for the first time. But now she wishes she hadn’t gotten her wish after all.
She went quiet then and he supposed he ought to say something. “Isn’t that how it always works? In the stories about genies, people end up screwing themselves up with all their wishing.”
She nodded. “It’s better not to wish.”
They stood there, in the middle of the woods, under a sky simmering with clouds, half looking at each other. He kicked at a buried rock that coughed out of the frozen ground. It sparkled with quartz. His father knew everything there was to know about rocks, minerals, and the two of them used to go hounding on the weekends, the bed of the truck full of shovels and picks. On their front porch he kept a geode the size of a child’s skull, carved open to reveal a violet crystal core. Sometimes they would visit old hardrock mines in California, and when they moved through the tunnels framed with old timbers, his father would tell him about silver. It is designated by the chemical symbol Ag, for argentum, Latin for shining. It has the highest electrical and thermal conductivity of any metal. The father of medicine, Hippocrates, believed that it had medical abilities, the power to heal, to fight infection and disease, and it was used widely in medicines and ointments during the world wars—and now most famously in Volpexx. When his father held a flashlight to a vein of silver, it shimmered like an underground river.
When Patrick thinks about all the years those minerals were rolled and grinded and baked by the earth, the precious veins hidden away by a hard ugly shell, until one day along comes somebody with a pile of dynamite to ravage a mountainside and reveal its glimmering guts—he thinks maybe that was what the girl, Claire, had done. Cracked him wide open.
He is not sure why he wakes up. But when his dreams blur away he discovers he is sitting upright in bed. Still fully clothed. His laptop in sleep mode beside him. The light of a streetlamp pours through the venetian blinds and decorates the wall with shadowed bars.
And then he hears it. A quiet padding and scratching in the hallway. His door is closed, but beyond it, he is certain he can distinguish the sound of something trying not to make a sound. He swings his legs out of his bed. He cringes when the box spring creaks. He creeps forward, depressing his weight slowly. He brings his ear close to the door and tries to open it up to accept every sound in the world. In the distance a train rattles along to some midnight destination. A long, lonely whistle cries out—the noise hushed by the snow but still loud enough to eat up anything he might have heard in the hallway. He waits for it to pass—the seconds dragging on—and then it is gone, a fading grumble.
The loaded silence of the house takes over. And there it is again, the sound. Click-click-click. Like someone teasing chalk across a chalkboard. Close. Right outside. The knob does not move, but the door clatters softly in its frame, barely displaced, the way it would if a window opened or someone braced a hand against it.
He keeps a baseball bat beneath his bed. He can’t understand why he didn’t grab it on his way across the room. He feels naked and small. He raises his trembling hand and lays it flat against the wood, not pushing back, not yet, but ready if the door bursts inward. Two inches of wood, not even, the door hollow core. On the other side of it, he imagines a shadow figure mirroring his own, its arm also outstretched, its mouth tusked with teeth.
His mind flips through a Rolodex of possibilities. It could be Claire’s hard-faced aunt, convinced he would expose them. Could be Malerie, her eyes raccooned by mascara, gone all Fatal Attraction on him with a butcher knife in her hand. Could be some lycan, connected to the cell that took down the planes, come to finish him off. Or it could be nothing. It could be he is imagining things.
He waits for a long time, so long he fades in and out of sleep, so long he can’t be sure he ever heard anything, before his free hand rises to the knob and depresses the spring lock. The noise is a startlingly loud snap, the tumblers falling into place like the hammer of a gun.
Whatever is on the other side of his door lurches back. He hears, moving across the landing and then dropping quickly down the stairs, what must be claws click-click-click-clicking their way to the entryway, where the hardwood turns to tile, the noise changing its timbre then, louder, more echoey.
His phone is on the night table—and he grabs it and nearly powers it on to call the cops. He could call them and he could stay here, stay safe—the door locked, his back against the wall. He shoves the handheld in his pocket instead. No more hiding. Not with his mother downstairs. He retrieves the baseball bat and strangles his hands around the grip and swings open the door and steps into the dark throat of the hallway.
Chapter 23
OVER THE CASCADES rolls a bruise-black cloud bank. From it, snow falls. Big flakes. It clings to Claire’s hair, her clothes, fills an outstretched palm when she steps outside, early this morning, for a walk.
Miriam is sleeping off a hangover. Sometimes her aunt seems like an alien, cold and unfamiliar with human emotion, but every now and then, she’ll do something that surprises Claire. Pour some tea and say, in a Cockney accent, “You want a little sugar with that, guvnah?” Or snort out a laugh when paging through a novel. Or go silent and drink whiskey and lock herself away in her room. From behind the door Claire will discern a high, keening sound and the occasional sniff that sounds like a tissue tugged from a box.
This is what happened last night, when Claire finally asked whether she had a cousin. “The children’s books,” she said. “I keep looking at them on the bookshelf.”
They were sitting at the kitchen table and Miriam was sawing her knife through her round steak. Blood pooled around it. “Had.”
“What?”
“Had a cousin.” She brought her fork to her mouth and then changed her mind and set down her silverware. “You had a cousin. I had a daughter.”
Claire didn’t need to ask what happened. Miriam told her, in a flood of words, as if Claire had taken a knife to a seam in her throat that had been holding all this back. Her name was Meg. She was seven, nearly eight. Curly brown hair like her father. Smart as hell. Could name all the capitals and recite the alphabet backward. Her father was building fertilizer bombs. He planned to enter six floats in Fourth of July parades across the state, detonating them at once,
ripping apart all the clowns shooting water guns and ladies tossing their batons and children racing for candy. “Instead he ripped his own child apart. We don’t know what happened, not exactly. We know the bomb went off. That’s what we know, and I suppose that’s all there is to know. This was in an open-air shed with a tin roof. She was snooping or playing one moment, dead the next. I remember running and looking into the sky and thinking it was full of bats. But it was tin, smoking pieces of tin, twisting their way to the ground.” She is not crying. She has dried herself out with all her crying. She grips the knife on her plate with such strength that her knuckles go white.
“Your parents were right. They were right to step away when they had you. I realized that too late.”
Miriam has told Claire, over and over, not to leave the cabin without her, not to let her guard down for a second. But Claire is tired of the paranoia. She has been here more than a month, and during this time, despite Miriam’s constantly fingering a weapon, peering out the window, nothing has happened, no shadow has slipped from the forest to their doorstep. Especially in weather like this, the air a blinding whirl of flakes, what danger could possibly present itself?
She needs to escape, antidote the day’s drag of hours. Her wrist aches in the cold. She wears boots that shush through the snow. A hooded sweatshirt beneath the old Carhartt jacket that her aunt wanted to burn but Claire wanted to keep for sentimental reasons. “It’s like a graduation tassel or something.” Paper crackles against her hand and she withdraws from the pocket a torn slip with Patrick’s name and phone number scrawled across it. She smiles and feels a snowflake catch against her lip and melt.
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