also by David Wellington
Monster Island
Monster Nation
Monster Planet
13 Bullets
99 Coffins
Vampire Zero
23 Hours
Frostbite
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by David Wellington
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
eISBN: 978-0-307-46080-6
v3.1
For Adelaide
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Part One - Great Bear Lake
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Part Two - The Barren Grounds
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Part Three - Victoria Island
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by David Wellington
prologue
Tucker’s Last Stand was the rowdiest bar in the town of Menden, Alaska, but when the naked woman staggered in through the front door it was still enough to make Greg Thomas’s jaw drop. He was the town doctor, and had seen some pretty crazy things in his time, but still.
From her post behind the bar, Margie Hurlwhite let out a low whistle and put down the glass she’d been filling. The four men at the bar turned to look all at once and none of them said a word. Three of them were old fishermen with hands so cut up and weathered they could barely hold a knife anymore. Thomas, the fourth, stood up so fast he knocked over his stool. The noise was loud enough to drown out the radio, but nobody bothered to look away from the naked visitor.
Thomas wiped his hands on his pants. “Well, hi there,” he said, when it was clear no one else was going to welcome the newcomer.
She looked him right in the eye and smiled. Didn’t say a word. She was beautiful, he thought, far lovelier a creature than any woman in Menden had a right to be, with long red hair that fell across her eyes and shaded her face but totally failed to cover her breasts, not to mention the rest of her. She looked like she might be twenty, or maybe younger. Just a girl. He wiped his hands on his hips again, because suddenly they were sweaty. It had been a long time since his wife had died and he’d never bothered much with women since then, but this one … except maybe it wasn’t exactly lust he was feeling in his heart at that moment. There was something about this girl. Maybe it was that she wasn’t making any effort to cover herself up. That she wasn’t shivering, even with snowflakes flecking her hair like glitter. It was just below freezing outside, and her feet were wet, as if she’d been walking in the snow, but she looked as though if you put a hand on her arm you might just get burned.
“You got a good enough look, Doc, to make a diagnosis?” Margie asked, rushing around the end of the bar to drag the girl inside, away from the door. She stopped before she could touch the girl’s skin, though, and mostly just waved her toward the back and the pair of red leather booths there.
Margie’s tone had been thick with sarcasm but Thomas shook his head and answered anyway. “Hypothermia’s my guess. We got to get her warm.” He stripped off his parka and wrapped it around the girl, which got him another smile, this one warm with gratitude. “Margie, make some coffee, will ya?”
“Got a pot brewing right now,” Margie told him. She busied herself behind the bar while the three fishermen turned on their stools to face Thomas and the girl. They were blinking and rubbing their faces like they couldn’t quite believe it.
“What’s the matter, miss?” Thomas asked. “You in an accident or something? Where’d you come from?”
She tilted her head so the red hair fell away from her eyes and looked up into his face. “No accident, m’sieur. I have come from the water, just now, on a boat.”
“You have people around here, someone I can call?”
The smile faded a bit. “Not so close, but people, yes. I have come for my man, who I have not seen for a very long time.”
“What’s that accent?” Margie asked, bringing the coffee. She set it down on the table in front of the girl with shaking hands. “Sounds like Quebec, maybe. You a Quebecois, dear?”
“Je suis française, but I have been abroad. Just now I am coming over from Russia.”
Well, Thomas thought, that made some sense, anyway. Menden was on the west coast of Alaska, near about as close as you could get to Russia without going for a swim. Boats went back and forth between the two landmasses all the time. Of course, most of the people on those boats dressed for the climate.
&n
bsp; “What’s your name?” Margie asked, and Thomas felt like a cad for forgetting to ask that, himself.
“I am Lucie, thank you.”
Thomas waved Margie back. The bartender was leaning so close she was blocking the girl’s air. “Find some blankets, a tarp, anything. And turn the heat up in here. She’s probably so cold her brain’s froze. We have to—”
“I am altogether fine, sir,” Lucie said, and she reached out to grab Thomas’s hand. He flinched, expecting her touch to scorch him. Her skin was warm, it was true, though no more than normal body temperature. Her lips weren’t blue or even chapped, and her pupils were normal, he noted. “But can you, please, tell me one thing? That clock, there. Is it accurate?”
He looked up at the old cuckoo clock above the bar mirror, mounted between a pair of antique snowshoes. It said it was a quarter to nine. “I suppose,” he said, though it did seem like that must be wrong.
“No, honey, that’s bar time,” Margie supplied. “About fifteen minutes ahead. That’s so when closing time comes I can get these sorry fools moving toward the door faster. Why do you need to know? Are you meeting your man soon?”
Lucie shook her head prettily. “Not yet. I merely wish to know, because the moon is due up at eight and the half tonight.”
Thomas frowned. There really was something about this girl. Something off. “You know when moonrise is off the top of your head?”
“I should be very surprised to find her up without me,” Lucie replied. “So it is just about now half past the eight? Yes, I can feel it is so.” She shrugged her shoulders and the parka fell away. “Merci. You have all been so very kind.”
Thomas grabbed for the parka and realized, too late, that she hadn’t pushed it off herself. It had collapsed around her. Or—through her. She was becoming intangible, her flesh transparent so he could see the red leather of the banquette right through her white skin. “Holy mother,” he said. “Like a—a ghost.”
“No, m’sieur. Not like a ghost at all.”
There was a flash of silver light, a shimmer like moonlight flickering on choppy water. Then in his arms was an explosion of fur and spittle and many huge teeth. Blood spattered the dusty floor of the bar and Margie screamed, but Thomas barely heard her. He never heard anything again.
part one
great bear lake
1.
Cheyenne Clark was, for the first time in her life, almost happy.
It wasn’t something she liked to admit to herself. She had plenty of reasons to be miserable, depressed, even pissed off. But those reasons felt very far away.
There had been a time, before, when things had gotten bad. Very, very bad, and she hadn’t come out of it innocent. She—or rather her wolf—had done things she didn’t like to contemplate.
An agent of the Canadian government had tortured her. He’d been using her as bait to draw another werewolf to his death. The two werewolves had retaliated, and things had gotten out of control. She’d gone a little crazy. Maybe a lot crazy. She had killed some people. Or, as she wished she could put it, her wolf had killed some people.
But that was in the past.
Now she wasn’t alone anymore. Chey and Montgomery Powell—she still called him Powell, though he’d told her she was a friend of his now, and could call him Monty—were together now, together in a way she’d never experienced with a human being. It was more like the bond wolves share in a pack. They’d headed north, away from anyone who might be looking for them. Away from people they might hurt, and people who might hurt them. People who had easy access to silver bullets.
Those people were a long way away. In the Northwest Territories of Canada, there was a lot of empty space to escape into.
Starting from Port Radium, a ghost town so polluted nothing could live there, they’d followed the sinuous curves of the shore of Great Bear Lake, staying close to the water where the hunting was still good. Summer was over, and though the ground was still soft and the wind didn’t bite too hard yet, most game animals were already migrating south. There were fewer snowshoe rabbits every day and even field mice were becoming scarce. When Powell caught his first lemming—like a big mouse with a red back and a short tail—he brought it back to their camp and studied it as if he were reading a newspaper. “It must be September,” he said.
He took a buck knife out of his pocket and started to skin the animal, preparatory to cooking it over their fire. Chey winced and turned away. She could feel him watching her, feel his surprise, but there were still some things her wolf handled better than she could.
“You’re going to eat this once it’s roasted, aren’t you?” he asked her.
“Yes,” she told him. She was always a little hungry these days and she knew once she smelled the cooking meat she wouldn’t be able to resist. “I just don’t want to see it cut up, that’s all.”
“You should learn how to skin one of these. Pretty soon we’ll be living off them. You’ll need to know, then.”
She shook her head. Their wolves were perfectly capable of hunting for themselves. Powell and Chey didn’t need to eat at all—what nourished their wolves nourished them. Powell insisted on cooking, though, because it was a human ritual and it made him feel like he was still in control of his destiny. She … respected that in him, that he still thought of himself as a human with some kind of disease. Something that could be managed. She was under fewer illusions, herself. “I’ll just let my wolf do it,” she said.
Her wolf loved it up here. Her wolf thrived on the constant cold, on the silence between the trees. On the clean air. And because there was no way for Chey to get rid of her wolf, she was just going to have to make do. Her wolf hated human beings and would attack them on sight, whether it was hungry or not. She didn’t want that to happen. Didn’t want to live with the consequences. The only option left to her was to live up here where people were scarcer than palm trees. Powell had figured that out decades earlier, after exhausting every other possibility. She had chosen to come with him, to learn from him, to live with him so that she didn’t have to be completely alone.
When the lemming was cooked he carved off a fillet and brought it to her. The meat was stringy and gamy but her stomach lurched happily when the first drop of its grease touched her tongue. She gobbled it down without bothering to chew too much.
“So?” he asked.
“You overcooked it,” she told him. He sighed and started to turn away, but she shot out one hand and grabbed his arm. “Is there any more?” she asked.
He stared at her with his big cold green eyes. Eyes she saw sometimes when she was about to fall asleep, eyes she couldn’t not see. His eyes were searching her face, looking for something. Not validation, she knew. He was too tough to need that. Not an apology, because he knew better than to expect that from her.
She’d been hard on him, she knew. Harsher than she’d meant to be. He’d hurt her badly, once, and she’d never fully forgiven him.
But maybe … maybe she didn’t have to be such a jerk about it. Things had changed. Were continuing to change, especially between the two of them. And all the bad things, the bad history that had led her to this point, seemed very far away indeed.
She took a step toward him. It was all he needed. He stepped toward her as well, then wrapped his arms around her and pulled her to him. Part of her wanted to push him away. Part of her wanted to lash out, to hit him, to scream in his face and rake her fingernails across his eyes.
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