Overwinter

by David Wellington

  “Which was a problem,” Powell said, his voice a soft growl. He didn’t like this part of the story. “The Graf had told his guests a little about us. Not everything. They had no idea what would happen to us when they’d all gone, and the moon rose. But he had hinted that we were afflicted by some mysterious, ancestral curse. A dark past no one could ever speak of aloud. Which meant every one of them would want to meet us and ask us leading questions. The men would all want to dance with Lucie and Élodie. The women would want to try to seduce me. So there were no more excuses to be made. Élodie had to appear for this party, no matter how ‘sick’ she might be, no matter how much we claimed she needed to be allowed to rest.”

  “And of course, there was another reason, which we were not told. Which Élodie had not spoken of, not to us,” Lucie said.

  “Tavin had asked for her hand in marriage. And she had said yes.”

  “You cannot imagine the mental strain upon poor Élodie,” Lucie insisted. “She knew this could not be permitted. And yet she could not refuse her beloved. Their engagement was to be announced at the ball before God and everyone worth knowing. She and Tavin would have the first dance. It was to be a grand evening, indeed.”

  “I’m guessing it didn’t go so good,” Chey said.

  “No,” Powell agreed.

  “We did what we could,” Lucie said. “We spent all that day with her. Calming her nerves, soothing her little fears. Encouraging all that was still human in her. Then we helped her into a very fine if slightly old-fashioned dress and a pair of satin dancing shoes, and led her down to the hall. When she was announced, she made a perfect curtsy, and everyone applauded her entrance. While a famous musician played his latest composition on the piano, we drew her back to the edges of the crowd, and told her how well she was doing. How proud we were of her, and how she was a perfect mate for the two of us. How we would soon leave the castle and begin a life together where things were easier for her.”

  “I’ve always wondered if that’s what did it,” Powell said. “I think maybe she wanted, in the human part of her, to stay there. To really marry Tavin.”

  “Unthinkable,” Lucie insisted. “She was ours.”

  Powell could only shrug. Chey knew that he would have found a way to break the bond, to let Élodie have her happiness, if it had been possible.

  “While the music was playing, the servants were busy laying out a quite lavish dinner. There were oysters and canapés, and sausages of a hundred varieties, and many fish courses, and of course an enormous roast joint of venison.

  “Élodie said the music hurt her ears. To be fair, it was an atonal composition in the most progressive style of that time. Not melodic at all, instead all brash, jarring chords and sudden changes of time signature. Élodie asked if she could be excused to use the necessary.”

  “The toilet,” Powell translated, and Chey nodded in thanks.

  Lucie wrinkled her nose, but went on. “We listened to the rest of the piece, and gave our polite applause. We were just about to go looking for her, to bring her back, when Tavin said he had an announcement to make. You know what it was. Yet he never had a chance to say the words. He asked us where Élodie was, and when we attempted to stall him, he laughed and said we must produce her at once. I looked to see the Graf, his face very pinched, and knew he was displeased. This made me very worried, of course.

  “At that same moment, a sound was heard from the grand dining room. A sound that was as dismal as the tolling of a funeral bell.

  “Perhaps what happened next could have been hidden, if we had been quicker. Alas, we could only stand there in horror and pretend nothing was happening when everyone in the room could hear growling and the sound of gnashing teeth. Everyone rushed in to see what was happening. We could not stop them. All those millionaires, painters, jazz trumpeters, servants, the Graf, Tavin—all of them saw it. They saw our Élodie, crouched on the table like an animal, tearing at the joint of venison with her teeth. Grease and gravy covered her hands and chest. Her dress had been torn off and discarded on the floor. Though she still wore her satin dancing shoes.

  “The ball, needless to say, was canceled. Everyone was sent home at once, the servants abandoning their city of tents in place, the intellectuals and artists bundled off in long cars. Some of those people could be bribed to never speak of what they’d seen. Others were guaranteed to gossip, but it was unlikely they would be fully believed. It was nineteen twenty-one, a very wild time in that part of Europe, and many impossible stories were making the rounds. As for us, however—the Graf made things quite clear.

  “We had disgraced his house. Abused his generosity. Worst of all, we had broken the heart of his beloved son. Tavin had fled to his tower room and locked himself in, and would not come out for days. Servants who put food outside his door said they heard him sobbing in there, and thought every so often they heard him calling Élodie’s name, sometimes in despair, sometimes so he could curse her to damnation.

  “This, the Graf could not accept. At once he made his decision known. Élodie was sent naked into the walled hunting ground, behind the gate of silver bars, and there she was locked away. We were not permitted to go in after her. No one was.”

  “Nobody ever spoke a word to her again,” Powell said. “She never put on another dress. Or combed her hair. Or had a fire when it was cold.” Emotion choked his voice. He had obviously cared for Élodie, in some capacity. Had he loved her? Chey couldn’t know. “It’s hardly a surprise that within a week her human mind was gone. Utterly submerged. There was nothing left of her but a wolf, a wolf that couldn’t understand why it spent half its life in a body it hated. We could hear her howling, day and night. We could hear her screams.” He turned away so Chey couldn’t see his face, even in the darkness of the den.

  Lucie was nearing the end of her story and the excitement in her voice was growing. “In time, it became necessary to—”

  “Stop,” Powell said.

  “But, cher, I—”

  “No! You’re done. Chey, as far as I’m concerned, you don’t need to hear the rest. It has nothing to do with you. And I am not going to lie here and listen to it.”

  “No! Come on, I need to know this. I need to know how it ends,” Chey insisted. “If I’m facing the same thing.”

  “It ended in madness and howling,” Powell said. “What happened after that doesn’t matter.”

  “It became necessary,” Lucie said, as if Powell hadn’t spoken at all, “to put her out of her misery.”

  29.

  “The Graf was many things, but always he had a sense of style,” Lucie went on. “He sent to another cousin of his, a Polish prince who had a grand collection of curios and artifacts from the Middle Ages. A wagon was dispatched, and in a few days it arrived. In the back was a thing about the size of a packing case. Or a coffin. It was very old, and made of base metal, much of which was red with rust. It was tapered, wider at one end than the other, and the narrow end was carved with the face of a howling wolf. It opened in the front, with a pair of doors that could be latched shut with a silver hasp.

  “It was—”

  “Stop!” Powell shouted. In the little cave the noise was enormous. Chey felt his breath stir the tiny hairs on her cheek. “If you won’t stop for her sake, stop for mine. I can’t think about this now. I can’t remember it!”

  “Powell,” Chey said, very calmly, “I’m asking you, please, to let her speak. Because I want to know this. I want to hear it.”

  He stared at her and even in the paltry light of the den she could see his eyes burning. Then he turned away and buried his face in the wall of the cave, clutching his hands over his ears.

  “I will whisper it, so as not to hurt him too much,” Lucie said, and dropped her voice.

  “It was called the silber jungfrau. The silver maiden. A device that had been built by the Prince-Bishopric of Mainz in the sixteenth century. A device of execution for werewolves. It had been used only a scant handful of times. Mostly the
church was content to burn our kind at the stake, and bury us with silver crosses. The silver maiden was used only for private executions, for those werewolves who were discovered high within the church hierarchy, or for those of princely rank and above. It was in a way a great honor that Élodie should meet her end within it.”

  “How did it work?” Chey asked, almost breathless.

  Lucie didn’t answer her at once. “A team of liveried servants unloaded it in the castle courtyard. They opened the doors and then ran inside, to safety. Tavin went to the silver gate and unlocked it. He called to Élodie. When she did not come, he went to her. How he convinced her to emerge from her refuge, I do not know. But he was almost tender with her as he brought her, naked and covered in filth, into the courtyard. I watched it all from a tower window. Powell could not watch. He was chained in the castle’s counting-house, under armed guard so he might not try to effect a rescue.

  “Élodie had eyes only for Tavin. There was fear on her face, but not as much as you might expect. I think the wolf in her brain recognized him, still. He led her over to the maiden, and only then did she begin to tremble.

  “Perhaps you have heard of the device called the iron maiden, and so you know already what was in store for her. The inside of the silver maiden was lined with spikes of silver, very long, like very sharp nails, polished to a high gleam. There was room inside for a small person to stand without being pricked—but only with the doors open.

  “Tavin spoke very softly to her. I could not hear his words. She nodded, once, and then she stepped inside.

  “Then he closed the doors. He did not slam them shut. He locked the hasp. And then he went inside and had his breakfast.

  “We could hear her screaming, of course, but no word was spoken in the castle that day about what was happening. The Graf would strike any servant who so much as glanced toward the courtyard with the back of his hand.

  “I do not know how long it took her to die. I do know that when they opened the doors again, and took out what was left of her, it was a wolf’s body, not a woman’s. Powell buried it inside the hunting ground.

  “Then he threw a glass of wine in the Graf’s face. And the two of us took our leave of that place, forever.”

  Lucie’s tale was finished. Chey couldn’t breathe. She could only stare at the redhead, and try not to shiver.

  30.

  Perhaps tired out by telling her story, Lucie went to sleep shortly thereafter. Powell still was turned toward the wall. Chey knew she wasn’t going to sleep for a long time, so she scooted over toward him and reached for his shoulder. He shrugged her off.

  For a while she just lay there, thinking about what was happening to her. Wondering how much longer she had before she, too, went mad. Before her wolf took over and drove away the last of her humanity.

  She couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t stand living with that knowledge, couldn’t stand not having anyone to talk to. “Powell,” she whispered. “Are you asleep?”

  He shifted slightly, curling up further around himself.

  “Powell,” she said again. “That was in nineteen twenty-one. The same year you left Europe—that’s what you told me. Was this why you left?”

  “Yes,” he whispered back.

  When he didn’t say anything more she scooted closer to him, until they were almost touching. “You must have been very upset,” she said, which sounded lame. “It must have torn you up inside.”

  “Élodie was my mate. How do you think that felt?” he asked. He didn’t turn to look at her, but there was a slight relaxation of his shoulders that told her he was resigned to talking to her now. “Yes. That was when I decided to leave. Before then I guess I thought I could make a life with the two of them. That no matter what horrible things I saw—what terrible things I did—it was still better than being alone. When Élodie … died, that changed. Lucie didn’t want me to go, of course. She didn’t want to be alone and she fought me.”

  “You mean you argued about it?”

  Powell’s shoulders shook in mirthless laughter. “She tried to kill me. Said that if she couldn’t have me, I didn’t have any right to live. She had made me into this—this lycanthrope. She felt that I owed her something. I disagreed. So we fought like savages. It was brutal, and bad, and we both got seriously hurt. She wasn’t able to walk afterward, and I was. So I walked away.”

  “And then you came home. To Canada.”

  “No,” he said. “I understood that wasn’t possible. I couldn’t go home—I would just be putting my family at risk. I came here because here I couldn’t hurt anyone. In the wild places, where there weren’t any people, I couldn’t kill anybody.”

  Chey rubbed at her face with her hands. “Did you ever think of going back? To Lucie, I mean? You must have been so lonely.”

  “I never even considered finding Lucie again. She found me instead. I did think about going back to Germany, though. I used to think all the time about finding the Graf and his son, and killing them. I thought about it a lot.”

  “But you didn’t?”

  “No. I didn’t need to. Hitler took care of them for me. In the Thirties, after he took over in Germany, he put out an edict that every werewolf in Germany had to be euthanized. And anyone who harbored a werewolf got the same punishment. They were among the first to go. You can call that justice, if you want.”

  Chey didn’t know what to think of that.

  There was something she wanted to say, though. Something she didn’t want Lucie to hear. “Listen,” she told him. “It sounds like there’s not a lot of hope for me. Like this is just going to get worse. When the time comes—when there’s nothing of me left, I want you to—”

  She stopped. Something had moved behind her. Something that wasn’t Lucie. Something big was displacing most of the air in the den. She spun around, thinking the bear who built the den had returned—or maybe the Russian hunter had found them; he had entered the den and was going to kill them all.

  Instead, it was Dzo.

  “Hi,” the spirit said. He was covered in mud and his mask was dripping wet.

  His appearance didn’t entirely surprise Chey. She was certainly startled by it, but it didn’t confuse her as much as it might once have. She had seen Dzo pop up in some very strange places, places where nobody should have been able to go. Wherever there was clean water—even the slow drip of groundwater sweating from the walls of the den—Dzo had access.

  Powell turned and half sat up. His face changed instantly when he saw his old friend. “Have you got some news for us, old man?”

  Dzo scratched underneath his furs. “The hunter’s gone. He left. He tried to fool me, but I was too smart for him.”

  “What do you mean?” Powell asked.

  “He said he was going to leave three days ago. Promised me he wouldn’t hurt you and that he was giving up. I was ready to come back inside and tell you—”

  “Wait,” Powell said. “You talked to him?”

  Dzo nodded. “Varkanin? Sure. He’s actually a pretty nice guy, if you’re not a werewolf. He made me some tea and we had a pretty long chat. How else was I going to figure out when he was leaving?”

  Powell shook his head. “I asked you to watch him discreetly.”

  “Oh, I minded my manners,” Dzo said. “I even held my pinky finger up when I drank my tea.”

  “That’s not what ‘discreet’ means,” Chey said, and rubbed the spirit’s fur-covered arm. It was good to see him. It helped get her mind off of … other things.

  “Yeah, okay. Anyway,” Dzo went on, annoyed at being interrupted, “he said he was going to leave, and that it was safe for you to come out. I believed him at first, but then I noticed that he just went a little ways down the lake and made a new camp. And that he was still watching me with a pair of binoculars. I remembered what you told me once, Powell. About humans, and how sometimes they make up stories to fool each other. I figured Varkanin might be lying to me. That’s the word, right? So I went into the lake and watched
him from there. I can see pretty good under the water. He stuck around another three days, but then he left for real. He’s about a hundred kilometers away, now. You think we’ll ever see him again? I liked him. I never met a blue human before.”

  “Blue?” Powell asked. Then he shook his head. “Never mind. You did a good job, Dzo. Thanks.”

  Lucie stirred. “This means we can leave?”

  “Yeah.” Powell moved to the mouth of the den, which was still partially collapsed. “Come on. Help me dig us out. Chey—you take it easy. You’re still recovering from your injuries.”

  The two werewolves worked fast. They seemed more than eager to get outside of the den and back to the wider world. Chey could imagine why. As cool light streamed in through the widening mouth, her stomach started growling, and she realized she was hungry for the first time since she’d been poisoned.

  “Come on,” Powell said, and took her hand. He led her out of the den, and together they stood upright again, blinking in the sunlight.

  There was an awful lot of sunlight. It took a while for Chey’s eyes to adjust—and to see where all the glare was coming from.

  The ground outside the den was covered in nearly a foot of crisp white snow. It must have fallen while they were inside. Winter had come to the north.

  part two