Overwinter

by David Wellington

  “Does that mean you cannot help me?” Varkanin asked.

  Holness unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. “No,” he said. “That’s not what I’m saying. I’ll have them shipped to you within the week.”

  56.

  Chey rose through a dream of growling, a dream of paws padding back and forth on snow, pacing, searching, of noses snuffling around the ground, of barking, of howling, of—

  “Jesus,” she said, sitting up very fast. All the blood rushed out of her head and she had to lie back down or throw up. Her body tingled painfully all over. It was worse than any other time she’d transformed back into her human body. It made her want to curl up and die. “Fuck,” she moaned.

  Carefully, she opened her eyes and looked around. She was lying in the shelter of a pile of rocks that formed walls on three sides. The sky above her was dark blue streaked with very white clouds. She was lying on her outspread parka, which kept her from actually sitting on the cold ground. She grabbed up a handful of snow and scrubbed her face with it, which made her feel a little better.

  “Sleeping beauty has awoken,” Lucie said. The redhead stood in the open space between two rocks. She was dressed in Powell’s coat, as usual, but underneath that she had on a shirt and a pair of jeans that didn’t quite fit her. Chey realized after a moment that they were her own, the same clothes she’d been wearing since she left Port Radium. Lucie was wearing her socks and boots, too. “I was beginning to wonder if you were not altogether lost.” Lucie’s smile was colder than the snow on Chey’s face. “Such a shame that would have been. Monty would have been so upset, non? But of course I would be there to console him.”

  “Not yet,” Chey said. “I’m not gone yet.”

  “Non,” Lucie agreed. “Yet it won’t be much longer, now.”

  A sudden thought made Chey wince. “How—long?” she asked. “How long have I been out?” When Lucie blinked at her in incomprehension she demanded, “How long has it been since we changed back?”

  “Only the better part of an hour,” Lucie assured her. “This time.”

  “This time?”

  Lucie’s smile creased at the corners, turning into a frown. “But of course, you will not remember. It has been three days since we last spoke. Since you were last, ah, yourself.”

  “No way,” Chey insisted.

  Lucie shrugged. “For the last three days, your body changed, but always, when we approached you, it was the snarling and the biting. You tried to kill us one morning in our sleep, but thankfully, we were able to fend you off. You seemed so much like poor Élodie—though of course, we were always able to rouse her eventually. You never broke through. I think you are one good shock away from madness. Utter madness.”

  “Powell won’t let it come to that,” Chey said. Though she knew better. She knew he wouldn’t be able to stop it alone. It occurred to her that she couldn’t hear him anywhere nearby, couldn’t smell him. Her eyes narrowed. “Where is he?” she asked.

  “Hunting,” Lucie said. She turned her face up toward the sky. “Dzo scouts ahead, and he lies in wait for the prey. They left me behind to protect you.” She chuckled. “I suppose in desperate times … and these are desperate times. A proper sacrifice must be made for the spirit, and game here is very scarce. One wonders what he will find that Tulugaq will find acceptable? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps this is the end of our journey.”

  Chey pushed herself up to her feet. “Give me my damn clothes back.”

  Lucie shrugged and reached up to unbutton her coat. “If you insist. Though—will you actually wear them, I wonder?”

  “Of course I will,” Chey said. Though honestly she wasn’t so sure. It felt good to be cold. Her blood was racing through her body and her forehead felt like it was glowing red hot. The idea of putting on clothes didn’t appeal all that much. She just didn’t like the idea of Lucie wearing them. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? If Powell couldn’t find anything to get Tulugaq to come. Then I’d go insane and you’d have him all to yourself.”

  “How callous I would be to want such a thing. Jeune fille, I think only of your well-being.” Lucie unbuttoned Chey’s pants and wiggled her hips so they dropped off her legs. She kicked them over to Chey, who bundled them up in her arms.

  “Bullshit. If you could think of some good way to kill me and make it look like an accident, you’d do it right now,” Chey said. “Don’t fucking lie and say otherwise. Hell, if I could do the same to you I would. Then I’d tie a big red ribbon around your corpse and leave you for the blue guy to find. Maybe then he’d leave us alone. He doesn’t want us, just you.”

  “I suppose that is the truth,” Lucie allowed.

  “So why don’t you do us a favor and leave? Go find him, settle the score personally. Instead of hiding behind Powell and me.”

  “Jeune fille, your words are like barbed arrows, that strike at my heart.” Lucie took off Chey’s shirt and threw it to her.

  Chey grabbed it and tossed it to the ground. Then she stomped over and slapped Lucie across her porcelain cheek.

  Blue fire exploded behind Lucie’s eyes. Her lips drew back from delicate little teeth that Chey knew could bite through a plank of wood. At her sides, Lucie’s fingers crooked into the shape of vicious claws.

  “Speak the truth for once in your misbegotten life,” Chey demanded. “You’re only here because you need Powell’s protection. And you’re going to sabotage any attempt to cure me.”

  “You are incorrect,” Lucie said, very carefully.

  Chey reared back to slap her again.

  Lucie’s hand shot out and caught Chey’s wrist. It was all Chey could do to pull out of Lucie’s supernatural grip.

  “I long for this cure,” Lucie said. “If it exists. It will make you human again. A weak, snot-nosed little human girl. And then Monty will see you for what you really are, and he will turn away from you in disgust. He will realize what he truly is, and then he and I will run together again. As life-mates. Do you understand? If there is a cure, I will cherish it. And if there is none, if you are doomed to the fate of Élodie, then this is even better. He cannot love a wolf. You see how much he hates the one within himself.”

  “And what if we find a cure—and he takes it, too?” Chey asked.

  “He will not,” Lucie said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “He would never hurt me so.”

  “Ha! You can’t believe it, can you? That he might like me better than a psychopathic redhead who kills people for fun.”

  “Don’t you understand? The love he and I share is meaningful. It is a force of power. I made him a wolf. I made him to be my mate.” Lucie stared deeply into her eyes. “What of you? You were an accident. A little girl, lost in the woods. The wrong woods, at the wrong time. He feels some obligation to you. Some guilt he must rid from himself. But when that is done you are nothing to him. Just as you are nothing, less than nothing to me. The grit I crush beneath my heel.”

  Chey grabbed for Lucie’s arm, planning to twist it up behind her back so she could force her stupid French face down into the snow. Or even better, smash it against a rock. Lucie made no attempt to avoid the grapple—but with her other arm she reached up to snatch at Chey’s face, maybe to rake her eyes out with her nails. It would have devolved quickly from there—except they both froze when they heard someone approaching from the other side of the rocks.

  It was Powell. He came climbing over the rocks with a dead seal slung over his shoulder. From behind him Chey could see Dzo looking down at them.

  For the first time Chey realized that both she and Lucie were completely naked. She put her arms across her breasts.

  “What have you two been doing?” Powell asked, a smile on his face.

  “Just talking,” Chey said.

  “Talking, only,” Lucie said, at exactly the same time.

  57.

  “I had to go all the way up to the coast,” Powell said, slinging the seal down on the ground next to the fire. “I’m sorry I
left you here for so long.”

  “What’s it like up there?” Chey asked. She had managed to button the shirt over her chest, but it had been hard. Her body didn’t want to wear clothes anymore. They felt weird and unnatural and constricting, as if she couldn’t breathe in them. As if she couldn’t run properly.

  “It’s cold,” Powell said with a shrug. He sat down next to the fire and she sat by his side. “Icy. It’s nearly November and even the sea is starting to freeze over. The water is about as thick as soup—what the locals call grease ice. There are towns up there, too.”

  “What, really? People actually live up here? Mostly Inuit, right?”

  He nodded. “Whaling villages, old trading posts, mine outposts. Most of the people living north of the Arctic Circle live on that coast—the ocean is the only source of food around here.” He shook his head. “When I first came to the north country, I came to get away from people. As people moved into western Canada, I kept moving farther and farther north to get away from them. This is it, though. This is as far as I can go. Any farther north and I’m right back to civilization—and putting innocent lives at risk. I don’t know where we’ll go next.”

  She leaned into him and laid her head on his shoulder. “Hopefully we won’t have to,” she said. Across the fire she could see Lucie, staring into the flames with a certain intensity. “Hopefully this cure will work, and we can go live normal, healthy, human lives together. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  He looked down into her eyes. “More than anything. More than I want to take my next breath,” he told her, his voice very serious.

  “I believe you,” she said, as if there had been some doubt.

  She looked across the fire at Lucie again. The redhead glanced up with a frown.

  “Powell,” Chey said, very softly, “I appreciate everything you’re doing for me. Really. Even if it doesn’t work, if Tulugaq doesn’t have what we’re looking for—”

  “He will.”

  She smiled at him. “Even if … even if I don’t last long enough to benefit from the cure. I want you to know how grateful I am. How much it means to me that you did all this. Powell … will you take a walk with me?”

  He glanced down at her carefully. “It’s warm here by the fire,” he said, “and I’ve been freezing cold all day. I don’t want to get up unless there’s a good reason.”

  “Oh, there is,” she said, and gave him a very warm smile.

  As the two of them rose from the fire together, Chey gave Lucie one last meaningful look. The redhead understood perfectly, she could tell by the way Lucie’s nostrils flared.

  Powell led her away from the light and heat back toward the rocks where she’d woken up. They passed Dzo, who was standing watch, and told him to go over to the far side of the camp. The musquash spirit shrugged and did as he was asked, clearly not understanding why but not curious enough to ask. When the two of them were alone inside the shelter of the rocks, Chey began slowly to unbutton Powell’s shirt. She leaned forward and planted gentle kisses on his collarbones and throat, tangling her fingers in his chest hair. He started breathing heavily and after a moment he grabbed her hands and held them away from his body.

  “It’s been a really long time,” he said. “I might be a little rusty—”

  “It’s okay,” she told him.

  “—the first time,” he went on. “I also don’t want to give you the wrong impression. I liked what you were doing,” he said, “kissing me like that,” though he sounded slightly uncertain.

  “But?” she asked.

  “But you might want to brace yourself.” He grabbed her then around the waist and threw her down to the ground. He buried his face in her throat as he fumbled with the zipper of her jeans, then yanked her pants down around her ankles. She helped by kicking them off—they hadn’t felt right on her anyway. She wasn’t wearing any panties. When her legs were bare he grabbed her face in both hands and kissed her passionately. Then he scooted down on his knees and grabbed her hips. His mouth buried itself in her pubic hair and her back arched convulsively.

  For a guy who was born in the nineteenth century, he knew his way around the female anatomy, she thought. He found the right spot the first time and knew what to do when he arrived. It didn’t take long before her body caught fire and in the midst of her climax she barely even noticed when he moved up her body and started kissing her mouth again with lips that tasted like the ocean. Then he was inside her, and it kept getting better, and better, and then she came again, and couldn’t open her eyes to see what else he was doing to her. The power in his body—the strength of hers, to receive it—made her cry out loud enough to split the Arctic night.

  “Oh my God.” She laughed. “Werewolf sex is awesome!”

  “Why haven’t we done this before?” he demanded, and she had no answer.

  As good as it was, he was right, though. He didn’t really catch his rhythm until the second time around.

  58.

  The moon rose the next morning, but it set within a few hours. When the silver light left Chey lying only a few dozen meters from the camp, she quickly took stock of herself and found that the wolf had let her be human for once. She could feel it panting at the back of her mind, but it didn’t try to take control. Her body didn’t even hurt as much as it usually did after a transformation—and she didn’t have any of the soreness she usually felt after a night of good sex.

  Powell found her stretching in the snow, naked to the sky. She raised her eyebrows in invitation. He smiled, but shook his head. “We need to get moving. The moon will be down for five full days and I don’t want to waste any of that time.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting we waste it,” Chey said, but when she saw he was serious, she grudgingly let him help her up to her feet. Together they headed toward the campfire, where Dzo had laid out their clothes to warm on a sunny rock. Powell dressed quickly. When Chey took her time about pulling on her clothes, he turned away so she wouldn’t be ashamed of how much of her had turned to wolf. She forced herself to button her clothes together and pull her parka on, though she left it unzipped.

  They found Dzo where they’d left him, standing guard. He said he hadn’t seen anything, and Powell thumped him on the back and said, “Good man.”

  “You sure you want to go through with this?” Dzo asked.

  “Hmm?” Powell said.

  “Finding Tulugaq. He’s a tricky bastard, and he won’t give you what you want without getting something in return.”

  “That’s what the seal is for,” Powell told him.

  Dzo shook his head. “He ain’t that cheap.” He would say no more, though. Instead he flipped his mask down over his face and got to work scattering the ashes of their fire and hiding all traces of their passing.

  The three of them headed west, then, and found Lucie a half kilometer away. She was crouching in a snow field, arms stretched out to either side. Her eyes were closed. Powell gestured for the others to stop and they waited until she pounced, throwing herself forward on the ground, her hands thrusting down into the snow. She came up with a lemming that screamed as she fondled it.

  “Put that out of its misery,” Powell told her. “It knows what you are.”

  Lucie looked up at him and smiled. “And I know it, as well. I know it is my breakfast.”

  “We’re heading out,” Powell told her. “We’ll make this inukshuk by lunchtime, and you can eat then.” He started off across the snow again, then, and Chey hurried to keep up with him.

  “You know where the inukshuk is?” she asked him. “Exactly where?”

  He nodded. “I saw it when I went for the seal. It’s tall enough you can see it for miles, which is the point. The ground where we’re going is flat and when there’s snow on it, all of it looks pretty much the same. The Inuit build inukshuks as landmarks, so they don’t get lost out here. It isn’t far off.”

  She nodded and fell into an easy rhythm walking beside him, her bare feet sinking effortlessly through t
he packed snow. She looked behind and saw Lucie and Dzo a couple dozen meters back, out of earshot. “So,” she said, suddenly feeling sheepish. “About the other night.”

  “It was glorious,” he said, not turning his head to look at her.

  “Yeah,” she agreed. “I wanted to talk about why it happened.”

  He nodded. “Good. Yes. We should discuss that. We should talk about how much we love each other.”

  “ … Oh,” she said. She had planned on talking to him about Lucie, and the delusion the redhead was living under—that Powell intended not to take the cure himself, and that he would return to Lucie once Chey was out of the picture. She had wanted a little validation that his plans were quite different.

  Instead it seemed he needed his own assurances. “I’ve loved you for a long time, Chey. Longer, I think, than I was willing to admit to myself. At first I thought my feelings were just based on guilt, for the things I’ve done to you. I can see now they run a lot deeper. The other night, you proved that you love me, as well. You couldn’t have given yourself to me so completely if you didn’t feel like I do.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Yes. Yes. I did that.”

  If he noted her hesitation he didn’t show it. “I needed that,” he told her. “Chey,” he said, turning to stare into her eyes, “what comes next—it won’t be pleasant.”

  “No?”

  “We’re headed toward darkness, of one kind or another. I can’t tell you what will happen. Not yet. But we need to be prepared. I’m going to do things you might not approve of.”

  “You will?”

  “But you have to know I’m doing them for you. That they’re motivated by the love we share. You have to promise me you’ll remember that. And that you won’t tell me to stop, no matter how ugly things get.”

  “You’re kind of scaring me,” she told him.

  He nodded. “I understand. Still. I need that promise.”

  “I promise to remember,” she told him.