Overwinter

by David Wellington

  “For you see, Amuruq was far from dead, and in some way she was aware of what had happened to her. Her spirit was divided, spread among many bodies, but still it longed to coalesce again, to take her original form. When she could not do so, she took every body she could lay her claws into. And so it has continued for more than ten thousand years.”

  “But the curse—did it work?” Chey asked. “What did the Bear People do?”

  “Most of them died,” Raven told her. “Vast numbers of them were slain and they did not rise again. Those who survived eventually fled the ice lands, just as Vull had hoped they would. They spread out to the south, into new lands. And they took the curse with them. Within a millennium or two, there were werewolves everywhere on Earth. There was no way to stop it. It wasn’t until the invention of metallurgy, and the refinement of silver, that the first weapons were made that could slay the lycanthropes. Only the metal that had carved Amuruq’s flesh originally could harm her.”

  “What became of the Sivullir?” Lucie inquired.

  Raven shrugged. “They had won a small victory. Yet they had addressed the symptom of the change that was destroying them, and not its cause. The ice age was over, and with it, their way of life. Within a generation they were extinct. Similarly, the dire wolves that once haunted the glaciers had lost their soul. Without Amuruq to keep them alive, they grew listless and weak. They were easily destroyed by other predators, or simply allowed themselves to starve to death. Even as the last of the Sivullir died, the dire wolf vanished from the world as well. The spirits, whom the Sivullir had originally summoned forth, lived on, of course. We live forever, whether we want to or not. Yet things had changed even for us, with the passing of the Sivullir. Our cousins were gone. That was the end of the time of stories, and it is now the end of my story as well.”

  66.

  Raven rose easily to his feet. He grabbed up the remains of the seal and tucked them under his arm, then turned as if to go. “Well, it’s been a pleasure,” he said, and reached up to pull down his mask.

  “Not so fast,” Powell said. He stirred himself up next to the fire and reached for Chey’s hand, which she gave him. “That’s half of what I wanted.”

  “I’m tired after talking so long,” Raven whined. “I’ll come back later and tell you the rest, if you like. But right now I need to rest.”

  “This is how he does it!” Dzo said, jumping to his feet. He jabbed a finger at Raven. “He says that, and then it’s months before he comes back. It’s always some trick with him. He thinks it’s funny!”

  “Take it easy, old man,” Powell said. With Chey’s help he stood up. She turned him slightly so he was facing Raven. “I paid you in full. I expect you to keep your bargain.”

  “And so I shall. When I have rested,” Raven assured him.

  It was then Chey noticed that Lucie wasn’t sitting by the fire anymore. At some point during the story she must have gotten up and slipped into the shadows. Now she pounced, jumping on Raven’s back and throwing an arm around his neck.

  “Do what he asks,” the redhead growled, “or I’ll tear off your wings.”

  “You can’t do that,” Raven said, as if he were addressing a child. “No human can. I’m immortal. I—”

  “I’m not human, am I? You just told me I have the spirit of Amuruq inside me. I bet I can make you hurt,” she told him.

  Raven’s mouth pursed at the thought. “This is silly. I can just change my shape and fly away.”

  “Try it,” Lucie suggested.

  Raven let out a deep sigh. “Listen, werewolf,” he said to Powell, “she can’t really hurt me. But I find this tiresome. If I give you what you want, will you call off your dog?”

  “Tell me if the curse can be undone,” Powell said.

  “I asked for an assurance that—”

  “Can it be undone?” Powell demanded.

  “Yes. Magic can always be reversed.”

  Chey felt something strange bubble up in her stomach. It made her feel a little dizzy. She eventually identified it as hope. For the first time it seemed even possible that Powell was right—that there was a way to save her humanity. She held tight to the feeling, not letting it consume her. It couldn’t possibly be as easy as that. Could it?

  “Now tell your defender here to—”

  “What do I need to undo the curse?”

  Raven rolled his eyes. “Well, obviously, you need the silver ulu. Once you have it you can—”

  “I know what to do with it. But where is it?”

  “Exactly where Vull left it. Where it was used,” Raven told him. “In the lowest cave beneath the glacier.”

  “And where is that?”

  “On Kitlineq,” Raven said. He looked down at the fire. “I really shouldn’t be telling you this. You’ll get no happiness out of—”

  “Where on Kitlineq?” Powell demanded. “That’s Victoria Island, right? It’s a big place. Where exactly is it located?”

  “I seem to have forgotten my GPS tracker,” Raven said, exasperated.

  “I don’t even know what that is,” Powell told the spirit. “Most likely Chey does, but it doesn’t matter. Tell me how to find the silver ulu, and I’ll let you go.”

  “I only know what it looks like from the air. If she lets me go, I can draw you a map.”

  “You forget I don’t have any eyes to see it,” Powell told him.

  Raven gasped in frustration. “Your wives here can see it. Or Musquash. Look, there’s no good way to just tell you. I need to draw a map, and I can’t do that with a werewolf hanging on my neck.”

  “Alright. But if you try to fly off before I’m satisfied, you’ll regret it.”

  “I’m sure,” Raven said.

  Lucie dropped down to her feet and let Raven go. Instantly the bird spirit tried to slip his arms inside his cloak so he could transform back into his animal form. Lucie didn’t need to be told what to do. She grabbed one of his arms and twisted it up behind his back—hard enough that if he’d been human she would have dislocated his shoulder. Raven cried out pitiably and tears rolled down his cheeks.

  “Please! Please! You’ve won,” he moaned.

  Chey looked over at Dzo, who just shook his head. He wasn’t buying this act.

  “Twist it again,” she told Lucie.

  Lucie complied.

  “Alright! Alright. I’ll draw your damned map. Then you let me go.”

  “Alright, Lucie,” Powell said. “That’s enough.”

  Lucie let go of Raven. The bird spirit shook his arm out, but it didn’t appear to be broken. The tears were instantly gone from his face and he did little more than mutter as he grabbed a twig from the fire and started drawing in the snow. The light was bad, but Chey studied every aspect of the map as best she could.

  “Here, there’s a lake. It looks like a whale’s flukes from above, yes? There’s a hill over here, on the north side, and over here there’s a pile of rocks sticking up out of the ground that resemble fingers.”

  “Is this what it looks like now, or what it looked like ten thousand years ago?” Chey thought to ask.

  Raven scowled and scrubbed out the map he’d been drawing. “You can’t blame an old trickster spirit for trying,” he said. He started drawing again. The lake’s shape had changed considerably, stretching itself out across the terrain. The hill was gone altogether, but the fingerlike stones remained. “Of course, they’re smaller now, and this one, the index finger, has fallen over. Now, there’s an island on the lake, and there’s a cave on the island. At the bottom of the cave you’ll find the ulu—and everything else you have coming to you. Got it?”

  “I think so,” Chey said.

  “Good. Farewell!” Raven shoved his arms back into his cloak and it became a pair of wings. With a sarcastic “Caw!” he jumped into the air and turned into a bird. A bird that flew away at top speed.

  Chey knelt down in the snow over the map, memorizing every line, trying to imprint every detail on her brain so she wou
ldn’t lose it.

  “I think—I think I can remember this,” she told Powell. “I think we can do this! I don’t believe I’m saying this. But I think we can find this thing. We can find the cure.”

  “Maybe we can,” he told her. But there was something wrong with his voice. He didn’t sound particularly happy. If anything, he sounded like his worst fear had just come to pass. He rolled over and turned his eyeless face away from her.

  67.

  Chey was suddenly energized, excited at the prospect of the cure. She could be human again—even better, she could reverse the madness that had been consuming her, the depredations of her wolf on her humanity. She tried to ask a million questions about Victoria Island, and the best way to get there. Powell was very tired, though, and his wounds bothered him so much that he just wanted to curl up and rest.

  “We’ve learned something valuable, yes,” he agreed with her. “Though there are still problems to overcome. It won’t be easy to find this place.”

  “What are you talking about?” she asked. “It should be easy. We have a map, now.”

  “We know it’s on an island in a lake on Victoria Island,” he said. “That’s actually less useful than you seem to think. We still don’t know exactly where this lake is.”

  “We don’t? How many lakes can there be on one island?”

  Powell grimaced. “Victoria Island has hundreds of them. It’s a bigger place than you think it is.”

  “How big?”

  “It’s the size of England and Scotland. And we don’t have a map.”

  Chey refused to have her mood dampened. “So we just need a guide. Dzo—what about you? You must know the place pretty well, right?”

  Dzo waved his hands in the air. “Don’t look at me. There’s no musquashes on Victoria Island. Haven’t been for a very long time. I’ve never been there, myself.”

  Chey frowned. “Well—we just have to get a good map, then.”

  Lucie laughed. “And how shall we do that, jeune fille? Perhaps we find some nice Eskimo nearby and say, give us your maps or we tear out your throat? A solution that has worked for me before, I will admit, though I doubt Monty will allow it.”

  “You know damned well I won’t,” he agreed.

  Fuming with frustration, Chey sat down hard by the fire and hugged herself. “This would be so easy if we could just Google it.”

  The rest of them stared at her as if she’d suddenly started speaking in Sanskrit.

  She stared back. “What?” Then she shook her head, realizing she was the only one in the camp less than a hundred years old. “Right. None of you have ever used the Internet. You’ve probably never even heard of it.”

  “Is it like one of those … GPS boxes Raven mentioned?” Dzo asked.

  “Non, non, non. I think—yes, I believe I heard something of this Internet, when I was in Russia,” Lucie admitted. “It is a new kind of television, yes? It was all the rage.”

  Chey laughed. “Yes, that’s exactly what it is.” She scrubbed at her face with her hands. “Oh, my God. Look, there’s this program—this—this Web page—” She stopped because she was getting a lot of blank looks. “Okay, imagine a map, a really, really good map of the world. It’s based on satellite images, so it’s up to date and it shows everything. You know what satellites are, right?”

  “Oh, yes,” Lucie said, beaming. “Like Sputnik.”

  “Yeah,” Powell said, sitting up a little. “I remember Sputnik. Drove the Americans crazy. They thought it would rain bombs on them. That didn’t ever happen, though, right?”

  “ … Right,” Chey confirmed. “This is going to take a long time to explain. They have a lot of satellites now, and some of them have cameras on them, to take pictures of the Earth from above. By combining all those pictures they can make a photographic map of the entire planet. Including Victoria Island. With a computer, you can access those pictures. If we could get to a computer, we could look at the pictures of Victoria Island and find this lake. It would be pretty easy, actually.”

  “You would have to pore over thousands of pictures with a magnifying glass,” Powell said, shaking his head. “It could take weeks.”

  “No it wouldn’t,” Chey said. “There are some benefits to progress, really.” She hugged her knees against her chest. “Listen,” she said, because she’d had a sudden thought. “Powell, when you went hunting for that seal, you said you saw there were towns up on the coast.”

  “Yes,” he agreed.

  “Well, any of those towns would do. Any of them is likely to have at least some kind of Internet connection.”

  “Really?” he asked. “Are you sure? A lot of them don’t have running water or sewers. And there are no roads up here.”

  “Trust me, even a place that still uses outhouses will already have the Internet. People have to get their porn somehow. If we could go to one of those towns, we could ask to borrow somebody’s computer for a couple hours. We could find this place on Victoria Island, figure out exactly how to get there. Then we just leave, and nobody gets hurt.”

  “What if we don’t find it before we transform?” Powell asked. “I don’t think this is a very good idea.”

  “It’s going to be four more days before we change again,” Chey pointed out. “Trust me, that’s more than enough time.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s dangerous. I don’t think I can allow this.”

  Chey felt anger flush through her. Her cheeks burned as she stood up and loomed over him. “Listen,” she said. “When we’re wolves, you’re the alpha pack leader head honcho whatever,” she told him, “but right now I’m human, and I don’t need you telling me what to do.”

  “You don’t?” he asked. He honestly looked surprised.

  “I’m going. My mind’s made up. I’m doing this. For once I’m going to be the one in charge. You can try to stop me, but it’ll be pretty hard tracking me without any eyes.”

  “That’s a cruel thing to say,” he told her.

  She didn’t bother addressing that. “Lucie—you watch him while I’m gone. If anything happens to Powell before I get back, I’m holding you personally responsible.”

  “I shall nurse him back to health, like my own baby,” Lucie assured her.

  “Creepy. But I guess it’ll have to do. Dzo, you come with me. Do you know where the nearest town is?”

  The musquash spirit shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so. There’s one about twenty kilometers east of here. Just a couple hundred people, almost all of them Inuit. They’re probably all buttoned down for the winter.”

  “Perfect,” Chey said, and without further ado, she started walking east through the snow.

  68.

  Chey and Dzo trudged on in silence for a while, covering a lot of ground. She was in a hurry to get to this town and find a computer. He kept up with her easily, his feet barely sinking into the powdery snow. He looked sad, though, and after a while she had to ask. “What’s up?” she said. “We’re finally on the right track. Isn’t that a good thing?”

  “I guess,” he said.

  “So what’s wrong?”

  He shrugged and pulled down his wooden mask. It was something he did when he felt like human weirdness was getting to be too much for him, she knew. “I’m very happy for you and Powell,” he told her. “Really. I just wonder what’s going to happen to me after you’re gone.”

  “We’re not going anywhere,” she told him. “We’re just going to be human again.”

  He shrugged. “Sure. And maybe—maybe you’ll let me come stay with you? I’m not real good with cities. Too much stuff going on all at once.”

  “I imagine we won’t be moving to Toronto anytime soon, either,” she told him. “I’ve almost started to like this place. Well, not this tundra.” She looked out across the frozen waste. She saw little but a barren snow field stretching to the horizon. There were a few hills to the south, but they did little to break up the monotony. “We’ll go back to Great Bear Lake. Maybe we’ll he
ad down to Yellowknife every once in a while for a beer. You can definitely come along.” It was a rosier picture than she really believed in, of course. She and Powell had done enough horrible things that they were more likely to be sent to jail as soon as they set foot back in civilization. But eventually they would be let out again, if they were model prisoners and showed real remorse, she thought. “We’ll live together like a happy family.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Until you die.”

  She stopped in her tracks. “What?”

  “You’ll be human. You’ll be mortal again.” He threw his hands up in the air. “Do you even understand how long I’ve been alive already? How much longer I’m going to live? It’s like, forever. That’s years and years yet. I’m sure you two will be real nice to me, but you’ll be gone before I even notice, really.”

  Chey exhaled long and hard. Then she rushed over and hugged him, her arms sinking into the depths of his furs. He stood stiffly in her arms for a moment, then laid his head against her chest.

  “We’ll have good times before then, I promise,” she said. “And … and maybe you can hang out with, you know. Our children.”

  Now there was a crazy thought.

  It was weird. Chey had been doubtful at best about this cure when Powell had mentioned it before. Now she believed in it—completely. She was certain that she would be human again, and that it wouldn’t be long in coming.

  The wolf in her brain howled at the thought, but her good mood was enough to keep it from getting out.

  They stopped after a couple hours and rested for a while, or rather, Chey rested while Dzo stood guard. He didn’t sleep, as far as she knew, nor did he ever tire. She supposed there were real advantages to being the collective soul of a rodent species.

  When they started up again, dawn was breaking—a long, drawn-out process that involved lots of pink clouds. The early light made the snow buzz a fluorescent blue that made her head fizz just to look at it. Before the sun was fully up, however, she caught her first sight of the town.