Frostbite

by David Wellington

  His tail between his legs, he stepped closer and pushed his snout into her flank. He was trying to apologize, she knew. The hair between his shoulders, a saddle-shaped patch of fur, stood up and then relaxed. It was a signal and an offering.

  He had tried to kill her. He would try again, unless she stopped him. Unless she killed him first. Yes, it made perfect sense. Bloodlust burned in her—a whole new sensation, but one that felt as old as time. It felt like it was etched into her bones.

  Kill, kill, kill, kill him, she thought, in the rhythm of her panting breath. Kill, kill, kill—the thought beat in her head like a drum, panted on the back of her tongue. Her thoughts were not like human thoughts. They were simpler. More pure. There was no need to examine them, to qualify them. Kill, kill, kill, kill him, kill.

  Her hind legs were like powerful springs. She reared up and brought her strong forelegs down on his neck, her paws smashing and tearing at the skin under all that fur. She raked her claws down between his shoulder blades and opened her mouth to snap at his throat.

  Beneath her he twisted and rolled away from her attack. She bounced sideways to get in another swipe, but before she could build up the momentum he slammed into her like a freight train, all of his weight hitting her just off her center of balance. She went flying, her legs splayed, and skidded painfully across the forest floor on her back. She couldn’t see where he ended up.

  Her vulnerable stomach was exposed. With a snapping twist of every joint in her body, she flipped over with effortless speed. She rose to her paws, spreading her toes out to grip the soft ground. If he came at her again she wanted to be ready. She lifted her muzzle and breathed in deeply. The scents of the forest filled her brain and she caught his signature odor easily. He was running away from her, dashing through the trees, moving quickly.

  She glanced back at her ankle, the one that had been injured when she was trapped in her human body. It looked strong and healthy now. Digging in with her hind legs, she leapt over a pile of dead branches and followed him.

  It was the easiest thing in the world to keep track of him, even if she couldn’t see him. Her eyes, barely thirty centimeters off the ground, saw little but the underbrush. He was running scared and in too much of a hurry to be silent, however, and her ears twitched back and forth as she heard him crashing through shrubs and stands of saplings.

  Oh, the way the world sounded now, a great, sighing, weeping, laughing, exulting, screaming melody of objects moving through time. How she longed to just sit and listen to the planet turn, listen to all its children breathing, their hearts pounding, the air sliding noisily over their fur! But this was not the time. This was the time to kill.

  She pushed herself to catch up with him and found herself streaking through the woods, far faster than she’d ever imagined. The crazily tilted tree trunks all around blurred as her body rippled with speed. Her legs intuitively found the right path, her wide paws barely touching the ground and digging in before they shot her forward again. She opened her mouth and let her tongue dangle out as the ground melted away before her.

  Up ahead she smelled water, muddy and stagnant. More—she smelled him. Her prey. She leapt through a copse of young larches and heard the screams of wood grouse as they startled up into the air, terrified of her. Hunger grabbed at her gut, but she put it aside and tried not to think about it. She had more important things to kill.

  The trees fell away and she was on a high sandy bank overlooking a tiny lake. The sun was just going down: the tops of the trees were still brilliant green, but darkness lurked between their roots. The northern lights played over the gaudy dusk, obscured here and there by clouds. An image of the crescent moon floated on the surface of the lake like a narrow eye. She pressed her muzzle into the wind that stirred the loose guard hairs of her ruffle and felt a howl coming on. He was near, very close by, near, so near, and she was going to finish their fight. It felt good to imagine his blood in her mouth, to hear with her mind’s ear the sound of his bones breaking under her attack.

  She opened her mouth to let out a screeching yowl, a battle song, but before she’d even started he came at her from the side. She spun to meet his strike, but she was too late—she had misjudged his speed and ferocity. He wasted no time with feints or dominance postures, instead sinking his enormous teeth deep into the soft flesh of her haunches. With a twisting, tugging motion he tore her side wide open and her blood spattered on the ground.

  Everything went black. She felt herself falling, tumbling, and then she was gone.

  10.

  Chey awoke with sand in her mouth, her hair matted and sticking to her face.

  When she opened her eyes she saw she was still in the crazy forest, with its trees sticking up at random angles to the ground. It wasn’t any part of the forest she recognized, however. She was nowhere near the little house, or the clearing by the stream, or the giant birch tree she’d sheltered in. She felt sort of as if she’d fallen asleep for a while, and sort of as if she had just blacked out. As if no time at all had passed, and she had just been transported from one place to another instantaneously.

  She remembered very little, though she understood vaguely what had happened to her. She had turned into a wolf.

  Oh.

  Oh God.

  She was just like him. When he scratched her leg—oh God. He had infected her with his curse. The curse—

  —but—she couldn’t—that made her—

  Her head hurt too much to put those thoughts in any kind of proper order. She had to shelve them, as desperately as she wanted to explore them. To figure out what had gone wrong and, much more importantly, how to fix it. For the moment the demands of her body had to take precedent.

  Everything hurt. Her body felt weak and ineffectual. She was freezing cold.

  At least that made sense. She was naked, after all.

  She pulled her knees up to her chest and hugged them hard. A strong shiver went through her and her arms shook so hard she couldn’t hold them down. They rose up, away from her body, no matter how hard she tried to pull them close, to make herself small and conserve her body heat. And there was something else. She was hurt, had been hurt before she unexpectedly turned into a wolf and woke up naked at the bottom of a tall bank of ferns. She was wounded, wasn’t she? The wolf had—the wolf—

  She was a wolf now, too.

  She shook her head, or maybe she just let the tremoring shiver run up her neck, and that helped a little. Cleared away the alarming, nasty thoughts that kept demanding to be heard.

  The wolf had clawed open her ankle. The bone had been bruised, if not fractured. Running around in the woods like that must have worsened the injury, she thought. With careful fingers she probed her leg but couldn’t find any tenderness. Craning forward, she looked down at her ankle. There wasn’t even a scar there.

  Oh God. Oh God. The wolf—Powell—the thing had—he had destroyed her, he had—healed her, somehow, but at what price?

  There had been another injury, another grievous hurt. She could barely remember it, but, if she studied her half-glimpsed recollections, if she forced her brain to think a certain way, she could just recall flashes of light that resolved themselves into fragments of images. Though the pictures seemed half-formed and inconsequential. What came back strongest were sounds and smells. It was so hard to remember because those sounds were in frequency ranges her human ears had never heard before. And those smells—her human nose, and the part of her human brain that handled sense data from her nose, couldn’t even begin to process the smells she could just about remember. But if she pieced things together, let the memories coalesce, she could get some rough idea of what had happened to her. She had transformed into a wolf. And then what? Something bad. Something violent had happened and she’d been badly hurt. She had been convinced, utterly convinced in the way only an animal can be, that she was going to die. The wolf had no ability to deny facts or obscure the obvious. The wolf had known that it was bleeding to death and that its wounds w
ere too severe to survive. The wolf had rolled over on its side, all it could do, and waited for the end to come, waited for the moon to set, when it would transform back into the human woman. Its one simple, ugly consolation had been that the human woman it hated would die too. Only—she hadn’t.

  Only now she was completely healed.

  There were no scars on her body. Not even the old ones, the scars she’d gotten in nasty fights on the playground as a child, the scars that hard work had left on her hands. The scrapes, cuts, and abrasions she’d gotten while she was lost in the woods—there had been a lot of those—were all gone. What else?

  Chey slowly looked down at her left breast. She’d had a tattoo there, had it done when she was sixteen. Sometimes she regretted getting it, other times she thought of it as a badge of her determination, her will. Most of the time she was barely conscious of it. It was there every time she looked in a mirror, every time she got dressed in the morning, and every time she got undressed for bed. The tattoo had become part of how she saw herself, part of her body.

  It was gone. Completely gone, as if she’d never had it done.

  She thought of Powell and his fresh face. Only his eyes showed his real age. Would she be like him? Would she stay young-looking forever, but with eyes crinkled in moldering rage?

  Or, she thought, as a fresh shiver went through her, would she die of hypothermia on the shore of this tiny lake? She was still naked and while she sat there examining herself and digging at memories that ought to be left buried, her perfectly unblemished skin was turning blue. Her body kept shaking until she felt like she was having a seizure. The cold sand burned the soles of her feet. Her teeth chattered together so sharply that she thought they might crack. She needed to find shelter. If nothing better presented itself she could dig down into the sand, bury herself in it to trap in her body heat. And then what, she wondered? Did she hunker down and wait for the Mounties to come save her?

  Oh God. Even if such nonexistent Mounties did come, would they find her in human form, or as a wolf? Would she attack them? Would they shoot her on sight, on principle? Oh God.

  A truck’s horn honked some way off. She jumped in surprise and shouted, “Hey, over here!,” then immediately regretted it. It had to be Dzo in that truck, and he had to be honking for her. She wasn’t sure she wanted to be found. He might take her back to the cabin and a warm fire. Or he might let Powell cut her head off with a rusty ax.

  “Lady? That you?” Dzo’s voice said, cutting through the trees. “Hey, come on, we’re not going to hurt you. Not anymore.”

  The only people in a hundred kilometers who could help her were the same people who had tried to kill her. She could hide—or run. If she did she would either die in the frozen woods or live as—as a wolf. Too much. Too much to think about. Better just to face this, to not have to go through it alone. She stood up and waved and shouted until she heard the truck’s horn again, closer this time. She ran through the woods, her arms clutched around her breasts and her pubic hair, and shouted for help. Eventually she found the truck and she pulled her arm away from her breasts to wave. She covered herself quickly again when she saw Powell in the bed of the truck glaring at her. He was wrapped in a heavy woolen blanket. Dzo drove the truck with his mask on.

  Powell stood up in the bed. “Truce,” he said.

  “What? I’m naked and freezing. Don’t play games with me,” she replied.

  “I want to call a truce. We stop fighting and try to get along. Okay?”

  She didn’t reply—but what choice did she have? He tossed her a bundle of clothing and a green blanket. He looked away just long enough for her to struggle into her pants and shirt. Dzo didn’t turn away, but he didn’t exactly leer at her either. She got the sense that she looked about the same to him naked or dressed. When she tried to climb up into the passenger seat, though, he shook his head and pointed at the bed with his thumb.

  “Wolves in the back,” he said. “I can never get the smell out of the seats.”

  Her face perfectly still—her soul too twisted up to let her feel anything—Chey climbed into the back. Powell stared at her openly but didn’t say a word. The truck growled to life and bobbed and rolled forward along a path that had never been designed for vehicular traffic. She had to hold onto the side of the truck or be thrown around in the bed like loose cargo. She hunkered down in her blanket and tried not to look at anything. Eventually she stopped shaking so much.

  11.

  They rode in silence for a while. Chey was lost deep in thoughts that didn’t please her, but that she couldn’t shake.

  “He hurt you,” Powell finally said.

  Chey looked up at him with bird-fast eyes. “What?” she chirped. She was about to go into hysterics. She was about to cry. She couldn’t talk to him at that moment, couldn’t play the game of being a social creature. Like an injured animal hiding in its den, her personality had curled up to lick its wounds. “What?” she demanded again. “He? He who? Who hurt me?”

  “He hurt you pretty badly. ‘He’ meaning, well, my wolf.” His face was set like stone. She supposed he’d had plenty of time to get used to this. He didn’t look away from her face as he spoke, didn’t drop his eyes or even fidget under his blanket. Chey could read that body language from long experience. He had something uncomfortable to say to her and he was going to be a man about it, a man with a capital M. “I try to think of the wolf, of him, as another being, someone different from myself. That we aren’t the same creature at all. That I stop existing when he appears, and vice versa.”

  “How’s that working out for you?” Chey asked, too fast, her voice too high and too loud. She could read her own body language, too.

  “It helps …sometimes.”

  Chey tried to look away from those eyes, but found she couldn’t. They kept drawing her gaze back. “Okay. So…your wolf…he…”

  “He hurt you, I think. He bit you or something. I want to say I’m sorry. I never remember what happened until later, until I’m clean again and warm and I can think straight.”

  “I think I’d rather not remember,” Chey said.

  “Fair enough.”

  She rubbed at her eyes with her palms. “It’s going to happen again, isn’t it?” she asked.

  He said nothing. Maybe he thought the question was rhetorical, or maybe he didn’t understand what she was asking.

  “I’m going to change again. Be that wolf, again.”

  “Yeah,” he answered.

  “It’s going to happen over and over. For as long as I live.”

  Powell finally did look away from her. It helped not to be pinned by those green eyes. “Whenever the moon rises. Every single time.”

  Chey shook her head and her hair bounced on her cheeks. It felt greasy and thick. “No, listen, I remember now—when you—when—when the wolf clawed me, up in that tree, the moon wasn’t full. It was a half moon, at best. It wasn’t full.”

  “They made up that guff about the full moon for the movies. Whenever even a sliver of moon is over the horizon, even when it’s new, even if we can’t see it, we change. We can be at the bottom of a coal mine when it comes up. We can be at the bottom of a lake and it won’t matter. There’s no way to stop it. Every single damned time. I’ve been trying to find a cure for—”

  “No,” she said. “Please, no more. I can’t talk about the rules right now,” Chey insisted. “I can’t hear about this.”

  Powell didn’t say another word for the rest of the trip.

  Afternoon was well on them by the time they got back to the cabin. The men busied themselves with various tasks, picking up firewood and folding blankets. Chey stood in the middle of the yard, just outside the house. Just stood there with her arms folded and didn’t move.

  A curl of smoke rose from a pipe chimney sticking out of the side of the house. Inside a fire crackled and a little yellow light came through the open doorway. Was Powell waiting for her to come in on her own? Maybe he thought she just needed some spa
ce. Some time to process what had happened.

  She would never get used to this, she thought. She was never going to accept it.

  There was no point standing outside in the dooryard all night, though. She went inside and warmed herself by the stove.

  Inside Powell made up a bed for her, lining his rough wooden couch with blankets and pillows. It looked more like a dog bed than one meant for a human being. When he finished he took a step toward her, but she wouldn’t let him come near her. He tried again, tried to touch her arm, and she recoiled as if he were a snake trying to bite her. He got the point and retired to his smokehouse. Chey followed him as far as the doorway and watched him go inside and close the door behind him. Dzo was outside refueling the truck from an enormous plastic jerry can. It was yellow with age and translucent, and she could see the shadow of the liquid sloshing back and forth inside.

  “Make yourself at home, eh?” Dzo said, grinning at her.

  She slammed the door shut. There was no lock, just a simple latch, but she pulled hard to make sure it caught. Then she found a chair—not that nest of a bed—and threw herself down in it and had a good sulk.

  A day earlier, when she had been lost in the woods, she had been certain she was going to die. It was the worst feeling she’d ever known. Now she was certain she was going to live and it was even worse.

  There was no way back, no cure except death. That was what Powell had been trying to tell her. She was stuck with the wolf for the rest of her life.

  What did she do next? Did she give up? There had been no room in her plans for this, for becoming a monster. How could she adjust her life to make room for a giant wolf? How could she hold a job if every twelve hours she transformed into an animal? She’d had a few boyfriends back in Edmonton. Mostly they’d been cowboy types, guys with ponytails and motorcycles. The kind of guys who might try to keep a wolf for a pet. None of them would have understood what she’d become. If she had tried to explain this to them, they might have thought it was cool. She could not agree.