Frostbite

by David Wellington

  Then everyone moved at once.

  Chey’s thumb moved down to disengage the safety. Her aim slipped away from Powell’s face.

  Lester, the Inuvialuit pilot, dashed around the side of his helicopter, trying to get to safety.

  Bobby shoved a hand into his leather jacket, clearly reaching for a gun of his own.

  In the distance Dzo spun out on the logging road and drove his rusted truck back into the impenetrable woods.

  But before any of that had really happened, before Chey could even breathe, Powell moved.

  She knew that even in their human forms wolves were faster than any normal person. She had that strength and that quickness in her own legs and arms. She’d never really tried it out, though. She’d never tested her new limits.

  Powell had possessed that speed for nearly a hundred years. He must have known what his body could do, what it could achieve if put to the test. He didn’t hesitate. He just moved, flowed across the clearing. One of his hands batted at Chey’s arm hard enough to dislocate her wrist. Her handgun went flying. Powell didn’t stop to watch it fall. Momentum carried him onward, his feet digging in the soil, his legs pumping. He brought his shoulder around and collided with Bobby hard enough to make them both yowl in pain. Bobby’s yowl was sharper. He smashed to the ground and rolled into a ball. Powell kept moving, his feet a blur, until he came up against the side of the helicopter with a clang. He looked through the Plexiglas bubble of its cockpit. Chey could see Lester back there, crouched low, his face and eyes wide.

  “Don’t try anything,” Powell grunted at the pilot.

  “Yeah, okay,” Lester said, nodding agreeably.

  Chey looked around. Her arm stung with pain but she could ignore that for a couple of seconds. She had better be able to ignore it long enough to find the gun again. There—its black angular shape stuck out prominently on a crust of snow. It was only a few meters away. She bent her knees and tried to jump for it.

  She didn’t even get to take a step. Powell pushed off the helicopter and nearly flew back across the clearing to tackle her legs. The ground tilted upward and her cheek smashed into it. Her teeth rattled in her skull.

  Powell pushed her face deeper into the soil with one hand. With the other he grabbed her hurt wrist and gave it a good twist.

  Yellow stars exploded behind her eyes. It hurt so much that vomit rushed up her throat and she had to swallow uncomfortably or choke.

  “You want to kill me,” he said to her, his voice thick with emotion. “Well, maybe I deserve it. But first you had to lie to me. I took you into my house and this is the thanks I get. I should kill you. I will, the next time I see you.”

  He twisted her hand again, all the way around this time. Her shoulders shook and bucked beneath his grasp, her jaws clacked in her head. The pain was sending her into shock. Cold flashed through her body, cold as fierce as when she’d been submerged in the freshet. Cold like the time she’d woken naked in the tundra after her first change.

  He let her go. She couldn’t move except to shiver, to convulse in pain and cold.

  When she’d recovered herself enough to sit up he was gone.

  32.

  Pain ate at her. It was like a small animal lodged in her abdomen, chewing on her stomach. Nausea made her eyes bulge, made her sweat even in the cold air.

  Slowly Chey raised her arm to look at her wrist. The skin of her forearm was red and purple, while the hand itself looked limp, like a doll’s hand. It dangled at the end of her arm. She tried to close her fingers and they twitched but refused to do as she asked. She tried to lift the hand but it wouldn’t move at all.

  The pain grumbled inside of her and told her to lie down. It told her to go to sleep. If she hadn’t been half wolf, she probably wouldn’t have had a choice. Whatever she thought of the curse Powell had given her, it did have some compensations.

  It wasn’t permanent, she told herself. As soon as she changed again her body would heal the injury. As soon as she changed again…

  She had some thinking to do. She had to make a plan. The pain was going to have to wait.

  She stumbled up onto her feet and walked toward where Bobby lay curled up on the ground. He was conscious, but his face was twisted in a grimace of hurt. “Lester,” she shouted. “Lester, come over here.”

  “Is he gone?” the pilot asked, coming around the side of his helicopter. “Do you think he might come back?”

  She shook her head. “He’s too smart for that. Come on, help me with Bobby.”

  Together they pulled Fenech up into a sitting position. The operative clutched at his chest, but Chey found he was weak as a kitten when she took his hands away. She pulled at the neck of his polo shirt and looked inside. A wide blue bruise had already formed around his sternum. Powell had tackled him pretty hard. “Can you talk?” Chey asked. “Can you say something?”

  “Frigging squatch,” he moaned. “That frigging squatch!”

  “I guess you’re going to live,” she said, and squatted down next to him.

  She stared out at the water, unsure of what to say next. The sun was still high over the trees, but she figured it had to be getting on to nine o’clock. She could have checked the clock on her cell phone, but that would have involved reaching into her pocket with her broken hand.

  “Listen,” she said finally, “I’m sorry, but—”

  “Hold on.” Bobby patted the needles around him with his hands, then turned up his sunglasses. They must have fallen off when Powell hit him. The right lens was badly scratched, but he polished them on his shirt anyway and then pulled them over his eyes. “Okay,” he said. “Chey, you know how I feel about you. You know that I trust you. So when I ask you my next question, I want you to please not take it the wrong way.”

  “Alright,” she said, making it half question.

  “Are you fucking stupid?” he demanded. “Did you know the safety was on? Because I seem to remember that was part of your training. The training I had to go through so much shit to convince your ratass uncle to give you.”

  “I fucked up, I know,” she said. “But it wasn’t conscious. Look, next time—”

  He held a finger to his lips. “The fact that you think there’s going to be a next time is actually pretty funny. I might even laugh, if I didn’t think it would rupture my spleen. Let me say this one more time—”

  “Wait, wait, you—”

  “You’re fired, Chey! You’re off the team. I’m going to get some friends of mine up here and we will actually kill that frigging squatch. That’s what’s going to happen. I have been working on this project way too long to let you end it like this. Lester, get the camp stuff out. I don’t think the squatch is coming back tonight, not if he knows we’re packing silver. Chey, you can help me go sit down inside the whirlybird. I think I’d prefer a padded seat to these fucking rocks.”

  Every time she moved pain rumbled through Chey like the tremors that come before a volcano lets loose. She nearly fell over. She helped Bobby stand up, though, and limp toward the helicopter. Lester did as he’d been asked, hauling a stack of nylon bags out of the helicopter’s cargo compartment.

  “Bobby,” she said, when he was sitting down inside the helicopter.

  “Save it.”

  “Bobby, there’s something we need to think about.”

  His head rolled to one side until he was looking at her.

  “I’m going to change,” she said.

  His brow furrowed.

  “In about an hour, I think, the moon is going to come up again. Every time the moon comes up I change. Into a wolf.”

  He nodded, but he didn’t seem terribly concerned.

  “When that happens,” she said, “I’m going to do everything in my power to kill you and Lester.” He started to protest and she raised her good hand to stop him. “It’s not an optional thing. When I change I kill anything human that I see. I think I should get out of here. Run off into the woods. I’ll get as far away as I can before it happens, an
d maybe that’ll be enough. Maybe if I get far enough I won’t smell you guys when I’m a wolf. Maybe.”

  He nodded and sat up a little, grimacing in pain as he did so. “I’ve got a better idea,” he told her. “Lester!” he shouted. “Open up the blue bag.” To her he confided, “I had kind of this crazy notion that we might catch your new friend unawares. That we might be able to take him alive.”

  Lester pulled open the blue bag and a length of metal chain slithered out. Bright silver chain, with a thick manacle on one end.

  “Do you think it’ll fit?” Bobby asked.

  33.

  The two men made camp and built a cheery little fire. The white smoke that lifted off the blaze mixed with the mist off the water and the yellowish twilight. That butterscotch quality of the evening had lingered for hours and it still wasn’t dark—it was near midsummer in the Arctic and that meant some very short nights—but the air had turned frosty and damp and the dancing fire chased away some of the gloom.

  It was half past nine, already. The moon was going to rise at 9:45.

  She caught Lester checking his watch more than once. Bobby, though, kept his eyes on her the whole time. Even as he got up to throw another sap-heavy log on the fire he watched.

  “You hungry?” he asked, and she almost jumped. She’d gotten used to the silence. “We’ve got some powdered eggs and coffee. Instant, you know, but it’s still Timmy Ho’s best, and it’ll probably smell like civilization. I can’t remember, do you take sugar?”

  The breath leaked out of her with a whimpering sound.

  “I guess not,” he said, and sat down by the fire. To watch.

  Her body grew light, almost insubstantial. Her clothes hung on her like formless sacks, then dripped to the floor of the clearing. She watched her broken wrist. The hand there lifted of its own accord—it looked like a balloon filling up with air. She could feel the bones inside twanging and grating on each other. It didn’t hurt much—nothing hurt, or felt like anything much. She felt like she were made of some softer substance than flesh and bones. She felt like she might have floated away if not for the incredibly heavy chain around her ankle that held her down. That didn’t fall off, even when she stood naked and ghostly and tearing at it, pulling at it—

  Silver light. The world filled up with silver light. It was 9:47 P.M. Moonrise.

  Her body shook with joy, her fur fluffing out and her bones popping happily. She dug at the ground with her claws and then lifted her muzzle to the wind to howl in pure pleasure.

  Her nostrils twitched. Her throat tasted smoke—fire—wood burning nearby. Her eyes tried to focus and though her vision was not her best sense, she could still see the yellow splash of flame in the middle of the clearing. She could still see—them.

  Men. Men. Men, hated men. Men, she panted. Men. She could taste their blood already. Though not as much as she would have liked. Visions of tearing them up and feasting on their entrails struck sparks in her heart and her head. Desires she had not felt before blossomed inside of her, filled her up, made her body race.

  Men—two of them. They stood around their little fire as if it could protect them, their bodies crouched as if they might run. They were afraid of her.

  They should be. A growl rumbled in her throat, low, but like the thundering pulse of a waterfall muted only by distance.

  They shouted at one another and at her. Grunting, grumbling noises that meant nothing to her. They sounded sickly. They made the kind of sounds a stomach full of rotten meat might make. Her lips pulled back from her teeth as she took a step toward them. Another step, closer, her paws flat on the ground, her body low for the pounce, another step—

  Searing pain burst through her leg, like a hot knife pressed against the bone. She yelped in horror and fell back, curled around herself, looked for the source of the terrible cutting agony. Her tongue lapped at her leg and she tasted fire there. She sniffed at the injury and smelled something new, new to her at least. Something she’d never encountered before and yet—and yet in her bones she understood immediately what it was. Silver. Silver the color of the moon, the color of the orb that ruled her.

  A band of it wrapped around her hind leg. The band was tied around a tree with a rope of silver. She could never break that cord. If she tried to bite through it her teeth would snap, her gums would bleed. It was stronger than she was. She understood at once that she was trapped, and she knew it was the men who had trapped her.

  She had not thought it possible that she could hate the men any more than she did already, that she could long for their throats between her teeth with any more rage and longing than she’d already known. But it was possible indeed. Every cell in her body burned with the need. And yet even as she wanted and begged and growled and fought and needed, she was stuck in place; she could not pounce, or run, or fight. A whimper leaked out of her that sounded pathetic, she knew, but she couldn’t help it. Let go, go, go, go, she panted, the rhythm of her anger and her dread rattling in the hollow parts of her skull. Free, free, free me, free!

  One of the men, the paler of the two, walked toward her, his knees bent. Ready to jump away if she snapped at him. If she could move, if she could just get loose for one moment, she would tear apart his face and his chest and lap at the blood of his hot heart. Closer he came, his hands outstretched as if to soothe her. Fool! And yet even with blood-lust smearing its gory paws across her eyes she knew she could not hurt him, not unless he came a little closer, closer, closer, little closer, closer—

  He stopped just outside her range. She swatted at him anyway out of sheer need, but he was out of reach. He made some more of those hateful sounds at her, but where before the clanging human syllables had been harsh and grating, these were soft and low like the fur of a woodchuck’s belly.

  She couldn’t reach him. She couldn’t bite through the chain. Her growls were pointless, impotent.

  Then she thought of something. Even as he spoke to her in those soft and rumbling tones, even as he studied her with his eyes, she licked the metal one more time, the silver like searing ice on her tongue. Then she got her muzzle and her enormous teeth around her own ankle and with one quick snap she bit through the bone. There was pain as her leg tore, as her skin and her muscles snapped apart, there was pain as her paw came off like so much dead meat. But the band of silver on her leg fell away and suddenly, instantly, she was free.

  34.

  Chey woke face down in a snowdrift, her hands gripping the earth like claws. Her body ached and pulsed—a maddening tingle in her left leg made her cry out.

  She rolled over and stared up at the sky. The sun was high above but its light couldn’t seem to warm her. Her breath turned to mist inside of her mouth.

  She sat up—her body complaining, her neck popping noisily—and grabbed at her leg, kneading the muscles there, trying to get her circulation going. She felt a real shock when her hands met the skin of her calf and found it blistered and raw. She looked down and saw what looked like a burn scar there. That was where the silver chain had bound her. She knew silver could kill her, kill the wolf. Maybe even just being in contact with the metal was enough to hurt her.

  Wait, she thought. Something was wrong. Bobby had chained her up so she wouldn’t hurt him or Lester. The chain had held her even when she transformed—she could remember that much. But now it was gone. Had Bobby released her while she slept?

  Except then why was she not in the clearing by the little lake? She looked around, nearly forgetting she was naked, and called Bobby’s name. There was no sign of the helicopter. She must have traveled some distance while she was in her wolf form.

  She brushed snow off her arms and her chest with shaking hands and rose creakily to her feet. She wasn’t going to freeze to death, she knew that much now, but her body still rebelled at the cold air around her, the cold earth beneath her feet. It wanted clothing and shelter.

  She took a step and got another shock. A bad one, a really bad one. The snowdrift around her was splattered
with red blood. What looked like gallons of it.

  Her hands pressed against her mouth. Her chest tightened—what—where—had that blood come from? Oh, God, she thought. Oh, no.

  Somehow she’d gotten free of the chain. She’d gotten free right in the midst of the two men. Her wolf was faster than any human, stronger. Bobby had silver bullets but—but maybe she had attacked before he could draw his weapon.

  Murder, she thought. Murder, murder, murderer, murderer, her brain gibbered. But no, she thought, no, she had to calm down. She didn’t actually know what had happened. She had vague memories of snarling and snapping and running through the woods. She could taste blood in her mouth still—the obvious conclusion, the most plausible scenario was that she had killed the two men and maybe …maybe she had eaten them—

  She fell to her knees and retched into the snow. A little red blood flecked the white, but after a moment her body was just fluttering with dry heaves.

  If she had killed Bobby and Lester then that made her exactly the same thing as her demon, as the trauma that had devoured her life. The thing she had sought to destroy for so many years, the thing that had destroyed her. It made her no better than Powell.

  Chey had on many occasions in her life been haunted by memories and questions. If there was one thing she knew how to do it was cope with horror. Not fix it, not resolve it, just cope. She knew what she needed to do. She needed to focus on her immediate situation. She needed to get to a place of safety.

  She started walking. It helped—moving over the rough ground required a certain amount of concentration. Picking her way through the dense undergrowth took mental energy away from the parts of her brain that just wanted her to sit down and scream. Still. She had no compass, no map. She wasn’t sure where she actually was, nor did she know where she wanted to go. She couldn’t go back to Powell’s cabin, could she? The wolf knew who she was now. He would be on his guard and he would probably attack her—kill her—on sight.