Overwinter Read online

  also by David Wellington

  Monster Island

  Monster Nation

  Monster Planet

  13 Bullets

  99 Coffins

  Vampire Zero

  23 Hours

  Frostbite

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by David Wellington

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-46080-6

  v3.1

  For Adelaide

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One - Great Bear Lake

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Part Two - The Barren Grounds

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Part Three - Victoria Island

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by David Wellington

  prologue

  Tucker’s Last Stand was the rowdiest bar in the town of Menden, Alaska, but when the naked woman staggered in through the front door it was still enough to make Greg Thomas’s jaw drop. He was the town doctor, and had seen some pretty crazy things in his time, but still.

  From her post behind the bar, Margie Hurlwhite let out a low whistle and put down the glass she’d been filling. The four men at the bar turned to look all at once and none of them said a word. Three of them were old fishermen with hands so cut up and weathered they could barely hold a knife anymore. Thomas, the fourth, stood up so fast he knocked over his stool. The noise was loud enough to drown out the radio, but nobody bothered to look away from the naked visitor.

  Thomas wiped his hands on his pants. “Well, hi there,” he said, when it was clear no one else was going to welcome the newcomer.

  She looked him right in the eye and smiled. Didn’t say a word. She was beautiful, he thought, far lovelier a creature than any woman in Menden had a right to be, with long red hair that fell across her eyes and shaded her face but totally failed to cover her breasts, not to mention the rest of her. She looked like she might be twenty, or maybe younger. Just a girl. He wiped his hands on his hips again, because suddenly they were sweaty. It had been a long time since his wife had died and he’d never bothered much with women since then, but this one … except maybe it wasn’t exactly lust he was feeling in his heart at that moment. There was something about this girl. Maybe it was that she wasn’t making any effort to cover herself up. That she wasn’t shivering, even with snowflakes flecking her hair like glitter. It was just below freezing outside, and her feet were wet, as if she’d been walking in the snow, but she looked as though if you put a hand on her arm you might just get burned.

  “You got a good enough look, Doc, to make a diagnosis?” Margie asked, rushing around the end of the bar to drag the girl inside, away from the door. She stopped before she could touch the girl’s skin, though, and mostly just waved her toward the back and the pair of red leather booths there.

  Margie’s tone had been thick with sarcasm but Thomas shook his head and answered anyway. “Hypothermia’s my guess. We got to get her warm.” He stripped off his parka and wrapped it around the girl, which got him another smile, this one warm with gratitude. “Margie, make some coffee, will ya?”

  “Got a pot brewing right now,” Margie told him. She busied herself behind the bar while the three fishermen turned on their stools to face Thomas and the girl. They were blinking and rubbing their faces like they couldn’t quite believe it.

  “What’s the matter, miss?” Thomas asked. “You in an accident or something? Where’d you come from?”

  She tilted her head so the red hair fell away from her eyes and looked up into his face. “No accident, m’sieur. I have come from the water, just now, on a boat.”

  “You have people around here, someone I can call?”

  The smile faded a bit. “Not so close, but people, yes. I have come for my man, who I have not seen for a very long time.”

  “What’s that accent?” Margie asked, bringing the coffee. She set it down on the table in front of the girl with shaking hands. “Sounds like Quebec, maybe. You a Quebecois, dear?”

  “Je suis française, but I have been abroad. Just now I am coming over from Russia.”

  Well, Thomas thought, that made some sense, anyway. Menden was on the west coast of Alaska, near about as close as you could get to Russia without going for a swim. Boats went back and forth between the two landmasses all the time. Of course, most of the people on those boats dressed for the climate.

&n
bsp; “What’s your name?” Margie asked, and Thomas felt like a cad for forgetting to ask that, himself.

  “I am Lucie, thank you.”

  Thomas waved Margie back. The bartender was leaning so close she was blocking the girl’s air. “Find some blankets, a tarp, anything. And turn the heat up in here. She’s probably so cold her brain’s froze. We have to—”

  “I am altogether fine, sir,” Lucie said, and she reached out to grab Thomas’s hand. He flinched, expecting her touch to scorch him. Her skin was warm, it was true, though no more than normal body temperature. Her lips weren’t blue or even chapped, and her pupils were normal, he noted. “But can you, please, tell me one thing? That clock, there. Is it accurate?”

  He looked up at the old cuckoo clock above the bar mirror, mounted between a pair of antique snowshoes. It said it was a quarter to nine. “I suppose,” he said, though it did seem like that must be wrong.

  “No, honey, that’s bar time,” Margie supplied. “About fifteen minutes ahead. That’s so when closing time comes I can get these sorry fools moving toward the door faster. Why do you need to know? Are you meeting your man soon?”

  Lucie shook her head prettily. “Not yet. I merely wish to know, because the moon is due up at eight and the half tonight.”

  Thomas frowned. There really was something about this girl. Something off. “You know when moonrise is off the top of your head?”

  “I should be very surprised to find her up without me,” Lucie replied. “So it is just about now half past the eight? Yes, I can feel it is so.” She shrugged her shoulders and the parka fell away. “Merci. You have all been so very kind.”

  Thomas grabbed for the parka and realized, too late, that she hadn’t pushed it off herself. It had collapsed around her. Or—through her. She was becoming intangible, her flesh transparent so he could see the red leather of the banquette right through her white skin. “Holy mother,” he said. “Like a—a ghost.”

  “No, m’sieur. Not like a ghost at all.”

  There was a flash of silver light, a shimmer like moonlight flickering on choppy water. Then in his arms was an explosion of fur and spittle and many huge teeth. Blood spattered the dusty floor of the bar and Margie screamed, but Thomas barely heard her. He never heard anything again.

  part one

  great bear lake

  1.

  Cheyenne Clark was, for the first time in her life, almost happy.

  It wasn’t something she liked to admit to herself. She had plenty of reasons to be miserable, depressed, even pissed off. But those reasons felt very far away.

  There had been a time, before, when things had gotten bad. Very, very bad, and she hadn’t come out of it innocent. She—or rather her wolf—had done things she didn’t like to contemplate.

  An agent of the Canadian government had tortured her. He’d been using her as bait to draw another werewolf to his death. The two werewolves had retaliated, and things had gotten out of control. She’d gone a little crazy. Maybe a lot crazy. She had killed some people. Or, as she wished she could put it, her wolf had killed some people.

  But that was in the past.

  Now she wasn’t alone anymore. Chey and Montgomery Powell—she still called him Powell, though he’d told her she was a friend of his now, and could call him Monty—were together now, together in a way she’d never experienced with a human being. It was more like the bond wolves share in a pack. They’d headed north, away from anyone who might be looking for them. Away from people they might hurt, and people who might hurt them. People who had easy access to silver bullets.

  Those people were a long way away. In the Northwest Territories of Canada, there was a lot of empty space to escape into.

  Starting from Port Radium, a ghost town so polluted nothing could live there, they’d followed the sinuous curves of the shore of Great Bear Lake, staying close to the water where the hunting was still good. Summer was over, and though the ground was still soft and the wind didn’t bite too hard yet, most game animals were already migrating south. There were fewer snowshoe rabbits every day and even field mice were becoming scarce. When Powell caught his first lemming—like a big mouse with a red back and a short tail—he brought it back to their camp and studied it as if he were reading a newspaper. “It must be September,” he said.

  He took a buck knife out of his pocket and started to skin the animal, preparatory to cooking it over their fire. Chey winced and turned away. She could feel him watching her, feel his surprise, but there were still some things her wolf handled better than she could.

  “You’re going to eat this once it’s roasted, aren’t you?” he asked her.

  “Yes,” she told him. She was always a little hungry these days and she knew once she smelled the cooking meat she wouldn’t be able to resist. “I just don’t want to see it cut up, that’s all.”

  “You should learn how to skin one of these. Pretty soon we’ll be living off them. You’ll need to know, then.”

  She shook her head. Their wolves were perfectly capable of hunting for themselves. Powell and Chey didn’t need to eat at all—what nourished their wolves nourished them. Powell insisted on cooking, though, because it was a human ritual and it made him feel like he was still in control of his destiny. She … respected that in him, that he still thought of himself as a human with some kind of disease. Something that could be managed. She was under fewer illusions, herself. “I’ll just let my wolf do it,” she said.

  Her wolf loved it up here. Her wolf thrived on the constant cold, on the silence between the trees. On the clean air. And because there was no way for Chey to get rid of her wolf, she was just going to have to make do. Her wolf hated human beings and would attack them on sight, whether it was hungry or not. She didn’t want that to happen. Didn’t want to live with the consequences. The only option left to her was to live up here where people were scarcer than palm trees. Powell had figured that out decades earlier, after exhausting every other possibility. She had chosen to come with him, to learn from him, to live with him so that she didn’t have to be completely alone.

  When the lemming was cooked he carved off a fillet and brought it to her. The meat was stringy and gamy but her stomach lurched happily when the first drop of its grease touched her tongue. She gobbled it down without bothering to chew too much.

  “So?” he asked.

  “You overcooked it,” she told him. He sighed and started to turn away, but she shot out one hand and grabbed his arm. “Is there any more?” she asked.

  He stared at her with his big cold green eyes. Eyes she saw sometimes when she was about to fall asleep, eyes she couldn’t not see. His eyes were searching her face, looking for something. Not validation, she knew. He was too tough to need that. Not an apology, because he knew better than to expect that from her.

  She’d been hard on him, she knew. Harsher than she’d meant to be. He’d hurt her badly, once, and she’d never fully forgiven him.

  But maybe … maybe she didn’t have to be such a jerk about it. Things had changed. Were continuing to change, especially between the two of them. And all the bad things, the bad history that had led her to this point, seemed very far away indeed.

  She took a step toward him. It was all he needed. He stepped toward her as well, then wrapped his arms around her and pulled her to him. Part of her wanted to push him away. Part of her wanted to lash out, to hit him, to scream in his face and rake her fingernails across his eyes.