Overwinter Read online

  the barren grounds

  31.

  Preston Holness was in his happy place.

  That did not mean he was happy.

  He was surrounded by silk ties, in every possible combination of colors and patterns. One polished oak table held an array of matching handkerchiefs, while a glass case displayed tie pins that ranged from daring Art Deco fantasias to patriotic enamel maple leaves to tasteful but very large pearls set in white gold. He was in a shop that catered to people exactly like himself—powerful men who liked to dress well, and were happy to pay for the privilege of doing so.

  It was the kind of place where you could have a heated discussion on your cell phone, as Holness was doing now, and the shop clerks wouldn’t even shoot nasty looks at you. They understood that your work must be very important or you wouldn’t have come in the shop in the first place. They understood that if you were taking a call, it was because you had to.

  “I think we can be cautiously optimistic about what happened. Varkanin engaged them for the first time. He didn’t expect to get them right away.” Holness considered, carefully, a lie, then went ahead and told it. “I didn’t expect him to, either. These things aren’t easy. They take careful preparation and there’s the basic necessities of survival to consider. He’s not going to do you much good if he freezes to death. Do you know how cold it is up there at this time of year?”

  On the other end of the line Demetrios all but snarled. “I want results, not a status report. He saw them. He shot at them. They are all still alive. Every day it takes is another day we have to wait on sending our crews in. Do you know how long it takes to survey a drill site, much less build a pipeline? Our people don’t give a shit how cold it is.”

  “I’m sure I’ll have better news for you very soon. Varkanin is motivated. He isn’t going anywhere until he—until he achieves a satisfactory result.” Even in a store with this understanding of high-powered phone calls, Holness didn’t want to say the phrase “until he kills our werewolves” out loud.

  “He’s motivated when it comes to the French one,” Demetrios said. “Are you telling me that if he gets her first, he’ll actually stick around to take care of the other two? They mean nothing to him.”

  “I personally met with him and brokered a deal,” Holness assured the lawyer. “From my end, I’m providing all the support I can muster. On his end … well. I can promise you he is committed to this. He would have done anything I asked for a chance to—to close the French deal.”

  “Committed. He’s committed to it,” Demetrios said, sounding one shade less angry than he had before. “I need something to take back to my superiors. Tell me how committed he is. Give me some proof of his commitment.”

  That, at least, Holness could provide. “You’ve seen the picture in his dossier. You’ve seen his blue skin. It’s no accident he looks like that. Have you ever heard of something called colloidal silver?”

  32.

  The three werewolves were intoxicated by their newfound freedom, after they emerged from the den. Lucie danced across the snow, stretching every muscle in her body, while Powell ran around looking for signs of danger. Chey wanted to join them, wanted to do jumping jacks or yoga or just anything that would get her body moving again, but she felt like just crawling out of the muddy den had left her exhausted.

  Dzo stood by, watching it all with a vaguely amused look.

  “By God, it feels good to walk again,” Lucie exclaimed, stretching her arms up toward the sky. She was standing on top of a rock that had been cleared of snow by the wind. “Two weeks in that hell! I thought it would never end.”

  “Lucie,” Powell said, “I’m pretty sure this is your name.”

  “To breathe clean air. To see the sun! I am overjoyed,” Lucie went on, lifting one leg, then the other. “Cher, do you not feel this good?”

  Two weeks? Chey had had no idea it had been that long. She must have slept through most of it while her body repaired itself. It still didn’t feel all that great. Knowing she was on an express train to crazy-town probably didn’t help, but she felt weak and lethargic. Two weeks? Really?

  “Could you just come down here for a moment?” Powell asked.

  “Are you okay?” Dzo asked, taking Chey’s arm. She tried to smile at him.

  “How I long to run beneath the moon. To stretch and leap and jump. How I—”

  “Enough!” Powell shouted.

  Everyone turned to look at him. He was standing next to a tree, just outside the abandoned den. It looked like the bark had been cut up by something with sharp claws.

  “Dzo,” Powell said, his voice lowered now. “You’re sure you didn’t tell Varkanin where we were?”

  “Well, no,” the spirit said, looking guilty.

  “No what?”

  Dzo shrugged. “I mean, he already knew.”

  Chey looked again at the scarred tree. The scratches there looked kind of like writing, if you squinted, but like nonsense writing, like someone who didn’t know the alphabet trying to make letters anyway. Then her brain made the connection. The scratches were in fact letters, very neatly carved into the bark. They just weren’t in the alphabet she was most familiar with.

  “That’s—what? Cyrillic? Is that how they write in Russia?” Chey asked.

  “Yeah,” Powell said. “I can’t read it. Lucie? I’m betting you can, since this first part looks a lot like your name.”

  Lucie was still standing atop her rock, as if she was afraid to get her toes wet in the snow. For a moment she just stared down at Powell, but then she jumped to the ground and walked over to the tree.

  “It’s nothing,” she said. “Just a sign of his frustration. He knows we are too quick for him, and—”

  “What does it actually say?” Powell demanded.

  Lucie looked straight into his eyes as she repeated the message Varkanin had left for her. “It reads, ‘Lucie, you will never have a home.’ It means—”

  Powell held up a hand for silence.

  Chey knew what he was thinking. She was thinking it, too. The hunter had known where they were. He must have watched them crawl into the den. He could have killed them in there, when they had no place else to run to. He must have had a good reason not to do just that, but Chey couldn’t think what it was.

  A shiver ran down her back that had nothing to do with the weather.

  “It means you can’t hide from him. That he isn’t going to just give up.” Powell shook his head. “I wouldn’t have believed him if he said otherwise. Fine. We need to get moving.”

  “I could really use a break,” Chey said. “I’m still not a hundred percent, and maybe if I could just sit for a while. You know.”

  Powell came over and grabbed her shoulders. “I’d love to let you rest. I’d love to build some kind of shelter and overwinter here. But we just can’t. He’ll be back, probably when we’re not expecting him.”

  “Okay,” Chey said, struggling up to her feet. “Maybe I’ll feel better once I get some exercise. Just—walk it off, right?”

  “That’s my girl. Come on. Lucie—you take point. You’ve got so much energy, you run on ahead and see if he left us any surprises. We’re heading north.”

  “North?” Lucie asked.

  “North?” Dzo echoed.

  “Seriously, north?” Chey laughed. “What, like, toward the pole?”

  “North,” Powell repeated. “Lucie—get moving. We only have a few hours before the moon comes up. We need to be well clear of this place by then. He may be gone now, but there’s nothing stopping him from coming back at any time. Dzo, help Chey walk if she needs it.”

  Lucie shrugged and darted off into the willow bushes to the north, moving almost as fast as her wolf could have run. Dzo offered Chey his arm and she took it gladly. She could walk with his help, though she wondered how long it would be before she just collapsed in the snow and Powell had to carry her again.

  She didn’t doubt that they needed to get away. But she did wonder why P
owell had chosen this direction. The snow was thick enough to make walking difficult already. The farther north they got the more of it there was likely to be. And while the cold didn’t bother werewolves the same way it bothered humans, there was a limit even to lycanthropic toughness. They were heading north, in the Arctic, at wintertime. It was one of those things you just didn’t do. When Chey had been younger she had watched more than one television documentary that started out with a bunch of hikers heading north in winter. Typically they were documentaries about how people lost toes and other body parts to frostbite.

  “Where are you taking us?” Chey asked.

  Powell shrugged. “I just want to get clear of this area.”

  “That’s bullshit. Lie to Lucie if you want to. But not me, Powell. I don’t have much time left, so don’t waste it on garbage. You’re headed somewhere. Somewhere specific. Tell me!”

  “It’s you I’m thinking of,” he told her. His icy green eyes revealed nothing. “I’m going to save you, Chey. If I can. So trust me. Alright?”

  “You’re looking for the place where the curse started,” she said, suddenly getting it. “Like we talked about, before. You said in the spring we would go look for it, because you thought there was a cure there.” She shook her head. “We’re going to tramp through the snow forever just in case you might be right?”

  “It’s your only chance,” he told her.

  33.

  Far to the north, on the edge of the Arctic Ocean, lay the community of Umiaq. It was not a very large town, even by the standards of northern Canada. It had a permanent population of less than two hundred people, though that could swell at times when there was work to be had. The town had a general store and a post office, and a place that was a bar in winter and a fish restaurant in the summer when the ice-breakers could make their way into the harbor. It had a community hall that also served as the health center, with one nurse in attendance five days a week. Beyond that it had about a dozen houses, all of them looking as weather-beaten and small of stature as the local residents, 90 percent of whom were Inuit. The town’s mayor was Métis, since he had a white trapper for a grandfather. As he made his way down the one plowed street of his domain he waved at everyone he saw, and stopped to shake hands with people he knew he wouldn’t be seeing for months. The season called freeze-up was over, and winter was coming down out of the north pretty fast. Like it did every year, winter was going to drive most people into homes as snugly shut up and cozy as animal burrows. For weeks now these people had been stockpiling food and fuel, knowing how difficult it would be to get to the store once the snow started piling up for real and every creek and waterway leading out of town froze solid.

  The Mayor stopped in front of the store and knocked caked snow off of his boots. The man named Varkanin was there waiting for him, sitting on a bench out front. He didn’t know what to make of this new fellow, the Russian. It wasn’t so much his nationality that bothered the Mayor. He’d met plenty of Russians before, coming through town off oceangoing fishing ships. Besides, he’d done a little checking and found out the Russian was working on behalf of the Canadian government, though of course that was all off the books. The government had given Varkanin plenty of money—which would normally make him the most popular guy in Umiaq. But his bright blue skin was disturbing.

  “Have you spoken with your people?” Varkanin asked. “Have you found any who might be willing to assist me?”

  “Well …” the Mayor said, rocking back and forth on his heels. “You gotta understand, we’re what you might call a traditional sort of people. We’re a people who like to tell stories. And we got a lot of stories about people who look strange.” The Mayor held up two mittened hands. “No disrespect meant, now.”

  “None was inferred.” The Russian was polite enough, and he wasn’t in town to get drunk, which was also a plus.

  The Mayor frowned, though. “Most people here think you must be some kind of angakkuq. That’s like a shaman, I guess you’d say. Now, the angakkuq in most of the stories is a good guy; he helps the community. But he’s scary, too, because he can do magic and talk to the spirits. You probably don’t believe in spirits, since you’re a southerner.”

  The Russian smiled knowingly. “I drank tea with one a few days ago,” he said.

  The Mayor cocked one eyebrow. Now that was weird. The Mayor believed in spirits; there was no doubt in his mind that they existed. But the idea that you could actually meet one—much less sit down and drink tea with it—was a little beyond how he conceived of them. He’d always thought of them as one of those things that was real specifically because you never actually had to confront it. He could believe they would drink tea, though, if they drank anything. He was a coffee man himself.

  “I am no shaman, though,” Varkanin continued. “I am here with the implicit sanction of your government—”

  The Mayor shook his head. “That’s not going to hold a lot of water with this bunch, honestly. They consider themselves people of Nunavut, not Canada.”

  Varkanin folded his arms across his chest. “I understand. Sir, I am only a simple hunter. I have found that my game is too challenging for me to handle alone. I only require the help of a few other hunters, men like myself, hardy, brave souls. Who preferably know how to operate a snowmobile. I assumed I could find such people here.”

  “Oh, sure. You came to the right place for that,” the Mayor assured him.

  “Then the problem is simply one of psychology.” Varkanin nodded to himself. “I did not wish to reveal something to you quite yet.”

  “Oh?” the Mayor asked. He’d kind of known there was something fishy about this guy. Now it looked like he might just find out what.

  “It is a very dangerous hunt I am on. The creatures I track are not human. But they are not entirely inhuman, either. They are supernatural in essence and viciously cruel. They are impervious to most modern weapons.”

  “What are you talking about? Werewolves or something?” The Mayor laughed out loud. “Boy, howdy. You really think I’m going to find hunters around here willing to tangle with the likes of them?”

  Varkanin smiled. It was not a warm smile, but there was a certain sympathy in it. “I think that if you approach the right kind of man—a young man, one who feels the need to prove his mettle, my offer will prove irresistible.”

  The Mayor’s mouth fell open. The guy had a point, he had to admit.

  “I think it will also help, if I say I am offering one thousand dollars a day to anyone willing to take this risk.”

  34.

  The wolves were starving, but there was nothing to eat. No game at all.

  With the first heavy snowfall the last straggling migratory animals had headed south. Those that remained either curled themselves up in their dens to wait out the weather, or were smart enough to get very far away at the first scent of wolves moving across their territory.

  The gray female stood very still in the blowing snow, nothing of her moving but her nose. It twitched back and forth, searching. Finding nothing. Behind her the white used her teeth to dig an insect out of the fur around her tail. It might be the only protein she got that day, and she intended to savor it.

  The male ran circles, widening his gyre with every pass. Looking for any sign of food. The gray female could hear his feet cracking the brittle snow with every step. Any game animal within a kilometer’s distance would be able to hear that noise, she was sure. Anything that heard it would run away.

  She lifted her nose to point at the sky. She could smell more snow coming. A storm was heading down toward them, and she just wanted to curl up somewhere underground and conserve her strength. For some reason she couldn’t understand, the other two didn’t seem to want to find a den. They seemed almost frightened by the possibility, and every time she had pointed out some good location where the ground wasn’t quite frozen, somewhere they could dig, the white and the male had shied away, dancing away from her as if she were mad.

  She didn’
t understand what they were afraid of. She couldn’t remember all those weeks in the bear den. She had slept through them, mostly. So she couldn’t understand how stir-crazy the others had gone, how desperate was their need to be outside and running and hunting.

  The male stopped circling.

  There was no warning. He stopped in mid-lope, one paw still lifted to take another step. His body could have been frozen solid in place, except that his tail moved back and forth, very slowly. He closed his eyes.

  And then he pounced. He threw himself forward, into the snow, paws and snout buried instantly. He scrabbled forward on his belly, pushing himself along with his hind legs, his rump in the air. Then he stopped again. His tail started waving dramatically.

  The females rushed over to where he waited for them. The snow around his face was red with blood and steaming in the cold. Something small and furry lay dead in front of him. He’d attacked it with such violence that the gray female couldn’t even recognize what it had once been.

  It didn’t matter. She was hungry. She moved forward to eat—and the male growled at her.

  She jumped back in surprise. He’d never done that before.

  Carefully, almost daintily, the male tore out the animal’s internal organs and swallowed them whole. Then he stepped away from the remains and turned his face away so he wasn’t looking at them.

  The gray looked around, wondering what was going on. She saw the white sitting on her haunches in the snow nearby. Licking her lips. Waiting. Waiting her turn.

  The gray had never been part of a pack before. When it had just been her and the male, there had been no need for the carefully stratified social structures that wolves had evolved over millions of years. The elaborate set of rules that made them social animals, instead of just coarse brutes.

  One of those rules was that everyone got to eat—but in the proper order. The male would always come first. He was the alpha of the pack. As the dominant female, she was permitted to eat whatever she chose of what he left. There would be no repercussions if she finished off this meal. If she left nothing for the white. But it would be bad form.