Frostbite Read online

  Things moved out in the woods. Occasionally a pine needle would flutter down through the branches and be swallowed by the gloom between the trunks. A bird would take off, bursting up into the air with a snapping sound of desperate wings, then catch itself on the breeze and swoop off in silence. One of the trees would creak and pop. Those trees froze in winter and thawed only slowly, one growth ring at a time, and when the ice broke inside them it would sound like they were ready to fall. These sounds made her jump, made her heart race a little faster. A squirrel rattled up a tall birch, skidding circles around the bark. She nearly cried out.

  Lester put some water on to boil, made some instant oatmeal. She ate, and felt a little better—and then Bobby came over and squatted next to her. He studied her face as if trying to figure out how she would react to what he said next.

  She didn’t like it.

  “We need to start thinking about this thing in a rational way. We need a medium-range plan, at least. The moon will be up at eight fifty-six tonight,” he told her. He showed her a piece of yellow legal-sized paper covered in two rows of numbers. He tapped it and she saw written there the number 2056.

  “Already?” she asked, trying to keep her voice low. “It feels like I just…woke up.”

  “Since you changed back to your human form,” he said. He had a way of saying things like that. He made them sound real. Like facts, facts that had to be dealt with. “The moon set at twelve fourteen today.” He tapped his paper again. The other row said 1214.

  “That’s not enough,” she said. “I mean, that doesn’t seem right. How much human time did I get today?”

  “About eight and a half hours,” he told her. “It’s gone seven o’clock now. I need you to help me prepare for tonight.”

  Chey’s spine shivered. She remembered Powell telling her that this far north the moon cycles were weird. He’d said their human time would grow shorter as the month went past, but she hadn’t expected the transition to be so noticeable. “How much time will I have tomorrow?” she asked. Human time, she meant, but unlike Bobby she couldn’t say those words out loud and take them seriously.

  “Six hours,” he told her. “We need to be ready.”

  She nodded. Six hours. Her wolf would have three quarters of the day to itself. She grew jealous suddenly. It was her life the animal was devouring. “And the day after that?”

  “Four. Come with me, please.”

  She finally let him take her arm, lift her to her feet.

  Four hours, out of twenty-four. Powell had said there were days coming up when the moon wouldn’t set. When it would never drop below the horizon. It would dip and rise and dip again but never quite go away.

  Chey suddenly felt weak. She felt like she was about to die. Bobby took her through the woods, along the logging trail. Sometimes he had to hold her up, his shoulder in her armpit.

  “I need to call my uncle,” she said. She wasn’t thinking clearly. “I need to get my uncle to come help me. He can fix this.” Her voice sounded shrill and insignificant in her own ears. Like the buzz of a black fly. She hated it, hated her weakness. She had been strong before—she’d been as strong as a wolf. What had happened?

  They walked for a kilometer like that, maybe two. Ahead of her she saw the little turnoff for the fire tower. She hadn’t realized how close it was to Powell’s cabin.

  “You’re going to put me back up there?” she asked. She struggled to regain herself, to put some iron back in her bones. “Bobby?”

  He didn’t look at her. He was looking up at the silhouette of the fire tower. The sun was setting in its measured way and there were already long shadows striping the road. “I know you don’t like this, Chey,” he told her. He sounded sincere and she loved him a little for that. For the fact that despite all the horror and the violence that swirled around them, he could still care a little about her feelings. She remembered how much she owed him. Without him she couldn’t have gotten as far as she had. She couldn’t have made any sense of her life at all.

  “You need to walk a ways in my shoes,” he told her. “Lester and I have a right to be safe. Don’t we? And I’ve got the guys coming in from Selkirk tomorrow morning. This is going to suck for you. But it’s the only way.”

  Chey breathed in the smell of musty pine needles. She would be safe up there. Everybody would be safe if she was up there. It had held her wolf just fine the night before—it would work again.

  “I understand,” she said, and started climbing the stairs.

  “Good girl,” he called up at her. She spun around to half-laugh, half-snarl at him, to shoot him a good-natured glare, but he was already walking back toward the cabin.

  39.

  Silver light came and passed behind her eyes and then Chey was down on the floor, naked and grunting, her fingers raw, the nails broken as she scratched and scrabbled and gnawed with her teeth at the wooden floorboards. Her cheek burned as she pushed her face harder and harder against the floor, and her hair got in her eyes. She whined and whimpered as her fingers dug and dug but got nowhere against the old dry wood.

  Then she sat up fast enough to give herself a head rush. What—what had she been doing? It was dark in the fire tower, but she didn’t want to get up to open the shutters, not when she didn’t know what she would find. She’d had a shock the last time she’d woken up in that position and found the place torn to pieces by her wolf.

  Her hands were stiff and sore. Carefully she unbent her fingers, smoothed out her palms. Then she reached down and touched the floor. There had been scratches there before, but now there were distinct gouges. Four narrow trenches, some of them deep enough to fit her fingertip inside.

  In the dark she pulled on her clothes, then stood up and hesitantly opened one of the shutters. Outside afternoon sunlight stretched in long rays through a haze of pollen. The golden spores filled the air between the trees like mist. She could hear people down there, maybe more people than just Bobby and Lester. She heard the repeated dull sound of a hammer at work. In a second, she thought, she would go down and join the other human beings. Yes. That would be nice. First, though, she had to make sure her wolf hadn’t destroyed her one place of refuge.

  Slowly Chey turned around. It wasn’t as bad as she’d expected. The gouges were there, yes, but only in a few places. Her wolf hadn’t dug its way through the floor. She’d been worried it might have found a way out—though she remembered almost nothing of the last eighteen hours, she knew the wolf had desperately, almost pitifully, wanted to escape the tower. The floorboards were too thick for that, it seemed.

  Chey smoothed out her wild hair and rubbed dried drool off the corner of her mouth. Maybe she could have a bath in Powell’s big galvanized tin tub. Maybe she could convince Bobby and Lester to heat up enough water so that the bath would actually be warm. She reached down and pulled the ring of the trapdoor, ready, she thought, to rejoin polite company.

  The trapdoor lifted half a centimeter, then stopped fast. Even with her better-than-human strength she couldn’t lift it any further. The explanation was obvious, even if she didn’t want to believe it. Bobby had locked her inside the tower.

  She couldn’t stay up there another minute or she knew she would lose her shit. She had to get out.

  Chey beat and pounded on the trapdoor, then ran to the open shutter and yelled down for someone to come let her out—anyone. She heard someone clambering up the metal stairs below and then the sound of a padlock being released. When the door opened she saw an unfamiliar face rise up toward her in greeting.

  “You’ll be the screecher, then,” the face said. It belonged to a middle-aged man with a square jaw and a nearly shaved head. He was wide through the shoulders and his hands were enormous. She watched them grip the edge of the trapdoor as he pulled himself up. “Frank Pickersgill, pleased to meetcha.”

  He held out one of those big hands and she put her own into the meaty grip. He did not squeeze her hand in greeting as much as he just enclosed it, the way Chey mig
ht have held the hand of a baby.

  “You’re a friend of Bobby’s,” she said. “I mean Mr. Fenech. Is he around?”

  “Out at the lake, coordinating. Supervising, you know,” Pickersgill said, shaking his head a little back and forth as if he thought Bobby’s talents were better employed elsewhere. “He’ll be glad to hear you’re back on your feet.”

  “He locked me in,” Chey said, then looked away from Pickersgill’s eyes very quickly. Maybe too quickly, she thought.

  “Ah, well, that was just a safety precaution,” the big man told her. He climbed all the way up inside the tower and Chey saw he was well over two meters tall. The floorboards, which had held up against the worst her wolf could do to them, creaked a little when he sat down with his legs dangling through the trap.

  Chey nodded. She supposed she understood that. Though so far her wolf hadn’t been able to open the trapdoor, she could sympathize with Bobby if he worried that sometime it might just figure out the trick. “I have to go down now,” she said, because the fire tower’s walls were just too close.

  She scrambled down the stairs and heard Pickersgill descending behind her. His bulk made the metal skeleton of the tower shake and groan. At the bottom she wondered what she should do. She felt like just running—running as far as her legs would take her. She just didn’t know which direction. She turned around, swiveling to look every which way, drinking in the open air. Then she noticed the pipes.

  While her wolf had been clawing up the tower floor someone, probably Pickersgill, had been busy hammering lengths of PVC pipe into the ground. There were around a dozen of them, spread in a circle around the base of the tower, each a few meters apart from the next. They were driven in at a sharp angle to the ground and they pointed outward, making her think of the cannon on a pirate ship. A strange smell issued from the pipe nearest to her. She stepped closer and leaned down to sniff as if she were smelling a rose. The scent was a lot more pungent and musky than that, however. In fact, she thought she recognized it. She touched the edge of the pipe, started to reach inside. What was that smell? It was the smell of—of—

  “Not for you, sister,” a man said, grabbing her arm and pulling it away from the pipe. “Not unless you’re ready to die.”

  40.

  The stranger’s hand on her arm felt like a pair of pliers were being closed on her wrist. She had no choice but to pull her hand back. Chey was astounded—she’d had no idea the man was near her, hadn’t heard him coming up behind her.

  She shook the pain out of her hand. Then held it out again, to shake. She glanced down at the PVC pipe at her feet. Its smell still tantalized her. “What is that, wolf musk?” she asked. She had it now. It smelled exactly like Powell’s hair. Like a lycanthrope.

  The sneaky guy stared at her for a long time before taking her hand. Then he bent down slowly from the waist and kissed it. “Bruce,” he said, “Bruce Pickersgill. I think you’ve already been introduced to my brother.”

  He was smaller than the near-giant Frank Pickersgill, considerably smaller, and his shoulders were thin and narrow, but there was a smoky kind of intelligence in his eyes she hadn’t seen in his brother’s. He had a pencil-thin mustache and he wore a parka with a beaver fur collar that smelled like old smoke. He had a pair of pistols low on his hips, like a gunfighter, though the guns themselves were matte black and square in shape, just like the one Bobby had given her. She didn’t doubt they were full of silver bullets.

  “Pleased to meet you,” she said.

  “We came in this morning,” he told her, “while you were up there howling away. We didn’t have a chance to be properly introduced then.” He held her with his eyes while he reached into his pocket. She half expected him to pull a knife on her. Instead his fingers flicked out with a business card between them.

  WESTERN PRAIRIE CANID MANAGEMENT LLC, she read. 67 YEARS COMBINED EXPERTISE!

  “Canids are what—dogs?” she asked.

  “Doglike mammals,” he told her. “Predatory beasts. Mostly we get called in by shepherds who don’t like coyotes worrying their flocks. Lots of outfits do that. My brothers and I, though, we specialize in larger pest animals. Coydogs, bears, and the occasional wolf pack.”

  She nodded. She understood how these men “managed” such animals, she guessed. They killed them in the fastest, cheapest way possible. “I take it Bobby explained to you what I have become, Mr. Pickersgill.”

  “Bruce, please.” He nodded. “That’s why I didn’t want you touching the mechanism.”

  She bent down to look at the PVC pipe. The smell of Powell on it had to be artificial, she decided. There was no way he would have gotten close enough to these guys to let them take a sample of his personal body odor. “What is this thing?” she asked, gesturing at the pipe but being careful not to touch it.

  “That,” Bruce Pickersgill said, his eyes very sharp, “is what we in the trade call a getter. It’s a modified kind of coyote getter, big enough for your average exotic canid.”

  Chey figured she knew what kind of exotic canids he was talking about. “How does it work?”

  A smile inched across his face like a worm crawling through the decayed insides of an apple. “At the bottom of that pipe is a rifle cartridge, a .38 to be exact. That’s wired to a spring-up top. When your target animal pokes its nose into the lip of the pipe, it triggers the cartridge, which goes boom, and fires a pellet up into their face. If you’re lucky it goes right down the target’s throat. If not it’ll get embedded in their jaw or face.”

  “Nice.” Chey grimaced. “What kind of pellet?” She was almost afraid to ask.

  Bruce scratched at his mustache. “Well, for your timber wolves, for your coyotes, for your coydogs, feral dogs, what have you, we usually use sodium fluoroacetate, what’s called 1080 in the trade. With that you get some convulsions, you get uncontrolled running, and then vomiting and death follow pretty quick.”

  Chey winced. “Jesus. But even that wouldn’t kill this kind of wolf,” she said.

  Bruce’s face smoothed out in happiness. “We love a good challenge at Western Prairie. My brother spends long, lonely nights in his workshop dreaming up new mechanicals and testing new baits and lures. For this job he really shone. We tested a getter with a silver bullet in it, but on the five experimental animals we used only one of them was sufficiently wounded to guarantee a clean kill. So Bruce thought up something new. The pellets we’re using today are full of colloidal silver, that’s silver particles in a water solution. For people like me and—well, for Homo sapiens, anyway, the stuff’s all but harmless. It might turn our skin blue if we got too big a snort. But for your exotic canid it’s deadly poison.”

  Chey’s hand twitched. She had come very close to setting off one of the getters. The silver pellet inside would kill her in human or in wolf form. And the smell, the smell of the lure—“You’ve got some kind of bait on these,” she said. “A musk.”

  “Genuine wolf matrix,” he said happily. “That’s a patented formula right there. We call it Canine Curiosity and it works great on most canid sets. We make it with a rue oil base with lovage oil on top. That’s a traditional canid passion simulator.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said, getting about half of that.

  “Then we grind up some authentic precaudal gland and add that in. That might be what you smell the most, because it’s pretty fresh.”

  “That’s disgusting,” she said, unable to keep her reaction inside.

  He shrugged. “It’s what works, normally.”

  “You’ve put a lot of thought into this,” Chey said.

  “We’ve been preparing for this job for the last six months,” he told her. “A population-control assignment like this, you don’t just fly in with what you have on hand; you need to make everything custom.”

  She frowned. Because that meant—“I thought Mr. Fenech just called you in yesterday.” She was confused. “Six months ago, he and I were still figuring out our original plan.”

  Picker
sgill shrugged. “Maybe he just wanted to be prepared, like a good Boy Scout. I gotta say, though, the way he was talking, made it sound like we were the main plan, and you were a side bet.” He shrugged. “No offense meant, but you’re just a slip of a girl. You really think he expected you to take down this canid alone?”

  “Yes, I did,” she said.

  Something connected in Chey’s mind. Something she very much didn’t like. Bobby had told her she would finally have her chance at revenge. That she would be allowed to go in alone and kill Powell. He’d never so much as hinted before that he had another angle working at the same time. And Pickersgill had a point—if he had all this technology at his disposal, why would he even need Chey in the first place?

  Unless—unless he had never really expected her to succeed. Never really thought she could kill Powell. Maybe he’d thought of her just as a way to find the werewolf in the first place. To bring him out into the open.

  Maybe he’d thought of her as bait. From the beginning.

  No, she told herself. She was being paranoid, that was all. Bobby really cared for her. He would never put her in danger just to flush Powell out of hiding.

  “This is how Bobby’s going to protect me from him,” she said. It sounded even to her own ears as if she was trying to convince herself. Pickersgill didn’t respond. She thought, suddenly, of Powell, moving silently through the darkness. She thought of him looking for her, searching for her so he could kill her. She visualized him sticking his nose into one of the getters, his head tilted to one side, his tongue out to taste the lure, one paw up on the pipe. And then bang. Her life’s long nightmare would be over.

  She could hardly believe it.

  Would he really be so curious? It had almost worked on her, even in her human form. But he was a lot older than she was. He was a lot more canny. “What if he doesn’t go for it?”

  “Well, then, Tony over there shoots him in the back of the head,” Bruce explained.

  A man sat in a tamarisk tree not ten meters away. A man with a very big shotgun. He was tied to the tree trunk with bungee cords. He had camouflaged himself with twigs and leaves so well that she saw him only because he waved down at her with one sweeping arm motion. Chey nearly jumped. “Is he your brother, too?” she asked, trying to mask her alarm.