Overwinter Page 18

  “What I was told is that an angakkuq, what you would call a shaman, tricked Amuruq into laying her body across a stone and showing him her belly. He told her how soft he thought her fur must be and how he just wanted to pet her, like his favorite sled dog, and feed her pieces of meat. She was very curious, Amuruq, and she’d always wondered what dogs found so appealing about human affection. She wanted to experience it for herself, so she lay down for him. Once he had her there he cut her into many pieces. Then he took the pieces and fed them to his warriors, who thus became her children. They became werewolves.”

  “This shaman killed her? Killed the wolf spirit? Why the fuck would he do that?” Chey demanded.

  Dzo grabbed her arm and gave her a warning shake of the head. “That wouldn’t kill her. Remember what I said about my friend the mammoth? Amuruq is still alive. She’s just in pieces, one piece in every werewolf in the world. She even travels around, like when you scratch somebody and they get your curse.”

  Chey’s head hurt. In that old familiar way.

  “You want to know why,” Nanuq said, sighing. “You got me. And you’re going to have to find out before you get your cure. Now you have all I know, for whatever good it is to you.”

  Powell’s shoulders slumped. “I see. I thank you.”

  “You want to know more, you want to know how to undo what was done, you’re going to need to talk to Tulugaq.”

  That name got an extreme reaction out of Dzo. He flipped down his mask and stamped his foot on the floor mats. “No way. No way, nuh-uh, no. We’re not going to do that. Forget it.”

  Powell licked his lips. “Dzo, just hold on a second.” He turned to look up at Nanuq again. “Why can Tulugaq tell us, when you can’t? Was he there?”

  “Yeah,” Nanuq said. “He wouldn’t have missed it. Since the whole thing was his idea.”

  53.

  Chey tried to calm Dzo down, but it wasn’t much use. He seemed intensely agitated just at the thought of talking about Tulugaq, much less going to see him. She tried to find out who this guy was but Dzo wouldn’t answer any of her questions.

  Powell wasn’t much help either, when she asked him. “I know he’s another one of the animal spirits. One of the really powerful ones. Beyond that, I’m as much in the dark as you are. I just know that if we’re going to save you from your wolf, he’s the one we need to find.”

  Nanuq wasn’t in a mood to talk anymore after he’d finished his story. He suggested, not very politely, that he’d prefer it if the werewolves left him alone. “You want to find Tulugaq, that’s on your heads. I’ve got shows to watch. If you miss one day of these shows, you can never catch up.”

  “But how do we find Tulugaq?” Powell asked.

  The polar bear spirit growled in annoyance and climbed out of his chair again. “It won’t be hard. He’ll come running when he hears he’s got a chance to screw with you. There’s an inukshuk about thirty kilometers from here, west by a little north. You go there, you leave some food for him. You’ll have to do better than a couple of lemmings. He likes bigger game, and dead meat is best. Then he’ll come.”

  Dzo and the werewolves left the dome house then, Chey thanking Nanuq profusely for his hospitality. He waved her away with one massive hand.

  They crawled through the flap of seal skin that formed the house’s door, into the darkness outside. For the first time Chey got to see the exterior of Nanuq’s house with human eyes. It was the kind of place that would be easy to miss if you didn’t know it was there. Most of it was underground, so it looked like just a modest rise in the snowdrifts. The smoke hole was clotted with snow, and the door was hidden between two rocks. Still, there were signs that people had been there repeatedly. There were woven baskets stashed outside the door, some of them smashed to pieces, some still holding foodstuffs. Dzo had calmed down a little and now he explained that the local Inuit hunters left food there for Nanuq, who was too sick to hunt for himself.

  “Like sacrifices for a god?” she asked.

  Dzo actually laughed at the idea. “More like bribes. If you want to kill a polar bear, or you want to be safe from polar bear attacks, they think you have to appease Nanuq or he’ll come for you in the night.” He shook his head. “The ideas that humans get about us. Still, it’s kind of nice, right? Nobody ever gives me presents just because they’re hungry for musquash steak.”

  The four of them headed out, moving in single file so that Powell could check the snow with every step. It wasn’t as bad as during the storm. The wind had cut the drifts down to a manageable depth. Still, if they stepped into the wrong snowbank they could find themselves hip deep in the powdery stuff.

  “For now, let’s just get far enough away that we don’t annoy Nanuq. We’ll head for this inukshuk tomorrow,” Powell told them. That didn’t make Dzo happy, but he seemed glad they weren’t leaving immediately. “I’d like to make an earlier start, but the moon isn’t being helpful.”

  October was half done. The moon was below the horizon only a few hours each night. That would change—before the end of the month it would linger for longer stretches out of sight, and eventually they would even get five days when it never rose, nearly a week of just being human. For the moment, though, they needed to obey its command.

  The silver light came on them without warning. Powell didn’t even bother to signal a stop. Their clothes fell empty to the ground and the wolves shivered with the ecstasy of being back in their own skins.

  There was no open water around for Dzo to dive into, so he couldn’t escape. He had to wait patiently while the wolves sniffed him warily. The gray was confused by him, as always. He looked somewhat human but he smelled altogether wrong and the fire that burned always in the back of her mind, the fire that urged her to destroy anything human, didn’t leap to life when she looked at him. Eventually she lost interest and trotted away. Hunger was a much bigger motivator at that moment.

  The wolves spent the long night hunting. When the sun rose they were still hungry, having found little to eat. The gray looked longingly toward the south, toward the softer land where there had always been plenty of animals to chase and kill and devour, but the male, her alpha, kept them moving northward. She wasn’t permitted to question his decisions, so she kept her doubts to herself.

  In the afternoon they came over a low rise where a few skeletal bushes dotted the ground, mostly buried in the snow. The wind from the north brushed back the fur on her face, then, and she smelled something interesting—something she had never smelled before as a wolf. The frigid wind carried traces of salt and iodine, the smells of the sea.

  They were no more than fifty kilometers, then, from the northern coast of the Arctic Ocean.

  54.

  Sharon Minik woke lying on a cold wooden floor, completely naked. A silver collar was locked around her throat. Wherever it touched her it burned like winter ice. She felt like she’d been beaten and then left for dead.

  It was not the best morning of her life.

  She reached up for the collar and felt its catch. It was held shut by a simple cotter pin, and when she pulled it free the collar fell away to clank on the floor. At least that was something. She shifted away from it, because just the smell of it was enough to make her feel sick. She couldn’t remember ever thinking silver had a smell before, but it did now. She thought maybe her sense of smell had somehow dramatically improved and she tried to sniff the iron door of the little room, but it didn’t seem to have an odor.

  While she was sniffing the hinges of the door, someone knocked on it. She jumped back and wrapped her arms around her chest and groin. There was a clanking noise like a heavy lock being turned back, and then the door opened. Varkanin was there, smiling down at her.

  Sharon had never been so glad to see anyone in her life. She started to weep, and then to sob, as the blue Russian came and put a blanket around her shoulders. “It’s alright,” he said.

  She stared up at him with wide eyes. Was he serious?

  She knew
what she’d become.

  “No,” Sharon told him. “It’s never going to be alright again.”

  Varkanin didn’t argue with her. Instead he helped Sharon stand up—being very careful not to touch her except through the blanket—and led her out of the little room. A pile of clothes was waiting for her in the kitchen. They weren’t the ones she’d been wearing when they’d gone hunting for werewolves, and she realized those must have been pretty well shredded when the wolf attacked her. They were a man’s clothes, but they were clean and warm. Sharon pulled them on hurriedly. People very rarely got naked in the Arctic unless they were showering or going to bed with each other. Having no clothes had made her feel utterly vulnerable. Varkanin gave her a cup of hot chocolate and some caribou jerky to chew on. Between the food and the clothes, Sharon was feeling almost human again by the time Varkanin led her into a sitting room.

  It looked like the front room of every hunting lodge Sharon had ever seen. Rustic furniture made of untreated wood, gun rack on one wall, trophy heads of caribou, elk, and even one very old and ragged polar bear staring down at her.

  “Nanuq,” she said.

  “I beg your pardon?” Varkanin asked. He sat down on the arm of one of the chairs and tried to meet her gaze, but she just kept looking down into her cup.

  “That was Nanuq who screwed up your plan. I wasn’t expecting that.” She put the cup down and stared at her hands for a while, expecting them to turn into paws at any moment. “The elders around here tell a lot of stories. You grow up listening to them, whether you want to or not, but you don’t really believe them. It’s like Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. Even when you’re a kid you know there’s something too weird about them to really be true. Then something like this happens … it was Nanuq.”

  “This is some god of your people?” Varkanin asked.

  “We don’t have gods, except Jesus. We’re Christians in Umiaq.”

  The Russian nodded politely.

  “What we have, are spirits. I guess maybe souls is a better word. It’s like, imagine all the polar bears in the world, and they all have just one soul they share between them. Nanuq is that soul. If you kill a polar bear, or if you just survive when one attacks you, you thank Nanuq. Maybe you just say it under your breath. Or maybe, if you’re like my dad or one of the elders, you actually take some food out on the ice and leave it for him. It’s a way of making sure your luck doesn’t dry up the next time you meet a polar bear. Nanuq is supposed to look after us, then. But instead he was on the side of the werewolves, huh?”

  “It would appear so.”

  Sharon grunted. “I guess that means he’s on my side now, too.”

  “I want to assure you I did not believe this would happen,” Varkanin said, clutching his hands together in front of him as if he didn’t know what else to do with them. “I knew there would be a certain element of danger in the hunt, and that one or more of you might not survive. However, I—I—”

  He stopped because Sharon wasn’t listening to him anymore. She was weeping, quietly. She reached up and smashed the palm of her hand into her eyes, trying to push the tears back in. She was not the kind of girl who cried a lot.

  He stood up. Came a step closer. Reached for her, maybe intending to hug her and give her some support that she could really use. Then he pulled his hands back as if he was afraid of touching her. As if he was afraid he would catch her disease if he made contact. She couldn’t really blame him.

  With the edge of her shirt cuff she wiped away the tears. When she’d finished, she reached for her cup again. Put it back down. “I don’t want to be like this,” she said, very softly. “I want it to stop. I don’t like turning into a wolf. I don’t like it.” She struggled to find more words. To describe exactly how she was feeling. She couldn’t find them. There’d never been anything like this in her life before. How could there have been? “What are we going to do?” she asked.

  He cleared his throat. “There is one thing. One possibility.”

  She looked up at him with hopeful eyes.

  “I can end your suffering,” he told her. His mouth squirmed around the words. He didn’t want to say this, any more than she wanted to hear it. “I can do it painlessly. You won’t know it’s happening.”

  Ice crystals bloomed in her stomach. She felt like she was going to throw up. “You mean you can shoot me? With a silver bullet? That’s the best idea you have?” She threw her cup across the room and it shattered against the far wall.

  He didn’t even flinch.

  She shook her head violently. “No,” she said. “No!”

  “I understand. I meant only—”

  “No!”

  “—to suggest it, in case it was what you wanted, but if you decide to—”

  “No!”

  “—live, that you wish to live with this condition, then of course, I—”

  “Not yet,” she told him, looking right into his eyes. “Not today.”

  55.

  “So the news is bad,” Preston Holness said. He sat down on his couch and put his free hand over his eyes. He was in his own apartment, having just gotten in after a very long and frustrating day’s work. This was not what he wanted to hear. “You didn’t get any of them?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Varkanin confirmed.

  “They’re all still alive. Even after I sent you land mines. Land mines, which are more or less banned by international treaty.”

  “There were complications,” Varkanin said.

  “I’m going to put you on hold. I may be a while,” Holness told him. He muted his cell phone and put it down on the couch beside him. Then he got up and went to his kitchen. To his liquor cabinet. He scanned the various bottles there but couldn’t find anything that was going to help. This was going to require bolstering of another sort.

  So he went to his closet. Preston Holness had what many Canadian women desired more than rubies or pearls, which was ample closet space. His apartment was a one-bedroom efficiency with a tiny kitchenette, but it did have a walk-in closet big enough to double as a fallout shelter. When he opened the door lights came on automatically, showing him the double row of suits hanging on padded hangers, the serried ranks of gleaming leather shoes, the immaculately organized bins for sweaters, fleeces, socks (dress, casual, and sport, each in their own drawer), and silk underwear.

  He picked out an Armani suit, one of his oldest and still one of his favorites. He put on a crisp new white oxford cloth shirt that was still wrapped in tissue paper. Finally he took out a pair of cuff links that had been given to him personally by a prime minster of Canada in a private ceremony.

  He felt like a knight putting on his suit of armor. Or a hockey player putting on his protective padding. He felt safer when he was dressed up. He felt like he could handle this.

  Then Varkanin told him about Sharon Minik.

  “Oh, for the love of gravy,” Holness moaned. He wanted to lie down on the floor and curl into a ball. But that might have rumpled his suit. “I hired you to kill three werewolves, and now we have four? I can’t believe that—”

  “You forget yourself, sir,” Varkanin said, his tone darkening.

  “What?”

  “You never hired me. We are working toward similar goals and have achieved an understanding. That is all.”

  I will tear out your heart and show it to you, Holness thought. I will take a shit on your head from a very great height. But what he said was “Yes, of course. I beg your pardon.”

  “My plan was foolproof—based on the intelligence I possessed at the time. Its failure was due to the appearance of factors I could not anticipate. Specifically, the operation was complicated by the appearance of a supernatural creature. One of the same order as Dzo, the werewolves’ boyer.”

  “What the fuck is a boyer?” Holness asked.

  “One who tends to a camp while the hunters are away,” Varkanin explained. “You are of course familiar with the creature I refer to.”

  “Yeah, he’s in
the dossier. But we never did figure out what he was. He’s not human—we got that much from the fact that the wolves don’t shred him every time they change shape. Beyond that he’s a mystery.”

  “I believe I know what he is,” Varkanin said, “but I don’t think I could explain it to you in a satisfactory way. The important thing to note here is that other creatures of the same type are assisting the werewolves now.”

  “Okay,” Holness said. “Whatever.”

  “It may become necessary to arm myself against them.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “They do not seem to suffer the same weaknesses as you or I, but I believe there is a way to defeat them. It will require some special assistance on your part, however.”

  “What do you need?”

  “I have read the dossier you gave me, describing the events that led to our agreement. Specifically the events that ended with the death of Robert Fenech. These notes are maddeningly inconclusive, but they offer some subtle clues. When the werewolves entered Port Radium, the creature Dzo did not accompany them. In fact, it appears from those documents that he could not accompany them without putting himself in peril. Therefore there must be something about the Port Radium site that constitutes a hazard to his very existence.”

  “Okay.”

  “I believe I know what it was. And if I am correct, it should be relatively easy to produce a countermeasure that will function against this new class of creature.”

  “This is beginning to sound expensive.”

  “Not necessarily in monetary terms. Though the required items will be difficult to procure.” Varkanin told Holness what he needed.

  It was enough to make Holness lie down on the floor after all. He could always have the suit pressed. “You do realize,” he said, while Varkanin was outlining his requirements, “that what you’re asking for is prohibited by the Geneva Convention?”