Overwinter Read online

  Instead she nestled her face into the crook of his neck. His flannel shirt smelled like woodsmoke, from the fire. Underneath that she smelled his own personal scent. It was a good smell. She closed her eyes and relaxed into his embrace. “Thanks for breakfast,” she said.

  “You’re welcome.” His voice was gruff, as always, but he couldn’t mask all of the relief in it.

  2.

  They packed up their things and headed north again, on foot as always. To Chey it seemed like they’d always been moving north. Her legs didn’t get tired, not the way they would have if she’d still been human, but after eight hours of walking she still thought she deserved a break. Powell made her walk another couple of kilometers, though, before he suddenly and without warning called for a stop.

  Chey didn’t argue. She sank down on a lumpy mat of yellow grass and took her shoes off. Her toes thanked her.

  “There’s something here you should see,” Powell said, standing tall and straight like a park ranger showing off a scenic vista.

  Chey grunted in response.

  It was enough to keep him going. Like every man she’d ever met, Powell relished a good excuse to give a speech. “This is what’s left of Fort Confidence,” he told her, tapping a bit of stone with his boot.

  “There’s a fort here?” Chey asked, looking around. She couldn’t see much but scrub grass and a couple of trees. On the ground there were a couple of square piles of stones that looked a little too regular to have just gathered naturally, she supposed. If you squinted at them.

  “Back when the fur traders came through here,” he explained, “there was. Jules Verne wrote a book about it. The fort burned down, though. So they rebuilt it. It burned down again. Nothing left but these chimney stones.” He gave her one of his thoughtful looks. “This is what happens when people try to build on this land. The land always wins.”

  She bit her lip and tried to figure out what she was supposed to learn from this. “Are you saying we’ll be safe here? That nobody’s going to come this far north just to bother us?”

  He shrugged. “It’s the safest place I know. For a while, anyway, we can stay here. Make a camp. Maybe we’ll even be allowed to overwinter here before they catch up with us again.”

  “So you think they will find us. Eventually.”

  He shrugged again. “I’m over a hundred years old, Chey, and for most of that time I’ve had people hunting me. I’d be at odds and ends if one day they just stopped. Running away from people is what I do best.” He stared hard at the land around them, especially down the slope that led to the lake. “Still, it would be nice to rest awhile. Build a shelter, get a fire going. Sit for a while and …”

  She waited for him to finish his thought.

  “In the spring,” he said, “when it’s warm again. We can get to work on … the other thing.”

  “You’re seriously still thinking about that?”

  It had been a common enough topic of conversation on their long trek north. There had been a lot of time to talk of many things while they marched, or, after their wolves had come and gone, when they backtracked, looking for the clothes their wolves had left behind.

  “You honestly think there’s a cure,” she said.

  He wouldn’t look at her when he answered. “There must be. There has to be a way to break the curse. There has to.”

  Who did he think he was fooling? The ground under her was wet and muddy. She moved over to sit on one of the chimney stones. Moss made a cushion for her. “How long have you been looking for this supposed cure? Fifty years?”

  “More like seventy.”

  She knew all the things he had tried so far. He’d studied the old legends of werewolves and other shape-shifters from around the world, learning how people had supposedly turned themselves into animals and, more important, how they’d changed back. He’d spent decades reading old legends and folktales, hoping there was a grain of truth in them somewhere. He had made wolf straps—belts of skin, either wolf hide or human skin he’d cut from his own body, studded with silver nails that burned him every time he touched them. He had cultivated the flowers of wolfsbane and purple aconite, hoping to brew some kind of potion that would release him from his double nature.

  None of it had ever worked.

  “There’s an answer,” he said, sounding like he was trying to convince himself. “And it has to be here. This is where the curse began, did I tell you that?”

  “A couple of times.”

  He shook his head. “Somewhere here in the north, in the New World. We know that this is where the first lycanthropes came from. If we can find the place where the curse originated, we’ll find the answer. You and me. Together.”

  “And then what?” she asked. “We walk south again, through all this country without the wolves to keep us alive? We walk into the first big city we find and we turn ourselves in, say, ‘Hi, we’re the ones who killed Bobby Fenech and the Pickersgill brothers, but it’s okay because we were wolves at the time, and now we’re cured?’ You think they won’t lock us up? You think they won’t send us off to prison?”

  “A human prison. Where we can live safely with other human beings. Jail can’t be worse than this existence.”

  She doubted that. Almost as much as she doubted there was a cure, of any kind, except the one that came from being shot multiple times with silver bullets.

  “The two of us will succeed where I failed alone,” he went on. “We’ll be able to … to …”

  “What?” she asked.

  “Blast.”

  She knew the tone in his voice. It was time, again. She didn’t bother putting her shoes back on. The moon must be just below the horizon, just about to peek up over the edge of the world and bring on the change. He had a way of knowing just when it was going to happen, a kind of internal alarm clock that went off just before it was time. She’d never known him to be off by more than a few minutes.

  They each looked around them, memorizing landmarks. They would need to find this place again when they changed back—their clothes would still be here. It was a routine they’d established early in their trek north, and she did it automatically. But just like every time before, she was thinking, Remember what this looks like with human eyes. Because every time it felt like she might never see anything that way again.

  “See you when we’re—” he began to say, but he was interrupted as the moon came edging over the line of trees to their east.

  Silver light dazzled Chey’s eyes, blinding her. She felt her clothing fall away as she became as intangible as a ghost. And then there was nothing; there was the wolf.

  3.

  The two of them were still finding each other in the dark, in many ways. Their wolves were working out their own relationship, every time the moon came up. Chey had seen the movies, but now she knew it wasn’t true, that thing about werewolves only changing under the full moon. Chey and Powell transformed every time the moon rose over the horizon whether it was full or new, whether it happened in the middle of the day or only after midnight.

  The change was ecstatic. For the wolves it felt like being joyously reborn. They had spent the long hours when the moon was down trapped in bodies that were fragile, slow, and half-blind—at least compared to the glorious forms the wolves possessed. The wolves emerged from flashes of silver light into a great symphony of smells and sounds, into wind that had more colors than their eyes could see, into bodies that were strong and sleek and fast.

  The wolves ran and played and sported—and hunted. With flashing jaws they snapped at the snow on the ground, snatching up the little bright warm things that burrowed underneath. Blood flecked their muzzles and their paws and their bellies, finally, were full. The cold night air was bracing, not frigid, and the stars overhead were bright enough to see by, even when the imperious moon grew dark.

  They marked their territory. They considered digging snug dens in the earth while it was still soft, and decided against it. The air was still warm enough, the
days still long enough, that there was time to play.

  How they played. The two of them danced about each other, ran arcs around each other, leaping sideways to keep their eyes locked even as they spun and turned. They snapped and nipped at each other’s snouts, feinted with slashing paws and butted each others’ sides with their heads, their powerful necks craning to try to get at each other’s bellies.

  He was stronger, and slightly bigger than her. Still he won only by trickery, by dashing up along a high tussock of grass and then crashing down onto her shoulders, spilling them both across the snow-strewn ground, sending them rolling. When she tried to right herself, to get her broad paws back down on the earth where they belonged, he was on top of her, pinning her with his weight across her chest, his jaws hovering over the soft flesh of her belly.

  She wrestled and fought and scratched, mewled and whined and screeched in an agony of excitement and pleasure and the need to break free, to get out from under. He kicked at her hind legs with his own.

  She sank her teeth deep into his throat.

  With a cry he jumped straight up in the air, off of her, leaving nothing in her mouth but his torn-out fur. She spat it out and rolled effortlessly to her feet, spreading her legs wide to get a firm grip on the ground. His forelegs came down across her shoulders and she bucked him off, then spun around and slammed into his side with the bony part of her haunches, knocking him away. She spun again to face him where he crouched low and with his forelegs stretched out across the snow, in a courteous bow.

  They were both panting. Their eyes were wild. The hair between their shoulder blades, a darker patch of fur called the saddle, stood up and puffed out to make them both look even bigger than they were. Their tails were up and lashing at the air. It was a signal any wolf could read instantly, any dog the world over, a warning, a threat, a promise, a demand to know what the other wanted.

  That signal could be answered with growls or with sighs. In a moment they could be mating—or tearing each other’s throats out. She watched his eyes, his tail. He watched hers. Neither was willing to make the first move, to break the spell, the staring contest, the ritual clash of wills.

  Then—as suddenly and dramatically as ice breaking on a frozen pond—his head went up. His nose scanned the air and his eyes narrowed. He had something, something serious enough to be a distraction.

  He sat down hard on his haunches and lifted his nose higher. His ears swept back and he closed his eyes, every iota of his perception committed to his impossibly keen sense of smell. She took a few tentative sniffs herself but couldn’t find what had distracted him. Annoyed that the confrontation had finished without proper resolution, she took a step toward him, her body low to the ground, and then another. She lifted one paw to bat at his face but held back when she heard what came next.

  His jaws parted slightly and a high, long keening came out, a bloodcurdling sound that made her teeth ache and her heart race. He let the sound slide out of him, a long descending yowl that broke up into a series of growling yelps. She’d heard him howl before, of course, but never with such nuance, with so varied a call. He was communicating something very specific but not something she could understand.

  She lifted her own nose to the air, let out her own preliminary cry. He opened his eyes and stared her into silence. For a time they waited.

  Did he expect a reply to his howl?

  None came.

  Eventually he rose to all fours again and trotted away, in the direction of the water. His tail rose again and started to waggle back and forth and she sensed a change in him, a slackening of tension. Had he been glad to get no reply? She could not know, but she understood that whatever had elicited that call was gone now. Everything was back to normal. She was glad for it. Still panting from their exertions, they sought out a place where the water had cut away a section of bank, forming a shallow overhang of frozen dirt, a bit of shelter from the wind. There they curled up together, sharing their warmth, recovering their energy for whatever came next. They dozed, their eyes drifting shut then snapping open again, still alert, still aware even as their muscles relaxed and their minds drifted into dreams.

  When the moon set the next morning, the silver light of transformation found them there, her foreleg draped across his neck.

  4.

  Chey’s eyes opened slowly. It felt like her eyelids were made of sandpaper. Her mouth tasted stale and her tongue was stuck to the inside of one cheek. Her entire body ached.

  It was never easy coming back.

  She stirred a little, lifted her head, but that hurt too much, so she let it fall back. She opened her eyes enough to see that she was sheltered under an overhanging bank of earth, just enough to keep the wind off. Then she noticed how she was lying. She was naked, of course—her clothes had fallen away when she transformed, and they didn’t magically follow her around—but unlike most times she had woken up naked on a pile of dirt, this time she wasn’t alone. She and Powell were spooning, her breasts crushed against his back and one of her arms wrapped around his chest.

  He seemed to be asleep. Slowly, careful not to wake him, she started to draw her arm away. If she could roll away from him before he woke, if she could get a little distance between them, she could pretend it hadn’t happened.

  She had known for a while now that their wolves were getting more than friendly with each other. More than once she’d woken with the impression that the wolves had been courting each other. She would come to still heavily aroused, her body aching for a male touch, and she knew it was the wolf’s heat she was experiencing. It was just a matter of time, she supposed, before they started mating.

  Chey didn’t know what would happen then. Powell had told her she couldn’t get pregnant, even by another werewolf, and he should know—he’d been mated to two of them, once, in both forms. For years he’d been the lover of a pair of female lycanthropes in France and though by his own admission there’d been plenty of sex, no one had ever conceived. It wasn’t that which worried Chey, however. If she and Powell started mating when the moon was up, she would have to make a decision about how she felt about him when she was human. About whether the attraction she felt toward him was okay, and whether or not acting on it would betray her inmost being.

  “Hello,” Powell said, rolling over.

  Her heart skipped a beat. She’d only managed to half extract her arm from their embrace, and when he turned to look at her like that she was still, technically, hugging him. She could still feel his body heat bathing her chest and legs. And now she had to accept the fact that he had an erection. And that it was pointing at her.

  She forced herself not to look down. That meant, unfortunately, that she had nowhere to look but into his eyes. Eyes that were already searching hers, as if he was trying to decide what he was allowed to do next.

  He shifted slightly, moving their faces closer together. Was he going to kiss her?

  “We should get back to the fort,” she said. She’d meant it to sound like a firm decision, a spur to get them both up and moving and out of each other’s arms. Instead it came out faint and halfhearted. Like she was asking if they had to, or if it was okay to lie here a while longer.

  He licked his lips. If his mouth tasted as bad as hers, she definitely didn’t want him to kiss her, she decided. Then he opened his lips as if he were about to say something. Luckily he was interrupted as a fat, greasy drop of water splashed on Chey’s cheek just then and she scurried backward, suddenly terrified.

  There—up on the bank above them, leaning over the edge. Someone else was there, a stranger leaning over them, watching them.

  Her hands grabbed at rocks and tree roots, looking for something she could throw. The figure above them was humanoid in shape, wrapped in thick furs. Its face was obscured by a long white wooden mask with square eyeholes and an elongated carved nose. With one hand the figure reached up and tilted the mask back, revealing a smiling gnomic face.

  Not a stranger at all.

  �
�Dzo!” she screamed, and jumped up to spread her arms and catch him as he leapt down to her level. “Where have you been? Where did you come from? What have you been doing?”

  “I thought you could use these,” Dzo said, and he pulled two bundles of clothing out from under his furs. He tossed them down on the ground and then hugged her back. His furs were damp with freezing-cold water, but she didn’t care. “It took me a while to find you,” he went on.

  She was so excited to see him that she kissed his cheeks over and over. It wasn’t just because he’d broken up a very awkward moment.

  She had thought she had lost him forever. When she had followed Powell into Port Radium, Dzo had explained that the waters in that cursed place were too polluted to allow him to follow. Months ago she had said good-bye and assumed she would never see him again.

  She was very glad it was otherwise.

  “Good to see you, old man,” Powell said, and shook Dzo’s hand firmly.

  “You too,” Dzo agreed. “Hey. You got anything to eat?”

  5.

  A helicopter came in off the ocean, from the west, and half the town of Menden came out of doors to see what it meant. The harbormaster stepped out of his office with a cup of coffee in his hand and shielded his eyes to watch the helicopter approach for a landing. Then, with a deep sigh, he jumped in his jeep and headed out to meet it.

  Not many helicopters came to Menden. It was a place where boats pulled in, dropped off their cargo, and left before the tide changed. There wasn’t even an airstrip within close range of town—what little air traffic came through tended to land on the water. Adding to the strangeness was the fact that this particular aircraft was a decommissioned Russian attack gunship. There were people in Menden who might still take a Russian aircraft entering U.S. airspace the wrong way, even if it was repainted in civilian colors. This helicopter had a filed flight plan and official clearance, however, so somebody had to be on hand to do the official honors.