Overwinter Read online

  She was running away.

  The wolf’s bloody lips split in a wicked smile. The wolf loved it when prey tried to run. It was good exercise, for one thing. And the thrill of a good chase made the prey taste that much sweeter.

  Toes spread wide for maximum grip, the wolf dashed after Sharon, intent on catching her and tearing her to pieces. Sharon ducked around a corner and the wolf followed, pushing off the snow and leaning into the turn. Sharon looked back over her shoulder and nearly tripped over a pile of snow in the middle of the street. She recovered gracefully, but it slowed her down for a split second.

  It was all the advantage the wolf needed. It shot forward and sprang, legs pumping, muscles straining nearly to the breaking point to launch its borrowed body through the air. It didn’t care if Chey’s body got hurt as long as it killed this enemy.

  The wolf threw its arms out in midair and scooped Sharon up at the top of its trajectory. It ducked its head under one arm as the two of them smashed into the rough plank wall of a house—and then through the wall, boards snapping under their weight, hundreds of splinters gouging their skin or pattering off their clothes like dry rain.

  Someone screamed. A human scream—a sound the wolf loved.

  Inside the house a woman in a housecoat dashed out of her kitchen as the two tumbled across the linoleum tile floor. Sharon smashed up against a stove and dented the steel oven door with her face. Moaning in pain, she rose stiffly to her feet.

  The wolf was already standing, silhouetted in the hole the two of them had made in the wall. Stray flakes of snow drifted past its shoulders and face. It panted a little when it saw blood dripping from Sharon’s left ear. It wanted very much to lap up that blood. And then bite Sharon’s face off. The wolf took a step forward.

  There was a pot of boiling water on the stove. Sharon grabbed it one-handed and tossed the water in the wolf’s face.

  It hurt. There was no denying it. The water scalded the wolf and made it want to whimper in pain. It held back the sound, reached up, wiped the water off its cheeks and away from its eyes. Took another step.

  Sharon had jumped over the kitchen counter into the parlor beyond. Somewhere along the way she’d grabbed up a wooden block full of knives. She flicked one at the wolf’s eyes.

  The wolf reached up and batted the knife out of the air. Its edge sliced through the skin of her knuckles, but she ignored the sudden pain. Took another step.

  Another knife, aimed low this time. The wolf leaned to one side and the knife missed it altogether, imbedding itself in the wall behind the wolf and thrumming there as it vibrated back and forth.

  The wolf took another step toward Sharon.

  Sharon had saved the biggest carving knife from the block. She didn’t throw this one. Instead she waited until the wolf was close enough, then stabbed wildly, bringing her hand up from a low position so the wolf couldn’t see it coming.

  The wolf was capable of admiring a strong attack. It panted wildly as the blade came right for its belly. There was no time to move aside, so instead the wolf stepped into the blow, turning slightly to take the cut in its hip instead of its entrails. Blood poured down the leg of Chey’s pants and pain burst like fireworks all up and down her side and leg. She had to close her eyes and squeal a little just to handle it.

  When the wolf opened its eyes Sharon was running for the far side of the house. The wolf chased after her and through the front door, back out into the snowy street. Sharon’s eyes were wide and full of terror when she saw the wolf still coming after her, hands stretched out to grab for hair, or arms, or whatever the wolf could reach. The game was winding down, now. Sharon had played very, very well. But she couldn’t match the ferocity of the wolf, or its willingness to sacrifice its human body for the win.

  The wolf’s shadow loomed over Sharon as it came on like inexorable doom. Just one more step and—

  —and—sniff—the wolf’s nose twitched. Something—something in the air—

  —silver.

  There was silver nearby. A lot of it. The wolf turned on its heel to look. It was vaguely aware that behind it, Sharon dashed around a corner and was gone. It could track her down later, as soon as it figured out where the stink of silver was coming from.

  A blue-faced man stepped around the corner of a nearby house.

  “This has gone on long enough,” he said. He had a silver chain in his hands, as thick and heavy as a truck’s tow chain. It gleamed in the snowy morning light.

  The wolf’s eyes narrowed and its nostrils flared. It stamped its feet and then shot toward the man, head low and arms up to dash him to the ground. He didn’t shift an inch as it charged him. At the last second it brought one fist around in a powerful hook that would smash his jaw to bone chips. He was no werewolf—he was human, weak and fragile and easily destroyed.

  The wolf’s fist connected with the blue man’s chin with enough power to pulverize concrete. There was no way human skin could withstand that much pressure, no way human bone could take that much shock. Yet something strange happened. Something the wolf could not have imagined.

  When its fist touched the blue chin, every bone in every finger shattered. Muscles in the wolf’s forearm split and kinked. Blood dripped from broken skin and the wolf dropped to the ground and howled in agony, clutching its crippled arm close to its body.

  The blue man wasn’t so much as bruised.

  The wolf’s pain was so enormous that it did not notice at all the raven standing on the roof of the house across the street, cawing raucously.

  72.

  The wolf continued to rage in pain and anger for a long time. Chey, buried deep inside the wolf’s consciousness, was barely aware of what was happening as it was hauled away in silver chains. The people of Umiaq came to watch as it was loaded onto a snowmobile and carried out of town.

  By the time the snowmobile reached Varkanin’s cabin, Chey had started to reassert her control over her own body. When Varkanin dragged her inside and fastened her chains to a couch in his sitting room, she was able to speak again. “How?” she asked. He seemed to understand what she meant—how could he stand up to a rampaging werewolf without getting his hair mussed? How was it that when the wolf attacked him, all it got for its trouble was multiple fractures of the arm bones?

  “Colloidal silver,” Varkanin told Chey, as he sat down with a grunt on a chair opposite her couch. “Perhaps you have heard of it? No?” He sighed. “When one fights monsters, one must array one’s self in proper protection. In the Middle Ages, werewolf hunters wore chain mail made of silver links. When I began to hunt Lucie I looked into having such a suit of armor made for myself. I was told how much it would weigh, and how much it would restrict my movements. I knew I required a better solution. I did much research on silver and one day came across the story of an American who was running for governor of their state of Montana.

  “He was having difficulty securing votes. Not least so because his skin was blue.” Varkanin’s eyes lit up. “He was a believer, you see, in alternative medicines. Looking for some more natural type of antibiotic, he’d found colloidal silver. There is nothing particularly unnatural about it. It is simply purified water in which a certain amount of silver has been placed in suspension. It has been marketed as such for quite some time, though obviously the advertisements tend not to mention the one unfortunate and quite permanent side effect. It turns your skin blue, all over. Like mine.” He held up his hands to show her, first the backs, then the palms. “Of course, this man in Montana did not mean for this to happen to him.

  “It took some work to find a dealer of colloidal silver—the stuff has fallen out of favor with the public—but when I acquired enough of it, I found it had no unpleasant taste and no bad side effects beyond changing the color of my skin. It worked quite well for what I had in mind. Every square centimeter of skin on my body now contains very small amounts of silver. More than enough to protect me from any werewolf attack.”

  “You did this intentionally,”
Chey said, with a cold realization. “You wanted to kill Lucie that badly—that you turned yourself permanently blue.”

  “Yes,” he said, as if it was the most reasonable thing in the world.

  “That’s commitment.”

  He nodded agreeably. “I have devoted the remainder of my life to her destruction.” He brought his arms up before him and flicked his wrists. A pair of silver knives emerged from his sleeves and landed easily in his blue hands.

  Chey gasped.

  “These are for her, not you. Do not worry. She will suffer before she dies.”

  “In God’s name, why?” Chey asked. “I understand she’s hurt a lot of people. But who deserves to be tortured to death?”

  “The same woman who killed my three lovely daughters,” Varkanin told her. “Who made them suffer, before she allowed them the release of death.”

  “That’s rough. But—but … she was a wolf at the time,” Chey insisted. “Wasn’t she?”

  “Yes,” he confirmed.

  “We can’t control what our wolves do. Listen, I’m not a big fan of Lucie either. But you have to understand. We know about the curse. We know what’s going to happen when we change. That’s why we live in secluded places, like here, or Siberia. So we won’t run into people and hurt them when we can’t control our behavior. I’m sure Lucie didn’t mean to do that.”

  Varkanin closed his eyes and breathed deeply through his nose for a while. “My daughter Irina, yes? My youngest. She lived in Magnitogorsk, with me. She was the first to die. Three weeks later my Varvara was found in pieces in Chelyabinsk. Hundreds of kilometers away. The last to perish was Lyudmilla. She lived in Novosibirsk, where she worked as a doctor. The wolf may not have known who the victims were. But Lucie did. She tracked them down, learning their addresses from a phone book. She put herself in their paths, just as the moon was set to rise.”

  “I’m—so sorry.” It was all Chey could think to say.

  “You tell me the wolves are not responsible. They cannot be blamed for what is bred into their bones.” He frowned and shook his head. “I say who else can be blamed? The one who made you a werewolf, this Montgomery Powell. I am told that was not his first crime. He killed your father.”

  It was Chey’s turn to close her eyes. “Yes.”

  “In fact, he partially ate your father.”

  “Yes.”

  Varkanin leaned forward in his chair. “I do not say these things to be cruel. But I must ask you—you have forgiven him for this? You have accepted that it was his wolf, and therefore his soul is spotless?”

  “Not … entirely,” she had to admit.

  Sharon Minik came through the door from the kitchen. Her face was dotted with bandages and she walked with a distinct limp. She had a steaming pot in her hand. “I haven’t forgiven anything,” she said. She lowered the pot so that Chey could see it was full of oatmeal. “You hungry?” she asked.

  Chey figured she knew what was coming, but the fact was that she was starving. “I could eat,” she said.

  Sharon came closer and held out the pot. Chey’s hands were bound behind her but she leaned closer to smell the oatmeal. Sharon had laced it with sugar and cinnamon and it smelled amazing.

  Leaning forward, Sharon spat blood and what looked like a tooth into the pot. Then she stirred it with a wooden spoon. She held the spoon toward Chey’s mouth. “Have a bite,” she said.

  “Sharon, please,” Varkanin said, sounding disgusted.

  “Eat it, bitch,” Sharon said. When Chey turned her head away, Sharon dumped the contents of the pot in Chey’s hair. It burned where it touched her skin, felt slimy where it dripped down her face. She couldn’t even wipe it away.

  73.

  “One thing I don’t get,” Chey said, while the oatmeal dried in her hair. “How did you even know who I was?”

  “The good people of this town have reason to keep a watch for werewolves,” Varkanin told her.

  Sharon scowled. “You wolves killed two good kids from this town, Jimmy Etok and Leonard Opvik. You almost killed me.” Her face went very still.

  She sat down on the floor next to Varkanin’s chair and he put a hand on her shoulder. Apparently the layers of shirts and sweaters she wore were enough to protect her from the silver in his skin. “Shortly after our return, we alerted Umiaq’s citizenry that you were in the vicinity. We told them what had happened to James and Leonard. What was still happening to Sharon. This is a small town where everyone knows everyone else’s business,” Varkanin said. “They look after one another.”

  “When Mrs. Oonark over at the library figured out what you were, she called me right away. She figured I would want to know you were in town. She stalled your friend the tuurngaq while she waited for me to show up. Turns out she didn’t need to. Crazy spirit ran away the second I hit you the first time. That’s the kind of loyalty someone like you deserves, I guess.”

  “Dzo didn’t run away,” Chey said, looking at Varkanin.

  The Russian nodded. “He went to get help.”

  “That’s why I’m here, isn’t it?” Chey sighed. “I’m the bait. You’re hoping Dzo will go get Powell and Lucie and that they’ll come in here loaded for bear. Then you’ll just pick them off when they show their faces.”

  “The bonds between members of a wolf pack are not easily broken. Mr. Powell will think he has no choice but to come and rescue you, no matter how dangerous this might be. I doubt Lucie will come happily, but she will do as he says. Is that not so?”

  “She will,” Chey agreed. “You sure you can handle them? Last time we faced off with you, we won.”

  Sharon bristled, but said nothing.

  “The last time you were aided by the spirit of the polar bear. This time you should expect to rely on no such assistance,” Varkanin told her.

  And she believed him. She could tell by the look on his face that he wasn’t bragging. He had thought this through, very carefully, and considered every possibility. If Powell and Lucie came for her, they would be walking into certain death.

  “And then … what about me? Once I’ve served my purpose, obviously you’re not going to just let me go.”

  “No,” Varkanin confirmed.

  “Are you going to ship me down to Ottawa, so they can put me in jail for life? Or maybe you’re going to take me back to Russia with you.”

  “Ms. Clark—”

  “—make me be some kind of special forces assassin for your army, is that it? Or hell, I don’t know, maybe you’re working for some evil corporation, and they want to put me in a lab, and—”

  “Please, Ms.—”

  “—do experiments on me, maybe even dissect me? Is that it?”

  Chey looked down at her legs. They were trembling so hard that her feet were drumming on the floor. She tried to force them to stop, but that just made it worse. Her teeth started chattering in her head and she felt like her body was going to shake itself to pieces. This was fear, she knew. True fear, born of desperation. Because she knew that all of those guesses were wrong. She knew exactly what he had planned.

  “When the time comes,” he told her, something like pity in his blue eyes, “I will place two silver bullets in your brain. That is all. I will do it when you are in your wolf shape. I will do it as humanely as I know how.” He shook his head. “I wish it could be another way.”

  Chey bit her tongue to try to keep her teeth from clacking together. The back of her head felt cold and wet, as if he’d already shot her. She felt like she might wet herself in terror. This was it. This was the end.

  Across the room, Sharon Minik laid her head gently against Varkanin’s knee. She wasn’t smiling. She didn’t laugh in wicked excitement. She just looked satisfied. Content. Chey’s death would be enough, it seemed, to soothe her rage.

  74.

  They left Chey alone after that. There was no way for her to get free of the silver chains that bound her—especially not when her arm felt numb and useless, the bones in it broken so she couldn’t ev
en twitch her shoulder or make a fist. It was all she could do to keep her shirt cuffs between the metal and her skin. Every time she shifted on the couch the chains around her wrists slipped down and made contact. Their touch was like being burned by acid.

  Eventually she managed to swivel around so she could lie down. The position was not quite as uncomfortable as sitting up had been. It took some of the pressure off her injured arm, anyway. She tried to sleep, but the fear wouldn’t let her. All she could do was lie there and imagine what it would feel like when the bullets entered her head.

  Varkanin had said he would do it when she was in her wolf form. Was that better or worse, she wondered? Her human mind wouldn’t feel the pain. But she would know—when she transformed, he would be waiting. She would see the silver light that marked a transformation and in that last instant she would know she would never return.

  Perhaps it would have been better to just surrender before that happened. To let the wolf in her brain take over—to give up on humanity altogether. Yet when she reached for the wolf she couldn’t find it. It was as if, having been hurt when it tried to attack Varkanin, it had gone to sleep and didn’t wish to be disturbed.

  In the morning she felt like hell. No sleep and the chafing burns on her wrists made her want to just curl up and disappear herself. She wasn’t given the option. Varkanin came out of his bedroom with a key. “I am not a cruel man,” he said. “I expected them to attack during the night. If I had known they would bide their time, I would not have left you trussed like this.” He unlocked the chains and let her get up from the couch. She was surprised that he would give her that much freedom. “You think I am being foolish?” he asked. “You already know that you cannot hurt me, nor Sharon. I see no reason we cannot permit you a small degree of freedom.”

  She glanced at the room’s windows. She couldn’t help herself. If she could get a running start, she could throw herself through the glass, roll into the street outside and dash for safety in the snow. But of course, he must have thought of that.