Overwinter Read online

  “Like what?” Sharon said. “Will you give me money? Huh?” She kicked Chey in the ribs. Chey flinched but managed not to fall over. “Are you going to offer to have sex with me or something? Or maybe him. You gonna suck his silver-plated dick?”

  Chey blinked away tears. “Anything. Just—just tell me. Please. Tell me what you want and I’ll do it. Anything, if you stop this.”

  “There’s one thing I actually want,” Sharon admitted.

  Outside they heard another gunshot. Then three more, one after the other.

  “Whatever it is, I—”

  “I want to be human again,” Sharon said. She kicked Chey again, this time in the leg. Chey slumped down to sit on the floor. She started another kick, aimed at Chey’s head. Chey reeled backward and Sharon laughed, putting her foot down. “I want to be human. All human, none of this wolf bullshit. You gonna make that happen? You think you can do that for me, you little bitch?”

  Chey’s eyes went wide.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Varkanin’s phone rang again. He stepped into the kitchen to answer it. Outside the sound of gunshots was almost constant now.

  “Yes,” Chey said again. “I can do that. There’s a cure.”

  “Bullshit,” Sharon said, and grabbed Chey by the hair. She hauled Chey across the room and smashed her face into one leg of the couch. “No fucking way you can do that! Don’t lie to me, bitch!”

  “It’s what we’ve been looking for,” Chey insisted. “Why do you think we came so far north? There’s nothing to eat up here! Why else would we come?”

  “Don’t,” Sharon said, “you,” she grabbed the back of Chey’s head, “fucking,” drew it back, “lie,” and shoved it hard into the wooden frame of the couch.

  “I swear it!” Chey moaned. Blood erupted from her nose where it had shattered from the repeated blows. “I’m telling the truth! There’s a cure! There is a cure! It’s on Victoria Island!”

  Varkanin leaned in from the kitchen. “Sharon, please. I really think that’s enough.”

  Sharon grabbed Chey’s hair and hauled her up to a sitting position. “It’s enough when she dies! That’s the only way it will ever be enough!”

  Varkanin’s phone rang once more, but Chey could barely hear it for all the gunshots.

  “On Victoria Island,” she whimpered, her voice broken by the blood pouring down the back of her throat and the sobbing tears coming from her eyes. “Victoria—Island, it’s there—the silver ulu—Raven—Raven told us, he took—took Powell’s eyes, and—and told us—told us about the—the silver ulu—and—and Amuruq, the—the wolf spirit, and—”

  Sharon released her. Chey fell in a heap on the floor.

  For a moment there was no sound but the constant gunfire as the townspeople of Umiaq unloaded silver bullets into Powell’s location.

  “Wait,” Sharon said. “Who told you this?”

  “Raven,” Chey sobbed.

  “Raven who?” Sharon demanded. “You mean Tulugaq? I don’t believe you.”

  “Nanuq told us how to find him. He—he ate Monty’s eyes.”

  Sharon brought one hand up to her face and rubbed the back of her hand across her mouth. She shook her head for a moment, but Chey could tell she’d gotten through. Sharon believed now.

  Sharon looked up at Varkanin. “There’s a cure,” she said.

  “Ms. Minik,” Varkanin said, “I have other things to worry about right now.”

  “Only Powell knows how to do it,” Chey said.

  “There’s a cure,” Sharon repeated. “If Tulugaq told them, then—there must really be a cure. I don’t have to be like this. Varkanin!”

  The Russian raised one finger for silence. He was busy dialing a number on his phone. Sharon rushed over to grab his arm, but he pulled away from her.

  “Varkanin—you owe me this,” Sharon demanded, staring him in the eye and refusing to let him look away.

  He met her gaze, finally. His face was very still. But then he sighed.

  “Cease fire,” he said, when his connection went through. “Immediately.”

  78.

  Chey wanted to go out into the town and bring Powell in herself, but Varkanin wouldn’t allow it. So she had to shout to him through the window and convince him she wasn’t being forced to trick him into revealing himself.

  Eventually he believed her—at least, enough to step out into the street. Instantly she saw that he was wounded. At least one of the gunshots she’d heard had hit home. She could only shout encouragement to him as he staggered closer, every step seeming to cost him immense agony.

  There was a bullet hole in Powell’s shirt. Blood foamed from the wound and his face was pale. He looked like he was about to collapse as he stepped inside Varkanin’s cabin. “This has to be a trick,” he said. He gasped for breath and staggered over to one wall. He put a hand against the plaster and lowered his head for a moment. “Right?”

  “No,” Chey said, rushing over to cradle his face in her hands. “He’s willing to listen, anyway. If you can convince him the cure is for real, then—”

  “Then what?” He shook his head. “Never mind. We’re out of here. Where’s Dzo?”

  Chey grimaced. “He’s dead,” she said.

  “Not likely,” Powell said.

  “Varkanin shot him with a uranium bullet.”

  “Depleted uranium,” Varkanin amended.

  Powell’s eyes were glassy and his pupils were tiny. At least he had eyes in his head again. He leaned toward Varkanin, perhaps intending to attack, but the strength visibly drained from his limbs as he tried to move. “I need to sit down.”

  He moved heavily into the room, his feet barely shuffling across the floorboards. Everyone was staring at him. Eventually he looked up and met Varkanin’s eyes.

  “If you want me to live long enough to talk, I need to get this bullet out of my belly.”

  “Certainly,” Varkanin said. “I believe you’ll require a pair of forceps.” He stepped into the kitchen and disappeared, leaving Sharon to watch them. The Inuit werewolf had a gun in her hand but it wasn’t pointed at anyone. She watched Powell with a certain fascination.

  Powell nodded and stumbled into the parlor. He dropped onto the couch and closed his eyes. For a while he just held his breath and didn’t move. The pain must have been incredible.

  “Don’t die yet,” Chey begged him. She could hardly stand to see Powell so weak. “Is it … bad?”

  “Yes,” he admitted. “Rifle bullet … it’s in my guts. Hit something vital. I can taste bile in my throat, so maybe my liver.” He shook his head. He was so pale. “I’ll die if we don’t remove it soon.”

  Sharon stepped closer and bent down to look at the wound. “How is he still breathing? I thought if we got shot with silver bullets we just keeled over dead,” she said.

  Powell looked over at Chey. “Who is she?” he asked.

  “That’s Sharon. Apparently I gave her the curse, back when we were wolves. She’s the one who convinced Varkanin not to kill you.”

  He looked up at Sharon with a curious expression. “Thanks, I guess.” He glanced down at his shirt. “Silver doesn’t kill us all at once. It’s like poison. Takes a while to work. Hurts like hell the whole time. I can feel it in there, burning me.”

  Sharon nodded and stepped back as if she expected Powell to jump off the couch and attack her at any moment.

  Varkanin returned with the forceps and a spool of gauze. “No need for antiseptic, in this case, but I’m sorry, I have nothing for anesthetic. Not even a bottle of vodka. This will be painful.”

  “Yeah,” Powell said. “I know.”

  “I would do this myself,” Varkanin said, “but I’m afraid I would touch your skin unintentionally, and this would only make matters worse.”

  “His skin is impregnated with silver,” Chey explained. “That’s why he’s blue.”

  Powell frowned. “Argyria? You did that to yourself on purpose?”

  “Yes,” Varkanin ag
reed.

  “That’s … a really clever idea. Here.” He reached for the forceps.

  “Don’t be stupid,” she said. “You can’t do it yourself.”

  “I’m going to try.” He took the forceps and tried to open them, but they fell out of his hand. They clanged against the floorboards. “Damn.”

  “Let me,” Chey said. She picked up the forceps off the floor. “Help me get this shirt off.” Powell could barely lift himself up off the couch enough for her to slip the sleeves over his arms. The wound under the shirt was ragged and crusted with blood clots. Fresh blood sluiced from the wound every time Powell moved and every time he drew a breath.

  “It’s deep,” he told Chey. “You’re going to really have to get in there and dig for it. Don’t worry about hurting me.”

  “Don’t be such a baby, then,” she told him. His eyes went wide, but when he saw her smile he calmed back down. “You want something to bite on?”

  “I understand a bullet is traditional,” he told her. “But no.”

  “Okay. If you need to scream, just go ahead,” she told him.

  Her bravado was patently empty, but she knew she had no choice but to do this and do it right the first time. She got the nose of the forceps into the wound without difficulty and then shoved the instrument in hard, until she felt it clink off the bullet. She tried to open the forceps a little so she could grab the bullet, but Powell jerked on the couch and he did scream. It was not a very manly sound.

  “Jesus, you moved it,” he said, his breath ragged in his throat.

  “I need you to stay still,” Chey insisted. Powell didn’t even seem to hear her. She held her own breath and steeled herself to what she needed to do. As quickly as she could, using all of her supernatural strength, she cranked open the forceps and jammed them around the bullet, then dragged it out into the air.

  Powell screamed again. And again. And again.

  Chey stared at the silver bullet she had removed from his abdomen. It was as long as the first two joints of her little finger. Ribbons of smoke wafted off its surface wherever Powell’s blood touched the silver. It hadn’t deformed much inside the wound, and it looked intact—normal lead bullets often shattered inside human bodies, she knew, and she’d been very worried that there might be pieces of it still inside Powell’s viscera, but it looked like she’d gotten it all.

  Powell kept screaming, for a long time. She used the roll of gauze to bandage the wound, but blood leaked through the thin fabric almost instantly. If she was right and she’d gotten it all, he would be okay once he transformed again. If even a minute amount of silver was left in his body, though, he wouldn’t survive the change. There was no way to know until it happened.

  79.

  Eventually he stopped screaming. Clearly he was still in a lot of pain and his eyes were wild, but he was able to talk.

  Varkanin’s first question was predictable. “Where is Lucie?” he demanded to know.

  “Somewhere safe,” Powell told him. “You think I trust you now? Just because you stopped shooting at me? I’m not going to tell you that.”

  “Very well,” Varkanin said. “So tell me about this cure, instead.”

  Powell glared at Chey as if she’d let him down by telling Varkanin what they were after. It had been the only way, though.

  “I’ve been looking for a way to remove the curse almost since I got it,” he told Varkanin. “I tried a lot of things. None of them worked. It looks like this is the real deal, though. The spirits gave me the information I needed.”

  “How is it done? I wish to know exactly, please,” Varkanin said.

  “Forget it,” Powell told him. “You killed Dzo. I’m not going to give you anything.”

  “Powell,” Chey said, “if you don’t tell him, he won’t help us.”

  “Or,” Powell suggested, “if I do tell him everything, then he’ll just kill us and use the information himself. What the hell do you want a cure for, anyway?”

  “For Sharon,” Varkanin admitted. “Honestly, I do not care very much what happens to the two of you. I want Lucie in my custody, so that I can dispose of her as I see fit. And I wish to restore to Sharon her humanity.”

  They all glanced at Sharon, then, but she just looked away.

  “In the interests of justice, I suppose you should be killed,” Varkanin said. “Yet I am an old man, and a Russian. These two things make me a pragmatist. You turn over to me Lucie. I will take her back to Russia with me, and after that her fate is none of your concern. Sharon will remain here with the two of you.”

  “What?” Sharon asked, suddenly paying close attention.

  Varkanin shrugged. “You seek a cure. If you agree to take her with you, to cure her as well, then I will offer no resistance.”

  “No,” Powell insisted.

  Varkanin sighed wearily. “Mr. Powell, I can kill you right now, should I so desire. You are too weak to resist me. I can kill your Ms. Clark as well. Surely you can see I do not wish to deceive you now?”

  “I won’t give you Lucie,” Powell said.

  “Please,” Chey said. “Just think about this. I know—you know what he’s going to do to her, I’m sure. It isn’t pretty. But maybe she deserves it. She’s a killer, Powell. A sociopath—do you honestly think she deserves that kind of loyalty?”

  “No, I don’t,” he told her. “The relationship I have with Lucie is complicated. But I have no problem letting her die if it means saving you.” He looked Chey right in the eye. “I’d kill her myself, for you.”

  Varkanin looked confused but pleasantly surprised. “Then we can reach an agreement, surely?”

  “I can’t just give her to you,” Powell explained, “because we need her to make the cure work.” He winced and sat up on the couch. “She has to die so the rest of us get our humanity back. The cure requires a werewolf sacrifice.”

  “Oh,” Varkanin said.

  “It … does?” Chey asked.

  Powell grabbed her hands. “I told you it was going to get darker, the closer we got to the end,” he told her. “You still with me?”

  part three

  victoria island

  80.

  It had been a mild autumn in Toronto, and the grass in Queen’s Park was just turning yellow under trees that still showed their brightest colors. Preston Holness waited on a bench, sitting quietly with his hands folded in his lap. He had a Burberry overcoat on top of his suit jacket. Lying next to him on the bench was an unmarked shopping bag with a drawstring.

  He had been waiting for hours. Demetrios had summoned him, demanding he come at once, and then left him waiting there long enough to start wondering if he was ever going to show. Holness understood the game that Demetrios was playing, and received the message this lateness was intended to send.

  He had fucked up. Royally.

  He had been feeding Demetrios daily progress reports since early October. The lawyer had grown increasingly upset every time he received one of these detailed e-mails, and had not restrained himself from showing his displeasure. Holness had carefully read each of the lawyer’s replies and then deleted them from his hard drive, after checking to make sure no copies remained on the e-mail server. That was standard practice for any communication he received, but he especially wanted to be rid of the insults, threats, and demands that Demetrios sent him. Some of them were quite creative. Others were simple. They all boiled down to the same thing.

  The oil company that Demetrios represented was now on the verge of pulling all of its interests out of the Canadian economy. When that happened, Holness would lose his job—if he was lucky. He might end up in jail. This worst case scenario didn’t worry him too much, however. Unemployment would be bad enough. He could not produce a résumé, because nothing he had done in the course of his career had any kind of official sanction or recognition. He would enter the job market unable to account for years of his adult life. He would most likely end up working in retail.

  For a man with the expensive fash
ion tastes of Preston Holness, that would be worse than jail. It might actually be worse than death.

  He shouldn’t joke, he told himself. It could come to that.

  He sighed and watched a group of young girls pass by, talking animatedly on their cell phones but not to each other. They were wearing lightweight coats and all of them had those furry boots that he detested so much, but that were apparently the “in” thing. When they had passed out of his field of vision he looked back down at his hands.

  Demetrios was sitting next to him. “I’m here,” he said.

  Holness didn’t jump. He was technically a spymaster, and in the James Bond movies, M never seemed surprised when James Bond just showed up somewhere, so Holness had trained himself not to react under similar circumstances. “Hi,” he said.

  “I didn’t get a progress report today,” Demetrios told him. “I’m guessing that means there’s bad news.” The lawyer didn’t look particularly angry. He almost looked happy. That might be another part of the game, calculated to put Holness off his guard.

  Or it might be the smile of a wolf descending on some unfortunate prey animal.

  “Well,” Holness began. “Yeah. I guess you could say that. I received a phone call from Varkanin last night. He said our arrangement was at an end.”

  Demetrios raised one professionally plucked eyebrow. “Which could be interpreted as meaning the werewolves are all dead.”

  “Yeah, but no,” Holness said. He reached over and with one hand he squeezed the plastic shopping bag lying next to him. It gave him a little strength. “They’re all still alive. He was able to kill the muskrat spirit.”

  “Impressive, but not part of the plan,” Demetrios said.

  “Right. He said that he no longer wished to work in cooperation with my government. He said he wouldn’t be returning any of the toys we sent him, either—which includes a parcel of custom-cut depleted uranium bullets. I’m going to have a really hard time accounting for those, since technically Canada opposes their manufacture or use.” He shrugged. “I’m sure you have better things to worry about than my troubles.”