Overwinter Read online

  “Unless they become mine. Go on.”

  “There’s not much more to tell,” Holness said. “He’s doubled on us. That’s spy lingo. It means he’s become a double agent, working for the other team.”

  “Varkanin? Working with the werewolves? I saw his dossier.”

  “I don’t have any explanation.”

  Demetrios nodded. “I see. I think you know what this means. Unless you have some amazing card to pull out of your ass, I think our association is also at an end.”

  Demetrios started to stand up.

  If he stood up and walked away, Holness’s life was over. Kaput. He would be working at a department store, selling men’s pants, before he could blink. So Holness grabbed Demetrios’s hand-tailored sleeve.

  The lawyer looked amused. And also like he was ready to break Holness’s arm any second now with a judo chop. “Yes?” he asked, quietly.

  It was Holness’s turn to smile. Though he didn’t feel particularly happy. “I’m an espionage agent. Of course I have another trick to play.” He dragged the shopping bag onto his lap. It was very heavy. “Varkanin is still a foreign national on Canadian soil. By taking this step he has declared himself engaged in interests that are counter to Canadian security and the public welfare. You see where this is going?”

  “Maybe.”

  “My bosses wouldn’t give me any troops to play with, not when we were fighting werewolves. Now we’re fighting an armed foreign national who entered our borders with violent intent. Do you understand?”

  Demetrios’s eyes went wide.

  “Yeah,” Holness said. “We’re fighting a terrorist.”

  He let that sink in for a moment.

  “That means there is no problem whatsoever with getting what I need. I’ve been cleared to take a company of Special Operations Forces personnel—the tan berets—and whatever equipment I require up to the frozen north to deal with this threat directly. If that equipment happens to include silver bullets, nobody’s going to ask any questions.”

  Demetrios actually looked impressed. “Do I understand correctly? You’re going to be leading them yourself?”

  Holness opened his shopping bag. Inside was a thick navy blue combat vest with lots of straps and quick release buckles. He held it up so Demetrios could see. “Hundreds of layers of interwoven nylon fabric. Guaranteed to stop a knife blade—or a werewolf claw.”

  Demetrios whistled as he ran the thick fabric between his fingers. “Very nice,” he said.

  “I just wish it came in black. Black goes with everything,” Holness said.

  81.

  “Keep an eye on him,” Powell told Chey, when they were still half a kilometer from the inukshuk. “I’m going to have my hands full when we arrive.” Varkanin was following behind, keeping a gun trained on both of them. Obviously, he didn’t exactly trust them yet.

  Not that Chey felt too sure about the Russian, either. But they didn’t exactly have much choice. If they wanted to live they had to play by his rules.

  To prove they were all on the same side, Powell had to get Lucie to come back to town with them. Chey wasn’t sure exactly how Powell planned on doing that. She figured she would just back his play, whenever he revealed it to her.

  Varkanin was walking far enough back that if they whispered he couldn’t hear them. That had to count for something, Chey figured. It meant he trusted the two of them not to turn on him without warning.

  “This is kind of fucked,” Chey said. “What’s to stop him from killing us as soon as he figures out how to cure Sharon?”

  Powell shrugged. If anything, he seemed less paranoid than she was. “I’ve spoken with him. And I’ve seen the way he operates. He’s a man of honor.”

  “You buy that?”

  Powell glared at her. “He’ll keep his word. As long as he gets what he wants, he has no reason to hurt us.”

  “I hope you’re right.” Chey hugged herself, though she wasn’t particularly cold. “He killed Dzo without blinking an eye. And I think he actually liked Dzo. If we can’t deliver what he wants—”

  “We will. Okay, stop here.”

  They were only a couple hundred meters from the inukshuk. Chey could see the remains of the camp where they’d met with Raven. There was no sign of Lucie.

  “There’s something you should know,” Powell told her, while they turned around in circles, scanning the barren snowfield all around them. They headed into the camp but there was no sign of Lucie anywhere. “When I went to rescue you, I asked Lucie to come with me. To help me. She said no.”

  Chey shrugged.

  “She said you’d gotten yourself in this mess and you weren’t worth saving.”

  “I’m really not surprised,” Chey told him. “She’d be happy if I died, because then she could have you all to herself.”

  Powell’s face hardened. “Is that really what you think? That if you were dead, I would turn to her for consolation?”

  “No,” Chey said, looking down. “But I know for a fact it’s what she thinks. Where the hell is she?” There was nowhere for her to hide in the empty landscape. She wasn’t lurking behind the inukshuk, nor in the rocks nearby. “You think she just ran off?”

  “No,” Powell said. He turned and waved at Varkanin. “She isn’t over here,” he shouted. “Do yourself a favor, and—”

  Lucie didn’t wait for him to finish his warning. She had been lying in wait under the snow, probably not even breathing. Without a sound she rose up out of the ground cover, the white snow that fell away from her only slightly more pale than the color of her skin. Chey could only recognize her because of her red hair—otherwise she was a blur as she streaked across the open ground and launched herself at Varkanin.

  The Russian was only human. He couldn’t react fast enough to stop her. The gun in his hand went flying as Lucie knocked him to the ground. Had it been anyone but Varkanin, death would have been certain.

  Lucie laughed and darted her head forward, her mouth open wide. She was going to try to tear Varkanin’s throat out with her human teeth.

  “Oh, boy,” Chey said. “That’s going to hurt.”

  Lucie reared backward and then rolled off of him, clutching at her bleeding mouth. She moaned in agony as she spat out broken teeth.

  “You okay?” Powell shouted. Varkanin raised one hand in an affirmative wave.

  “Lucie,” Chey said, “you can’t hurt him; he’s—”

  Lucie had never been the type to give up easily. She tried to grab Varkanin up off the ground, perhaps intending to throw him far enough and hard enough to break every bone in his body. Wherever her hands touched him, though, her strength just melted away. Varkanin struggled to sit up, then get to his feet. Lucie tried one last desperate punch to his jaw.

  As far away as she was, Chey heard Lucie’s knucklebones pop and crackle as they shattered. She definitely heard Lucie’s screams.

  Eventually, when the redhead had calmed down, Powell went to her and picked her up out of the snow. He put an arm around her shoulders and helped her walk off some of the pain. “Our plans have changed,” he told her.

  82.

  The plan was to leave for Victoria Island immediately. Then the weather turned bad.

  The wind came howling out of the north, bringing with it fine sheets of snow like shaved ice. Those few people who braved the streets walked bent over, their faces covered completely with scarves and goggles. It never seemed to start snowing for real, not like in the storm the wolves had slogged through, but the snow that did fall didn’t melt. It built up in enormous windswept drifts, great slopes of it leaning against every building, tons of it piling up atop every roof. The roads, which to begin with had just been places where the snow had been scraped down, filled in and disappeared.

  Inside Varkanin’s cabin, the werewolves and the Russian were forced to wait.

  Victoria Island lay no more than a hundred kilometers from the town of Umiaq, but it was separated from the mainland by the Dolphin and Union Str
ait, a stretch of water thirty kilometers wide at its narrowest point. It was impossible in the winter to travel across that distance by boat, because the water was frozen solid. Traditionally the best way across had been by dogsled, but these days most people chose to fly. There were airstrips all over the north, one for every town of more than a hundred or so people. Umiaq had one and so did both Cambridge Bay and Ulukhaktok, the two towns on Victoria Island.

  Planes couldn’t fly when it was snowing, however, or even when the wind just kicked up. It was hard enough keeping an engine from icing up on a clear day, and radar was almost useless in a place with so few landmarks, so visibility had to be perfect or the bush pilots would refuse to take off.

  “I have quite a bit of money,” Varkanin suggested. “Surely we can convince someone to take on this challenge.”

  Sharon shook her head. “People up here are poor, but they aren’t crazy.”

  “So what do you do when you have to get somewhere in a hurry?” Chey asked.

  “We wait,” Sharon replied. “In the winter, up here? There’s no such thing as a hurry. If somebody gets hurt real bad, and they need to be flown to a big hospital, well,” she shrugged, “we do our best. But if the weather’s bad enough, they just have to wait, too.”

  Chey sighed and stared out the window at the snow coming down. It just didn’t look that bad. She was anxious to get started, to be cured. To go back to real life. She was learning that weather was something you had to take seriously this far north.

  “Without Varkanin, we could press northward on foot,” Lucie said, coming up behind her. “We could cross the ice like wolves.”

  Chey turned and stared at the redhead. Lucie would never really accept the change in alliances, she knew. She might be crazy, but she wasn’t stupid enough to think that Varkanin had forgiven her. Chey didn’t think she could lie convincingly, either, and convince Lucie that she was going to come out of this alive—Powell had warned her not to say a word on that front. Still, there was one way to keep Lucie from trying to run away. One thing that would convince her to play along.

  “This is what Powell chose,” Chey said. Lucie’s eyes flashed with deep fire for a moment, but then it was gone.

  “I’m hungry,” she said, and threw herself across the couch.

  Chey had to admit she was starving herself. She hadn’t eaten since they’d returned from the inukshuk. She headed into the kitchen and found Sharon there, already preparing a bunch of sandwiches.

  “Slice up some of that meat,” Sharon said, indicating a haunch of caribou that she’d taken out of Varkanin’s freezer. A long chef’s knife lay next to it. “Use a cutting board so you don’t mess up the countertop.”

  Chey stepped over to the kitchen counter and picked up the knife. “You trust me with this, now? A couple days ago you wanted to tear my guts out.”

  Sharon looked down at the table, where her hands were busy shredding a head of lettuce for the sandwiches. “I wouldn’t say I’m thrilled about how things are now,” she admitted. “I wouldn’t say I like you now.”

  “Okay,” Chey replied. She shared the sentiment.

  “Up here, though, we don’t really believe in grudges. Back when we used to hunt whales, just for food enough to last through the winter, we had a sort of unwritten law. It didn’t matter if somebody was sleeping with your husband, or they stole all your money, or you just didn’t like the way they looked. The captain of the whaling boat had to trust that everybody would work together—if they didn’t, they would all get killed. You had to rely on the guy next to you that he was going to paddle like crazy. You had to rely on the guy with the harpoon that he was going to throw it right. And you definitely had to rely on the people back at camp who kept the fire going. If you couldn’t trust all those people, you would just have to starve. So no matter what grievances anybody had with anybody else, they got put on hold—just so we could live long enough to work things out later. Even if—”

  Sharon stopped in the middle of her sentence and stared at Chey’s hand.

  “What?” Chey asked. Then she looked down and saw the knife trembling in her grip. She hurriedly put it down and smiled as brightly as she could.

  “You okay?” Sharon asked. It didn’t sound like friendly concern.

  “I’m fine,” Chey said. She turned around and faced the caribou haunch in front of her. She didn’t understand why her hands were shaking so badly. She felt fine, she really did. She felt okay, at least.

  The haunch before her was dripping with blood. It was raw and red and the bone sticking out one end was filled with creamy marrow. Chey had to clamp her mouth tight to keep from drooling.

  “I think maybe you should sit down,” Sharon said.

  Chey shook her head. She was absolutely fine. She felt perfectly—completely—

  Her hand reached down and grabbed the bone. Chey couldn’t stop her hand. It brought the haunch up to Chey’s mouth and she took a bite out of the meat, the blood smearing on her lips and cheeks.

  She wasn’t controlling her own body.

  “Get—guh,” she tried to say, but her mouth was full of meat. “Get Powell!” she managed to gasp.

  She could hear people running around in the cabin. She could hear voices calling, but she couldn’t understand what they were saying. Her vision grew dim and she heard a high-pitched ringing, like an air raid siren going off in her head.

  Then it was as if a light switch had been flipped inside her head, and her consciousness just … went out.

  83.

  “No!” Chey screamed, and she reared upward, gasping for breath. Arms were wrapped around her chest, holding her down, suffocating her, and she fought wildly, scratching and punching without thought, just trying to get free. Tears burst from around her eyes and she could hear herself moaning in panic and fear.

  “Chey! Chey, calm down,” Powell hissed, right next to her ear. The arms that held her were his, she realized. “Be quiet! You can’t let them hear you. Please—just calm down, calm—”

  “I’m okay,” she lied. She dropped onto her back and curled into a ball, unable to do anything but breathe, sucking air into her lungs as if she’d woken up underwater, drowning and weak.

  She heard someone ask, “Is everything alright back here?” It was not a voice she recognized.

  “She’s just a nervous flyer,” Powell responded.

  She heard a door closing and someone walking away. And underneath that a persistent humming sound, a throbbing mechanical drone. The sound of an engine laboring away. She looked around herself and saw metal walls, curved like the fuselage of an airplane. Boxes and crates were stacked everywhere, secured with bungee cords to keep them from shifting in flight.

  “We’re in the air already?” she asked.

  Powell stroked her hair. “The weather lifted and we caught a lift on a cargo plane headed to Cambridge Bay,” he told her. “The others are up front in the passenger section, but I figured it would be safer to keep you back here with the cargo. Varkanin didn’t want to travel at all with you in bad condition, but I told him we didn’t have any choice.”

  Chey closed her eyes and ran her fingers through her hair. “How long was I gone?” she asked.

  “Three days.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut even harder. “It was different this time. My wolf took over—I mean, that’s happened before. But always in the past I felt like I could fight it. Like I could somehow get control back.” She shook her head. “This time there was no warning, and not a thing I could do to stop it. Was I—did I cause any problems?”

  “You tried to attack Sharon. She didn’t take it well, even after I explained why it happened. After that we kept you in restraints.”

  Chey opened her eyes a crack and looked down at her wrists. A band of red skin on either forearm told her they’d had to use silver manacles. So it was bad. Really bad.

  “I think I may have done something really stupid,” she told Powell. “When I was in Umiaq, when I first met Sharon
and we were fighting in the street—I let my wolf out. I asked for its help.”

  Powell pressed his body close against hers. It was a comfort. Not least because he was human, human-shaped anyway. If she sniffed hard enough she felt like she could smell her wolf still lingering on her skin.

  “That was probably a mistake,” he said.

  She nodded. She’d figured as much. She’d let the wolf out and now it felt like it could take over whenever it wanted to.

  “I’m running out of time.”

  “We need to move quickly. That’s why I didn’t want to wait until you came back to us,” Powell confirmed.

  “This must be what Élodie felt like, at the end,” Chey said.

  “Don’t say that. You still have time,” Powell insisted.

  She had a hard time sharing his optimism. “Even if we find the cave, and the silver knife—what if I’m already gone by then?” she asked. “What if my wolf figures out what we’re doing, and decides she doesn’t want it?”

  “That won’t happen.”

  Chey grimaced. “It’s fine to say that, but—”

  “It won’t happen. I won’t let it,” he told her.

  84.

  They set down outside of Cambridge Bay but didn’t stick around that tiny town for long. Chey knew they were in a desperate hurry—on her behalf—but it saddened her to see buildings and people on snowmobiles and electric lights go by and know that soon they would just be a memory again, when she was out on the wild tundra. Her time in Umiaq had not been a lot of fun, but just the simplest experiences of being in civilization—walls around her, rooms warmed by central heating, even using the Internet again—had been so exciting after the time she’d spent in the wilderness. Now here was the world of people again, and then it was gone in the blink of an eye.

  Varkanin drew the usual stares and pointed questions when he showed his blue face in town, but he was able to hire the use of a snowcat, a big vehicle with a square yellow cab that stood on top of four massive treads. It roared and rumbled as its diesel engines were fired up and then lurched forward when he threw it into gear. He and Sharon—both of them armed to the teeth—sat in the seats up front, while Chey, Powell, and Lucie rode in the cargo area in the back, bracing themselves against the walls of the cab as best they could.