Overwinter Read online

  “Amuruq,” Chey said. “He freed you. You owe him a debt.”

  The woman did not answer. Instead she knelt down on the bones as if she were about to start praying. But that wasn’t what she had in mind at all. Instead she leaned over Powell’s body and—

  “No!” Chey shouted, but it was already too late.

  Powell’s body was gone. Swallowed up.

  The woman rose to her feet again. She gave Chey a piercing look, with eyebrows raised. “Of all the bodies I was trapped in, I liked his the best,” she said. “I’ll take him with me. Make him part of me. That is what I owed him.”

  “That’s not enough—”

  “Think of what is owed to me, little ape. Think what I deserve after so long. Do you wish to join him, inside my belly? Maybe I deserve you, too.”

  Chey shrank back, clutching her arms across her chest. The woman nodded, once. “I did not think so,” she said. Then she walked up the tunnel and out into the daylight. In the distance, very far away, Chey heard wolves howling in joy. In triumph.

  Amuruq was back. The spirit of the dire wolf. Did that mean they had returned from extinction, too? Chey couldn’t begin to guess.

  It was then that Chey began to feel cold. Not just chilly, but bone-searingly cold. She had a desperate urge to put some clothes on.

  It had worked. It had seemed impossible. But it had worked.

  She was human, once more.

  epilogue

  Human. And a long way from home.

  “Okay,” Chey sighed to herself. “Okay.” The sound of human words broke the spell. Hearing a voice, even her own, made her feel less alone and defenseless. She zipped up the parka she’d taken from one of the dead soldiers, and stood up. Her feet felt as if they were on fire, even inside the soldier’s socks and boots. Her body was cramped with the cold. It had been a long walk from the tunnel mouth to the rock formation on the far side of the lake, where Varkanin had made his last stand. A long walk on bare, human feet. She wasn’t sure how badly her feet had been damaged by the cold, but she figured if they still hurt, that was a good sign. It was when they stopped hurting that you were in trouble, she thought. But oh man, did they hurt. She had to stop for a second and wait for the roaring in her ears to die down. The next step hurt slightly less.

  “Okay,” she said. Louder. More confidently. The hard k sound was the part that helped. “Okay, you little idiot. You’re going to be okay.”

  The tundra swallowed her up without comment. Her slow pace made it easier, actually, to cross the rough ground. She had plenty of time to look and see where each foot should go, to avoid the rocks and the deep snowdrifts. She had time to listen to the sound of snow squishing and crunching under her feet, to the squeak of old ice as her boots sank down through it. She could smell the snow, too, smell how clean it was. Smell the blood that stained the front of her parka.

  So many people had died. Varkanin had died—she’d found his body. Lucie, Sharon, Powell.

  Powell.

  She’d come so close to telling the truth when she said she loved him.

  She walked for an hour, as best she could tell. Then she stopped to rest. Sitting down on a dry rock, she pulled her knees close to her chest and looked back the way she’d come. There was no trail or path there—she felt really proud for how she’d covered so much unbroken ground. Then she looked up and saw the lake behind her, and the cluster of rocks like a broken hand behind it.

  It stood no more than a half kilometer behind her. In an hour that was all the distance she’d covered. The town of Cambridge Springs was fifty kilometers away. Assuming she could find it. Assuming she didn’t just keep walking south until she died.

  Tears exploded in her throat. Chey bit them back, sucking breath into her body. “No,” she said, though she didn’t know what she was rejecting, exactly. “No!”

  She was lost.

  She was alone.

  Her feet fucking hurt.

  She knew how to add up those figures. She knew what the sum would be. Those three variables were what separated happy, healthy young human women from corpses no one would ever find. Her body would fail her, the life drained out of it by the cold or the wind or by hunger or lack of water. Whatever animals actually lived up here would find her, after she died, and eat her corpse. In time her bones would bleach white and then even they would decay, and no one would ever know where she’d gone to. Maybe a million years from now, she thought, she would be a fossil, and some future paleontologist would dig her up, and wonder what she was doing there, so far from any human habitation.

  “Goddamn it, no!” she shrieked. “I won’t stop here! Not when I’ve come so far!”

  Her shout echoed around the snowfield. A drift of snow slid off the top of a half-buried rock.

  “I won’t,” she said, as if saying it aloud could make it so.

  In the distance a bird called back to her with a high bell-like note she didn’t recognize. A bird? Up here? She hadn’t seen any birds. It must not have been a bird at all. It sounded almost mechanical, actually, less like an animal sound than something man-made. It sounded almost like a fork clinking on a metal plate.

  She closed her eyes and concentrated, and heard the clinking sound again. If she concentrated, really concentrated, she was pretty sure she could hear something else, too—the tearing sound of ice cracking open.

  Chey rushed forward, using up all the strength she had left. Ahead of her, something bright caught the sun, so bright it hurt her eyes. A tiny pond, the frozen surface of a miniature lake. As she got closer she saw a spiderweb of white lines snaking across the ice. It was cracking, breaking up. Suddenly a piece of ice popped out of the web of cracks and spun away. She heard water splashing underneath. More ice broke up and then a hand reached up out of the black water. An arm, wrapped in thick furs.

  Water cascaded down from Dzo’s furs as he climbed up out of the ice. He had his mask down over his face. For a second the two of them just stood there, staring at each other. Then he lifted the mask and smiled at her.

  “What did I miss?” he asked.

  She grabbed him and hugged him and asked a million questions. How had he survived after Varkanin shot him? Where had he been? What was he doing here? She barely heard his answers. She got the sense that the depleted uranium bullet had hurt him—badly—but that he had just gone deep enough into the water until he didn’t have a real body anymore. That down there he’d been safe, and that now he was fine, having reincorporated in a new body. She had no idea how that worked, very little idea what he even meant. She didn’t care. She hugged him and he was warm and he smelled—he smelled like campfires, and cooked food, and, and, yes, deep in his fur she caught a whiff of Powell. Of the way Powell used to smell.

  Powell.

  Powell, who was gone, now. Dead like all the rest.

  Chey broke down and cried, then. Really hysterically wept, like she never had before in her entire life. Her entire human life. Dzo waited for her to get the worst of it out of her system. Then he asked her what they were going to do next.

  “I have to go back to civilization,” she said. “But I don’t even know what direction town is in, and I don’t think I can walk that far anyway. I think I may have survived just long enough to get myself killed.”

  “There’s an abandoned snowcat over that hill,” he told her, waving one arm. “I saw it when I was looking for you, trying to figure out where to come up out of the water. I think I can drive it. You want me to give you a lift?” he asked.

  She stared at him in total surprise.

  He just stared at her, his face wide open.

  “That,” she said, “would be very nice of you.”

  acknowledgments

  When I finished Frostbite, I always wondered where the wolves were going. I’d like to thank Julian Pavia, my editor, and everyone at Three Rivers Press who made it possible to find out. I’d also like to thank my agent, Russell Galen, for believing there was more to life than the vampires and zombie
s.

  about the author

  David Wellington is the author of Monster Island, Monster Nation, Monster Planet, 13 Bullets, 99 Coffins, Vampire Zero, 23 Hours, and Frostbite. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1971, he currently lives in New York City with his wife, Elisabeth, and his dog, Mary.

  Also by

  David Wellington

  For Cheyenne Clark,

  there’s a bad moon

  on the rise …

  Frostbite

  A Werewolf Tale

  978-0-307-46083-7

  $14.00 paper (Canada: $17.99)

  When a strange wolf’s teeth slash Cheyenne’s ankle to the bone, her old life ends, and she becomes the very monster that has haunted her nightmares for years. Worse, the only one who can understand what Chey has become is the man—or wolf—who’s doomed her to this fate. Yet as the line between human and beast blurs, so too does the distinction between hunter and hunted … for Chey is more than just the victim she appears to be. But once she’s within killing range, she may find that—even for a werewolf—it’s not always easy to go for the jugular.