Overwinter Read online

  Chey wanted to hurt her. Badly.

  Powell cleared his throat before either of them could speak. Chey stopped where she was and realized that she’d been circling the other woman. The way a wolf circles an animal while trying to decide if it’s prey or a threat. She folded her arms across her chest and looked down the hill, toward the water, even though the sunlight off the lake was dazzling enough to hurt her eyes.

  “Lucie,” Powell began, “it’s been a long time. I don’t think I expected to see you again.”

  Lucie laughed politely, as if he’d made a joke. “My dear,” she said, “we may be separated by time or fate. But you and I shall never part forever. Haven’t you learned this simple thing, yet? We’re bound, you and I.”

  Powell waved a hand in the air, dismissing what she’d said. Or at least tabling it for further discussion. Chey, for one, fully intended to explore that subject.

  “Maybe you could tell me what you’re doing here,” Powell said. “I mean, why you’re here right now.”

  “Is it such a mystery? The whole world, he knows your story this time. I was living in Russia, being very good, as you asked me to be the last time we spoke. Keeping to myself, minding first my own business, yes? Do you remember when you asked this of me?”

  “I remember,” Powell said.

  “Russia—Siberia—was such a dismal place, but it was lonely. The kind of lonely place you like. I was hoping, truly, that you would come to me this time. That we could be a family again. I kept watching the trees for you to emerge, dear. Kept listening at night for the sound of your whistling—ah.” She turned to face Chey, who quickly looked away. “Cheyenne,” she said, making Chey’s name sound like “chain,” but in an irritatingly lilting French accent, “do you know this habit of my husband? How he whistles to himself old songs, when he thinks no one can hear?”

  Chey frowned. “No. I can’t say I’ve ever caught him … whistling.” The Powell she’d always known didn’t seem the type. Most of the time he was far too miserable.

  “Ah, perhaps someday you will hear this sound, you will look up from what you are doing and you will think, he is coming home.”

  “Lucie,” Powell warned. “You’re getting off track.”

  “Am I? How like me that is. I am ever the dreamer. As I said, I was living in Siberia, with no one there to talk to. I happened across a newspaper left by some wandering woodsman and I read about the werewolf attacks in Canada. Five dead. Who else could this be, I thought, but my Monty? So I came at once, thinking you are in trouble. That you should not be alone at this dangerous time. I did not know you had found another lover to replace me.”

  “She’s not—she—” Powell ran one hand through his hair. “Chey and I did just fine on our own. We didn’t need your help then, and we don’t need it now,” he said.

  “Chain,” Lucie said, turning to Chey again, as if for aid, “do you agree with him? Are the two of you truly safe?”

  “I get to talk now?” Chey asked.

  Powell shrugged.

  “First off, don’t call me Chain. Call me Chey.”

  Lucie smiled prettily. “If you like, Shy.”

  Chey rolled her eyes. “Powell’s told me all about you, Lucie,” she said. “There’s no need to spin this line of bullshit about listening for his whistle and staying out of trouble. I know what you are. You’re a murdering sociopath of a werewolf. For some reason you got this idea that Powell owes you something. That’s crap. You kidnapped him during the war and turned him into a monster. He’s spent the last hundred years running away from all human contact because of what you did to him.”

  Lucie’s face was as innocent as clean sheets on a motel room bed. Her lower lip quivered a little, as if Chey had truly injured her, and she glanced at Powell as if looking for sympathy. He didn’t provide it, though his shoulders did slump a little as if he were melting.

  “Well,” she said, very softly. “I suppose this is deserved, this hurt. But I will point out—he did the same to you.”

  “Totally different. I came hunting for him, came into his territory when the moon was up. It was my fault. He actually tried to save me after he realized what he’d done, when he was human again, but it was too late. He’s a good person.”

  She glanced at Powell. He was watching Lucie as if she might attack at any moment.

  “You are not. I want you to answer one question, I want an honest answer, and then I’m going to ask you to leave. To leave us alone. Okay?”

  Lucie lowered her eyes demurely. She wasn’t going to crack any time soon, Chey saw. She would keep up the act no matter how rude Chey got. Damn. “What is your question?” Lucie asked. “I will try to answer it, if I can.”

  “You said, back when we were first introduced—you said you were Powell’s wife. What exactly did you mean by that? Was there a ceremony? A ring?”

  “Oh, for the love of Mike,” Powell said, throwing his hands up.

  “A ring of gold?” Lucie asked. Her face grew wistful as she looked across at Powell. “No … he never gave to me a ring. And wisely so, really. For it would only fall away every time I changed. Silly me, I would lose it, again and again, I am sure. And no, there was no church, no happy families watching. No priest, certainly, ever spoke words over us. Ours was a secret marriage, a marriage of the forest and the moon. An unspoken ceremony.”

  “Where I come from, we call that shacking up,” Chey said. “So you were never married. You can’t call yourself his wife. You have no right to him.”

  “We are wolves,” Lucie said, as if that explained everything. When Chey just stared at her, she added, “Wolves mate for life. Did you not know that? Only death can part them.”

  “Wolves have a life expectancy of six to ten years,” Powell said. It sounded like he’d said it to her before.

  “You want me to go. I suppose I must,” Lucie said. “Will you be so kind as to let me eat among you, before I head back into the wastes?”

  Chey opened her mouth to say no, but Powell grabbed Lucie’s arm before she could speak. “Lucie. Tell me the truth now. Why are you here?”

  “I have said already,” Lucie whimpered. She glanced down at Powell’s hand as if he was hurting her. Powell didn’t let go.

  “Why did you come?” Powell asked again. “You’ve never shown up before unless you needed something from me. Or unless you were running away from something. That’s it, isn’t it? Things got too hot for you in Russia?”

  Lucie threw her head back and sighed deeply. “A man. A hunter. He wanted my pelt.”

  “Uh-huh. An ordinary, everyday hunter. Who you couldn’t handle.”

  “He was more tenacious than most. More committed to the hunt.”

  Powell nodded. “Okay. Now we’re getting somewhere. Let me guess. You did something to this hunter, right?”

  “Yes,” Lucie admitted.

  “You hurt him, bad. Oh, not physically—or he’d be one of us. Or dead. No. You—you fucked with his head one time too many, as Chey would put it.” Powell looked like he’d heard this story before.

  “Perhaps,” Lucie said. “Perhaps a little.”

  16.

  Preston Holness stared out the window of a seaplane as it skimmed just above the tree tops, looking for any sign of human life. “There,” Holness said, when he spotted the cheery orange glow of a campfire in a clearing a little to the south. The clearing let out onto a long thin glacial lake that would make a perfect landing strip for the plane. The pilot nodded and nudged his stick to bring them around for a closer approach.

  Almost before the plane had skidded to a stop on the water, Holness leapt out of its side hatch and stomped through knee-deep water toward the shore. He was wearing technical snow pants of the kind you could buy in a Toronto department store and were guaranteed against temperatures well below freezing, but the instant the water soaked through his shoes he knew he’d made a bad mistake. They were top-of-the-line Rockport hiking shoes, designed to let his feet breathe. They were not
in the slightest bit waterproof.

  Hopping and cursing, he headed up into the clearing, toward the fire. If he didn’t get his feet warm soon he would risk losing some toes. Which, while it might make for a good story to tell back at the club, would not help him with the ladies.

  The blue man sitting by the fire jumped up and brought him a dry towel. He didn’t look surprised to see Holness there. “Varkanin, right?” Holness asked, rubbing vigorously between his toes. “My name’s Preston Holness. I work for the government of Canada. Thought I’d drop by and see how you were getting along. Ask you a few questions.”

  “The hospitality of your nation touches me,” the Russian said. His English was pretty good, Holness thought. “Perhaps you will take a cup of tea? I have some food as well.”

  “I already ate,” Holness said. He took the cup the Russian handed him and looked around Varkanin’s camp. It was about what he’d expected. A good but well-used tent, some piles of boxes full of supplies and gear. Standing on top of a wooden crate was an ornate but tarnished samovar as big as the Stanley Cup. A flickering can of Sterno kept it warm. Holness turned its spigot and poured the tea into his cup. It was hot enough to be uncomfortable in his hands, but he supposed the warmth would be good for him.

  Jesus, it was cold. Holness always forgot how much he liked Toronto until he had to leave it. The rest of his country was full of blackflies, drunken cowboys, and fucking ice and snow. It was below freezing this far north and it was barely autumn. Best, he decided, to do this as quickly as possible.

  Still, though. It had to be done right.

  “You’re an interesting guy,” Holness said, when the Russian just went back to tending his fire and didn’t offer any further conversation.

  “You refer of course to the color of my skin,” Varkanin said with a sigh. “I know it must seem strange to you.”

  “Nah. I already figured that part out. It did get my attention, though—when the Border Service sent me your picture I thought maybe here was somebody I should check out. So I called up some people I knew in your homeland and they sent over your dossier.”

  “I am pleased that you took such an interest.” Varkanin sat down on a packing case and smiled as he stared into his campfire.

  “Trained by the Spetsnaz,” Holness said. “The Russian Special Forces. Decorated for bravery in Afghanistan. Served as a polkovnik in Chechnya. I’m sorry, I don’t speak your language. What’s a polkovnik? Is that like a colonel over here? One step below general, right?”

  “That was my old life. I’m retired now.”

  Holness laughed. “Sure. You were discharged with high honors from your unit in, what, ninety-six? After the first Chechen war ended. You didn’t retire then, though. You went to Magnitogorsk, where you were some kind of high-level policeman.”

  “My duties in that city were purely in a consulting role,” Varkanin explained. “I never had a formal job description.”

  “Yeah. Which means what, exactly? You were working for the KGB?”

  Varkanin shrugged. “Such an organization no longer exists, not since the end of the Soviets.”

  “Fine. So they changed the name, now it’s the FSB. Putin’s attack dogs.”

  Varkanin poked the fire with a stick. He was starting to look peeved. Good. Holness wanted to break the man’s reserve. It was all part of the negotiation that hadn’t even started yet.

  Holness was a very nervous man, but that didn’t mean he was bad at his job.

  “You liked working for Putin? Crushing dissent, keeping people from complaining?” Holness asked.

  “The work was not all like that,” Varkanin said. It was almost an admission of guilt. “Much of what I did concerned public safety.”

  “Right. And that’s how you got mixed up with the werewolf in the first place. She was hanging out in the woods near your city. Occasionally eating somebody.”

  Varkanin looked up at Holness for the first time. His eyes were hard, calculating. There was a little anger flickering back there, but maybe not enough.

  “My father was a lumberjack. Not a very complicated fellow. He used to tell me what men did. What real men did, and what made them real men. Once he told me that a man,” Holness said, “a real man knows what to do with a rabid dog. He shoots it right between the eyes. He doesn’t ask anybody else to do it for him. Is that right? Is that how you feel, too?”

  “The world is full of shades of gray,” Varkanin demurred. “Sometimes things are not so clear.”

  “But sometimes they are.”

  Varkanin frowned. “May I ask what branch of the government you represent, Mr. Holness?”

  “No, you may not.”

  The Russian nodded as if he finally understood something. “I see. I know how that works, very well. Alright. May I ask why you’ve come here, truly? It was not merely to assure yourself that I am capable of surviving alone in these woods.”

  “I’m not done with your story yet,” Holness insisted.

  “I suppose this is true.”

  “You went out on your lonesome to take down this werewolf. You had a high-powered rifle and some silver bullets. You tracked her for six days. When you finally found her, you shot her and then you went home. But that wasn’t the end of it.”

  “It looked like a clean shot at the time,” Varkanin insisted. “A kill shot. The bullet was small and I made sure to aim into her central mass, toward her heart, yes? All as I had been taught. The silver bullet should have lodged inside her rib cage. If it did not kill her all at once, it would have poisoned her until she finally collapsed and died. It did not work that way. The bullet passed through her body and out the other side.”

  “That must have hurt, all the same.”

  Varkanin nodded. “And in both our countries, I believe, it is understood that a wounded animal is not a safe animal.”

  Holness reached for his socks where they were drying by the fire. They were still kind of damp. At least feeling was returning to his feet. “She didn’t die. She came back. Hurt some more people.”

  Varkanin’s shoulders tensed up. “Yes.”

  “Not just any people. Your family.”

  “I had three lovely daughters,” Varkanin said, and his voice sounded like it was being choked inside his throat. Holness watched as the Russian slowly unwound himself, relaxing his muscles one by one. This guy was good—that had to be some kind of yoga training. “Now I do not,” Varkanin finished, once again in control of himself.

  It was time to step up the attack. “You came to this country to find her and kill her,” Holness said. “I understand that. I’m sorry I can’t allow it.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Holness shrugged. “Call it a territorial pissing match. Any werewolves inside Canada’s borders are my responsibility, not yours. You’ve got no police jurisdiction here and I can’t allow you to operate on my turf.”

  “You cannot—”

  “I can stop you, and that’s what I’m here for. Look at it from our side. If you get killed here—and going up against a werewolf, we both know that’s a suicide mission—then Canada could be held liable.”

  “Liable.”

  Holness smiled in mock sympathy. “It’s an insurance thing. I’m sure you understand.”

  “Insurance.” Varkanin’s eyes were almost blazing as bright as the fire, now. “I have spent ten years of my life following her from one bloodbath to another. You will give her sanctuary now? You will stop me from doing what I must do, on a technicality of insurance?”

  “It’s nothing personal. I’ll take you back to the border, now, in my plane. If you prefer I can fly you to an airport and I’ll buy you a plane ticket back to Russia. Economy, of course. Canada isn’t made of money.”

  The Russian stood up. He didn’t bolt up to his feet—the man was too tightly controlled for that. But Holness could see that Varkanin’s hands were clenching into fists. Maybe he would attack Holness, and that was okay. Holness could use that as leverage. The Russian d
idn’t attack, though. Instead he moved briskly around the camp, throwing open all his cases, lifting the lids on all his crates.

  “I am here on a tourist visa. You have no reason to revoke that. Look at my things, if you like. There are no weapons here. I brought nothing illegal into your country, nothing of contraband. Do you wish to look?”

  “I’m sure you would have been stopped at some point if you were carrying any guns,” Holness said, agreeably. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “How am I to hunt this werewolf, with no weapons?” Varkanin insisted.

  He was trying to be logical. Holness almost wanted to laugh. This was a matter of internal security. Logic had nothing to do with it. He lifted one hand and pointed at Varkanin’s exposed blue face and hands. “You’re a weapon, just on your own. And that,” he said, jabbing his index finger in the direction of the samovar, “is sterling silver, right? You could melt that down and make a lot of silver bullets out of it.”

  A connection was made inside Varkanin’s brain. Holness could see it in the man’s eyes. “Bullets,” he said. “Of what use are bullets when I have no gun?”

  Holness smiled. This was what he’d been waiting for.

  “Not much,” he said. “But …”

  “Yes?”

  “I have guns,” Holness said. “A lot of them. As many as somebody like you could want. I’ve got men on my payroll, too. The kind of men who would love to go toe-to-toe with a werewolf, just to prove something. I’ve got vehicles: helicopters, snowmobiles, boats. Why, just today I got a new toy—a satellite cell phone. Works anywhere, even up in here in this frozen pisshole. Want to see it?” He took the phone out of his pocket. “It’s got a solar charger so it never runs out of juice. It’s even got my personal phone number recorded in its memory. All of these things seem like they might be useful to a man hunting a werewolf.”