Overwinter Read online

  “I have it—is this enough?—just—just get her mouth—”

  “We have to go, cher! We cannot stay here. He will come, this was only a delaying tactic, a trick to slow us down. Can you not see it?”

  “Here. Here! C’mon, get it in there. Chey. Chey! You have to swallow this. Just swallow—no—no, goddamn it, don’t spit it up—hold her mouth closed—hold it!”

  Her breath sputtered and wheezed and she felt like she was being buried prematurely. Well, not that prematurely. Death was all around her, in the dark. She couldn’t see any hooded skeletons advancing on her, nor did her life flash before her eyes. Her death was fluid, like smoke. It stank of wood smoke. Of charcoal.

  “We must flee. It is the only chance. Leave her!”

  In a vague way she was aware that something was in her mouth. And that someone was stroking her throat, the way you got an animal to swallow a pill. She wanted to fight against whatever was choking her, but she was no longer connected to her body in any meaningful way. Even the sounds she heard herself making, the gagging and the retching, were just sounds. They might as well have been playing on a tape, a tape she didn’t particularly want to listen to.

  “Stand back—let her get it out. It has to come out again, it—oh, blast!”

  “Oh, boy—all over your only shirt. I’m so sorry, Powell.”

  “It’ll wash. Dzo, I need your help—she’s dying, I know you don’t understand that, but—get me more charcoal. More!”

  It would be so easy to let go. To stop.

  To just … stop.

  Chey’s eyes snapped open. Light burst into her darkness and blinded her. She squinted and tried to look around. She saw Powell and Lucie standing over her. Both of them had blood on their lips and they looked pale and sick. She looked down and saw wet black dust all over herself. It was all over Powell’s shirt, too, and all over the ground around her. Dzo leaned into her vision with a double handful of charcoal from the campfire. What the hell was he doing? He shoved it in her throat, then held her jaw shut with both of his hands so she couldn’t spit it out. Was he trying to kill her? There was no air in her lungs. She gasped for breath. Tried to growl. She was back—she was back in her body, and it was—it felt—

  “She’s drifting,” Powell shouted. “She’s going to—”

  Her eyes fluttered closed and then she was just gone.

  Gone away.

  23.

  The gray wolf woke up slung across Powell’s shoulders. She felt weak and sick, drained of all her supernatural vitality and close to death. Worse—once again her body felt wrong, perverted, and she panicked, terrified at her helplessness. She bit and scratched and tore open the back of Powell’s shirt. She wanted to kill him, wanted to tear him to pieces, though she lacked the strength to lift her head far enough to bite at his throat. Her teeth felt wrong, anyway, short and round, as if they’d been ground down to powder. She yelped and growled and twisted herself around as best she could to get loose, but to no avail.

  “Quiet!” Powell hissed, in little more than a whisper. She could understand his words, though she didn’t know how. “Chey—we have to be quiet. He’s close.”

  She snarled and tried desperately to get her head up far enough to at least tear his ear off. It was no use.

  “Come on, Chey, please,” he begged.

  They were moving through a thicket of trees, but even the trees were wrong—alders barely five feet tall, not like the towering pines where the wolf had first found her legs. The trees had lost most of their leaves and looked skeletal and sick, almost as bad as she felt. Ahead of them the white wolf was moving cautiously, testing her footing every time she took a step. She looked wrong, too—hairless and awkward, her body stretched out and upright, graceless and clumsy when she should be flowing along the ground like a sleek avalanche.

  Dzo brought up the rear, holding branches away from his face as he peered behind them, looking for something dangerous. Dzo looked the same as he always did, mostly human, but just as always he didn’t smell human. Didn’t smell like anything she understood.

  The wolf opened her mouth to howl, to call Powell’s wolf to her side to save her. She couldn’t lift her head very far, but she thought still he might hear her, might come rescue her. Before she could even begin her vocalization, however, Powell’s human hand clamped tightly over her mouth. She tried to bite and chew at his fingers, but she lacked the strength—or the jaw muscles—to even break his skin.

  “Chey, you have to fight this,” he whispered in her dull ear. “You’re a human being. Remember yourself!”

  The gray wolf squirmed at the very notion—but then a strange thing happened.

  Her forelegs were numb and useless. They hung down Powell’s back like so much dead game strung up to ripen. When she shifted her weight, though, they flopped around and for the first time since waking she saw her own paws.

  They were human hands.

  Her eyes rolled, looking for the moon, but couldn’t find it anywhere in the sky.

  It made her want to howl again. This time Powell wasn’t fast enough to stopper up the sound that made her chest resonate like a drum.

  “Leave her!” Lucie said, turning to glare at Chey. “She’s going to get us killed.”

  “I won’t,” Powell insisted. It sounded like something he had said many times.

  “Her mind is gone. You must accept this, cher. You’ve seen it happen before!”

  Powell started to draw breath to answer, but a sudden sound stopped him in his tracks. It was a flat, distant report, like the sound a frozen lake makes when it begins to thaw. An instant later the bark of a nearby alder split and splinters of wood jumped into the air.

  “Damnation,” Powell said, louder now. “Run!”

  Then Chey was flopping around on Powell’s back, her head glancing off his shoulder blade again and again. She couldn’t catch her breath, couldn’t fend off the wave of darkness that crashed over her once more, and carried away both the woman and the wolf.

  24.

  The next thing Chey knew she was lying flat on her back. Her parka was rolled up and tucked under her head like a pillow, and she could barely see.

  She was enclosed in some kind of shelter. She could just make out a ceiling, a few feet above her head. It was made of close-packed earth, veined with tree roots. Occasionally a few grains of dirt would come loose and patter down on her face or body.

  She felt sick. She felt like her insides had been burned out with a welding torch. She felt so weak that she could barely breathe. But she was alive. And she was human. Her wolf was nowhere to be found, not even lurking in the deepest subbasement of her brain.

  “Powell?” she said, her voice very, very soft. The earth all around her soaked it up at once and she wasn’t sure anyone could have heard her. She took a deep breath and tried again. “Powell? Where are we?”

  The thought that he wasn’t there—that she’d been abandoned somewhere underground—hit her like she’d been doused with cold water. Underground, in the dark, lying on her back. Was she …

  Was she dead and buried?

  Then a hand grabbed her arm and squeezed in reassurance.

  “Oh, thank God,” Powell said. “I thought we’d lost you.” He scooted closer to her and she saw his face, almost completely lost in shadows. It was so dark. He could just about sit up in the close, mud-stinking place. His body filled up most of the air she’d been breathing.

  “She awakens,” Lucie said. The redhead was close enough to touch as well.

  “Powell, I’m so sorry,” Chey said. A tear welled up in her eye and blurred her vision. It was too small to escape and run down her cheek. “Powell, did I get us into this?”

  “Hush,” he said. “You need to rest. You nearly died.”

  “Or worse,” Lucie suggested.

  Powell’s dark face grew stiff. “Don’t worry about that now. Here, there’s some water.” He turned away for a moment and she was terrified he was going to leave her alone wi
th Lucie, even for an instant. But then he returned and his hands were cupped, filled with water that smelled terrible. Her lips were so chapped, though, and her tongue so swollen that it felt like infinite mercy when he dribbled a little of it into her mouth. “No food, I’m afraid.”

  “Not hungry,” she managed to say, while licking her lips carefully to get every tiny droplet of the water. Her tongue could feel how cracked and broken the skin there was. “I don’t think I’ll ever be hungry again.”

  “I’m unsurprised,” Lucie sneered. “Considering how much of that tainted meat you gobbled down. It should have killed you.”

  Chey managed to turn her head a little to the side, so she was looking at Powell. “What happened?” she asked.

  He rubbed at his forehead and eyes as if he was very tired. “We had to abandon the camp,” he said. “Someone—a hunter—came after us. It was him who left those rabbits for us, of course. He must have been feeding them for days on a silver solution before he killed them and brought them to the camp. Their meat was full of silver. Enough to poison one of us. He didn’t really expect to kill us that way, though. Lucie and I knew what had happened as soon as we tasted the meat. He just wanted to slow us down.” He shook his head. “He’s clever. And more than that—he’s diabolically patient. Just to get to the camp, he must have waited nearby for days until we were all gone, our wolves out in the woods, Dzo in the lake. Then he approached from downwind, so our wolves wouldn’t even smell him. He had the element of surprise—we had no idea he was there—but still. This one’s something special. Not like those idiots who tried to kill us at Port Radium.”

  “Is he from the government?” Chey asked.

  “I don’t think so. I think this is the same guy Lucie was running away from when she left Russia.”

  “Impossible,” Lucie said. “A man like that—your nation would never let him inside its borders.”

  Powell frowned. “Unless he made some kind of deal with them. They want us dead, he wants to kill you. Maybe they decided to strike three birds with one stone. Who is he, Lucie? What does he want, other than to kill us?”

  Lucie answered the second question first. “Nothing. Nothing but oblivion. If it is Varkanin—and I think this very unlikely, no matter what you say—he has sworn to destroy me though it be the last thing he ever does.”

  “Sounds familiar,” Chey said. There had been a time when that described her—when she had come tracking Powell, intent on killing him. She’d made a mess of that, certainly, and in time her feelings had completely changed, but she still understood the urge.

  “What is he?” Powell demanded.

  “He is only human, really. Nothing to concern us. But he is possessed of a certain persistence I do not find amusing.”

  Powell grunted in dissatisfaction. “This isn’t good.”

  Chey let her head fall back. Even talking was wearing her out, but there were things she needed to know. “Where are we now?”

  “We ran for it when he started shooting,” Powell told her. “I had no idea where to go, but I knew he was behind us the whole time. I headed north, following a creek that had some pretty good tree cover. Eventually we found this place. Judging by the size of it, I’d say it used to be a bear’s den. It hasn’t been used in a while. We’ll lay low here until we know he’s gone, then look for a more suitable place to overwinter.”

  Chey couldn’t nod. She didn’t have the strength. Instead she bit her lip a little and then turned her face as far as she could toward him. She didn’t particularly want Lucie to hear what she had to say, but she supposed it was unavoidable. “I remember something,” she told him. “Right after I ate the rabbit. You and Dzo were doing something to me, shoving ashes from the fire in my mouth.”

  “Charcoal,” he told her.

  “I can still taste it.”

  He smiled at her. “You were full of silver and the only way to get it out was to make you throw up.” He sounded apologetic, for some reason. “Charcoal absorbs the contents of your stomach so when you vomit it back up, whatever you were poisoned by comes up with it. It was the only way to—”

  “To save my life,” she finished. “Thank you, Powell. Thank you for not just leaving me behind, too. How many times have you saved me now?”

  “I owed you,” he said, though she couldn’t imagine why.

  25.

  Hours ticked by but Chey was barely aware of them—she was in and out of consciousness, unable to tell, sometimes, whether she was awake or dreaming. She was barely aware of what was going on when she heard Powell talking.

  “When we change,” Powell said, “which is going to happen very soon now—our wolves won’t know why they’re hiding in here. They’ll run outside looking for game.”

  “They will find Varkanin,” Lucie said.

  “Exactly. Him and his high-powered rifle. So we need to keep them inside. I can only see one way to do that.”

  The two of them, Powell and Lucie, went to work right away, collapsing the mouth of the den. They had to do it carefully in such a way that the entire structure didn’t fall in, crushing all three of them, but so thoroughly that the wolves couldn’t dig their way out with just their paws. It took a while. Chey could do nothing to help, only watch silently as more and more of the light was cut off. Finally, when it was pitch black inside the den, she heard the two of them come back. They were breathing hard, and not just from the exertion.

  “We won’t asphyxiate,” Powell assured Chey, “even though there’s no air coming in. But it won’t be comfortable. At least it’ll be our wolves gasping in here, not us.”

  “You hate your wolf, don’t you?” she asked.

  She couldn’t see the expression on his face, so when he didn’t answer her she had no way of knowing what he thought.

  They changed soon thereafter. Even in the darkness where the moon couldn’t find them, the silver light shone.

  What the wolves thought of being buried alive she would never know. She woke up desperate for air and scared, but her wolf didn’t make another appearance inside her human body, as she had feared it might.

  Powell went to the mouth of the cave and dug an air shaft through to the outside world. No one tried to shoot him even for the scant minutes he was partially visible, but he didn’t take that as a sign that it was safe to leave.

  That was another problem.

  “How can we possibly know when it’s safe?” Chey asked, her lungs sucking deep on the cold sweet air coming in, and her eyes lit up by the rare beam of sunlight that made its way down into the den.

  “Dzo’s out there, keeping tabs on the hunter. He’ll let us know.”

  There were other problems, some of them less important than others, but far more insistent.

  “The bear that hibernated in here,” Chey asked. “Where did it go to the bathroom?” She was feeling a little better—it might have been a day or so, or maybe more since they’d been inside the den, but this was the first time the call of nature had made itself known.

  “It didn’t,” Powell told her. “When bears sleep through the winter they don’t eat, drink, urinate, or defecate. Just sleep. Lucie and I have been going over there,” he said, anticipating the question she was really asking. “Do you need help?”

  “No, thanks,” she said. She shifted carefully, moving as gently as possible. It tired her out just to crawl over Powell to get to the lowest point of the den, a place where the ceiling was barely thirty centimeters from the floor. Getting her pants down was hard, harder than anything she’d had to do in a long time, but she managed.

  When she crawled back she considered the biggest problem she faced, one she’d been far too frightened to ask about. It had to be done, though. Most likely, she thought, as soon as she asked Powell would tell her it was no big deal, that it happened to everybody sometimes. That she shouldn’t worry. That would be an enormous relief.

  She lay back down in her spot, in the groove her body had already worn in the muddy floor, and rested a
while until her strength came back. Then she rolled over to face Powell and just said it.

  “My wolf keeps showing up. Even when the moon is down, I mean.”

  “I know,” he told her.

  “You do?”

  He was between her and the light. She couldn’t see his face at all. “When I was carrying you here, you tried to scratch me. You started howling. I knew for sure, then. I had already guessed it was happening before, though. That time you didn’t put your shoes on. That could have been nothing. Now I know what it meant.”

  “Care to share with me?” she asked.

  He was silent for quite a while. Maybe finding the right words. Maybe conserving their precious oxygen. Maybe he just didn’t know what to say.

  Lucie broke the silence. “I will tell her, if you will not, cher.”

  Powell stirred as if he’d been slapped. “No, you will not. She’ll hear it from me. The best way I can tell it.”

  Chey managed to laugh a little, though it sounded more like desperation than mirth to her own ears. She hoped that the weird acoustics of the den would make it sound different to him. “How bad is it, doc? Will I ever play the violin again?”

  He didn’t understand the joke. “Chey, normally when a human being becomes a lycanthrope, they manage to find a balance. An equilibrium between the human being and the beast. It doesn’t have to be an easy equilibrium. You asked me if I hate my wolf and the answer is that I do. I despise it, as much as it loathes me. When I’m human, I try to be as civilized and rational as I can because I dread the moment when I lose those qualities, when the wolf comes for me. Lucie has her own balance to maintain, which I won’t even try to explain.”

  “It is only the contrast between vicious beast and innocent girl,” Lucie suggested.