Frostbite Page 9

  “By eighteen hundred our kind of wolves were extinct, or so it was commonly believed. By my day they were nothing but old silly stories. But of course the wolves never went away—they just went into hiding. Lucie in her cage was not the only one. I’ve met others in my time, old beasts, legendary monsters. I met a duke’s son in Spain who lived locked up inside a silver palace, a tiny house made entirely of silver in the courtyard of an enormous castle. He had servants who fed him with very long forks, through a barred window, and a valet who he had infected just to have someone inside with him to dress him and brush his hair. It seemed sometimes like every aristocratic family in Europe had at least one of us hidden away somewhere. It made a certain degree of sense, of course. Peasants who turned into wolves were hunted down without mercy. If you could afford a silver cage, though, you were allowed an amount of leniency. Under the feudal system these nobles were quite literally beyond the reach of law—no court in the land could condemn them. So they lived hidden away, sometimes for centuries. They were lunatics, all of them, of course. Their families saw them as obligations, as part of noblesse oblige, but really I think they were just afraid of their secrets being discovered. If they were careful enough they got away with it, and these old European families had learned to be very, very careful.

  “Lucie and the Baroness weren’t in the same league, of course. They were both crazy and had nobody sane around to keep them under control. Maybe that was another reason they wanted me with them. First, though, they had to tame me. They kept me locked in the cage for the first week, even as my body changed and changed again. When they worked together they were stronger than me, so what could I do? They fed me raw meat and filthy water until I went a little crazy myself. At one point a patrol came around looking for me and my pals. We’d been gone so long I assumed the front had moved on without us and that they’d marked us off as missing, assumed dead. When I heard soldiers moving around the half-ruined castle I thought maybe I was going to be rescued. I didn’t even consider what that would mean. Lucie held her hand over my mouth when I started to scream. I tried to bite and even chew through her fingers, but she didn’t even yelp. Eventually the soldiers left. When they were gone I knew there was no hope left for me. I was never going to escape.”

  “So you stopped trying, right?” She understood that feeling.

  He shrugged. “Hatred is a funny thing. It’s tough to keep it hot in your heart when you’re faced with the truly mundane. I had realities I had to confront that got in the way of hating my captors. I wanted cooked food. I wanted to shave. I wanted to wash my clothing. All these things I could do, they said, but first I had to behave myself. Eventually I relented. I swore up and down I’d be good. They let me out of the cage, at first only when my wolf was on me. Later I was allowed to move around the castle, though they watched me. Eventually they began to trust me on my own. By then…by then I was a wolf, through and through. I had accepted what I had become, and I knew I could never go back. They didn’t need to watch me anymore. I couldn’t escape, because the most freedom I would ever have again was living with them, away from other human beings. That—that was when they started to discuss with me why I had been chosen. What was expected of me.”

  “You mentioned they were looking for a mate.”

  Powell actually turned red. His eyes stabbed into her as if he were angered by her interruption. Then they drifted, across her hair. Down to her breasts and then her hips for one flickering moment. Jesus, Chey thought. He’s—he’s checking me out.

  “It must have been hard,” she said. “I mean, difficult, to really hate them when they were, you know. Coming on to you.”

  He squirmed and his eyes drifted off of her body. “There was that, yes. Having two beautiful women as my captors was—well, I won’t deny it. There was a certain excitement in the idea. Had they been men I might have fought a little harder.”

  “Did you have sex with them?” she asked, point blank.

  “My God! It sounds so ugly when you say it like that,” he said. He sat up very straight and looked out at the trees flashing by outside of the truck. “Yes,” he admitted, turning his face into his shoulder.

  “Both of them?”

  “Yes!”

  Chey just watched in fascination as he tried to recover himself. She took some real delight in his squirming. She wondered for the first time how much experience he might have had with sex. She thought he had probably been a virgin before he was cursed. Lucie and the Baroness might have been the only lovers he’d ever had.

  Just as he’d mostly calmed down and looked relaxed again, she asked, “How were they? Any good?”

  He looked away and blew air out of his mouth. He shifted on the truck bed as if his legs were falling asleep. Finally he looked straight up—then turned his frozen eyes on her. The discomfort was gone. He was going to talk about this, and she wasn’t going to be able to torture him anymore. The sheer strength of his will scared her a little. “They were voracious. But I found it within myself to satisfy them. Physically, at least. I could not truly love them, not the way they wanted—they were like vampires when it came to love, draining me every chance they got and always demanding more. There were endless fights and slow-burning jealousies and quite a bit of treachery. But we had sex, yes. We … fucked, if we’re being blunt about such things. We fucked almost constantly. Sometimes as humans and sometime as wolves. Real wolves go on heat just like dogs, only for a few days of the year. The rest of the time they don’t even think lustful thoughts. But like humans, werewolves are in a constant state of estrus. There is no bottom to their desires. Is that what you wanted to know?”

  “Just trying to keep you honest,” Chey said, a laugh in her voice she didn’t really feel. She had challenged him and he had responded to her attack. This wasn’t joking around. This wasn’t a game they were playing. But she didn’t want to bring that to the surface quite yet. Especially when she was losing.

  Maybe he was tired of their sparring as well. He changed the subject quickly. “For the first few years we hunted with impunity. France was in the grips of chaos at the time. There really were no civilian authorities capable of stopping us, and the military had no interest in chasing down mythical creatures. But after the war ended that had to change. The Baroness was at least sane enough to realize we couldn’t roam the countryside by moonlight anymore. We shared the cage when we were wolves and lived like humans when the moon was down, pretending to be a quietly decaying, formerly aristocratic French family. The local villagers supplied us with our needs and asked few questions. If anyone noticed my accent was a bit off when I spoke, they just assumed I was a deserter from the war, which was true enough.

  “We received only vague recollections of the terror and anger our wolves felt locked away like that. In dreams I would catch glimpses of our panic, though, and even in my quietest moments I felt claustrophobic and anxious. I was going insane, just as Lucie had over the decades. I didn’t want to break down completely the way she had. I told them I wanted to leave. To come back to Canada, my homeland, and try to create some kind of life. There were real wolves there, I told them, there were places we could be free. The Baroness might have come with me, but Lucie took it worse than I expected.”

  “It was a messy breakup?”

  “She tried to kill me,” he told her. “I barely got away—and even then she tracked me. For years she followed me, sticking close to my shadow, waiting for me to slip up.”

  “Jesus,” Chey said. “What happened?”

  “Like I said,” Powell told her, “hate’s difficult to maintain. Even for crazy people. Love, though. Love doesn’t die so easily. She’s still out there somewhere. She’s still chasing me, though for now I’ve escaped her. I haven’t seen her in thirty years, but I know she and I are not done with each other yet.”

  18.

  Powell drank some water from an old tin canteen and went on with his story. “I left the castle in nineteen twenty-one, I think. I had lost track of tim
e—when you’re not living in society, when every day is like every other, you stop paying attention to clocks and calendars. When I first came back to human civilization I was in a sort of fog and I wasn’t entirely sure where I was, either. I quickly discovered it wasn’t going to be easy fitting in. The moon rises when it’s going to, and there’s no way to hold back the change. I had to make sure I was someplace safe when it happened. That made it hard to make friends, and quite impossible to hold down a job. I slept rough for a lot of that time and spent my human hours pondering how I was going to get along, how I would ever make my own way in the world. I couldn’t go back to my family, I knew. They wouldn’t understand—and what if I ended up hurting one of them? I would have to create my own life, out of whole cloth. I don’t know if you can imagine what that’s like.”

  Chey shrugged. Maybe she had some small idea.

  “Without a plan, without money, with this horrible curse forcing me to take elaborate precautions for every day of my life, I fell from one bad circumstance into another. I followed the trains and asked everywhere if anyone knew a way to reverse my condition, but of course there was no good way for me to approach anyone who might actually know the answer. I went to scientists who wanted to study me—to experiment on me. I went to scholars of history who frankly disbelieved that I still existed. I went to priests who could only tell me that my immortal soul was forfeit, though their explanations as to why never made any sense to me.

  “No one had anything tangible to offer me. I wandered around Europe for a while, but I’d been honest when I said I wanted to come back to Canada. Eventually I got enough courage together to try it.

  “It wasn’t easy crossing the ocean. I could hardly afford to buy a silver cage. Instead I stole a trunk, a big steamer trunk large enough that I could climb inside. I had a silver chain I had taken from Lucie’s castle, and no matter how badly I needed money I managed never to pawn it. It was the only way I could keep my wolf from hurting anyone, you see. It wasn’t very thick, but it didn’t matter. When I would feel the change coming on I would climb into my trunk. Then I would wrap the chain around the outside in such a way that it held the trunk shut but could still be easily removed by a human hand. My wolf would try to get out, of course, but it was impossible—without hands the wolf couldn’t pull the chain free. Stuck inside that confined space the wolf couldn’t get enough leverage to kick the trunk to pieces, either. Every time I climbed into that trunk I worried the wolf would get out, all the same. I might hurt someone—for all I knew I might kill every human being on the ship, and as I was no seaman I would be left adrift on the ocean, unable to steer my way to any harbor. Far worse, there was the possibility I might get out, hurt only one person without killing them, and thereby spread my curse.

  “My fears went unrealized. The other passengers and the crew knew there was something odd about me, but back then people weren’t terrified of each other’s mysteries so much, and no one asked any questions I couldn’t answer. Two weeks after I’d departed I made landfall at Boston and from there I worked my way north, across the border. Back, at last, to ‘our home and native land.’

  “I know the southern part of the country is pretty well developed now, but there wasn’t much of anything west of Ontario back then. This was sometime during the Depression, but before the second war. I found a cabin in the Barren Lands and tried that for a while. I was lonesome, but it was bearable—I thought I had found my place. Eventually, though, the cities of Ontario started to grow and spread out and new suburbs developed, whole new towns sprouting up where before there had never been anything but logging camps and the occasional hunter. When the land developers moved in I moved out, heading west. That became a pattern. I would live somewhere a while, maybe six months, maybe a whole year, but as soon as the loggers packed up and moved out I knew I would have to hurry on, sometimes with no warning. I roamed through the west until the west became British Columbia and the western coast, which was already growing itself, the cities there spreading back eastward. I changed direction, headed north, and then I roamed upcountry until I got here. Always running away, always foot-weary and wanting to finally settle down, to stop the running, always horrified of what might happen if I did. I know I’ll have to leave even this desolate place eventually, but I think it’ll be a while.”

  He stopped talking, then. His story was done. The sudden silence was so strange that she sat up and looked right at him. “You’ve spent all this time alone? All those years in the backwoods with nobody?”

  He shrugged. “There’s Dzo. He and I met up in the seventies. He was living above a bar in Medicine Hat. It was kind of weird, actually. I had popped in for a quick beer—I allowed myself that small luxury sometimes, when I knew the moon wouldn’t rise until much later. He was sitting on a bar stool eating peanuts out of a dish, but I knew something was up because he had another little dish full of water and he had to wash each peanut fastidiously before he popped it in his mouth. I knew, from long experience, that whenever I saw something weird my best bet was to turn around and walk away, but this seemed like harmless eccentricity, so I just pretended not to notice and held up a finger for service. It was too late, though. He saw me and pointed at me and said, ‘Hey, you’re a shape-shifter, right?’ I looked around, expecting to be seized by the patrons of the bar. If they knew what I was, surely they would lock me up, or worse, I figured. I raised my hands in surrender and fled. My car was parked out back—I still had three hours to get back to my cabin before I changed. He came up and stood in front of my car and wouldn’t let me leave. He had his mask on and a bag over his shoulder and he said he was coming with me. I tried to explain that I was just passing through. He just nodded and said he was mobile himself. I tried to explain it would be dangerous, that he should be afraid of me, but my threats just made him smile. No matter what I said, he wouldn’t take no for an answer. Eventually I had to give in and let him tag along. We’ve been working together ever since.”

  “At least you had someone, then. Anyone. You must have missed your family pretty terribly,” she said.

  “Eh, families aren’t what they’re cracked up to be,” he said, dismissively. There was a story there he wasn’t interested in telling.

  Chey had her own ideas, though. “Mine was pretty great, once,” she said. She could feel the wolf inside of her, baring its teeth. She fought it back, kept her face clean of emotion. “Then things went to shit.” Some ember of humanity in her heart flared up as soon as she’d said that. No matter what she’d been through, Powell’s sheer life span meant he’d suffered a lot longer than she had. “I’m sorry. I know you’ve had it bad, too.”

  He shrugged. They said little more to each other until they were back at the cabin. When he jumped down from the truck bed he took a look at his watch. “The moon’s down until about quarter to ten tonight. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t mind a bath and a bed.” Her eyes must have flashed, because he grinned. “One at a time, of course. We have a big galvanized tub I bathe in, usually. Fill it up with water off the fire and it actually gets medium hot. I don’t have much in the line of fancy soaps and notions, but what’s mine is yours.”

  She nodded gratefully. It would feel good to get clean again.

  “Listen,” he said. “I know you probably don’t want to think about this right now. But this life doesn’t have to be so terrible as you think. It’s been a long, long time since I had a place I could call my own for more than a season or two. I figure it’ll be five years before we have to move on from here. If you’re going to be sticking around”—her eyes definitely flashed at that, but he pressed on—“If you’re going to be here a while, maybe we can start thinking about how to improve this place. Dig a well for sweet water, maybe even rig up a windmill to get some electricity. Don’t say anything now. Just think about it. Your life doesn’t have to be completely miserable.”

  Her face froze. Complete misery. When was the last time her life had been anything but? She tried to smile
but felt like her skin was stretching painfully over her teeth. Instead she just turned away and walked toward the cabin. He headed for his smokehouse.

  When he’d mentioned electricity it had made her think of her cell phone. She looked around to make sure Dzo wasn’t watching, then pulled it out of her pocket to check to see if it still had any charge. She nearly dropped it when the screen lit up with the message:

  SATELLITE

  CONNECTION

  ESTABLISHED

  -you have (1)

  message waiting

  19.

  Chey announced, on returning to the little house in the woods, that the thing she wanted most in the world was a bath.

  “I think we can make that happen,” Powell told her. He shot her a look with one corner of his mouth turned up in what sort of resembled a smile. “Of course, if you want hot water, you’re going to have to work for it.” He led her around the side of the house and showed her a big galvanized tin washtub hanging from a hook. “It’s big enough to sit down in.” It was mottled white with age, but there were no holes in it. “I try to take a bath myself at least once a week. Though typically I just jump in a pond and scrub myself until my fingers go numb.”

  “All the comforts of home,” Chey said, and reached up to grab the tub. “You going to help me with this?”

  “No need,” he told her.

  She frowned, but then she lifted the tub off its hook with one hand. It felt far lighter than it had any right to be. She hefted it a couple of times and realized that it weighed quite a bit, actually, but that the muscles in her arm worked better than they ever had before. Somehow she’d gotten stronger since she’d changed.

  “One of the few bright spots in your new existence,” Powell told her.

  Chey slung the tub over her shoulder and started heading toward the woods behind the house.