Frostbite

White water surged and foamed around Chey’s face. She could barely keep her mouth above the freezing torrent. Her hands reached around behind her, desperately trying to find what was holding her down, even as the water rose and she heard bubbles popping in her ears. Her skin burned with the cold and she knew she would be dead in seconds, that she had failed.

She had not been prepared for the freshet. She thought flash floods were something that happened in the desert, not in the arctic. Summer had come to the north, however, and with the strengthening sun trillions of tons of snow had begun to melt. All that runoff had to go somewhere. Chey had been hiking up a narrow defile, trying to get up to a ridge so she could see where she was. The ground had been hard and dry--she had climbed down into the narrow canyon to get away from a knife-sharp wind. It was rough going, climbing as much with her hands as her feet, but she’d been making good progress. Then she paused because she’d thought she’d heard something. It was a low whirring sound like a herd of caribou galloping through the trees. She had thought maybe it was an earthquake.

The frigid water had come blasting around a curve in the terrain and smashed into her body, the cold of it slicing through her, the force of it pummeling her until she thought she would be torn to pieces. The current dragged her backwards across ground she’d just covered, pulling her over sharp rocks that tore her parka, filling her mouth with grit and pebbles. She could see nothing but silver, silver bubbles, the silver surface of the water above her. Somehow she had fought her way upward, clawing at the yielding water until her mouth was up in the air again. Then she had stopped with an abrupt jolt. Something had grabbed her and was holding her down beneath the surge.

Her hands were numb and her fingers kept curling up from the cold as she searched behind herself. Chey begged and pleaded with them to work, to move again. She felt nylon, felt a nylon strap—there—her pack was snagged on jagged spar of rock. Fumbling, cursing herself, she slipped the nylon strap free. Instantly the freshet grabbed her again, pulling her again downward, down into the defile. She grabbed at the first shadow she could find, which turned out to be a willow shrub. Hugging it tight to herself she coughed and sputtered and physically pulled air back into her lungs.

Eventually she had enough strength to pull herself upward, out of the water. It ran waist deep but she could slog through it. After the first explosive rush much of its force had been spent and she forded the brand new stream easily. On the far bank she dragged herself up onto cold mud and exposed tree roots and lay there shivering for a long time. She had to get dry, she knew. She had to warm herself up. She had fresh clothes and a lighter in her pack. Tinder and firewood would be easy enough to come by.

Slowly, painfully, she rolled over. She was still soaking wet and freezing. Her skin felt like clammy rubber. Once she warmed up she knew she would be in pain. She would have countless bruises to contend with and maybe even broken bones. It would be better than freezing to death, however. She pulled off her pack and reached for its flap. Unfamiliar scraps of fabric met her fingers.

The flap was torn in half. The pack itself was little more than a pile of rags. In the stream, when she’d been dragged by the current, it must have been torn apart by the rocks. It had protected her back from the same fate but in the process it had come open and all of her supplies had come out. She shot her head around to look at the stream. Her gear, her dry clothes, her flashlight—her food—must be spread out over half the Northwest Territories, carried hither and yon by the water.

With shaking fingers she dug through the remains of the pack. There had to be something, the heavier objects maybe had stayed put. She did find a couple of things. The base of her Coleman stove had been too heavy to wash away, though the fuel and the pots were lost, making it useless. Her cell phone was still sealed in its own compartment. It dribbled water as she held it up but it still chirped happily when she clicked it on. The map she’d been given by the helicopter pilot was still there though the water had made the ink run and she could barely read it. The rest of her stuff was gone. Her tent was lost. Her dry clothes were lost. Her weapon was nowhere to be found.

She spent the last of the daylight searching up and down the steep bank of the new stream. Maybe, just maybe something had washed up on the shore. Just as the moon came up she spied a glint of silver bobbing against a half-submerged log and jumped back into the water to get it. Praying that it was what she thought it was she grabbed it up with both hands and brought it up to her face. It was the foil pack full of energy bars. Trail food. She started to cry but she was so hungry she tore one open and ate it instead.

That night she buried herself under a heap of pine needles and old decaying leaves. In the morning she was still damp and every muscle in her body was stiff and unresponsive. But she was still alive.

The black trees stood up in random directions, at angles to the earth. The ground rose in sharp hillocks and sudden crevasses that hid glinting ice. Chey’s feet kept catching on exposed roots and broken rocks. She could barely walk any farther, not after days of this with nothing to eat but energy bars, no real sleep, no shelter except the fleece lining of her torn parka.

Between two of the trees a pair of yellow eyes flickered into glowing life. They caught the fish belly-white moonlight and speared her with it. Froze her in place. Slowly, languorously, they closed again and were gone, like embers flickering out at the bottom of a dead campfire.

“Oh, shit,” she breathed, and scratched at her prickling armpits. Slowly she turned around in a circle. Were there more of them? Was there a pack nearby?

She heard them howl then. She’d heard dogs howl at the moon before but not like this. The howling went on and on and on with new voices jumping in and following, a sound almost mournful in tone. They were talking amongst themselves and she figured they were telling each other where to find her.

She lacked the energy to go another step. Her face contracted in a grimace of real terror. Then she dug deeper inside of herself, deeper than she’d ever been before, and she ran.

The trees flashed by her, leaning to the left, the right. The gnarled ground tore at her feet, made her ankles ache and burn. She kept her arms up in front of her—despite the half-full moon she could barely see anything, and could easily collide face-first with a tree trunk and snap her neck. She knew it was foolish, knew that running was the worst thing she could do. It was the only thing she could do.

To her left she saw flickering gold. The eyes again. Was it the same animal? She couldn’t tell. The eyes bounded along side her, easily keeping up with her pace. The eyes weren’t expending any effort at all. The feet that belonged to those eyes knew this rough land by instinct, could find the perfect footing without even looking. The Arctic belonged to those eyes, those feet. Not to human weakness.

To her right she heard a wolf panting. More than one of them over there, too. It was a pack, a whole pack and they were testing her. Seeing how fast she could run, how strong she was.

She couldn’t compete with them in their own environment. Nature, red in tooth and claw, was going to beat her. She was going to die here, as far from civilization as anyone could ever be. She was going to die.

No. Not quite yet.

Evolution had given her certain advantages. It had given her hands. Her distant ancestors had used those hands to climb, to escape from predators. She needed to unlearn two million years of civilization in a hurry. Ahead of her a tree stood up from the leaning forest, a big half-dead paper birch with thick limbs starting two meters off the ground. It rose five meters taller than anything around it. She steeled herself, clenched and unclenched her hands a few times, then dashed right at it, her aching feet catching on the loose bark that pulled away like sloughing skin. Her hands reached up and grabbed at thin branches that couldn’t possibly hold her weight, twigs really. She shoved herself up the tree, a wave of ripped bark and crystalline snow boiling across her face, her mouth. Suddenly she was holding on to a thick branch three meters above the earth. She pulled herself up onto it, grabbed it with her whole body.

Looked down.

At the bottom six adult wolves stood staring back up at her. Their golden eyes were placid and content. She could almost see laughter there. Their long sleek bodies gleamed in the half-light. They had their tails up and wagging.

“Go away,” she pleaded, but their leader, a big animal with a shaggy face, leaned backward, stretching out his forelimbs, and sank to lie down on the carpet of musty pine needles and old brown leaves. He wasn’t going anywhere.

One of the others, slightly smaller, raked at the birch tree with its claws. The wolf’s tongue hung out of its mouth as it reached higher and higher. It opened its mouth wide as if yawning and let out a devilish screech that elongated into a full-blown howl. The others added their voices until Chey vibrated on her perch, feeling as if they could shake her out of her refuge with nothing more than their yowling.

From deep in the forest another call came. Instantly the wolves were up and looking from side to side. Their tails went down and they glanced at each other as if to ask if they had all heard it. They all had.

The new call came again. It was unlike the sad moaning of the wolves. It was more wicked, more chilling. It was hateful.

The wolves beneath Chey’s branch scattered, disappearing into the darkness as if they’d been candles and they’d been snuffed out. The new cry came a third time, then, but from much, much closer by.

 

4.

 

Chey awoke with sand in her mouth, her hair matted and sticking to her face. She remembered very little, though she understood vaguely what had happened to her. She had turned into a wolf.

Oh God. She was just like him. When he scratched her leg—oh God. He had infected her with his curse.

Her head hurt too much to put that thought in proper order. Everything hurt. Her body felt weak and ineffectual. She was freezing cold.

At least that made sense. She was naked, after all.

She pulled her knees up to her chest and hugged them hard. A bad shiver went through her and her arms shook wildly, uncontrollably. She was wounded, wasn't she? She looked down at her ankle. There wasn’t even a scar there.

Oh God. Oh God. He had—he had destroyed her, he had—healed her, somehow, but at what price?

She ransacked her brains, trying to remember what had happened. She had transformed into a wolf. And then what? Something bad. Something violent had happened and she’d been badly hurt. Only now she was completely healed.

Chey slowly looked down at her left breast. She’d had a tattoo there, had it done when she was sixteen. Sometimes she regretted getting it, other times she thought of it as a badge of her determination, her will. Most of the time she was barely conscious of it. It was there every time she looked in a mirror, every time she got dressed in the morning and every time she got undressed for bed. The tattoo had become part of how she saw herself, part of her body.

It was gone. Completely gone, as if she’d never had it done.

She thought of Powell and his fresh face. Only his eyes showed his real age. Would she be like him? Would she stay young-looking forever but with eyes crinkled in moldering rage?

Or would she die of hypothermia on the shore of the tiny lake? The shivering wasn’t stopping. Her body kept shaking until she felt like she was having a seizure. The cold sand burned the soles of her feet. Her teeth chattered together so sharply she thought they might crack. She needed to find shelter. If nothing better presented itself she could dig down into the sand, bury herself in it to trap in her body heat. And then what, she wondered? Did she hunker down and wait for the Mounties to come save her?

Oh God. Even if such non-existent Mounties did come, would they find her in human form, or as a wolf? Would she attack them? Oh God.

A truck’s horn honked some way off. She jumped in surprise and shouted “Hey, over here!”, then immediately thought better of it. It had to be Dzo in that truck and he had to be honking for her. She wasn’t sure she wanted to be found. He might take her back to the cabin and a warm fire. Or he might let Powell cut her head off with a rusty axe.

“Lady? That you?” Dzo’s voice said, cutting through the trees. “Hey, come on, we’re not going to hurt you. Not now.”

Chey had a bad choice to make. The only people in a hundred kilometers who could help her were the same people who had tried to kill her. She could hide—or run. And either die in the frozen woods or live as—as a wolf. Too much. Too much to think about. She stood up and waved and shouted until she heard the truck’s horn again, closer this time. She ran through the woods, her arms clutched around her breasts and her pubic hair, and shouted for help. Eventually she found the truck and she pulled her arm away from her breasts to wave. She covered herself quickly again when she saw Powell in the bed of the truck glaring at her. He was wrapped in a heavy woolen blanket. Dzo drove the truck with his mask on.

Powell stood up in the bed. “Truce,” he said.

“What? I’m naked and freezing. Don’t play games with me,” she replied.

“I want to call a truce. We stop fighting and try to get along. Okay?”

She didn’t reply—but what else could she do? He tossed her a bundle of clothing and a green blanket. He looked away just long enough for her to struggle into her pants and shirt. Dzo didn’t turn away, but he didn’t exactly leer at her either. She got the sense that she looked about the same to him naked or dressed. When she tried to climb up into the passenger seat though he shook his head and pointed at the bed with his thumb.

“Wolves in the back,” he said. “I can never get the smell out of the seats.”

Her face perfectly still—her soul too twisted up to let her feel anything—she climbed into the back. Powell stared at her openly but didn’t say a word. The truck growled to life and bobbed and rolled forward along a path that had never been designed for vehicular traffic. She had to hold onto the side of the truck or be thrown around in the bed like loose cargo. She hunkered down in her blanket and tried not to look at anything. Eventually she stopped shaking so much.

“He hurt you,” Powell said.

Chey looked up at him with bird-fast eyes. “What?” she chirped. She was about to go into hysterics. She was about to cry. She couldn’t talk to him at that moment, couldn’t play the game. “What?” she demanded again. “Who hurt me?”

“He hurt you pretty badly. ‘He’ meaning, well, my wolf.” His face was set like stone. She supposed he’d had plenty of time to get used to this. “I try to think of him as another being, someone different from myself. It helps… sometimes. He hurt you, I think. He bit you or something. I want to say I’m sorry. I never remember what happened until later, until I’m clean again and warm and I can think straight.”

“I think I’d rather not remember,” Chey said.

“Fair enough.”

She rubbed at her eyes with her palms. “It’s going to happen again, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“It’s going to happen over and over. For as long as I live.”

Powell finally did look away from her. It helped not to be pinned by those green eyes. “Whenever the moon rises. They made up that guff about the full moon for the movies. Whenever even a sliver of moon is over the horizon, even when it’s new, even if we can’t see it, we change. There’s no way to stop it. I’ve been trying to find a cure for—”

“No,” she said. “Please, no more. I can’t talk about the rules right now,” Chey insisted. “I can’t hear about this.”

Powell didn’t say another word for the rest of the trip.

Afternoon was well on them by the time they got back to the cabin. Inside Powell tried to make up a bed for her but she wouldn’t let him come near her. He tried to touch her arm and she recoiled as if he were a snake trying to bite her. He got the point and retired to his smokehouse. Dzo busied himself outside with refueling the truck from an enormous plastic jerry can. It was yellow with age and translucent and she could see the shadow of the liquid sloshing back and forth inside.

A day earlier when she had been lost in the woods she had been certain she was going to die. It was the worst feeling she’d ever known. Now she was certain she was going to live and it was even worse.

There was no way back, no cure except death. That’s what Powell had been trying to tell her. She was stuck with the wolf for the rest of her life.

What did she do next? Did she give up? There had been no room in her plans for this, for becoming a monster. How could she adjust her life to make room for a giant wolf? How could she hold a job if every twelve hours she transformed into an animal? She’d had a few boyfriends back in Edmonton. Mostly they’d been cowboy types, guys with ponytails and motorcycles. The kind of guys who might keep a wolf for a pet. None of them would have understood what she’d become. They might have even thought it was cool. She could not agree.

Chey knew she needed to think in the moment, to ignore the future. It was so hard, though.

She rose from her chair and walked out onto the porch. As much as she didn’t want to face her new circumstance, she did need answers.

The snow between the trees caught what little sunlight made it through the branches and glowed an unearthly blue. Frigid tendrils of mist snaked around the feet of the bushes. In the back of the house Dzo was busy washing out the bed of his truck with buckets of stream water.

When he saw her coming around the corner of the house he pushed up his mask and smiled at her.

“Am I a prisoner here?” she asked.

He frowned. “No,” he said. “Of course not.”

“So I’m free to go at any time,” she tried.

He shook his head and smiled at her again. “No, sorry. We’d just have to come after you and drag you back. You might hurt somebody.”

She squinted at him. “I think I have a little more self control than that.”

Dzo sighed. “A wolf—your kind of wolf—can’t look at a human being but something comes over him. He gets that taste of blood on the back of his tongue. You see a human being when you’re in that state, you won’t have any choice. You’ll go right from zero to kill.”

“No,” she said. “That’s—that can’t be right. What about—what about you, then? Why hasn’t he killed you yet?”

“I’m special,” he said. “I’m safe. Everybody else is fair game.”

“Everybody…” Her breath came faster. Her ankle pulsed with phantom pain.

“It’s the main reason Monty lives up here.” He spread his arms wide. “No people. It ain’t for the warm weather. You were the first human being he’d seen in three years. He attacked you without a thought, right?”

Chey folded her arms across her stomach. She felt suddenly quite queasy. She thought back to when she’d been up in the paper birch. She’d seen the hatred in the wolf’s eyes, the need to kill. She’d seen what that madness was like, up close and personal, in a way she never wanted to repeat. “I didn’t… I didn’t know that. My god—how does something like this happen? What kind of virus does that to a person?”

Dzo threw his hands up. “You think it’s some kind of disease, huh?” She nodded. “That’s where you got it wrong, see. It’s not any kind of virus, it’s a curse. And when I say curse I don’t mean a germ that got explained away by some old Indian story. I mean a curse, a magic spell. About the biggest and baddest one ever.” He hopped up onto the open bed of the truck and sat down on the tailgate. His eyes looked off into the middle distance as if he were lost in a bad memory.

“I don’t want to kill anyone,” she breathed. She thought she might be sick. “I’d rather die myself. I’d kill myself first—but is that even possible, now?”

“Sure,” he said, smiling again. “Yeah, any kind of silver will do for you. ‘Course, we don’t keep much on hand for the obvious reason. I suppose you could ask Monty. Listen, if that’s what you want, we can make it happen.” He put a gloved hand on her shoulder. “Promise.”

She shook her head. Had she been serious? Maybe. But no—that wasn’t the answer. At least not yet.

Chey woke up stiff and naked—with Powell, also naked, draped across her legs.

Her heart pounded in sheer unadulterated disgust. She thought she might throw up. When he’d put his hand on her shoulder that was one thing but this—she could not let herself get close to him. Not like that. “Jesus,” she said, her whole body shivering and not with the cold. She slid out from under him and dashed behind a tree. When she looked again his green eyes were open and staring at her but he lay still as a dead man on the forest floor. “This is not cool,” she said. “This is definitely not cool. I can’t do this for the rest of my life."

He put his hands up and covered his eyes. “Dzo will be here soon enough. I’ll try not to look at you until you’re dressed.”

She sat down on a soft carpet of reindeer moss. Her arms broke out in gooseflesh but at least this time she knew she wasn’t going to die of hypothermia.

“I’m sorry,” she said. Her stomach rumbled and she realized that maybe some of her nausea didn’t come from the horror of waking up naked with Powell. She felt like she’d eaten something that didn’t agree with her. With a sudden inpouring of wisdom she realized she did not want to find out what it might have been. “I know you didn’t ask to get saddled with a newbie wolf who didn’t even know how to hunt. I’ve been pretty abominable so far.”

“It’s understandable,” Powell said. “You didn’t ask for this either. I just hope you’ll find it in your heart to forgive me.”

She bit her lip. She’d been about to take a step in that direction, had reflexively almost said yes, that she did forgive him but then her old self, her purely human self recoiled inside her head, squirmed with negation—not on your life, she wanted to say. Never. She decided to deflect the subject. “I’m so far out of my element,” she said. “Nothing up here makes sense to me. Compasses don’t point north. This is mid-summer, the days last eighteen hours, but it never really gets warm. And these trees. Why on earth do the trees point all different directions? For my entire life I was under the impression that trees pointed straight up.”

“These did too, originally.” He rolled over onto his stomach, his hands still over his eyes. “It’s the permafrost that does it. Some parts of the ground, the shadowy parts, stay frozen all year. Other parts thaw out and turns to mud, which sags. The earth around here is fluid. If you could stay still long enough to watch it, say over the course of a year, you would see waves rolling through it like on the surface of the ocean. The miners and loggers who used to come through here called this the Drunken Forest.”

Chey rested her chin on her kneecap. “You’ve been up here a long time, haven’t you?”

“Nearly twelve years now. You learn plenty about a place by just being in it and paying attention. I’ve even come to love it.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Well, it has its charms. For one thing north of the Arctic Circle there are days every month when the moon never rises. Of course there are days when it doesn’t set, either.”

“No,” she said. She caught her breath. This was one of the important questions. One she’d been asking herself for a long time. “I meant, why did you come up here in the first place? Dzo said the main reason was because there were no people up here for you to hurt. Fair enough. But if that’s the main reason, it must not be the only reason.”

“I’ve got others,” he admitted, his voice suddenly rough. She looked around the tree and found him staring at her. “I don’t know if I should trust you with that kind of information or not.”

“Don’t you think you owe me?” she asked. His eyes narrowed and she shifted uncomfortably. “This isn’t just obnoxious curiosity. I have to understand you better if we’re going to be stuck together for the rest of our lives. This place,” she said, indicating the whole of the North, “is one big prison cell, and we’re bunkmates. You want me to forgive you for—everything. Why don’t you start with a little honesty?”

She could see it was working, that she was persuading him. She wanted him to say it, to admit why he had fled to this frozen place. If he would just confess to what he’d done it would go so far with her. He opened his mouth and started to speak but just then they heard Dzo honking through the woods, honking for them.

The spell was broken. “Maybe we’ll talk about that later,” he said, meaning they wouldn’t. She knew that game.

They walked together naked through the trees, Powell in front so he wouldn’t stare at her. She studied the angular shape of his back, the bones that stuck out beneath his shoulders and wondered if she really could have connected with him anyway. She had to shake those thoughts out of her head. It had worked before to talk about other things. About the weirdness in his world. “Will you tell me something else, then?” she asked.

He sounded guarded when he grunted a yes back at her.

“Will you tell me how you got your wolf?”

He turned to face her and her arms went up to cover her breasts. He was looking right into her eyes, however. “Alright,” he said. “I’ll tell you that much.”

Powell drank some water from an old tin canteen and went on with his story. “I left the castle in 1921, I think. I wandered around Europe for awhile 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 kept my wolf in check as best I might but I could hardly afford to buy a silver cage. Instead I bought a trunk, a big steamer trunk large enough that I could climb inside. I had a silver chain, not very thick but it didn’t matter. When I would feel the change coming on I would climb into my trunk. I would wrap the chain around the outside in such a way that it could 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 worried the wolf would get past it. I sweated the thought of the wolf getting loose among the ship’s crew. I might hurt someone—I might even spread my curse.

“I made landfall at Boston and worked my way north, across the border. 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. I found a cabin in the Barren Lands and tried that for a while. When the land developers moved in I moved out. It became a pattern. I would live somewhere a while, maybe six months, maybe a whole year, but as soon as the loggers came through 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 spreading back east, and then I roamed upcountry until I got here. I may have to leave this place eventually, but I think it’ll be a while.”

He stopped talking, then. 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 woods 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. He saw me and pointed at me and said, “hey, you’re a shapeshifter, 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 paid my tab 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 I was just passing through but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. We’ve been working together ever since.”

“At least you had someone, then. 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. 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 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 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. 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. 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 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-

Dzo pushed the mask up onto the top of his head and grinned at her. “You’re starting to like him, aren’t you?” he asked. The two of them had dragged the tub out to just beyond the edge of the clearing. The location would give her some privacy while still leaving her within shouting range if she saw a bear. “Monty, I mean.” He had already scraped out a fire ring and he laid down a pile of thick logs with air space between them. “At least tell me you’re not still mad at him.”

Chey grabbed an armful of twigs and started piling them in a cone shape, just like she’d been taught in the Girl Guides. “He’s not what I expected,” she admitted. She caught herself almost immediately but she forced herself not to look up, not to look at his eyes and see if he’d caught her.

He had, though. Dzo stood up straight and squinted at her. “What do you mean by that?” he asked. “How could you have expectations about a guy you didn’t know existed until two days ago?”

“I just meant when I first saw him,” she said, trying to keep her voice slow and steady, “when you brought me here. I had no idea he was a wolf.”

That seemed to do the trick. Dzo nodded happily and lit a crumpled page from a crossword puzzle book on fire. Blowing on it carefully he tucked it inside the twig cone she'd made, then pushed in some dried leaves. The fire jumped up at once, then flickered back down as the kindling was exhausted. Fingerling flames touched at the logs and blackened them. Eventually they would catch. Dzo brought over an old fire-stained kettle and braced it on some rocks over the fire. “There’s a stream about twenty meters that way where you can get water,” he said, pointing into the woods. “Or you can just gather up snow off the ground, though it tends to be pretty muddy underneath.”

“Beauty,” she said, and gave him the warmest smile she had. After a minute she blinked at him. “That’s—great. Maybe you can go now,” she said. “So I can take my clothes off without you watching me.”

He shrugged and flipped his mask down. “You need anything else, just holler.” He started away, then stopped and looked back at her. “He likes you, you know. I mean Monty.”

“He does?” she asked. She hadn’t even considered that.

“Sure. ‘Course, he ain’t seen a naked lady in more’n fifty years,” he added, “so maybe he’s just ruttin’.” With that he traipsed away, back towards the cabin.

Chey watched him go. As soon as he was out of sight she unzipped her pocket and took out her cell phone. She pushed the five key three times and a GPS display came up. She looked at the trees, then back at the cabin. Then she dashed into forest as fast as she could on human feet.

The two of them would leave her alone for at least an hour. They wouldn’t dare come check on her in the tub for that long. Eventually they would wonder what was taking her so long and investigate discretely. When they couldn’t find her they would start searching for her. They couldn’t just let her run away—Dzo had been quite clear on that, that they would track her down and drag her back if they had to. She had little faith in her own ability to evade them, as well. Powell had been a wolf long enough to know how to track a woman through the woods, she was sure of that. With an hour’s head start, though, maybe she could make it to the rendez-vous and back before that happened.

She’d forgotten how hard it was to move at any speed through the drunken forest on two feet and she tripped three times before she was even out of visual range of the cabin. She slid down a slope of loose dirt and weakly-anchored reindeer moss and got a face full of snow at the bottom, but she got right back up and kept moving. Her course, as outlined on her cell phone’s screen, took her along the high bank of an all-year stream, a thundering rivulet that made it impossible for her to hear if anyone were pursuing her. Eventually she came around the source of the stream, a miniature lake as white and blue as the sky above, a brilliant mirror. On the far side a red light burned angrily—a flare, giving off great clouds of pale smoke as it fizzed away.

She had to pick her way around the lake. It would have taken her ten minutes to swim across but it was far too cold for that—whether or not her body could handle the chill, she knew she wasn’t prepared for it emotionally. Taking the long way round cost her another twenty minutes. She estimated she had eight minutes left before Dzo came to check on her and found her missing.

In the clearing on the far side of the lake a two-man helicopter sat like a giant dragonfly sunning itself on a clump of sparse grass. The pilot, an Inuvialuit in a padded vest, lay with his back against the big machine with his hands folded behind his head. He didn’t even look up as she staggered into the light.

Fenech, on the other hand, jumped up as if he’d been bitten by a snake. He was wearing a leather bomber jacket over an orange polo shirt with the collar turned up. He had on a pair of wraparound aviator sunglasses but he was just as soft- and harmless-looking as ever. His spiky hair stayed perfectly motionless even in the stiff breeze off the lake.

“Jesus, Chey, you don’t just sneak up on a guy in my profession,” he said. “Don’t you know we’re famous for our killer reflexes?”

“Hi, Bobby,” she said, and leaned into his embrace. She let him lift her chin and kiss her. She had let him do a lot more than that before—it was hardly time to get squeamish. “You got my message. About my pack.”

He grinned evilly. “I can’t believe you lost it. Do you know how expensive these are?” he asked. He put a hand inside his jacket and pulled out a square black handgun. He ejected the magazine and handed it to her so she could check.

The seven bullets lined up in the magazine were black with tarnish but she knew they were 995 grade silver underneath.

Author's Note: Monster Nation is now listed as "in stock" on Amazon. You might check that out--just click on the link over to the right. While you're there you could help me out by writing a nice reader review (assuming you read it!). Also, if you've preordered it, or if you order it now, email me and tell me you want the new chapbook. Please specify that you want the chapbook for Monster Nation. The chapbook for Monster Island is still available to anyone who bought that book, too. Thanks!--Dave

They were coming down out of Jasper National Park, where her Dad had shown her the glaciers. Just the two of them—she was on holiday from school and he was between jobs but he’d scraped enough together for the trip of a lifetime. They’d ridden in a snowmobile as big as a bus and out of the window she’d seen a herd of deer. They’d had a week in the Park, and though she’d been dreading the trip all spring now that it was over she wished she could stay for a month.

It was July 25th, 1994, and Chey was twelve years old. Her Dad let her put an Ace of Base CD in and he even said it wasn’t half bad. It was that or the radio and there was nothing on that far west but country music and talk radio about ice fishing and hockey.

He was wearing his red Melton jacket that smelled like cigarettes even though he’d quit the year before. He hadn’t shaved in three days and his face was dark with stubble. Afterwards she would not be able to remember much of what they talked about in the car. They had plenty of time—they were nearly a thousand kilometers from home, and had days ahead of them—and most often, she thought, they lapsed into a kind of companionable silence, the two of them sharing a half-breathed laugh now and again, her father occasionally pointing through the windshield at a flight of geese or a particularly stunning stretch of landscape.

She was sure, however, that she was the first one who saw the wolf. “Oh, Dad, look at that,” she exploded, pressing up against her window until her breath fogged on the glass. He stamped on the brakes, maybe thinking she’d seen some obstruction in the road. They hadn’t quite stopped when the wolf leapt onto the highway and smashed into the front side of the car.

Glass shattered and metal crumpled under the impact. The car slid to one side and Chey screamed as the windshield cracked.

“Honey, shh,” her Dad said, “shh,” his big hairy hand across her chin, his eyes fixed on the animal in front of them.

The sun had set but still a trace of orange lingered on the horizon. The moon was up, a narrow crescent. In the distance the mountains were slowly turning black with night. The wolf stood in the road in front of the car with its head turned to one side. Its frosty green eyes were full of undeniable malice.

“Just, don’t scream, okay?” Chey’s Dad said. “Just don’t make any noise, and I’m sure it will leave us alone.”

The wolf tilted its head back and let out a roaring yowl, sounding more like a mountain lion than a dog. Tears jumped out of Chey’s eyes and she pulled her knees up to her chin.

“I’m going—” he stopped as she started to whine for him to not go anywhere, to stay with her. It was a sound that came out of her, not any coherent speech. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere, I’m just going to put the car in drive and—”

The wolf bounded up onto the car’s bonnet and smashed through the windshield with its wide face. They both screamed then. A crack clicked and rattled across the glass as the wolf reared back, wrinkling its nose. It brought up it massive paws and slapped them against the glass and it shivered, cracks radiating outward, cobwebs of broken glass emanating from where it struck. It brought its face close again and howled in at them and its breath froze on the windshield, fogged it up. The wolf threw itself at the windshield one last time and the glass just evaporated out of its frame in a winking cascade of light and noise.

The wolf’s giant teeth came inside, inside the car with them, they were white and yellow and the lips were drawn back and then they were red as they sank into her Dad’s neck, she heard her Dad trying to talk, he made a gurgling sound as he tried to talk and tell her something. The wolf yanked backwards and his body strained against his seat belt. Safety glass was everywhere, in the leg wells, on the dashboard, in her hair. The wolf yanked again and her Dad’s throat came out in pieces, his eyes were still on her and she was screaming. She screamed and screamed but the wolf didn’t even seem to hear her.

Her Dad kept trying to speak. Blood came up out of his neck and ran down his shirt. The wolf lunged forward again and got its teeth into his shoulder and his chest. It pulled, and pulled, and finally he slid out of his seatbelt, his arms and legs bobbing, and the wolf dragged him down into the road.

Cool air came in through the hole in the windshield, a breeze that touched the wetness on her face. Chey sat up a little and looked forward.

In the fan of the headlights the wolf was tearing at her Dad’s body. Tearing pieces off of him and swallowing them convulsively. Eating him. The wolf looked up, its face covered in blood except for those wintry eyes. Those hateful eyes. They looked right into Chey and judged her and found her wanting. They despised her.

In a minute, those eyes said, I’ll be done here. Then I’m coming for you.

Author's Note: Hey everybody--Monster Nation is selling like hotcakes, in large part thanks to all your help and support. Thanks to everyone who bought a copy or is thinking of buying a copy or who just recommended it to a friend! You can still pick one up by following the links on this page. They shouldn't be hard to find--just look for the creepy baby doll head.

Also, please don't forget, you can order signed copies of the book here, thanks to Ann Towey and Nuke Con. It looks like there's been a great response so far. My wrist will ache after signing my name so many times, but I can't imagine any nicer way to develop Carpal Tunnel! -Dave

Her Dad—her Dad was dead. Dead. He was—he was dead.

She screamed and screamed. She thrust her hands into her eyes so she wouldn’t see it, pressed her face against her shoulder.

Screamed some more.

It didn’t change anything. It didn’t help. Breath whistled in and out of her lungs but she was just sitting there. She was just sitting there doing nothing.

She was still about to die. The wolf was still going to tear her apart and—and—

She was still screaming as she unfastened her seatbelt, but at least she was moving. Achieving something. What was she going to do? She was dead, certainly. The wolf would have her. It would destroy her. She was going to open her door, very slowly, and get out. And then she was going to run as fast as she could.

And it wouldn’t be enough. She knew it wouldn’t. The wolf would outrun her. It would catch her, and finish her off.

There had to be something she could do. Something other than running for it. She glanced over at all the blood on the driver’s seat. Her Dad’s blood. His seatbelt hung slack and stretched out across the blood. So much blood.

Her whole body shivered though she was not particularly cold. She slid across the seat, slid her legs down into the leg well on the driver’s side.

It was absolutely crazy. She was twelve years old—she’d never driven a car before, had no idea how. She’d played video games where you had to drive a car. She looked down and saw two pedals. She thought there were supposed to be three. Weren’t there supposed to be three? She stepped on one of them with all her weight and the car bobbed back and forth a little.

In the headlights the wolf tore something stringy out of her Dad’s torso. She wasn’t sure but it looked like one of his arms was already gone.

She stamped on the other pedal and the car surged around her but it didn’t go anywhere. She held down her foot and the engine made an angry whirring sound. It was enough to get the wolf’s attention. It pulled its face out of her father’s side and took a step around the side of the car.

“Get away,” Chey screamed. “Get away!” If neither pedal worked she had no idea what to do next. She was certain she was pressing the accelerator but—but why wouldn’t the car go? She stepped on it again and the car roared. The headlights flickered but—

What had her Dad said? Right before the wolf got him? He had said he was going to put the car into drive. What did that mean?

The wolf took another step. It was coming up around to the driver’s side door. Was it grinning at her?

She grabbed a stick on the side of the steering wheel—she’d seen her Dad move it before—and yanked it down as hard as she could. The windshield wipers swept up but then the one on her side got stuck in the broken glass and just sort of flopped there. The other one beat back and forth madly. She pushed the stick back up.

The wolf reared up and put both paws on her window sill. It licked at the window next to her face. Jesus, she thought, it was playing with her. It wanted to scare her.

“I’m already scared, you, you asshole!” she screamed at it. Then she grabbed another stick and pushed it down. The car jumped underneath her and started rolling backwards. Shit! She looked back and saw the side of the road there, saw a ditch. A big letter R had appeared on the control panel. It had to mean Reverse.

The wolf trotted away from her. It got maybe five meters away. She stepped on the brake pedal and the car stopped. Everybody stopped. She studied the stick and the dashboard and she figured out how to push it up two stops until it said D, for Drive. There was a 1 and a 2 as well but she had no idea what they meant.

Standing on the brake pedal, her legs not quite long enough to reach comfortably, she flipped the stick up to D. The car bobbed again and she looked over and saw the wolf. It was leaning back on its hind legs, ready to jump at the car again. To drag her out just like it had dragged her Dad.

Just as the wolf bounded toward her she shifted all her weight from the brake to the accelerator. The car lurched forward and she swung the steering wheel around to get back on the road. The wolf slashed at the side of the car and she heard the metal ring and tear. She looked back in the mirror and saw the animal falling away behind her in the red wash of her taillights.

That was the last she saw of it. The last thing she remembered before she skidded to a stop in a little town fifty kilometers away and the police took over. Before they put her in a little room that smelled like sweat and started asking her questions.

Only some nights, when she couldn’t sleep—which was pretty much every night after that—some nights she would sit in the dark and replay her escape. She would go over it in her head, each event, every little thing that had happened. Her hands would involuntarily reach for the gearshift, her feet would press down against the sheets. And she would remember looking in the rearview one last time and—

—she swore to herself every time it was a false memory, a guilt complex, her imagination running away with her but—

—just for a second, just for a split second she would see her Dad lying in the middle of the road, covered in blood and gore, and before she looked away, before tears made it impossible to see anything, she would watch him sit up and reach for her with his remaining hand. Reach out, begging her to come back and get him.

She was in the papers for a while, and even on TV a couple of times. Her Mom wouldn’t let her give any interviews, though, so quickly enough the media attention dried up. The police wouldn’t take no for an answer, and for weeks afterwards they would come to the door at night, right after they’d finished dinner and cleared the plates, and she would have to sit down with a man in a uniform and answer questions. Sometimes they brought pictures, photographs of different kinds of wolves. Once they even brought pictures of the Crime Scene, of the stretch of road where it happened. Her Mom hated it when she had to look at the pictures. Chey would claim it was okay, that it didn’t bother her. There was never any blood in the pictures. She wouldn’t be able to sleep after she saw the pictures, though. Not for whole days on end.

Chey tried to ask questions, too, but the police didn’t like to answer them. They did tell her that her Dad hadn’t felt much pain at all, that he had been in shock when he died and probably wasn’t even aware of what was happening. They also confirmed what she’d thought, that it wasn’t any kind of ordinary wolf that had attacked them. That it was a lycanthrope. That was the word they used. The Assailant was believed to be a Lycanthrope. Just like the car was a Late Model Vehicle, and her Dad was the Decedent Victim.

Lycanthropes fit a certain profile of Assailant. There were Protocols for dealing with Lycanthropes. There were statistics on Lycanthropes—no more than three Fatal Attacks in the last twenty years, a believed Global Population of no more than a thousand Individuals, most of them in Europe now. There were whole three-ring binders of information on what to do when investigating a Lycanthrope Sighting.

The police carried out a Thorough Investigation. They formed a Searching Party and they swept the country around the Incident Area. They turned up No Result—the lycanthrope was never found.

The police had done what they could. Chey never blamed them—why would they even want to find the wolf? Who would ever want to face such a thing if they didn’t have to? The main detective on the case was good enough to recommended a therapist for Chey. The therapist was a very skinny, very pale man with blonde hair who recommended they meet three times a week, at least until they saw how much help she needed. Her Mom just nodded and wrote a check.

They had a funeral for her Dad. The police had held onto his remains for the duration of their investigation. Chey’s Mom had not protested. They had also cremated his remains—that was the law—but Chey’s Mom bought an empty coffin anyway. All of her relatives came up and touched the wood of the coffin and some of them cried. Chey got to stand with her Mom at the door of the chapel, wearing a black dress that buttoned at her neck. She got to shake all their hands and thank them for coming.

Back at the house they had a reception and the same people showed up but there was a lot less crying. People in suits and dresses filled up the tiny rooms, pressed up against the walls balancing paper plates full of food or plastic cups full of soda. They spoke in whispers or at least in low voices but the combined sound was loud enough to hurt Chey’s ears. She really wanted to just run back to her room and go to bed but it was covered in coats and bags so she couldn’t.

All of her aunts and adult cousins had to make her go through the same ritual that was boring after the first time. They would pat her head or hug her to their waists and tell her how brave she was and how the hurt would go away with time. She would nod morosely and look like she was about to cry and eventually they would let her go. Then the door bell rang and she ran to get it. A tall man in a military uniform stood there, a peaked hat in his hands. He was maybe fifty years old and he had a fuzz of iron-colored hair on his head. Chey had never seen a man before with hair that short and it startled her but she tried not to show it on her face.

“Cheyenne,” he said, and bowed forward a little to hold out his hand. “I doubt you remember me but I’m your uncle Bannerman. Your father’s American brother.”

She nodded politely and shook his hand. He smiled at her, a cold little smile without anything at all hiding behind it. She asked him to come in and he disappeared, making the rounds, greeting everyone. A couple of Chey’s aunts tried to grab him up into bearhugs but he deflected them easily with a neat little trick. He held his hat in front of his body. If they hugged him they would have crushed the hat and nobody wanted that. Chey was impressed. She wished she had thought to bring a hat.

She lost track of Uncle Bannerman then but near the end of the reception he found her again. She assumed he wanted to tell her how sorry he was for her loss and she assumed the position, eyes downcast, but instead he squatted down next to her and fixed her with his eyes.

“I wanted to say something to you, specifically,” he said. When she didn’t reply he just went on. “I was very impressed with how you escaped.”

She squinted. Nobody at the reception had mentioned any of that. The day was supposed to be about her Dad. “I had to do something or I would have died,” she said, trying to dismiss him.

“Not everyone would have had the intelligence to make that connection. Very few people would have had the resolution to carry it out.” He smiled at her and started to stand up. It was all he’d wanted to say.

A question came out of her then like a belch. She had no control over it. She actively fought it. This man was her Dad’s brother, after all. His grief would be very real, too. But she had to ask.

“Is this how people die?” she demanded. “They just disappear. And nothing happens.”

He looked at her with very hard eyes as if trying to decide what to say to her. “That’s exactly how it happens,” he told her.

“A person just goes away.” Her voice was getting louder. She couldn’t seem to control it. “A person is there, one day, and the next he doesn’t exist. Even if he’s your Dad. Because nobody is safe. Ever.”

More than a few black-clad aunts turned to look. But Uncle Bannerman just held her gaze and wouldn’t let go. He said nothing, just looked at her. Finally he took a handkerchief out of his pocket, not a tissue but a real cloth handkerchief, and gave it to her. She hadn’t realized she was crying.

For a couple of weeks Chey’s Mom walked around the house like a ghost. She would walk into a room and look around as if she didn’t recognize it. She didn’t talk much and when she did it was just to say she was alright, she was fine, she was just tired. She worked pretty hard at boxing up all of Chey’s father’s stuff. Most of it went to the local church, even though the Clark family had never been particularly religious.

Eventually Chey’s Mom went back to work. She was a paralegal at a firm of business lawyers. She said she desperately didn’t want to, that she wanted to stay home with Chey and help her, but after a couple days back on her job Chey’s Mom wasn’t wandering around the house anymore. She looked more like her old self.

It took Chey a while longer to figure things out.

She had trouble with the neighbor’s dog. It was a little schnauzer with whiskers hanging down from its face and it didn’t look anything like a wolf but still, every time it barked, she would jump. Her heart would race and she would hug herself, pull herself into a ball. When they walked around town, when her Mom would take her to do the shopping and she saw a dog, she would cross the street.

She didn’t sleep much. Maybe a few hours every night. Her grades started dropping at school because she kept falling asleep during Algebra. She would try all kinds of tricks to stay awake. She would jam pencil points into her thighs, bite her tongue, anything, but it never seemed to work.

The therapist gave her tranquilizers so she could sleep and Prozac so she wouldn’t just sleep all day. The combination made Chey feel like live eels were swimming around and around inside her skull so after a while she only pretended to take them and hid them in the back of her desk drawer.

She didn’t much like therapy, but everyone agreed that she needed real help. Professional help. She couldn’t see what the use of it was. He was supposed to be somebody she could talk to but she had nothing to say. She would go and sit in his office and not say anything, thinking she could just wait him out. For a couple of sessions that was exactly what happened—he just waited until her time was up, then sent her home. After a while though he started asking her questions. Weird questions that made her feel angry or upset and she didn’t know why.

He asked her about dogs a lot. He told her that he owned a dog, a Dalmatian. He asked if she’d like him to bring his dog to the office so she could pet it. She said no thank you.

One session he started asking her questions she definitely didn’t like. This time he wouldn’t take no for an answer, though. He wanted to know what she remembered about her father. She wanted to know what her father had looked like, and she thought that would be easy but then she couldn’t quite remember. Then he asked her if she ever thought about how her father had died and she had to admit that she did.

“Do you ever get excited when you think about that?” he asked. Her heart jumped in her chest when he said that. She stared at him as hard as he could but he just sat back in his chair and waited for her answer. “This is really important, Chey,” he said to her. “I think this might be a breakthrough. I want to show you a picture,” he said. “I want you to tell me if this picture is arousing.” He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket, a folded sheet torn from the pages of a magazine. Carefully he unfolded it and passed it to her. It was a picture of a wolf with snow on its muzzle.

She told her Mom about what had happened and she said Chey didn’t have to go to therapy anymore.

She tried to be a normal kid, then. Tried her hardest to just fit in and do okay. Tried to act like a spinny chick and flirt with boys and get invited to parties. It never felt quite right but it did lead to one unexpected bonus. At the parties there was always alcohol. She discovered by trial and error that two or three beers would insure she slept the whole night through.

When she was sixteen years old Chey went down to Colorado for the summer. Uncle Bannerman met her at the airport in Denver in his uniform. As far as she knew he always wore it. He was in the American army somehow but she didn’t really understand when he tried to explain his exact job. He took her up into the mountains where he’d already set up a camp with two small tents and a fire ring.

“We’re going to live up here for two months,” he said. “No telephones, no computer internet, no friends from school.” He took off his uniform jacket and tie and put them in a plastic bag in the back of his car. Chey was confused and kind of frightened—she’d had no idea this was coming. “Your mother tells me she found pot in your school bag,” he said. “That won’t happen again. Correct?”

“I guess,” she said. She hadn’t liked it anyway. “Yeah, whatever.”

“When you speak to me you will call me sir,” he told her. He wasn’t joking around. “She tells me you’re running with a bad crowd. Older girls who already have bad habits.”

She squirmed and kicked at the dirt before answering. “They know how to fight,” she said, figuring that if anybody would understand it would be him. “I mean, sir.”

“Fighting is a bad habit,” he told her, which didn’t make a lot of sense since he was in the army. His eyes softened a little, though. “Cheyenne,” he said to her, “there is a difference between getting in fights and learning how to defend yourself.”

She could only look at him. He got it—he understood. She was amazed.

“It’s up to you how you spend your time here. You can do that by gathering all of our firewood and do the washing up every night. Alternatively you can do no work at all. You can sit around camp and stare into space. Your choice.”

She did what he asked. If it had been anyone else she would have told them to fuck off. She would have run away at night and hitch-hiked into town. But this was Uncle Bannerman. He had never lied to her, even when he probably should have. And he had never treated her like a baby. It meant more to her than she could say. So she scrubbed his dishes and she washed out his clothes in the stream and she called him sir.

She made a lot of mistakes the first couple of days. She gathered green wood that took forever to start burning and gave off huge clouds of black smoke. She wore a hole right through one of her uncle’s shirts by scraping at a bad stain with a rock. He never had a harsh word for her, but he didn’t hug her and tell her it was alright, either—he would just show her what she’d done wrong, and how to do it better the next time. At night she would lie on the hard ground and her whole body would hurt. She missed her friends, missed television and pizza and dressing in decent clothes. She cried sometimes and wished she had her mom there. Sometimes she thought about running away, about hiking down to the highway under cover of darkness and hitch-hiking her way back to Canada. The idea made her even more scared

But the next day she would wake up, perhaps stiff and groaning, but stronger. Every day she worked at the camp made her stronger.

One morning on her daily firewood expedition she found a deadfall, the rotting hulk of a fir tree that had crashed through half an acre of forest, rolling down hill and smashing up saplings as it slid. It was all red and wet with sap and teeming with insects. She brought out her hatchet and a travois and broke it down into nearly half a cord of firewood, her arms lifting again and again to let the hatchet fall, to let the wood split where it wanted. Her arms just never seemed to grow tired. When she dragged the accumulated firewood back to camp, Uncle Bannerman looked up at her with real surprise. He was sitting drinking coffee out of a tin cup. She tried not to meet his gaze as she stacked the cut wood carefully under a blue tarp.

“Why’d you do all that?” he asked her. “That’s more than we need for tonight.”

“Yes, sir,” she said. “But I figured it might rain tomorrow, and this way I won’t have to go looking for twigs in the mud.”

“Hmph,” he said, his eyebrows rising. “Good thinking.”

It was—it made her feel—she didn’t know how it made her feel. But it was good, she felt good that she’d gotten that much praise out of him. It was good.

After all that hard work she was sweaty and covered in sap so they drove down to a little park where the water was warm enough to go swimming. There was a little changing cabin and he went first. He looked ridiculous in swim trunks but she managed not to laugh. She went next and put on her black one-piece suit. She came out of the changing cabin and saw him and waved. He came walking over but then his face hardened and he stopped in place.

She looked down at herself thinking maybe her suit was too revealing or something. Then she realized what he was looking at. Her new tattoo. She’d lied about her age and had it done at a place way downtown. Her Mom had never seen it—nobody but her friends ever had. It was done in brown ink and it was pretty simple, just the silhouette of a wolf’s paw print on the top of her left breast.

“It’s nothing, sir,” she said, looking at her feet.

“It’s an obscenity,” he told her. His arms stuck out from his sides and his hands were balled in fists. If he hadn’t been so angry he would have looked ridiculous. “Why on earth would you do such a thing?”

She tried to put it in words but she couldn’t. Years later she would think of the right answer. Because the wolf was stronger than me, she would have told him. Because I wanted its strength. At the time all she could do was break down in tears. Most people would have given up, then, and maybe even reached for her, tried to comfort her. Uncle Bannerman just stood there and waited for her to finish.

At eighteen she left home. She didn’t go to University.

At nineteen she found herself in Edmonton, Alberta, nearly a thousand kilometers from where her mother lived. She told herself she wanted to get as far away from the crazy old bat as possible. There had been some pretty epic fights between them just before she left—screaming fights. Worse, even. She had punched her mother in the nose, not all that hard. There hadn’t been any blood. But it was going to be a long time before she could go back there.

Edmonton was okay. It was huge but it always felt half empty. There were big parks to roam around in and plenty of cheap places to live. She tried living with a couple of girls her age in a nice place near old Strathcona, which was safe and clean. After six months though she found she couldn’t live with other people. They wanted to sleep at night when she was still full of energy. After the forty or fifty thousandth time they knocked on her door at three a.m. and told her to turn her stereo off she moved out.

She got a room above a car repair shop and had to listen to metal screaming and tearing all day long. It only sounded a little like the way the car sounded when the wolf clawed it, and the rent was next to nothing.

Chey got a job as a bartender, which was pretty easy work and it paid well. She’d stopped drinking herself to sleep after she started waking up places she didn’t recognize, but being around alcohol didn’t bother her as much as she thought it might. She didn’t mind pouring shots for the Ukrainians in cowboy hats and the real cowboys in baseball caps who surged in and out of the place every night, as reliable and reassuring as the tide.

The bar had a reputation as being a real tough joint but for the three female bartenders there was no safer place in the world. They kept a bouncer at the table next to the door all night, big guys who drank for free but never very much. If anything went wrong the bartenders would slip out back and share a smoke while the bouncer took care of it. When she started Chey wasn’t sure how well one guy no matter how big could keep a lid on so many rowdies but she quickly learned. Good bouncers didn’t wait for a fight to break out. They watched the crowd and they could see right away who was going to be trouble—the ones who laughed too loud at dumb jokes, the skinny little ones who looked like they wanted to prove something. Just as trouble was about to begin the bouncer would jump in, grab the idiot’s arm, and haul him outside. It was truly rare that a punch ever got thrown—things usually ended well before that point.

That was how you kept yourself from being victimized, Chey realized. It was how you kept from being prey. You found out where the would-be predators were and you dragged them out of their dens when they didn’t expect it. She made a mental note.

Not all of the men who came to the bar were after violence, of course. Occasionally somebody would grab her ass or make a stupid pass at her. Occasionally she would go home with one of them. Nobody ever came back to her place and she always drove her own car—those were her rules. Some of them told her they wanted to be her boyfriend. Some said they wanted to marry her. She never stuck around long enough for them to sober up and decide if they’d meant it or not.

A lot of the guys asked her about her tattoo, but she just shook her head and smiled in reply. Very rarely somebody would recognize her. She didn’t look the same as she had when she was twelve, when she was in the papers. She had no idea how they figured out who she was but she didn’t bother finding out, either. People who knew her name got a drink on the house, and got politely told to shut up. If they didn’t shut up they got told to go home. If they didn’t go home, she called in the bouncer.

Work didn’t end until four or five in the morning, when the cleaners would come in and the bar back would put all the chairs up on the table. The regulars who stayed that late got to drink for free in exchange for washing glasses. The bartenders left as soon as the doors were locked.

Most nights Chey drove straight home but she knew she wasn’t going to sleep. Sometimes she would drive around town, looking at the lights with the radio on low and soft. Sometimes she drove out to the edge of town, or beyond. One night she caught herself driving half-asleep as the sun came up and pulled over onto the side of a highway. She had no idea how far she was from home. Up ahead she saw a sign saying she was on Highway 16. There was another sign below that showing a man’s head in silhouette, painted a bright yellow. It couldn’t be more literal.

She was on the Yellowhead Highway. The road that ran from British Columbia all the way to Manitoba. She knew it best for the stretch between Edmonton and Jasper National Park. The stretch where her father had died.

She breathed a curse and pulled a road map out of the side pocket of her car door. She studied the landscape, looked for clues as to where she was but she couldn’t figure it out. It looked like there might be a little town ahead of her—she drove slowly toward the slumbering cottages and convenience stores where the Coke signs were the only lights still on. When she saw the name of the local bar—the Chesterton Arms—she stamped on the brakes and closed her eyes and waited until she could think straight again. Chesterton. That was the town she’d driven into when she was twelve years old, the town where she’d told the local police about what had happened. It was the safe place she’d gone to when she was running away from the wolf.

She thought about getting out, going into the bakery down the street. They might remember her—or they might not, maybe the people there weren’t the same.

She turned around and drove back to Edmonton with the radio turned up. She didn’t want to think about how she’d gotten out there, a hundred and fifty kilometers from home. She didn’t want to think that her subconscious could control her like that. She drove home, she pulled the heavy drapes closed across her windows, and she swallowed three Ambien with a can of flat ginger ale.

It was July 25th, 2003. Chey was twenty-one years old. Though she’d done nothing in remembrance, nor did she even want to think about it, she was conscious of the fact that it was the ninth anniversary of her father’s death.

She did whatever she could do to put it out of her head. She threw herself into her work.

She was pulling Labatt Blues for the workingmen and Alley Kat microbrews for the more discriminating customers. She was laughing and generally having a good time, making jokes with the regulars, eating some fried fish one of them had brought her from the chip shop next door. She had just taken an order for a table full of mixed drinks when Fenech pushed through the door and the smoke in the air rolled under the lights. Well, it did that when anyone walked in, when the warm air in the bar surged out into the cool night. For whatever reason she happened to be looking up at that exact moment and she saw him.

He wasn’t a big guy, really, but he sort of puffed himself out, the way a cat’s fur will stand on end to make it look bigger. He had on a heavy duty leather jacket and boots with steel-reinforced laces, as if he’d just hiked down out of the hills. If he was all business on his feet, though, he was ready to party upstairs. His hair glowed with mousse and ended in sharp triangular points that stuck straight up. He was maybe thirty-five years old, though there was a weird boyish air around him. Maybe it was the shit-eating grin on his face. He came up to the bar and leaned up against it, his hands grasping the brass rail around the edge.

Chey smiled at him—he looked like he might be a big spender—and finished the order she’d been working on. Then she turned and gave him the nod.

He raised his voice over the general din of conversation and the Aerosmith song on the jukebox. “What do you have that’s Mexican and bottled?” he asked. “I can’t stand domestic beer. I prefer my piss-water imported.”

Her eyebrows drew together in consternation but his grin didn’t falter. The bouncer by the door, three hundred pounds of Eastern European muscle named Arkady, gave her a glance. But it was a questioning glance, not a warning glance. She shook her head and Arkady relaxed a fractional amount. She was pretty sure this newcomer was just trying to be funny.

“Corona good enough?” she asked, reaching for the bottle. He nodded and she tapped it down on the bar, flipped off the cap and shoved a lime wedge down the neck in one quick motion. “Three dollars,” she said, holding up three fingers in case he couldn’t hear her.

He took out a hundred and draped it across the top of his bottle. “You see me running low, just give’r and don’t ask questions,” he smiled. “Whatever’s left when I leave you keep for yourself.”

Chey had been tending bar long enough at that point to know how to react. “That’s very generous, thank you,” she said. “I’ll be sure to take care of you tonight.” She grabbed the bill off the top of his bottle. “At least until you leave.”

He said something low and probably insulting but she decided not to hear it. It was a busy night and she had orders to fill so she moved on. He kept an eye on her and she knew he wanted to talk further. She was trying to decide whether she wanted to listen when he finished his first beer and she went to replace it with another.

He grabbed the nearly empty bottle away from her and tilted it to his mouth. When she bent to get the next beer she could feel his eyes on her chest. On her breasts. Nothing new or surprising there except she got the sense he was more interested in her tattoo then her skin.

That moved him into the category of people she’d rather not talk to. She was about to grab his hundred back out of the till when he set down his bottle and spoke.

“They never found it,” he said. His grin was still in place.

She popped open his second beer. She didn’t say a word.

“They did a pretty thorough search, surprisingly. Most local copshops would have written that one off as an act of God. The good people of Chesterton, though, they really tried. They called in the big guns. The Mounties sent helicopters out into the Bush and brought in real live bloodhounds when the aerial search turned up nothing. They found a caribou carcass a ways north of here that looked like maybe it was his handiwork. Only two kinds of animals could rip up a buck like that. Either a grizzly or a… werewolf.”

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s enough.” Arkady sat up in his chair. “We have a policy here for people who want to talk about things they don’t understand. I get a free smoke break, and you get a free beer. There’s only one catch. You finish the beer and you leave before I come back.”

“Alright,” he said. “If that’s what you want. Listen, though, I brought you something. Something I think you might like to have.” He started reaching into his pocket. Arkady grabbed his wrist and pulled it back out, twisted it around behind his back. A slip of paper or maybe an index card fell across the bar and Chey picked it up.

She flipped it over and saw it was an aerial photograph. It showed a patch of waving grass from above. In the middle of the picture was a wolf rearing up on its hind legs, its massive paws batting at the camera. Its eyes were an icy green that made her whole body tense up.

“Wait,” she said, and looked up.

Arkady had the weirdo in a neck lock. He wasn’t going anywhere. He wasn’t struggling, either, which was strange, but then he’d only had one beer. Maybe he was smart enough to understand what the bouncer could do with just a little pressure. “Wait,” she said again. “This picture looks recent.”

“It was taken two weeks ago by a bush pilot flying up near the Arctic Circle. A guy who sees real wolves all the time. He knew the difference and so he took that shot and brought it to me, because it’s my job to look at pictures like that. It took me all this time to connect that thing with your daddy. And then to you.”

Chey nodded at Arkady and the bouncer let go.

“My name’s Robert Fenech,” the weirdo said, sitting back down on his bar stool. His grin was back. “I’m an intelligence operative with the government. And I’d like my free drink now.”

Three days later she woke up and rolled out of a motel room bed in Ottawa. Bobby lay asleep under half of a sheet, one arm slumped off the side of the bed, his knuckles buried in shag carpeting.

Chey showered as quietly as she could and then got dressed. Bobby didn’t stir. She went to the drapes across the plate glass front of their room and pulled them open a little. Across the street she saw a convenience store, a chemist’s, the parking lot for the local Canadian Tire. Everything had the same muted, grayish colors that blended together. Bilingual signs crowded the sidewalks. It was Ontario, alright.

It had been so many years. Her mother still lived in Kitchener. A couple hundred kilometers away, but in the same Province at least. She hadn’t spoken to her mother in six months and she wondered if she ought to call her—but it was still too early.

They’d flown in the night before and taken the little room because they were too tired to find anything better. Then Bobby had wanted to fool around, and she’d been too tired to put him off.

No. As much as she wanted to pretend that she wasn’t attracted to Bobby she couldn’t convince herself. He was a little daft looking and a little obnoxious, sure. But he got her. When she’d told him about sleep-driving to Chesterton he’d just nodded and held her hand. When she told him about how ashamed she’d been when Uncle Bannerman saw her tattoo he had showed her his own tattoo, a sloppy black Molson logo on his bicep that a high school friend had done with a hot sewing needle. And when she told him she was still afraid of dogs he hadn’t laughed.

Then there was the fact that he knew more about lycanthropes than she did. He could teach her things. That was his ultimate turn-on.

“Couldn’t sleep?” he asked, his head still buried in a pillow. He brought up his dangling hand and ran it through the spikes of his hair. They were crusty with old mousse and he scratched at the scalp underneath.

“I’m too excited,” she confessed.

He turned his head enough to smile at her. “You’re doing a good thing,” he said. He pushed his butt up in the air, getting his knees up underneath him, then sprang out of bed and whooped as he jumped into the shower. “Today’s going to be a good day.”

A car came for them promptly at nine, a white sedan with a government seal on the driver’s side door. They drove along the St. Lawrence river to CSIS/SCRS headquarters. The building was a big three-sided monolith with big mirrored windows surrounded by a miniature park. It looked pretty impressive from the highway.

Maybe Bobby had seen it one too many times. “You know, America’s got the Pentagon. That’s got five sides. Even the CIA building in Virginia has four.”

Inside they passed through a metal detector and were fitted for security cards. Chey had worn her best outfit, a black velvet skirt and a purple blazer. When they clipped the VISITOR pass on her she felt like Gillian Anderson in the X-Files. It was all she could do not to giggle.

A woman with permed hair and thick glasses lead them down a long corridor and then they went inside a conference room where a lot of men in suits waited to shake Chey’s hand. They seemed really happy to meet her. She forgot all of their names as soon as she heard them. Once everybody was seated another man came in and put a tape recorder on the wood-grain table. He explained that everything she said was going to be recorded for later use and she agreed that was okay with her.

The newcomer, who had not been introduced to her, started asking her questions then. Most of them were pretty basic. He wanted to know the date and the time of the attack. He apologized before he asked her a series of simple questions about how, exactly, her father had died. She didn’t mind answering.

“It went right for his throat for,” she couldn’t remember the word. “For the artery here,” she said, and drew a finger across her neck.

“That’s the jugular vein,” one of the other men offered. Chey smiled her thanks.

There were a bunch of questions that surprised her altogether, then, questions about her life since the attack. They asked her if she’d ever grown any unnatural hair and she did laugh then. They asked her if she had ever experienced an occurrence of unusual strength or fast reflexes.

“Well, I exercise a lot,” she told them, looking around to see their reaction. A couple of them frowned. “I don’t sleep very well, you see. So I need something to do with all that extra time.”

The man with the recorder moved on. It turned out he only had one more question. “At any time since the attack have you been contacted by the lycanthrope? In any way? I want you to take time and think about this. There’s the possibility of what we call subtle communication.”

“Subtle?” she asked.

The man with the recorder shrugged. “For instance, telepathy. Or maybe a telehypnotic suggestion. Have you ever done something, especially when you were tired or in a trance-like state, that you can’t explain?”

She looked over at Bobby, excited. “Yes,” she said, her hands grabbing at the table edge. “Yes.” And she told them everything about her sleep-driving.

When she was done the men all stood up. She didn’t understand what they were doing. Then she stood up and they all started shaking her hand. “The Canadian Security Intelligence Service is extremely grateful for your help,” one of them said. Another repeated the same message in French. She started shaking their hands.

“Wait,” she chirped. She couldn’t believe that was all they wanted. “Wait, I’d like to ask you something. If I may.”

They had been filing out of the conference room. Now they stopped and looked at her patiently.

“If you catch him.” She swallowed painfully. “If you catch the lycanthrope. Is there any way you could let me talk to it? I don’t mean privately. You can listen all you want. I just want to know if it hated my father or if it was just hungry.”

The men looked at each other, not at her. She knew what that meant.

“Look, I know it’s weird. But it would help me so much,” she pleaded.

Finally the man with the recorder cleared his throat and put a hand on her upper arm. “Ms. Clark, I’m so sorry if we gave you the wrong idea. This was just a backgrounder session. Just for informational purposes.”

She shook her head. She didn’t understand.

“Mr. Fenech will explain, I’m sure,” he said, and then they all left.

An hour later they were back at the motel. Chey sat down in a chair and smoothed out the wrinkles in her skirt. Bobby tore all the sheets off the bed and threw them at the tv set.

“Goddamned grits!” he shouted. “I shit on all the green party bilingual wine-sipping owl-hugging dolphinfuckers who run this country! I knew this would happen.”

Chey exhaled deeply before she spoke. “What happened? You said the Government wanted my help.”

“Yeah, and I was right.” He threw the plastic ice bucket at the tempered glass windows. It bounced off without leaving a mark. “They wanted you to help them not make a decision. What you said in there—what you said should have gotten me a death warrant. It should have gotten me the paperwork I needed to go up to the Arctic and give this animal a sterling silver enema. Instead they took what you gave them as a sign that they needed to do so more fact finding. Maybe form a new committee on Lycanthrope Relations. Lycanthropes! I hate that fucking word. It’s Greek or something, right? It’s one of those science words. It’s the name of a medical condition. This isn’t some kind of cancer that only baby seals can get. It’s a godforsaken monster. Why can’t anybody ever say the word werewolf with a straight face?”

“So they’re not going to do anything?” Chey asked.

“They never do,” he told her. Then he tried to pull the curtains off the curtain rod. They wouldn’t come loose.

Pain ate at her. It was like a small animal lodged in her abdomen, chewing on her stomach. Nausea made her eyes bulge, made her sweat even in the cold air.

Slowly Chey raised her arm to look at her wrist. The skin of her forearm was red and purple, while the hand itself looked limp, like a doll’s hand. It dangled at the end of her arm. She tried to close her fingers and they twitched but refused to do as she asked. She tried to lift the hand but it wouldn’t move at all.

The pain grumbled inside of her and told her to lie down. It told her to go to sleep. If she hadn’t been half wolf, she probably wouldn’t have had a choice. Whatever she thought of the curse Powell had given her it did have some compensations.

It wasn’t permanent, she told herself. As soon as she changed again her body would heal the injury. As soon as she changed again…

She had some thinking to do. She had to make a plan. The pain was going to have to wait.

She stumbled up onto her feet and walked toward where Bobby lay curled up on the ground. He was conscious but his face was twisted in a grimace of hurt. “Lester,” she shouted. “Lester, come over here.”

“Is he gone?” the pilot asked, coming around the side of his helicopter. “Do you think he might come back?”

She shook her head. “He’s too smart for that. Come on, help me with Bobby.”

Together they pulled Fenech up into a sitting position. The operative clutched at his chest but Chey found he was weak as a kitten when she took his hands away. She pulled at the neck of his polo shirt and looked inside. A wide blue bruise had already formed around his sternum. Powell had tackled him pretty hard. “Can you talk?” Chey asked. “Can you say something?”

“Frigging squatch,” he moaned. “That frigging squatch!”

“I guess you’re going to live,” she said, and squatted down next to him.

She stared out at the water, unsure of what to say next. The sun was still high over the trees but she figured it had to be getting on to nine o’clock. She could have checked the clock on her cell phone but that would have involved reaching into her pocket with her broken hand.

“Listen,” she said finally, “I’m sorry but—”

“Hold on.” Bobby patted the needles around him with his hands, then turned up his sunglasses. They must have fallen off when Powell hit him. The right lens was badly scratched, but he polished them on his shirt anyway and then pulled them over his eyes. “Okay,” he said. “Chey, you know how I feel about you. You know that I trust you. So when I ask you my next question, I want you to please not take it the wrong way.”

“Alright,” she said, making it half of a question.

“Are you fucking stupid?” he demanded. “Did you know the safety was on? Because I seem to remember that was part of your training. The training I had to go through so much shit to convince you ratass uncle to give you.”

“I fucked up, I know,” she said. “But it wasn’t conscious. Look, next time—”

He held a finger to his lips. “The fact that you think there’s going to be a next time is actually pretty funny. I might even laugh, if I didn’t think it would rupture my spleen. Let me say this one more time—”

“Wait, wait, you—”

“You’re fired, Chey! You’re off the team. I’m going to get some friends of mine up here and we will actually kill that frigging squatch. That’s what’s going to happen. I have been working on this project way too long to let you end it like this. Lester, get the camp stuff out. I don’t think the squatch is coming back tonight, not if he knows we’re packing silver. Chey, you can help me go sit down inside the whirlybird. I think I’d prefer a padded seat to these fucking rocks.”

Every time she moved pain rumbled through Chey in a bout of severe gastric distress. She nearly fell over. She helped Bobby stand up, though, and limp toward the helicopter. Lester did as he’d been asked, hauling a stack of nylon bags out of the helicopter’s cargo compartment.

“Bobby,” she said, when he was sitting down inside the helicopter.

“Save it.”

“Bobby, there’s something we need to think about.”

His head rolled to one side until he was looking at her.

“I’m going to change,” she said.

His brow furrowed.

“In about an hour, I think, the moon is going to come up again. Every time the moon comes up I change. Into a wolf.”

He nodded but he didn’t seem terribly concerned.

“When that happens,” she said, “I’m going to do everything in my power to kill you and Lester.” He started to protest and she raised her good hand to stop him. “It’s not an optional thing. When I change I kill anything human that I see. I think I should get out of here. Run off into the woods. I’ll get as far away as I can before it happens, and maybe that’ll be enough. Maybe if I get far enough I won’t smell you guys when I’m a wolf. Maybe.”

He nodded and sat up a little, grimacing in pain as he did so. “I’ve got a better idea,” he told her. “Lester!” he shouted. “Open up the blue bag.” To her he confided, “I had kind of this crazy notion that we might catch your new friend unawares. That we might be able to take him alive.”

Lester pulled open the blue bag and a length of metal chain slithered out. Bright silver chain, with a thick manacle on one end.

“Do you think it’ll fit?” Bobby asked.

Chey discovered the limits of her new domain pretty quickly. The fire tower comprised a single square room twenty feet on a side. It had a pitched wooden roof through which she could see sunlight peeking in. The walls were painted a peeling green, and were cut away at waist height so they could be opened upwards like shutters. The walls, floor, and ceiling were covered in block-letter graffiti carved into the wood with a pocket knife. Very little of it was legible or made any sense—mostly it was just names and dates, presumably memorials left by the people who had stood lonely watches high above the trees, making sure they didn’t all burn down. Chey propped open one of the shutters even though it let in a gust of frigid air and made her feel even chillier. She took a long look at what her predecessors in the tower would have seen. The drunken forest all around rolled and pitched like an ocean frozen in mid-heave. In the distance she could see sparkling light bouncing off some water, but she couldn’t be sure if it was the lake where Bobby had set up his camp. Powell’s cabin was nowhere in sight. Beyond that she had no points of reference—beyond those two locations the forest was one unicellular seething mass, an entity without boundaries or form. She let the shutter fall back with a bang that made her wince and made short work of the tower’s contents.

A big foot locker along one wall proved to be locked up tight. Chey tugged at the latches a little as if they would come loose in her hands but the metal locks were solid, perhaps rusted in place. Chey inhaled deeply—she wasn’t going to let even such a tiny mystery go unsolved if she could help it. Then she used all of her wolf-given strength and tore the locker open, sending pieces of the lock flying around the small room.

Revealed inside the locker were kerosene lamps (but no kerosene), boxes of firestarters, tin plates and cups and other camping supplies. Underneath the supplies she found an old sweater with a bad tear down one sleeve and struggled into it. It was far too big for her and came down to mid-thigh. She pawed wildly through the other contents of the locker, looking for more clothes, but didn’t turn anything up. One of them contained some old books but they smelled musty and when Chey picked one up the cover was damp and spotted with mold. The pages stuck together in one thick gloppy block.

On the far side of the room stood a table and a pair of folding chairs. There was a big electrical outlet under the table—perhaps there had been a radio once—and a single light bulb hung from the ceiling but the power had been cut off. With the shutters down the room was dark and oppressive. With the shutters up the wind tore right through and cut her to the bone. She compromised by bracing one shutter halfway open, then sat down in one of the folding chairs. It creaked badly under even her relatively slight weight—rust had been working at its joints for years.

If she sat very still it didn’t make any noise. She experimented with drawing her feet up underneath her, sitting almost in lotus position on the chair. She pulled the sweater down over her knees, stretching it out.

She had no idea what to do next. She had no way of measuring time, and anyway, she didn’t know when the moon was going to rise next. She was bored, bored to distraction, but what was there to do? If Bobby and Lester were dead, if Powell was going to kill her the next time he saw her—she couldn’t stick around. She knew she was going to have to leave if she wanted to survive. Still, she couldn’t very well walk back to civilization. And even if she did she would just be putting people at risk. What would she do, walk into a hospital and ask to be treated for lycanthropy? There was no cure. Powell had been quite clear on that—he’d been looking for one for a hundred years, he’d said.

She bit off all her fingernails, thinking her way through her situation. Then she jumped up and tore open the foot locker and took out one of the books. It was called “Black Sun”, by somebody called Edward Abbey. She’d never heard of him but she didn’t care. She tore off the cover, then started peeling the pages apart one by one. Carefully she arranged them on the floor, left to right, then across when she ran out of room. The paper felt slimy in her fingers but it crumbled if she rumpled it too much. She was careful not to rumple it. She figured she could dry out the pages and then read them one by one over by the propped-open shutter where the light was better.

Before she had fifty pages laid out to dry silver light came and carried her away.

She came to, naked and stiff, on the floor of the fire tower. It was nearly pitch dark inside but she recognized the texture of the floorboards under her cheek and her stomach.

It was somewhat reassuring to find herself in the same place she’d been before. She was a little surprised, though, to find herself still there—surely her wolf would have wanted to get down to the forest floor, to get out among the trees and run and hunt. Then she noticed the trapdoor that lead to the stairwell. It opened easily, in fact it was on a spring so you barely had to tug with one finger on a ring to make it pop open. Of course, what’s easy for a human finger might not even be possible for a wolf’s paw.

She pulled the sweater back on. She had no real memories of what had happened—well at least this time she was pretty sure she hadn’t killed anybody.

Rising to her feet she pushed open one of the shutters to let in some morning light. Then she turned around and jumped in the air.

The wolf had been busy while she was out.

It must have gone wild when it realized it couldn’t escape through the trapdoor. The walls of the small room were gouged, scarred with claw marks, scratches whole meters long, some deep enough to put her finger inside. The graffiti left behind by the tower’s human occupants were obliterated by the scratches. The table and the chairs had been broken into pieces while the foot locker had been smashed up against one wall, its contents strewn across the room, battered and trampled. Nothing remained of the Edward Abbey book except tiny scraps of paper that littered the floor like big moldy snowflakes.

She understood, of course. They had been human things. Maybe they even smelled, to the wolf, like their previous owners still. Trapped and alone the wolf had resorted to the one thing it really understood, which was destruction.

The smell of the wolf was thick in the tiny room. A little like wet dog, a little sharper than that. Chey pushed all the shutters open and let in a frozen wind to try to disperse the funk. Then she sat down on the floor—the chairs were useless, broken—and put her head in her hands.

She didn’t even hear the helicopter at first because she was too sunken into her own depression. It wasn’t a particularly loud sound, either, not one that demanded attention. Just a rhythmic chattering carried on the wind. As it grew closer she did look up but she had no idea what she was listening to. Then the light coming in through the shutters changed and she jumped up.

Out over the tree tops, maybe five hundred meters away, Bobby’s helicopter zoomed past in a long arc. It was curving inward to get a better look at the fire tower. Chey waved her arms and shouted, then thought to open and close the shutters rapidly as a signal. The helicopter tilted backwards and stopped to hover in mid-air, then slowly moved closer. She redoubled her efforts until the pilot waggled his vehicle back and forth to tell her she’d been seen. It hunted around for a minute then started to descend toward a clearing she could make out in the distance.

Chey didn’t waste any time. She rushed down the stairs and across the forest floor, her bare feet aching from the cold in the ground, from sharp rocks and pinecones and broken branches. She stumbled and tripped but she ran as fast as she could toward the clearing.

When she arrived Bobby and Lester were both waiting for her. They didn’t look like they’d been hurt at all.

“Oh, thank God,” she said. “I thought I’d killed you!”

Bobby wasn’t smiling. “You very nearly did,” he told her. “I thought I was pretty clever bringing that chain along.”

“What happened?” she asked. “What did I do?”

“You don’t remember at all?” he asked. He glanced down at her legs. Involuntarily she took a step backwards. “I really should have thought it through better. You did what wolves in traps are famous for doing. You gnawed off your own leg. Except, there wasn’t a lot of gnawing involved. Then you came for us like you wanted to swallow us whole.”

“How—how did you get away?” she asked. What she really wanted to ask was why he hadn’t just shot her. He had a pistol full of silver bullets, after all. No one could have blamed him for defending himself.

“The second you changed you started straining against the manacle. I had a bad feeling so I told Lester to get the chopper warmed up. When I saw what you were going to do we jumped in and took off. You still came for us and you even jumped at us but, well, with only one hind leg you didn’t get much air.”

Chey put an arm across her mouth. She could hardly believe it. “I’m so sorry,” she said, and moved to reach for him, to grab his hands, to hug him.

It was his turn to step backwards. She guessed he didn’t want her to touch him. Maybe he was afraid she would scratch him and pass on the curse. Maybe he was just afraid of her.

She stood there for a moment with her hands out. She needed something from him, something she couldn’t ask for. Maybe not ever again. But he was still alive—he and Lester were both still alive. That had to be enough. She backed off until he looked a little more comfortable and stood there, hugging herself in the cold.

“Do you have any food?” she asked.

Bobby gave her back her old clothes—he’d gathered them up from the camp site at the tiny lake. She’d almost forgotten how cold she was until she pulled her parka back on and felt warmth, real human warmth caress her. It made a big difference, though even getting warm didn’t seem to shake the hollow feeling she had, the strange high-pitched weirdness in her stomach and her limbs.

She tried not to think about it. She helped Lester built a fire out front of the cabin. She couldn’t help but look up at the trees. She would try to focus on the wood in front of her, concentrate on building a little pyramid of medium-sized branches, or Lester would say something and she would realize she was scanning the dark rank of trees again. Looking for Powell.

He wanted to kill her. He had killed other people before. She had plenty of reason to be frightened of him. Right?

Skin—human skin—hanging in his sweat lodge. What had Powell been up to? She didn’t like to imagine it. She’d come north to kill him. She had wanted to confront him, thinking she knew what kind of monster he was. Maybe she’d been wrong.

She watched the trees. Waiting. It was only a matter of time before he came back. To finish things with her. Maybe to finish her off. She’d made a bad mistake. Maybe a terrible one.

Things moved out there. Occasionally a pine needle would flutter down through the branches and be swallowed by the gloom between the trunks. A bird would take off, bursting up into the air with a snapping sound of desperate wings, then catch itself on the breeze and swoop off in silence. One of the trees would creak and pop. Those trees froze in winter and thawed only slowly, one growth ring at a time, and when the ice broke inside them it would sound like they were ready to fall. These sounds always made her jump, made her heart race a little faster. A squirrel would go rattling up a tall birch, skidding circles around the bark. She nearly cried out.

Lester put some water on to boil, made some instant oatmeal. She ate, and felt a little better—and then Bobby came over and squatted next to her. He studied her face as if trying to figure out how she would react to what he said next.

She didn’t like it.

“We need to start thinking about this thing in a rational way. We need a medium-range plan, at least. The moon will be up at 8:56 tonight,” he told her. He showed her a piece of yellow legal-sized paper covered in two rows of numbers. He tapped it and she saw written there the number 2056.

“Already?” she asked, trying to keep her voice low. “It feels like I just… woke up.”

“Since you changed back to your human form,” he said. He had a way of saying things like that. He made them sound real. Like facts, facts that had to be dealt with. “The moon set at 12:14 today.” He tapped his paper again. The other row said 1214.

“That’s not enough,” she said. “I mean, that doesn’t seem right. How much human time did I get today?”

“About eight and a half hours,” he told her. “It’s gone seven o’clock now. I need you to help me prepare for tonight.”

Chey’s spine shivered. She remembered Powell telling her that this far north the moon cycles were weird. He’d said their human time would grow shorter as the month went past. She hadn’t expected the transition to be so noticeable. “How much time will I have tomorrow?” she asked. Human time, she meant, but unlike Bobby she couldn’t say those words out loud and take them seriously.

“Six hours,” he told her. “We need to be ready.”

She nodded. Six hours. She would be—her wolf would have three quarters of the day to itself. She grew jealous suddenly. It was her life the animal was devouring. “And the day after that?”

“Three. Come with me, please.”

She finally let him take her arm, lift her to her feet.

Three hours, out of twenty-four. Powell had said there were days coming up when the moon wouldn’t set. When it would never drop below the horizon. It would dip and rise and dip again but never quite go away.

Chey felt weak, suddenly. She felt like she was about to die. Bobby took her through the woods, along the logging trail. Sometimes he had to hold her up, his shoulder in her armpit.

“I need to call my uncle,” she said. She wasn’t thinking clearly. “I need to get my uncle to come help me. He can fix this.” Her voice sounded shrill and insignificant in her own ears. Like the buzz of a black fly. She hated it, hated her weakness. She had been strong before—she’d been as strong as a wolf. What had happened?

They walked for a kilometer like that, maybe two. Ahead of her she saw the little turn-off for the fire tower. She hadn’t realized how close it was to Powell’s cabin.

“You’re going to put me back up there?” she asked. She struggled to regain herself, to put some iron back in her bones. “Bobby?”

He didn’t look at her. He was looking up at the silhouette of the fire tower. The sun was setting in its measured way and there were already long shadows striping the road. “I know you don’t like this, Chey,” he told her. He sounded sincere and she loved him a little for that. For the fact that despite all the horror and the violence that swirled around them, he could still care a little about her feelings. She remembered how much she owed him. Without him she couldn’t have gotten as far as she had. She couldn’t have made any sense of her life at all.

“You need to walk a ways in my shoes,” he told her. “Lester and I have a right to be safe. Don’t we? And I’ve got the guys coming in from Selkirk tomorrow morning. This is going to suck for you. But it’s the only way.”

Chey breathed in the smell of musty pine needles. She would be safe up there. Everybody would be safe if she was up there. It had held her wolf just fine the night before—it would work again.

“I understand,” she said, and started climbing the stairs.

“Good girl,” he called up at her. She spun around to half-laugh, half-snarl at him, to shoot him a good-natured glare, but he was already walking back toward the cabin.

Silver light came and passed behind her eyes and then Chey was down on the floor, naked and grunting, her fingers raw, the nails broken as she scratched and scrabbled and gnawed with her teeth at the wooden floorboards. Her cheek burned as she pushed her face harder and harder against the floor and her hair got in her eyes. She whined and whimpered as her fingers dug and dug but got nowhere against the old dry wood.

Then she sat up fast enough to give herself a head rush. What—what had she been doing? It was dark in the fire tower but she didn’t want to get up to open the shudders, not when she didn’t know what she would find. She’d had a shock the last time she’d woken up in that position and found the place torn to pieces by her wolf.

Her hands were stiff and sore. Carefully she unbent her fingers, smoothed out her palms. Then she reached down and touched the floor. There had been scratches there before but now there were distinct gouges. Four narrow trenches, some of them deep enough to fit her fingertip inside.

In the dark she pulled on her clothes, then stood up and hesitantly opened one of the shutters. Outside afternoon sunlight stretched in long rays through a haze of pollen. The golden spores filled the air between the trees like mist. She could hear people down there, maybe more people than just Bobby and Lester. She heard the repeated dull sound of a hammer at work. In a second, she thought, she would go down and join the other human beings. Yes. That would be nice. First though she had to make sure her wolf hadn’t destroyed her one place of refuge.

Slowly Chey turned around. It wasn’t as bad as she’d expected. The gouges were there, yes, but only in a few places. Her wolf hadn’t dug its way through the floor. She’d been worried it might have found a way out—though she remembered almost nothing of the last eighteen hours, she knew the wolf had desperately, almost pitifully, wanted to escape the tower. The floorboards were too thick for that, it seemed.

Chey smoothed out her wild hair and rubbed dried drool off the corner of her mouth. Maybe she could have a bath in Powell’s big galvanized tin tub. Maybe she could convince Bobby and Lester to heat up enough water so that the bath would actually be warm. She reached down and pulled the ring of the trap door, ready, she thought, to rejoin polite company.

The trap door lifted half a centimeter, then stopped fast. Even with her better-than-human strength she couldn’t lift it any further. The explanation was obvious, even if she didn’t want to believe it. Bobby had locked her inside the tower.

She couldn’t stay up there another minute or she knew she would lose her shit. She had to get out.

Chey beat and pounded on the trap door, then ran to the open shutter and yelled down for someone to come let her out—anyone. She heard someone clambering up the metal stairs below and then the sound of a padlock being released. When the door opened she saw an unfamiliar face rise up toward her in greeting.

“You’ll be the screecher, then,” the face said. It belonged to a middle-aged man with a square jaw and a nearly-shaved head. He was wide through the shoulders and his hands were enormous. She watched them grip the edge of the trapdoor as he pulled himself up. “Frank Pickersgill, please to meetcha.”

He held out one of those big hands and she put her own into the meaty grip. He did not squeeze her hand in greeting as much as he just enclosed it, the way Chey might have held the hand of a baby.

“You’re a friend of Bobby’s,” she said. “I mean Mr. Fenech. Is he around?”

“Out at the lake, coordinating. Supervising, you know,” Pickersgill said, shaking his head a little back and forth as if he thought Bobby’s talents were better employed elsewhere. “He’ll be glad to hear you’re back on your feet.”

“He locked me in,” Chey said, then looked away from Pickersgill’s eyes very quickly. Maybe too quickly, she thought.

“Ah, well, that was just a safety precaution,” the big man told her. He climbed all the way up inside the tower and Chey saw he was well over two meters tall. The floorboards, which had held up against the worst her wolf could do to them, creaked a little when he sat down with his legs dangling through the trap.

Chey nodded. She supposed she understood that. Though so far her wolf hadn’t been able to open the trap door, she could sympathize with Bobby if he worried that sometime it might just figure out the trick. “I have to go down, now,” she said, because the fire tower’s walls were just too close.

She scrambled down the stairs and heard Pickersgill coming down behind her. His bulk made the metal skeleton of the tower shake and groan. At the bottom she wondered what she should do. She felt like just running—running as far as her legs would take her. She just didn’t know which direction. She turned around, swiveling to look every which way, drinking in the open air. Then she noticed the pipes.

While her wolf had been clawing up the tower floor someone, probably Pickersgill, had been busy hammering lengths of PVC pipe into the ground. There were a round dozen of them, spread in a circle around the base of the tower, each a few meters apart from the next. They were driven in at a sharp angle to the ground and they pointed outward, making her think of the cannon on a pirate ship. A strange smell issued from the pipe nearest to her. She stepped closer and leaned down to sniff as if she were smelling a rose. The scent was a lot more pungent and musky than that, however. In fact, she thought she recognized it. She touched the edge of the pipe, started to reach inside. What was that smell? It was the smell of—of—

“Not for you, sister,” a man said, grabbing her arm and pulling it away from the pipe. “Not unless you’re ready to die.”

The stranger’s hand on her arm felt like a pair of pliers were being closed on her wrist. She had no choice but to pull her hand back. Chey was astounded—she’d had no idea the man was near her, hadn’t heard him coming up behind her.

She shook the pain out of her hand. Then held it out again, to shake. She glanced down at the PVC pipe at her feet. Its smell still tantalized her. “What is that, wolf musk?” she asked. She had it now. It smelled exactly like Powell’s hair. Like a lycanthrope.

The sneaky guy stared at her for a long time before taking her hand. Then he bent down slowly from the waist and kissed it. “Bruce,” he said, “Bruce Pickersgill. I think you’ve already been introduced to my brother.”

He was smaller than the near-giant Frank Pickersgill, considerably smaller, and his shoulders were thin and narrow but there was a smoky kind of intelligence in his eyes she hadn’t seen in his brother. He had a pencil thin mustache and he wore a parka with a beaver fur collar that smelled like old smoke. He had a pair of pistols low on his hips, like a gunfighter, though the guns themselves were matte black and square in shape, just like the one Bobby had given her. She didn’t doubt it was full of silver bullets.

“Pleased to meet you” she said.

“We came in this morning,” he told her, “while you were up there howling away. We didn’t have a chance to be properly introduced then.” He held her with his eyes while he reached into his pocket. She half expected him to pull a knife on her. Instead his fingers flicked out with a business card between them.

WESTERN PRAIRIE CANID MANAGEMENT LLC, she read. SIXTY-SEVEN YEARS COMBINED EXPERTISE!

“Canids are what, dogs?” she asked.

“Dog-like mammals,” he told her. “Predatory beasts. Mostly we get called in by shepherds who don’t like coyotes worrying their flocks. Lots of outfits do that. My brothers and I, though, we specialize in larger pest animals. Coydogs, bears, and the occasional wolf pack.”

She nodded. She understood how these men “managed” such animals, she guessed. They killed them in the fastest, cheapest way possible. “I take it Bobby explained to you what I have become, Mr. Pickersgill.”

“Bruce, please.” He nodded. “That’s why I didn’t want you touching the mechanism.”

She bent down to look at the PVC pipe. The smell of Powell on it had to be artificial, she decided. There was no way he would have gotten close enough to these guys to let them take a sample of his personal body odor. They didn’t look like the kind of people Powell would hang out with at all—they looked more like exterminators. “What is this thing?” she asked, gesturing at the pipe but being careful not to touch it.

“That,” Bruce Pickersgill said, his eyes very sharp, “is what we in the trade call a getter. It’s a modified kind of coyote getter, big enough for your average exotic canid.”

Chey figured she knew what kind of exotic canids he was talking about. “How does it work?”

A smile inched across his face like a worm crawling through the decayed insides of an apple. “At the bottom of that pipe is a rifle cartridge, a .38 to be exact. That’s wired to a spring up top. When your target animal pokes its nose into the lip of the pipe, they trigger the cartridge, which goes boom, and fires a pellet up into their face. If you’re lucky it goes right down the target’s throat. If not it’ll get embedded in their jaw or face.”

“Nice,” Chey grimaced. “What kind of pellet?” She was almost afraid to ask.

Bruce scratched at his mustache. “Well, for your timber wolves, for your coyotes, for your coydogs, feral dogs, what have you, we usually use sodium fluoroacetate, what’s called 1080 in the trade. With that, when you’re controlling canids, you get some convulsions, you get uncontrolled running, and then vomiting and death follow pretty quick.”

Chey winced. “Jesus. But even that wouldn’t kill this kind of wolf,” she said.

Bruce’s face smoothed out in happiness. “We love a good challenge at Western Prairie. We my brother spends long, lonely nights in his workshop dreaming up new mechanicals and testing new baits and lures. For this job he really shone. We tested a getter with a silver bullet in it but on the five experimental animals we used only one of them was sufficiently wounded to guarantee a clean kill. So Bruce thought up something new. The pellets we’re using today are full of colloidal silver, that’s silver particles in a water solution. For people like me and—well, for homo sapiens, anyway, the stuff’s all but harmless. It might turn our skin blue if we got too big a snort. But for your exotic canid it’s deadly poison.”

Chey’s hand twitched. She had come very close to setting off one of the getters. The silver pellet inside would kill her in human or in wolf form. And the smell, the smell of the lure—“You’ve got some kind of bait on these,” she said. “A musk.”

“Genuine wolf matrix,” he said happily. “That’s a patented formula right there. We call it Canine Curiosity and it works great in most canid sets. We make it with a rue oil base with lovage oil on top, that’s a traditional canid passion simulator.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, getting about half of that.

“Then we grind up some authentic precaudal gland and add that in. That might be what you smell the most, because it’s pretty fresh.”

“That’s disgusting,” she said, unable to keep her disgust inside.

He shrugged. “It’s what works, normally.”

Something connected in Chey’s mind. “This is how Bobby’s going to protect me from him.” She thought, suddenly, of Powell, moving silently through the darkness. She thought of him looking for her, searching for her so he could kill her. She visualized him sticking his nose into one of the getters, his head tilted to one side, his tongue out to taste the lure, one paw up on the pipe. And then bang. It was over. Her long nightmare, her life’s long nightmare, would be over.

She could hardly believe it.

Would he really be so curious? It had almost worked on her, even in her human form. But he was a lot older than she was. He was a lot more canny. “What if he doesn’t go for it?”

“Well then Tony over there shoots him in the back of the head,” Bruce explained.

A man sat in a tamarask tree not ten meters away. A man with a very big shotgun. He was tied to the tree trunk with bungie cords. She saw him only because he waved down at her with one sweeping arm motion. Chey nearly jumped. “Is he your brother, too?” she asked, trying to mask her alarm.

“Half-brother,” Bruce said. “Same ma, different dad. Meet Tony Balfour, my shootist.”

Chey looked back up at the sniper. “Hi,” she said.

Balfour gave her about three tenths of a smile.

“He doesn’t talk much,” Bruce explained.

The six hours she had that day between moonset and moonrise went by in a flash. Especially because she knew the next day would be even shorter. And then—well, maybe by then it would all be over.

Bobby came with her back to the fire tower. He had a padlock in his hand so he could lock her inside. She tried not to think about what her wolf was going to do when it found itself locked up, again.

Lucie, the French lycanthrope who had given her curse to Powell, had gone mad from being confined when the moon was up. Of course, she’d been doing it for centuries. Chey wasn’t sure she could live any kind of life that long without going crazy.

Then again, she’d had so little practice at life. What did she know?

Bobby knew exactly when the moon would come up. He offered to sit with her until nearly the last minute. She wanted to tell him not to bother, that he didn’t have to coddle her like that. Instead she tried to hug him, to hold him close, to force him to be nearer to her. Physically near her.

“I understand you need some human contact,” he told her, gently pushing her away. “But it’s not so safe any more. I don’t know if you can pass on your infection to me when you’re in human form. But I won’t take that chance, Chey.”

“No,” she agreed. It occurred to her that she could grab him and pull him close, make him embrace her. She was strong enough. But no.

“It’s not fair to me,” he said, even though she’d already agreed. Did he see in her eyes how much she needed him? She didn’t even like him all that much, had never found him particularly lovable. But she needed somebody, anybody, to understand. To tell her she wasn’t a monster. “I’m not the one who screwed up,” he added.

She hung her head in shame. After a minute she looked up again. “I want to thank you, Bobby. While I still have the chance.”

“You make it sound like you’re going to die,” he said, scolding her.

She shook her head. “Maybe it’s like dying, if just for a couple of days. But pretty soon I won’t be able to talk. And I really do want to thank you. You got me up here, you got me closer than anyone ever could have. You knew exactly what I needed, what was holding me back. And you tried to fix me. Heal me, I mean.”

“I had my own reasons for wanting him dead,” he grumbled, but not loud enough that she couldn’t pretend he’d kept quiet.

“Whatever happens,” she said, “we tried, right? A lot of people have wrecked lives but they never try to put things right. This was a silly thing to do, I know that. But at least we tried.”

He did reach over, then, and rubbed her back a little. She wanted to reach up and take his hand—surely, surely that would be okay? But no, she knew it wouldn’t. If she reached for him he would pull away again.

“How much longer do I have?” she asked. “This is so hard when I don’t have a clock or anything. I wake up and it’s mid-afternoon. Or it’s first thing in the morning. I wake up and—I guess it’s not really like waking at all.”

He glanced at his watch. “We have a couple of minutes. There’s something I wanted to talk to you about,” he said.

She glanced up. “Yes?”

“Tomorrow,” he said. “You’ll only have four hours of human time.”

She nodded, understanding. “I want to make the most of it. Have a bath, have at least two real meals. I want to read a book, if you brought any with you. Anything to make me feel more human before I go under for five days straight.”

Bobby grimaced. “Actually—I was thinking maybe you could just stay up here. The whole time.”

“But—why?” she asked.

“It’s just safer for all of us that way. I mean, four hours isn’t a lot of time. We could lose track or something.”

She shook her head. No. No, it was impossible. That wasn’t fair, it wasn’t acceptable!

“I’ll see what I can do about getting you that book. I think the Pickersgills brought up some magazines, maybe they’ll loan you one. Though the last time you had some reading material you just kind of tore it up.”

He meant the Edward Abbey book. The one she’d found in the fire tower and tried to dry out so she could read it. The wolf had torn the printed words to shreds, as surely as if they’d been human bodies.

“Okay, time’s up,” he said, before she could protest any more. He climbed down through the trap and before she could even say goodbye he was fitting the padlock.

Chey knelt over the trap and knocked on the closed door. Rapped on it with hard knuckles. “Bobby,” she said, “I—”

But then silver light flooded her brain.

She came to crying, screaming. She came to not quite human. The walls around her—the walls—they were closing in—the walls—how long—how long had she been imprisoned—how long had the wolf howled—the walls—she shrieked, she pushed into a corner of the little room, tears wet on her face—the walls—the walls—

Come on, Chey, she thought. Calm down. Just—calm down.

She focused on her breathing. Focused on the darkness, seeing it as the absence of light, not as some dark fluid that was pressing in on her, drowning her. No. It was just the absence of light.

Breathe in, breathe out.

Eventually, feeling just a little week in the knees, she pulled her clothes on. Then she opened one of the shutters to let some light inside.

Four hours. She had four hours left. Or less—how long had it taken her to calm down? How long had she been screaming? How much of her time had she—

She was leaning on the edge of the wall, craning her head out into the fresh air. Her hands were braced on the wood and they felt very strange. She looked down at them, at the wood she could see right through them. It was like her hands were made of translucent glass. Or—no—as if they were made of fog, of mist.

The silver light came again and found her screaming.

The wolf howled. The wolf had always howled.

The wolf felt as if she had always howled.

The wolf had gone a little bit crazy.

Not crazy like a human being goes crazy. Like an animal. There were two parts of her, of her self, of her mind. The thinking part of her brain, the part that could solve problems and which kept her out of trouble, grew less active with each passing hour. The instinctual part of her, the older half of her brain, rose up, its hackles high, and demanded more and more of her mental energy. Anger and fear and desperation had built up in the crenellations of her brain like wax building up in her ears, horror and hate and pain added to every day she was locked in the human place, magnified by the moonlight that leaked in through tiny cracks in the ceiling and the shutters. Multiplied—her hatred and her rage and her torment were multiplied, jacked up by a power of ten, because she knew a human being had been inside her square little cell the last time she’d slept. She could smell him on the floor, on the walls. She licked the wood and tasted him, the oily sourness of his skin, the unbearable thickness of his artificial scent. She hated, hated, hated him, hated, hated, hated him, wanted to snap his neck, wanted to grind his bones between her teeth. Where was he? Was he nearby? Was he—was he?

She paced the corners of her cell, ran from wall to wall. It wasn’t enough, wasn’t enough, wasn’t, wasn’t, wasn’t. She panted with the fear, the fear, the fear. Her legs cramped and her head bowed—her body filled all the available space. Her rage filled every square centimeter, it made the walls stretch and buckle as if she could escape just by needing it badly enough.

Her breath came fast and wet and then it slowed, then it slowed down and her lungs sagged, her breathing slowed and her belly sagged, she sank down to lie on her belly, her tongue out, her breathing slowing. And still she howled.

The human, the human, was he near, near? He had done this to her—he had imprisoned her in this terrible place. She could smell him! Was he nearby? She would tear him apart! She would, she would, she would. She would.

The human was nowhere near. She knew as much. Still his stink, his cologne, was smeared on the walls, and the floor. Still he stung her nose, her eyes.

Still she howled.

She howled. She was a creature that howled. It was how she defined herself. Her long sleek body was built for this, for howling, for giving voice. The howls came out of her like the pure distilled essence of her anguish, long, rumbling horrors that ripped out from her throat, from her belly, from her throat, her mouth, over her teeth, rumbling in her chest, shaking in her, over her teeth, out into the air.

She howled—and nothing changed. The howling achieved nothing.

For four days straight she howled, even as her body hungered and grew weak. Even as her brain dried out in her skull and she forgot even why she was howling.

Still she howled.

And then one night she heard the other wolf, out there, out there in the dark, in the dark, out there, she heard him, she howled for him—and he howled back.

Her massive jaws snapped shut. Her ears perked up. The rest of her body lay perfectly still. She made no sound at all as she listened. She knew she had no reason to want him near, she knew he would try to kill her if he could. But he was another wolf, another creature like her. Another, another, someone like her, another. She listened—she craned her ears forward and she listened, desperate to hear him.

A roaring howl rattled through the forest, bouncing off the tree trunks. A searching wail. Then it was gone.

Her body had little sound left in it, so little energy left, so little to call on. She yelped. Whimpered. She leapt up and pushed and scratched at the walls until one of the shutters slipped open and she shoved her muzzle out into the dark air, her tongue tasting the wind, the wind, the howl, where was the howl, the wind, the wind, where was the other wolf?

Again—the answering howl. Her undercoat stood up away from her skin as if it were straining toward that sound. That long, stretched-out, lonely sound. He was looking for her, the other wolf was searching for her. She whimpered.

Below her she heard metal clinking, a fire crackling. She heard humans moving around excitedly. Had they heard the answer? They must have. She could hear them moving, hurriedly extinguishing their fire. She could hear them moving out into the trees, their hands full of metal, their voices low, their grunting words meaning nothing to her. Nothing, nothing, nothing to her, nothing.

The answer came again. She dug deep, dug into the last flickering embers of her strength, and let out a warbling yowl. Enough sound to guide him, enough for him to find her through the woods. Enough to lead him to her. She slipped backwards, her body spent, and collapsed on the wooden floor, one foreleg over her muzzle.

Later on she heard gunshots, and her tail flicked across the floor, but she was too weak to prick up her ears.

For another day and a night she lay on the floor of the fire tower, rolling over when she could, too weak, too hungry, too weak, too weak, too hungry to do more than pant and wait, and pant, and try to sleep.

She lacked the strength to make a single noise, but in the hidden chambers of her heart, she howled, and howled, and howled.

Chey’s mouth was smeared across the floor. Her hands were down underneath her, crushed under her own weight. There was no blood in them, it felt like—they tingled painfully. Unbearably.

Her eyes felt like raisins. Dried up, cracked and broken. She rolled over and the effort made her squint. She was so hungry, it felt like insects had colonized her abdomen, that they had hollowed her out and left a gaping void where her stomach had been. So hungry.

“Hungry,” she moaned. She had a voice at least. A voice meant she was human again. It was getting hard to tell, sometimes. “Hungry,” she said again, and her throat cracked. No one could have heard her—she didn’t expect them to. But she was hungry.

She had no idea what time it was, or how many days had passed. Her thoughts were loose and small and she couldn’t get the mental energy together to make the simplest of logical jumps.

“Hungry.” She hadn’t even thought it that time. It just came out of her like a fetid belch.

Without water, without food—shouldn’t she have died already? But no. The curse wouldn’t let her die. It wouldn’t let her age or—die.

She closed her eyes. Maybe she changed, maybe she didn’t. All she saw was darkness.

When she opened her eyes again she felt a little better. There was a sound—a soothing sound. Tapping. Something was tapping on the roof. Lots of people, tapping very gently. There was a whole crowd of them up there, and they were—

A droplet of water seeped through the shingles over her head and dropped to scatter the dust near her face. Oh, she thought. It was raining. She closed her eyes again.

Up, moving, she smashed against the wall of the tower, slammed against it again trying to knock the tower over, trying to break out, her hands grabbed at the wood and pulled and shook and—and—she couldn’t—couldn’t catch her breath—she sank down to the floor again and—and closed her eyes.

Water was dripping down one wall. A thin, thready stream of it that wove around the splinters and pooled in the wolf-scratches. She watched it intently, raised her hands to touch, lowered them again. As if by touching the stream of water she would make it stop. As if it were just there to tease her.

Her mouth burned. Her eyes felt like hard-boiled eggs, swollen inside her head. It hurt to move them from side to side. It felt like her eye sockets were full of sand, and every time she moved her eyes she could feel them getting scratched up back there.

The tiny ribbon of water never stopped. She leaned forward. Touched her tongue to the moistness. The water felt like ice on her cracked and swollen skin. It splashed across the inside of her mouth, wet her teeth. She laughed it felt so good. She pressed her mouth against the wooden wall and sucked, sucked like an animal.

Like a gerbil in a cage sucking at its water bottle.

She didn’t fucking care.

“I don’t fucking care, alright?” she asked nobody. Because nobody was there. She sucked more water off the wall.

When she was done she dropped back to the floor. And closed her eyes. She had a smile on her face.

Knock, knock. She opened her eyes but didn’t move. Knock, knock. Someone was knocking—no, she’d thought the rain was people tapping on the roof, but—knock, knock.

“I’m here,” she screeched, and rolled over. She realized she was naked. She realized she didn’t have the strength to call out like that. She shouted again. “Please! I’m here! And I’m human!”

The trap door creaked open on its spring. A hand, a very human hand, reached up through the dark hole and pushed a plastic bag up onto her floor. Then the hand drew back and the door shut again.

She reached for the door, tried to get to it. She could barely crawl across the floor. It was already closed. The arm—she’d seen the arm, it hadn’t just been a hallucination. She was sure of it. The arm had been tanned and brown. It had been Lester’s arm.

“Lester,” she called. “Come on, Lester, it’s safe. You can come in. Lester! Look, I know I’m dangerous. I know I’m scary. But I’m also a human being. It’s not okay, Lester. It’s not okay to leave people alone like this! It’s not fucking appropriate! Lester! Come back. Just, come back. Please. Come back.”

She pressed her face up against the wood of the trap door. Pressed against it with her nose, her cheek. She was crying, she was sobbing. Was he there? She could visualize his face, inches away from hers. Looking up, through the wood, just like she was looking down through the wood at him.

She heard the padlock click into place. She felt the fire tower shake a little as he rumbled down the stairs. Then nothing. If she’d had more strength she could have got up on her feet, thrown the shutters open. Screamed after him. If she’d had more strength, but she didn’t. She had no more strength at all.

She wept until she was dry again, and then she closed her eyes.

Later she opened the plastic bag. There were three sandwiches inside, all the same. Ham with a wilted leaf of lettuce on white bread. She ate two of them right away, crammed them into her mouth, chewed the minimal amount of requisite time, swallowed them in great painful lumps. Then she started to get sick to her stomach. It was too much, too fast. If she threw up it would only make her feel worse. She put the rest of the sandwiches aside. Promised herself she would wait and eat them later.

Her body grumbled and bitched at her. But she could feel her stomach starting up again. Starting the process of digestion. “Oh, thank you, Lester, Bobby, whoever. Just thank you,” she whispered.

The bag also held two magazines. An outdated copy of Outdoor Life, and a relatively new Flare, which surprised her. What did the Pickersgills want with a fashion magazine? Then she noticed that half the pages were stuck together.

She put it aside and picked up the bag to see what else they’d given her. The bag was so heavy it slipped through her fingers. She picked it open and took out the last of the contents. A pistol. A black, square pistol. She ejected the magazine and found there was one silver bullet inside.

Chey lifted the pistol in her hand and studied it as if there were some hidden message engraved on it. Some explanation of why it had been placed in the bag with the sandwiches and magazines.

When she actually thought about it, though, there really was only one conclusion to be made. A pistol with a single bullet in its is useful for a small variety of things, and only one of them made sense given where she was. And how alone she was.

She lifted the pistol to shoulder height. She wondered if it mattered if she shot herself in the heart or the head. Blowing her brains out might hurt fractionally less—before she even knew what was happening she would just be gone, a puff of smoke blown away on a stiff breeze. If she shot herself in the heart it might take a couple of seconds for her to die. Excruciating, burning seconds.

Yet wasn’t the heart more traditional? That was how the stories usually went. Or was she thinking of vampires? Yes, of course. It made no difference where she shot herself. It was just silver bullet plus lycanthrope equals no more lycanthrope. Just that simple.

Then again—what if she were wrong about that? She had never actually seen a wolf killed by a silver bullet. What if she shot herself in the head and it didn’t work? What if she had to lie there in her blood and scattered brains until she changed again?

She lifted the weapon as nonchalantly as she could and tapped the muzzle against the side of her head. Then she started laughing and put the gun carefully back down on the floor. She hadn’t been serious, of course, she wasn’t actually going to follow through. Why, that would just be dumb.

She kept laughing until she realized she couldn’t stop. Then she clutched her hands over her mouth and rolled up into a ball and tried to squeeze herself shut before her mind leaked out all over the floor.

Eventually she recovered enough of herself to reach for another sandwich. She was still hungry—ravenous, after five days with nothing to eat. The food might help her think more clearly, and… and she reached down and found nothing but a piece of wet ham lying on the floorboards. The stale bread and wilted lettuce leaf were gone.

“You can have that part,” Dzo said. “I’m a vegetarian, remember?”

It was so natural, so perfectly ordinary for him to be sitting in the corner nibbling at a piece of bread that she didn’t scream. She just turned to look at him with half a smile on her face. He was sprawled across the floor with his mask tilted up, his furs spread out around him making him look as flabby as a bear about to go into hibernation.

“Hi,” she said.

“Yo.” He shoved the rest of the bread in his mouth and chewed noisily, breathing through his nose. “You’re probably asking yourself how I got in here without you noticing.”

“I am?” she asked. Now that he mentioned it, though… “I am,” she said.

“Yeah, that’s the obvious question. You might also want to know what I’m doing here. That’s pretty good, too.”

“Did Powell send you to find me?” she asked, because suddenly that was what interested her.

“Ah ha!” he crowed. “Good, good question, but, no, no he didn’t. Haven’t seen him in a while now. Where he’s got to I can’t follow, you see. So I was pretty bored and I figured, heck, I’ll go check up on the lady shape-shifter. See how you’re doing.”

“Not so good,” she said. “I’ve got a bad case of cabin fever. They’ve got me locked in here pretty tight.”

“That’s no good. Liable to make you crazy,” he said.

“Yeah.” She glanced at the gun lying on the floor. “I think that was the point. Can we get out of here? Go someplace else and talk there? Pretty much anyplace—anyplace at all—will do.” She scrabbled over to the trap door and yanked on the latch—and nearly pulled her arm out of joint. It was locked up as tight as ever. She pulled again just for form’s sake but nothing had changed.

She turned to look at Dzo. He just shrugged.

How had he gotten in?

What was he? He had told her once that he was in no danger from the wolves. Unlike everybody else. She remembered when she’d met him and told him she was lost and freezing and about to die. He’d patted her on the back and said “there, there.” As if he didn’t even understand what death meant.

She realized she was naked and she grabbed for her sweater. Dzo didn’t turn away or blush or anything. “This—this means nothing to you, does it?” she asked. She pulled it on anyway. “You don’t, I mean you’re not—”

“Gosh, do you mean if I care what kind of clothes you wear or if you’re in your altogether?”

She nodded.

“Well, to be honest, not as such.” He scratched his belly. The question seemed to make him much more uncomfortable than her nudity. “I mean, I barely have time to notice what color your skins are. You kind of all run together in my head. You’re like mayflies, eh? You’re here for a second and then you’re gone. I like you shape-shifters better ‘cause you last a little longer, but, well, still and all.”

She nodded again, understanding very little but maybe more than she had before. Dzo wasn’t human. She had that much. He wasn’t mortal, either. Beyond that she didn’t even want to get started.

Maybe she could worry about that later. “Dzo, you got in here somehow. I’m sure that if I asked you how I wouldn’t understand the answer.”

“Dove through the water. I’m a pretty strong swimmer.”

“See what I mean?” she said. “Can—I—dive through the water?” she asked. “To get out of here?” Whatever it meant, whatever weird new fucked up thing it might entail she knew she would do it. Anything to get out of the tower.

His face opened up as he considered her question. “Well,” he said, finally, “no.”

“Okay.”

“No, you see, because this isn’t water like you’re used to. It’s everywhere all at once, kinda, and I don’t think you know how to swim like that.”

“Right,” she agreed.

“Now, as for teaching you, that’s been done before, but that’s a long time since. Like that was back when all the stories were still true.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said, defeated. She slumped back against the wall of the fire tower and closed her eyes.

“But that’s not to say there’s no way out for you. Why, I can see a pretty good way right now,” he told her.

“You can.” It wasn’t a question. Because she didn’t expect an answer, at least not one that made sense.

“Yeah, sure,” he told her. “You just open up one of these windows and jump out.”

“It’s at least thirty meters down,” Chey said, looking out into the darkness. She had one shutter propped open but the moon was down (of course it was, she thought, otherwise she’d be in her wolf form) and she couldn’t see anything beyond the branches of the nearest trees. She couldn’t, for instance, see the ground below her. She thought if she could see how far the drop was she might be more afraid than she was already. In the pitch dark it might be possible to climb up on the sill and jump out. The idea still made her stark raving terrified. “That would kill me.”

“No it wouldn’t.” Dzo leaned out and looked down. “You’re a shifter, remember? It’s just going to hurt like a bitch.”

Chey licked her chapped lips. “I’m not sure if I can do that. I’m afraid.”

Dzo shrugged mightily. “You asked if I knew a way out of here. You’re looking at it. Don’t blame me if you wimp out.”

“You’re not human. I don’t think you’re alive, really. You’re more like a ghost or a spirit. Can you even feel pain? Have you ever felt pain?”

Dzo tilted his head and shoulders from side to side. It was a distinctly ambivalent gesture. “Why, sure I have,” he said, finally. “Sorta. Actually, no, I guess I haven’t.”

“Well, it’s not fun. That’s pretty much the definition of pain. It’s the opposite of fun. Maybe I should just take my chances and stay here.” And blow my head off with my one silver bullet, she thought. “I mean, even if I did survive the fall, even if I recovered from the broken bones and punctured lungs and blood loss and everything, then I’d still be down there. In these woods, with Powell wanting to kill me. At least up here I’m safe from him.”

She was trying to talk herself out of it. Out of jumping into darkness and toward what should have been, in a normal world, certain death. It was working.

“I guess you kinda need to figure out who you’re more afraid of,” Dzo said. “Powell or this other guy, your boyfriend.”

He had a point.

If she could get out of the tower she could talk to Bobby. Find some way for her to survive this. Alternatively she could look for Powell. She could settle things between them. If she wanted to live she had no choice.

“How long is it until moonrise?” she asked Dzo.

“No clue,” he told her. She stared at him and he shrugged. “You think I got some kind of built in moon schedule, in my head or something? Listen, you want to know where the nearest body of water is, and how deep it is, and what’s at the bottom, then I’m your guy. But why do you care?”

“Because when I land down there and I break my neck, I’ll be in incredible pain until the next time I change. I’d like to spend as little time as possible like that. The perfect time would be to jump just a couple of seconds before I change.” She stared at him again.

“Sorry,” he said.

She nodded and grabbed all the things she had to her name. The two magazines, the slice of greasy ham, and the pistol. She made sure the safety was on and jammed it in her pocket.

“If I land on my head, and my brains splat all over the ground,” she said, “I still won’t die. Will I?”

“Don’t know,” Dzo admitted.

Chey frowned and went to the shutter. It was so easy not to jump. It was so easy to waste more time. But what if she changed in the next second? What if she had to wait for another night, another day to pass?

And what if she jumped—and there were still hours to go?

“Okay,” she said. “I’m going to do it.” But then she just stood there. Her legs were frozen in place. “Can you help me?”

“Yeah, definitely,” Dzo said. He came up behind her and picked her up as if she were made of paper. Then he tossed her out into the wind, even as she began to scream at him, to beg him not to. She looked back and saw the side of the fire tower, saw Dzo silhouetted in the window, barely illuminated by starlight. His mask was down.

Then she fell.

The cold darkness around her felt like an illimitable gulf of space. She felt for a particle of time as if she were floating in the depths of interstellar space.

A moment later she collided with the ground so hard she felt like a squashed bug, like a stain on the forest floor.

The pain was unimaginable. Her skin hurt everywhere and she felt bones poking her, fragments of bone sticking in her guts. Her breath sputtered inside her, full of blood—she must have punctured a lung. She could see nothing, could feel nothing but her own insides squirming out through a break in her skin.

She tried to get a hand underneath her, tried to rise. Blood gouted from her mouth and she fell back, her torn cheek grating on the rocks.

The moon—she begged the moon to rise—the moon had to come. It had to come soon. The moon. It would heal her. It had to come. Soon.

Then she felt a hand slip into hers. It was smooth and small, almost feminine. It was a stranger’s hand but she was past caring. The tiny fragment of comfort she took from that human touch was something, a drop of water on a parched tongue. It didn’t hurt—that was the main thing.

Who was it? She could wonder but she had no way of answering. Her eyes couldn’t focus, couldn’t make out anything. No one spoke to her—or if they did she couldn’t hear it.

Her breath hitched in her damaged lungs and stopped and she panicked for a second but the hand just closed tighter around hers and she calmed down, literally felt herself settling down and then, with a noise like a balloon popping air sagged out of her.

Whose hand was it?

In the end it didn’t matter.

She lay there broken on the ground for forty-seven minutes. She had no way of measuring that time—to her it felt hundreds of hours. It would have felt like an eternity if not for that hand in hers.

Then silver light came like a grace upon her, a divine breath of mercy.

Confused, her head still buzzing and unclear, the wolf rose on strong legs and howled for her newfound freedom.

She tried not to look at Frank Pickersgill’s body. She looked anyway. It was awful. She got up and stumbled away from him, staggered down the creek bed. She couldn’t cry, couldn’t throw up. It was like her body had become hermetically sealed. Her feet were blue under the cold water but she couldn’t seem to step out of the stream.

Eventually she managed to climb up on the far bank, a gentler slope. She rolled in the dead leaves and mud there and just breathed for a while, and thought of nothing. Then she went back to the body.

His coat was stained with blood in a couple of places. She pulled it off of his arms anyway and struggled into it. He’d been a giant of a man and she was an average-sized woman. The coat sagged across her, dangled from her arms and across her knees. It was still warm. She shuddered but she didn’t take it off. It was still better than being naked in that trackless wilderness.

She rifled his pack. It was sacrilege. Evil, pure evil. It didn’t matter. Her conscience stayed mostly quiet as she searched through his things. She found a packet of ketchup chips which she ate with one hand while searching with the other. She found a mickey bottle of bourbon which she put aside for maybe later. Though surely drinking a dead man’s liquor was enough to bring down heavenly wrath on her, if anything was. She found a box of silver shotgun shells and she took one out and held it in her hand. The pellets were wrapped in a red paper cartridge. She unraveled the paper and picked one of the spherical pellets out. It was perfectly smooth but it felt like a piece of broken glass rubbed against her fingers. Blood welled in the whorls of her fingertips and she threw the pellet back into the pack.

She reached up and touched her shoulder, then craned her head around and tried to look. There were distinct scratches there, ugly, red marks that looked infected. They could only have been made by silver—so Frank Pickersgill had shot at her first, before she had attacked him. He had drawn first blood.

It made absolutely no difference to the guilt she felt, she realized. If anything it made her feel for him more.

There was a map in the pack. A good one, with contour lines and lumber roads drawn in fine gray ink. She found the fire tower. Powell’s cabin wasn’t shown but she found the tiny lake where Bobby had landed his helicopter. She had no idea where she was—she was near a little stream but there were hundreds of those on the map. She could be anywhere. Giving up she looked for Port Radium, wherever that was, and then she found it.

Frank Pickersgill had said she should stay away from Port Radium. That had to be where Bobby had gone. He would be following Powell, to a place where Dzo had said he couldn’t go.

Port Radium was on the eastern shore of Great Bear Lake, a body of water so big it filled the left hand side of the map. There was something about its location that seemed odd to her. She studied it and turned the map around and wondered why it should seem familiar. She hardly knew this part of the world at all. Then she remembered. It was the same place she’d seen on maps before, the only town anywhere near Powell’s cabin. She’d always seen it before referred to as Echo Bay. Maybe they’d changed the name—“Port Radium” hardly sounded like a place anyone would want to visit.

She knew she was going to have to go there, one way or another. She could run away, as fast and as far as she liked, but her wolf was always going to head right for where the trouble was thickest. And her wolf could run faster than she could.

At the bottom of the pack she found a satellite cell phone. Just like the one she’d used to summon Bobby and screw up everything. She turned it on and started dialing Bobby’s number. Then she stopped and hastily cleared the display.

Bobby had given the Western Prairie guys an order that she was to be shot on sight. He wanted to kill her. He was going to kill her. Bobby was going to kill her. Just like Powell. All the important men in her life wanted her dead.

Well—except for one.

She had trouble remembering the number but after a couple of false starts she got it. She pressed the phone against her ear and listened to clicks and static for a couple of seconds, and then the phone began to ring. Then it clicked and answered.

“Hello,” the phone told her. “You’ve reached the Bolton’s Valley Horse Ranch. We’re most likely out riding fences right now but if you press one, you can—”

She pressed one and shoved the phone back to her ear. She could barely hear the beep on the other end. Then she spoke, as quickly as she could.

“Uncle Bannerman, this is Cheyenne and I’m in trouble,” she said. “I don’t know when you get this, or where I’ll be when you do but I need help. It’s pretty bad. You see, I, I’ve been infected. With you-know-what. And I kind of just killed a guy.” Tears filled her throat and she couldn’t talk for a second. “Bobby’s up here and he. He’s going to. He’s at a place called Port Radium and he. I need. I don’t know what I need but help. Please help me.”

She didn’t know what else to say. What else she could say. She ended the call and shoved the phone in a pocket of Frank Pickersgill’s jacket. Then she sat down and for a while just tried not to fall apart.

She was falling, falling fast, and there didn’t seem to be a bottom that she could hit. Bobby had locked her up to keep people safe. She’d gone crazy with the confinement and thought she had a right to be free. But did she? Did anybody, if they were going to use that freedom to hurt other people? Even if they didn’t want to, even if they couldn’t help themselves?

She took his boots. He had three pairs of dry socks in his pack, and if she wore them all at once the boots almost fit her. For once, at least, her feet were warm.

Author's Note: Due to the Thanksgiving holiday, the update which would normally appear on Friday will appear this weekend. Monday's update will appear on time. Thanks, Dave.

That night Chey walked through the forest with the inevitable fatalism of the truly damned. Her feet hurt, blistered by the loose boots and her body trembled with cold, hunger, and fatigue. None of it mattered. If she had thoughts in her head they were dark, earthy thoughts that crumbled like clods of dirt when she tried to grab at them. The landscape changed around her as she hiked but she barely noticed as the trees grew thinner and shorter. The world got more wet, too. There had been a hundred tiny lakes and ponds near Powell’s cabin. Now she moved through a realm of swampy half-frozen muskegs where the tree roots dipped like bent pipes into dark water. Once she had to ford an actual river, a ribbon of brown water deep enough in the middle that she was forced to swim across its width. The chilly dip woke her up a little—enough to see the dead forest beyond the further bank.

The trees over there stood white as bones, pointing at random angles at the cold stars above. They bore neither leaves nor needles and their branches stuck out like broken ribs or were missing altogether.

The ground at her feet was caked with ash. There must have been a forest fire here recently, she thought. Every step stirred up more of the powdery gray debris. What had happened? Surely the Western Prairie guys hadn’t been foolish enough to throw a lit cigarette butt into the underbrush. Maybe lightning had struck nearby. It must have happened recently. She knew that after a forest fire the smaller plant species—grasses, mosses, shrubs—came back quickly but she could find nothing green anywhere.

She trudged into the dead forest and soon found herself in a place as desolate as the back of the moon. No owls hooted in the darkness and no wildflowers grew up from the ash to tremble in the breeze. She saw a very few insects—beetles, mostly, their wingcases snapping open as she approached, their dirty-looking wings convulsing in the air to zip them away from her on long curved paths. She touched the white trunks of the dead trees as she passed by and their wood was dry and rough as if they were half petrified.

She still didn’t know exactly where she was. She had headed west from the stream where Frank Pickersgill died, figuring that no matter how badly lost she got her wolf would find the way when the moon rose again.

In time the trees grew thinner on the ground still, and thinner, until she was no longer in a forest at all but a sandy flatland punctuated here and there by the occasional dead stump. Streams rolled across bare rock and through drifts of shallow snow covering endless hectares of land. After the myopia of the forest she felt like she could see to the very edge of the world. The starlight painted the ground white and the water black and the world seemed striped and piebald between the two. On the horizon she saw what could have been the ocean—an endless wrinkled mass of water. It had to be the shore of Great Bear Lake.

She pressed on.

The sun rose while she was still human. She hadn’t seen it in a while—for the last few days she’d only been human by starlight. The sun’s warmth on her back and shoulder filled her up, made her skin tingle, eased the soreness in her joints, even as it painted the vast open ground with yellow light. It felt good. She knew it wouldn’t last.

“Dzo,” she said, as if he could hear her. She thought maybe he could.

She heard a splash behind her and saw him clamber up out of a black pond. His furs streamed with water but by the time he reached her he was dry. He tipped his mask back onto the top of his head. “Uh, yeah?” he asked, as if he’d been with her the whole time. She still had no idea what he really was but she understood he was a lot more at home in this weird land than she would ever be.

“Dzo,” she said, “is it much farther?”

“Yeah,” he said. “But your wolf can make it today.” His face screwed up in bewilderment. “You scared or something?”

She nodded. “Yes, I am.”

“Humans seem to get scared a lot. When animals get scared, sometimes they just freeze. You know? Their muscles lock up and they can’t move. You ever try that?”

“That won’t work for me. Dzo—I killed a guy. Kind of. I don’t know what that makes me.”

“A predator?” He sat down on the ground and rubbed his hands together. “I’m not really the guy you ought to be asking these questions.”

She nodded. “I know. The funny thing is I’m not as scared of getting killed as I am of talking to Powell again. But you wouldn’t understand that.”

He raised his hands in weak apology. “Maybe you’ll get killed before you get that far,” he offered.

“Yeah.” She started walking again. “Thanks, Dzo,” she said.

“My pleasure. Listen,” he called after her, “this is as far as I can go. They poisoned the water out there and I can’t follow you now. If you do see Powell, will you give him a message for me?”

“Sure,” she said, turning around.

“Tell him I have his boots in my truck. In case he’s looking for ‘em.”

Chey smiled. It felt wrong on her face but she liked it all the same. “I’ll do that.”

An hour after the sun rose, the moon followed.

Bobby’s helicopter stood motionless in the air, maybe half a kilometer away, maybe seventy meters up. The bubble cockpit was turned her way—was he watching her, was he watching Pickersgill march her across a field of broken stones? Was he wondering why she wasn’t dead yet? Maybe he wasn’t even inside. Maybe it was just Lester up there.

“Okay, head over to that utility pole,” Pickersgill said from behind her. He wasn’t taking a lot of chances—she had to keep her hands straight up in the air or he would jab her in the back with one of his pistols.

The field had been a parking lot once, she thought. It was relatively flat and it was interrupted here and there only by ten meter tall light poles, each crowned with a pair of long-broken Klieg lights. The poles were as thick as her arm and made of some metal that hadn’t corroded over the years.

“Listen,” Chey asked, “could I get a coat or a blanket or something? I’m freezing like this.”

He tossed her a pair of moth-eaten, grease-stained coveralls. They were meant for a larger person than herself but she was glad just not to be naked anymore. “I appreciate it,” she said. “Can we talk for a second? I’d like to—”

He didn’t let her finish. “Turn around and grab the pole behind you with both hands,” Pickersgill said.

She did as she was told. The metal was freezing cold and plenty sturdy, though she could feel that the pole was hollow. Nothing more complex than a pipe sticking out of the ground with a few wires running through. Pickersgill moved around behind her and clicked one end of a pair of handcuffs to her left wrist. She could feel him fumbling around behind her with the second cuff—he had to do it one-handed, since he kept a pistol in the crook of her neck the whole time.

“It ain’t silver, but tensile steel’s got to be worth something,” he told her. He clicked the second cuff shut and came back around to face her. He had one pistol in his hand, the other in its holster.

“You’re not going to kill me?” Chey asked.

“Not yet, no. We still need to catch your alpha. He’s smarter than your average canid, obviously. That’s the only reason it’s taken us so long to catch him. He’s still prone to the weaknesses of his kind, however. What we call, in the business, taxic behaviors. Instincts. For instance, he won’t abandon his mate.”

“I’m not his mate,” Chey said. “He wants to kill me.”

Pickersgill shrugged. “One lure is as good as another in this case. When he hears you, he’ll come.”

Chey frowned. “Are you sure?”

“When we had you up in that fire tower, howling like a bitch on heat, his exotic half couldn’t keep away. Every time he would come closer, and once we even got a couple of shots off at him. If he had kept that up we would have had him. He must have figured as much. After that his human half just up and ran off and came here, far enough away that he wouldn’t be tempted by your vocalizations.” He scratched at his mustache.

“So you think if he hears me now he’ll come again,” she said.

“You got it. As soon as the moon comes up you’ll start in to howling and he’ll show himself. Then we’ll finish this contract and we can all go home. Except for the two of you, of course.”

“And your brother,” Chey said. Taunting Pickersgill was probably a mistake but she couldn’t stop herself.

“Yes. We haven’t heard from Frank in a bit. I suppose you had something to do with that?”

Chey sighed. Guilt squished around in her stomach as if she’d eaten tainted food. “I killed him, I guess. My wolf did. I’m sorry. I guess that gives you a right to kill me, too.”

Pickersgill scratched his mustache again. She wondered if he had fleas. “Well, no, I don’t suppose that’s it,” he said, finally. “What gives me the right to kill you is just I’m a better predator. I’m smarter than you and I’ve got better weapons. That’s all.”

She didn’t have anything to say to that.

Pickersgill took a phone out of his pocket with his left hand and dialed a number. The pistol in his right hand drooped until it wasn’t pointing directly at her but he didn’t holster it. He was pretty smart, she had to give him that. He’d thought this through better than she had.

Well, Chey had never been very good at making plans. She’d pretty much followed her gut her whole life. And now it was going to get her killed. She stared out at the broken plain of the parking lot, at heaps of stones and broken chunks of asphalt. The helicopter was moving away, headed toward the far side of the town. Soon it was gone behind rust-stained walls and mounds of dark soil, lost in a purpling sky that was about to turn into darkness.

Her mind turned over and over, trying to decide what to do next. If Pickersgill would just step closer she could kick him. Maybe get her legs around his neck and snap his spine. She could spit in his eyes and when he went to wipe them clean she could kick the gun right out of his hand. Then she could bring her knee up into his chin hard enough to knock him out.

What she would do then, still handcuffed to the light pole, she had no idea. But it was worth a try.

“Hey,” she said.

Pickersgill looked up.

“Your brother told me something right before he died.”

“Yeah?” he asked.

“Yeah. If you come over here I’ll whisper it in your ear.”

He grinned at her. “Nice try.” He actually took a step back.

Okay, she thought to herself. Time for plan B.

She tried flexing her arms, tensing against the chain that held her hands cuffed together. She could feel how solid the metal was. She was stronger, stronger than any normal human being, but she didn’t think she could break that chain. In fact, she was sure of it. She pulled anyway. The muscles in her arms tensed and burned and the steel held. She grunted and gritted her teeth and pulled harder. The cuffs dug into her wrists and scraped at her skin like dull knives. Sweat broke out on her forehead.

The chain held.

“I didn’t think so,” Pickersgill said. He gave himself a good long scratch and let his pistol arm hang loose at his side. “Just relax, okay? It’s a long time until moonrise. You don’t want to dislocate your shoulders.”

She stared right into his eyes and pulled and yanked with every muscle fiber in her body. She felt the blood pounding in her head, felt the bones of her arms flex and start to fracture. She pulled harder. The chain didn’t give.

Instead the light pole behind her did. As she heaved forward the chain put pressure on the hollow pole and it crimped, slamming forward across her shoulders. The pole flicked forward and the twin light fixtures at its top slapped against the ground, shattering what little glass was left in them. Chey was thrown sideways by the toppling pole, her wrists screaming with abrasions. Feeling like an idiot she looked over at Pickersgill.

He didn’t look back. The collapsing light pole had connected with the space between his shoulder and his neck. Maybe it had broken his spine, or maybe it had just given him a concussion. Either way he lay sprawled across the broken stones, his eyes wide open but seeing nothing.

Chey kicked and kicked at the pole until it broke off at the crimp and clattered to the ground. She pulled down on the cuffs until they came loose from the pole. She struggled and bent and twisted until her hands were in front of her, at least. Then she ran over to check Pickersgill’s neck. She couldn’t find a pulse.

Behind her she heard someone clapping, very slowly. She looked up and was not surprised to find Powell standing not ten meters away.

Night had officially fallen. The stars were out, thick in the heavens, and they gave enough light for the two of them to see each other but not much more.

Powell wore a pair of coveralls much like her own—she guessed he had been forced to scrounge for clothing since he’d been in Port Radium. He didn’t have Dzo around to follow him around in a rusty pickup truck any more.

He had an ugly scar across his forehead and cheek. Either he’d been injured since his last change or he’d had a near miss with a silver bullet. His icy green eyes were quiet—she couldn’t quite gauge what he was thinking. Or what he was planning.

She wondered if he’d given as much thought to this confrontation as she had.

“Hi,” she said, moving toward him as sedately as she could manage.

“Hello, yourself,” he said, and ducked just as she brought her arms down and tried to get her handcuff chain around his neck.

He had her at a distinct disadvantage. It didn’t matter. She spun around just in time to see him running at her, his head down, his arms wide. He grabbed her around the midsection and knocked her off her feet. She went skidding along a rough section of asphalt and her head bounced off a broken stone. Light erupted behind her eyes and she couldn’t seem to breathe.

He was on top of her, a piece of rubble in his hands as big as her head. He brought it up high, clearly intending to use it to smash her face in. She lunged upward with her knees and he flew off of her. Rolling onto all fours she looked over and saw him doing the same.

Together they jumped to their feet, their arms in front of them. They wheeled around each other like sumo wrestlers. Chey had been trained in unarmed combat by the US military. She knew how to hold her own. Powell had had a century to learn how to fight. He rushed her and she dodged but he must have expected it—he swung around in mid-swing and grabbed her around the waist, twisted up underneath and slammed her to the ground. The wind went out of her but she managed to kick out with her legs and hit him in the ankle, toppling him to the ground, too. They both rolled over, panting for breath. Then he looked up and met her gaze.

Could he kill her? Did he even want to?

For a second they just stared at each other. Then he reached out and grabbed the chain that held her hands together. She cried out as he yanked, hard, and dragged her across the stones, but she couldn’t get her feet underneath her, couldn’t twist out of his grip.

He dragged her inside the big corrugated tin building. The darkness inside was nearly complete. He pulled her a ways farther then dragged her up and off the ground. Both of his hands grabbed at her flesh and then she was airborne, hurtling over the poured concrete floor. She hit hard enough to make spit fly out of her mouth.

“If you want to kill me, just do it,” she shouted. She was hoping he would reply and thereby give away his location. She couldn’t see him at all in the shadows.

“I don’t want to kill anybody,” he said. He was moving around, circling her. She thought of her training. She needed to move, too. She needed to get a wall at her back. Otherwise he could attack her from behind and she would be defenseless. “I’m sorry that I killed your father, but believe me, I did what I could to prevent it. You should understand that by now.”

“Bullshit! You could have done something. You could have locked yourself up in a silver cage that night. But you didn’t,” she said.

He didn’t bother to reply.

She could feel him nearby but she couldn’t determine where he was. She scrabbled up to her feet and started moving toward the wall ahead of her.

She felt his body heat a moment before he scooped her up and threw her back into the dark. She landed badly with an arm underneath her, crushed by her own weight. She cried out in pain.

“You done yet?” he asked. He was close, but not close enough to hit. “Why can’t you just go away and leave me alone? I never wanted any of this. I just want to survive the mess you’ve made for me.”

“Oh, that’s rich,” she said. “You brought this on yourself.” She crawled forward through the gloom. Her hands searched the dusty floor, looking for rocks, discarded tools, anything she could use as a weapon.

He hit her hard, then, hard enough to pick her up and carry her, screaming, across the floor. They smashed into the wall and through it. The corroded tin collapsed under their combined weight and she saw stars, real stars as they rolled back out into the parking lot. Her shoulder gave way with a popping noise—if it wasn’t broken it still hurt like a bastard. He pushed her away and staggered into the night. She knew better than to think he was done with her.

The pain curled her inward on herself. It made her want to scream. She forced the pain down, away from her, and rose to her feet. If not for the strength her wolf shared with her she knew she would be unconscious, maybe even dead already.

She spun around in a circle, looking for Powell. Looking for any sign of movement—a flash in the darkness, a dull glint. Instead she saw Port Radium.

It lay beneath her, spread out at the bottom of a long, rolling hill. No one lived there, she was sure of it—what few structures remained intact had collapsed roofs or had tumbled down to fall in on themselves. There had been dozens, maybe a hundred hangars and warehouses and who knew what else, once, but the vast majority of the buildings had been burned to the ground. The roads remained, long dark ribbons sectioning the land into parcels. Long poles of stripped wood had been pounded into the earth at every crossroads and intersection. She knew what they were for—when the snow came, as it would early this far north, that would be the only way for anyone to know where a building’s foundation lay. There were streetlights as well, in some places, but the metal poles had sunk and listed as the permafrost beneath them shifted over the years until they stood at angles like the trees of the drunken forest.

Abandoned—no, more than that. There was a pall over the remains of the town, nothing visible or even tangible really but there was a wrongness about it. Chey felt like waves of regret and desolation were rolling up out of the ruins. Maybe they were haunted. A ghost town, in more ways than one.

Between Chey and the ghost town’s near edge glimmered the black mirror of a pond, a big oval pool of water. A heap of twisted metal and broken rock stood in the center of the pond like a gigantic cairn. She recognized a few outlines, of dump trucks and backhoes and cranes, but most of the metal had softened and lost its shape to rust and wind until it became a single agglomeration of bent girders and decaying engines. Hundreds of tons of forgotten equipment, left to soften like compost over a span of millennia. She could only imagine how toxic the water must be with runoff from the dead machinery. “Jesus,” she said, astounded despite herself. After spending the last few weeks in the utter natural serenity of the forest this man-made ruin startled her. “What was this place?”

Powell answered her from the shadows. “It was a mining town, once.” She didn’t turn or give any sign she’d heard him. She didn’t want to move. She didn’t want him to hit her again—her shoulder still hurt from the last time. “The rocks here are some of the oldest on Earth and they’re full of radium, cobalt, chromium. It also contained one of the biggest silver lodes ever discovered.”

“And you thought it would be a nice place to hide out,” she said, quietly.

There was nothing wrong with his hearing—or maybe he was closer to her than the sound of his voice made her think. “It was too expensive to mine the silver profitably, though. It cost more to dig it up and ship it back to civilization than it was worth.”

“So they abandoned it then?”

“Not quite,” Powell told her. His voice came from over to her left—she was sure of it. She had to be ready, had to anticipate his next attack. If she could turn his move against him—but he was still talking. “They found something else here, too. This is where the Americans got the uranium for their first a-bombs.”

She gasped in spite of herself. “Really?”

“They hired the local Dene Indians to carry it out of here in burlap sacks. They’ve always claimed they didn’t know how dangerous the stuff was, but an entire generation of Dene men died young here. You see those dark mounds down there?” he asked, and she nodded—there were piles of dark earth almost everywhere, sticking up from the empty ground like mammoth ant hills.

“Those are pitchblende tailings, what’s left of what they dug out of the ground after they refined the uranium ore. Every couple of years someone from the government comes out here to measure how radioactive they still are.”

“Radioactive—this place is radioactive,” she said, and cold sweat burst in pinpricks under her hair.

“I didn’t think your friends would follow me here. I figured they had to know how dangerous it was. Maybe you can tell them. Maybe they’ll leave, then.”

“I don’t think Bobby would listen to me now,” she said, and turned, her hands up, ready to grab him and throw him. He was so close she could smell his skin—she could smell his wolf.

She expected him to lunge forward and knock her down. He didn’t. She overbalanced and had to stagger to keep from falling. When she’d straightened again, wary, too stiff, he raised a hand toward her and she swung to block his punch. He wasn’t punching, though. He had a square black pistol in his hand. He must have gone back to Pickersgill’s corpse and recovered one of the man’s guns.

“Powell,” she had time to say, but then he shot her.

The noise barely registered in her ears. The pain blocked out almost every other sense impression she had. Her heart lurched in her chest and her lungs sagged as the breath burst out of her. The pain was immense and bitter and devastating—she couldn’t tell up from down, couldn’t even tell what part of her body had been shot. Then her arm throbbed viciously and she knew exactly where the bullet went in. She also knew that it was still inside of her.

She dropped to her knees and grabbed the bloody wound on her left forearm. Her skin was burning—literally smoldering but that didn’t bother her as much as the throbbing. It felt like every blood vessel in her arm had swollen up until they were crowding each other in there. It felt like her circulatory system was pumping undiluted agony deep into her body.

With her index finger she probed at the wound. It was narrow and round and blood leaked out of it. She dug her finger into the wound a little and a whole new kind of pain revealed itself to her.

She threw up. There wasn’t much in her stomach but she threw up acid and bile that streamed down over her chest. It actually made her feel better. Then she looked up at Powell, finally able to form a thought in her head.

“I’m not dead,” she said.

“Not yet,” he agreed. He started to put the gun in his pocket, then pulled it out again and threw it to clatter in the ruins, out of sight. “But you will die eventually. Already your body is reacting to the silver.”

“Poison,” she said. He had meant to shoot her in the arm. Somewhere non-vital, a non-lethal wound. “I’m poisoned.”

He nodded. He bent down to look into her eyes. “I don’t know how long it’ll take to kill you. You might have time to find your boyfriend and get him to cut the bullet out of you. Better hurry, though. The moon will be up sooner than you think.”

He turned around and started to walk away. He gave her one last glance—not so much a look of sympathy as curiosity, as if he expected her to say something or do something to make him stop.

“Powell,” she mewled, like a hurt kitten.

It wasn’t enough. He kept walking and soon the darkness swallowed him whole.

“Okay,” Balfour said. His voice matched him perfectly. Gruff, but not too low.

“Okay what?” she asked.

He gestured with the gun for her to climb out of the truck. Chey studied his face. There was no smile there anymore. He’d had his fun, and he’d won his game. Now he was just going to finish her off so he could collect on his contract. It was over.

Chey lifted herself from the ceiling of the cab with her arms and legs. Then with a sudden inspiration she threw herself forward, against the windshield. She didn’t weigh all that much and she had little strength left to add to her momentum, but it was enough.

The truck screamed as metal tore apart from metal. Welds popped, rivets shot out like bullets. The whole massive multi-ton body of the trucks scratched forward. Broken rock tailings rolled away, out from under all that mass and the truck jumped forward as if it were moving on rails. Balfour’s eyes went wide and he fired right through the windshield, but the bullet went wild. A second later the truck rumbled forward, gaining speed, and smacked right into him. He was carried forward as the vehicle tilted down and fell right into the water with a noisy splash and one long extended bass note of metal folding in on itself.

The windshield had become the floor. Chey lay sprawled across it, hurt herself, but not in such a way that mattered—not in any way that could kill her faster than she was already dying. She rubbed her forehead and then opened her eyes.

Under the water, Balfour looked right back at her. His cap was gone and his sparse hair floated in the silver bubbles that streamed out of his mouth. She couldn’t tell if he was alive or dead. His eyes were wide, very wide.

Then he slammed on the windshield with the flats of his hands, slapped at the glass as his mouth opened and toxic water poured in. Chey screamed as she saw the muscles of his face constrict, as he drowned while she watched. His muscles went slack—his hands drifted away—and finally, after far too long, his eyes lost their focus.

She had made no move to save him.

Frigid water gurgled in through the bullet hole in the windshield. It leaked around her body, soaked her clothes. The saline stink of the muck filled what little air there was in the cab. Chey jumped up, away from the touch of the water, and pushed her way back out through the open side window. At the last moment she reached back inside and grabbed her broken coil of spring, just before the water surged over the sill of the window and filled the cab.

In the water she kicked and stroked with her one good arm and struggled to get clear. Making all the noise in the world she scrambled out onto the shore and lay gasping on the bank, in pain, half-frozen, and still needing to get the bullet out of her arm.

In a second, she promised herself. She stared up at the stars. In a second she would start again, she would go back to digging in her flesh with a rusty piece of metal. In just a second.

Above her the aurora flickered and snapped like a wind-swept curtain. It was so beautiful. Green coruscations like waterfalls of pure light dazzled overhead. It was hard to look away. She didn’t want to.

She had to—but she could give herself a second, she thought. Just a second to look, to see one last beautiful thing. In a second, she would—

Then Chey passed out.

She had pushed herself far past human limits. She had pushed herself past the limits of wolf strength. Her body couldn’t go another minute, it was just that simple. Sleep, which had escaped her almost every night of the last twelve years, sleep which had been her greatest enemy, finally came for her and took no mercy on her plight.

She did not wake when the sun rose and warmed her chilled body. She did not wake hours later, when the moon came up too, and silver light transformed her.

Silver, silver, silver inside, silver.

The wolf stood up and panted into the wind.

Silver. Silver, silver, silver. The wolf knew exactly what was wrong. She felt weak, weaker than it had ever had before. It felt sick, and thoughts of food made her sicker. She felt hot and cold at once, and she knew she was dying. There was silver in her leg—how had it gotten there? She couldn’t even begin to imagine.

The obvious course of action presented itself. She lifted her hurt leg and grabbed it with her jaws. Pull it off. Bite it out and spit it in the poison water where it belonged. She had done as much before, to get out of chains.

Her teeth sank through her fur and then she was yelping and rolling on the ground, rolling her forehead along the hard ground, her eyes squinted tightly shut. Pain! Her teeth had touched the silver and her whole skull had erupted in pain, in agony. Her nerves sang a high thready note that buzzed in her ears and in her brains. She rolled and shook herself and warbled out a kind of muted scream until the pain had lessened a little, until she could think again.

She couldn’t bite off the leg. She couldn’t bite the silver out. Every fiber of her being cried out for relief, for comfort, but she had none to provide.

Silver, silver, silver, silver insider her, silver, poison silver!

She ran in circles. She ran in random directions as if she could get away from the pain. She tilted her head back and howled, howled and howled, yelped, mewled, roared. None of it helped. She heard the echo of an answer, a callback, from far away and she knew the other wolf must be nearby. Maybe—maybe he could help her. But would he? He had tried to kill her, hadn’t he? The facts of the matter were hazy to her, as everything in the past must be. He had tried to kill her. Would he try again?

It didn’t matter. He was the only possible source of help. She ran toward him and howled and followed his answering howls. They would meet, they would join together again, they would meet like packmates and he would help her, he would do something, something, something for her.

Before she’d even smelled him, though, a buzzing roar chopped up the night, chopped it to pieces. The helicopter came up over the far side of the junkheap and turned to come right for her.

The wolf ran.

Silver. Silver silver.

Silver in her body. Silver in the moon. Silver bullets that smacked the ground and whined away into darkness.

She ran—silver. Silver silver silver. Silver everywhere, she could smell it in the air. The only thing she was afraid of.

The wolf was very much afraid.

The wolf was terrified.

The wolf ran.

Silver. It came down like evil rain from the helicopter, bullets blasting away at the earth in the rhythm of her panting thoughts, of her laboring heart.

Silver silver silver silver silver.

She dashed around the side of the pond, her paws splashing in horrible water thick with silver run-off. The helicopter bobbed and twisted on its rotor and came after her. She ran so slowly—her body ready to give out. Still the bullets came down, invisible rays that would cut through her. Cut her to pieces.

In the distance he howled. He was closer, much closer. Still too far to help.

She ran. Bullets tore up the ground to her left, to her right. The spitting gun up there could not seem to hit anything it aimed at but she knew she had just been lucky so far. By the law of averages one of those bullets would hit her, eventually. And then she would die.

Silver cut the soil ahead of her. She wheeled and turned and ran right back toward the helicopter, as if she could charge it, as if she could leap high enough to get her claws in its metal belly. She snarled with joy as the helicopter actually bobbed in the air, rolling from side to side as if afraid of her. There were humans inside it, she knew. It was a man-made thing and there were humans, humans, humans inside, humans, she could smell the blood inside them, smell the sweat on their skin. She even recognized the particular stink of one, of the one, the one, the one who had chained her. Oh how she longed for the feel of his throat between her massive teeth.

Silver. He had the upper hand. He had the high ground. Silver silver. A bullet came so close it kicked up shards of rock that got in her eye like dust. She shook her head and feinted to the left, then darted to the right.

A good move—the helicopter swung around wildly to follow her, wobbling, nearly turning on its side. But she was growing weaker.

He howled, so close now she could hear him running. What could he do? Would he give his life for hers, take the bullet meant for her skull? She doubted it. He had wanted to kill her, kill her, kill her—

Silver passed right through her front left paw.

She yelped in surprise, then yowled in pain. Her blood made a footprint on the ground, a mark, her mark, a mark, a mark. She was panting for breath already and this new wound made her curl, made her curl up, made her curl inside her belly, made her want to lie down, to surrender, to die. But those were men up there, humans, and she would not stop for them. She would never stand down for humans.

A hill ahead of her. It would be a hard climb, even if she were at full strength. It would slow her down. But there were buildings up there, big, square, unnatural buildings men had built, men, humans, men, humans, and their shadows blocked out the stars. If she could run between them, if she could, if she could, she was tiring already, if she could get between the buildings, into their shadows, the helicopter could not follow. She dug in with her hind legs and pushed, leapt, jumped up the slope.

Silver silver silver silver silver silver silver silver silver silver silver—it did not stop, there were shafts of moonlight falling all around her, shafts of silver moonlight frozen, hardened and made cruel, made deadly. The ground beneath her churned with the soft impacts as the bullets crashed around her.

There—the top of the slope, the top, the crest, the summit, she could see it. She pushed and pushed and shoved herself through the air, leapt like a salmon leaping upstream. Ahead of her the buildings stood, wrong and square, her only possible salvation. She dashed down a side street and silver silver silver behind her, silver, she had no energy left, she could not run, she could only cower, silver silver silver.

A bullet passed within inches of her spine. It lodged in her liver and she felt her body surge with a new wave of poison. She screamed, screamed in horror and pain and rolled, rolled on her side and kept rolling, slid into a shadow, rolled into darkness. A bullet pranged off the metal side of a building just above her head.

Silver inside her, silver, silver inside her, silver in her guts, silver in her leg. She could not take another step, the pain was just too great. She collapsed in a heap, then strained, pushed, lifted herself onto her feet. She gathered up her breath and gave voice to one last howl, a cry of a dying being, a plaintive, one-note symphony, plangent, eloquent, sad.

Above her the helicopter sank through the cold air, its noise so big, so loud, so big. Silver, once, banged off the building face, even closer to her this time. Silver again. Bang. The helicopter dropped farther, dropped to the level of the building’s roof. There was nothing she could do but watch.

Then he, the other wolf, leapt from the roof of the building and got his claws in the plastic bubble of the helicopter. His body swung like a pendulum, loose and muscular, as the helicopter rolled and dipped and turned. His weight pulled it around, dragged it through the air. He was shaken free almost instantly, his body thrown through the air, but not before he had overbalanced the helicopter on its rotor, made it list to one side.

The tip of the rotor kissed the corrugated tin wall of the building with a high-pitched shriek. In that contest neither side could win—the wall peeled open as if by the effect of a giant can opener, while the composite resin of the rotor splintered and snapped. The helicopter slewed around on a wide arc, suddenly off-center of its own angular momentum. As if a giant had thrown it like a discus it swerved through the air, out of control, until it smashed into the side of another building. Then it just dropped like a rock. Sounds of tearing metal, of crumpling plastic, and of human screams followed. There was a flicker of light and then fire lit up Port Radium for the first time in decades as the helicopter’s fuel caught, all at once. It didn’t burn for long.

He came for her, the other wolf. She had seen him fall through the air, and though she had not heard him smack into the ground she knew he must have been hurt when he landed. He did favor one hind leg—maybe the other had broken on impact. He did not mewl or whine as he slinked through the shadows, his muzzle twitching as he sniffed for her.

When he found her she was barely conscious. Her breath came in and out, in and out, shallow draughts of air wheezing in and out, in and out of her lungs. It was not even panting but the labored breathing of those about to die.

She had silver inside her. She was poisoned and she was done for. He showed her no mercy. With his powerful jaws he tore at her, pulled her apart. He ripped open her guts and they spilled with a rank smell across the broken road surface. He tore off her leg and threw it into the darkness like so much meat.

The pain was intense but she could not complain or fight him off. She lacked the energy to even raise her head. He tore and bit and ripped her apart and she could only experience it passively, as if from some remove.

When he was done, when all the silver was torn out of her body and cast away from her, she breathed a little easier, and then she sank into a fitful sleep. He stood watch over her throughout the night, occasionally howling as the moon rode its arc across the night sky. Occasionally he would lick her face, her ears, to wake her up, to keep her from fading out of existence altogether. Once when he could not wake her he grabbed her by the back of the neck and shook her violently until her eyes cracked open and her tongue leapt from her mouth and she croaked out a whine of outrage.

When the moon sank behind the buildings of Port Radium, she was glad for it. For the first time ever the wolf was glad for the change.

Chey woke curled in a ball, naked, cold, hungry, and in massive amounts of pain, but she was alive. She lifted her left arm and saw there was no silver there. Nor was there any bullet wound. She touched herself all over, felt her smooth skin and found it unbroken.

Her head pounded but she rolled up to a sitting posture. She had no idea what had happened during the night. She knew somehow, though, that Bobby was dead. The exact circumstances eluded her but she was sure of it.

“Here,” Powell said, and threw her a blanket. He’d been standing behind her the whole time. He was wrapped in a blanket himself and he sat down next to her, close enough that his body heat warmed her a little. She snuggled closer to him and pulled his arm around her shoulders.

“You forgiven me or something?” he asked.

“Never,” she told him.

“But things have changed between us.”

She dug her face into his blanket. Her nose was freezing.

“I guess they have,” he said. “You still want to kill me?”

She shrugged her shoulders. That wasn’t good enough, though. “No,” she said, and the act of saying it made it true.

“Fair enough,” he said.

The sun was halfway up the sky when they moved again. They’d both heard a sound, a familiar and unwanted sound. The noise a helicopter makes as it cuts up the air. Together, pulling their blankets close around themselves, they jumped up and moved around the side of the abandoned hangar, keeping to the shadows.

A big double-rotor helicopter passed over the buildings of Port Radium. Chey recognized the symbol on its side, a red maple leaf inside a blue circle. She also had a feeling she knew who was inside.

Before Powell could stop her she ran out into the parking lot and waved her arms at the helicopter. The pilot brought it around and then dropped to a soft landing twenty meters away. A hatch opened on its side and soldiers in blue-gray uniforms jumped out. Behind them came a man in a dark blue suit. It looked like a uniform but it wasn’t. The man was retired and he wasn’t even Canadian.

Chey couldn’t hear anything over the noise of the rotors. Uncle Bannerman gestured at the solders and they all stood back. Then he dashed over toward her, only stopping when she held her hands out, warning him to keep his distance. “Listen,” she said, “I’m okay. Everything’s okay. But I’m going to change in a little while.” She could feel the moon trembling on the horizon. In fifteen minutes, maybe less, it would rise. She didn’t know if the soldiers standing in formation by the helicopter had silver bullets. She didn’t want to find out. “You have to go now.”

He stared right into her eyes. The way he always had. Then he glanced sideways at Powell, who was lingering in the shadowy entrance of the hangar building. Bannerman studied Powell for a second and then looked back at her.

“Is he…?” Bannerman asked.

The lycanthrope who ate my brother, your father. She could see the words in her uncle’s eyes.

“Yes,” she said.

“I have equipment with me. I can keep you safe. I can keep you from hurting anyone,” he told her. It was a question.

She could guess what kind of equipment he meant. Chains. Cages. Maybe he wanted to take her back to his ranch in Colorado, where he could lock her in a shed every time the moon came up. Maybe he wanted to take her to a government lab somewhere where they could study her.

“I’m going with him,” she said. Powell took a step forward but she waved him back. “We’ll go where there aren’t any people.”

There was a lot more to be said—Bannerman clearly wanted to argue with her—but she had no more time. She was going to change any minute.

“I don’t know what happened to Fenech,” he said, finally, “but I doubt the Canadians will just leave you alone.” It was a warning—not a threat, not an attempt to make her change her mind. It was important information she needed to know. She thanked him with a nod.

Three minutes later the helicopter was in the air and headed south.

A moment later the moon rose, and two wolves headed north.