Overwinter

by David Wellington

  “Whatever,” Chey said, wishing Powell would just get on with it.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “the balance is lopsided. Sometimes the wolf gets stronger with each transformation and the human … starts to weaken. The human becomes more and more wolflike. The wolf asserts dominance over the human. It can go the other way as well, which is maybe worse. I can only imagine what it would be like to wake up in the body of a wolf but with a human mind. It must be torture. But in the cases we’re talking about, the cases where the wolf predominates, it eventually leads to—well, to the human losing. Dying, in every way that matters.”

  Chey’s breath came fast in her throat. She felt like her heart might stop. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.”

  “It gets worse when the human is under stress. When you were poisoned, your human half thought it was going to die, and it gave in. The wolf took over. Now you’re getting better and you’re stronger. You, your human self, is stronger.”

  “Alright,” Chey said.

  “You need to fight it as long as you can,” he said.

  And that was it. That was all he was going to tell her. He lay back, not even looking at her.

  She couldn’t let it go, though. “So—so—we cure this. We figure out a way to make this stop happening. I could do Zen meditation. I could do really highbrow mental human stuff, like, like listening to classical music or playing chess. You’ll help me make chess pieces, right, Powell? You’ll teach me how to play?”

  “Chey, I—”

  “You must know how to play chess. I mean, you look like the type,” she said. She was starting to get hysterical, and she knew it. “Because we can beat this. You didn’t say we couldn’t, which must mean that we can. Right? Tell me how to beat this.”

  He reached for her hand. She pulled it away.

  “Don’t,” she said.

  “I can’t lie to you, Chey. I’ve heard of this happening many times. I’ve never heard of anyone who recovered from it.”

  Chey sat up so fast that she hit the ceiling with her forehead. Cold, wet dirt cascaded down the neck of her shirt. Come on, she thought. Give me something. But she knew what he had said was true—he couldn’t lie to her. He never had before.

  “You’ve heard of it happening. You’ve heard stories. But there’s more,” she said. “Lucie said something, when I was on your back, wolfing out. She said—she said—God, what was it? She said my mind was gone. Which was a little fucking presumptive, lady.” She turned and snarled at Lucie.

  Snarled the way a wolf snarls.

  Lucie’s eyes caught the wan morning light, what there was of it, and sparkled.

  “She said something else, too,” Chey went on, trying to ignore the sound she’d just made. “She said—‘Her mind is gone. You’ve seen it happen before.’ ” Chey rubbed the dirt off her face and chest. “You’ve seen it. Who? Who was it this happened to?” She considered the possibilities. Powell had told her many stories of Lucie before, but the only other werewolf he’d ever spoken of by name had been—“the Baroness.” She shook her head. “Oh my God. This happened to the Baroness.”

  “Yes,” Powell said.

  “What happened to her? Where is she now?” Chey grabbed the front of Powell’s shirt and tugged at it, demanding that he tell her more. “What happened to her?”

  “That I won’t tell you,” he said.

  Lucie laughed. “I will,” she said. “I was there, also.”

  Powell made a warning noise, deep in his throat.

  “Damn it, Powell. I have a right to know,” Chey said.

  He didn’t deny it.

  26.

  Lucie told her story, then, and Chey was rapt with attention.

  “Some things you already know. In nineteen seventeen Monty came to France as a soldier to the Great War, and there I met him. I was living at the time with my great-great-grand-niece Élodie, whom you know only as the Baroness. We fell in love with Monty and made him like us so we could have him forever. But it was not to be.

  “The story of what happened to Élodie takes place in the year nineteen twenty-one, when we were still living in our castle, at Clichy-sous-Vallée. During the war we were a most happy family together, the three of us. After the peace, though, things became very difficult for us, and we were forced to leave France owing to a grave misunderstanding.”

  Powell grunted. “The locals didn’t understand why wolves kept eating their pigs when real wolves had been extinct in France for centuries.”

  “Cher. I am telling this, no?”

  Powell raised one hand in apology. “Alright,” he said, “go on. But don’t lie to her. If you think she needs to know this, then fine. But tell her all of it.”

  “I will endeavor to speak only truths. In nineteen twenty-one I had been changing for some hundreds of years. Élodie and Monty were new to it. They had become loups-garou much at the same time—I had given to her the curse only days before I met him—and it was my duty to teach them all I knew of our ways. I taught them to hunt, and how to conceal their double nature when the moon was down. It was also my duty to introduce them to the society of the great families of Europe. When we closed down our castle at Clichy-sous-Vallée for the last time, it was a sad thing, but I knew we had many friends who would be kind enough to take us in as their guests. Élodie and I were of noble blood, you see, and so we had many cousins in the grand houses of Europe. Many of those cousins had wolves living under their roofs, and would understand our plight, I thought.

  “We traveled into lands that had been stricken by the war, places where refugees were common and a man and two women traveling together were not so strange a sight. We even had a big motor truck which was always breaking down in the wilderness, but which had room in the back for a silver cage, so that when the change found us we could contain ourselves, and hurt no one—”

  “My idea,” Powell insisted.

  “—which was Monty’s clever notion, I was just about to say that. You must understand that at this time things in Europe were very different. Now you can travel from Paris to Berlin, and along the way you will never be away from a superhighway, and there are people and their ugly little houses the whole way. Back then it was different, and still much of the country was wild. There were river valleys and whole mountains where no one ever went, and forests whose trees reached higher to heaven than the spires of cathedrals, with branches so thick and so woven together that it was always night beneath them. The roads were often as not unpaved, and always bumpy. When we saw people, it was always a little family on a farm very far from any town. So it was safe for us to travel and we were able to keep our secret close.

  “Our cousins were always gracious, and took us in out of courtesy and compassion—”

  “Or fear we would come back and kill them if they didn’t,” Powell chimed in.

  “Cher! You do them too little credit. In Spain we stayed with a great man who was one like us, who lived in a house made all of silver built in the courtyard of his castle. In Venice—oh, Venice!—we had a house all our own, with a door that let onto the canal, and boats at our disposal day or night. It was in Prussia, though—that is part of Germany—that our story takes its tragic turn.

  “At first it seemed a dream come true. I had a distant cousin there, the Graf von Krafft-Ebing, a very important man. Until nineteen nineteen he had been one of the most important men in Germany, and even then, during the Weimar Republic, he was influential. And quite wealthy, of course. He had a big estate out in the country that was quite a fashionable place to be invited to dine. Writers, artists, decadents of all stripes would come there to be seen, though always they must leave before the moon rose. The popular opinion was that the Graf had lost his mind and developed a phobia of the moon, but of course you will have guessed the real reason. He had a son named Gustav—though we always called him Tavin—upon whom he doted, and who was one like us.

  “The Graf welcomed us into his home with open arms. He was a portly man with a red face and bri
ght eyes. He was very glad to have us, as we represented good society for his son. He thought we would be of an improving nature for Tavin and we did our best to teach him what we had learned. We had a suite of rooms all our own, with two beds—though we only ever used one—and a bath to ourselves, and any food or drink we desired any time of day or night. Best of all, we were given a little iron key which opened a silver gate at the back of the castle. Beyond that gate was a stretch of forested land many hectares in size, walled all around with stone, that was the Graf’s private hunting ground. It was his gift to Tavin, and made perfect for such as us. It was stocked well with game for us to chase and catch, and where our wolves could run and be free as nature had intended, without possibility of reproach. The six months we stayed there were among the happiest in my life. How I wish they could have never ended. But of course for poor Élodie, it would not prove so pleasant.”

  Lucie’s voice drifted off a little at the end and it was clear she didn’t relish telling what came next. Chey took advantage of the pause to turn toward Powell and ask him a question. “How much of this is how you remember it?”

  “Oh, she’s telling it pretty straight,” he replied. “Though maybe she makes the Graf sound better than he actually was. He loved Tavin alright, but when it came to other people … well, when she says he stocked that hunting ground with game, you probably thought of deer, or maybe rabbits, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It was more like drifters, criminals, and people who owed him money.”

  27.

  “That’s horrible,” Chey said. “He let his son hunt people?”

  “None of them were innocent,” Lucie insisted. “These were rapists and thieves.”

  “For the most part. It didn’t mean they deserved to die like that.” Powell grunted in distaste. “Chey, you have to understand something about people like the Graf. The nobility in Germany back then didn’t think of themselves as the same species as the peasantry. The artists and the courtesans who came to the Graf’s party were like the prize-winners at a country fair to him, but his son was born to be a great man. Nothing Tavin ever did, or wanted to do, could be wrong.”

  “And you lived under this guy’s roof?”

  Powell shrugged. “I genuinely thought I could help the boy. Teach him better and break the cycle. Or maybe … if I’m truly honest with myself, maybe I was just tired of running. It was pretty comfortable there.”

  “Tavin was a sweet child,” Lucie said, as if there had been no interruption. “How I remember the blush upon his cheeks. He would bring me posies of wildflowers picked from his private hills, and let me strew them in his long blond hair. He saved the best of the blooms for Élodie, however. He was under the impression that Monty and I alone were married, and that Élodie was like a sister to me. He could not imagine that we three were joined in union, because no such thing would ever have been allowed in the very proper society that raised him. So it could not exist. Élodie was the first werewolf he ever met whom his father considered eligible to mate with him. He was not likely to meet another for a very long time. Do you understand what must happen in this case? He fell in love. For the same reason any boy falls in love with any pretty girl. Because she was there, and because she did not instantly refuse him.

  “Élodie was already mated, for life, to Monty. Yet she could not tell the boy as much. Certainly not when it would get back to his father. The scandal would be too much, and we three would be sent back out into the cold. If not worse. So we let young Tavin have his fantasies. It was a time of very long courtships, and it seemed the boy would take forever to ask for Élodie’s hand.

  “I think, had we led him to believe that I was the available one, things may have gone very differently.

  “For poor Élodie knew so little of life. Before I gave to her the curse, she had been a sheltered girl, never allowed to stray from the castle where she was born. Now she was being asked to play a part beyond her abilities. She claimed she understood our ruse, but I wonder if she did not come to love Tavin a little bit. He was so very kind to her, which is ever the way to a woman’s heart. That heart was not hers to give, and I believe the fracture between these two desires drove a wedge into her sanity.”

  Powell rolled over to face the two women. It seemed he had to interrupt. “Come on, we knew well before then she was having trouble. When I first met her she was clearly shell-shocked. She could barely speak. She was walking around with a candelabra that wasn’t lit. Afterward, when I understood what had broken her sanity—because I was going through it, too—I tried to help her, but she would never talk about the things we did. And then she started to slip away. Become less human, and more wolf. She would wake up growling and for an hour or so in the morning she wasn’t human at all. She couldn’t bear to wear any underclothes because they just felt wrong against her skin. It was all we could do to keep her from going naked all the time. And then there was what happened in Venice. That should have been an obvious warning.”

  “Ah. Yes. Venice,” Lucie said, as if his words had recalled to her something she’d forgotten from a shopping list. “But that was not so much. We had a room in a tower, there, where we would retire when the change was coming on us. It had silver bars on the windows and the door, so our wolves could not escape. There was a bed in the room, and the three of us shared it, and that one particular morning, when we woke together—”

  “Élodie rolled over and bit my throat,” Powell said. His voice was hollow, almost emotionless. “Took a chunk right out of it. There was blood everywhere. Lucie tried to pull her off of me and Élodie slashed Lucie’s face with her fingernails. It took both of us to finally pin her down and all that day—until our next change—we had to hold her arms. She squirmed and shook and screamed at us. Howled at us, sometimes demanding that we let her go, sometimes just growling like an animal. We were humans and she was still a wolf, and she wanted nothing but to destroy us. When we finally changed it was such a relief. But then the next morning we were ready for it to start again. When we woke we were ready to fight her off once more. We didn’t have to, though.”

  “What happened?” Chey asked. She had to know.

  “I awoke,” Lucie said, “and jumped out of the bed ready to restrain Élodie, only to find her sitting before a vanity mirror, carefully pinning up her hair. She gave me a warm smile and asked if there was any chocolate for breakfast.”

  “She had no idea that anything had happened,” Powell went on. “She couldn’t remember the day before at all. When we insisted, when we showed her all the blood on the sheets, she only blushed and looked away and claimed she’d had her—her, you know. That she’d gotten her monthly bill.”

  “Like, her period?” Chey asked.

  “Don’t be crass, jeune fille,” Lucie said. “I will admit, it was a disturbing episode. But we did not want to believe it was part of an overall pattern. It happened rarely that she would fail to recover her humanity upon awakening, and I for one was polite enough not to make much mention of it.

  “Yet when Tavin started to plead his love for her, and fall upon her knees and beg her to say she loved him too—”

  “It started to get worse,” Powell said, his voice very soft.

  28.

  “I—I can see where this is going,” Chey said. She was terrified by the story Lucie was telling her, and she suspected that was the very reason why Lucie had chosen to relate it. Lucie wanted her to squirm. To live in terror of what was happening to her, now. “Every time she changed, when she woke up, she had a harder time shaking off her wolf, right? It was always with her.”

  “Sometimes … she would seem so normal. So human. She would be walking with Tavin and they would be talking like young people,” Powell said. A deep sadness had entered his voice. “Or we would be taking a meal and she would be correcting my etiquette—telling me which spoon to eat my soup with.” He sighed. “And out of nowhere it would come over her. Her face would change. She would stop talking. She seemed to lo
se the ability to speak. She would look around as if she had no idea where she was and her lip would curl back in a snarl. It was like her mind wanted to transform, even when her body wasn’t ready.”

  “When the moon was still below the horizon,” Lucie pointed out. “You know how good it feels to change. To become that thing, so powerful, so self-assured. Élodie’s human life could not compare. It was a maze of confusions and little pains. Every little shock, every frustration she felt would send her running for the comfort, the peace, that only our wolves can know.”

  Powell cleared his throat. He hadn’t wanted to tell this story before, but now it seemed like he needed to get it off his chest. “We hid it as best we could. The Graf had been pretty clear on one thing: we were welcome in his house only as long as none of his guests ever suspected there might be something different about his son.”

  “It was not easy. We kept Élodie apart from the Graf and his human servants, as much as possible. Especially at mealtimes. Élodie could not bear to have anyone touch her food but one of us. Should a footman attempt to clear her plate before every morsel was finished she would snap and bite at his arm. Should anyone be so clumsy as to drop a fork on the castle’s flagstones, the noise would send her dashing for the hunting grounds, where she would strip off her clothes and run as best she might on all fours.

  “Tavin was our great ally in this deception. When his father would ask why Élodie did not dine with him, or why her clothes seemed to fit her improperly, he would make up one thousand excuses, or simply say she chose to spend all her time with him. He believed so fervently in her love. In their future together.

  “But then the time came, when we could pretend no longer. There was a ball, a formal event. Guests of great importance were coming. All the avant garde that the Graf wished to impress—millionaire heiresses from America, cabaret stars from Berlin, a cousin of the Czar of Russia who intended to raise an army and take his country back from Lenin. The cars that pulled up in front of the castle were like none we’d ever seen before, sleek, powerful things that throbbed with speed. The fashions the guests wore were daring or provocative but always so chic. The servants, so many servants for these wonderful people, so many they had to build a city of tents outside the castle wall for them to live in. It was like a great sparkling galaxy of light and color had descended on our tiny world in the country. There was music playing, all the time. Jazz! Hot jazz, of a kind we had never heard before. It stirred the blood. Excited all the passions.”