Overwinter

by David Wellington

  “You two, go on,” he insisted, as he struggled to hold her down.

  Chey and Powell did as they were told, because it was their only chance. Together they raced out onto the ice of the frozen lake, and headed for the island, and whatever was there, waiting for them.

  94.

  Chey’s bare feet slid on the ice. Under a light powdering of snow it was as slick as glass and she kept falling onto all fours. Every time she landed on her hands and knees, she looked down and thought she saw paws.

  Don’t, she told the wolf inside her head. Just don’t. The wolf could barely hear her, though. It was so close—close to what, Chey didn’t know. But it could taste this place in its oldest memories. It remembered this lake, this island, so vividly that it was panting loud enough to deafen her.

  Powell was calling to her, from ten meters away. He was reaching for her as if he wanted her to come to him. She shook her head. She couldn’t hear what he was saying. Struggling, slipping, she got back on her feet. Two feet, like a human being.

  For the moment. She looked up at the horizon and though there was nothing to see there she knew—knew, in absolute factual terms—that the moon was coming back. If it came before she reached the cave, what then? Varkanin would die. The soldiers would come and find her, and Powell, in wolf form. They wouldn’t hesitate or make any blunders this time. They would shoot them from the air, like Americans did in Alaska, shoot the wolves from on high. And that would be an ending.

  An ending. Any ending seemed welcome, now.

  But there could be a better one than that.

  She slid her feet forward across the ice, keeping her balance by flailing her arms. Caught up with Powell and climbed with him up onto the rocky shore of the island. There wasn’t much to it, just a pile of smooth black rocks dusted with snow. No plants grew on the island, not even lichens or brush. There were no bird droppings or animal tracks to suggest that anything living ever came here.

  Of course not, she thought. This is a place of death.

  It wasn’t her thought. Yet it wasn’t a wolfish thought, either—her wolf couldn’t think in English.

  “Stop,” she said, to Amuruq. Ahead of her Powell turned around, a look of annoyed puzzlement creasing his face.

  “No, no,” she said. “Not you.”

  His face cleared. “She’s talking to you,” he said.

  Chey put a hand to her mouth, ashamed. Ashamed by her weakness, by the fact that the wolf had grown so strong inside of her and she couldn’t keep it contained.

  “She spoke to me, once,” he told her. He held out one hand and helped her scramble on top of a huge boulder. “Just the once. She told me how to do this.”

  Chey nodded. “She wants this. But she’s afraid, too. Afraid it won’t work.”

  Powell licked his lips and studied the rocks before him. There was no sign of a cave entrance.

  What if the rocks had collapsed and the cave was inaccessible now? What if it was full of old snow, a hundred meters deep? Snow never melted up here; even in midsummer it lingered in the shadows. What if—what if they couldn’t—because—

  “We can’t do this without Lucie,” she said, because it was a terrifying thought, and saying it out loud was the only way to fight it.

  He picked up a boulder as big as his torso and flung it away from the heap. Grabbed another, and then another, rolled them down onto the ice. Soon he had revealed a tunnel, a dark den entrance just wide enough for a wolf or a human being to wriggle through. A smell came wafting up out of the hole that startled Chey. It smelled like her mother’s freezer. Like dead meat, frozen so long it started to rot even at subzero temperatures.

  This is a place of death, the wolf said, inside her head. This is a tomb.

  My tomb.

  “Powell,” Chey said, to get the noise out of her head. “Powell, did you hear me?” He was already reaching inside the hole, searching it with his hand, checking to make sure it went all the way down. The smell hadn’t been enough to convince him, but Chey knew. Knew for sure, this was the way. “I said, we can’t do this without Lucie.”

  “No,” he told her.

  “No—just—just no? We can’t? We’re wasting our time here?”

  He withdrew his arm and looked at her for a long time. His eyes were hungry. He wanted to devour her. Wanted to seize and possess her, right here, even now. Wanted something from her she had refused to give him. This wasn’t about him. It was about her, about Chey. About the lengths he would go to for her.

  “No,” he said again, “as in, no, you’re wrong. We can still do it. With or without Lucie. Let’s go.”

  95.

  Varkanin was dying, cell by cell.

  The curse fought with the silver in his body. It raged and fumed and snatched at him, piece by piece, trying to change him, destroying itself even as it grew and fought. His human body could not withstand that onslaught.

  He writhed on the ground, his limbs twitching as he fought for control. As he pushed himself past his own limits, just to roll over on his side. He vomited explosively onto the snow. He curled around his stomach as it heaved and heaved again. Sweat slicked his face and the palms of his hands.

  Death was coming, and it would take from him his last chance of revenge.

  That must not be allowed to happen.

  He could not see Lucie. She must have run off. But he intended to find her again before he drew his last breath.

  Somehow he got up onto his knees. He clutched at his face, because it was burning. He clutched at his chest because he could feel his heart racing so fast it might tear itself loose from its moorings. He cursed and spat and turned every ounce of his considerable willpower just to stopping the trembling, to keep himself from shaking to pieces.

  Eventually, it worked.

  His lungs throbbed like bellows as he worked to calm himself. His eyes stared from his head and then clamped closed as a new wave of pain and nausea swept through him. But he did not fall down. He did not go into convulsions. He did not die.

  Not yet.

  There was nothing he longed for more than the sweet release of oblivion. Yet his work was not done. He need only look over toward the quiescent face of Sharon Minik to know that.

  Sharon—who looked nothing at all like his three lovely daughters. They had been blond, with their dear mother’s sharp features and gracefully long limbs. Sharon was short, and squat, and her hair was black as Raven’s wings. Yet for a while, he had known a very broken kind of peace, when he had spoken with Sharon. When he had seen the life and youth in her. It had made him weak, of course. Peace always did—it was inner turmoil that gave a man strength, in Varkanin’s philosophy. His affection for Sharon had cost him everything. If he had not felt obligated to find the cure for her, he would never have trusted the werewolves.

  Now Sharon was dead. He owed her something. Something like what he owed his three perished daughters.

  When the helicopter appeared on the horizon, a blurred smudge of darkness like an especially large black fly, when it took a bearing directly toward him, he forced his body to be quiet. The war inside him raged on, but he refused to let it overcome him. He was a man, and there are things in this world a man must do before he dies.

  The helicopter came in low and made a cautious landing half a kilometer away. Varkanin had moved by then, taking shelter in the strange rock formation on the far shore of the lake. He made sure not to be too stealthy, too invisible when he picked his hiding place. It was important—vital—that the soldiers in the helicopter knew where he was.

  Of course, he need not make it too easy for them. They were special forces, trained in tracking and pursuit. Trained in the extraction of violent men from defensible positions. They would be disciplined. They would be very well armed. Varkanin did not even have his pistol anymore, because Lucie had taken it from him. He was only one man, and there were four soldiers coming for him.

  But Varkanin had been trained by the Spetsnaz. The special forces of the Soviet
Union, whose combat prowess had been legendary. He was older now, and had not fought soldiers in many years. But he thought he remembered a few tricks.

  96.

  The tunnel went down quite a ways. In places the ceiling was so low that Powell and Chey had to crawl. In others it was big enough that four people could have walked through it abreast. It ran straight enough that light from outside streamed down its length, which was good—otherwise it would have been pitch black inside.

  Powell did not say a word as he headed down into the depths of the earth. He gestured to Chey occasionally, to warn her to watch her head, or to urge her to hurry onward. Chey tried to match his silence—this was a sacred place, after all, and it felt like any words she spoke would disturb its ancient and very sad peace. But then she tripped over something and scraped her hand badly on a rock as she fell forward.

  “Fuck!” she shouted.

  The obscenity echoed up and down the tunnel, rolling along the ceiling, coming back as echoes louder than the original profanity. Powell swung around to stare at her.

  She bit her lip and looked down to see what she had tripped over.

  “Oh my God,” she said, and danced sideways. There was a skull half-buried in the floor. Another one, a few meters away, caught her eye and she shoved the knuckle of her index finger into her mouth to keep from swearing again.

  When you looked for them, bones were everywhere. Not just skulls. Rib cages and pelvises and arm bones and most of a skeletal hand. Some were broken and worn away by time. Some collapsed into dust when she touched them. Others looked almost fresh. One skull she saw still had patches of hair attached to its crown.

  “Who—this couldn’t be—are these the bones of the last of the Sivullir?” she asked.

  Powell frowned. He picked up one of the skulls and studied it carefully. “No,” he said. “These are the bones of werewolves.”

  Chey stared at him.

  He came over and showed her the skull in his hand. The jaw was stretched forward and the teeth were pointed and wicked. The eye sockets looked human, though, and the braincase was round like a human’s. It was half wolf and half human.

  Chey shook her head. “No, that’s not possible.”

  He raised one eyebrow and held the skull out toward her.

  “When we change, we go directly from our human shape to our wolf shape. There isn’t some weird half-and-half form in between. It’s just a flash of silver light and then it’s done.”

  Powell nodded. “I know.”

  “So what is that thing?” she demanded.

  He set the skull gently on the floor of the tunnel, exactly where he’d found it. “I’m guessing we aren’t the first werewolves to come here, looking for the cure. I would be surprised if we were. But no one has ever done it right. Maybe if you do it wrong—this is what happens.”

  His eyes went very wide, then, startling her. Had he seen something behind her? Was one of these hybrid abominations lurking back there, waiting to grab her, or—?

  Then she felt what he had felt. She felt Amuruq pacing madly back and forth inside her skull. An animal trapped in a cage.

  Do it right, the wolf spirit said. Do it now, she demanded.

  Then she was gone.

  Chey covered her face in her hands. “You heard that, too?”

  “Yes,” Powell told her.

  “Okay.”

  Without another word they headed deeper into the tunnel. The light was growing very thin by the time they reached the bottom, but at least one stray beam of sunlight touched on the cave down there.

  It was not as big as Chey had expected. Maybe five meters across, the ceiling like a dome that made her feel very hemmed in and claustrophobic. The dome was painted everywhere with pictures of animals and people, but time and moisture had so damaged the paint that it was impossible to make anything out clearly.

  The floor was covered in bones. They crunched under Chey’s feet as she stepped inside. She couldn’t begin to guess how many skeletons were strewn around the floor. There was nothing else in the cave. No remains of Sivullir magic. No old fire rings or even old broken pots. The silver ulu was nowhere to be seen.

  “It must be here,” Powell said. “Raven said it would be.”

  “He’s famous for lying every time he gets the chance,” Chey pointed out.

  Powell shook his head. “I know that, but he lies by twisting the truth, not by making things up. The ulu must be here somewhere. There should be something else, a little leather bag.” He started stirring through the bones, because if those objects were anywhere they must be hidden under the pile. “Help me find it! We don’t have much time.”

  Chey didn’t want to touch the weird twisted bones. Just looking at them made her feel funny. But he was right, they were on a deadline—the moon would be up, soon. And the soldiers were still coming for them.

  She got down on her knees and dug in.

  97.

  Up in the helicopter Preston Holness watched it all through binoculars. Standing next to him, Sergeant Matthieu relayed his instructions through the radio.

  The four soldiers spread out around the rock in perfect formation. They kept their weapons up and ready and covered one another’s field of fire in textbook fashion. Periodically each of them checked in over the radio, so they all knew where the others were, and they could not be surprised. Sergeant Matthieu seemed pleased with their discipline. Holness didn’t give a shit, as long as they killed Varkanin.

  The Russian must have chosen this spot, Holness thought, because it was so similar to where everything had gone wrong the last time. Where six of the soldiers had died. These rocks were similar to the ones where the werewolves hid back then. They provided plenty of hiding places, and they would be difficult to storm. The soldiers knew that. They were not going to make the same mistake again and attack it en masse.

  The helicopter drifted slowly inward, toward the rocks, to provide visual intelligence. “Keep us out of pistol range,” Holness told the pilot.

  “Give him a reason to move,” Sergeant Matthieu said, into the radio.

  One of the soldiers raised an arm in the air and threw a hand signal. The others shifted position, moving in to cover him. He clambered up into the rocks, then jumped back down in a hurry, trying to draw Varkanin out.

  Nothing happened. The radios squawked again. The soldiers held their positions.

  “Anything?” Holness asked.

  The lead soldier climbed back into the rocks. “I heard something,” he said. “Something moved. Somebody come up here and cover me.”

  A second soldier climbed up beside him. Together they scanned the rocks with their weapons. The lead unit moved a little further in. The pile of rocks was like a maze. There were footprints in the snow, he said.

  “Up ahead of my position, about five meters,” he went on. “That would be a great place for an ambush. Sight lines are limited.”

  “You know what to do,” Sergeant Matthieu told him.

  The soldier nodded—Holness was watching him from above. He reached down to his belt and detached a smoke grenade. “I’m going to try to flush him out. Everybody move back, but be ready to catch him when he runs for it.”

  The radios bleated a confirmation.

  The lead soldier popped the pin off his grenade and tossed it into the labyrinth of rocks. It hissed and spun around as it pumped out hundreds of cubic feet of sweet-smelling smoke. The fumes billowed out of the rocks in thick clouds that hung nearly motionless in the still air.

  “He doesn’t have any breathing gear, we’re sure of that?” Holness asked. The radio confirmed that none had been seen on Varkanin’s person.

  Sergeant Matthieu gave a tight little nod. Sweat had formed on his upper lip. “Okay, he’ll either run or suffocate. Stand by to—”

  Suddenly the soldier was gone. Vanished. The soldier covering him rushed forward to catch sight of him but he was just—gone.

  Inside the smoke cloud someone screamed, just for a moment. Th
en there was silence again.

  Preston Holness itched all over. The tactical clothing he wore was made of nylon—manmade fibers!—and it didn’t breathe. He was sweating inside his werewolf-proof vest and he had a sudden urge to loosen his neck tie, even though he wasn’t wearing one.

  The radios went wild, squawking and beeping as the soldiers tried to understand what had happened, what could possibly have gone wrong. “Give me information, damn it,” Holness shouted. One of the soldiers was foolish enough to lower his weapon as he tried to answer. There was a gunshot and then a red blotch appeared on the hood of his parka. He collapsed in a heap.

  “No!” Holness shouted. Sergeant Matthieu started yelling for the ground units to return fire.

  The remaining two soldiers responded instantly, shooting blind into the smoke. “I can’t see him!” one of them shouted. “Where the hell is he? He’s using our own smoke for cover—who the hell is this guy?”

  He never received an answer to his question. A bullet caught him in the chest and he was dead before his body could fall to the snow.

  “Come on,” Holness grunted. As if he could make Varkanin appear by yelling for him. But the Russian stayed hidden in the smoke.

  The last remaining soldier turned and ran. He kept his rifle low and ready in his hands, and he glanced behind himself frequently, but clearly he was far more intent on getting away, escaping, than in watching out for the killer in the rocks.

  Finally Varkanin emerged from the smoke, his face covered by the respirator mask of the lead soldier. The first one to die. In his hands he held the assault rifle he’d taken away from that same soldier, after he yanked him into the smoke. Holness had no doubt that soldier was dead.