Overwinter

by David Wellington

  Taking his time, Varkanin ejected the weapon’s magazine. It was loaded with silver bullets. He let the clip fall to the ground. Holness understood why he did that. Silver bullets were notoriously inaccurate and useless at any kind of range. Nor were they needed for this target. There was another magazine, this one full of traditional lead ammunition, taped to the receiver of the assault rifle. Calmly, with hands that had performed this action a hundred times before, he pulled the replacement magazine free, then slapped it into the weapon and locked it home. Then he lifted it to his eye.

  The soldier running away from him fired back over his shoulder, burning through his own ammunition in one furious burst. The silver bullets pinged and bounced all around Varkanin, but none of them came close to hitting him.

  “Shit,” Holness barked.

  The Russian waited until the other soldier was done with his pointless attack. He adjusted his own weapon for single fire. Then he took aim and squeezed his trigger. There was a cracking noise, and the last of Holness’s soldiers dropped to the ground, lifeless.

  Varkanin lowered his weapon. Then he looked up at the helicopter. To Preston Holness, up there in the helicopter, it felt like the Russian was staring him right in the eye. Varkanin lifted his rifle to his eye again and fired. One bullet. Two.

  “Move,” Holness told the pilot. “Up, up, go up!”

  The helicopter’s engine whined as the pilot grasped for more altitude. The big aircraft wasn’t built for fast maneuvers. Varkanin lined up another shot. Took it.

  “Jesus, can he hit us from there?” Holness’s heart was pounding in his chest.

  Sergeant Matthieu shrugged. “It’s unlikely, a tricky shot even for a marksman, but—”

  A bullet struck the bottom of the helicopter’s fuselage. It sound like a stone being tossed into an aluminum pot, an almost comical sound, but it made Holness scream like a little girl. “If he does hit us?” he demanded.

  “If he hit a fuel line, or worse, the hydraulics,” Sergeant Matthieu said, “it could—”

  Another bullet cracked one of the side windows.

  “Get us the fuck out of here,” Holness shouted at the pilot. He had just ruined a very expensive pair of silk boxer shorts.

  “But the objective,” the sergeant insisted.

  “Do I look like I fucking care about werewolves right now?”

  98.

  “What was that?” Chey asked, but she knew already—the sound she’d heard, which boomed inside the echo chamber of the cave like pounding surf, was the noise of gunshots. “They’re here.”

  A cold wave of dread went through her.

  “Don’t stop,” Powell demanded.

  She hadn’t, though. She was still digging through the pile of bones, though her hands were scraped by the sharp edges of the broken skulls and spines and arm bones. Though her back hurt from stooping so long.

  So far she’d found nothing—except enough to disturb her. Rooting through the bones, she’d had no choice but to look at them. She’d realized quickly enough that they were not normal. It wasn’t just that they belonged to both wolf and human skeletons—often each individual bone was a perverted combination of the two. A human femur would thicken and twist as it curved from one end to the other. A rib cage would splay outwards, the ribs like broken fingers grabbing for something they couldn’t reach. The skulls were the worst. Mostly the jaw bones had fallen away from the crania, but sometimes they were intact—horribly intact.

  It was evident from the state of the bones that when the werewolves who came here died, they died in agony. In horrible, twisting pain, wracked from within as two competing anatomies struggled for dominance inside their bodies.

  “When we find the silver knife, you know what to do with it, right?” she asked, patting the stone floor of the cave under the bones. There was nothing down there. “You know the proper ceremony? So we don’t end up like these?”

  “I know it,” he told her. “Keep looking.”

  The sound of more gunshots came rolling down the tunnel. Inside the dome-shaped cave the noise was immense. It made her lungs hurt and her ears pop. She forced herself to keep looking. “If they find us like this, they—”

  She stopped, because her hand had touched something. Powell looked up at her, suddenly very alert. She reached around under the bones and her hand closed on a leather bag. She brought it up to the light. It was smeared with bone dust, but it looked surprisingly well preserved for something that was ten thousand years old. The stitching that held it together had not come undone. The leather itself hadn’t rotted at all. “How is this possible?” she asked.

  “Magic,” he told her. As if that explained everything. “Good. Now we just need to find the ulu.”

  She studied the bag in her hands. It was held shut by a tightly knotted piece of leather thong. She picked at the knot with her fingernails and it started to come loose. “What’s in here?” she asked, as the thong came undone.

  “No, don’t!” he shouted, and stumbled toward her across the bones. “Don’t open it, not yet!”

  Then two things happened all at once. The bag came open in her hands. It felt like it had opened itself, like it had a will of its own and it wanted to open. She wasn’t sure if she could have stopped it. Inside were a bunch of small black rocks, two eyeballs, and a long thin piece of pink flesh. Like a tongue. It curled in her fingers and she dropped it in horrified surprise. The little black rocks flew everywhere.

  At the same time, Powell’s foot sank deep into the bones and he cried out in torment. Drawing back in horror from the eyes and tongue, Chey rushed over to him and found him hopping on one foot. He held the other in his hands. It was missing some toes.

  “The ulu,” he said. “I must have stumbled on—”

  He didn’t finish his sentence.

  Chey couldn’t have heard him if he had. Amuruq burst out of the darkness in her head and seized control. She dropped to all fours and started sniffing at the body parts from the bag.

  Amuruq’s body parts.

  Raven had tried to tell her what was done with the contents of the leather bag. What the Sivullir had done with it when their spell was cast. She hadn’t wanted to hear it. She should have been less squeamish.

  For ten thousand years the spirit of the dire wolf had been looking for those last pieces of herself that remained. The pieces the Sivullir had held in reserve, trapped inside a bag of pitchblende to keep her from finding them. Now they were in her reach. She pounced, trying to get them back. To absorb them back into her body.

  Except she didn’t have a body. She was borrowing Chey’s.

  “Powell,” Chey managed to shout. Except it wasn’t a human word that emerged from her lips. It was a snarling, yelping vocalization of the kind a wolf might make.

  Amuruq surged forward, straining every muscle in Chey’s body. Pushing them past the point of collapse. Must have them, she said, inside Chey’s mind. Waited so long. Stop fighting me!

  “Chey, no,” Powell called, running toward her. He had something in his hands. A knife shaped like a crescent moon, made of pure silver.

  It was too late. Chey felt her bones start to change. To lengthen in places, to contract in size elsewhere, pulling her flesh around, tearing things open inside her. She felt hair burst from her skin. She was changing. Without the moon. And she could not survive the transformation.

  99.

  Varkanin watched the helicopter shoot away toward the south, until it was no more than a dark dot against the sun. Then he finally let himself relax, lowering his assault rifle, letting his shoulders slump.

  The curse inside him was winning. He would not last much longer. He was unsure if he would even live long enough to see the moon come up. He would surely not survive the change when it did.

  He had come so far. Gotten so close. Now he was going to fail. It was a very small consolation that he had aided Powell and Cheyenne. He hoped, in an abstract way, that they would find their cure. But that was not his fight. H
is life’s purpose lay elsewhere.

  It was closer than he thought. As he started to lean forward, thinking he would just lie down and wait for death, he heard someone moving in the rocks behind him. Given the possibilities, it was not difficult to imagine who it might be.

  “Have you come to gloat?” he asked, his voice softer than he would have liked.

  “I’ve come to watch you die,” Lucie told him.

  He spun around with what little strength he could muster. Raised his weapon, even knowing the lead bullets in its magazine would not harm her. He needn’t have bothered, of course.

  She was faster than he was. She was so much faster than he was, even when his strength was full within him. Now she was a blur in the cold air. She grabbed the rifle by the barrel—careful not to touch him directly, she had learned that lesson—and tore it away from him. Bent the barrel over her knee and threw the weapon toward the lake.

  Then she danced backward, getting clear of his reach, all before he could even react. She had his own pistol in her hand. She kept it pointed at his stomach.

  “Silver bullets,” she said, gesturing with the handgun. “They will still kill a human, non? I think they will. Do not try anything, now.”

  “No. Even if I could.” He fought his rebellious body but there was nothing left in his legs. Even the bones felt soft and pliant, like gelatin. He dropped painfully to his knees. Inside him a wolf scratched and bit, again and again, at the silver in his cells.

  “You accept that I have won,” Lucie said. She looked surprised.

  “The conditions of earthly life do not lend themselves to justice,” he said. “What is good, what is right, are the province of God in his heaven, and such things are not meant to be expected from flesh and blood.”

  “Poetry. At this late date. Still, you have not truly surrendered, have you? Put your hands behind your head.”

  “Very well,” he said, and did as he was told.

  “You followed me halfway around the world, to come to this. Was it worth it?” Lucie asked, taking a step closer. “I admit, you had reason. I hurt you. Now, in this place, I will accept that what I did to you was perhaps excessive, compared to your crime against me. I can see why you would seek revenge.”

  “I shot you, to protect my community. You slaughtered my children in return,” Varkanin said, his voice flat. “I had no choice but to act as I did.”

  “Choice,” Lucie said. She came closer still. Daring him to make an attack. When he did not she stepped even closer. “It is good to have choices. That is all I wanted. The choice of where I should live, the choice of how I should live.”

  “Even if that choice meant death for human beings.”

  “Especially if it did! I am a werewolf, Varkanin. I am meant to kill you and your kind. Damn Powell and his moralizing. We are made for this purpose, and this alone. You would take that away from us, our right to choose our lives. But I will give you a choice. A choice of death. You may wait for the moon to rise. I have no doubt the result will be entertaining.”

  “For you. For me it will be quite painful,” he said, seeing where this was going.

  “Exactly. Your other choice is simple … to kiss my feet. Lick them, with your tongue. Like a wolf. No, like a dog. If you do this simple thing, I will make your death effortless and without pain. You see? I am not without mercy.”

  He managed to tilt his head back. Looked up at her face.

  “Which one first? Left, or right?” he asked.

  She smiled. She bared her teeth. Who could say which was the more apt description? She was enjoying this.

  Which was the only reason Lucie ever did anything, he knew. Because it felt good, at the exact moment she chose to do it. She could understand nothing more than that.

  “You may choose that, as well,” she said, with a little laugh.

  Varkanin unlaced his fingers and placed his hands down on the snow so he stood on all fours like a dog. He lowered his face toward her left foot, putting all his weight on his left hand. He had so little strength left that his left arm began to tremble and falter.

  His right arm did a little better.

  He flicked his wrist. A silver knife jumped out of its sheath. He brought it down to his hand in a practiced motion, smooth, very smooth, and then stabbed upward without even looking. Buried the knife in her belly before she even saw it.

  She screamed and drew back, ready to bolt, to run. He tried to push harder, to lodge the blade in her guts, where she would not be able to get it out.

  “I choose to wait for the moon,” he said, even as she ran away, into the snow, desperately trying to escape the burning pain he had given her. “So that I may watch you die.”

  He did not have long to wait. Even at that very moment, the moon was beginning to rise.

  Neither of them, Varkanin nor Lucie, exploded when its silver light touched them. There was some screaming, and some blood. But it did not last long. When it was over their eyes, blue and white, stared up at the moon from faces that were still human, but cold and still and dead.

  100.

  Chey’s teeth were like daggers in her mouth. Her arms were changing shape and the agony of it was beyond description. All the while Amuruq was panting and whining in her head, so loud she could not hear anything else. Didn’t the wolf spirit understand? This was the wrong way—the way that had claimed so many werewolves before, and left their bones rotting on the floor of the cave.

  The moon—the moon was up, the transformation was beginning. It would not stop what was happening to her. Only one thing could.

  This must be how it always happened. And Chey knew exactly who to blame. The Sivullir hadn’t wanted Amuruq to find her body again so easily. That would have spoiled their sadistic plan for driving out the Bear People. So they had created this trap, this safeguard, to keep it from happening.

  “Chey,” Powell shouted, right in her ear. It sounded like a whisper underneath the snarling, mewling cries of the wolf. “Chey, hold on, I just need to—”

  He shouted then in pain and distress. Silver light flashed in her eyes and she thought—she thought the moon—all thoughts were torn away from her, a wind blew through her head and everything was gone, everything—everything lost—

  Slowly she opened her eyes.

  She saw the room full of bones, with just a few stray beams of sunlight coming down the tunnel, streaking through the bone dust in the air. She saw the tongue flapping on the ground, next to the pair of eyes. Blood splattered them, fell in huge drops that pooled around them. Almost as soon as it touched them, the blood was absorbed. Sucked into the eyeballs and the tongue as if they were drinking it.

  Blood.

  Chey’s chest hurt. Her face was a mask of pain. She touched her arms, her legs, and found them shaped like they always had been. Human shaped.

  Blood.

  She tried to close her eyes again. Tried to look away. She did not want to see where that blood was coming from. Because she already knew what she would see.

  “Chey,” Powell said. “There was no other way. No time left.”

  “I know,” she said, her voice breaking. She was going to start crying if she looked. If she accepted what had happened.

  “I fell in love with you, Chey. I think—it must have happened when we—when we were still trying to kill each other, actually. Before Port Radium. At first I thought I was just lonely. That I was just glad to have someone share my solitude with me. Later I came to understand. What I feel for you is bigger than that. It’s bigger than me. I don’t regret this.”

  Chey reached up to wipe tears from her eyes. Before they flooded her vision and made it impossible to see, she looked up. She owed him that.

  Powell was standing very close. The silver ulu lay at his feet, stained with his blood. His face was pale, but his wrists were open and red and pouring out his life.

  “It has to be done this way,” Powell said. His voice was already fading. “She tried to come back to life inside your body, but
—that would have killed you. She needs her own body back. What’s—left of it, anyway. Her blood runs in our veins. She couldn’t be whole again, not without her blood. I had to give it back.”

  She surged forward to hold him, to save him somehow, but he shook his head.

  “Don’t. If you touch me—it’ll be—bad, I think. She’ll take your blood, too.”

  She could barely control herself. The need to embrace him was so strong. “What can I do?” she asked. She knew already there was no way to save his life. He’d lost too much blood. “What do you want most, right now?”

  “I want—I want you—to say you love me.”

  “I do,” Chey gasped. “Oh, God, Powell, I’ve never loved anyone like this—”

  “You’re lying,” he said. His mouth twisted in a complex smile. “I loved hearing that. But I know it isn’t true. I’m the guy who killed your father.”

  “No,” she said. “It wasn’t you. It was your wolf.”

  “Thank you, Chey,” he said.

  It was all he had the strength for. He sank down to his knees, somehow keeping his wrists directly above the eyeballs and tongue on the floor.

  Her tears did obscure her vision then, so she could see nothing. She wept for a very long time, her chest seizing up with sobs, with cries of grief. She didn’t love him. She didn’t forgive him. But those were absolute terms, words that could not convey the shades of gray, the complexities of how she felt, and the sacrifices he’d made.

  Eventually she wiped her tears away. Eventually she could see again. Someone else was in the room, someone who hadn’t been there before. She was not surprised, though she should have been. She was not afraid, though she should have been terrified.

  It was a woman, a very beautiful woman with gray hair, wearing a fur cloak that draped around her bare feet. The woman reached up over her head and pulled a wooden mask over her face. It had an open, gaping mouth, perfectly round like a circle.

  The woman didn’t speak. She just looked down at Powell’s bloodless body.