Frostbite: A Werewolf Tale

by David Wellington

  A man sat in a tamarisk tree not ten meters away. A man with a very big shotgun. He was tied to the tree trunk with bungee cords. He had camouflaged himself with twigs and leaves so well that 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.

  41.

  Bruce Pickersgill took Chey down to the tiny lake on the back of an ATV. It was one of two vehicles the exterminators had brought with them. When she arrived she found Bobby and Lester unloading a small seaplane with the Western Prairie Canid Management logo on its side. The logo showed a stylized wolf head howling at a crescent moon.

  “That’s a strange logo for what you do,” she said, as Bruce helped her off the ATV.

  “Oh? Why’s that?” he asked.

  She squinted at him. “You guys hate wolves,” she tried to explain.

  “Heck, no,” he told her, leading her over to the landing site. “I wouldn’t say that at all. I’d say we have a healthy respect for them. The wolf is a beautiful animal; all of the canids are.” He looked up as if he were trying to remember something. “I think Tony’s pop’s even got a pet coydog, back at home. We just provide an important service for livestock ranchers.”

  Chey decided she had better things to do than psychoanalyze the three brothers. She dashed ahead to where Bobby was drinking Pepsi out of a three-liter bottle. He had a number of white paper bags on top of a crate before him and as she got closer he took a golden brown pastry out of one of them.

  “Oh boy,” she said, as he beckoned her forward. Maybe he did care for her after all. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “This,” he announced, “is an authentic jam-buster from Tim Hortons. I can’t be expected to guess what you think a given thing is,” Bobby told her. He held it out and she grabbed it away from him. The icing sugar got all over her fingers and down the front of her sweater, but she didn’t care. The thick, super-sweet jelly inside spurted the top of her mouth and she sighed in deep bliss. It was exactly as she remembered.

  Everything came rushing back with that taste—hot showers, air-conditioning, good roads, and nationalized health care. As she chewed on the doughnut she was back, back in Edmonton, back in her mother’s house growing up, even.

  “I got addicted to these back in the real world,” she said. “When you don’t sleep much you need to eat more, and the only place open late at night is Tim’s. I would sit in the parking lot staring up at the sign, wondering where the apostrophe went. Then I would taste one of these and forget why I cared. You don’t understand, Bobby—this is the taste of home. Please tell me you have eleven more of these in those bags.”

  “They’re not all for you,” he told her, but then he pushed a bag across the top of the crate at her. She tore it open and found a mixed variety of doughnuts and Timbits inside. She didn’t waste time devouring them. For one thing, she hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours.

  “You’ve met the boys,” Bobby said while she ate. “I’m glad. I want you to feel like you’re part of this operation, Chey. I really do.”

  She nodded in agreement.

  “When I kill Powell, I want you to be there. I want to give you that satisfaction. Did they show you the traps?” “They’re called getters,” she said.

  Bobby nodded and picked up a crowbar. He started tearing open a crate while she watched. “Honestly I don’t think he’ll be stupid enough to fall for those. And the lure they’re using is all wrong—it’s meant for timber wolves, not werewolves. But maybe we’ll get lucky. But then we have another kind of bait for him. We have you.”

  She nearly choked on a cruller. “What?” she managed to say. It was what she’d been thinking, before. It was the worst thing she’d ever thought, and here he was saying it out loud. The doughnut in her mouth was suddenly dry and tough.

  “He wants you, Chey. He wants to rip your throat out. Last night—you won’t remember this, I guess. Last night you were up in that tower howling like a fucking dog for twelve hours straight. We could hear you over this far; we could hear you at the cabin. Lester slept right through it, but poor old me, I couldn’t catch a single z. I wandered over to the tower, thinking I’d try talking to you—though God knows why I thought that would help; my presence would probably have just made you yowl more. And that’s when I saw it.”

  “It? What did you see? Don’t tell me you saw Powell,” Chey breathed. She glanced around at the trees behind her.

  “I saw his tracks in a snowdrift. Like wolf tracks, but bigger. Wider. I looked around and found them on the other side of the tower, too. I found them all over the place. The whole night while you were howling he was circling you, desperate to get at you. Your howling summoned him.”

  “Oh.”

  “Come on, don’t look so pale,” he said, clapping her on the shoulder. “You were perfectly safe. I even locked you in, just in case he tried to open the trapdoor. And don’t you see what this means? I was worried he was just going to run off and escape us. He’s done that before. But not this time. No, he won’t leave until he’s gotten to you. Or until we kill him. Now, with the boys here, I figure we’ve finally got him. It’s all but done.”

  Chey swallowed the mass of thick dough at the back of her throat. When she spoke sugar puffed out of her mouth. “If you think they’re good enough. The Pickersgills, I mean.”

  “It’s Balfour I’ve got my money on,” he told her. “I’ve been hunting with him. The guy’s a menace to vermin.” His face softened. “You’re still with me, Chey, right?” he asked. “I mean, you want to help me get the asshole who ate your dad. Or maybe you’ve changed. Maybe becoming a werewolf has changed your perspective.”

  Chey nodded. “It has. It’s helped me understand just how dangerous Powell is.”

  “So you’ll help me,” he said, looking at her over the lenses of his sunglasses.

  “Yeah. But Bobby—I have one question.”

  “Of course,” he said, opening the top of his crate. Inside were boxes of ammunition—bullets, shotgun shells, rifle cartridges. All of it silver. He’d told her his gunsmith took days just to make a handful of silver bullets. How long ago had he put in the order for all this ordnance, she wondered?

  “What happens to me, when Powell is dead?”

  He laid his crowbar gently down. “I guess that depends on how you feel then. On what you want, what kind of life you think you want to try to have.”

  It wasn’t exactly what she’d wanted to hear.

  42.

  The six hours 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 anymore. 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? If she was honest with herself, 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.

  She hated herself a little for feeling that way. She could imagine her wolf’s reaction to those feelings—her lips pulled back over a snarl, her ears back in disgust. But she was still human, too.

  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. Because you believed in me.”

  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.

  “You…did believe in me. Right?”

  He exhaled noisily. “I believed you believed in yourself.”

  That just confused her. She needed to know, now. She needed to know that he’d been behind her all along, that he really had thought of her as the best person to take down the werewolf. “You hired the Pickersgills a long time ago. You had your gunsmith make all kinds of bullets. I saw them,” she said.

  “I don’t know what you’re getting at—” he began, but she reached over to put a finger across his lips. He jerked backward as if she were trying to stab him.

  “Just tell me the truth,” she said. “Did you actually think I was going to get Powell? Or did you just send me up here to draw him out?”

  He looked at her for a while, his eyes studying her as if he were trying to decide what answer would get him the best return on his investment of lies and truths. His hesitation infuriated her, made her want to drag her nails across his face, because it told her exactly what she wanted to know, far better than any measured response he might come up with.

  “Chey, I—” he said.

  “Never mind,” she growled. “Don’t—don’t say it.” “Don’t make this all about you,” he told her. “That’s not the way to handle this.”

  She turned away from him in disgust. “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 midafternoon. 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 sighed. As much as she needed human companionship right now, she really wanted him to shut 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, 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.

  That was what it did when she tried to lock it up. It destroyed the things she needed to stay sane, because that was the only way it could hurt her.

  “No,” she said. “No. I won’t stay up here. I refuse.”

  “Okay, time’s up,” he said, before she could protest any more. He climbed down through the trap and before she could even say good-bye 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, “you son of a bitch, you can’t just leave it like that and expect me to—”

  But then silver light flooded her brain.

  Later 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.

  Breathe in, breathe out.

  Eventually, feeling just a little weak 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. “Let me out,” she demanded. It came out of her like a moan. “Let me out; I don’t have much time left. I don’t want to be up here. Let me—” 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.

  43.

  The wolf 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 that 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 female had been inside her square little cell the last time she’d slept. She could smell it on the floor, on the walls. She licked the wood and tasted the human, the oily sourness of the female’s skin, the unbearable thickness of her artificial scent. She hated, hated, hated the human, wanted to snap her neck, wanted to grind her bones between her teeth. Where was she? Was she nearby? Was she—was she?

  Was she still here? Hiding somewhere? The wolf felt the female human like she was under the wolf’s very skin.

  She paced the corners of her cell, ran from wall to
wall. There wasn’t enough room, 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.

  Finally she sank down to lie on her belly, her tongue out, her breathing slowing. And still she howled.

  The human, the other human, the male, was he near? The one who had chained her leg, the one she’d nearly devoured. 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.

  No, 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 all she had left in this prison. 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, over her teeth, rumbling in her chest, shaking in her, and 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 why she was howling.

  Still she howled.

  And then one night she heard the other wolf, out there in the dark—howling 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.