Cold Hearted: An Alaskan Werewolf Romance

by Heather Guerre

  “You are number thirty-four,” she told me, stopping in front of that particular door, at the end of the hall. She pulled a key from her pocket and unlocked it. She flicked the lights on. There was no overhead light, but a table lamp on the nightstand and a floor lamp in the opposite corner filled the room with a gentle, warm glow.

  The room was extremely narrow, awkwardly L-shaped, with a low, sloping ceiling. There was a double bed on an old brass bedstead, made up with a beautiful cathedral window quilt. Tucked beneath the lowest point of the ceiling, the bed stood just next to the only window, overlooking Longtooth’s main street. There was an old mission-style dresser across from the foot of the bed. Beside the dresser sat a mini-fridge with a microwave mounted on top. At the back of the room, another wooden door led to a full bathroom, complete with a cast-iron tub and a black and white penny tile floor. My bags had been laid neatly on the bed.

  “Breakfast is served from five a.m. to nine a.m. Supper from five p.m. to nine p.m.” Natasha said, pacing around the room and inspecting its cleanliness as she spoke. “Your board includes both meals. The kitchen is closed for lunch, but you can buy packed lunches in the morning. Otherwise, you have a fridge that you can fill with whatever you like and a microwave. No hotplates. No pets. No overnight guests.”

  “No problem,” I said, wishing she would just leave.

  She glanced at my bags on the bed. “You did not pack very many things.” There was an unspoken judgment in her tone. I was too tired to unravel the what or why of it. But I didn’t dare tell her that the bigger of the two bags was mostly filled with books.

  “I got rid of a lot of things before I moved,” I told her, which was the truth. “There wasn’t much to pack except for clothes and toiletries.” The most significant lack was the little wooden chest that held all my sentimental keepsakes. For all I knew they were still inside of it, but after I’d broken up with my ex, the chest had gone missing.

  Natasha gave me a searching look and then shrugged. “It’s not my business.”

  Then why’d you ask? I swallowed the words and smiled blandly.

  “Here.” Natasha deposited my key on top of the dresser. “If you lose your key, you must come to the front desk for the spare. Now. Get some sleep.”

  Natasha bustled from the room, pulling the door shut behind her.

  I began to undress for bed, moving slowly, disjointedly. Alone, without people and tasks and obligations to distract me, that old familiar void opened. The emptiness, the numbness, swallowed me, and I sank into it without a fight.

  I was always cold. No matter how warm the day, how high the furnace was cranked, my blood ran cold. It’d begun a few years ago, when the depression had started. I’d been to the doctor—it wasn’t anemia, my blood pressure was fine. “Some people just run cold,” he’d told me with a shrug.

  I couldn’t feel the heat, could never feel warm. But the cold could cut through my like a knife. I savored the way a harsh wind bit into my skin, reveling in the intensity of the sensation, the brief moments of feeling. I hadn’t been able to savor it earlier, distracted by the pilot’s surliness and the necessity of making a good impression with Margaret. But now…I crawled across the bed to look out the window. It was evening, the sky dark and moonless. There wasn’t a soul on the street.

  I pushed the window open. The cold hit me like a slap. I inhaled deeply, savoring the broken glass feeling in my lungs. In the distance, I heard the ululating howl of a wolf. The single howl was joined by another, and then another, forming a ghostly chorus that echoed off the mountains.

  I stepped out onto the narrow Juliet balcony, dressed in only underpants and the worn cotton t-shirt. The cold ate at my exposed skin with a pain like fire. It was negative-forty with the wind chill. Exposure would result in frostbite in less than 10 minutes. I was aware of the danger. I’d grown up with cold advisories. I just needed a couple minutes to feel… something. Anything. I meant to go inside before any real damage was done.

  I’d been standing there for less than a minute when the scuff of boots on ice caught my attention. I looked down at the road and saw the bush pilot—Caleb Kinoyit—staring up at me. Even standing three stories away, even with most of his face covered by a dense beard and a slouching toque, I could read him loud and clear. His eyes said What in the ever-loving fuck are you doing? more succinctly than words ever could.

  Embarrassment spiked through me, a flush of sudden warmth. God, when was the last time I’d cared enough to feel anything so sharply? I stumbled back through the window and threw it shut.

  Inside, my room was too warm. Sticky, nervous sweat prickled over my chest and back. I went to the bathroom, wet a towel with cold water, and mopped at myself until my skin cooled enough to feel the cold that had filled my room while I’d had the window open.

  Idiot, I chided myself. Natasha wouldn’t appreciate me driving up the heat bill. And what if the window had slid shut behind me? I would’ve been trapped. My extremities could’ve been lost to frostbite before anyone responded to my humiliating cries for help. And now there was a witness to my idiocy.

  I double-checked the latch on the window, then turned off the lights and crawled into bed. A few minutes later, I heard the tromp of boots in the stairwell. They came down the hall, passing my door. I lay frozen in place, listening as keys jingled at the door next to mine.

  Oh, fuck. He was my neighbor, wasn’t he?

  Chapter Two

  Even when I can’t make myself care about anything else, it’s easy to care about teaching. There’s actually something at stake—the minds and futures of hundreds of kids. Or, at Teekkonlit Valley High, dozens. My teaching methods were not totally conventional. At my old school, the administration was often on my case about it. But they’d been desperately understaffed and shamefully underfunded, so I’d been able to do what I wanted without too much interference. It helped that my students always outperformed their cohort on state testing.

  When I’d interviewed for the position with Teekkonlit Valley, I’d been so despondent about my life or prospects that I hadn’t cared enough to downplay my general disdain for following curriculum. To my surprise, they offered me the job.

  On my first day, I waited at the front of the classroom, propped against the edge of my desk as students filed in. Several stacks of battered paperbacks sat next to me. The final bell rang, and the last few stragglers wandered in from the hall, slumping into their seats.

  “Good morning,” I said, my voice still rough with sleep. I cleared my throat. “I’m Ms. Rossi. I’m taking over from Mr. Hendricks. I understand you read Great Expectations, The Scarlet Letter, and The Great Gatsby last semester. Is that right?”

  A few slow, dull nods in response.

  “Did you guys like those books?”

  Blank stares. A few bordered on hostile, startling a genuine laugh out of me.

  I coughed, collecting myself. “Alright, here’s the thing—the state requires us to learn certain skills and meet certain milestones. Traditionally, we do this by reading the classics of Western literature. Books like Great Expectations. The problem is that those books are super boring.”

  A few glazed looks sharpened with surprise.

  “I didn’t enjoy them when I was in high school, and I’m the kind of nerd who took advanced English classes and went on to get a bachelor’s degree in Literature. I really love books, you guys. But the reason I love books and literature isn’t because of Dickens or Hemingway or whatever long-dead, crusty old guy they want us to read. I loved the fun, weird books—gothics and sci-fi and fantasy. I loved ghosts and spaceships and witches and adventure. And it’s okay if you don’t like those things. Maybe you like murder mysteries. Or romances. Or political thrillers. Or historicals. Or really thoughtful, subtle character studies. Maybe you actually do like books like Great Expectations. That’s great. I just want you guys, if nothing else, to find at least one book that you really enjoy reading. That’s my goal for the rest of the school year.”
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  The looks had turned wary. They’d probably heard plenty of we can do this, guys! from previous teachers. That wasn’t my angle, but words alone wouldn’t make them believe it. I really, genuinely just wanted kids to enjoy reading. At my last school, a few of the more crotchety teachers in the English department snidely referred to my classes as “book club.” I didn’t mind. I’d rather run a book club than the psychological torture programs their mind-numbing classes had been.

  “So, anyways, we’re supposed to learn about things like characterization, and foreshadowing, and symbolism, and allusion—and we will. I’ll make sure you guys know what those mean and how to identify them. But I hope you can enjoy the process. So, we’re going to start with Howl’s Moving Castle by Dianna Wynne Jones.” I stood up, grabbed my stack, and began passing them around. “This is loaded with foreshadowing, allusion, characterization—all those terms we’re supposed to learn about. But it’s also just fun.”

  I passed out the books and assigned the first three chapters as homework. I spent the rest of class going around the room and having the students introduce themselves. They were all from the Valley, born and raised, and they interacted with each other with the easy familiarity of lifelong neighbors, even though some of them lived over an hour away from each other. It was clear they were skeptical of me, but they were polite enough, which was more than I could say for my first day of classes at my last school.

  Class period after class period, I did my song and dance and passed out novels. Natasha’s son, Alek, showed up in my fourth period class of juniors. He’d inherited slightly lighter hair and skin from his mother, but he still had what I was coming to think of as “the Valley look.” My students had the same ethnically ambiguous look that most of the townspeople did—dusky skin and dark, sleek hair along with hooded, often light-colored, eyes. High-bridged noses and wide cheek-bones. Several generations of indigenous Alaskan, African-American, and Euro-immigrant intermarriages had homogenized into a distinct ethnicity, particular to the Teekkonlit Valley.

  Compared to the rest of the valley’s residents, I was a frizzy, goggle-eyed, ghost lady. My thick, wavy, unmanageable hair was a drab shade somewhere in between blonde and brown. If there was even a single drop of moisture in the air, it expanded into a ragged lion’s mane. My eyes were heavily lidded—Byzantine eyes, my grandmother had always told me fondly—and an ordinary shade of brown. My skin was naturally a pale olive tone, but the last few months of deepening depression had left me wan and sallow. In the faculty bathroom at lunch, the sight of my reflection almost took me by surprise. My skin looked thin and fragile, laying too close to the bone. Dark circles made hollows beneath my eyes. The severity of my cheekbones might have been attractive if the rest of my face weren’t so gaunt.

  I turned away from the mirror in dismay. Putting on the friendly mask, I made my way to the staff lounge to eat the lunch I’d bought from The Spruce. Margaret had called a brief staff meeting on my second day in Longtooth, so I’d already been introduced to all of the other teachers before I started classes. They greeted me warmly now as I slid into an empty chair. Most of them had the same sable handsomeness as the rest of the Valley’s locals. Roger Yidineeltot, the history teacher, Tamsyn Taaltsiyh, one of the math teachers, Alan Evers, one of the science teachers, and Linnea Teague, the art teacher, had all been born and raised in the Teekkonlit Valley.

  But a few others were clearly outsiders like myself. Eric Hansen, the other science teacher, was a nordic blond who’d moved up here from Minnesota two years ago. Lucia Alvarez, one of the math teachers, originally from Texas, was a petite Latina woman who could be mistaken for a local at first glance. But upon closer inspection, her curling hair and large Spanish eyes set her apart from the locals as much as my own hair and eyes did.

  I spent lunch fielding more questions about myself—where I’d come from, how long I’d been teaching, why I’d decided to move to Alaska, and so on. After lunch, I went back to evangelizing for my lord and savior, books. By the end of the day, I was out of steam. After eight hours of performing a one-woman play about a mentally-engaged, emotionally functional human, I had nothing left in me. I bid my final class goodbye and when the last student had filed from the room, I dropped into my desk chair and stared out the window. It was only three-thirty, but already dark outside. My reflection stared back at me, haggard and apathetic. The coldness beneath my skin made my entire body ache.

  Chapter Three

  Pretty quickly, I learned that the locals of Teekkonlit Valley fell into two camps—those who were excited by the arrival of somebody new, and those who saw me as a trespasser.

  “Not the big, fun adventure you expected, is it?” Harry Lance, the owner of Lance Outfitters, demanded scornfully one morning at breakfast. “Bit colder and darker than you were prepared for, I bet.”

  I took another methodical bite of oatmeal. “Nah,” I said dismissively. “It’s not that different from the upper Midwest.”

  Harry scowled, deprived of the opportunity for smugness. “Well, there aren’t any grizzly bears in Chicago, are there?” he persisted.

  “No. But I haven’t seen any in Longtooth, either.”

  Behind me, Arthur Freeman—Natasha’s husband—chuckled. “She’s got you there, Harry.”

  Like Harry, Arthur was another Teekkonlit Valley local, as broad and strapping as the rest of them. His hair had gone steel gray, still shot with threads of black, and his eyes were a muddied hazel. He kept a perfectly groomed, Sam Elliot-style mustache. The mustache somehow made him seem trustworthy and authoritative. I saw him on nearly a daily basis around The Spruce, usually doing some sort of maintenance—fixing a leaky sink, sealing drafty windows, taking apart and reassembling one of the coffee machines, nailing down a loose floorboard. He wasn’t a talkative man, and I appreciated that about him.

  Natasha, on the other hand, was anything but quiet. Every morning, she poured my coffee and then forced me into conversations with anybody else who’d come to The Spruce for breakfast. She kept introducing me to single men with an unapologetic intensity that both amused and exasperated me. Through a combination of assertive friendliness and maternal bossiness, Natasha subtly but persistently directed our seating arrangements every morning and evening. She had a clear directive—hook me up with a Teekkonlit Valley native. Like a determined collie, she kept the other lower-48ers away from me, shooing them towards local women while driving local men into my orbit.

  In my first week, I’d eaten breakfast beside Maxim Freeman (Natasha’s oldest son, and Longtooth’s sheriff), Adam Toonikoh (owner of the Blue Moose tavern), and Connor Ankkonisdoy (a hunting guide). Natasha had twice chased away Eric Hansen, my fellow teacher, making sure the two of us sat at opposite ends of the dining counter, surrounded by locals. I’d managed to speak to Harlan Bennett, a doctor originally from Georgia, for all of a minute before Natasha intervened. Harlan was tall and handsome, with rich dark skin, a thick black beard, and the shoulders of a discus thrower. His deep voice was inflected with a gorgeous Southern accent that even I—numb as I was—couldn’t help but be entranced by. Andy Watanabe, a lawyer from Oregon, was whipcord lean, with a face composed entirely of blade-sharp angles. He managed to introduce himself one morning before Natasha herded him over to sit between Elena Morris and Jessica Taaltsiyh, both born-and-bred Teekkonlit Valley women.

  Clearly, Teekkonlit Valley was looking for fresh blood, and they weren’t going to let outsiders waste their shiny new genetic material on each other.

  My amusement with the situation was a detached feeling. I soldiered through breakfasts, making small talk with the ease of a born and bred Midwesterner, all the while wishing I could just be left in peace. Max was polite but seemed equally bemused by his mother’s matchmaking, and didn’t press his suit. Adam and Connor, though, were more than happy to accept Natasha’s meddling. They watched me with bright, hungry eyes, asking what I liked to do for fun, what my plans were for the weekend, if I’d ever ridden a snowmobile
, had I been to the tavern, and did I like hunting? (Nothing, nothing, yes, no, and no.) I managed to put them both off without an outright rejection, explaining that my first few weeks would be taken up with getting accustomed to my new job, et cetera.

  “Well, when you’re free,” Connor had said, holding my gaze intently.

  “Sure.” I put on the smile that nobody ever saw through. “I’ll let you know.”

  But I had no intention of doing that.

  Just as in Chicago, I fell into a mindless routine. Every day felt the same. When I didn’t have the distraction of teaching, exhaustion unraveled me like a cheap sweater. I could feel the pieces of my mind falling apart into disconnected chunks of thought. My body seemed to do the same, clumsy and off-kilter. The cold beneath my skin was a constant ache.

  Outside of school, I wanted nothing more than to lay in my bed in the dark until it was time to get up and go back to work. But, since I had to go to the dining room to get my meals, and Natasha insisted on serving me at the counter, I had no choice but to sit in the open, twice a day, fielding the social overtures of anybody and everybody who strolled through The Spruce.

  It was probably good for me. But keeping up the pleasant mask I wore in public was exhausting. After supper each night, other Spruce residents often remained in the dining room, chatting, playing cards, arguing over what to put on the television mounted on the back wall. But as soon as my plate was empty, I returned to my room, alone, where I showered and collapsed into bed. Beneath a pile of blankets that never managed to warm me, I drifted in a shallow half-sleep until morning came.

  Before leaving Chicago, I’d tried everything. I’d gone to the doctor, been diagnosed with depression. I’d cycled through a few prescriptions and dutifully attended therapy. Nothing seemed to break through the numb fog that dragged at my mind and body. Nothing banished the bone-deep cold. I was still faithfully taking the most recently prescribed antidepressants. They seemed to work better than nothing at all, but I still didn’t feel like a real person. The pills, combined with a steady intake of caffeine, gave me just enough energy to get through the basics of keeping myself alive.