Dzo pushed the mask up onto the top of his head and grinned at her. “You’re starting to like him, aren’t you?” he asked. The two of them had dragged the tub out to just beyond the edge of the clearing. The location would give her some privacy while still leaving her within shouting range if she saw a bear. “Monty, I mean.” He had already scraped out a fire ring and he laid down a pile of thick logs with air space between them. “At least tell me you’re not still mad at him.”

Chey grabbed an armful of twigs and started piling them in a cone shape, just like she’d been taught in the Girl Guides. “He’s not what I expected,” she admitted. She caught herself almost immediately but she forced herself not to look up, not to look at his eyes and see if he’d caught her.

He had, though. Dzo stood up straight and squinted at her. “What do you mean by that?” he asked. “How could you have expectations about a guy you didn’t know existed until two days ago?”

“I just meant when I first saw him,” she said, trying to keep her voice slow and steady, “when you brought me here. I had no idea he was a wolf.”

That seemed to do the trick. Dzo nodded happily and lit a crumpled page from a crossword puzzle book on fire. Blowing on it carefully he tucked it inside the twig cone she'd made, then pushed in some dried leaves. The fire jumped up at once, then flickered back down as the kindling was exhausted. Fingerling flames touched at the logs and blackened them. Eventually they would catch. Dzo brought over an old fire-stained kettle and braced it on some rocks over the fire. “There’s a stream about twenty meters that way where you can get water,” he said, pointing into the woods. “Or you can just gather up snow off the ground, though it tends to be pretty muddy underneath.”

“Beauty,” she said, and gave him the warmest smile she had. After a minute she blinked at him. “That’s—great. Maybe you can go now,” she said. “So I can take my clothes off without you watching me.”

He shrugged and flipped his mask down. “You need anything else, just holler.” He started away, then stopped and looked back at her. “He likes you, you know. I mean Monty.”

“He does?” she asked. She hadn’t even considered that.

“Sure. ‘Course, he ain’t seen a naked lady in more’n fifty years,” he added, “so maybe he’s just ruttin’.” With that he traipsed away, back towards the cabin.

Chey watched him go. As soon as he was out of sight she unzipped her pocket and took out her cell phone. She pushed the five key three times and a GPS display came up. She looked at the trees, then back at the cabin. Then she dashed into forest as fast as she could on human feet.

The two of them would leave her alone for at least an hour. They wouldn’t dare come check on her in the tub for that long. Eventually they would wonder what was taking her so long and investigate discretely. When they couldn’t find her they would start searching for her. They couldn’t just let her run away—Dzo had been quite clear on that, that they would track her down and drag her back if they had to. She had little faith in her own ability to evade them, as well. Powell had been a wolf long enough to know how to track a woman through the woods, she was sure of that. With an hour’s head start, though, maybe she could make it to the rendez-vous and back before that happened.

She’d forgotten how hard it was to move at any speed through the drunken forest on two feet and she tripped three times before she was even out of visual range of the cabin. She slid down a slope of loose dirt and weakly-anchored reindeer moss and got a face full of snow at the bottom, but she got right back up and kept moving. Her course, as outlined on her cell phone’s screen, took her along the high bank of an all-year stream, a thundering rivulet that made it impossible for her to hear if anyone were pursuing her. Eventually she came around the source of the stream, a miniature lake as white and blue as the sky above, a brilliant mirror. On the far side a red light burned angrily—a flare, giving off great clouds of pale smoke as it fizzed away.

She had to pick her way around the lake. It would have taken her ten minutes to swim across but it was far too cold for that—whether or not her body could handle the chill, she knew she wasn’t prepared for it emotionally. Taking the long way round cost her another twenty minutes. She estimated she had eight minutes left before Dzo came to check on her and found her missing.

In the clearing on the far side of the lake a two-man helicopter sat like a giant dragonfly sunning itself on a clump of sparse grass. The pilot, an Inuvialuit in a padded vest, lay with his back against the big machine with his hands folded behind his head. He didn’t even look up as she staggered into the light.

Fenech, on the other hand, jumped up as if he’d been bitten by a snake. He was wearing a leather bomber jacket over an orange polo shirt with the collar turned up. He had on a pair of wraparound aviator sunglasses but he was just as soft- and harmless-looking as ever. His spiky hair stayed perfectly motionless even in the stiff breeze off the lake.

“Jesus, Chey, you don’t just sneak up on a guy in my profession,” he said. “Don’t you know we’re famous for our killer reflexes?”

“Hi, Bobby,” she said, and leaned into his embrace. She let him lift her chin and kiss her. She had let him do a lot more than that before—it was hardly time to get squeamish. “You got my message. About my pack.”

He grinned evilly. “I can’t believe you lost it. Do you know how expensive these are?” he asked. He put a hand inside his jacket and pulled out a square black handgun. He ejected the magazine and handed it to her so she could check.

The seven bullets lined up in the magazine were black with tarnish but she knew they were 995 grade silver underneath.