She tried not to look at Frank Pickersgill’s body. She looked anyway. It was awful. She got up and stumbled away from him, staggered down the creek bed. She couldn’t cry, couldn’t throw up. It was like her body had become hermetically sealed. Her feet were blue under the cold water but she couldn’t seem to step out of the stream.

Eventually she managed to climb up on the far bank, a gentler slope. She rolled in the dead leaves and mud there and just breathed for a while, and thought of nothing. Then she went back to the body.

His coat was stained with blood in a couple of places. She pulled it off of his arms anyway and struggled into it. He’d been a giant of a man and she was an average-sized woman. The coat sagged across her, dangled from her arms and across her knees. It was still warm. She shuddered but she didn’t take it off. It was still better than being naked in that trackless wilderness.

She rifled his pack. It was sacrilege. Evil, pure evil. It didn’t matter. Her conscience stayed mostly quiet as she searched through his things. She found a packet of ketchup chips which she ate with one hand while searching with the other. She found a mickey bottle of bourbon which she put aside for maybe later. Though surely drinking a dead man’s liquor was enough to bring down heavenly wrath on her, if anything was. She found a box of silver shotgun shells and she took one out and held it in her hand. The pellets were wrapped in a red paper cartridge. She unraveled the paper and picked one of the spherical pellets out. It was perfectly smooth but it felt like a piece of broken glass rubbed against her fingers. Blood welled in the whorls of her fingertips and she threw the pellet back into the pack.

She reached up and touched her shoulder, then craned her head around and tried to look. There were distinct scratches there, ugly, red marks that looked infected. They could only have been made by silver—so Frank Pickersgill had shot at her first, before she had attacked him. He had drawn first blood.

It made absolutely no difference to the guilt she felt, she realized. If anything it made her feel for him more.

There was a map in the pack. A good one, with contour lines and lumber roads drawn in fine gray ink. She found the fire tower. Powell’s cabin wasn’t shown but she found the tiny lake where Bobby had landed his helicopter. She had no idea where she was—she was near a little stream but there were hundreds of those on the map. She could be anywhere. Giving up she looked for Port Radium, wherever that was, and then she found it.

Frank Pickersgill had said she should stay away from Port Radium. That had to be where Bobby had gone. He would be following Powell, to a place where Dzo had said he couldn’t go.

Port Radium was on the eastern shore of Great Bear Lake, a body of water so big it filled the left hand side of the map. There was something about its location that seemed odd to her. She studied it and turned the map around and wondered why it should seem familiar. She hardly knew this part of the world at all. Then she remembered. It was the same place she’d seen on maps before, the only town anywhere near Powell’s cabin. She’d always seen it before referred to as Echo Bay. Maybe they’d changed the name—“Port Radium” hardly sounded like a place anyone would want to visit.

She knew she was going to have to go there, one way or another. She could run away, as fast and as far as she liked, but her wolf was always going to head right for where the trouble was thickest. And her wolf could run faster than she could.

At the bottom of the pack she found a satellite cell phone. Just like the one she’d used to summon Bobby and screw up everything. She turned it on and started dialing Bobby’s number. Then she stopped and hastily cleared the display.

Bobby had given the Western Prairie guys an order that she was to be shot on sight. He wanted to kill her. He was going to kill her. Bobby was going to kill her. Just like Powell. All the important men in her life wanted her dead.

Well—except for one.

She had trouble remembering the number but after a couple of false starts she got it. She pressed the phone against her ear and listened to clicks and static for a couple of seconds, and then the phone began to ring. Then it clicked and answered.

“Hello,” the phone told her. “You’ve reached the Bolton’s Valley Horse Ranch. We’re most likely out riding fences right now but if you press one, you can—”

She pressed one and shoved the phone back to her ear. She could barely hear the beep on the other end. Then she spoke, as quickly as she could.

“Uncle Bannerman, this is Cheyenne and I’m in trouble,” she said. “I don’t know when you get this, or where I’ll be when you do but I need help. It’s pretty bad. You see, I, I’ve been infected. With you-know-what. And I kind of just killed a guy.” Tears filled her throat and she couldn’t talk for a second. “Bobby’s up here and he. He’s going to. He’s at a place called Port Radium and he. I need. I don’t know what I need but help. Please help me.”

She didn’t know what else to say. What else she could say. She ended the call and shoved the phone in a pocket of Frank Pickersgill’s jacket. Then she sat down and for a while just tried not to fall apart.

She was falling, falling fast, and there didn’t seem to be a bottom that she could hit. Bobby had locked her up to keep people safe. She’d gone crazy with the confinement and thought she had a right to be free. But did she? Did anybody, if they were going to use that freedom to hurt other people? Even if they didn’t want to, even if they couldn’t help themselves?

She took his boots. He had three pairs of dry socks in his pack, and if she wore them all at once the boots almost fit her. For once, at least, her feet were warm.