A young woman lost in the hostile wastes of the Canadian north finds herself at odds with a vicious wolf. When next the moon rises what will she discover? Frostbite is a story about werewolves... though perhaps not the werewolves you're expecting.

Please be advised that this site includes graphic textual descriptions of violence and gore, and is not suitable for all readers.

If you'd like to start reading, please begin here at Chapter One. You can also browse the table of contents in the sidebar to the right.

You can read all of Frostbite free of charge. You can read all my books here free of charge. If you like what you see, perhaps you'll consider buying one of my books in print? If you're interested, please see the link at the bottom of this page.

Thanks,
David Wellington

Thanks to everyone who stayed with us this time. When we lost our ability to send mass emails I know it inconvenienced a lot of you, and I'm sorry about that.

We're going to take some time off. The software we're using is getting old, and needs to be fine tuned. I also need a break--though don't believe for a second that I won't be writing. I've got a bunch of exciting projects coming up, some of which involve vampires, some of which might just be about zombies (yes, even now).

The forum will remain up and running, as will my home page. My books are still on sale and more will be coming out in 2007--first "Thirteen Bullets" and then "Monster Planet". Those of you in the UK can check out www.snowbooks.comfor info on my UK release schedule.

There will be another serialized novel, I just can't say exactly when. Keep an eye on www.davidwellington.net for updates.

Thanks again for dropping by and listening to me ramble. I hope you found something to enjoy in "Frostbite", and I hope to see you again very soon.

Best,
Dave

When he found her she was barely conscious. Her breath came in and out, in and out, shallow draughts of air wheezing in and out, in and out of her lungs. It was not even panting but the labored breathing of those about to die.

She had silver inside her. She was poisoned and she was done for. He showed her no mercy. With his powerful jaws he tore at her, pulled her apart. He ripped open her guts and they spilled with a rank smell across the broken road surface. He tore off her leg and threw it into the darkness like so much meat.

The pain was intense but she could not complain or fight him off. She lacked the energy to even raise her head. He tore and bit and ripped her apart and she could only experience it passively, as if from some remove.

When he was done, when all the silver was torn out of her body and cast away from her, she breathed a little easier, and then she sank into a fitful sleep. He stood watch over her throughout the night, occasionally howling as the moon rode its arc across the night sky. Occasionally he would lick her face, her ears, to wake her up, to keep her from fading out of existence altogether. Once when he could not wake her he grabbed her by the back of the neck and shook her violently until her eyes cracked open and her tongue leapt from her mouth and she croaked out a whine of outrage.

When the moon sank behind the buildings of Port Radium, she was glad for it. For the first time ever the wolf was glad for the change.

Chey woke curled in a ball, naked, cold, hungry, and in massive amounts of pain, but she was alive. She lifted her left arm and saw there was no silver there. Nor was there any bullet wound. She touched herself all over, felt her smooth skin and found it unbroken.

Her head pounded but she rolled up to a sitting posture. She had no idea what had happened during the night. She knew somehow, though, that Bobby was dead. The exact circumstances eluded her but she was sure of it.

“Here,” Powell said, and threw her a blanket. He’d been standing behind her the whole time. He was wrapped in a blanket himself and he sat down next to her, close enough that his body heat warmed her a little. She snuggled closer to him and pulled his arm around her shoulders.

“You forgiven me or something?” he asked.

“Never,” she told him.

“But things have changed between us.”

She dug her face into his blanket. Her nose was freezing.

“I guess they have,” he said. “You still want to kill me?”

She shrugged her shoulders. That wasn’t good enough, though. “No,” she said, and the act of saying it made it true.

“Fair enough,” he said.

The sun was halfway up the sky when they moved again. They’d both heard a sound, a familiar and unwanted sound. The noise a helicopter makes as it cuts up the air. Together, pulling their blankets close around themselves, they jumped up and moved around the side of the abandoned hangar, keeping to the shadows.

A big double-rotor helicopter passed over the buildings of Port Radium. Chey recognized the symbol on its side, a red maple leaf inside a blue circle. She also had a feeling she knew who was inside.

Before Powell could stop her she ran out into the parking lot and waved her arms at the helicopter. The pilot brought it around and then dropped to a soft landing twenty meters away. A hatch opened on its side and soldiers in blue-gray uniforms jumped out. Behind them came a man in a dark blue suit. It looked like a uniform but it wasn’t. The man was retired and he wasn’t even Canadian.

Chey couldn’t hear anything over the noise of the rotors. Uncle Bannerman gestured at the solders and they all stood back. Then he dashed over toward her, only stopping when she held her hands out, warning him to keep his distance. “Listen,” she said, “I’m okay. Everything’s okay. But I’m going to change in a little while.” She could feel the moon trembling on the horizon. In fifteen minutes, maybe less, it would rise. She didn’t know if the soldiers standing in formation by the helicopter had silver bullets. She didn’t want to find out. “You have to go now.”

He stared right into her eyes. The way he always had. Then he glanced sideways at Powell, who was lingering in the shadowy entrance of the hangar building. Bannerman studied Powell for a second and then looked back at her.

“Is he…?” Bannerman asked.

The lycanthrope who ate my brother, your father. She could see the words in her uncle’s eyes.

“Yes,” she said.

“I have equipment with me. I can keep you safe. I can keep you from hurting anyone,” he told her. It was a question.

She could guess what kind of equipment he meant. Chains. Cages. Maybe he wanted to take her back to his ranch in Colorado, where he could lock her in a shed every time the moon came up. Maybe he wanted to take her to a government lab somewhere where they could study her.

“I’m going with him,” she said. Powell took a step forward but she waved him back. “We’ll go where there aren’t any people.”

There was a lot more to be said—Bannerman clearly wanted to argue with her—but she had no more time. She was going to change any minute.

“I don’t know what happened to Fenech,” he said, finally, “but I doubt the Canadians will just leave you alone.” It was a warning—not a threat, not an attempt to make her change her mind. It was important information she needed to know. She thanked him with a nod.

Three minutes later the helicopter was in the air and headed south.

A moment later the moon rose, and two wolves headed north.

Silver in her body. Silver in the moon. Silver bullets that smacked the ground and whined away into darkness.

She ran—silver. Silver silver silver. Silver everywhere, she could smell it in the air. The only thing she was afraid of.

The wolf was very much afraid.

The wolf was terrified.

The wolf ran.

Silver. It came down like evil rain from the helicopter, bullets blasting away at the earth in the rhythm of her panting thoughts, of her laboring heart.

Silver silver silver silver silver.

She dashed around the side of the pond, her paws splashing in horrible water thick with silver run-off. The helicopter bobbed and twisted on its rotor and came after her. She ran so slowly—her body ready to give out. Still the bullets came down, invisible rays that would cut through her. Cut her to pieces.

In the distance he howled. He was closer, much closer. Still too far to help.

She ran. Bullets tore up the ground to her left, to her right. The spitting gun up there could not seem to hit anything it aimed at but she knew she had just been lucky so far. By the law of averages one of those bullets would hit her, eventually. And then she would die.

Silver cut the soil ahead of her. She wheeled and turned and ran right back toward the helicopter, as if she could charge it, as if she could leap high enough to get her claws in its metal belly. She snarled with joy as the helicopter actually bobbed in the air, rolling from side to side as if afraid of her. There were humans inside it, she knew. It was a man-made thing and there were humans, humans, humans inside, humans, she could smell the blood inside them, smell the sweat on their skin. She even recognized the particular stink of one, of the one, the one, the one who had chained her. Oh how she longed for the feel of his throat between her massive teeth.

Silver. He had the upper hand. He had the high ground. Silver silver. A bullet came so close it kicked up shards of rock that got in her eye like dust. She shook her head and feinted to the left, then darted to the right.

A good move—the helicopter swung around wildly to follow her, wobbling, nearly turning on its side. But she was growing weaker.

He howled, so close now she could hear him running. What could he do? Would he give his life for hers, take the bullet meant for her skull? She doubted it. He had wanted to kill her, kill her, kill her—

Silver passed right through her front left paw.

She yelped in surprise, then yowled in pain. Her blood made a footprint on the ground, a mark, her mark, a mark, a mark. She was panting for breath already and this new wound made her curl, made her curl up, made her curl inside her belly, made her want to lie down, to surrender, to die. But those were men up there, humans, and she would not stop for them. She would never stand down for humans.

A hill ahead of her. It would be a hard climb, even if she were at full strength. It would slow her down. But there were buildings up there, big, square, unnatural buildings men had built, men, humans, men, humans, and their shadows blocked out the stars. If she could run between them, if she could, if she could, she was tiring already, if she could get between the buildings, into their shadows, the helicopter could not follow. She dug in with her hind legs and pushed, leapt, jumped up the slope.

Silver silver silver silver silver silver silver silver silver silver silver—it did not stop, there were shafts of moonlight falling all around her, shafts of silver moonlight frozen, hardened and made cruel, made deadly. The ground beneath her churned with the soft impacts as the bullets crashed around her.

There—the top of the slope, the top, the crest, the summit, she could see it. She pushed and pushed and shoved herself through the air, leapt like a salmon leaping upstream. Ahead of her the buildings stood, wrong and square, her only possible salvation. She dashed down a side street and silver silver silver behind her, silver, she had no energy left, she could not run, she could only cower, silver silver silver.

A bullet passed within inches of her spine. It lodged in her liver and she felt her body surge with a new wave of poison. She screamed, screamed in horror and pain and rolled, rolled on her side and kept rolling, slid into a shadow, rolled into darkness. A bullet pranged off the metal side of a building just above her head.

Silver inside her, silver, silver inside her, silver in her guts, silver in her leg. She could not take another step, the pain was just too great. She collapsed in a heap, then strained, pushed, lifted herself onto her feet. She gathered up her breath and gave voice to one last howl, a cry of a dying being, a plaintive, one-note symphony, plangent, eloquent, sad.

Above her the helicopter sank through the cold air, its noise so big, so loud, so big. Silver, once, banged off the building face, even closer to her this time. Silver again. Bang. The helicopter dropped farther, dropped to the level of the building’s roof. There was nothing she could do but watch.

Then he, the other wolf, leapt from the roof of the building and got his claws in the plastic bubble of the helicopter. His body swung like a pendulum, loose and muscular, as the helicopter rolled and dipped and turned. His weight pulled it around, dragged it through the air. He was shaken free almost instantly, his body thrown through the air, but not before he had overbalanced the helicopter on its rotor, made it list to one side.

The tip of the rotor kissed the corrugated tin wall of the building with a high-pitched shriek. In that contest neither side could win—the wall peeled open as if by the effect of a giant can opener, while the composite resin of the rotor splintered and snapped. The helicopter slewed around on a wide arc, suddenly off-center of its own angular momentum. As if a giant had thrown it like a discus it swerved through the air, out of control, until it smashed into the side of another building. Then it just dropped like a rock. Sounds of tearing metal, of crumpling plastic, and of human screams followed. There was a flicker of light and then fire lit up Port Radium for the first time in decades as the helicopter’s fuel caught, all at once. It didn’t burn for long.

“Okay what?” she asked.

He gestured with the gun for her to climb out of the truck. Chey studied his face. There was no smile there anymore. He’d had his fun, and he’d won his game. Now he was just going to finish her off so he could collect on his contract. It was over.

Chey lifted herself from the ceiling of the cab with her arms and legs. Then with a sudden inspiration she threw herself forward, against the windshield. She didn’t weigh all that much and she had little strength left to add to her momentum, but it was enough.

The truck screamed as metal tore apart from metal. Welds popped, rivets shot out like bullets. The whole massive multi-ton body of the trucks scratched forward. Broken rock tailings rolled away, out from under all that mass and the truck jumped forward as if it were moving on rails. Balfour’s eyes went wide and he fired right through the windshield, but the bullet went wild. A second later the truck rumbled forward, gaining speed, and smacked right into him. He was carried forward as the vehicle tilted down and fell right into the water with a noisy splash and one long extended bass note of metal folding in on itself.

The windshield had become the floor. Chey lay sprawled across it, hurt herself, but not in such a way that mattered—not in any way that could kill her faster than she was already dying. She rubbed her forehead and then opened her eyes.

Under the water, Balfour looked right back at her. His cap was gone and his sparse hair floated in the silver bubbles that streamed out of his mouth. She couldn’t tell if he was alive or dead. His eyes were wide, very wide.

Then he slammed on the windshield with the flats of his hands, slapped at the glass as his mouth opened and toxic water poured in. Chey screamed as she saw the muscles of his face constrict, as he drowned while she watched. His muscles went slack—his hands drifted away—and finally, after far too long, his eyes lost their focus.

She had made no move to save him.

Frigid water gurgled in through the bullet hole in the windshield. It leaked around her body, soaked her clothes. The saline stink of the muck filled what little air there was in the cab. Chey jumped up, away from the touch of the water, and pushed her way back out through the open side window. At the last moment she reached back inside and grabbed her broken coil of spring, just before the water surged over the sill of the window and filled the cab.

In the water she kicked and stroked with her one good arm and struggled to get clear. Making all the noise in the world she scrambled out onto the shore and lay gasping on the bank, in pain, half-frozen, and still needing to get the bullet out of her arm.

In a second, she promised herself. She stared up at the stars. In a second she would start again, she would go back to digging in her flesh with a rusty piece of metal. In just a second.

Above her the aurora flickered and snapped like a wind-swept curtain. It was so beautiful. Green coruscations like waterfalls of pure light dazzled overhead. It was hard to look away. She didn’t want to.

She had to—but she could give herself a second, she thought. Just a second to look, to see one last beautiful thing. In a second, she would—

Then Chey passed out.

She had pushed herself far past human limits. She had pushed herself past the limits of wolf strength. Her body couldn’t go another minute, it was just that simple. Sleep, which had escaped her almost every night of the last twelve years, sleep which had been her greatest enemy, finally came for her and took no mercy on her plight.

She did not wake when the sun rose and warmed her chilled body. She did not wake hours later, when the moon came up too, and silver light transformed her.

Silver, silver, silver inside, silver.

The wolf stood up and panted into the wind.

Silver. Silver, silver, silver. The wolf knew exactly what was wrong. She felt weak, weaker than it had ever had before. It felt sick, and thoughts of food made her sicker. She felt hot and cold at once, and she knew she was dying. There was silver in her leg—how had it gotten there? She couldn’t even begin to imagine.

The obvious course of action presented itself. She lifted her hurt leg and grabbed it with her jaws. Pull it off. Bite it out and spit it in the poison water where it belonged. She had done as much before, to get out of chains.

Her teeth sank through her fur and then she was yelping and rolling on the ground, rolling her forehead along the hard ground, her eyes squinted tightly shut. Pain! Her teeth had touched the silver and her whole skull had erupted in pain, in agony. Her nerves sang a high thready note that buzzed in her ears and in her brains. She rolled and shook herself and warbled out a kind of muted scream until the pain had lessened a little, until she could think again.

She couldn’t bite off the leg. She couldn’t bite the silver out. Every fiber of her being cried out for relief, for comfort, but she had none to provide.

Silver, silver, silver, silver insider her, silver, poison silver!

She ran in circles. She ran in random directions as if she could get away from the pain. She tilted her head back and howled, howled and howled, yelped, mewled, roared. None of it helped. She heard the echo of an answer, a callback, from far away and she knew the other wolf must be nearby. Maybe—maybe he could help her. But would he? He had tried to kill her, hadn’t he? The facts of the matter were hazy to her, as everything in the past must be. He had tried to kill her. Would he try again?

It didn’t matter. He was the only possible source of help. She ran toward him and howled and followed his answering howls. They would meet, they would join together again, they would meet like packmates and he would help her, he would do something, something, something for her.

Before she’d even smelled him, though, a buzzing roar chopped up the night, chopped it to pieces. The helicopter came up over the far side of the junkheap and turned to come right for her.

The wolf ran.

The truck rumbled as if it were coming back to life. She heard clattering footfalls above her and knew that Balfour had climbed up on top of the dead vehicle. He stopped suddenly as the truck dipped forward. It had been dumped unceremoniously on the heap with no effort given to finding balance or stability. Now, disturbed after a long rest of many winters, it rocked in its bed.

With a creaking, tearing sound, as of metal being pulled to pieces, it lurched a few centimeters forward. The motion was enough to send Chey swinging. She clutched hard to the side mirror but knew she had only seconds before she would have to let go. Already her palm and all the joints of her fingers burned. Her injured arm, the one with the silver bullet inside it, hung limp at her side, completely useless.

One last effort. It was all she had in her. She brought her legs up as if she were on a trapeze and swung, hard, for the window of the truck. Her feet went through into darkness and then the lower half of her body followed. Her hand let go without warning and she nearly fell but she held on tight with her legs and slithered inside the truck’s cab like a mouse disappearing into a hole.

The truck moaned and slid forward again, dipped forward a millimeter at a time, with rocks and bits of debris pattering away with every grudging incremental motion. Then it stopped. Was Balfour still on top of it, clutching on for dear life? She was sure he must be.

The inside of the cab was almost warm compared to the outside world. The windshield remained intact except for one long diagonal crack and it cut off the frigid breeze, at least. As a result, though, the air inside was close and it stank of mildew. There had been leather on the truck’s seats once but it had succumbed entirely to rot. Now Chey, lying on the ceiling of the cab, looked up into sharp-edged springs that poked down at her like coiled snakes ready to strike. The steering wheel, cracked and peeling, and the gear shift and controls looked all wrong from where she looked at them but she didn’t have time to think about it. She lay there gasping for breath with her mouth wide open, trying not to make too much noise.

She could not have got up at that moment, could not have moved from that spot, even if Balfour had climbed in beside her with his rifle and his silver knife.

Slowly she recovered herself. Very slowly. The truck had stopped moving—perhaps it had settled down into something approaching equilibrium. She heard a footstep from above her, a clattering noise. Balfour must have been wearing steel-toed boots. That first step sounded almost hesitant, as if he weren’t sure of his footing. Then he clambered forward, moving steadily closer to her. She somehow found the energy to hold her breath. She heard him step almost directly above her—and then stop.

Then nothing happened. Her lungs complained. She let the breath out and still nothing happened. He must not have seen where she went. He must be looking around up there, trying to follow her trail. He would not be able to see her, even if he were standing outside the cab looking in—the darkness where she lay was almost absolute.

She waited, and listened. And finally she heard the footsteps moving away.

Alright, she thought. One problem taken care of. Or at least put off for the moment. Time for the next horrible thing to happen. She reached up, into the skeletonized driver’s seat, and plucked loose one of the springs. She got a rusted coil of metal no thicker than a ribbon for her trouble—but at least it had a sharp point.

She couldn’t see what she was doing—couldn’t even see the bullet hole in her arm. It didn’t matter. The poisonous silver thing inside her flesh hurt so much she could visualize it perfectly. It had changed shape after breaking her skin, its nose crumpling and spreading out until it looked like a ragged mushroom. It lay exactly halfway between her wrist and her elbow.

Chey jabbed the sharp end of the spring into her arm. She knew the damage she did was not permanent, that it would heal the next time she changed. She knew she had worse things to worry about than lockjaw.

No amount of thinking, however, could keep it from hurting like a son of a bitch. Blood splashed the inverted ceiling of the cab and her whole torso strained and heaved as she dug and twisted and poked the spring inside of herself. She pushed harder, her face contorting, and suddenly made contact—the end of the spring touched the bullet with a gentle scraping vibration.

Then the bullet moved. It slid a micron or two forward inside her body and whole new realms of agony made themselves known to her. Her lungs inflated like balloons and as much as she tried not to, as much as she bit her lips and tongue and bared her teeth and sweated and shook, she couldn’t help it. She let out a whimper, no more than the sound a hungry kitten might make. In the prevailing silence it sounded far too loud.

Instantly Balfour surged forward. He must have been waiting for her to give herself away—waiting in ambush. His footfalls clattered on the underside of the truck and then he was climbing down the grill, using the bars there like a ladder. His feet swung into view through the windshield and then his legs. He dropped to the tailing pile in front of the truck, his whole body silhouetted in the windshield. Then he lifted a flashlight and switched it on and pointed the beam inside the cab. The light blinded Chey and she raised her hands to fend it off.

He drew a pistol from a pocket of his jacket. She had no way of knowing if the bullets inside were silver or lead—it didn’t matter. He had her. She couldn’t get out of the cab, not quickly enough to get away from him. If she tried he could just shoot her.

There, ahead, she saw where a pile of metal rods had rusted together into a thick stalk that jutted out from the side of the pile. The individual rods were no thicker than her thumb. Maybe she could break one off and use it to dig—to dig around—in her flesh until she found—the bullet. Just thinking about it made her feel woozy. But she would do it. She knew she could do it.

With her good hand she grabbed one of the rods. She pulled and it gave but just a little. She needed it to snap off. She looked down and saw her footing was ridiculously bad. She had one foot on the loose tailings, the other on a flap of rusted metal that probably wouldn’t support her weight.

It didn’t matter. She had more important things to worry about than falling in the lake. Chey leaned out as far as she could and then jumped, swinging on the rod, all of her mass conspiring with gravity to pull down hard, to shear off a length of metal.

The rod held.

Chey screamed a curse and swung back, got one foot on the tailings again. Red stars were bursting inside her eyes. She paused a moment, but just a moment, and then shifted her grip on the rod.

As she readied herself for another swing she heard a flat snapping sound. Dust exploded next to her cheek, one of the rocks on the tailing heap spontaneously turning into gravel. Or maybe not so spontaneously.

Another snap, like a robot coughing, and something whizzed by her ear. Something hard and metallic.

Somebody was shooting at her. She turned in slow motion, unable to hurry anymore, and saw a human figure standing on the shore, holding a hunting rifle. Taking his time, he raised the rifle to his eye and sighted on her. She barely had time to jump before he fired a third bullet at her.

It could only be the third brother, the one with a different father—Tony Balfour. That was his name. The shootist.

It didn’t make a lot of sense. Silver bullets would be useless in a rifle. They would be too inaccurate. Bobby had been quite clear on that fact. Balfour had already put three bullets close to her head. He wasn’t having any trouble with accuracy. Was he using normal lead bullets? But why?

He smiled. She could see his teeth by starlight. He switched the rifle over to the crook of his arm and then took a long knife out of a scabbard on his belt. The blade almost glowed in the darkness and she knew it was made of silver.

She understood. He wanted to shoot her with lead bullets not to kill her but just to stop her in her tracks. If he blew her head open with the rifle it wouldn’t technically kill her—but it would leave her unable to run away. You need a functional medulla oblongata to be able to run. She imagined herself spread-eagled on the scrap heap, her blood leaking out on the rusty machinery, her eyes unable to focus, her mouth unable to close. In her mind’s eye she saw drool leaking from one slack lip. Then she saw him climb up carefully, taking all the time he wanted, the knife ready in his hand.

Would she feel it as he stabbed her to death? Would she be aware even then? Would he do it quick, one quick jab into her chest, or would he take his time?

He gave her a jaunty little wave and came toward her.

Down on the shore he stepped gingerly, almost delicately into the dark water. The mud surged around his boots and he winced almost comically but he didn’t stop. One leg in, then the other, wading in hip-deep. Then he stopped and looked up at her. He switched the rifle back into his hands and looked up at her expectantly.

She realized then that she hadn’t moved a centimeter since he’d stopped firing. She needed to get up, she needed to run. Why didn’t he fire?

He took his eye off the rifle’s sights and lifted one hand. He flicked his fingers dismissively, telling her to move on. He wanted to see her run, she realized. He wanted to chase her because he would enjoy her death more that way.

Adrenaline jumped up inside her blood and made her go. The silver bullet in her arm was nearly forgotten as she jumped across the pile of tailings and leapt onto the tires of an upturned truck. She got her hands down, grabbed for anything that presented itself, and threw herself around the side of the pile, toward the shadows, toward the toxic junk.

Behind her a bullet blew out one of the truck tires and it deflated with a sagging, sighing sound. She flinched and missed a handhold. Her body rolled forward and she slid, her feet unable to grip the loose tailings beneath her. She was falling, sliding, falling in slow motion down the side of the heap. Suddenly she did care if she fell into the water. She would be slower down there, unable to run. Her hands flew out and she grabbed at a side mirror on the upside-down truck, a long rectangular shadow with splinters of broken glass winking at her. Her feet flew free and she was hanging by her arms in empty space. Her damaged left arm shook with spasm and then she lost all feeling in her hand. The fingers uncurled and she swung like a pendulum by her good hand, and that arm felt pretty weak, too.

She couldn’t hear him coming for her but she knew he wouldn’t be long behind.

The silver bullet in her arm felt like it was alive. Like it was some horrid kind of beetle that had burrowed into her muscle tissue and now it was gnawing at her from the inside out. It felt sharp, spiky, as if it were growing in size. It felt like it was going to be bigger than she was, soon.

Chey slumped to the ground and shook for a while. Not trembling with sobs but shivering. Chills racked her spine while her head burned with fever. Her arm itched and she scratched it unthinkingly, her nails dragging long strips of skin off her arm.

The wound turned an angry purple while she watched. How long before the poison spread to her heart? How long before the poison finally killed her? She had no way of knowing. Powell hadn’t given her so much as a hint. Was he trying to torture her with fear as well as kill her with silver?

She rolled back onto her knees. Pushed herself to stand up. Her body didn’t want to. She shouted, screamed inside her head at her legs, at the muscles in her back, to stop shaking and start working again.

It didn’t work. She fell backwards and her back scraped on the rough ground.

She had to try again. No one would help her, she knew. There was no one anywhere nearby who wasn’t already trying to kill her. Dzo couldn’t come to Port Radium—it was too toxic. Bobby had given orders to shoot her on sight.

She had to save herself this time and she just didn’t know exactly how she would do it, but she was certain she did need to get up and get moving.

Now, she thought, stand the goddamned fuck up. Just stand up. Stand up.

One complaining foot got underneath her. The other. She cursed and snarled and wept and then she was standing up. She could walk, she thought. The poison wasn’t in her legs and though her whole body felt like it was breaking down, giving up, she was pretty sure she could still walk.

She knew what she was going to have to do in a general way. She needed to find a knife or at least something sharp and she needed to cut the bullet out of her arm. Maybe even that wouldn’t be enough—maybe she was already too full of poison—but the only way to find out was to try. The very thought horrified her but she couldn’t just die, couldn’t just give up—

Well, she thought. Well. Well, she could, actually.

Why had she come to the Arctic, after all, except to resolve things with Powell. And her death at his hand would be a kind of resolution. It was one of the possibilities she’d been living with for years, wasn’t it? That she was supposed to have died on the Yellowhead Highway. Lycanthrope kills two in bloody road rampage, no survivors—that was one way it was supposed to have played out. It was something that she had thought many times that she might have, well, actually, preferred. The guilt of surviving her father’s death, the blankness and trauma and fear and depression and unhappiness that followed, the sleeplessness that had defined her life—none of those things would have had to happen. If she died now, if Powell killed her twelve years after the fact, things would still balance out. In their own bad way. Chey knew she understood very little about the universe but she knew that things coming to a bad end was not unheard of. That sometimes happy endings were too much to ask for.

Lycanthrope kills two.

No.

She didn’t like that ending. She had worked so hard. Sometimes without focus, sometimes to no point, but she had worked hard. She had jumped out of a fire tower and survived the fall, for instance. She had convinced her uncle to do something he hated. She had tattooed a wolf’s paw on her breast to steal some of Powell’s strength.

No, she wouldn’t stop now. She wouldn’t die.

In the hangar building, back in the offices, she searched for a knife, for a broken edge of a metal girder, for anything sharp. The offices were nearly bare except for some green enameled metal desks, their surfaces covered in rusted scratches. She tried pulling the leg off one of the desks but her strength was broken in half by the pain and the poison. She sweated and strained and pulled but nothing happened. With the handcuffs still on her wrists and only one good arm to work with she couldn’t get any leverage, anyway.

She ran out to where Pickersgill still lay dead in the parking lot. She searched his pockets, figuring he had to have a penknife, a folding knife, anything of the kind. He didn’t. She did find the handcuff key and spent a long frustrating while figuring out how to unlock the cuffs. With them off she felt minutely better. More free, at least. She dropped them to the ground and moved on.

She needed a jagged piece of metal. An especially sharp rock would do. She looked down at Port Radium and saw the pond down there full of cast-off machines corroding away in their polluted bath. Down there, certainly, there would be something.

Chey raced down the hill as quickly as she could manage. At one point her feet went out from under her and she rolled part of the way, dust and mud flecking her face, getting in her mouth, gravel pattering through her hair, stinging her eyes but then she was up again, moving again. She splashed out into water that felt all wrong, thicker, stranger than water. Muck bloomed in great rolling clouds wherever she disturbed the surface and a bad saline stink came up to make her choke, a disused, decayed smell, wholly inorganic and asphyxiating. She coughed up bloody phlegm and spat it into the ripples around her legs. She pressed on.

She spun around in a circle, looking for Powell. Looking for any sign of movement—a flash in the darkness, a dull glint. Instead she saw Port Radium.

It lay beneath her, spread out at the bottom of a long, rolling hill. No one lived there, she was sure of it—what few structures remained intact had collapsed roofs or had tumbled down to fall in on themselves. There had been dozens, maybe a hundred hangars and warehouses and who knew what else, once, but the vast majority of the buildings had been burned to the ground. The roads remained, long dark ribbons sectioning the land into parcels. Long poles of stripped wood had been pounded into the earth at every crossroads and intersection. She knew what they were for—when the snow came, as it would early this far north, that would be the only way for anyone to know where a building’s foundation lay. There were streetlights as well, in some places, but the metal poles had sunk and listed as the permafrost beneath them shifted over the years until they stood at angles like the trees of the drunken forest.

Abandoned—no, more than that. There was a pall over the remains of the town, nothing visible or even tangible really but there was a wrongness about it. Chey felt like waves of regret and desolation were rolling up out of the ruins. Maybe they were haunted. A ghost town, in more ways than one.

Between Chey and the ghost town’s near edge glimmered the black mirror of a pond, a big oval pool of water. A heap of twisted metal and broken rock stood in the center of the pond like a gigantic cairn. She recognized a few outlines, of dump trucks and backhoes and cranes, but most of the metal had softened and lost its shape to rust and wind until it became a single agglomeration of bent girders and decaying engines. Hundreds of tons of forgotten equipment, left to soften like compost over a span of millennia. She could only imagine how toxic the water must be with runoff from the dead machinery. “Jesus,” she said, astounded despite herself. After spending the last few weeks in the utter natural serenity of the forest this man-made ruin startled her. “What was this place?”

Powell answered her from the shadows. “It was a mining town, once.” She didn’t turn or give any sign she’d heard him. She didn’t want to move. She didn’t want him to hit her again—her shoulder still hurt from the last time. “The rocks here are some of the oldest on Earth and they’re full of radium, cobalt, chromium. It also contained one of the biggest silver lodes ever discovered.”

“And you thought it would be a nice place to hide out,” she said, quietly.

There was nothing wrong with his hearing—or maybe he was closer to her than the sound of his voice made her think. “It was too expensive to mine the silver profitably, though. It cost more to dig it up and ship it back to civilization than it was worth.”

“So they abandoned it then?”

“Not quite,” Powell told her. His voice came from over to her left—she was sure of it. She had to be ready, had to anticipate his next attack. If she could turn his move against him—but he was still talking. “They found something else here, too. This is where the Americans got the uranium for their first a-bombs.”

She gasped in spite of herself. “Really?”

“They hired the local Dene Indians to carry it out of here in burlap sacks. They’ve always claimed they didn’t know how dangerous the stuff was, but an entire generation of Dene men died young here. You see those dark mounds down there?” he asked, and she nodded—there were piles of dark earth almost everywhere, sticking up from the empty ground like mammoth ant hills.

“Those are pitchblende tailings, what’s left of what they dug out of the ground after they refined the uranium ore. Every couple of years someone from the government comes out here to measure how radioactive they still are.”

“Radioactive—this place is radioactive,” she said, and cold sweat burst in pinpricks under her hair.

“I didn’t think your friends would follow me here. I figured they had to know how dangerous it was. Maybe you can tell them. Maybe they’ll leave, then.”

“I don’t think Bobby would listen to me now,” she said, and turned, her hands up, ready to grab him and throw him. He was so close she could smell his skin—she could smell his wolf.

She expected him to lunge forward and knock her down. He didn’t. She overbalanced and had to stagger to keep from falling. When she’d straightened again, wary, too stiff, he raised a hand toward her and she swung to block his punch. He wasn’t punching, though. He had a square black pistol in his hand. He must have gone back to Pickersgill’s corpse and recovered one of the man’s guns.

“Powell,” she had time to say, but then he shot her.

The noise barely registered in her ears. The pain blocked out almost every other sense impression she had. Her heart lurched in her chest and her lungs sagged as the breath burst out of her. The pain was immense and bitter and devastating—she couldn’t tell up from down, couldn’t even tell what part of her body had been shot. Then her arm throbbed viciously and she knew exactly where the bullet went in. She also knew that it was still inside of her.

She dropped to her knees and grabbed the bloody wound on her left forearm. Her skin was burning—literally smoldering but that didn’t bother her as much as the throbbing. It felt like every blood vessel in her arm had swollen up until they were crowding each other in there. It felt like her circulatory system was pumping undiluted agony deep into her body.

With her index finger she probed at the wound. It was narrow and round and blood leaked out of it. She dug her finger into the wound a little and a whole new kind of pain revealed itself to her.

She threw up. There wasn’t much in her stomach but she threw up acid and bile that streamed down over her chest. It actually made her feel better. Then she looked up at Powell, finally able to form a thought in her head.

“I’m not dead,” she said.

“Not yet,” he agreed. He started to put the gun in his pocket, then pulled it out again and threw it to clatter in the ruins, out of sight. “But you will die eventually. Already your body is reacting to the silver.”

“Poison,” she said. He had meant to shoot her in the arm. Somewhere non-vital, a non-lethal wound. “I’m poisoned.”

He nodded. He bent down to look into her eyes. “I don’t know how long it’ll take to kill you. You might have time to find your boyfriend and get him to cut the bullet out of you. Better hurry, though. The moon will be up sooner than you think.”

He turned around and started to walk away. He gave her one last glance—not so much a look of sympathy as curiosity, as if he expected her to say something or do something to make him stop.

“Powell,” she mewled, like a hurt kitten.

It wasn’t enough. He kept walking and soon the darkness swallowed him whole.

Powell wore a pair of coveralls much like her own—she guessed he had been forced to scrounge for clothing since he’d been in Port Radium. He didn’t have Dzo around to follow him around in a rusty pickup truck any more.

He had an ugly scar across his forehead and cheek. Either he’d been injured since his last change or he’d had a near miss with a silver bullet. His icy green eyes were quiet—she couldn’t quite gauge what he was thinking. Or what he was planning.

She wondered if he’d given as much thought to this confrontation as she had.

“Hi,” she said, moving toward him as sedately as she could manage.

“Hello, yourself,” he said, and ducked just as she brought her arms down and tried to get her handcuff chain around his neck.

He had her at a distinct disadvantage. It didn’t matter. She spun around just in time to see him running at her, his head down, his arms wide. He grabbed her around the midsection and knocked her off her feet. She went skidding along a rough section of asphalt and her head bounced off a broken stone. Light erupted behind her eyes and she couldn’t seem to breathe.

He was on top of her, a piece of rubble in his hands as big as her head. He brought it up high, clearly intending to use it to smash her face in. She lunged upward with her knees and he flew off of her. Rolling onto all fours she looked over and saw him doing the same.

Together they jumped to their feet, their arms in front of them. They wheeled around each other like sumo wrestlers. Chey had been trained in unarmed combat by the US military. She knew how to hold her own. Powell had had a century to learn how to fight. He rushed her and she dodged but he must have expected it—he swung around in mid-swing and grabbed her around the waist, twisted up underneath and slammed her to the ground. The wind went out of her but she managed to kick out with her legs and hit him in the ankle, toppling him to the ground, too. They both rolled over, panting for breath. Then he looked up and met her gaze.

Could he kill her? Did he even want to?

For a second they just stared at each other. Then he reached out and grabbed the chain that held her hands together. She cried out as he yanked, hard, and dragged her across the stones, but she couldn’t get her feet underneath her, couldn’t twist out of his grip.

He dragged her inside the big corrugated tin building. The darkness inside was nearly complete. He pulled her a ways farther then dragged her up and off the ground. Both of his hands grabbed at her flesh and then she was airborne, hurtling over the poured concrete floor. She hit hard enough to make spit fly out of her mouth.

“If you want to kill me, just do it,” she shouted. She was hoping he would reply and thereby give away his location. She couldn’t see him at all in the shadows.

“I don’t want to kill anybody,” he said. He was moving around, circling her. She thought of her training. She needed to move, too. She needed to get a wall at her back. Otherwise he could attack her from behind and she would be defenseless. “I’m sorry that I killed your father, but believe me, I did what I could to prevent it. You should understand that by now.”

“Bullshit! You could have done something. You could have locked yourself up in a silver cage that night. But you didn’t,” she said.

He didn’t bother to reply.

She could feel him nearby but she couldn’t determine where he was. She scrabbled up to her feet and started moving toward the wall ahead of her.

She felt his body heat a moment before he scooped her up and threw her back into the dark. She landed badly with an arm underneath her, crushed by her own weight. She cried out in pain.

“You done yet?” he asked. He was close, but not close enough to hit. “Why can’t you just go away and leave me alone? I never wanted any of this. I just want to survive the mess you’ve made for me.”

“Oh, that’s rich,” she said. “You brought this on yourself.” She crawled forward through the gloom. Her hands searched the dusty floor, looking for rocks, discarded tools, anything she could use as a weapon.

He hit her hard, then, hard enough to pick her up and carry her, screaming, across the floor. They smashed into the wall and through it. The corroded tin collapsed under their combined weight and she saw stars, real stars as they rolled back out into the parking lot. Her shoulder gave way with a popping noise—if it wasn’t broken it still hurt like a bastard. He pushed her away and staggered into the night. She knew better than to think he was done with her.

“Okay, head over to that utility pole,” Pickersgill said from behind her. He wasn’t taking a lot of chances—she had to keep her hands straight up in the air or he would jab her in the back with one of his pistols.

The field had been a parking lot once, she thought. It was relatively flat and it was interrupted here and there only by ten meter tall light poles, each crowned with a pair of long-broken Klieg lights. The poles were as thick as her arm and made of some metal that hadn’t corroded over the years.

“Listen,” Chey asked, “could I get a coat or a blanket or something? I’m freezing like this.”

He tossed her a pair of moth-eaten, grease-stained coveralls. They were meant for a larger person than herself but she was glad just not to be naked anymore. “I appreciate it,” she said. “Can we talk for a second? I’d like to—”

He didn’t let her finish. “Turn around and grab the pole behind you with both hands,” Pickersgill said.

She did as she was told. The metal was freezing cold and plenty sturdy, though she could feel that the pole was hollow. Nothing more complex than a pipe sticking out of the ground with a few wires running through. Pickersgill moved around behind her and clicked one end of a pair of handcuffs to her left wrist. She could feel him fumbling around behind her with the second cuff—he had to do it one-handed, since he kept a pistol in the crook of her neck the whole time.

“It ain’t silver, but tensile steel’s got to be worth something,” he told her. He clicked the second cuff shut and came back around to face her. He had one pistol in his hand, the other in its holster.

“You’re not going to kill me?” Chey asked.

“Not yet, no. We still need to catch your alpha. He’s smarter than your average canid, obviously. That’s the only reason it’s taken us so long to catch him. He’s still prone to the weaknesses of his kind, however. What we call, in the business, taxic behaviors. Instincts. For instance, he won’t abandon his mate.”

“I’m not his mate,” Chey said. “He wants to kill me.”

Pickersgill shrugged. “One lure is as good as another in this case. When he hears you, he’ll come.”

Chey frowned. “Are you sure?”

“When we had you up in that fire tower, howling like a bitch on heat, his exotic half couldn’t keep away. Every time he would come closer, and once we even got a couple of shots off at him. If he had kept that up we would have had him. He must have figured as much. After that his human half just up and ran off and came here, far enough away that he wouldn’t be tempted by your vocalizations.” He scratched at his mustache.

“So you think if he hears me now he’ll come again,” she said.

“You got it. As soon as the moon comes up you’ll start in to howling and he’ll show himself. Then we’ll finish this contract and we can all go home. Except for the two of you, of course.”

“And your brother,” Chey said. Taunting Pickersgill was probably a mistake but she couldn’t stop herself.

“Yes. We haven’t heard from Frank in a bit. I suppose you had something to do with that?”

Chey sighed. Guilt squished around in her stomach as if she’d eaten tainted food. “I killed him, I guess. My wolf did. I’m sorry. I guess that gives you a right to kill me, too.”

Pickersgill scratched his mustache again. She wondered if he had fleas. “Well, no, I don’t suppose that’s it,” he said, finally. “What gives me the right to kill you is just I’m a better predator. I’m smarter than you and I’ve got better weapons. That’s all.”

She didn’t have anything to say to that.

Pickersgill took a phone out of his pocket with his left hand and dialed a number. The pistol in his right hand drooped until it wasn’t pointing directly at her but he didn’t holster it. He was pretty smart, she had to give him that. He’d thought this through better than she had.

Well, Chey had never been very good at making plans. She’d pretty much followed her gut her whole life. And now it was going to get her killed. She stared out at the broken plain of the parking lot, at heaps of stones and broken chunks of asphalt. The helicopter was moving away, headed toward the far side of the town. Soon it was gone behind rust-stained walls and mounds of dark soil, lost in a purpling sky that was about to turn into darkness.

Her mind turned over and over, trying to decide what to do next. If Pickersgill would just step closer she could kick him. Maybe get her legs around his neck and snap his spine. She could spit in his eyes and when he went to wipe them clean she could kick the gun right out of his hand. Then she could bring her knee up into his chin hard enough to knock him out.

What she would do then, still handcuffed to the light pole, she had no idea. But it was worth a try.

“Hey,” she said.

Pickersgill looked up.

“Your brother told me something right before he died.”

“Yeah?” he asked.

“Yeah. If you come over here I’ll whisper it in your ear.”

He grinned at her. “Nice try.” He actually took a step back.

Okay, she thought to herself. Time for plan B.

She tried flexing her arms, tensing against the chain that held her hands cuffed together. She could feel how solid the metal was. She was stronger, stronger than any normal human being, but she didn’t think she could break that chain. In fact, she was sure of it. She pulled anyway. The muscles in her arms tensed and burned and the steel held. She grunted and gritted her teeth and pulled harder. The cuffs dug into her wrists and scraped at her skin like dull knives. Sweat broke out on her forehead.

The chain held.

“I didn’t think so,” Pickersgill said. He gave himself a good long scratch and let his pistol arm hang loose at his side. “Just relax, okay? It’s a long time until moonrise. You don’t want to dislocate your shoulders.”

She stared right into his eyes and pulled and yanked with every muscle fiber in her body. She felt the blood pounding in her head, felt the bones of her arms flex and start to fracture. She pulled harder. The chain didn’t give.

Instead the light pole behind her did. As she heaved forward the chain put pressure on the hollow pole and it crimped, slamming forward across her shoulders. The pole flicked forward and the twin light fixtures at its top slapped against the ground, shattering what little glass was left in them. Chey was thrown sideways by the toppling pole, her wrists screaming with abrasions. Feeling like an idiot she looked over at Pickersgill.

He didn’t look back. The collapsing light pole had connected with the space between his shoulder and his neck. Maybe it had broken his spine, or maybe it had just given him a concussion. Either way he lay sprawled across the broken stones, his eyes wide open but seeing nothing.

Chey kicked and kicked at the pole until it broke off at the crimp and clattered to the ground. She pulled down on the cuffs until they came loose from the pole. She struggled and bent and twisted until her hands were in front of her, at least. Then she ran over to check Pickersgill’s neck. She couldn’t find a pulse.

Behind her she heard someone clapping, very slowly. She looked up and was not surprised to find Powell standing not ten meters away.

She trotted out to the top of a sand esker, a long, low bar of sand atop slickrock that had been deposited by glaciers when true dire wolves still roamed the earth. She wanted to howl in jubilation and anticipation of the bloodshed to come but she didn’t want to alert her prey to her presence just yet.

Her eyes were not sufficiently keen to see the buildings a half kilometer from where she stood. She could make out some square outlines—unnaturally square, humanly square, square, square. She could not see the red and green pigments that painted the tops of the waters all around but she could smell the heavy metals floating in great swirls like oil slicks there.

She could not feel the radiation that leaked upward like darkness from the very ground she stood on. She could not in any case have understood that the very land here was cursed with uranium, with radon gas, with the vast deposits of pitchblende and raw radium that gave the place its old name.

But she could tell the place was cursed.

Cursed, she panted, cursed, cursed. Cursed forever. She would have chosen another place if it had been up to her. Any other place. But no one had asked. She was a predator and she followed her prey. If they went to ground in tainted earth she would wallow in poison to get to them.

And they were nearby, she knew it. Even over the bitter wind, over the stinks of heavy metals and broken ore and disturbed earth and rusted metal and decayed plaster and crumbled concrete, she could smell the humans. The human, in fact, the one who had chained her and tried to drive her mad.

As the sun began to set she picked her way down from the esker and into Port Radium, and it was there she yelped and whined for the change came too soon.

Chey found herself awake and standing for the first time since she’d begun to change. It unnerved her a little. No more than the character of the place where she found herself, however.

She was standing, for one thing, on a road.

Long broken slabs of concrete lead off to the horizon in either direction. Between slurries of shattered tan chips some grayish weeds had poked up, and the uneasy soil of the arctic had bucked and shifted the concrete around until it looked half like crushed rock. Nature was busy reclaiming the abandoned road. But it was a road.

Chey covered her breasts with her arms. It had been one thing to wake up naked in an uninhabited forest, where the nearest voyeurs were hundreds of kilometers away. But now she was effectively in a town—and she was completely lacking in clothing.

She hurried off the road and between a pair of giant steel cargo containers, one rust red, one a faded and streaky blue. She ducked inside the blue one and listened to her footfalls echo alarmingly. She had to be in Port Radium, she decided. Her wolf must have reached the fabled town.

Peeking around the edge of the container she saw buildings off to the west, long industrial sheds with fallen-in roofs and decaying walls. She saw dozens of smokestacks like cyclopean chess pieces on a board of upturned soil. Nearer than the buildings she saw a forlorn bulldozer, its blade gnawed by rust, its black leather seat turned into a nest for some absent bird.

She got the message. Port Radium it might have been, but Port Radium had long since stopped being anywhere. There would be no people here other than those she’d come to confront. At least she had that.

Moving as quickly as she could she ducked out of her cargo container and scrambled up a slope of loose dirt and fist-sized rocks. The nearest building looked like an aircraft hangar, an enormous structure of corrugated tin. Wind and rain had bored holes right through it until she could see the setting sun right through its metal walls. She found a door, or rather the frame where a door might once have been, and slipped inside.

Orange light fell in dusty beams to make burning spotlights on the floor. Overhead a massive skeleton of iron girders remained partially intact. At the far end of the enclosed space stood a conical pile of rubble, bright brown and steep-sided. A dump truck stood by the pile, its bed tilted upward as if it had been abandoned in the middle of depositing a new load.

Closer to her a small portion of the building had been enclosed to make office space. The wide windows were broken and smeared but she could see desks inside and lockers—maybe there would be clothes hanging up inside that she could use. She went to the office door and pulled up on the latch, half-expecting it to be rusted shut. Half-expecting that she would need her extranormal strength to open it. Instead the door almost flew open and she staggered backwards, nearly losing her balance. It felt almost as if the door had been kicked open.

In fact, it had. Bruce Pickersgill stood in the doorframe, stupid mustache, fur collar, and all. He held his twin pistols at arms length, one barrel trained on her forehead, the other on her heart.

He had orders to shoot on sight. He was about to shoot her with silver bullets. Chey closed her eyes and prepared to accept the inevitable.

He didn’t fire.

That night Chey walked through the forest with the inevitable fatalism of the truly damned. Her feet hurt, blistered by the loose boots and her body trembled with cold, hunger, and fatigue. None of it mattered. If she had thoughts in her head they were dark, earthy thoughts that crumbled like clods of dirt when she tried to grab at them. The landscape changed around her as she hiked but she barely noticed as the trees grew thinner and shorter. The world got more wet, too. There had been a hundred tiny lakes and ponds near Powell’s cabin. Now she moved through a realm of swampy half-frozen muskegs where the tree roots dipped like bent pipes into dark water. Once she had to ford an actual river, a ribbon of brown water deep enough in the middle that she was forced to swim across its width. The chilly dip woke her up a little—enough to see the dead forest beyond the further bank.

The trees over there stood white as bones, pointing at random angles at the cold stars above. They bore neither leaves nor needles and their branches stuck out like broken ribs or were missing altogether.

The ground at her feet was caked with ash. There must have been a forest fire here recently, she thought. Every step stirred up more of the powdery gray debris. What had happened? Surely the Western Prairie guys hadn’t been foolish enough to throw a lit cigarette butt into the underbrush. Maybe lightning had struck nearby. It must have happened recently. She knew that after a forest fire the smaller plant species—grasses, mosses, shrubs—came back quickly but she could find nothing green anywhere.

She trudged into the dead forest and soon found herself in a place as desolate as the back of the moon. No owls hooted in the darkness and no wildflowers grew up from the ash to tremble in the breeze. She saw a very few insects—beetles, mostly, their wingcases snapping open as she approached, their dirty-looking wings convulsing in the air to zip them away from her on long curved paths. She touched the white trunks of the dead trees as she passed by and their wood was dry and rough as if they were half petrified.

She still didn’t know exactly where she was. She had headed west from the stream where Frank Pickersgill died, figuring that no matter how badly lost she got her wolf would find the way when the moon rose again.

In time the trees grew thinner on the ground still, and thinner, until she was no longer in a forest at all but a sandy flatland punctuated here and there by the occasional dead stump. Streams rolled across bare rock and through drifts of shallow snow covering endless hectares of land. After the myopia of the forest she felt like she could see to the very edge of the world. The starlight painted the ground white and the water black and the world seemed striped and piebald between the two. On the horizon she saw what could have been the ocean—an endless wrinkled mass of water. It had to be the shore of Great Bear Lake.

She pressed on.

The sun rose while she was still human. She hadn’t seen it in a while—for the last few days she’d only been human by starlight. The sun’s warmth on her back and shoulder filled her up, made her skin tingle, eased the soreness in her joints, even as it painted the vast open ground with yellow light. It felt good. She knew it wouldn’t last.

“Dzo,” she said, as if he could hear her. She thought maybe he could.

She heard a splash behind her and saw him clamber up out of a black pond. His furs streamed with water but by the time he reached her he was dry. He tipped his mask back onto the top of his head. “Uh, yeah?” he asked, as if he’d been with her the whole time. She still had no idea what he really was but she understood he was a lot more at home in this weird land than she would ever be.

“Dzo,” she said, “is it much farther?”

“Yeah,” he said. “But your wolf can make it today.” His face screwed up in bewilderment. “You scared or something?”

She nodded. “Yes, I am.”

“Humans seem to get scared a lot. When animals get scared, sometimes they just freeze. You know? Their muscles lock up and they can’t move. You ever try that?”

“That won’t work for me. Dzo—I killed a guy. Kind of. I don’t know what that makes me.”

“A predator?” He sat down on the ground and rubbed his hands together. “I’m not really the guy you ought to be asking these questions.”

She nodded. “I know. The funny thing is I’m not as scared of getting killed as I am of talking to Powell again. But you wouldn’t understand that.”

He raised his hands in weak apology. “Maybe you’ll get killed before you get that far,” he offered.

“Yeah.” She started walking again. “Thanks, Dzo,” she said.

“My pleasure. Listen,” he called after her, “this is as far as I can go. They poisoned the water out there and I can’t follow you now. If you do see Powell, will you give him a message for me?”

“Sure,” she said, turning around.

“Tell him I have his boots in my truck. In case he’s looking for ‘em.”

Chey smiled. It felt wrong on her face but she liked it all the same. “I’ll do that.”

An hour after the sun rose, the moon followed.

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.

His body surged with pain and fear and it made her rejoice. She shook in convulsions as she tore at his flesh, as she swallowed chunks of him. He rattled and wailed and fell away from her and part of him tore free, his leg tore open in her mouth and he toppled backwards like a felled tree. She gulped down his blood and meat and lunged forward for the rest of him. Bloodlust scattered her senses—all she knew was to press forward, to press the attack. She did not see his arm come around, would not have guessed he had any strength left, and when his closed fist smashed into the top of her head, crushing her sensitive ears, she yelped and dropped to her side.

Light swirled in her eyes. Her mouth was full of nothing, full of air, of air—her paws beat at the carpet of pine needles and dead leaves. What had happened? How had—how had he hurt—how had—

He pushed away from her, scuttling into the darkness like a pill bug, his hands pushing at the snow and the rocks. She shook herself, trying to throw off the dullness, the ringing numbness in her head. When she recovered he was not there. She cast about, threw her forelegs down and touched the earth with her muzzle, sniffing for him. He couldn’t have gotten far, she knew she’d wounded him badly.

She took a step forward, another, another. She smelled water and breeze, cold air like the trailing hem of a ghost’s gown flapping in space. Another step and—no. She stood on a precipice looking down at a sunken stream bed. Far below her, down a raw slope of disturbed earth, he had crashed to the bottom of the trickling water. He was down there moaning and bleeding and still alive.

The need to kill filled her up. Her hackles lifted and a growl grew in her throat. Yet it was over. There was no way for her to get down that sharp slope. She was no human with fingers and toes to grab at the descent.

No matter. He couldn’t live long. She’d given him a death wound, and it was only a matter of time before blood loss finished him off. She turned around a few times and settled to her belly, to listen to his screams and wait.

The moon sank behind the trees and caught her yawning. And then—

Chey came to sobbing, her body cold and damp. She remembered blood, but whose, and how it had been shed was lost to her. She lay on the edge of a river bank maybe five meters high, a carved out shore of mud and tree roots. She looked over the edge—and then she shrieked in horror.

She couldn’t remember it—but her wolf had killed a man. There could be no doubt about it, this time. She could see his bent and twisted corpse down there. It was Frank Pickersgill and his blood stained the water. Naked and shivering she stared down at her own handiwork and realized that she had finally become the monster, the creature that had defined her life. She was no better than Powell.

Frank Pickersgill. She had not hated the man, though she’d been a little afraid of him. He’d never shown her anything but kindness. And she had killed him. Her stomach rumbled and she realized she must have—must have—

“Lady,” he croaked up at her.

Oh, God, he was still alive. Chey stepped forward onto the sloping bank and clods of dirt tumbled away from her foot, pattered down across him. She hurried down as quickly as she could manage, grabbing at exposed roots and bits of rock, sliding down as much as she climbed. She was covered in mud and dead leaves by the time she reached bottom, by the time she knelt by him in the frigid water. Tears dropped from her face and stained his shirt.

“Lady,” he sighed, and she heard his breath come weakly in and out of him, dripping, almost gently from his lungs.

“Don’t try to move,” she insisted. “I’ll find help, I promise.”

“Lady, they see you,” he protested, “they’re gonna kill you.”

She searched him for wounds. Found most of his left leg gone. She started to vomit but forced herself to stop. “You’re going to make it,” she promised him, because it sounded like something she was supposed to say. She tore at his pant leg and found raw meat underneath. Blood trickled out of dozens of small wounds. Teeth marks.

Chey put the guilt aside. She had to save him.

“We got our orders. If you come down from that tower, we gotta shoot on sight. Figured you should know that.”

She pressed down on the raw tissues of his leg, tried to stanch the bleeding. She had no idea how much blood he’d lost already. “Don’t talk. Does talking hurt?” she asked.

“Shit,” he laughed. Weakly. “Everything hurts. Gimme my pack, willya? I’m gonna die.”

“Not if I have anything to say about it,” she swore.

“Nice.” He smiled at her. His eyes weren’t tracking, just staring straight ahead of him. Was that a bad sign? “You’re a nice lady. I want you to know I ain’t sore. I know this wasn’t personal and I’m sorry they’re going to. My pack?”

She looked up and saw a leather satchel lying near his head. She grabbed it with her free hand and pushed it into his arms. He opened the flap and reached inside.

He wasn’t going to die. She knew it, understood it. He wasn’t going to die. But he was going to change.

“The moon will rise in a while,” she said. How many hours would it be? If he died of blood loss first—but no. No, she wouldn’t let him fade away. He would make it until the moon rose. And then he would be healed. If you were wounded by a wolf but you didn’t die, then you came back as a wolf. And the change could heal his wound. “Do you understand what’s going to happen to you?”

“I heard the story from Fenech, yeah. It’s like rabies or somethin’. You get bit and you become one yourself. Lady, you get out of here. You head east. Get as far from. Get away from Port Radium, and maybe you’ll make it. Don’t look, now.”

“What?” she asked.

He drew a pistol from his pack and it wavered as it moved around between them. She reared back, thinking he was going to kill her. He had every right. Instead he pushed the muzzle of the gun into his mouth and fired.

“Jesus!” she shrieked, the noise lost in the gunshot. She fell backwards into the water, her hands back to catch her.