Cold Wind (2 page)

“Maria, you make me hungry.” And she would have, with her spirit intact. “But not like this.” I fastened her back up and stood. Time to go.

*   *   *

The city was another world in the snow. Silent. Flakes falling soft as owl feathers. Time out of time.

The streets were empty. No traffic in or out. It would last until she was done. I'd traced her through campfire stories, elders' tales, academic papers, psychiatric reports; it's what she did. She had been new in the world when Columbus came; alone. Over the centuries she had refined her methods until they were ritual: she fed early on the evening of a winter high day or holiday, brought her strength to peak, then chose someone to play with all night. Someone strong. Someone who would last.

I had put myself in her path and she had chosen me, and now I must seek her out. But as I did, as I followed her, she was shadowing me, herding me. I didn't try to pinpoint her—she was at the height of her powers, luxuriant with Maria Flores—but I knew she was there somewhere, behind the abandoned, snow-shrouded cars, in the doorway, behind the dumpster and the frozen cameras. I felt her on my left, a presence as subtle as atmospheric pressure, turning me north. I knew where she wanted me to go. So I padded through the muffled white dream downtown had become, pacing my shadow along the old brick and concrete walls of back streets and alleys, toward the edge of the city, where land met sea.

Alleys widened to open space and the sky glimmered with reflected water light. The land began to climb and undulate. Under the snow, pavement softened to grass and then alternating gravel path and turf on dirt layered on concrete. A paved switchback over a road. The sculpture park overlooking the Sound.

Before I reached the brow of the hill I stopped and listened. Silence. So profound I heard the snow falling, settling with a crystalline hiss, bright and sharp as stars. I closed my eyes, opened my mouth a little, breathed and tongued the air to the roof of my mouth. There. To the west. Where there should be only the cold snow, industrial solvents beneath the thin layer of topsoil trucked in and grassed over, and the restless damp of the Sound. The sharp tang of woman, of beast.

I opened my eyes, let blood flood the muscles of my shoulders and thighs, and listened.

The snow stopped. A breath of wind ruffled my hair. The clouds thinned from iron to mother-of-pearl, lit from above by moonlight. To the west, the Sound shimmered.

Eyes unfocused, vision wide to catch motion, I saw the shadow picking its way over the snow. If I closed my eyes I would hear the lift and delicate step of a doe moving through undergrowth.

I moved again, keeping low, east then south. I stopped. Coughed, deliberately, and felt as much as heard her ears flick and nostrils flare as she tracked my position. Come, I thought, come to me.

And she did. She crossed the skyline and I saw her clearly.

Her coat was winter beige, thick and soft, pale as underfur at her throat and where it folded back as she walked. Her knees bent the wrong way. Her dark boots were not boots.

Deer Woman.

I took off my jacket and dropped it in the snow. I opened my shirt.

She stopped, nostrils opening and closing. Her head moved back, her right leg lifted as though to stamp. But there was no herd to signal. She kept coming.

She wanted me to run, so I did. I bounded away, moving through trees—they were not big enough to climb—north and east, leaping the concrete wall, running between the looming sculptures, until I was among the cluster of greenery at the corner of the park. She followed.

Two hundred years ago, even a hundred, when there were still wolves in the north of this country and big cats in the south, she would have been more careful, but she had been playing predator, not prey, for too long. No doubt she had lost count of nights like this, the victims whose fear for a while overwhelmed their attraction. She would take her time, not risk her legs on those walls. She was still sleek with Maria, and this was the height of her yearly rite, not to be rushed.

The sky was almost white now. Against it, bare twigs stood out like black lace. I couldn't see the water from here but I could smell it. It softened the air, utterly unlike the arid cold of Korea, coarse as salt. Korea, where it was rumored that the Amur leopard was back in the DMZ.

The snow crunched. Closer, so much closer than I expected; I'd been careless, too. She was not a buffalo calf.

Moonlight spilled through the cloud and splashed like milk onto the snow and I saw the darker line in the gray-blue shadow of the steel sculpture.

“Onca,” it said. “Come to me.”

Recklessness burst in me, brilliant as a star. I stood, and left the safety of the trees.

Moon shadow is steep and sharp. The tracks I made looked like craters. Her scent ripened, rich and round against the keen night air. I swallowed.

“I can't see you.” My voice was ragged, my breath fast.

She stepped from the shadow.

I moved closer. Closer still, until I could see the pulsing ribbon of artery along her neck, the snowflake on a thread of her hair. Strong hair, brown-black.

“Kneel,” she said. She wanted me beneath her in the snow. She would fold down on me and crush the breath from my lungs until my heart stopped and she could lap me up and run, run through the trees, safe, strong for another year.

“No,” I said.

She went very still. I regarded her. After a moment I stepped to one side so she could see my tracks.

She took a step backward. It wouldn't be enough. It would never have been enough, even in the long ago.

“Who are you?”

“Onca.” My newest name,
Panthera onca
. “B'alam before that. And long, long ago, Viima.” She didn't understand. I'd been a myth before she was born.

I waited.

She looked at the tracks again: a half moon and four circles. Unmistakable.

She shot away, all deer now, straight for the trees lining Western Avenue. They always go for the trees.

In the DMZ the water buffalo had been heavier, and horned, but only a buffalo, nothing like my equal. Deer Woman ran like a rumor, like the wind, but I was made for this, and though I hadn't hunted one of my kind for an age, had thought I had taken the last a lifetime ago, she had never run from one like me. I was older. Much older. And at short range, cats are faster than deer.

I brought her down with one swipe to the legs and she tumbled into the snow. She panted, tail flickering. Her hind legs tightened as she prepared to scramble up and run again. I stood over her. I could take her throat in my jaws and suffocate her until she was a heartbeat from death, then rip her open and swallow her heart as it struggled to beat, feel its muscular contraction inside me. The lungs next. Rich with blood. Slippery and dense. Then the shoulders.

But she didn't move, and I didn't move, and she was a woman again.

“Why?” Her hoarse voice seemed more human now. She didn't know why she was still alive.

I didn't, either. “Cold Wind. That was my first name, before people crossed the land bridge and I followed. Or perhaps I crossed and they followed, I forget. You think you're old…”

I looked at the steel sculpture: huge, undeniable, but rust would eat it as surely as leaves fall in winter and dawn breaks the night open and spills light afresh on the world, and I would still be here. Alone. I had killed them all, because that was what I did.

“Get up,” I said.

“Why?”

“So you can run.”

Surely she wasn't weary of life, not yet, but she began to lift her jaw, to offer her throat. Cats are faster than deer. I would catch her, and as young as she was, she felt it: this is who we were, this is what we did. It was the old way.

“Run. I won't kill you. Not this year.”

Silence. “But next?”

Predator and prey. We were the last. I said nothing. And she was gone, running, running.

The stars shone bright but the moon was setting and more cloud was on its way, ordinary northwest cloud. The night was warming, the silence already thinning, traffic starting up again at the edges. By tomorrow the snow would melt, the cameras would work. But tonight it was still a white world where Deer Woman ran toward daybreak, and I had someone to hunger for.

Copyright (C) 2014 by Nicola Griffith

Art copyright (C) 2014 by Sam Wolfe Connelly