Frostbite (12 page)

“No one had anything tangible to offer me. I wandered around Europe for a while, but I’d been honest when I said I wanted to come back to Canada. Eventually I got enough courage together to try it.

“It wasn’t easy crossing the ocean. I could hardly afford to buy a silver cage. Instead I stole a trunk, a big steamer trunk large enough that I could climb inside. I had a silver chain I had taken from Lucie’s castle, and no matter how badly I needed money I managed never to pawn it. It was the only way I could keep my wolf from hurting anyone, you see. It wasn’t very thick, but it didn’t matter. When I would feel the change coming on I would climb into my trunk. Then I would wrap the chain around the outside in such a way that it held the trunk shut but could still be easily removed by a human hand. My wolf would try to get out, of course, but it was impossible—without hands the wolf couldn’t pull the chain free. Stuck inside that confined space the wolf couldn’t get enough leverage to kick the trunk to pieces, either. Every time I climbed into that trunk I worried the wolf would get out, all the same. I might hurt someone—for all I knew I might kill every human being on the ship, and as I was no seaman I would be left adrift on the ocean, unable to steer my way to any harbor. Far worse, there was the possibility I might get out, hurt only one person without killing them, and thereby spread my curse.

“My fears went unrealized. The other passengers and the crew knew there was something odd about me, but back then people weren’t terrified of each other’s mysteries so much, and no one asked any questions I couldn’t answer. Two weeks after I’d departed I made landfall at Boston and from there I worked my way north, across the border. Back, at last, to ‘our home and native land.’

“I know the southern part of the country is pretty well developed
now, but there wasn’t much of anything west of Ontario back then. This was sometime during the Depression, but before the second war. I found a cabin in the Barren Lands and tried that for a while. I was lonesome, but it was bearable—I thought I had found my place. Eventually, though, the cities of Ontario started to grow and spread out and new suburbs developed, whole new towns sprouting up where before there had never been anything but logging camps and the occasional hunter. When the land developers moved in I moved out, heading west. That became a pattern. I would live somewhere a while, maybe six months, maybe a whole year, but as soon as the loggers packed up and moved out I knew I would have to hurry on, sometimes with no warning. I roamed through the west until the west became British Columbia and the western coast, which was already growing itself, the cities there spreading back eastward. I changed direction, headed north, and then I roamed upcountry until I got here. Always running away, always foot-weary and wanting to finally settle down, to stop the running, always horrified of what might happen if I did. I know I’ll have to leave even this desolate place eventually, but I think it’ll be a while.”

He stopped talking, then. His story was done. The sudden silence was so strange that she sat up and looked right at him. “You’ve spent all this time alone? All those years in the backwoods with nobody?”

He shrugged. “There’s Dzo. He and I met up in the seventies. He was living above a bar in Medicine Hat. It was kind of weird, actually. I had popped in for a quick beer—I allowed myself that small luxury sometimes, when I knew the moon wouldn’t rise until much later. He was sitting on a bar stool eating peanuts out of a dish, but I knew something was up because he had another little dish full of water and he had to wash each peanut fastidiously before he popped it in his mouth. I knew, from long experience, that whenever I saw something weird my best bet was to turn around and walk away, but this seemed like harmless eccentricity, so I just pretended not to notice and held up a finger for service. It was too late, though. He saw me and pointed at me and
said, ‘Hey, you’re a shape-shifter, right?’ I looked around, expecting to be seized by the patrons of the bar. If they knew what I was, surely they would lock me up, or worse, I figured. I raised my hands in surrender and fled. My car was parked out back—I still had three hours to get back to my cabin before I changed. He came up and stood in front of my car and wouldn’t let me leave. He had his mask on and a bag over his shoulder and he said he was coming with me. I tried to explain that I was just passing through. He just nodded and said he was mobile himself. I tried to explain it would be dangerous, that he should be afraid of me, but my threats just made him smile. No matter what I said, he wouldn’t take no for an answer. Eventually I had to give in and let him tag along. We’ve been working together ever since.”

“At least you had someone, then. Anyone. You must have missed your family pretty terribly,” she said.

“Eh, families aren’t what they’re cracked up to be,” he said, dismissively. There was a story there he wasn’t interested in telling.

Chey had her own ideas, though. “Mine was pretty great, once,” she said. She could feel the wolf inside of her, baring its teeth. She fought it back, kept her face clean of emotion. “Then things went to shit.” Some ember of humanity in her heart flared up as soon as she’d said that. No matter what she’d been through, Powell’s sheer life span meant he’d suffered a lot longer than she had. “I’m sorry. I know you’ve had it bad, too.”

He shrugged. They said little more to each other until they were back at the cabin. When he jumped down from the truck bed he took a look at his watch. “The moon’s down until about quarter to ten tonight. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t mind a bath and a bed.” Her eyes must have flashed, because he grinned. “One at a time, of course. We have a big galvanized tub I bathe in, usually. Fill it up with water off the fire and it actually gets medium hot. I don’t have much in the line of fancy soaps and notions, but what’s mine is yours.”

She nodded gratefully. It would feel good to get clean again.

“Listen,” he said. “I know you probably don’t want to think about
this right now. But this life doesn’t have to be so terrible as you think. It’s been a long, long time since I had a place I could call my own for more than a season or two. I figure it’ll be five years before we have to move on from here. If you’re going to be sticking around”—her eyes definitely flashed at that, but he pressed on—“If you’re going to be here a while, maybe we can start thinking about how to improve this place. Dig a well for sweet water, maybe even rig up a windmill to get some electricity. Don’t say anything now. Just think about it. Your life doesn’t have to be completely miserable.”

Her face froze. Complete misery. When was the last time her life had been anything but? She tried to smile but felt like her skin was stretching painfully over her teeth. Instead she just turned away and walked toward the cabin. He headed for his smokehouse.

When he’d mentioned electricity it had made her think of her cell phone. She looked around to make sure Dzo wasn’t watching, then pulled it out of her pocket to check to see if it still had any charge. She nearly dropped it when the screen lit up with the message:

Chey announced, on returning
to the little house in the woods, that the thing she wanted most in the world was a bath.

“I think we can make that happen,” Powell told her. He shot her a look with one corner of his mouth turned up in what sort of resembled a smile. “Of course, if you want hot water, you’re going to have to work for it.” He led her around the side of the house and showed her a big galvanized tin washtub hanging from a hook. “It’s big enough to sit down in.” It was mottled white with age, but there were no holes in it. “I try to take a bath myself at least once a week. Though typically I just jump in a pond and scrub myself until my fingers go numb.”

“All the comforts of home,” Chey said, and reached up to grab the tub. “You going to help me with this?”

“No need,” he told her.

She frowned, but then she lifted the tub off its hook with one hand. It felt far lighter than it had any right to be. She hefted it a couple of times and realized that it weighed quite a bit, actually, but that the muscles in her arm worked better than they ever had before. Somehow she’d gotten stronger since she’d changed.

“One of the few bright spots in your new existence,” Powell told her.

Chey slung the tub over her shoulder and started heading toward the woods behind the house.

“Where are you going?” he asked her.

“Far enough away that I can have some privacy, if you don’t mind. Don’t worry. I won’t go so far that I can’t scream for help if I see a bear.”

He shook his head, but he made no move to stop her. “You’re still figuring this out. If a bear attacks you out there, scream so I know to come help the bear,” he told her. She thought maybe he was going to leave her alone, but then he called for Dzo to come help her. The little man came jogging over and grabbed one handle of the tub, even though she didn’t need the help. The message Powell was sending her was clear. Still, she was glad it was Dzo who was going to watch over her and not her fellow wolf. She had been worried Powell might insist on keeping an eye on her while she disrobed.

The two of them, Chey and Dzo, carried the tub out to just beyond the edge of the clearing and set it down on a spot relatively free of undergrowth. Then 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. “Monty, I mean.” He scraped out a fire ring and started to lay 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. He 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 her twig cone, 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. She didn’t mind, somehow, talking to him with his mask on. Maybe because she had no trouble imagining the expression on his face beneath it. It would be the same half-bemused, half-amused expression he always wore. She could see now that the mask, which before had just looked creepy, was actually carved to resemble that same expression.

“I will,” she said, thinking he was just waiting for a reply. But he just stood there a while longer before he said anything more.

“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 toward the cabin.

Chey watched him go. As soon as he was out of sight she poured out the kettle over the struggling fire, extinguishing it with a hiss. She would, indeed, have loved a bath just then, but there was no time. 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 the 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. When they couldn’t find her they would start searching. 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. Once they came after her she would have very little time left. She had little faith in her own ability to evade them. 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 rendezvous and be 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 soil 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 was pursuing her. Eventually she came around a thick stand of trees and found the source of the stream, a miniature lake as white and blue as the sky above, a brilliant mirror. On the far side of the water a red light burned angrily—a flare, giving off great clouds of pale smoke as it fizzed away. From the air that light would have been visible for kilometers, but the heavy tree cover made it impossible to see from the ground unless you were right at the shore of the lake.

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