Frostbitten (5 page)

With a snort, I bounded up and spun around. He was twenty feet away, prancing away, tail waving. Every instinct said to chase, but I toppled back down into the snow and whined in pain. Now Clay knows better than to fall for that. He really does. But he can never bring himself to run off, in case this is the one time I really
am
injured.

He circled me, wide and wary. I licked my foreleg. He came a little closer, staying out of lunging range. I struggled to my feet, paw raised, then gingerly touched it to the ground. He came closer, head lowered, nose working hard to catch the scent of blood. I lifted my paw and whimpered.

Closer, closer…

I sprang. He danced out of the way and took off. I hesitated, then started snuffling the ground. He stopped, head tilting. I kept sniffing, checking out all the prey trails. Vole, hare… is that lynx?

He dashed past so close I felt the draft.

I kept sniffing. Marten, porcupine, more hares…

Another dash, this time snagging my tail hairs in his teeth and tugging. I snapped and snarled, then went back to sniffing. More voles, more marten… Hey, what’s that? I scratched off the top layer of snow, trying to uncover the scent.

Clay whipped past again, this time veering and sending a tidal wave of snow over me. I shook it off, nose still working, trying to pick up the mystery scent. When I glanced up, I caught a whiff of it in the air. I tracked it to an old tree with missing chunks of rough bark. There, caught on one loose piece six feet from the ground, was a tuft of brown fur.

Bear? Oooh. We’d crossed paths with black bears in northern Ontario, but never one of their big brown cousins. I scrambled up the trunk, nails digging in as I stretched to sniff—

Clay plowed into my side. I went flying. Then I bounced up, snarling, and tore after him.

He was smart enough to know that his advantage lay in the forest, so that’s where he stayed, keeping only a few strides ahead, dropping back, then sprinting ahead, taunting and teasing.

When the forest opened into a clearing, I hit full speed, head down, paws sailing over the snow, closing the gap, the delicious smell of him filling my brain—

He swerved… right at the edge of a small embankment. I tried skidding to a stop, but tumbled over it, down the five-foot cliff onto the ice-covered creek below, each leg going its own way as I spun snout-first into the snowy embankment on the other side.

From behind me came the rough growl of Clay’s wolf laugh. My answering growl was not nearly as amused. I got to my feet slowly, digging my claws into the ice for traction. Then, without turning to look at him, I gingerly picked my way along to a spot where a branch poked through the ice. I scratched at the thinner ice around it until I had a hole. Then I lowered my muzzle and drank.

I lapped the cold water, so clean and sweet that I closed my eyes to savor it. I could hear Clay pacing along the embankment, his panting getting louder, thirst growing. I bit off a chunk of ice, making the hole bigger, then shifted aside to give him room. He tore down the creek side, slowing as he reached the ice, testing each step under his weight.

When he got up beside me, the ice groaned, but held. He brushed against me, tail beating the back of my legs as he drank, droplets of icy water spraying my face. I shifted closer, rubbing against him. He made a deep-throated noise closer to a purr than to a growl. I quietly scraped at the ice with my far front paw. Then I reared up and slammed down, all my weight on my front legs. As I twisted and tore off the crack of the ice rang through the quiet forest.

Now it was my turn to stand on the embankment and laugh, as Clay scrambled like a lumberjack on a runaway log jam, jumping from piece to piece as they sank beneath him. He leapt for the shore, but didn’t quite make it, splashing down to his dewclaws in icy water.

I tore off, but I’d stayed to enjoy the sight a few seconds too long. He caught me ten feet from the embankment, grabbing my back leg, yanking me down, then pouncing over me and shaking, water spraying everywhere. I tried to buck him off, but he bit the scruff of my neck and pinned me beneath his soaked underside.

I flipped him over and we tussled, fangs flashing, nipping and kicking and snarling, tone changing, the need for exercise and play fading fast, the need for something more primal taking over. The nips and growls grew rougher. I wriggled free, about to take off in a final chase before a quick Change back and—

A scent floated past and I went still. Clay’s teeth clamped around my lower jaw, trying to get my attention. I shook him off and got to my feet. He tried one last time to grab me. I growled and stepped aside, nose lifting telling him however much I hated the interruption, what I smelled demanded my attention.

The distant murmur of a voice got him to his feet. He turned his nose into the breeze. His sense of smell wasn’t as good as mine, but after a moment he caught it. His only reaction was a grunt, deep in his chest, the canine equivalent of a mildly curious “huh.” When I started toward the source, he caught my hind leg in his jaws. Just a light tug, like catching my arm.

I looked back. He had his ears down, expression uncertain, cautious even. Normally, Clay’s leading the charge and I’m holding back, but this was one situation where I was bolder than he.

I chuffed, getting his attention, then gave a slow shake of my head. I’d be careful, but I was going to investigate. He snorted, his jowls vibrating, huffed breaths hanging in the air. Fine, but he wasn’t happy about it.

I took off at a lope, Clay at my heels. The sun was cresting the mountains now, the valley still gray and gloomy, with patches of snow glittering where the sun pierced the thick trees. It was a strangely eerie time of day, shadows playing with the light. More than once I thought I saw something and slowed, only to gaze out over empty forest.

We went a half mile before the distant murmur turned into three distinct male voices, and even then I couldn’t make out what they were saying. For that, I’d need to concentrate, and I was focused on getting closer.

As the voices grew loud enough for me to eavesdrop without effort, Clay nipped my heels, saying we were too close already. I could have safely gone another fifty feet, but I stopped before those nervous nips became anxious bites.

I couldn’t see the men, but their voices seemed to come from a lighter patch ahead, presumably the forest’s edge. I circled to the east, until I could see a frozen lake through a gap in the trees. I kept circling, wide enough to keep Clay’s complaints down to a steady grumble.

When I drew close to the forest’s edge, I hunkered down, sliding across the snow on my belly. Clay tried to follow, wanting to stay close, but I chuffed and shook my head. He grumbled a little louder, but knew I was right. Our fur matches our hair color and, against a snowy backdrop, his gold caught the eye far better than my silvery blond.

I stuck my muzzle out beyond the tree line and took a deep breath. Four men—three standing, one on the ground. The scents didn’t betray their positions; their voices did. For the three, their voices above my head told me their position. The scent of the fourth told me where he was. His smell was the one I’d caught back by the creek. The stink of decomposing flesh.

The smell wasn’t overwhelming, but I should have picked it up while we’d been goofing around. I suspected it was no coincidence, then, that I’d noticed the smell and the voices at the same time. The corpse must have been buried under a layer of snow, now found and uncovered.

I pushed forward a few more inches. When my eyes passed the tree line, I could still make out only shapes in the twilight.

I shuffled another few inches forward. Clay’s grumbling turned to growls. I stopped as soon as I could see the three standing figures. They were all too bundled to guess age, but I could take a good stab at occupation, given that two had badges on their hats and the third was in camouflage gear with a glow-in-the-dark vest.

At their feet lay the body… or what was left of it. Most of the clothing had been torn away. What remained was dark with frozen blood. Even up close it didn’t smell too bad—a human nose would barely detect it. Freezing had kept decomp at bay, but by the time it got warm enough to stink, there wouldn’t be anything left to smell. Being buried under the snow was the only thing that had stopped the scavengers from finishing what they’d begun.

I could tell that the body had been eaten, but unless I could get close enough to sniff it, I had no idea what had done the eating—wolf, werewolf, mink or one of the dozens of other predators out here. Even knowing what ate the man wouldn’t tell me what killed him. At the tail end of a long winter, even wolves won’t turn down free meat. And that, I realized when I concentrated on the men’s speech, was exactly what they were saying.

“Fresh snowfall yesterday means no tracks today,” the shorter cop said. “No way to tell if it was canine, ursine or homo sapiens.”

“You think a person could have done this?” The taller cop’s voice squeaked with surprise and youth.

“Eat poor Tom for dinner? I hope to hell not, but I wouldn’t put it past some of the whack-jobs we get up here. I meant he could have been murdered, then eaten by scavengers. He’s so chewed up, we might not ever know for sure.”

“I always told Tom he was crazy,” the hunter said. “Checking his traps at night. But it was his favorite time.”

There was a moment of silence for the dead man.

The younger cop broke it first. “I saw some wolf tracks back there.”

“Wolf?” the older cop said. “You sure about that?”

“I can tell canine from ursine, Reed.”

“He means there’s more than one kind of canine out here,” the hunter said.

“And I mean don’t go jumping to conclusions,” the older cop said. “Folks hear about paw prints near a dead body and they start crying wolf.”

“My money’s on a wolf-dog,” the hunter said. “City idiots think it’s cool to own a dog that’s half wolf… until it turns out there’s some wild beast in their pet pooch. Fancy that. Then what do they do? Let them loose out here and tell themselves they’ve done the humane thing.”

“That’d explain the big canine tracks people have been seeing since the pack moved on. A wolf-dog got dumped here, started harassing the pack, scaring off the prey, so they left. If an animal’s been raised by people, it doesn’t fear them. It gets hungry? That big hunk of meat on two legs looks damned tasty.”

As I backed up, Clay huffed in relief and circled in front to herd me to safety. Even being raised near people had never erased that gut-level anxiety that said a human in the forest was a bad thing. In this case, his instinct was right. If these guys caught of glimpse of a big yellow wolf right now, we’d be picking shotgun pellets from our butts for weeks.

I started walking away, my nose to the ground, skimming it like a metal detector. Clay watched for a moment, then made that rumbling noise deep in his chest, one that said he’d rather get as far from these humans as possible, but I had a point. He put his nose down and joined my search.

We found tracks about a half mile from the kill site. It looked as if the trail went in that direction, but we didn’t dare follow it any closer—not until the people had left. I supposed they were waiting for the coroner or crime-scene techs. But whoever was coming was taking his time and I could still hear the men talking.

The tracks were definitely canine, as the young officer had said. While they seemed too big to be wolf. I won’t say
definitely
too big, because wolves have been found weighing up to two hundred pounds. The average, though, is just over half that. These tracks were the size of Clay’s, but the scent already told me we were dealing with a werewolf.

The trail was a few days old, the prints remaining only because the tree canopy protected this patch from the freshly fallen snow. I had to pace along it before my brain really latched onto the smell. Then I sat on my haunches and mulled it over, like a wine expert with a cork, trying to place the vintage. When it didn’t tweak a memory, I sniffed again. No match to anything in my mental file cabinet.

I glanced at Clay, who was sniffing another section of the trail. He lifted his muzzle from the ground and shook his head—no one he knew either. My dossiers document twenty-five werewolves currently living in the United States, but we weren’t arrogant enough to believe that actually meant there
were
only twenty-five.

Mutts were always immigrating and emigrating, plus there were a handful that stayed under the radar. Keeping tabs on all of them was impossible. We really only tracked the troublemakers and the ones from the oldest werewolf families, like the Santoess and the Cains.

Still, in the Lower 48, we could say with some confidence that we knew most of the werewolves around—either by reputation or by scent. Up here in Alaska, though, we might as well be in another country. The only Alaskans we had in our dossiers were the Stillwells, and if Clay didn’t recognize this scent, then it wasn’t either of them.

We couldn’t follow the trail back to the kill site, but we could take it the other way. We’d tracked it for almost a mile before it ended at a clearing. Inside, we found a piece of plywood and a wooden crate. A werewolf’s winter locker—a place to Change in the mud and snow, and to store your gear. We had something similar, if more elegant, at Stonehaven.

This clearing reeked of scent and sweat, meaning someone was using it regularly. As I sniffed more, I realized it was more than someone. We had two distinct scents and possibly a third.