New Title 1 (34 page)

“Put your snowshoes on,” Oddy said. “Disperse the weight.”

Tripwire and Answer did as advised, though neither relished the prospect of trying to swim with them on.

“Jack be nimble, Jack be quick,” Tripwire whispered, and set off.

The ice cracked. The ice groaned. But the ice held. Tripwire made it across, then Answer, then Oddy. The werewolf had not moved.
Why fight when patience will bring an easy meal
, it was no doubt thinking.

The forest resumed to the west. Dark shapes moved within the tall pines, watching, waiting.

“Let’s get humping.”

««—»»

Shshshshsh
…

Daniel Coles, who, as a man, would earn the nickname “Zippo,” could not tell if the sound came from the dim and fading world around him, or was an internal echo within the darkening corridors of his own mind.

Shshshshsh
…

Opening his eyes required a colossal effort. Above, the sky was a blissful, muted purple—the most beautiful purple he had ever seen.
Gorgeous
, he tried to say, but no word came out. He swallowed blood and coughed, his eyes never leaving that sky. The stars shone brilliantly. Although he had no knowledge of astronomy, their order made some kind of elemental sense to him.

Shshshshsh
…

The pain resonated at a distant level, like a cathedral bell ringing many blocks away. He stared down at his body. It was a testament to his beatific state of mind that the sight did not disturb him: the flesh flayed open and the stiffly frozen tatters of fabric peeling away from horrific wounds like dead birch bark from a tree trunk. His legs, bent at awkward angles, looked like stogies that had been crushed in someone’s pocket.

“
Shshshshsh…
”

Something was moving through his hair. A hand. A woman sat beside him, stroking his hair. She was, without question, the most beautiful woman Daniel had ever seen. Her skin was the color of burnt caramel and it glowed in the dusk. She was naked but seemed neither cold nor self-conscious. Her breasts were small and her ribs visible. It looked as if she had not eaten in quite some time. But her body, the leanness of it, the ropes of muscle running long beneath smooth brown skin, realized some kind of essential symmetry.

“You’re hurt very badly.” Her voice was rich as cream and honey.

“Y-yuh-yes.”

She asked his name.

“Daniel,” she repeated, “such a nice name.”

Her hair and eyebrows were shockingly white. And if her face was slightly too long, the angle of her jaw slightly vulpine, Zippo neither noticed nor cared. Her eyes, though too close-set, flashed with colors he had never seen, nor could put a name to.

“You are going to die soon, I’m afraid.” She scratched behind her ear. Not with her hand but with her foot, in the manner of a dog.

“I cuh-could h-have b-buh-been r-ri-rich.” She had stopped stroking his hair. He wished she would do it some more. “A muh-muh-million b-bucks.”

“That would have been nice, I suppose.”

Tripwire’s gun was nowhere to be seen. Zippo couldn’t have shot her, anyway.

She bent down and pressed her lips to his ear. “I can help you.” Her breath was sweetly bitter, like fresh-mown grass. “Would you like me to try?”

More than anything in this world.

“Y-yuh-yes.”

“Alright.”

Her mouth moved further down and her breath warmed his throat. Then her teeth—small and white and very, very sharp—were biting into his flesh, saliva mingling with blood…

…he felt himself moving, pulled across the ice on a bier of flexible saplings. The bier hit a rut and pain, thick and fibrous and sickening, hammered down his legs. He passed out…

…in a dark, warm place. In the darkness, noises. A sound like trickling water. Another like the spirited play of puppies. He touched his face to find it matted with a layer of coarse fur. A beard? How long had he been here…

…he was in a cave. To his left a fire flickered, casting strange shadows on the rock. The woman crouched between his legs. She was licking his wounds, cleaning away the blood and pus with her small pink tongue…

…terrible fever dreams. Every man he had every killed appearing before him as they had at the moment of death. Kenny Webb, the first man he’d killed for money, twenty-one years old with powder burns frosting the bullet hole in his neck. The father-and-son Viets, the look of utter hatred on their faces the moment before he’d flamed them in that tunnel outside Song-Be. The dreams deepened, darkened, spiraled. Now he dreamt of the great caribou herds, the scent of them, a crystal-clear sense-memory of their flesh, their taste…

…in the cave again. Small creatures at play near the fire. Some were wolf kits, some young children, some an uneasy combination of both. Beneath a fine layer of white hair his legs were slender and scarred. Jagged scabs healed along their length. She appeared at his side. Firelight etched the contours of her face and reflected off her kaleidoscopic eyes.

“Who?” he said, pointing at the wolf kits.

“Mine alone,” she said. “My mate was killed by the black man.”

“Why did you save me?”

“Because you are a hunter.”

She pressed her lips to his cheek…

…and then he was outside under a full moon. She was at his side. She was as beautiful, or more so, in lupine form than she was as a human. Her fur was white as snow and her body radiated grace and power. Wolfish yips emanated from the cave, interspersed with childish laughter.

“Young mouths to feed.” Her voice was a guttural growl.

He stared at his feet. They were longer now, and furred. His nails were dark, and hooked, and very sharp—
claws
. There were dark pads on the underside of each foot and he barely felt the snow beneath them. His mouth felt crowded with too many teeth. He tried to stand but his spine had acquired a streamlined curvature that made moving on all fours more comfortable.

So he did.

He could hear things he’d never heard before: it was as if someone had cranked the volume of the world to full blast. His nose was alive with scents more tantalizing and more deeply-textured than he’d known to exist. He opened his mouth to speak and a howl tore out of his throat. To his new ears it was the most natural sound in the world.

She loped off into the forest. He followed, marveling at the coiled strength of his new body. Soon they were running together at speeds that were breathtaking, exhilarating. He caught the scent of something small and quick-footed ahead, sensing its stark fear, and realized he’d never been hungrier in his life.

He ran as fast as his new legs would carry him, the taste of blood strong in his throat. She ran beside him, her body a sleek white blur. Their quarry juked ahead of them, desperate and afraid. They veered easily, a unified motion, locked on their prey.

The creature who had once been Daniel Coles unleashed another, gleeful, howl.

He was hunter once again.

— | — | —

V.

Three Amigos

Northwest Territories

December 9th, 1987. 4:43 a.m.

Nothing existed except the path.

Sometimes it described a flat, straight line. Other times it climbed, or wound, or dipped only to rise again. They followed wherever it led. Their focus narrowed to a single overriding intent: constant forward motion. If their minds were to deviate from this goal for even a split-second, there was a chance, and a good one, they would fall and never get up again.

The snow began to fall sometime earlier. Big wet flakes clung to the men’s sweat-slick hair and melted in thin streams down their backs. Their feet sank down into the new snow, and soon chunks of ice clung to their fatigues and bootlaces, as though to the fur of a dog. It was, Oddy noted with worming melancholy, the consistency of snow he’d always wished for as a child: moist and packable, perfect for snowmen or forts. He recalled a time when, as a child, he’d packed a rock into a snowball and thrown it at a neighborhood boy he’d suspected of stealing his toboggan. It had burst against the boy’s cheek and the rock left an inch-long gash under his eye. His toboggan re-appeared on his doorstep the next day. That was the first time Oddy realized that violence and intimidation were a form of currency and that sometimes the only way to avoid being stepped on was to wield the bigger boot.

As the miles unwound under his feet, Oddy found himself thinking about his father, who’d also been a soldier. Oddy’s father enlisted in Roosevelt’s war on May 3rd, 1942. He took a jerry slug in the throat and, after three months recuperation in Poland, was medically discharged. Sick of the flag-wavers and flag-burners, he grew his high-and-tight haircut out long and bushy, finding work at a pulp mill in Montana.

Oddy didn’t believe his old man slept a single peaceful night in the fourteen years he knew him. Like Oddy, he kept a Barlow knife under his pillow, a .45 Desert Chief in the drawer beside the bed. Like Oddy, he rose at hourly intervals to walk the perimeter of his house. Oddy would hear him get up, stab his feet into slippers, make a brisk circuit. The height of Oddy’s bedroom window allowed him to see his father’s head and neck move past. During the final circuit he’d look in on him. Oddy remembered the first pale light of dawn cutting through the backyard cedars to silhouette his father’s head, a dark and featureless disc, except for the eyes, white and glassy, animal. Other times his father disappeared into the attic, where he kept his footlocker. Oddy once poked his head through the trapdoor to see his father in his dress blues. Standing stock still, tunic buttoned to the neck, a fruit salad of combat citations pinned to the left breast. Standing at attention, staring at the naked roofbeams, before fingering the dimpled scar on his throat. The man snapped off a four-fingered salute at nothing, no one.

The day of Oddy’s fourteenth birthday, his father bought him a Remington 30/30 with a seven-cartridge clip, red bow tied around the walnut stock. He packed lunch and supper, filled a thermos with hot chocolate, and the two of them hiked deep into the seed lot flanking their property. Father and son rambled over snow-topped rocks and down a rocky daw, across frozen streams lying flat and silvery against the sun, boots crunching through mid-winter hardpack. A sharpshin hawk wheeled low into the blue strip of sky over a stand of poplars, legs trailing a brown curve of mouse.

Listen now,
Oddy’s father said after they’d set up a blind.
Deer are skittish and temperamental creatures. You’ll only get one chance.
He lifted his arm and jabbed a thumb into the meat below his armpit.
Here. Behind the front legs. Bullet ruptures the lungs, lungs fill with blood, deer suffocates. Got it?

He chambered a round in the breech and handed Oddy the Remington. It was incredibly heavy. Oddy said,
Did you learn that in the war?

Learn what?

Where to shoot something so it dies.

The older man stared up into the big safe sky. A good man, Oddy’s father. Never hit his son or wife, never catted around, gutted it out in the pulp mill’s stink and heat to provide for them. Nothing extraordinary. Just a kind, decent man.
The war taught me a lot of things,
he said.
Most of it was…useless.
He smiled at the sky, as if he’d come to a sudden revelation.
It’s a sucker’s game, son. Pointless. Never get involved.