The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten (28 page)

“You’re calling vampires wendigos now? Anyway, I don’t recall Edwin swearing to be anyone’s enemy.” I shivered and pulled my coat tighter around me. “Aren’t you freezing out here without a jacket?”

He shrugged.

“I guess you probably run hotter than normal, with your were-bear metabolism,” I said. “That makes you better able to stand the cold, huh?”

Joachim turned and frowned at me. I missed his big sunny smile, even if it had been a little puppy-dog-like at times. He seemed a lot more… I don’t know…
bearish
now. “That doesn’t make sense. If my body temperature were higher, I’d feel the cold
more
. When you run hot, it’s harder to maintain homeostasis, you know? A lower body temperature would actually be better for withstanding the cold.”

I frowned. Maybe I should’ve paid more attention in biology class instead of mooning over unreliable vampires. “Ah. So it’s just badass Native American toughness then?”

He sat beside me, a little smile quirking at his lips. “Ha. No, I’m cold, I just
grew
a lot in the past few weeks, and now none of my coats fit me anymore. Being a were-bear is hell on your wardrobe, Bonnie. I’ve only got about three good pairs of pants, and every time I change, I’m going to ruin one of them.”

I reached over and took his hand, and he didn’t pull it away. “I didn’t know what Edwin was when I first fell for him,” I said. “And once I
did
know… well, it was too late. I was… enthralled.”

“My dad says vampires—wendigo, I mean—have traps and lures to snare minds. Did your mind get snared?” There was naked hope in his voice.

“Maybe so,” I said. “But it doesn’t matter anyway. He dumped me and his whole family took off yesterday.”

He nodded. This wasn’t news to him. “They had a big celebration on the rez last night,” he said. “Fireworks and everything. People around here—the people who
know
—are glad to have them gone. I’m glad too. I worried about you.” He squeezed my hand.

“Yeah, well, I’m sure I’m better off,” I lied. “His family hated me anyway. When they weren’t looking at me like I was lunch.”

Joachim shuddered. “If they’d hurt you… I wouldn’t care about the treaty. I’d have left our land to go after them at home.”

I leaned into him, resting my head on his shoulder. “You’re a good friend, Joachim. You’re actually my oldest friend, now that I think about it, since we played when we were little kids.”

“Life sure was simpler back then.”

“Mmm. How are you coping with, you know. Your transformation.”

He sighed. “Dad always told me when I got older I’d start to sprout hair in funny places, but I thought he meant when I hit puberty.”

I snorted.

“I don’t know. When the power of my ancestors is flowing through me, when I change, it’s… pretty awesome, honestly. So much power, like I can do anything. Me and some of the older guys, we transform and run around the woods some, sniffing, hunting, but we haven’t gotten whiffs of any new vampires. We’re patrolling, though. Dad says after a few years of no vampires, it’ll become harder for us to transform. He says we’re sort of like an automatic reaction to a disease, you know? Us becoming bears, it’s like the body producing antibodies to fight off infection, and after the infection’s gone, the body stays on high alert for a while.”

“Is it, um, contagious? Being a bear? Like, if you bite somebody—”

He shook his head. “We’re not werewolves. If there even are werewolves. It’s a heritage thing, a bloodline thing, as far as I know.”

“Interesting,” I said.
Crap
, I thought. I’d had some idea that maybe I’d get Joachim to turn me into a were-bear. Being a big hairy monster didn’t have as much appeal as being a cold, flawless vampire, but it was
power
, supernatural strength, and I wanted that desperately. Still… even if Joachim didn’t offer any avenues to power, maybe he could offer other things. He’d always been cute, but now he was
sexy
, all muscles and raw animal energy seething just under the surface. And maybe he wouldn’t have Edwin’s old-school no-sex-until-marriage hang-ups…

Yes, all right: I was looking for a distraction. Looking for a rebound, maybe. Looking for a way to reassure myself I
was
attractive and desirable, after getting dumped.

But I was also hoping Edwin wouldn’t be able to resist the urge to spy on me occasionally, and that he might look through Joachim’s eyes, and see me flirting with him, and get jealous, and
come back
. So I decided to seduce Joachim.

And the way you seduce a boy like Joachim is with machinery.

I lifted up the tarp by the side of our house and looked at the heap of machinery underneath it. “So what is this thing, Dad?” I asked.

Harry looked up from whatever dumb yard maintenance thing he was doing and walked over. “That’s my old snow machine.”

“It makes snow?” I said doubtfully. “Isn’t that sort of unnecessary around here?” The first flurries had fallen the night before, and though they hadn’t stuck, they’d provided a hint of the winter hellscape to come.

“No, no, it’s a snowmobile, you know. Two-seater, four-stroke engine, 115 horsepower…” He went on in that vein for a while, but I just let the vehicle talk wash over me. “Me and your mom used to go out riding on it back when we were together, but it broke down a few years ago, and I never got it fixed—the city has one for police business, winter rescue and such, so I just use that.”

“Hmm.” The snow machine was a little rusty, but it didn’t look obviously broken, so I figured it was some kind of engine issue. “Mind if I let Joachim take a look at it? He’s pretty mechanical. Could be fun for me to ride around on this in the winter.”

Harry nodded. “You spending time with Joachim, then? He’s a great kid, good with tools, too. If he’s willing, sure, but I can’t pay him much—”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I think he’s looking for a project anyway.”

“Well, you two can use the shed if you want to work on it,” he said. “You never struck me as being too mechanically inclined though, sweetie.”

Like you’d know
, I thought,
what with your encyclopedic understanding of my life
. “Oh, I’ll limit my duties to bringing sandwiches and handing him the occasional wrench,” I said.

Once we got the snowmobile moved into the shed, Joachim squatted and looked into the engine compartment, clucking his tongue and making various noises of interest and despair. “Well,” he said. “Carburetor’s shot. Most of the other problems are just from sitting around for a few years. It’ll need new hoses. I’m a little worried about…” And then
he
went on in that vein for a while, and again, I didn’t pay much attention to details.

When he was done, I said, “Can you fix it?”

“I can fix anything,” he said, without apparent arrogance, just matter-of-factly—and that’s when he started being
hot
, and this went from being a mere ploy to get laid or make Edwin jealous and became genuine interest on my part. Big strong guy who was casually competent and confident? Turns out, that’s my type, too, at least as much as pale brooding troubled immortal. What can I say? I’m a complicated girl.

So here’s the part where you’d better just insert a mental snowmobile-fixing montage. Picture us laughing in the shed, me passing him tools, us sitting on the unworking snowmobile eating sandwiches and talking, and a final triumphant activation of the ignition followed by high-fives and cheers. By then it was deep November, and the snow was upon us. Marmon had chains on his tires, and he didn’t mind a little snow—weighing as much as a mountain helped—but the thought of riding this fast, nimble snowmobile (possibly with my arms wrapped around Joachim) through the woods was appealing. Like being carried through the woods in the arms of a vampire, only with a big machine throbbing between my legs: not a bad deal at all, as people around here like to say when something is awesome.

On the morning of the inaugural run, with the snow a deep blanket of white covering anything and everything, we bundled up and loaded the snowmobile into the back of Marmon and drove out to the reservation together, where the woods seem to go on forever. We parked at a spot he knew, and then took down the snow machine and I put on a helmet. (Joachim didn’t bother. He said since his transformation he could heal just about anything, so he wasn’t worried about flying face-first into a tree.) He took the front seat, and I climbed on back and put my arms around him. Despite what he’d said about his body temperature, he
did
feel impossibly warm to me, but maybe that was just in contrast to Edwin—hugging him had been like squeezing an ice sculpture of a boy sometimes.

“Here we go!” he shouted, and then: we were off.

The ride was surprisingly smooth, like riding a jet ski on a placid body of water, and Joachim whooped as we zoomed over the landscape, whipping past trees at a pretty fast rate. I leaned into him more, enjoying his warmth, and the speed, and the sensation of motion. Joachim hadn’t even tried to kiss me, though I could tell he was into me. Normally I’m not a shy and retiring type—I don’t mind being the aggressor in a relationship—but despite my growing attraction to Joachim, I couldn’t shake thoughts of Edwin. All those nights in bed with him had left a mark inside me, and maybe it
was
his magical vampire powers, but I wasn’t over him. Besides, what if he
was
watching? If I slept with Joachim, or even kissed him, and Edwin happened to be looking through the were-bear-boy’s eyes, what if it
didn’t
make him jealous? What if it made him think I’d moved on? Because I hadn’t moved on. I didn’t wear the engagement ring on my finger, of course, but I wore it on a chain around my neck, the cold metal and cold gem pressing against my skin, reminding me of his touch.

I’d considered doing stupid, dangerous things in hopes of spurring Edwin’s well-documented protective impulses, but I wasn’t about to go play in traffic or fake a suicide attempt—after all, he couldn’t see through
my
eyes, so I’d have to do the death wish thing in view of witnesses, and what if he didn’t happen to be spying on me at the time? What if he wasn’t spying on me at
all
? Or was too far away to reach me quickly? I’d just get a reputation as a crazy suicidal girl, which wasn’t what I wanted.

Joachim slowed down as we approached the frozen lake. “Can we ride over the lake?” I said into his ear.

“Eh,” he said. “It’s only been frozen over for a few days, the ice might not be that thick yet. Probably we should wait a while.” He rode along the edge of the lake a bit, and we came upon a group of boys who’d chopped a swimming-pool sized hole in the ice—which did look pretty thin—and were in the process of stripping off their clothes.

“Whoa,” I said. “What’s this?”

Joachim stopped the snowmobile and we got off. “Hey, guys!” he shouted, waving, and the other boys waved, too. None of them seemed that shy about stripping down to their underwear in front of a girl, and there was a decent amount of muscly Ojibwe eye candy on display. “They’re going to do a polar bear plunge,” Joachim said. “Crazy bastards.”

“They jump in the
lake
?” I said. “In this kind of weather?” I remembered Joachim mentioning something about this, the first time we’d talked, by the lake. It seemed so long ago.

“A lot of people do it on New Year’s up at Lake Como,” Joachim said, “to raise money for charity. But these guys, they just do it for the rush.”

“Come on, Joachim!” one of them called. “Get in, you wuss!”

Various other hoots and shouted teasing rained down, and Joachim rolled his eyes. He leaned over to me and said, “I mean, I
can
—I’m a were-bear, you know, so I’m closer to polar bear than these guys are—but why would I want to?”

I made a decision. “
I
want to,” I said, and started to undress.

“Whoa, are you crazy?” Joachim said. “You want to get in
that
water?”

“Hey, man, shut up!” one of his friends called. “When a girl wants to get undressed, you don’t
stop
her.”

I might have hesitated to strip down to my underwear around a group of guys I didn’t know, but I trusted Joachim implicitly, and he was a
were-bear
—if any of these boys tried anything, he’d punch them onto the moon. “I think it sounds awesome,” I said. “How often do you get to do something like this?”

“Okay,” Joachim said doubtfully. “But, look—don’t stay in for long, and don’t let your head go underwater. When you hit cold water, your body reacts, you suck in a breath, you can’t help it, and you
don’t
want your head in the water when you inhale, all right?”

“That girl’s got more balls than you do, Noir!” a boy called.

“Well, now my manhood’s been questioned,” Joachim said. “So here I go.”

Before long, we were both down to our underwear (though that entailed taking off our
long
underwear first)—me in a fortunately rather utilitarian bra and panties, Joachim in his boxers.
So cold
. But it was so cold so fast that pretty much everything felt numb. By then the other boys had plunged in and climbed out again, howling and running in circles and slapping their chests to get their circulation back. We stepped out onto the ice—okay, never mind, the bottoms of my feet weren’t numb enough for
that
not to be a shock. “Ready?” Joachim said, holding my hand.

“You only live once,” I muttered, and we stepped off the ice into the water.

I’ve been in the Pacific Ocean without a wetsuit, and that’s cold. But I’d never felt cold like this before. My whole body clenched like a fist, and the shock was so sudden my heart stopped for a second, I think. But then there was this
rush
of blood, and this huge adrenaline wave, and—I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt so physical, so in my body, so
alive
. I whooped and shouted and we splashed around for maybe two or three minutes, and then the other boys were there to help us out of the water, and throw a couple of blankets over us. I toweled off a bit, then wriggled out of my bra and panties under the blanket—the boys did a good job of not obviously watching—and then pulled on the rest of my clothes. Joachim and I took seats on the snowmobile and snuggled together under a blanket and the guys joined us, squatting in the snow, passing a joint around (I even took a puff, to be sociable, and because warmth of
any
kind was incredibly welcome right about then.) We spent a pleasant half hour before my ears started to go numb even under my earmuffs and my nose started to run rather unattractively.