Overwinter.

by David Wellington.

prologue.

Tucker's Last Stand was the rowdiest bar in the town of Menden, Alaska, but when the naked woman staggered in through the front door it was still enough to make Greg Thomas's jaw drop. He was the town doctor, and had seen some pretty crazy things in his time, but still.

From her post behind the bar, Margie Hurlwhite let out a low whistle and put down the glass she'd been filling. The four men at the bar turned to look all at once and none of them said a word. Three of them were old fishermen with hands so cut up and weathered they could barely hold a knife anymore. Thomas, the fourth, stood up so fast he knocked over his stool. The noise was loud enough to drown out the radio, but nobody bothered to look away from the naked visitor.

Thomas wiped his hands on his pants. "Well, hi there," he said, when it was clear no one else was going to welcome the newcomer.

She looked him right in the eye and smiled. Didn't say a word. She was beautiful, he thought, far lovelier a creature than any woman in Menden had a right to be, with long red hair that fell across her eyes and shaded her face but totally failed to cover her breasts, not to mention the rest of her. She looked like she might be twenty, or maybe younger. Just a girl. He wiped his hands on his hips again, because suddenly they were sweaty. It had been a long time since his wife had died and he'd never bothered much with women since then, but this one ... except maybe it wasn't exactly lust he was feeling in his heart at that moment. There was something about this girl. Maybe it was that she wasn't making any effort to cover herself up. That she wasn't shivering, even with snowflakes flecking her hair like glitter. It was just below freezing outside, and her feet were wet, as if she'd been walking in the snow, but she looked as though if you put a hand on her arm you might just get burned.

"You got a good enough look, Doc, to make a diagnosis?" Margie asked, rushing around the end of the bar to drag the girl inside, away from the door. She stopped before she could touch the girl's skin, though, and mostly just waved her toward the back and the pair of red leather booths there.

Margie's tone had been thick with sarcasm but Thomas shook his head and answered anyway. "Hypothermia's my guess. We got to get her warm." He stripped off his parka and wrapped it around the girl, which got him another smile, this one warm with gratitude. "Margie, make some coffee, will ya?"

"Got a pot brewing right now," Margie told him. She busied herself behind the bar while the three fishermen turned on their stools to face Thomas and the girl. They were blinking and rubbing their faces like they couldn't quite believe it.

"What's the matter, miss?" Thomas asked. "You in an accident or something? Where'd you come from?"

She tilted her head so the red hair fell away from her eyes and looked up into his face. "No accident, m'sieur. I have come from the water, just now, on a boat."

"You have people around here, someone I can call?"

The smile faded a bit. "Not so close, but people, yes. I have come for my man, who I have not seen for a very long time."

"What's that accent?" Margie asked, bringing the coffee. She set it down on the table in front of the girl with shaking hands. "Sounds like Quebec, maybe. You a Quebecois, dear?"

"Je suis francaise, but I have been abroad. Just now I am coming over from Russia."

Well, Thomas thought, that made some sense, anyway. Menden was on the west coast of Alaska, near about as close as you could get to Russia without going for a swim. Boats went back and forth between the two landmasses all the time. Of course, most of the people on those boats dressed for the climate.

"What's your name?" Margie asked, and Thomas felt like a cad for forgetting to ask that, himself.

"I am Lucie, thank you."

Thomas waved Margie back. The bartender was leaning so close she was blocking the girl's air. "Find some blankets, a tarp, anything. And turn the heat up in here. She's probably so cold her brain's froze. We have to-"

"I am altogether fine, sir," Lucie said, and she reached out to grab Thomas's hand. He flinched, expecting her touch to scorch him. Her skin was warm, it was true, though no more than normal body temperature. Her lips weren't blue or even chapped, and her pupils were normal, he noted. "But can you, please, tell me one thing? That clock, there. Is it accurate?"

He looked up at the old cuckoo clock above the bar mirror, mounted between a pair of antique snowshoes. It said it was a quarter to nine. "I suppose," he said, though it did seem like that must be wrong.

"No, honey, that's bar time," Margie supplied. "About fifteen minutes ahead. That's so when closing time comes I can get these sorry fools moving toward the door faster. Why do you need to know? Are you meeting your man soon?"

Lucie shook her head prettily. "Not yet. I merely wish to know, because the moon is due up at eight and the half tonight."

Thomas frowned. There really was something about this girl. Something off. "You know when moonrise is off the top of your head?"

"I should be very surprised to find her up without me," Lucie replied. "So it is just about now half past the eight? Yes, I can feel it is so." She shrugged her shoulders and the parka fell away. "Merci. You have all been so very kind."

Thomas grabbed for the parka and realized, too late, that she hadn't pushed it off herself. It had collapsed around her. Or-through her. She was becoming intangible, her flesh transparent so he could see the red leather of the banquette right through her white skin. "Holy mother," he said. "Like a-a ghost."

"No, m'sieur. Not like a ghost at all."

There was a flash of silver light, a shimmer like moonlight flickering on choppy water. Then in his arms was an explosion of fur and spittle and many huge teeth. Blood spattered the dusty floor of the bar and Margie screamed, but Thomas barely heard her. He never heard anything again.

part one.

great bear lake.

Cheyenne Clark was, for the first time in her life, almost happy.

It wasn't something she liked to admit to herself. She had plenty of reasons to be miserable, depressed, even pissed off. But those reasons felt very far away.

There had been a time, before, when things had gotten bad. Very, very bad, and she hadn't come out of it innocent. She-or rather her wolf-had done things she didn't like to contemplate.

An agent of the Canadian government had tortured her. He'd been using her as bait to draw another werewolf to his death. The two werewolves had retaliated, and things had gotten out of control. She'd gone a little crazy. Maybe a lot crazy. She had killed some people. Or, as she wished she could put it, her wolf had killed some people.

But that was in the past.

Now she wasn't alone anymore. Chey and Montgomery Powell-she still called him Powell, though he'd told her she was a friend of his now, and could call him Monty-were together now, together in a way she'd never experienced with a human being. It was more like the bond wolves share in a pack. They'd headed north, away from anyone who might be looking for them. Away from people they might hurt, and people who might hurt them. People who had easy access to silver bullets.

Those people were a long way away. In the Northwest Territories of Canada, there was a lot of empty space to escape into.

Starting from Port Radium, a ghost town so polluted nothing could live there, they'd followed the sinuous curves of the shore of Great Bear Lake, staying close to the water where the hunting was still good. Summer was over, and though the ground was still soft and the wind didn't bite too hard yet, most game animals were already migrating south. There were fewer snowshoe rabbits every day and even field mice were becoming scarce. When Powell caught his first lemming-like a big mouse with a red back and a short tail-he brought it back to their camp and studied it as if he were reading a newspaper. "It must be September," he said.

He took a buck knife out of his pocket and started to skin the animal, preparatory to cooking it over their fire. Chey winced and turned away. She could feel him watching her, feel his surprise, but there were still some things her wolf handled better than she could.

"You're going to eat this once it's roasted, aren't you?" he asked her.

"Yes," she told him. She was always a little hungry these days and she knew once she smelled the cooking meat she wouldn't be able to resist. "I just don't want to see it cut up, that's all."

"You should learn how to skin one of these. Pretty soon we'll be living off them. You'll need to know, then."

She shook her head. Their wolves were perfectly capable of hunting for themselves. Powell and Chey didn't need to eat at all-what nourished their wolves nourished them. Powell insisted on cooking, though, because it was a human ritual and it made him feel like he was still in control of his destiny. She ... respected that in him, that he still thought of himself as a human with some kind of disease. Something that could be managed. She was under fewer illusions, herself. "I'll just let my wolf do it," she said.

Her wolf loved it up here. Her wolf thrived on the constant cold, on the silence between the trees. On the clean air. And because there was no way for Chey to get rid of her wolf, she was just going to have to make do. Her wolf hated human beings and would attack them on sight, whether it was hungry or not. She didn't want that to happen. Didn't want to live with the consequences. The only option left to her was to live up here where people were scarcer than palm trees. Powell had figured that out decades earlier, after exhausting every other possibility. She had chosen to come with him, to learn from him, to live with him so that she didn't have to be completely alone.

When the lemming was cooked he carved off a fillet and brought it to her. The meat was stringy and gamy but her stomach lurched happily when the first drop of its grease touched her tongue. She gobbled it down without bothering to chew too much.

"So?" he asked.

"You overcooked it," she told him. He sighed and started to turn away, but she shot out one hand and grabbed his arm. "Is there any more?" she asked.

He stared at her with his big cold green eyes. Eyes she saw sometimes when she was about to fall asleep, eyes she couldn't not see. His eyes were searching her face, looking for something. Not validation, she knew. He was too tough to need that. Not an apology, because he knew better than to expect that from her.

She'd been hard on him, she knew. Harsher than she'd meant to be. He'd hurt her badly, once, and she'd never fully forgiven him.

But maybe ... maybe she didn't have to be such a jerk about it. Things had changed. Were continuing to change, especially between the two of them. And all the bad things, the bad history that had led her to this point, seemed very far away indeed.

She took a step toward him. It was all he needed. He stepped toward her as well, then wrapped his arms around her and pulled her to him. Part of her wanted to push him away. Part of her wanted to lash out, to hit him, to scream in his face and rake her fingernails across his eyes.

Instead she nestled her face into the crook of his neck. His flannel shirt smelled like woodsmoke, from the fire. Underneath that she smelled his own personal scent. It was a good smell. She closed her eyes and relaxed into his embrace. "Thanks for breakfast," she said.

"You're welcome." His voice was gruff, as always, but he couldn't mask all of the relief in it.

They packed up their things and headed north again, on foot as always. To Chey it seemed like they'd always been moving north. Her legs didn't get tired, not the way they would have if she'd still been human, but after eight hours of walking she still thought she deserved a break. Powell made her walk another couple of kilometers, though, before he suddenly and without warning called for a stop.

Chey didn't argue. She sank down on a lumpy mat of yellow grass and took her shoes off. Her toes thanked her.

"There's something here you should see," Powell said, standing tall and straight like a park ranger showing off a scenic vista.

Chey grunted in response.

It was enough to keep him going. Like every man she'd ever met, Powell relished a good excuse to give a speech. "This is what's left of Fort Confidence," he told her, tapping a bit of stone with his boot.

"There's a fort here?" Chey asked, looking around. She couldn't see much but scrub grass and a couple of trees. On the ground there were a couple of square piles of stones that looked a little too regular to have just gathered naturally, she supposed. If you squinted at them.

"Back when the fur traders came through here," he explained, "there was. Jules Verne wrote a book about it. The fort burned down, though. So they rebuilt it. It burned down again. Nothing left but these chimney stones." He gave her one of his thoughtful looks. "This is what happens when people try to build on this land. The land always wins."

She bit her lip and tried to figure out what she was supposed to learn from this. "Are you saying we'll be safe here? That nobody's going to come this far north just to bother us?"

He shrugged. "It's the safest place I know. For a while, anyway, we can stay here. Make a camp. Maybe we'll even be allowed to overwinter here before they catch up with us again."

"So you think they will find us. Eventually."

He shrugged again. "I'm over a hundred years old, Chey, and for most of that time I've had people hunting me. I'd be at odds and ends if one day they just stopped. Running away from people is what I do best." He stared hard at the land around them, especially down the slope that led to the lake. "Still, it would be nice to rest awhile. Build a shelter, get a fire going. Sit for a while and ..."

She waited for him to finish his thought.

"In the spring," he said, "when it's warm again. We can get to work on ... the other thing."

"You're seriously still thinking about that?"

It had been a common enough topic of conversation on their long trek north. There had been a lot of time to talk of many things while they marched, or, after their wolves had come and gone, when they backtracked, looking for the clothes their wolves had left behind.

"You honestly think there's a cure," she said.

He wouldn't look at her when he answered. "There must be. There has to be a way to break the curse. There has to."

Who did he think he was fooling? The ground under her was wet and muddy. She moved over to sit on one of the chimney stones. Moss made a cushion for her. "How long have you been looking for this supposed cure? Fifty years?"

"More like seventy."

She knew all the things he had tried so far. He'd studied the old legends of werewolves and other shape-shifters from around the world, learning how people had supposedly turned themselves into animals and, more important, how they'd changed back. He'd spent decades reading old legends and folktales, hoping there was a grain of truth in them somewhere. He had made wolf straps-belts of skin, either wolf hide or human skin he'd cut from his own body, studded with silver nails that burned him every time he touched them. He had cultivated the flowers of wolfsbane and purple aconite, hoping to brew some kind of potion that would release him from his double nature.

None of it had ever worked.

"There's an answer," he said, sounding like he was trying to convince himself. "And it has to be here. This is where the curse began, did I tell you that?"

"A couple of times."

He shook his head. "Somewhere here in the north, in the New World. We know that this is where the first lycanthropes came from. If we can find the place where the curse originated, we'll find the answer. You and me. Together."

"And then what?" she asked. "We walk south again, through all this country without the wolves to keep us alive? We walk into the first big city we find and we turn ourselves in, say, 'Hi, we're the ones who killed Bobby Fenech and the Pickersgill brothers, but it's okay because we were wolves at the time, and now we're cured?' You think they won't lock us up? You think they won't send us off to prison?"

"A human prison. Where we can live safely with other human beings. Jail can't be worse than this existence."

She doubted that. Almost as much as she doubted there was a cure, of any kind, except the one that came from being shot multiple times with silver bullets.

"The two of us will succeed where I failed alone," he went on. "We'll be able to ... to ..."

"What?" she asked.

"Blast."

She knew the tone in his voice. It was time, again. She didn't bother putting her shoes back on. The moon must be just below the horizon, just about to peek up over the edge of the world and bring on the change. He had a way of knowing just when it was going to happen, a kind of internal alarm clock that went off just before it was time. She'd never known him to be off by more than a few minutes.

They each looked around them, memorizing landmarks. They would need to find this place again when they changed back-their clothes would still be here. It was a routine they'd established early in their trek north, and she did it automatically. But just like every time before, she was thinking, Remember what this looks like with human eyes. Because every time it felt like she might never see anything that way again.

"See you when we're-" he began to say, but he was interrupted as the moon came edging over the line of trees to their east.

Silver light dazzled Chey's eyes, blinding her. She felt her clothing fall away as she became as intangible as a ghost. And then there was nothing; there was the wolf.

The two of them were still finding each other in the dark, in many ways. Their wolves were working out their own relationship, every time the moon came up. Chey had seen the movies, but now she knew it wasn't true, that thing about werewolves only changing under the full moon. Chey and Powell transformed every time the moon rose over the horizon whether it was full or new, whether it happened in the middle of the day or only after midnight.

The change was ecstatic. For the wolves it felt like being joyously reborn. They had spent the long hours when the moon was down trapped in bodies that were fragile, slow, and half-blind-at least compared to the glorious forms the wolves possessed. The wolves emerged from flashes of silver light into a great symphony of smells and sounds, into wind that had more colors than their eyes could see, into bodies that were strong and sleek and fast.

The wolves ran and played and sported-and hunted. With flashing jaws they snapped at the snow on the ground, snatching up the little bright warm things that burrowed underneath. Blood flecked their muzzles and their paws and their bellies, finally, were full. The cold night air was bracing, not frigid, and the stars overhead were bright enough to see by, even when the imperious moon grew dark.

They marked their territory. They considered digging snug dens in the earth while it was still soft, and decided against it. The air was still warm enough, the days still long enough, that there was time to play.

How they played. The two of them danced about each other, ran arcs around each other, leaping sideways to keep their eyes locked even as they spun and turned. They snapped and nipped at each other's snouts, feinted with slashing paws and butted each others' sides with their heads, their powerful necks craning to try to get at each other's bellies.

He was stronger, and slightly bigger than her. Still he won only by trickery, by dashing up along a high tussock of grass and then crashing down onto her shoulders, spilling them both across the snow-strewn ground, sending them rolling. When she tried to right herself, to get her broad paws back down on the earth where they belonged, he was on top of her, pinning her with his weight across her chest, his jaws hovering over the soft flesh of her belly.