Her forelegs were numb and useless. They hung down Powell's back like so much dead game strung up to ripen. When she shifted her weight, though, they flopped around and for the first time since waking she saw her own paws.

They were human hands.

Her eyes rolled, looking for the moon, but couldn't find it anywhere in the sky.

It made her want to howl again. This time Powell wasn't fast enough to stopper up the sound that made her chest resonate like a drum.

"Leave her!" Lucie said, turning to glare at Chey. "She's going to get us killed."

"I won't," Powell insisted. It sounded like something he had said many times.

"Her mind is gone. You must accept this, cher. You've seen it happen before!"

Powell started to draw breath to answer, but a sudden sound stopped him in his tracks. It was a flat, distant report, like the sound a frozen lake makes when it begins to thaw. An instant later the bark of a nearby alder split and splinters of wood jumped into the air.

"Damnation," Powell said, louder now. "Run!"

Then Chey was flopping around on Powell's back, her head glancing off his shoulder blade again and again. She couldn't catch her breath, couldn't fend off the wave of darkness that crashed over her once more, and carried away both the woman and the wolf.

The next thing Chey knew she was lying flat on her back. Her parka was rolled up and tucked under her head like a pillow, and she could barely see.

She was enclosed in some kind of shelter. She could just make out a ceiling, a few feet above her head. It was made of close-packed earth, veined with tree roots. Occasionally a few grains of dirt would come loose and patter down on her face or body.

She felt sick. She felt like her insides had been burned out with a welding torch. She felt so weak that she could barely breathe. But she was alive. And she was human. Her wolf was nowhere to be found, not even lurking in the deepest subbasement of her brain.

"Powell?" she said, her voice very, very soft. The earth all around her soaked it up at once and she wasn't sure anyone could have heard her. She took a deep breath and tried again. "Powell? Where are we?"

The thought that he wasn't there-that she'd been abandoned somewhere underground-hit her like she'd been doused with cold water. Underground, in the dark, lying on her back. Was she ...

Was she dead and buried?

Then a hand grabbed her arm and squeezed in reassurance.

"Oh, thank God," Powell said. "I thought we'd lost you." He scooted closer to her and she saw his face, almost completely lost in shadows. It was so dark. He could just about sit up in the close, mud-stinking place. His body filled up most of the air she'd been breathing.

"She awakens," Lucie said. The redhead was close enough to touch as well.

"Powell, I'm so sorry," Chey said. A tear welled up in her eye and blurred her vision. It was too small to escape and run down her cheek. "Powell, did I get us into this?"

"Hush," he said. "You need to rest. You nearly died."

"Or worse," Lucie suggested.

Powell's dark face grew stiff. "Don't worry about that now. Here, there's some water." He turned away for a moment and she was terrified he was going to leave her alone with Lucie, even for an instant. But then he returned and his hands were cupped, filled with water that smelled terrible. Her lips were so chapped, though, and her tongue so swollen that it felt like infinite mercy when he dribbled a little of it into her mouth. "No food, I'm afraid."

"Not hungry," she managed to say, while licking her lips carefully to get every tiny droplet of the water. Her tongue could feel how cracked and broken the skin there was. "I don't think I'll ever be hungry again."

"I'm unsurprised," Lucie sneered. "Considering how much of that tainted meat you gobbled down. It should have killed you."

Chey managed to turn her head a little to the side, so she was looking at Powell. "What happened?" she asked.

He rubbed at his forehead and eyes as if he was very tired. "We had to abandon the camp," he said. "Someone-a hunter-came after us. It was him who left those rabbits for us, of course. He must have been feeding them for days on a silver solution before he killed them and brought them to the camp. Their meat was full of silver. Enough to poison one of us. He didn't really expect to kill us that way, though. Lucie and I knew what had happened as soon as we tasted the meat. He just wanted to slow us down." He shook his head. "He's clever. And more than that-he's diabolically patient. Just to get to the camp, he must have waited nearby for days until we were all gone, our wolves out in the woods, Dzo in the lake. Then he approached from downwind, so our wolves wouldn't even smell him. He had the element of surprise-we had no idea he was there-but still. This one's something special. Not like those idiots who tried to kill us at Port Radium."

"Is he from the government?" Chey asked.

"I don't think so. I think this is the same guy Lucie was running away from when she left Russia."

"Impossible," Lucie said. "A man like that-your nation would never let him inside its borders."

Powell frowned. "Unless he made some kind of deal with them. They want us dead, he wants to kill you. Maybe they decided to strike three birds with one stone. Who is he, Lucie? What does he want, other than to kill us?"

Lucie answered the second question first. "Nothing. Nothing but oblivion. If it is Varkanin-and I think this very unlikely, no matter what you say-he has sworn to destroy me though it be the last thing he ever does."

"Sounds familiar," Chey said. There had been a time when that described her-when she had come tracking Powell, intent on killing him. She'd made a mess of that, certainly, and in time her feelings had completely changed, but she still understood the urge.

"What is he?" Powell demanded.

"He is only human, really. Nothing to concern us. But he is possessed of a certain persistence I do not find amusing."

Powell grunted in dissatisfaction. "This isn't good."

Chey let her head fall back. Even talking was wearing her out, but there were things she needed to know. "Where are we now?"

"We ran for it when he started shooting," Powell told her. "I had no idea where to go, but I knew he was behind us the whole time. I headed north, following a creek that had some pretty good tree cover. Eventually we found this place. Judging by the size of it, I'd say it used to be a bear's den. It hasn't been used in a while. We'll lay low here until we know he's gone, then look for a more suitable place to overwinter."

Chey couldn't nod. She didn't have the strength. Instead she bit her lip a little and then turned her face as far as she could toward him. She didn't particularly want Lucie to hear what she had to say, but she supposed it was unavoidable. "I remember something," she told him. "Right after I ate the rabbit. You and Dzo were doing something to me, shoving ashes from the fire in my mouth."

"Charcoal," he told her.

"I can still taste it."

He smiled at her. "You were full of silver and the only way to get it out was to make you throw up." He sounded apologetic, for some reason. "Charcoal absorbs the contents of your stomach so when you vomit it back up, whatever you were poisoned by comes up with it. It was the only way to-"

"To save my life," she finished. "Thank you, Powell. Thank you for not just leaving me behind, too. How many times have you saved me now?"

"I owed you," he said, though she couldn't imagine why.

Hours ticked by but Chey was barely aware of them-she was in and out of consciousness, unable to tell, sometimes, whether she was awake or dreaming. She was barely aware of what was going on when she heard Powell talking.

"When we change," Powell said, "which is going to happen very soon now-our wolves won't know why they're hiding in here. They'll run outside looking for game."

"They will find Varkanin," Lucie said.

"Exactly. Him and his high-powered rifle. So we need to keep them inside. I can only see one way to do that."

The two of them, Powell and Lucie, went to work right away, collapsing the mouth of the den. They had to do it carefully in such a way that the entire structure didn't fall in, crushing all three of them, but so thoroughly that the wolves couldn't dig their way out with just their paws. It took a while. Chey could do nothing to help, only watch silently as more and more of the light was cut off. Finally, when it was pitch black inside the den, she heard the two of them come back. They were breathing hard, and not just from the exertion.

"We won't asphyxiate," Powell assured Chey, "even though there's no air coming in. But it won't be comfortable. At least it'll be our wolves gasping in here, not us."

"You hate your wolf, don't you?" she asked.

She couldn't see the expression on his face, so when he didn't answer her she had no way of knowing what he thought.

They changed soon thereafter. Even in the darkness where the moon couldn't find them, the silver light shone.

What the wolves thought of being buried alive she would never know. She woke up desperate for air and scared, but her wolf didn't make another appearance inside her human body, as she had feared it might.

Powell went to the mouth of the cave and dug an air shaft through to the outside world. No one tried to shoot him even for the scant minutes he was partially visible, but he didn't take that as a sign that it was safe to leave.

That was another problem.

"How can we possibly know when it's safe?" Chey asked, her lungs sucking deep on the cold sweet air coming in, and her eyes lit up by the rare beam of sunlight that made its way down into the den.

"Dzo's out there, keeping tabs on the hunter. He'll let us know."

There were other problems, some of them less important than others, but far more insistent.

"The bear that hibernated in here," Chey asked. "Where did it go to the bathroom?" She was feeling a little better-it might have been a day or so, or maybe more since they'd been inside the den, but this was the first time the call of nature had made itself known.

"It didn't," Powell told her. "When bears sleep through the winter they don't eat, drink, urinate, or defecate. Just sleep. Lucie and I have been going over there," he said, anticipating the question she was really asking. "Do you need help?"

"No, thanks," she said. She shifted carefully, moving as gently as possible. It tired her out just to crawl over Powell to get to the lowest point of the den, a place where the ceiling was barely thirty centimeters from the floor. Getting her pants down was hard, harder than anything she'd had to do in a long time, but she managed.

When she crawled back she considered the biggest problem she faced, one she'd been far too frightened to ask about. It had to be done, though. Most likely, she thought, as soon as she asked Powell would tell her it was no big deal, that it happened to everybody sometimes. That she shouldn't worry. That would be an enormous relief.

She lay back down in her spot, in the groove her body had already worn in the muddy floor, and rested awhile until her strength came back. Then she rolled over to face Powell and just said it.

"My wolf keeps showing up. Even when the moon is down, I mean."

"I know," he told her.

"You do?"

He was between her and the light. She couldn't see his face at all. "When I was carrying you here, you tried to scratch me. You started howling. I knew for sure, then. I had already guessed it was happening before, though. That time you didn't put your shoes on. That could have been nothing. Now I know what it meant."

"Care to share with me?" she asked.

He was silent for quite a while. Maybe finding the right words. Maybe conserving their precious oxygen. Maybe he just didn't know what to say.

Lucie broke the silence. "I will tell her, if you will not, cher."

Powell stirred as if he'd been slapped. "No, you will not. She'll hear it from me. The best way I can tell it."

Chey managed to laugh a little, though it sounded more like desperation than mirth to her own ears. She hoped that the weird acoustics of the den would make it sound different to him. "How bad is it, doc? Will I ever play the violin again?"

He didn't understand the joke. "Chey, normally when a human being becomes a lycanthrope, they manage to find a balance. An equilibrium between the human being and the beast. It doesn't have to be an easy equilibrium. You asked me if I hate my wolf and the answer is that I do. I despise it, as much as it loathes me. When I'm human, I try to be as civilized and rational as I can because I dread the moment when I lose those qualities, when the wolf comes for me. Lucie has her own balance to maintain, which I won't even try to explain."

"It is only the contrast between vicious beast and innocent girl," Lucie suggested.

"Whatever," Chey said, wishing Powell would just get on with it.

"Sometimes," he said, "the balance is lopsided. Sometimes the wolf gets stronger with each transformation and the human ... starts to weaken. The human becomes more and more wolflike. The wolf asserts dominance over the human. It can go the other way as well, which is maybe worse. I can only imagine what it would be like to wake up in the body of a wolf but with a human mind. It must be torture. But in the cases we're talking about, the cases where the wolf predominates, it eventually leads to-well, to the human losing. Dying, in every way that matters."

Chey's breath came fast in her throat. She felt like her heart might stop. "Okay," she said. "Okay."

"It gets worse when the human is under stress. When you were poisoned, your human half thought it was going to die, and it gave in. The wolf took over. Now you're getting better and you're stronger. You, your human self, is stronger."

"Alright," Chey said.

"You need to fight it as long as you can," he said.

And that was it. That was all he was going to tell her. He lay back, not even looking at her.

She couldn't let it go, though. "So-so-we cure this. We figure out a way to make this stop happening. I could do Zen meditation. I could do really highbrow mental human stuff, like, like listening to classical music or playing chess. You'll help me make chess pieces, right, Powell? You'll teach me how to play?"

"Chey, I-"

"You must know how to play chess. I mean, you look like the type," she said. She was starting to get hysterical, and she knew it. "Because we can beat this. You didn't say we couldn't, which must mean that we can. Right? Tell me how to beat this."

He reached for her hand. She pulled it away.

"Don't," she said.

"I can't lie to you, Chey. I've heard of this happening many times. I've never heard of anyone who recovered from it."

Chey sat up so fast that she hit the ceiling with her forehead. Cold, wet dirt cascaded down the neck of her shirt. Come on, she thought. Give me something. But she knew what he had said was true-he couldn't lie to her. He never had before.

"You've heard of it happening. You've heard stories. But there's more," she said. "Lucie said something, when I was on your back, wolfing out. She said-she said-God, what was it? She said my mind was gone. Which was a little fucking presumptive, lady." She turned and snarled at Lucie.

Snarled the way a wolf snarls.

Lucie's eyes caught the wan morning light, what there was of it, and sparkled.

"She said something else, too," Chey went on, trying to ignore the sound she'd just made. "She said-'Her mind is gone. You've seen it happen before.' " Chey rubbed the dirt off her face and chest. "You've seen it. Who? Who was it this happened to?" She considered the possibilities. Powell had told her many stories of Lucie before, but the only other werewolf he'd ever spoken of by name had been-"the Baroness." She shook her head. "Oh my God. This happened to the Baroness."

"Yes," Powell said.

"What happened to her? Where is she now?" Chey grabbed the front of Powell's shirt and tugged at it, demanding that he tell her more. "What happened to her?"

"That I won't tell you," he said.

Lucie laughed. "I will," she said. "I was there, also."

Powell made a warning noise, deep in his throat.

"Damn it, Powell. I have a right to know," Chey said.

He didn't deny it.