Frostbite (13 page)

In the clearing on the far side of the lake a two-man helicopter sat like a giant dragonfly sunning itself on a clump of sparse grass. The pilot, an Indian in a padded vest, lay with his back against the big machine and his hands folded behind his head. He didn’t even look up as she staggered into the clearing.

Bobby Fenech, on the other hand, jumped up as if he’d been bitten by a snake. He was wearing a leather bomber jacket over an orange polo shirt with the collar turned up. He had on a pair of wraparound aviator sunglasses, but he was just as soft- and harmless-looking as ever. His spiky hair stayed perfectly motionless even in the stiff breeze off the lake.

“Jesus, Chey, you don’t just sneak up on a guy in my profession,” he said. “Don’t you know we’re famous for our killer reflexes?”

“Hi, Bobby,” she said, and leaned into his embrace. She let him lift her chin and kiss her. She had let him do a lot more than that before—and now was hardly the time to be squeamish. “Please tell me you got my message. About losing my pack.”

He grinned evilly. “I can’t believe you lost your weapon. Do you know how expensive these are?” he asked. He put a hand inside his jacket and pulled out a square black handgun. He ejected the magazine and handed it to her so she could check the ammunition.

The seven bullets lined up in the clip were black with tarnish, but she knew they were 995-grade silver underneath.

A duck slid in
on the wind and flapped to a landing on the perfect mirror surface of the lake. Thick velvety ripples of black water hurried away from its body as it cruised serenely along. The breeze off the water made the quaking aspens rattle and shiver.

Chey’s weapon swung through the air and sighted on the duck as if the handgun were mounted on ball bearings. It felt like her arm didn’t move at all. She’d trained long and hard so it would feel like that. “Remember,” Fenech said, “you have to be close.”

“I know. You told me already,” she said, slipping the gun into her back pocket.

She knew the science involved. Normal lead bullets were soft enough that when they passed down the barrel of a gun they changed shape, slightly, conforming to the rifling on the inside of the barrel. They emerged from the muzzle spinning as a result, and that spin kept them traveling in a mostly straight line. Silver bullets were harder than lead and they didn’t change their shape as easily. Because they didn’t spin they were far more likely to deviate in mid-flight from the trajectory you wanted—which made them far less accurate, especially at any kind of range. She knew all this; she knew it better than he did, but he was going to tell her again anyway. Bobby was one of those people who liked to repeat things for emphasis, because he assumed other people’s memories weren’t as good as his. “At more than twenty meters you’re
unlikely to hit the side of a wood buffalo.” He smiled at his own jest. “So you need to be close.”

“Close,” she said. “Got it.”

His smile deepened a little. Turned warm. In his own way he really could be affectionate, even caring. “How are you?” he asked. “It can’t have been easy getting this far. You look great, though. I kind of half expected to find you starving and frozen, but you look like you’ve been working out. You found out that life up north agrees with you?”

She nodded and bit her lip. How to tell him? Would he freak out? Would he shoot her on the spot?

“You know I always thought you were crazy for wanting to hike in like this.”

“It was the only way,” she said. “My cover story was that I was completely lost and near death. I had to look the part—enough to fool somebody who’s lived in these woods for decades.”

“Have you seen him yet?” Fenech asked. She hadn’t said much in her message. He had no idea what had happened to her. “Did you make contact?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I made contact. He has a cabin about two kilometers from here in a little clearing. He lives there with another guy, a Dene Indian named Dzo.”

She’d thought the pilot of the helicopter was asleep. When she mentioned Dzo’s name, however, he let out a little grunt of humor.

“Something amuse you, Lester?” Fenech asked, a cockeyed grin on his face.

The pilot sat up a bit. His eyes were hidden under deep, pouchy lids, but they sparkled when they met Chey’s gaze. “That’s probably not his real name, is all,” the pilot said.

Fenech turned halfway around. “It’s not a common Dene name?”

The pilot shrugged. “In North Slavey language, that’s the word for the musquash. The, you know, you call it the muskrat down south. Little furry thing. It’s like if your name was Chipmunk.”

“Is that so.” Bobby stared at the pilot as if surprised he’d had the temerity to speak. Surprised, and slightly amused. “You know, Lester’s a pretty funny name where I come from.”

The pilot shrugged again and closed his eyes, done with the conversation.

“Bobby,” she interjected, “let’s worry about people’s names later, okay? I made contact. I made really bad contact. There’s been a complication with the plan.”

Fenech’s face hardened and he nodded. He was ready to hear it.

She sighed deeply. “He scratched my leg with one of his claws. While he was a wolf.”

He looked down at her leg, concern growing across his face. “So you need medical attention? We’ll fly you out of here right now,” Fenech offered.

She shook her head. “No, Bobby, you don’t understand. He scratched me, and that’s all it takes. I’m one of them now.” She could see in his face he still didn’t get it.

She swallowed painfully. There was a thickness in her throat she didn’t fully understand.

“I’m a wolf, too, now,” she said, and watched him take a step back, just like she’d known he would. His face stayed perfectly still, but his eyes widened a little.

“Oh, boy,” he said. He brought one hand up and scratched at his spiky hair, careful, even in this moment of shock, not to muss a single strand. “Oh, boy,” he said again. “Alright. So…”

“So you just need to be aware of this,” she said. “It doesn’t have to change anything. I can still do what I came for.”

“No. No, in light of this—this shocking revelation—I think we scrub the mission. I mean, we need to move forward but not—not like this. I know some guys I can bring in.”

“You’re going to call in the Mounties on this?” she shouted. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

“Not exactly. Not any official police,” he said carefully. “Just some guys I happen to know. I mean, that’s what I wanted to do in the first place.”

“No,” Chey insisted.

“No?” he asked, and it was an actual question. “Because it looks like maybe you’ve screwed this up. In the worst way possible.”

“No,” she repeated. “This is my operation. I fucking deserve it.”

He might have started in on her again if Lester the pilot hadn’t cleared his throat just then.

“If you two are at a good stopping place,” he said, “you might notice we’ve got guests.”

Fenech and Chey swiveled in unison to look down the side of the lake. Something was moving toward them, bouncing and lurching through the brush, weaving around the tree trunks. It was Dzo’s rusted truck crawling over broken terrain down there, its windshield catching sporadic winks of sunlight as it rumbled through the shadows.

Powell leaned out of the driver’s side window and shouted her name. The soft syllable flapped around in the treetops and echoed off the surface of the lake.

“Chey,” he yelled again. “I just want to talk to you, that’s all,” he called.

Chey muttered a curse and turned to look at her handler, but Fenech’s eyes were invisible behind his sunglasses. He was smiling, but she had no idea what that meant.

“When you said you made contact,” he told her, “I assumed that meant you’d set up a position and had him visually. I didn’t think you’d been properly introduced. Does he know about me? Did you tell him you already had a boyfriend?”

Chey tried to keep her face blank of expression. She would not let him take this away from her. Not now. Not after what she had done, not after what she had become, just to get this far. “I had no weapon at the time. I needed to get close. I did what I had to.”

Dzo slewed his vehicle around to a stop where a line of trees
blocked further progress around the lake. Powell didn’t wait for a full stop, but jumped out of the truck while it was still slowing down. His legs caught the earth and grabbed it, propelling him toward her a lot faster than she’d been able to cover the same distance. He had seen her, perhaps, or maybe he’d just spotted the helicopter. He came loping around the side of the lake and then stopped twenty meters away. He looked more confused than anything else. “Chey,” he said, closing the gap. Ten meters. Eight. “Chey, you can’t leave me now. You know that. Who the hell are these people?”

“Bobby,” she said, “I’d like you to meet—”

“I don’t want to meet him. You know what I want,” Fenech said.

She nodded and drew her weapon. Powell was six meters away. She sighted on his forehead.

“Chey?” he asked.

Most people’s lives change
very slowly, more slowly than the seasons. Some people are born into the life they’re going to lead and nothing much ever comes along to force them to change. For Cheyenne Clark, change came about in the space of thirty very bad seconds.

It happened when she was younger. Much younger. It happened one day when she and her dad were driving in their car.

It was at the end of a vacation. They were coming down out of Jasper National Park, where her dad had shown her the glaciers. Just the two of them—she was on holiday from school and he was between jobs, but he’d scraped enough together for the trip of a lifetime. Her mother hadn’t been able to get time off from work, but frankly, she’d looked relieved when they packed up the car, waved good-bye, and pulled out of the drive—glad enough to have the house to herself for a while, to have some time off from looking after the both of them. For Chey and her dad it had been a time to bond, something they’d never had much of before. The park was half a continent away from home and they’d driven the whole way there, which meant a lot of time to talk to each other and reconnect.

That was the summer she’d started to really think about what it was going to be like to be an adult, and her dad had answered all of her stupid questions. He’d told her stories about his own youth, in America,
and his time in the army there, which sounded like going to a summer camp you couldn’t leave. In exchange she’d told him all about her life, about school and her friends, and she’d even told him about her first kiss, with a sweaty Quebecois boy who had called her
mademoiselle
and then bragged, afterward, that he’d gotten his hand up under her shirt even though he really hadn’t.

As for the park itself, it had turned out to be a lot of fun. The two of them had ridden in a snowmobile as big as a bus and out of the window she’d seen a herd of deer. They’d had a week in the park, and though she’d been dreading the trip all spring, now that it was over she wished she could have stayed there for a month.

It was on the drive back that things changed.

It was July 25, 1994, and Chey was twelve years old. They’d been driving for days already and the car was full of discarded fast food wrappers and empty plastic water bottles and it had started to smell a little. Her dad let her put in an Ace of Base CD, and he even said it wasn’t half bad. It was that or the radio, and there was nothing on that far west but country music and talk radio about ice fishing and hockey.

He was wearing his red Melton jacket that smelled like cigarettes even though he’d quit the year before. He hadn’t shaved in three days and his face was dark with stubble. Afterward she would not be able to remember much of what they talked about in the car that day. There had been so many long, deep conversations already, and the promise of plenty more to come—they were nearly a thousand kilometers from home, and had days of driving ahead of them—and most of that day, she thought, they had lapsed into a kind of companionable silence, the two of them sharing a half-breathed laugh now and again, her father occasionally pointing through the windshield at a flight of geese or a particularly stunning stretch of landscape.

She was sure, however, that she was the first one who saw the wolf. “Oh, Dad, look at that,” she said, pressing up against her window until her breath fogged on the glass. He stamped on the brakes, maybe thinking
she’d seen some obstruction in the road. They hadn’t quite stopped when the wolf leapt onto the highway and smashed into the front end of the car.

There was a really loud bang as metal crumpled under the impact. Chey slid to one side in her seat and screamed as the car rocked on its tires.

“Honey, shh,” her dad said. “Shh,” his big hairy hand catching her across her chin as he reached to steady her. Maybe he’d reached over to try to grab her shoulder, but his eyes were fixed on the animal in front of them.

The sun had set, but still a trace of orange lingered on the horizon. The moon was up, a narrow crescent. In the distance the mountains were slowly turning into silhouettes, already heavy with night. The wolf sat in the road in front of the car with its head turned to one side, not moving at all.

Chey breathed heavily. She was very scared.

“It’s alright,” her dad said. “It was just a little accident. It didn’t see us coming.”

The wolf slowly stood up and took a loping step to the side, away from the car. Then it shook its head violently as if trying to shake water out of its ears. It turned its face to look at them, and its frosty green eyes were full of undeniable malice.

“Just don’t scream, okay?” Chey’s dad said. “Just don’t make any noise, and I’m sure it will leave us alone. It’s hurt. It’s going to be scared, but—”

The wolf tilted its head back and let out a roaring yowl, sounding more like a mountain lion than a dog. Tears jumped out of Chey’s eyes and she pulled her knees up to her chin.

“I’m going—” he stopped as she started to whine for him to not go anywhere, to stay with her. It was a primal sound that came out of her, not any coherent speech. She couldn’t have held it in if she’d tried. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m just going to put the car in drive and—”