Free Frostbite by David Wellington Page A

He frowned. “I’ll try to remember to teach you how to hunt tonight,” he said. When the moon came up, she realized. He meant he would try to teach her how to hunt when they were wolves. She shuddered at the thought of transforming again. “This land belongs to them. For hundreds of thousands of years before people came they hunted the caribou here. You may have noticed they aren’t like other wolves.”
    “The teeth,” Chey said with a gulp of horror. When she’d been up in her tree, looking down at Powell’s wolf, she’d noticed the teeth most of all.
    He nodded. “The curse was cast ten thousand years ago, right at the end of the last ice age. There were timber wolves here then, but they were smaller and not so fearsome. The shamans who created this curse wanted to strike fear into the hearts of their enemies, really mess with them. So they picked an animal they knew would scare anyone—the dire wolf. They had huge teeth for crunching bones and enormous paws for walking on top of snow. That made them look like monsters to your average Paleo-Indian. Dire wolves are extinct now, but in their day they used to bring down woolly mammoths and giant sloths. They were tough sons-of-guns, see? Everything was bigger back then. And nastier.”
    “Dzo said a timber wolf would never attack a human being,” Chey suggested. “He said we don’t look like their food.”
    Powell nodded. “Yeah. Unless you provoke a wolf—poking it with a stick would do, I guess—it’ll leave you alone. The same wasn’t true of dire wolves. They were man-killers, because back then people didn’t have the technology to make them afraid. There’s more to it, though. The curse makes our wolves resent us. They don’t like being human, any more than we like being wolves. They want to be wolves all the time—you probably felt that.”
    Chey nodded. She remembered exactly how good it had felt to change. It sickened her, offended her humanity. But she remembered how bad she’d felt when she changed back, too.
    “They grow to hate us. I don’t know if it’s just natural antipathy or if the curse includes some kind of evil twist, but our kind of wolves go out of their way to destroy anything human. They would destroy us in a heartbeat if they could. There have been times when I changed back and found that I had busted all the windows out of my house because my wolf thought maybe I was sleeping inside.”
    “Jesus,” she said. “But—”
    “Yes?”
    “What about Dzo? Why doesn’t your wolf attack him?”
    “He’s gotten very good at staying out of my way, I guess,” Powelltold her. “Believe me, no human being wants to be nearby when the change comes.”
    “And there’s nothing you can do to stop it?”
    “You can lock yourself up when the moon is out. I’ve tried that and found I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t take waking up in a locked room. My wolf got so hungry it went a little crazy—it spent all that night bashing itself against the walls trying to get out. It hurt itself, so much so that when I changed back I found myself in so much pain I couldn’t even walk. Dzo had to bring me food. It was …tough. Too tough. I needed to be free.”
    She wondered if she could handle being locked up. It might be better than running around like an animal.
    He glanced down at his watch and his face fell. “Oh, shoot. I guess I’ve forgotten how nice it is to have somebody new to talk to about this stuff,” he told her. “The time just flew.”
    Chey jumped inside her skin. “You mean—”
    “Brace yourself, is what I mean,” he told her.
    She closed her eyes and nodded. “Okay,” she said. “I guess I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”
    He reached over and put a hand on her shoulder. As monstrous as he was, as much as he had hurt her, she didn’t shrug it away, not immediately. It was some small measure of comfort, something she needed very badly. Without warning the hand got heavier and started to sink through her