Read Online Frostbite by David Wellington - Free Book Online Page A

she thought. She was never going to accept it.
    There was no point standing outside in the dooryard all night, though. She went inside and warmed herself by the stove.
    Inside Powell made up a bed for her, lining his rough wooden couch with blankets and pillows. It looked more like a dog bed than one meant for a human being. When he finished he took a step toward her, but she wouldn’t let him come near her. He tried again, tried to touch her arm, and she recoiled as if he were a snake trying to bite her. He got the point and retired to his smokehouse. Chey followed him as far as the doorway and watched him go inside and close the door behind him. Dzo was outside refueling the truck from an enormous plastic jerry can. It was yellow with age and translucent, and she could see the shadow of the liquid sloshing back and forth inside.
    “Make yourself at home, eh?” Dzo said, grinning at her.
    She slammed the door shut. There was no lock, just a simple latch, but she pulled hard to make sure it caught. Then she found a chair—not that nest of a bed—and threw herself down in it and had a good sulk.
    A day earlier, when she had been lost in the woods, she had been certain she was going to die. It was the worst feeling she’d ever known. Now she was certain she was going to live and it was even worse.
    There was no way back, no cure except death. That was what Powell had been trying to tell her. She was stuck with the wolf for the rest of her life.
    What did she do next? Did she give up? There had been no room in her plans for this, for becoming a monster. How could she adjust her life to make room for a giant wolf? How could she hold a job if every twelve hours she transformed into an animal? She’d had a few boyfriends back in Edmonton. Mostly they’d been cowboy types, guys with ponytails and motorcycles. The kind of guys who might try to keep a wolf for a pet. None of them would have understood what she’d become. If she had tried to explain this to them, they might have thought it was cool. She could not agree.
    She could hear her uncle’s voice in her head. Telling her she was feeling sorry for herself. Bemoaning her fate instead of trying to fix it. She tried to argue with him, but even when he was actually there that had never worked. He had a bad habit of being right all the time.
    “Okay,” she said, finally, rubbing the bridge of her nose. “Okay. Fuck! Okay.”
    She rose from her chair and walked out onto the porch. As much as she didn’t want to face her new circumstance, she did need answers.
    The snow between the trees caught what little sunlight made it through the branches and glowed an unearthly blue. Frigid tendrils of mist snaked around the feet of the bushes. Powell was still hiding in his smokehouse, judging by the volume of aromatic fumes streaming out through the cracks around its door. Behind the house Dzo was washing out the bed of his truck with buckets of stream water.
    When he saw her coming around the corner of the house he pushed up his mask and smiled at her.
    “Am I a prisoner here?” she asked.
    He frowned. “No,” he said. “Of course not.”
    “So I’m free to go at any time,” she tried.
    He shook his head and smiled at her again. “No, sorry. We’d just have to come after you and drag you back. You might hurt somebody.”
    She squinted at him. “I think I have a little more self-control than that.”
    Dzo sighed. “A wolf—your kind of wolf—can’t look at a human being without getting blood in his eyes. Normal times, he’s just an animal, but you get him around people and something comes over him. He gets that taste of blood on the back of his tongue. He gets that smell, that smell in the back of his nose like suppertime has come around.” Dzo shook his head. “You see a human being when you’re in that state, you won’t have any choice. You’ll go right from zero to kill in two seconds.”
    “No,” she said. “That’s—that can’t be right. What