Iron Lake

48

ADOZEN YARDS INTO THE WOODS, Cork knew he couldn’t keep up with Jo. Adrenaline couldn’t mask all his pain, couldn’t undo the shortness of breath that was the legacy of tobacco. As Jo had moved farther ahead, Cork looked for a place to hide. He spotted a humping of snow-covered vines, and with all the strength he could muster, he’d leaped the thicket. The deep snow on the far side cushioned his landing and he crawled to cover only seconds before Parrant rushed by pursuing Jo.

He had no idea how far ahead Jo had been able to run, but he wanted to give her the best chance he could to make it safely away. He crawled from the safety of the thicket. When the beam of the flashlight was forty or fifty yards beyond him, he let out a cry. He’d meant it to be a cry of challenge, but the stabbing in his ribs turned it to a howl of pain. Still, it did the trick. Parrant turned for him and Cork ran for his life.

He skirted the cabin, not even trying to make it inside to find the rifle. It would be too great a gamble fumbling around, hoping to find the Winchester before Parrant reached him. He made instead for the vast, unbroken wilderness of the Superior National Forest a mile northeast.

He ran numbly through drifts above his knees. Awkwardly he vaulted a fallen log and came down in a snag of branches on the other side. His foot became entangled. While he worked himself free, he checked the woods behind him. Nothing. No movement. Only sound. Above him the wind raced through the tops of the pines, its passage marked by the scrape and groan of branches. From farther east came a deeper sound, a throaty grumble that Cork recognized as the tumble of fast water in a stream. Half Mile Spring. The flow gushed out of high ground and rushed down a deep ravine to the lake. As its name implied, the spring didn’t have a long run from its source to its ending, and even in the coldest winter the water never froze.

He became aware of something else, the smell of wood smoke in the wind. Meloux’s cabin! The place wasn’t far beyond the spring. Cork tried to think if Meloux owned a firearm. The old man had been a hunter once, a great one it was said, but did he own a working firearm?

Cork knew he should be moving again. Two things held him there at the log. He wanted to be certain Parrant was still following him. If Parrant was after him, it meant that Jo had a good chance of getting away. The other thing was the simple fact that he couldn’t move. The adrenaline had washed out of him, and what had seeped in to take its place was searing pain. The beating his ribs had sustained was too much. He couldn’t straighten up, could barely take a breath. Even the slightest movement drove a spike of pain right through his chest.

He’d left his gloves on Molly’s kitchen table. His hands, vulnerable to the bitter, single-digit temperature of the night, ached from the cold. He tried to blow on them for warmth, but the stabbing of his ribs gave him almost no breath for it.

The flashlight beam shot like an arrow through the trees. Cork tried to rise but grabbed at his ribs and doubled over with a moan. The flashlight swung his way. He crouched behind the log as the light played past him. He thought about the ravine at his back. Even if he could escape Parrant somehow, the deep, rugged walls of the ravine and the rush of Half Mile Spring would stop him. His best hope would be to turn to the lake, cut across the ice, and make for Meloux’s cabin. But first he would have to elude Parrant, a possibility that became less likely with each step Parrant took.

The .38 fired unexpectedly. Cork jerked although nothing hit near him. Parrant shot another round. Cork risked a glance over the log. The light swung back and forth, scanning the woods to the left. What had he fired at? Jo? Christ, no! Cork braced himself to rise, to call out, to draw Parrant’s fire, but a hand on his shoulder restrained him.

Meloux crouched beside him. He beckoned to Cork and began to crawl on all fours toward the ravine. Cork followed his example, snow up to his chin. After a short distance, the old man rose and loped ahead, graceful despite his age. Cork did the same, although much less gracefully and a good deal slower.

He glanced back once. The beam of the flashlight had vanished.

Jo cursed the old man. Cursed him because he’d made her afraid.

In Molly Nurmi’s kitchen, she had been angry. She’d been trapped in something she didn’t see any way out of and she’d been blind with rage. Rage at Sandy for what he was, what he’d been able to hide from her so well, and rage at herself for her stupidity and blindness. The sanctuary the old man offered her had changed things. She wasn’t backed into a corner anymore. She had hope. But something unexpected had accompanied the hope. Fear. Fear so overpowering it made her tremble violently as if she were bitterly cold. She’d never been so afraid. She knew what it was now to be paralyzed by cowardice, because she didn’t think she could move.

She’d done as Meloux had suggested. She’d thought about the children. What would happen if both Cork and she were killed? She tried to remember exactly the language of their will. She wanted Rose to be the children’s guardian. She’d made that clear. Of course, it didn’t necessarily mean the court had to comply, but there was no one to contest that request. No close relatives left alive. Jo realized more clearly than she ever had how alone they all were in the world. God, they should have held together. They should have found a way.

She looked at herself, cowering in the dark little hollow, and she felt full of disgust. Cork’s cry had saved her from being discovered by Sandy. And the old man had put himself in danger, too, even though this trouble had nothing to do with him.

But here I am, she thought coldly, pulling herself together around a small fire of anger and self-loathing. Hiding like a damn rabbit.

The next shots, two of them, came from some distance away, beyond the cabin it seemed. If she were ever going to move, if she were ever going to do anything, now was the time.

She shoved aside the bough and crawled out. At her back, miles down the lake, was the safety of Aurora. She could make it. Keeping to the trees, moving carefully, she could make it. That would leave Cork and the old man to deal with Sandy alone. If Cork and the old man were still alive. If they weren’t, she was all that remained of the complications for Sandy to clear up. And he would do his best to kill her. When he wanted something, he always did his best.

She looked south toward Aurora, looked with an ache of longing toward where her children were safe with Rose. Then she turned back toward the cabin and she began to run.

She paused at the edge of the clearing, studying the dark cabin. The last shots had come from far enough away that she didn’t believe Sandy could have returned already, but she waited, watching carefully. Moonlight and the northern lights made the clearing and the cabin easy to see. The wind that had risen lifted snow off the pine trees and cabin roof, and swirls of white danced ghostlike before her. Nothing human moved, and Jo finally made a rush at the door, quietly opened it, and slipped inside. In the moonlit kitchen, she knelt and searched the floor for the rifle Cork had dropped. She found it kicked against a baseboard, and she took it in her hands.

From the window above the kitchen sink, she studied the clearing and the lane that ran between the small cabins all the way down to the lake. All around her the big cabin groaned in the wind. Sprays of loose snow gusted across the clearing. Her legs quaked and her whole body shivered with terrible anticipation. She thought about shooting Sandy Parrant. Less than fifteen minutes before, she would have done it without a second thought. Now she stood wondering. Could she pull the trigger if she had to? Could she really kill him? It might be a moot point anyway since she wasn’t sure she could hold the rifle steady enough to shoot ducks in a barrel. Even so, she understood the wisdom of old Henry Meloux. If she’d charged out of her little sanctuary full of blind rage, the only thing she would have done was get herself killed. Now at least she had a chance.

A figure emerged from the trees, loping into the clearing. She raised the rifle and sighted through the windowpane. She had no idea if she could hit a moving target, and she wasn’t sure who the target was. Her hands ached from their desperate grip on the rifle. She shook violently as if she were freezing cold. The figure turned down the lane and headed for the lake. Only then did Jo see clearly that it was Sandy, and then it was too late. He was too far away. She watched him trot past the old cabins and vanish behind the sauna. Jo felt a rush of relief that he hadn’t come her way, that she hadn’t had to shoot.

But what was Sandy up to?

She cracked open the back door. Above the sound of the wind rushing through the treetops, she heard the engine of the Cherokee turn over. A moment later, the black shape of it headed away slowly across the ice.

Where was he going?

Then she remembered the two shots. With a plummeting of hope she thought, He’s going after their bodies.

At the ravine, the sound of Half Mile Spring grew to a small roar. Meloux turned back and searched the woods behind them for any sign of Parrant.

“Jo?” Cork croaked as soon as he reached Meloux. He stood holding his ribs, bent so far over that he had to raise his eyes to look into the old man’s creased face.

“Safe,” Meloux replied.

“Thank God,” Cork wheezed. He coughed several times and groaned as the pain hit him, echoing every blow Parrant had slammed into him.

“Your hands,” Meloux said, ignoring Cork’s attention to his ribs. He gestured for Cork to show him his hands.

They were clumsy things, bare and without feeling. The old man took off his knitted mittens. He wrapped his own wrinkled hands around Cork’s, but Cork couldn’t even feel their touch let alone any heat from them. The old man blew his warm breath over them and rubbed them gently, all the while scanning the woods for Parrant. Cork smelled sage rising off the old man’s clothing and skin and hair.

In a while Cork began to feel tingling in the tips of his fingers. He knew he’d probably suffered frostbite, but the tingling, which was rapidly becoming a painful stinging, was a relief.

“Here.” Meloux slipped his mittens onto Cork’s hands. Cork started to protest, but the old man hushed him. He motioned for Cork to follow again and started along the ravine toward the lake.

Jo was safe. But where? And for how long?

They reached a cliff overlooking Iron Lake where Half Mile Spring fed in. Black, open water lay along the base of the rock twenty feet below, and a slender black tongue of open water extended a couple of dozen yards out into the ice. Meloux moved along the cliff until he came to a tall solitary pine, then he began a careful descent. Cork would never have seen the path even with the bright moon and the northern lights. He realized Meloux must know every inch of that part of the lake, and he followed the old man with blind trust.

On the ice, a safe distance from the open water, Henry Meloux waited. The wind blew snow off the cliff so that it drifted down around him like sparkling magic powder. In the moonlight, he cast a huge shadow on the ice. Cork saw the old man suddenly in a kind of vision, as if beholding in the long black shadow the real Meloux, a great hunter spirit, silent and powerful. Cork was very grateful to have the old man on his side.

He figured they would probably skirt the thin ice around the open water, then head toward the safety of Meloux’s cabin on Crow Point. But the old man surprised him. He started back toward Molly’s.

“Henry?” Cork reached out and grabbed his arm.

“We have been rabbits,” Meloux explained. “It’s time to become a more dangerous animal. There is a vehicle parked on the ice near Molly Nurmi’s sauna. He will go there soon enough.”

Meloux lifted the bottom of his plaid mackinaw. A sheath hung from his belt. The old man slid out a hunting knife. Its six-inch blade caught the moonlight with a cold glint and Cork saw that the edge had been honed razor sharp. Meloux held the knife out to him.

“To kill the Windigo,” the old hunter advised somberly, “a man must become a Windigo, too. He must have a heart of ice. There must be no hesitation.”

Meloux began at an easy lope along the shoreline. Cork grasped the knife tightly, trying to put from his mind the knifelike stabbing at his own ribs.

It’s time to become a more dangerous animal.

He thought about the bear hunt decades ago with Sam Winter Moon, recalling how the great creature had lost them and doubled back, how surprised he had been when the bear charged at him out of the sumac. It had been a cunning tactic. But there was one problem. They’d killed the bear.

Jo hustled down to the lake and looked where Sandy and the Cherokee had gone. The wind blew hard across the ice and shoved such a bitter cold at her face that her eyes watered immediately. She could just make out the black shape of the Cherokee cautiously moving over the ice along the shoreline. The sound of the engine carried to her faintly on the wind. She didn’t know the lake well, but she knew that somewhere in that direction was a little spring and beyond the spring was Crow Point, where Cork visited Henry Meloux.

Did Sandy know about the old man’s cabin? If he did, he probably knew Cork would head in that direction. If that was the case, it probably meant two things. That Cork and the old man were still alive. And that Sandy Parrant intended to cut them off before they reached the cabin.

She started across the ice just as the brake lights of the Cherokee flashed, red as the eyes of a night demon, then went dark. Jo paused and considered Sandy’s move. Why stop? If they were headed toward the old man’s cabin, wouldn’t Sandy still be moving? Maybe they weren’t headed to Meloux’s. Maybe they were coming back across the ice, doubling back. Coming straight toward Sandy.

She began to run.

The shoreline between the ravine and Molly’s place curved in a ragged, inward arc that was punctuated by several tiny inlets and small rocky peninsulas covered with stunted pines. The two men made straight for the sauna, a line that took them away from the arc of the shoreline, far from cover. Cork knew it was a bold and dangerous move, but it would allow them to reach more quickly the vehicle Meloux had spotted.

They hadn’t gone far when Meloux stopped.

“Listen,” he said.

Cork cocked his ear toward Molly’s, but all he heard was the rush of the wind at his back.

“There.” Meloux pointed toward a dark point of land ahead and to the right.

Cork saw nothing.

“Off the ice!” Meloux said, turning suddenly for the shoreline. “Quick!” The old man began to run, not a lope this time but a full-blown retreat.

Cork followed blindly. A moment later, he understood.

Headlights came on at the tip of the point, as if a beast had opened its eyes. Parrant’s Cherokee started for them. They were only fifty yards from shore, but they might as well have been a mile. Cork knew they’d never make it. Whatever well of adrenaline had pumped his muscles and numbed his pain was empty, and he couldn’t make himself run the way he knew he had to. And Meloux, for all his amazing ability, was still an old man. Parrant would run them down long before they reached safety.

Cork split off suddenly, moving away from Meloux and toward the cliffs at Half Mile Spring. When he looked back, Parrant had slowed the Cherokee almost to a stop, as if confused. Cork stopped, too, and turned to show himself clearly in the headlights.

“I’m here, you son of a bitch! I’m the one you want!”

Cork stood dead still on the lake. The urgency of fleeing had vanished. In its place was a deep calm, and around that calm, like an aureola around the dark center of an eclipse, blazed a fierce resolve to be done with it.

To kill the Windigo, Meloux had said, you must become a Windigo, too.

A man was never just a man. A man was endless possibility waiting to become.

In the hoary glare of the headlights, Cork changed. He grew. Past the pain of his body. Past the fear of dying. Past the concerns of conscience that kept a man small. He stood huge and full of an icy determination to see Sandy Parrant dead. To kill him with his own hands. He felt no pain in the fingers that gripped Meloux’s knife. He felt no pain in his ribs as he drew himself upright. He felt only a depthless, pitiless cold that froze his heart.

He even smiled as the Cherokee came for him.

The vehicle launched itself across the lake. Cork heard the sizzle of the tires spinning on the ice as Parrant accelerated toward a killing speed. The sound was like the whine of a hungry animal. Death was coming and Cork opened his arms to embrace it, to bring it to him so that he could feed on it. Welling up from a dark place inside him he’d never known rose a cry he didn’t recognize or understand, the howl of a hungry beast. He stood with the knife in his hand, howling beneath the moon as the Cherokee bore down on him. He crouched to meet it.

He didn’t hear the shots. But he heard the shatter of glass and saw the vehicle swerve at the last instant. The Cherokee missed him by several feet, drifting into a lazy spin as Parrant fought to bring it under control. He never did. The end seemed to take a long time. Cork watched it all with a dispassionate appreciation for the beauty of circumstance.

As the Cherokee approached the open water from Half Mile Spring, the thin ice at the edge gave with a crack, as if the earth had split. The jeep tilted, its tires touching water. It rolled to its side, then flipped onto its top. It narrowly missed the open water, and like a new Christmas sled skated across the frozen lake on the bare metal of its roof, hardly slowing at all before it slammed into the base of the cliff on the far side of Half Mile Spring.

A moment of absolute quiet followed. The night caught its breath. Then the gas tank exploded.

Fire washed the cliff and the lake all around with a fearsome, wavering orange. The snow and ice melted on the rock wall and ran like black tears down the face of the cliff. Where he stood, Cork felt the heat reaching out toward him. He watched flames engulf the vehicle and listened to glass exploding from the intense heat.

“Cork!” Jo came out of the dark, the Winchester in her hand. “Are you all right?”

Cork looked at the rifle. “Thanks to you, I guess.”

Meloux materialized beside them. He also noted the Winchester and nodded to Jo. “I thought for sure this old man would not be getting any older. I thank you.”

The Winchester suddenly seemed too heavy for Jo to hold. She handed it to Cork. She felt empty and a little weak and she sat down abruptly on the ice. Meloux sat down cross-legged beside her.

Cork asked, “Back at the cabin, Henry. The Windigo calling. Was that you?”

In the quivering light that came off the burning Cherokee, Cork saw a perturbed look cross the old man’s face, as if he’d been asked a rather stupid question. A glittering dust of snow blew over them and Meloux glanced up at the sky. The northern lights were fading, but the moon was high, looking bright and new as if it had only just been created.

“Whatever it was brought the Windigo here to feed is gone,” Meloux declared.

He closed his eyes and began to sing, words Cork didn’t understand. But he knew what it was about. The song of the dead. Henry Meloux was singing his fallen enemy onto the Path of Souls.