The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

STAY Leah Bobet

She felt the storm come in, in her kneecaps, then her thighs. By eight o’clock, it blew from the north into Sunrise, January-hard and fine like sand, and Cora’s hip was aching.

She asked Johnny Red for a smoke break and limped out back to the storeroom, kneading the hip with her right hand while her left cupped the cigarette. The storeroom was cold and cluttered, a tiny junkyard of boxes and broken chairs, but normally it was quiet; the rattle of pots in Johnny Red’s kitchen didn’t quite reach through the door. Tonight, though, the back door banged like an angry drunk; the snow hissed and ground at metal, brick, bone. Cora lit a second thin-rolled smoke off the first and listened to the rattle of the heartbroke wind.

When she came back through the storeroom door, half her tables had up and left.

“Better service across the street?” she asked. The plates were half-full, still steaming. There was nothing across the street. There was nowhere else to eat in the whole town: just the service stations, the Tutchos’ grocery, and the snow.

“Transport truck’s gone off the road,” Johnny said behind the counter, and crimped a new coffee filter into the brew basket. A few hairs pulled loose from his straight black ponytail and drifted into his face; he brushed them back with a callused brown hand. “The boys went to haul it to Fiddler’s.”

Georgie Fiddler ran one of the two service stations in town. Mike Blondin, who ran the other, was still at his table, hands wrapped thin around a chipped blue pottery mug. He held it up and Cora grabbed the stained coffeepot.

“I want the fresh stuff,” he complained; she didn’t answer, just filled the mug with sour, black coffee. He waved her off before it hit the brim and flipped open the dented metal sugar tin.

“You didn’t go out with them,” she said. Not a question.

Mike Blondin’s fingers moved like a stonecarver’s, measured sugar with chisel precision: one pinch, two. He had big hands. “Wouldn’t want to just abandon you,” he grinned. There’d been a time, not too many years past, when Mikey Blondin’s grin had got him whatsoever he desired anywhere from Sunrise to the Alberta border.

“Thoughtful,” she said, dry, just as Johnny Red hit the percolator button and called out, “What’m I, chopped liver?” Gertie Myers, back at the corner table, rolled her eyes. Cora ignored it all and covered the cooling plates.

An hour passed before the menfolk trickled back in, red-faced and damp with winter-sweat. “Hey,” Johnny Red said, and ladled out eight bowls of steaming chicken soup. “What’s the news?”

“Went hard into the ditch,” Fred Tutcho replied, and sucked back soup straight from the bowl. The steam set the ice in his eyelashes to melting. “Georgie got the tow and we managed to fish it out, but the front axle’s pretty busted.”

“The driver?” Cora asked.

“Got him up at Jane’s.” Jane Hooker ran the Treeline Motel, which was ten rooms and a Dene crafts shop, old-style porcupine quill-and-hair work, out by Blondin’s. In the deep wintertime most of her rooms were closed; the only visitors to Sunrise in January were family and the odd long-haul trucker. “She’n Georgie are checking him out.”

“I’ll bring them something, then,” Cora said, and ducked into the kitchen. She filled three thermoses and screwed the lids on tight, shrugged on her long, thick, battered coat. She wound three scarves and a hat about her head before stepping out into the storm.

It wasn’t enough. The storm cut. It had blown in from the north, where there weren’t no buildings or shrubs — whitebark pines or larches — to beat down the wind. Even breathing through thick wool, Cora’s nostrils froze together at the first sucked-in breath, and her jeans were stiff by the time she reached the Treeline Motel. There was only one light on. Cora hunkered deeper into her scarves and scooted, knees-bent against the slippery gravel, down the battered row of doors with fingers clamped around her canvas bag.

Room six had been converted into a warm and stuffy sickroom. Jane Hooker leaned over the bed, obscuring her patient from the knees on up, and Georgie Fiddler tinkered with the steam radiator, coaxing out a whining, clanking heat. The warm air made Cora sneeze, and two heads turned sharp around the double bed. She waggled the canvas bag and groped with her free hand for a tissue.

Her fingers were still stiff when she unscrewed the thermos caps and set them on the nightstand. Jane shifted over to make room, and she finally got a look at the driver.

He had soft, sweaty, messy hair. It fell dark across a white man’s flattened cheekbones and was tamped down in a line where his cap would sit. The cap was on the dresser: white and faded red, damp from the roadside snow. The brim was bent almost double, into a fist.

Jane had the man’s jackets off — one for winter and a checked old lumber jacket — and her broad hand felt the shape of his ribs. “Good enough,” she said to Georgie with a nod, and he let out a little sigh; probably happy he didn’t have to call to Hay River for the doctor.

Cora poured them half-chilled chicken soup and passed the mugs into reddened hands. “From Johnny,” she said. Jane took hers with a nod, distracted; Georgie caught his up and resumed his regular pacing. She cupped her hands around a third mug, stealing what heat it had left, and leaned back against the wall to watch.

“Enough left for our boy here?” Jane asked, and Cora nodded. She’d ladled Johnny’s soup pot dry. “Good,” Jane replied, and stood with a long, loose breath. The lines around her eyes were windburned and deep. “I get the feeling he’ll wake up hungry. Got a pretty good crack on the head.”

“Lucky he didn’t break those ribs too,” Georgie said.

“Speaking of.” Jane paused. “You find his seatbelt on?”

“He was clear across the cab.” Georgie looked up at her, at Jane, and his brow creased into three fine canyons over his greying eyebrows. “I’ll look over the truck tomorrow.”

Jane nodded. “You’re a good man, George Fiddler.”

She didn’t need to say it. But Georgie pinkened anyways over the rim of his mug, and those terrible fissures came out of his face.

“Hey,” he said sudden, and both Jane and Cora looked up. “I think he’s waking up.”

Cora leaned in soon enough to see his eyes flicker. They were folded, turned a touch at the corners. Métis then, not white, but whatever blood he had, it wasn’t Dene or Inuit. The nose was too narrow, the face too thin. Too thin for his own cheekbones, she realized. The man looked gaunt. Hungry.

“Hello?” she asked softly, then: “Wotziye?”

The creased eyelids opened.

The eyes behind them were bright and black, bone-sharp. They darted right and left like a trapped hunting bird’s, taking in ceiling, walls, triple-paned window with the air of something captive. Cora jerked back and they tracked her movement. The gaze stung like wind-whipped ice on the edge of her cheek.

Cora had once, before she moved to Sunrise, seen a polar bear hunt. It crouched by a seal’s breathing hole silent, waiting, waiting for a seal to draw breath, and then reached in and crushed its skull.

Those black winter eyes rested upon her, and she didn’t breathe.

“Hey there,” Jane said beside her, terribly far away. “How you feeling?”

That terrible watching, January-cold and fine like sand, moved.

Nothing happened. Jane Hooker, solid and dependable, didn’t lean back or recoil. “Thought we’d lost you there,” she said, all good cheer and good sense.

Cora exhaled, and for a brief second, her breath steamed in the air.

She felt a hand on her elbow and jumped; Georgie Fiddler, standing an arm’s-length back. “You all right there?”

No. “Yeah,” she said. Her jaw was numb, and it ached. Those wicked eyes looked at Jane Hooker and they were just brown: too-bright and confused, flicking back and forth between faces and the pitted white ceiling. The pupils were overlarge, crowding the skin-brown iris, dark and deep but normal.

It wasn’t the pupil, Cora thought distinctly, and rubbed her palm against her cheek. The man’s mouth shaped a question, and it was not at all the same.

Georgie quirked an eyebrow. “Go on, Cor. Johnny probably needs you back.”

“Thanks,” she said. There was gooseflesh on her hands. She stuffed them in her coat pockets and went.

She was ten steps into the crunching, wailing snow, her second scarf only half-wrapped around her ears, when she heard the bird cry.

There was a raven perched on the Treeline Motel’s roof, still as an animal killed five miles from home and frozen rictus. The storm beat against it, passed around it, let it through. It cocked its head — a beak-shadow, a change in the darkness — and laughed at her once more, biting.

Oh hell, she thought.

And then it blurred against the snowfall, its wings black against white against bottomless black, and she ran.

“I saw a raven on the Treeline’s roof last night,” Cora said, no preamble, when she came into the diner the next morning.

Johnny Red was in the kitchen, fumbling for something that clattered and bumped and made him swear. “It’s minus thirty,” he said when he surfaced.

“Yeah,” Cora said.

She felt his eyes on her as she hung up her coat and tied on her soft, worn-down apron. It was just the two of them here this time of day, but he still kept his voice low. “Think it’s something?”

She pulled the knot tight, tugged at each of the loops to make sure they wouldn’t give. The sun was brilliant outside, halfway through the sky and already falling: subarctic noontime. It turned the snow to pure light and slanted anti-shadow across the pale blue tabletops. “I don’t know medicine, Johnny.”

“Sometimes you don’t have to,” he replied, ducking back onto his haunches behind the counter and clattering some more. She had all the table settings in place and he’d started the soup before she said, “Yeah. I think it’s something.”

His mouth pulled down, grimmer. He didn’t reply.

Georgie Fiddler came in right at the lunchtime open, pink with cold and puffy-eyed. He nodded to Cora and bellied up to the old-fashioned lunch counter. “Thanks for the soup last night,” he said, and set the bag of empty thermoses on the counter.

Johnny waved it off, ladle in hand. “How’s damages?”

“Bent front axle,” he said, and tugged off his gloves. “Be a day or two before I can run up to Hay River for the new axle brackets. They haven’t cleared the highways yet.”

Cora looked out the restaurant’s triple-paned windows at the glittering snow: knee-high if it was an inch. Terrible driving weather. “How’s our trucker?”

“Awake,” he said; the glance he cast her was only a little concerned. “Jane said he’s just staring.” He didn’t need to say more; there was only one kind of stare in a town like this. Cora’d first seen it young, in an uncle home after a turn in Grande Cache who’d stayed only a week before drifting off one night to freeze. After that it showed up on mothers, friends, the boys who sniffed gasoline in tool sheds on long winter nights; it blurred.

“You reach his people yet?” Johnny Red asked.

“Jane don’t think he’s got any people. The only number in his wallet was the trucking company.”

“That’s a shame,” Johnny Red said evenly, in a way someone else might have thought idle.

Cora lifted an eyebrow. He put his long chef’s knife against the curve of a withered onion and said nothing.

Georgie Fiddler did. “Everything all right there, John?”

Johnny’s knife paused. “Cora saw a raven on the motel roof last night.”

“Johnny—” she said, sharp enough to surprise herself. His jaw twitched a little below the curve of his ear; the look he cast her said sorry, and no. She let out a breath and noticed her hand at her own jaw, rubbing it like a feeding baby’s back. She put it in her apron pocket. She needed a smoke.

“It’s thirty below,” Georgie said.

Johnny Red nodded and snipped the shoot end off his onion.

Georgie Fiddler frowned. “So what’s that mean?” He was one of the few fully white men in Sunrise, come up from north Saskatchewan twelve and a half years back. Nobody begrudged him for it — he paid better wages and kept better hours than Mike Blondin, after all — but it meant sometimes he needed a thing explained that should never need explaining.

“The problem with Raven,” Johnny Red said delicately, “is that you’re never sure what you’re going to get.”

“Oh,” Georgie Fiddler said, in a way that meant he hadn’t grasped the half of it. Cora couldn’t blame him. She’d barely grasped the half of it.

“Anyways,” Johnny said, brushing onion from his cutting board, “It’ll go better when he’s gone.”

The silence puddled a little, chilly, on the tiled black and white floor.

“Well,” Georgie said, stiff, “it’ll be a good while for that. The other driver on the route went missing last week, just up and vanished from the depot, and they can’t send another until next week. If they clear the highway tomorrow. So try to keep it under your hat, man.”

Johnny’s expression didn’t change. “So that truck’s gonna sit in your garage for a week?” he said as if he’d not heard Georgie at all.

Cora shot Georgie a look. He took the hint. “Looks like,” he said, and ran a hand through his thin hair. “Northbest’ll be pretty pissed. It’s a perishable load, and boy is it gonna perish.”

“What’s so perishable?” she asked.

Georgie Fiddler smiled dryly. “Fruit. Veg. Stuff I’ve never even seen before. Don’t know how good it’ll be after another night in this weather.”

Johnny put his knife down. “So you’ve got the phone number for this Northbest man.”

Georgie set a torn slip of paper down on the Formica counter. “That’s what I came to bring you,” he said, still a little cool. “And to ask if you could run lunch for two down to Jane’s.”

“For him,” Johnny said.

“And Daisy.”

“I’ll go,” Cora said.

“Cor—” Johnny started.

“Not even Raven lives on thin air just yet.” Her voice stayed level. The colour rose behind his windburned brown cheeks, but he tipped her a nod.

“I can do sandwiches,” he said, and disappeared into his kitchen.

“You sure you’re all right?” Georgie Fiddler asked, and she wasn’t sure if he meant Johnny Red or last night or Raven on the Treeline’s roof, laughing bitter dark.

Cora untied her apron and let out a long breath. “If I don’t come back,” she said, “break all the eggs.”

Inside the kitchen, Johnny Red snorted.

Daisy Blondin was in with the trucker when Cora tapped on the door. “Lunch,” Cora said, stomping snow off her boots.

The trucker was propped up in Jane Hooker’s clean white bed, tee-shirt thin and rumpled, bruise-dark shadows underneath his eyes. Light brown stubble was coming in on his cheek; someone would have to find a razor. Too far away to see his eyes, but Georgie was right: staring.

“Lunch!” Daisy said, and put aside a creased copy of Canadian Technician. Her feet were on the bed; two brown toes peeked out of a hole in her red-and-white striped socks. “No chance you could take over? Jane’s sleeping and my brother’s gonna kill me.”

Cora unbuttoned her coat, but didn’t take it off. Tough words in the presence of Johnny Red or not, she wasn’t staying a minute farther than she had to. “I can’t. It’s lunch rush.”

Daisy sighed. “All right. Let me go to the can.” She wandered around the foot of the bed to the bathroom, and there was silence for a moment after the bathroom door slammed. Cora heard the click of the toilet lid hitting the tank, and another sound: the steady thud of an axe against a whitebark pine. Her forehead wrinkled. It was cold for cutting trees this afternoon, and as far as she knew, the gas for the furnaces wasn’t anywhere near that precarious yet.

The heater pinged and muttered. It was cold in here, too. Her hip ached. The man on the bed pushed himself up to sitting, and she forced herself to stay still. “Lunch?” she asked, and it fell into the silence like a stone.

He was a big man; she hadn’t noticed that last night. Tall and rangy enough that his feet stuck out over the edge of the double bed, his forearms pale but ropy and strong. It made the hollows under his cheekbones stand out even sharper. His shoulders hunched around his chin as if he wished himself disappeared. His nod was a ghost.

“So what do I call you?” she asked, trying to keep her voice normal.

“Aidan,” he said. He sounded hoarse, quiet; like someone half out of the habit of talking.

“I’m Cora.” She forced herself to hand him the waxed-paper package. He stared at it for a second, cupped in his two hands, before picking it open with a dirty fingernail.

“You were here last night,” he said suddenly, and Cora realized he was watching her from behind that fall of mussed-up hair. She rubbed her jaw, little circles like Johnny Red cleaning his counter.

“I was,” she said careful.

He rolled bread into a tiny ball between thumb and forefinger. He wasn’t eating.

The sound of wood chopping was closer now, in the room, and heater or not, her breath steamed. She stepped backwards once, twice.

“You feeling better, then?” she asked to cover it, and he looked up at her full for the first time. He talked like a shut-in, but he stared like a resting lynx.

“Yeah,” he said, soft and creaking, and the chill sound of trees falling, wood splintering in rhythm—heartbeat rhythm—almost drowned it out.

Her ears were ringing. Her tongue didn’t want to move, and his eyes were so big, nighttime-big, dark as raven’s-feather and sharp as a polar bear’s, waiting. Waiting. “Well, we’ll take good care of you,” she blurted.

He stopped. Everything stopped.

The dizzying cold shattered.

“I… pardon?” he choked out. His face was dirty pale, hands shaking. The sandwich was squashed flat between his fingers.

What did I say?

Cora sucked in a breath. Her hip was burning with cold, wedged hard against the motel’s plaster wall. She was shivering. She couldn’t get warm. “They ain’t coming to get you for a week. I just didn’t want you to worry, that we wouldn’t take good care of you—”

She was babbling. She was panicking.

She hadn’t thought he could look any sicker.

“A week?” he asked, and there were funerals in his brown, big, human eyes.

The toilet flushed, and Daisy banged out of the washroom, Jane’s bathroom towel trailing from her hand. “Thanks, Cor. Tell Mikey I’m here if you see him?”

“Yeah,” she said unsteady, and Daisy Blondin, only six years younger than her but about twenty more invincible, flicked up an eyebrow and looked each to each.

“Everything all right?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Cora said, automatic, regretting it a split-second after. “I gotta run.” She had three smokes left in the pack. She’d counted them last night.

The skies were clear on the walk from the Treeline Motel to the Sunrise Restaurant. She scanned the skies and rooflines as she walked, and smoked them all.

There were things in the back of the produce truck that Cora had never seen: mangoes, persimmons, fine nubbly oranges, not to mention the vegetables she couldn’t name. She and Johnny loaded a good third of the Northbest crates onto service station wagons after the lunch crowd trickled away, and then helped Magda Tutcho wrestle the rest into the General Store. It wouldn’t last long — a week and a half at most, Magda said — but there was always Gertie’s canning apparatus, and besides, it’d be a hell of a week.

Cora hand-lettered a sign for the Sunrise Restaurant’s door—Tropical Party 7pm Tonite: $15 Full Meal—and tacked it firmly down by all four corners. Sunrise was a small town. Word would get around.

They sorted the oddest fruits on the countertop, next to the spine-cracked chef school cookbook left behind, mouldering, by the last owner of the Sunrise Restaurant. “What’s this one?” she asked, balancing a red, round weight in one hand.

“Pomegranate,” Johnny Red said. He’d worked as a cook down in Calgary for three years before he took over the Sunrise Restaurant. By the second year up north he’d mostly stopped complaining about how everything came in tins, but when he took the pomegranate from her hand, the look on his face was like the first day of spring. “All the rage out in BC. White ladies in workout pants beat down your door for them.”

He waggled his eyebrows, and she laughed. It came out bad; forced. There was something cold stuck inside her. The sound of a chopped-down tree, creaking, falling.

“Cor?” he asked, and his eyebrows drew down. She shook her head. “It’s the trucker, isn’t it?”

“Johnny—” she started.

“You didn’t have to go out there.”

“Pomegranate,” she said, firm, and crossed her arms.

He split it with his chef’s knife, and a dribble of red juice wandered across the counter. The seeds were packed in tight, nestled together for warmth or love or safekeeping. They didn’t part easy: Johnny had to dig in with two fingers and pry a cluster out. They were translucent when alone, and bruised easily. She held them to the light before popping them in her mouth.

“Sour,” she said when she could speak again. Her mouth felt washed-out, astringent. They burned warm all the way down.

“That,” Johnny Red said, “is the fruit that trapped a white girl down in Hell at the beginning of the world.”

She ran her tongue over her lips. “Now you tell me.”

He smiled, lopsided. “White people medicine only works on white people, dontcha know.”

“I’m half that,” she replied, mild.

Johnny Red sized her up for a moment, a stare that echoed like Aidan the trucker man’s but much, much warmer. “Well,” he said. “That means half of you is going to be bound three whole months to me and this town. So better decide if it’s the top half or the bottom.”

This time she really did laugh. “Oh, you’d like that.”

He waggled his eyebrows again — Groucho Marx had never had a Dene man’s sharp eyebrows, but it worked out — and leaned over the counter at her. She leaned back a little, shook her head smiling. “Nuh-uh.”

He sighed, overtheatrical, and dusted his palms on his jeans. They left smears and smudges of red. “What’s a guy have to do?”

“Give me a raise,” Cora replied, but her lungs had stopped aching. Thank you, Johnny Red. She rolled a green-red oval at him across the counter. “Next?”

People started showing up come half past seven: fashionably late for a party in Sunrise. Johnny Red took their cash at the counter and Cora steered them to their tables, each stacked with the three-course menu they’d done in two shades of blocky handwriting. It was fresh veg and mangoes, orange juice not from a can; wedges of pineapple cut and perched on scratched plastic glasses. There wasn’t no pomegranate on it; either Johnny Red hadn’t found a use for it in time or he just didn’t plan on sending the whole town to white-man Hell.

Nate Okpik brought his fiddle, and Daisy Blondin her drum, and by eight the whole place was hopping, Johnny slinging plates as fast as he could. Cora dodged the odd dancer, coffeepot and empty soup bowls balanced, rock-certain she wasn’t getting no smoke break tonight.

People streamed in and out, took seats, moved chairs, left them for other tables; nobody sat alone. Nobody was quiet. She noticed, then, the little puddle of silence at the corner table; the little draft of cold air.

Aidan the bird-eyed trucker was hunched alone over a menu.

He was pale, even for a sick man — a sick half-white man with a crack on the head the size of a trailer. He looked up, hunting-hawk quick, and saw her. Two spots of red bloomed in his face: frozen, helpless embarrassment. She reached out to steady herself and caught the handle of the coffeepot, waitress’s self-defence. There was no pretending she hadn’t seen him. No turning away.

She approached the table, holding the pot out like a shield. “Coffee?”

“Sure,” he mumbled, tilting his head away.

She poured. The stream of coffee arced into the cup: it only trembled a little, only spilled a drop. “Sugar’s on the table,” she said, unnecessary. “You take milk?”

He shook his head. He still wouldn’t look at her. It made the back of her neck prickle in a way that Mike Blondin’s too-big smiles never had. “No milk,” he said, and fingered the edge of the menu. “This is from my truck?”

Nate Okpik, next table over, turned and grinned broadly over the booth’s back. “That’s right. You’re drinking free tonight.”

Aidan’s shoulders folded in like a deflated accordion. “Let him be,” Cora snapped. Leave him alone. He’s dangerous.

“Fine, fine,” Nate said, big and rumbling and good-natured, and turned back to his wife and boys.

Aidan had retreated even farther into himself, fingers plaited together as if groping for something to hold on to and finding only each other. “Sorry ’bout that,” she said, and he flashed a wan, anxious smile. He looked like hell. Who was supposed to be watching him — Magda? Gertie? The man shouldn’t have been out of bed.

It’ll be better when he’s gone, Johnny Red’s voice echoed, and she shook her head. Come off it. Do your job.

She swallowed, tried to force up a smile. “Get you the special?”

He nodded, lifting his gaze from her knees to her belly, the apron tied snug about it. A whisper of chill wind wandered across her hip.

“Cor?” Johnny Red’s voice rose sharp and tense across the floor. She looked up and he was right behind the lunch counter, ladle clenched in his hand like a weapon. “Need you over here, please.”

Cora shivered with relief and steered back across the restaurant. The muscles of Johnny’s face eased like she’d just walked back off a highway median. Behind him, over at table thirteen, Georgie Fiddler watched them and frowned.

Grandma Okpik had said Johnny had a bit of the medicine once, back when he’d rolled into town on the Tuesday Greyhound with nothing but a few changes of clothes and a set of knives that’d make your hair stand up until you found out they were for the kitchen. It wasn’t the kind of thing she’d got around to asking about, and this was, unfortunately, not the time for a hearty and extended chat about what it was Johnny Red saw.

“What d’you want to do?” she asked.

Johnny looked over her shoulder; watching him. “I don’t know yet,” he said, and went to whisper in Mike Blondin’s ear.

Aidan No-Last-Name picked at his food; the violent green vegetable soup Johnny Red had fixed for starter was barely below the rim when she came back to refill the coffee. His spoon leaned unused on his napkin. “He your boyfriend?” Aidan asked through a fall of brown hair.

“No,” Cora said, though Johnny Red had managed to kiss her in the storeroom once or twice, and she’d not turned away. “He just likes having people to boss around. Everything all right here?”

His hands stilled. He looked up at her. Opened his mouth and shut it again. He knows, she realized, sharply. Everything was not at all right.

He’s scared.

“Something I can do?” she asked carefully.

His hands were still on the table. He was staring, and she realized, not at her; past her, out the big windows of the Sunrise Restaurant, into the snow. She turned, and on the featureless white there was a splotch of black; low to the ground, ruffled, feathered.

The raven hopped one step, two, in the soft-packed January snow. It twisted its head near backwards, like birds do, and cawed a wicked laugh at the both of them.

Something dropped from its sharp little beak and landed in the snow: long, and thin, and red.

Aidan scrambled up against the back of the booth and howled, all the voice of wolves and snuffling bears and winter, eyes big and black and wide, and the cold spiralled out of him. The cold rushed in.

The raven fluttered into the night laughing, its wings snapping like falling trees. The coffeepot slid out of Cora’s hand and rang on the black and white tile. Coffee splashed her trousers, her shoes. She flinched back from the window, the raven, the boiling hot liquid on the floor. The fiddle had stopped, and the drum. Every head in Sunrise turned to stare out into the dark.

He took one step towards her. Two.

And ran.

Aidan jostled past her, between tables and chairs, out the oak front doors. “Hey!” she called, slipping in coffee, limping after him. The cold air hit like a knife to the throat. “Wait!” she managed, before she doubled over coughing.

He didn’t wait. Coatless, hatless, Aidan ran across the path and to the highway, head down and legs working like all the wickedness in the world was right behind him. His breath misted, a little plume to follow, and then her hip tightened sharp and he was disappearing, farther away. Going, smaller and smaller. Gone.

“Shit!” she said, and the footsteps behind her caught up: Johnny Red and Georgie Fiddler, one after the other, Johnny still with his fat blue oven mitts on.

“Cora,” he said, and threw an arm full around her to keep her from falling, or maybe just running any further. “What the hell?”

“He got away. The raven,” she said, and burst out again coughing. “It was out here. It dropped something—”

“I felt it,” he said. Felt, not saw.

“He’s scared,” she said. “It scared him.”

“We need coats,” Georgie called, and they picked their way back over the broken snow. Their feet had churned up the bird-tracks.

“It wasn’t too far.” Her teeth were chattering. She curled out of Johnny’s bracing arm and picked her way back to the parking lot: back under the edges of the sodium lights. Nothing. Nothing—

And then the wind rose and ruffled the snow, stirred it up and out and away, and Cora looked down at the smooth brown finger, slowly turning blue in the January snow.

The search party came back cold and empty-handed, and Johnny Red had nothing left over for soup.

“We found Gertie,” Jane Hooker said, staring at the specials board and the remains of Tropical Party Night. Her right mitten dangled from a string on her coat sleeve. “She’s…”

Mike Blondin swallowed. “We’re gonna need to call her nephew.”

Bile nudged into Cora’s throat. She forced it back. “Oh,” Daisy said, and it sounded like all the air had left her lungs forever. Johnny held his coffee filter between thumb and finger for one long moment, turned it around, and crumpled it in his fist.

“I went by Jane’s. We got an APB ’bout an hour ago,” Georgie Fiddler said, his face sallow and sick. Smudged fax paper fluttered from his left hand, limp as a dead child. “From the Mounties over in High Level.”

Cora took the paper. She read it briefly, like a dry goods manifest or a power bill. “Suspicion of murder and—” her voice failed. Johnny Red took the page from her. “Desecration of a corpse?” he finished, both eyebrows up high.

Jane’s cheeks were red: bright and hot and burning. The tears in her eyes were probably scalding. “Her fingers were missing,” she said, out from somewhere far away. “And her stomach—”

“Hey,” Georgie said, and held up one hand. Big Mike Blondin looked like he planned to be sick.

“Wendigo,” Johnny Red said quiet, and it cut every voice in the restaurant dead.

Cora felt for her pack, dipped into it with chilly fingers: empty. “Bum a smoke?” she asked Mike Blondin quietly, and he didn’t even try to make her give him a smile for it. She rolled it between her fingers like a raven’s trophy, held onto it like there was nothing else to hold.

“What do you mean?” Georgie Fiddler said. He was sweating. “Wendigo’s a monster. They’re made up.”

She shook her head. She couldn’t explain wendigo to Georgie Fiddler, not now. Jane stepped in smoothly, taking his arm. “Wendigo aren’t made up,” she said softly. “My grandpa knew one.”

“What happened?” Georgie asked.

Jane hesitated. “They found him at the river and shot him down.”

“We can’t — that’s murder. He’s a person.”

“Not anymore,” Fred Tutcho said softly.

Poor Georgie Fiddler looked around the circle for backup; found none. “Maybe he won’t come back,” he said weakly.

Johnny Red shook his head. “He’ll come back.” There was no food or shelter for two hundred miles in any direction, and he had no jacket, and he was unarmed. Cora didn’t know a whole lot about wendigo, but there were ways in which they were just like people: they wanted above everything to live through the night.

“So what do we do?” Georgie asked.

“We get the shotguns,” Jane said, and shoved the restaurant door open, letting in the night.

“He’s still a person,” Georgie muttered, and the cigarette between Cora’s fingers bent and tore.

There were seven shotguns in the town of Sunrise. Six of them worked. The six shotguns and their owners gathered close in the Sunrise Restaurant with the other eighty-three townsfolk crammed in around them. They locked the doors and turned the outside lights on full. Whatever came, if it threw a shadow, they’d see it coming.

Jane and Georgie and Nate and Daisy and Fred Tutcho and Johnny Red stood behind the counter, lining up ammunition. It was most of it deershot: there weren’t no licences to carry for much else in this small a town. “They’re hard to kill,” Johnny Red said softly; loud enough for Cora to hear where she was pouring hot cocoa into salvaged and washed-up mugs. “You got to shoot and shoot again. Don’t stop, even if he’s got his hands up. Don’t stop ’til he stops moving.”

Cora popped one more marshmallow into the cocoa mug and drifted back to the counter, to the always-filling coffeepot. “Have a minute, Johnny?”

He looked down at her with a frown she hadn’t seen before; tense, old. Tired. “What’s up?”

She glanced around at her people, her family: the Okpiks and Tutchos and Blondins and Hookers and Fiddlers and Johnny Red Antoine from down south in the plains. “Georgie’s right,” she said. “He’s still a person.”

“You didn’t see what he did to Gertie,” Nate said, and she held up a hand, but gently.

“I looked into his eyes,” she said, swallowing back the thought of fingers snapped at the bottommost joint, of intestines looped and gnawed, teeth marks like wolves’. “The real ones. And… that’s still a person. He’s scared.” She hesitated, gathered her breath. “This isn’t old times, where you could just hunt someone down by the river. The Mounties’ll come. They’ll have an inquest. And you know what that means.”

It’d change Sunrise. Knowing everyone by name, knowing their children. Leaving your door unlocked at night. The way a man like Mikey Blondin was bad, but roll-your-eyes bad, and how people didn’t get run out of town or live on welfare or huff rubber cement or sneak liquor before noontime.

It’d change everything.

“He knows something’s wrong,” she finished, weakly. “He’s terrified.”

“We could deal with an inquest later,” Fred Tutcho said, but his heart wasn’t all in. “He’s out there, and the kids—”

“You don’t want to do this,” Cora said, soft. “I will not let no wendigo or man or Raven make me someone I’m ashamed to be.”

A moment passed. Fred Tutcho let out a breath. He shook his head.

Johnny Red squinted at her. “So what then?” A real question, not a challenge.

“We heal him up,” she said, faltering now. She didn’t know what then. She’d never expected them to say yes. “We find a way to drive it out, or keep him tucked away until the Mounties get here. He was raised a white man. It’s like as he doesn’t know what’s happened to him.”

Georgie made a little noise of protest. “C’mon, Cor.”

She patted his hand, absently. “There’s knowing and there’s knowing, George.”

Johnny Red’s shoulders were tight-wound. “Cor,” he said. “You don’t do medicine.”

She didn’t, and Sometimes you don’t have to wouldn’t cut no ice with Johnny. Grandma Okpik had been the first and last in Sunrise and she hadn’t taught it; this wasn’t an old community, where people could say This is where my father’s house sat, or Here’s a spot cleared by ancestors. Nobody here passed down traditions. Sunrise had been built, deliberate and slow like a snow dune: people washed up from the highway between north Alberta and the city, smelling the bad coffee, the music, something. The right ones stayed.

“We’ll put the word out. Ask for help,” she said. “We’ve gotta try.”

Johnny Red looked at her for a long moment, then nodded once, slow.

“All right,” Mike Blondin said. “We’ll try not to shoot.”

“Thank you,” Cora said, and went back to washing dishes.

Johnny Red came into the kitchen a few minutes later. He bellied up to the sink beside her and dipped his arms in to the sleeve line. “You thinking something?”

“Yeah,” she said. “A bit.”

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to.

“You trust me?” she said anyways.

He rinsed a plate. Set it in the rack. “Yeah.”

She nodded. “Okay.” Behind them was the hum of worried voices; the clink of cutlery both in the sink and outside. Her elbow brushed his as they passed plates and bowls from the battered aluminum sink to the draining board. Water splashed and rustled, and outside, the wind.

Behind it all a sound, faint and creaking, like the chopping of a whitebark pine.

Cora slid her hands out of the water, dusted them gently on the front of her apron. “Going for a smoke,” she said to Johnny Red, and walked slow and straight down the little hall past the kitchen that led to the storeroom door.

“She didn’t have any left. Wait—” she heard behind her, but she didn’t turn around.

When she passed the kitchen counter, she picked up a drying wedge of pomegranate and tucked it into her pocket.

She felt it right away in her kneecaps, her thighs: cramp and twist. The burn of cold so hard it wrapped your body like heat.

Storm coming.

She closed the storeroom door behind her cautiously, sharp for any unfamiliar sound. The wind scuttled ’round the corners, wearing the heart out of the buildings inch by creeping inch. She stumbled into her milk crates, swore, and righted the top one before it fell. Plastic scraped plastic, terrifically loud. She let it go with shaking hands.

“Aidan,” she said soft. Shifted her weight to her good leg, trying not to feel the burn. “C’mon, I know you’re back here.”

Something rustled behind the old stacked-up chairs. Silence.

“I can hear your heart,” she whispered.

The blow blacked out her vision for two long, falling seconds, and then he was on top of her.

Aidan was sobbing. He wept like an animal, his hips pinning hers, his hands groping for her flailing wrists to hold them down. She tried to push with her leg, but her leg wouldn’t work; the hurt turned to paralysis, muscles shutting down, giving up, playing dead. The back of her head felt bitter, bitter cold, and then it was nothing but pain; he must have hit her with something. He slammed her left wrist to the floor, and she gasped. It had only been his bare hands after all.

Too strong.

Oh, hell.

She screamed, and it was tiny; his chest was on hers too, pushing the air out, sinking the chill of every January night she’d ever known down through her ribcage, her bones. She couldn’t scream. She couldn’t get enough air.

“Why did you say that?” he said, and it took a second before she could make out the words through his shuddering, terrified tears. “Why’d you say it?”

“Say what?” she gasped, and his teeth glinted in the thin light. Man’s teeth, not a predator’s: dull and blunt and slow. It wouldn’t be quick or clean, this. It would hurt like five thousand years of Hell.

“Why’d you say you’d take care of me!” he burst, and his hands were moving wildfire, moving without will; they spread her own hand out, palm up, on the floor. The specks cleared from her vision, and his eyes were black, all pupil, black as a raven’s wing. “Nobody can take care of this—”

His voice failed. The hands grew steadier, firmer, and she hadn’t realized that they were shaking until they weren’t; that the look on his face had been the same that Jane Hooker’d worn when she talked about Gertie cut down. Broken in two, like a little child.

And now it was fading into something monstrous. Something not a person anymore.

“Aidan, stay—” she managed, and the smell of wind, the winter-mask that used to be a person’s face faltered.

“What?” he whispered, pupils shrinking abrupt and small.

Oh please. A plan. A bit of a plan.

Cora rolled herself hard right and jammed a knee up against his thigh. Those brown man’s eyes went wide — wide and betrayed — and his grip broke: just a man’s again, weak and changeable, not a monster’s anymore. Cora fumbled in her pocket, grabbed, slid out her weapon before the hand came down and smashed her skull against the concrete once, twice, three times.

She held on like it was the only thing left in the world.

There was a raven in the roof, shuffling its feathers, watching the wendigo in Aidan’s flesh pry open that hand, lean down close, bare his teeth. Its eyes were bright and staring. It was curiously silent.

The monster growled through Aidan’s throat. It flung itself down and bit.

Pain spiked through her fingers: second, middle, ring. They unclenched, unwilling, and then willing, and then she jammed a full wedge of pomegranate into his open mouth.

The seeds crunched between his teeth like bones, like something living. He choked.

She twitched out from under him, wheezing; she couldn’t roll anymore, couldn’t move right. Her leg was a dead weight, and her head wouldn’t lift. There was winter in her lungs, and she couldn’t cough it out.

“Once upon a time when the world was young,” she forced out, rattle-quick and low, because white-people medicine needed invocations, needed words, “a white girl ate six pomegranate seeds and was trapped down six months in Hell.”

His eyes went big. He knew this story, knew it to the bone. He spat, reflexive, and she let slip a grin through the tears. Too late.

“Now you’re bound to us,” she said. Her vision was blurring. She couldn’t see half of him, couldn’t see the dark that was from the dark that wasn’t. “See all those seeds? Each one’s a month. That’s how long you’re bound to me and this town.”

His mouth was stained red. Some of it was thin and some thick, drying. Some of it was hers: her hand stung, burned on three flat points on the ridge of each long finger. It’d all stain.

“Stay with me,” she said, and cradled her bleeding hand; tried to say it like Grandma Okpik, like medicine, like somebody who loved you. “Stay people.”

He opened his mouth, and the moan that came out was terrible, terrible, but not animal. Only the sound of a human being, pushed horrible miles too far.

“Good boy,” she whispered, and leaned back against the hard, freezing floor. There were footsteps somewhere outside, footsteps in the hallway she could hear now that the sound of trees falling, wood breaking, living things dying was gone. The raven’s eyes regarded her, black on black on black, and then one blink to the next, they were gone.

They broke down the door.

Shadows flicked across her vision: friends and neighbours, friends with guns. “Down!” Jane Hooker was shouting. “Stay down!”

“I’m done now,” Aidan sobbed, rocking, hands clasped over his ears, mouth torn and bleeding fruit and flesh and saliva. “I’m all done. I want to go home—”

“Don’t shoot,” Cora whispered.

And then Johnny was beside her, gathering her up and calling for Jane, for Georgie, for the doctor from Hay River. She blinked slow and long and his face was above hers, lined with stark terror. “He won’t be no trouble,” she managed, and Johnny Red looked like he was about to be sick.

“That was your plan?” he said.

“He needs a bowl of soup,” she told him, cradled lopsided in his arms, and the world went black as wings departing.

She came to in room five of the Treeline Motel, the last set of buildings standing before the end of roots and leaves and life and hope. Sunlight speckled across the ceiling, ice-light, winter-light, and the trees outside swayed quiet, and she was still alive.

She let out a sigh, long and shuddering.

Johnny Red was at her bedside in an instant. “You okay?” he said. His voice was snow-brush soft. He looked like he hadn’t slept for at least a day or three.

She licked her lips. Dry. “Who’s got the restaurant?” she croaked, and he went for a glass of water. He wet her lips, her bruised throat.

“Nobody,” he said, and there was a rawness in it now. “Talk to me.”

She stretched, cautiously; nothing broken. Jane Hooker’s careful hands would have made sure of it. Her eyes wouldn’t quite focus, but that was all right. There were three tidy, thick bandages wrapped about the fingers of her right hand. “I’ve had worse,” she said.

Johnny Red flinched. “Don’t tell me that.”

His hand slipped down to her good one. Held on. She didn’t shake it off.

“He’s outside.” Johnny’s mouth twisted with something: fear, anger, distaste. The edges of a terrible hatred. “Has been all day, and all yesterday too. Crying like a dog.”

“How much does he remember?” she asked after a second.

Johnny Red opened his mouth, shut it with a snap. “All of it.”

“Did Jane call the Mounties?”

Johnny’s expression went even flatter. “Not yet.”

Cora leaned back against the soft pillows; heard a half-wendigo voice sobbing, burning, asking Why did you say that to me? Why’d you say you’d take care—

“It’s gone now,” she said. Then hesitated, turned her head to him half an inch. “It is, right?”

Johnny Red’s lips pressed together. “Hard to tell. This could just be—” he paused with distaste “—a stronger claim. How long do we have?”

There were a lot of seeds in that pomegranate, nestled together like lovers, like houses perched on the edge of the highway to Hay River. It was past too late to find out how many he’d spit, how many he’d swallowed down. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess we’ll find out.”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t answer for long enough that she turned her head another agonizing space, and saw him sitting in a chair beside her, elbows on his knees, head buried in his hands.

“The raven left,” he said muffled. “Maybe that means something.”

It means, she thought, we’re on our own now.

“How much medicine d’you have?” she asked.

He looked up. There were tears in his eyes: sheer frustration, pain. Relief. “Not enough,” he said. “Not half enough to make this safe.”

“We’ll be fine,” she said, faintly.

Johnny Red stood up, all six feet of him, and leaned over her slowly, bracing himself with a hand on the yielding mattress. The kiss he left on her mouth wasn’t hard — she was bandaged up too much for hard right now — but it didn’t brook no questions.

“You,” he said, “are bound to me three months, and next time you talk to me about the plan.”

She didn’t talk back to that.

Johnny Red went to the door, swung the hinges wide. She felt the cold air blow in, cold but not terrible bitter, and heard voices exchanged low, terse, cautious. One set of footsteps faded, and another stepped inside. Shut the door. Moved, soft and tremulous, along the faded carpet runner to the bedside.

The light was so much better now. It had to be past three. Spring coming, eventually.

“Hey,” Aidan said, standing two feet away, hands clasped in front of him like they were the only thing in the world to hold; eyes big and brown and human and terrified and whole.

“Hey,” she said. “You stayed.”