Frostbite by David Wellington Read Free Book Online Page A

said, and hefted his ax. “You don’t understand. I’m trying to protect you. You and other—protect other people from—”
    He couldn’t seem to finish his sentence. He reached up and wiped the cuff of his shirt sleeve across his mouth. Then he looked to the side. “Blast,” he finally said.
    A surprisingly mild curse to come out of the mouth of an ax murderer. But he made it sound like the most profane thing he could think of.
    Chey looked over as well, following his gaze, desperate to know what could be so important it would distract him in the middle of killing her. She could see the brook she’d heard before, and the gap in the trees where it had worn its path over thousands of years. A bit of actual horizon showed there, a hilltop, and a smear of silver light thatgraced its top. That had to be the moon, she decided. Moonrise had come.
    The ax fell out of Powell’s hand and thudded at her feet. No—that wasn’t right. She watched it fall. She watched it fall
through
him, as if he’d suddenly turned to mist and lacked the solidity necessary to hold the ax. It had fallen through his hand. He was changing further when she looked up at him again. His skin had turned translucent and it glowed as if lit up with moonbeams. His clothes dropped off of him and fluttered to the forest floor. She could see the bones in his fingers, the twin bones in his forearm. She could see through them. He had become as insubstantial as a ghost.
    Then silver light erupted behind her eyes and she didn’t see anything more.

9.
    When a caterpillar turns into a butterfly, it sews itself up into a cocoon just big enough to hold its body. A gossamer coffin—because it knows that in a very real sense it is dying.
    Its body dissolves inside the cocoon. Other than a very few cells, the caterpillar liquefies entirely. Its eyes, its legs, its furry segmented body all disappear and are lost forever. Then it rebuilds itself. From scratch. When the butterfly emerges from the cocoon, later on, it will not resemble the original caterpillar at all. It will not remember anything of its previous life, even to the extent that butterflies are capable of remembering in the first place. It will have new powers and senses that it literally could not have conceived of before, but they will not seem strange, because the butterfly has no past experience from which to draw comparisons.
    It can fly from the moment it hatches. It does not mourn its former life, any more than it mourns the quiet, liquid time in between.
    Something very similar happened, but much more quickly, when the first beam of silver moonlight struck Chey from afar.
    The silver light filled up her senses. It didn’t so much blind her as suffuse her with light, a blossoming, cold light that passed through every cell in her body as if she were made of perfectly transparent glass. She could see it with her skin, with her heart and her bones as well as she could see it with her eyes—better, even. Beams of that light pinned herto the ground. She struggled, at first, but her struggles changed into a writhing transformation, as her body changed its shape. As her being changed.
    It was not what she’d expected.
    Hair did not burst out of her skin, nor did her jawbone lengthen and sprout enormous teeth. Her ears did not slide up to the top of her head and stick out in points. There was no halfway state, no hybrid creature, not even for a moment. She was a woman, and the silver light swept through her, and then—
    —and then she was a wolf.
    The transformation was painless. In fact, it felt good. Really good. It felt like an incredibly intense orgasm that lasted only for a split second, but afterward left her trembling with ecstasy. With a sense that this was right. Natural.
    It felt like taking off a suit of uncomfortable clothes at the end of a very long and tiring day. It felt like standing under a waterfall and letting the pounding water drive all the filth and sweat off her body. It felt