“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.”