The morning following the night in the Jacuzzi where Eos was asking me all the questions about being Druze, we went with the microphone and the video camera to a small park called Pan Pacific Park, which is very near to the Park La Brea apartments. Here they have sports fields, a running loop, and all kind of nice spots to picnic or fly a kite, as some few children were doing that day. Eos had the idea to ask many questions to each person we found agreeable to be on camera. This way, she said she’d be able to use different answers in all the future episodes and we wouldn’t have to film as many people. The main list of questions we’d come up with was the following:

1) What is the best-selling record album of all-time?

2) What percentage of the average human’s weight is blood?

3) How many miles is the moon from Earth?

4) Who invented the computer mouse?

5) Who was the first Emperor of China, ruling between 221 BCE and 210 BCE?

6) What is the main difference between an opera and a musical?

7) How many countries are on the continent of Europe?

8) How many US Presidents have been assassinated?

9) Who was Michael Faraday?

10) The original Latin word sinister means what?

Chey woke up stiff and naked—with Powell, also naked, draped across her legs. His—his penis was flopping across his thigh. It wasn’t quite flaccid.

“Guh,” she let out.

Her heart pounded in sheer unadulterated disgust. She thought she might throw up. When he’d put his hand on her shoulder, that was one thing, but this—she could not let herself get close to him. Not like that. “Jesus,” she said, her whole body shivering, and not with the cold. She slid out from under him and dashed behind a tree. When she looked again his green eyes were open and staring at her but he lay still as a dead man on the forest floor. “This is not cool,” she said. “This is definitely not cool.”

He didn’t cover himself up. He didn’t even look down at himself. “Don’t be so agitated,” he told her. “You’ve never seen a man’s thing before?”

“A man’s thing? His thing? What are you, twelve years old?” She turned away and covered her face. When she looked again he hadn’t moved. “Put that thing away, please. Now.”

He waited a moment longer. Then he smiled with a certain degree of self- satisfaction. She didn’t like it at all. Eventually he sat up and moved his legs so he wasn’t so—so entirely naked.

“You knew we would be naked when we came back,” he said, which sounded almost like an apology.

“I didn’t think you would be stretched out all over me!”

He shrugged. “I can’t control what my wolf does.”

A new wave of disgust surged up from her stomach to the roof of her mouth. “Oh. Oh my God. We didn’t. We definitely did not. Please tell me we didn’t—”

“My memories are hazy at best. But no, I don’t think so.”

That was some kind of relief, anyway. She clutched her arms around herself, hiding her breasts, and said, “I can’t do this for the rest of my life. Don’t look at me!”

He put his hands up and covered his eyes. “Dzo will be here soon enough. I’ll try not to look at you until you’re dressed.”

She sat down on a soft carpet of reindeer moss. Her arms broke out in gooseflesh, but at least this time she knew she wasn’t going to die of hypothermia. She watched him for a while, watched him keep his hands pressed tight over his eyes, and started to feel a little guilty. She had been harsh, she decided. Everything he’d said had been true.

The night before we started the Ask Otis questions, Eos announced that she wanted to know all kind of stuff about being Druze. We were seating in this Jacuzzi at the Park La Brea pool where she has a membership. I was her guest for some few dollars only and it was late, like maybe 9:30 at night or so. We were the only two people in the place, except for some small Latino woman who was doing some cleaning up of the pool chairs with yellow rubber dishwashing gloves on her hands.

Anyway, Eos said she’d never met a Druze before. So I told her how basically I wasn’t doing any praying or anything special for it. You just need to be born from a mother and father who are Druze and that’s it: you are basically Druze. My parents are secular, but even so, I told her that religion is always a small part of growing up in a small community, even if you’re not practicing because it’s part of how a family comes to be together and comes to inhabit a place. For a lot of the Druze people of Israel, that place is called Daliyat el-Carmel, located on Mount Carmel, some 25 kilometers southeast of the Mediterranean port city of Haifa.

The power in her legs astounded her. Run, run, run, she could run for hours, far faster than a human, and never grow tired—it didn’t feel like running at all. It felt like the world was made of rubber and she was bouncing along like a ball. Run, run, her body rippling with her panting breath, run. Her claws dug deep into the earth with every bound, absorbing the jarring impact as she touched down, then tensing to send her flying again. She ran with the rhythm of her own pulse, her heartbeat keeping time as the world flashed by around her. She opened her mouth to let the air flow in and out of her lungs, tasting its many smells as it surged back and forth. Unashamed, she let her tongue hang out of the side of her mouth, flapping between two enormous teeth like a flag in the wind.

She bounded into a narrow open space between two stands of trees that leaned away from each other. He waited for her there, his body as still as stone. The saddle of fur between his shoulders was up and she understood the signal—he wanted her quiet. She dug her claws into the lichen- covered forest floor and focused entirely on him. Her level of concentration almost scared her, it was so intense. And yet nothing had ever felt so natural. Before she had been running and the entire universe was speed and motion. Now she was crouching, waiting, and the planet itself seemed to hold its breath for her.

The male watched her carefully. He was making sure she understood what that stillness meant. What it was for.

With her stone- like immobility she proved that she did.

His ears flicked back and forth. His eyes stayed on hers. He was watching to see if she got the next step on her own. She thought she did. Silently, with the smallest motions of the flaps of skin around her nostrils, she breathed in the world around her. It was all there, all the things she’d smelled before, but back then she’d been building a map of smells in her mind, taking in the whole picture. This, she understood, was different.

He tilted his head a fraction of a degree to one side. Asking her a question. What do you smell? Specifically.

Enormous sections of her brain were devoted to just this activity. She ran through the vast catalog of things she could smell, trying to pick out the one he wanted. It took only milliseconds before she had it. It was as if a lover of classical music, having gone to the symphony, had been asked to pick out a single instrument’s voice. It was almost laughably simple, because her brain had already flagged that particular smell, had already mapped and memorized and pinpointed it for her. The male wasn’t teaching her technique or finesse here—only to accept and rely on her most basic instincts. There could be only one smell he was looking for, and she had it: an animal, a mammal, something small and defenseless. Prey.

A whole new set of thoughts, feelings, instincts lit up her mind. All of them revolving around the concept of prey—and the knowledge that she was a predator. She felt reflexively ready, felt an almost unbearable anticipation of pleasure. It was time to learn how to hunt.

She heard Lynette’s voice before she actually saw her. Standing behind Greg in the doorway, she would have had to lean around him to catch a glimpse, like a grinning child popping aside to take credit for faux rabbit ears in a photograph. She didn’t want to take credit for anything right now. She would simply wait.

First she heard Greg’s slightly baffled voice – “Hi, can I help you?” followed by Lynette’s unctuous upper-hand tone, feigning surprise. “Oh, you must be Greg. Hi. My name’s Lynette…”

“Oh, Lynette -- hi!” Amy willed herself to wait for Lynette to identify herself before acknowledging her by name; so many “Greg, sweetie, this is my pottery instructor, Lynette.”

“Oh, hey,” Greg said, smiling, now reoriented to the situation, certain of his place in it. Amy met Lynette’s mischievous green eyes, which were torturing her with bemused calculation, deciding what to do. Please, Amy tried to convey.

“So, based on the pottery Amy brings home, I’m guessing you teach the remedial course,” Greg’s blustery voice telegraphed the unexpected pleasure of teasing two attractive women. Lynette looked at Amy, and it seemed that her glance contained a blend of contempt and pity. “I’m not sure whether that one purple thing Amy made is a deformed measuring cup or a water bowl for a hamster on hallucinogenic drugs.”

Eventually Powell came out of his shed. Chey watched him through a window of the little house, unsure of what to think or what to do. He knew things, things she needed to learn. She couldn’t bear the thought of asking him to teach her, though.

Yet when he headed out into the woods, on foot, her immediate urge was to follow him. She slipped out of the house and headed into the woods herself, trying to look casual. Trying to act as if she’d just decided to take a stroll of her own.

It didn’t work. No matter how far ahead she let him get, he was always aware of her presence behind him. He would stop in the act of climbing over a moss- covered log or lifting a branch away from the path so he could climb underneath it and freeze in place for a moment, then glance back at her before continuing on his way.

When he looked at her his eyes weren’t as hard as she’d remembered them. He didn’t look concerned or apologetic—but he damned well should be, she thought—as much as sympathetic. As if he remembered his first time changing into a wolf, and knew she had to come to accepting it in her own time.

Eventually he got tired of their slow- motion game of freeze tag. He stopped in a small clearing in the woods and just waited. When she didn’t follow him in after a minute he turned and stared at her. She’d thought she was perfectly concealed behind a stand of whip- thin saplings covered in shaggy needles fifty meters away, but he caught her eye as easily as if they were standing together in an otherwise empty elevator, trying not to make eye contact.

She started to come forward, a little sheepish. He nodded and called out to her, “We don’t have enough time to play silly buggers.”

Chey had never liked being scolded and she especially didn’t like it coming from him. “Silly buggers? Who says that anymore except, like, my grandpa?” She shook her head. “Anyway, it’s not like I have anything better to do.”

He shook his head. “You have to start thinking differently,” he told her. “You have to change the way you think about time. Time when the moon is down is precious, because it’s the only time you’re really yourself. Don’t waste it.”

Maybe he knew what she’d come to him for. She sat down on a slightly damp log and looked up at him expectantly, a pupil waiting for her teacher to start lecturing.

“You’ll learn to be very conscious of moonrise and moonset. Most places that’s easy but up here, in the Arctic, nothing is simple. This is the land of the midnight sun, right? And the moon cycle’s crazy too. We’re moving through a phase of longer moons, when the moon rises earlier each night and sets later the next day. In a couple of weeks we’re going to have a very long moon—it’ll stay above the horizon for five days before it sets again.”

“I’ll be a—I’ll be that creature—for five days?” she gasped.

Not from our flesh or from our bone, but still, miraculously, our own. It would turn out to be true, of course. The truth of it would far exceed the chirpy ostentation with which they’d proclaimed it, pep-rally style, on a disposable tablecloth at Amy’s baby shower. Most of all, its truth would be evident after its loss, spreading out like a shadow over a stretch of unremarkable days.

That day, though, it was simply a cheap decoration. The mawkish sentiment had been emblazoned in a whimsical, gender-neutral font on the stork-patterned paper tablecloth, purchased online. Its evocation of human flesh and bone was perhaps questionable for a buffet table, Amy thought, but otherwise, it had captured the spirit of the occasion perfectly. It insisted, with Hallmark bravado, that this celebration was legitimate. Yet hadn’t it also cloaked a subtle whine of defensiveness, of insecurity, just as surely as it cloaked their shabby, water-ringed dining room table? But still, it argued, as if to an invisible challenger. This was forgivable; they couldn’t be expected yet to know anything about this love.

They rode in silence for a while. Chey was lost deep in thoughts that didn’t please her, but that she couldn’t shake.

“He hurt you,” Powell finally said.

Chey looked up at him with bird- fast eyes. “What?” she chirped. She was about to go into hysterics. She was about to cry. She couldn’t talk to him at that moment, couldn’t play the game of being a social creature. Like an injured animal hiding in its den, her personality had curled up to lick its wounds. “What?” she demanded again. “He? He who? Who hurt me?”

“He hurt you pretty badly. ‘He’ meaning, well, my wolf.” His face was set like stone. She supposed he’d had plenty of time to get used to this. He didn’t look away from her face as he spoke, didn’t drop his eyes or even fidget under his blanket. Chey could read that body language from long experience. He had something uncomfortable to say to her and he was going to be a man about it, a man with a capital M. “I try to think of the wolf, of him, as another being, someone different from myself. That we aren’t the same creature at all. That I stop existing when he appears, and vice versa.”

“How’s that working out for you?” Chey asked, too fast, her voice too high and too loud. She could read her own body language, too.

“It helps ...sometimes.”

Chey tried to look away from those eyes, but found she couldn’t. They kept drawing her gaze back. “Okay. So...your wolf...he...”

“He hurt you, I think. He bit you or something. I want to say I’m sorry. I never remember what happened until later, until I’m clean again and warm and I can think straight.”

“I think I’d rather not remember,” Chey said.

“Fair enough.”

She rubbed at her eyes with her palms. “It’s going to happen again, isn’t it?” she asked.

He said nothing. Maybe he thought the question was rhetorical, or maybe he didn’t understand what she was asking.

“I’m going to change again. Be that wolf, again.”

“Yeah,” he answered.

“It’s going to happen over and over. For as long as I live.”

Powell finally did look away from her. It helped not to be pinned by those green eyes. “Whenever the moon rises. Every single time.”

Eos and I finished our dinner and walked back along the twisty path lined with all kind of nice little flowers and shrubs like purple iris and lavender. In between the plants, there were dripping irrigation tubes of brown or black, just like back home in my village, and also at the kibbutzim. Most people don’t know, but it was at a kibbutz in 1960 or so that an Israeli man with the name of Simcha Blass first laid down this dripping pipe. Well, there was always irrigation of this sort, but the tiny holes in the pipes were frequently becoming blocked by earth, sand and all kind of stuff like this. But Simcha Blass found some way to use friction instead of the tiny holes to slow the water down and save it. In a desert, of course each drop is very valuable and the drip method you’ll see everywhere.

Also on the path toward her place I saw something which was looking exactly like the reichardia tingitana flower, which I think is the scientific family name I read once. I don’t know how you are calling it in English but the flower is small and delicate and you can eat it. In fact, where I come from, the Bedouin people use it instead of lettuce for salads.

Simon’s love-affair with the painting began at the art museum.

The small museum was part of a private college. The tuition was quite expensive, so they were able to afford such things as a Rodin partial figure sculpture and another one of those large Georgia O’Keefe flower paintings.

All of their contemporary pieces were kept on the lower level. Simon spent most of his time there, where a huge painting hung in the far corner. It took up most of the wall and needed five track lights to fully illuminate it. The painting was entitled, Green is the Color. This was appropriate because it was made up, mostly, of green paint.

In fact, Green is the Color was caked and sculpted with paint. It seemed to have been applied with wide flat tools instead of brushes. The paint swept in turbulent waves of green along the canvas. Evergreens lapsed into bright green-y yellows, then hurled up from the canvas in nervy fluorescent greens. In places, it seemed to swirl into vortexes of dark green so dark they became deep blacks.

Simon always stood about a foot from the painting. A security guard at the museum once told him that this was the closest distance he would be allowed to view it from. The guard, apparently, had been afraid that Simon was either going to lean forward and lick the mounds of paint, or was going to leap-up and cling to the painting, perhaps even try and press himself into it.

He could feel the security guard’s vision lassoing his head from behind and pulling him away. A foot was close enough though. His entire field of vision swarmed with the color green. And, he could watch the moisture of his breath condense on the mounds of thick paint.

Simon always walked away from these “encounters” telling himself that “viewing” this painting was just another way for him to enjoy his favorite color. No harm in that.

Simon first noticed the woman one afternoon when he decided to visit the rest of the museum. He noticed her because she looked so blatantly suspicious. She was rather small with bright blond hair and was wearing a white flouncy dress. She stood in front of a large dark Victorian portrait. A painting of a wealthy woman with a cat in her lap. Simon stood at the equally dark portrait beside it –- a wealthy man sitting high and erect on the back of horse. It was pretty evident that she was not interested in either picture as she continuously glanced at the guard in the doorway. In turn, the guard was clearly watching her.

Chey awoke with sand in her mouth, her hair matted and sticking to her face.

When she opened her eyes she saw she was still in the crazy forest, with its trees sticking up at random angles to the ground. It wasn’t any part of the forest she recognized, however. She was nowhere near the little house, or the clearing by the stream, or the giant birch tree she’d sheltered in. She felt sort of as if she’d fallen asleep for a while, and sort of as if she had just blacked out. As if no time at all had passed, and she had just been transported from one place to another instantaneously.

She remembered very little, though she understood vaguely what had happened to her. She had turned into a wolf.

Oh.

Oh God.

She was just like him. When he scratched her leg—oh God. He had infected her with his curse.

The curse—

—but—she couldn’t—that made her—

Her head hurt too much to put those thoughts in any kind of proper order. She had to shelve them, as desperately as she wanted to explore them. To figure out what had gone wrong and, much more importantly, how to fix it. For the moment the demands of her body had to take precedent.

Everything hurt. Her body felt weak and ineffectual. She was freezing cold.

At least that made sense. She was naked, after all.

She pulled her knees up to her chest and hugged them hard. A strong shiver went through her and her arms shook so hard she couldn’t hold them down. They rose up, away from her body, no matter how hard she tried to pull them close, to make herself small and conserve her body heat. And there was something else. She was hurt, had been hurt before she unexpectedly turned into a wolf and woke up naked at the bottom of a tall bank of ferns. She was wounded, wasn’t she? The wolf had—the wolf—

She was a wolf now, too.

Eos and Otis lived by themselves at a very unusual part of Los Angeles called Park La Brea. I was assuming that her parents were paying for the five-room flat with the nice parquet floors downstairs and the white wall-to-wall carpet that’s soft under your feet in the upstairs bedrooms because Eos sort of seemed too young to be able to afford such a great place by herself.

Park La Brea has a few entrances, but each one has a gate and a security guard out there so you have to stop and tell who you are before coming into the place. Unless, of course, you live there—then you have a sticker on your car to drive through. In Israel we have security guards everywhere. Even if you are just going into the mall, basically you have to open everything you might be carrying so they can poke their noses in. One time, I went to the canyon—that’s how we call malls in Israel—for some shopping with some few friends of mine in the small city of Netanya on the Mediterranean Sea. Only we couldn’t shop that day because there had been a suicide bombing just at the entrance of the mall that killed some five people, if I remember myself right, including the security guard. It was during some years where there were lots and lots of these suicide bombers, but usually they were on buses, not going into the canyon.

Okay! Here's how to win. Send an e-mail to david 'at' neatorama.com telling me what's your favorite part of Frostbite so far! If I like your answer, you win a copy of the sequel: Overwinter (autographed by the author!) We'll leave the contest open until we post Chapter 16!

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 her to 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.

If there was one thing she loved about Lynette, it was that she didn’t have to be polite with her. Greg made her feel trapped in a sort of stunted formality, like the kisses she’d been forced to give her great Aunt Julia when she was a child. It was the weird, forced brush with the face and body of a stranger, those kisses; the feel of light old-lady whiskers, the strange foreign smell of White Shoulders or Anais, Anais mixed with cigarette smoke and coffee. With Lynette, it was like the visit with great Aunt Julia had ended and she was able to run and shout and break the good China. This often quickly ceased to be enjoyable, but it never ceased to be liberating. Now, with Greg gone from the house for his Trivial Pursuit night, Amy was alone in the house and almost giddy with freedom as she called Lynette.

“Oh, you torture me,” Lynette intoned, sending a goose-bump thrill of complicity up Amy’s arms. “You made me wait twenty five minutes, you bitch.”

Chey would have thought it was impossible to run. No matter how much it might have healed, her ankle was still sprained at the very least and all the hobbling around she’d done in the forest had left her leg stiff and sore. Yet when the option was decapitation she found she could run just fine.

Oh, it hurt. Every bone in her leg vibrated with the pain, but adrenaline or endorphins or some blessed chemical in her bloodstream kept her moving.

She dashed between the two sheds at the side of the cabin, her hand slapping the ancient wood of one of them, and caromed into the forest. The trees accepted her without comment as she weaved between their trunks, her feet digging into the carpet of pine needles. She leapt over a deadfall of gray branches as thick as her wrists and came down on the other side on top of a mass of puffballs that exploded in yellow spores. Silently she cursed herself. Any good tracker would see the broken fungi and know she had passed that way. She had reason to think Powell was an excellent tracker.

Could she outrun him? She doubted it. With every step her leg hurt less—perhaps the unwanted exercise was pumping fluid out of her swollen tissues. Still. There was no question in her mind anymore— those eyes had convinced her. He was a monster. He would be faster than her, and much, much stronger. Unless she’d misjudged the intelligence in his eyes and the way he’d watched her, he would also be sneakier. She’d already gotten a taste of that, hadn’t she? She’d been on her guard when Dzo brought her to the house, ready, she had thought, for anything. Powell had crept up behind her without even trying.

She dashed around a stand of black spruce that grew so close together it looked like a palisade wall, the trunks nearly touching one another. Ducking down behind this makeshift cover, she forced herself not to make a sound. Not even to breathe too loudly. Maybe—maybe there was something she could do.