The great gray thing shivered and jerked erratically, spewing great clots of pale phlegm.

“Kill me,” the newborn wendigo hissed. “My arms and legs burn. My throat. Everything.”

“Careful,” Raspberry said as Thornsong approached. “It’s an old hate, a curse from the nature itself.”

“That’s one theory,” he said, nodding. The wendigo tried to turn its head to look up at him, but it was shaking too badly. “Another is that it’s guilt cannibalising the soul. When the pain in the soul outgrows the body, it forces the body to change.”

“If that were true, Thornsong, you yourself would-”

Thornsong cut him off with a stare.

“It’s different. Wildly different. You know that.”

“Guilt is guilt,” Raspberry said.

“I don’t believe that. Guilt comes in all the flavors of sin.”

“Kill me,” the wendigo said, slapping a malformed hand the size of a lilypad on the ground. The slap raised a cloud of bright early snow-dust.

“Do it, now,” Raspberry said. “Before the change is complete.”

Thornsong’s fixed his gray eyes on the pitiful monster.

“I’ve heard there are ways to reverse the change, before it becomes too far gone. The Sun Tribes on the Plains use fire and pain. They hang the cannibal by hooks in the flesh and brand him. The pain purges the guilt.”

“And the Fat Chewers in the Far North just kill them outright and push the body out on an ice floe, so it doesn’t contaminate the village,” Raspberry replied. “And you told me that this curse is most common in the north. We should follow the experts.”

Thornsong shook his head.

“There’s no experts in this kind of thing. Cannibalism isn’t even a guaranteed trigger, or the only trigger.”

“Please,” it said. “I admit what I have done. The cold and the hunger - I succumbed. My wife, my lovely young wife - I killed her. I ate of her flesh. I even salted her to eat again once my belly was full. I am a monster.”

Thornsong knelt at the wendigo’s side. He set his new shield and spear behind him.

“You are. I am. We’re all some kind of monster, deep down.”

“I wear my monstrous nature on the outside now,” he said. A throaty growl brought up more of the darkening phlegm and a new round of erratic jerks and tics. “I’ll hurt you - kill you - if this goes on. I can feel the hunger again, pulling my stomach tight.”

“Thornsong,” Raspberry said, hefting the beechwood knuckle. “Let’s end this, now.”

“You said much the same thing when you found me,” he said. “You spared me then. We should try to save him.”

“It’s not even remotely the same,” he said. “We can’t save him. I can feel it in my bones, and those bones are far older than yours. I knew there was hope for you.”

Raspberry let the knuckle drop and put his free hand on Thornsong’s shoulder.

“There’s no hope here. He’s too far gone.”

Thornsong rested his chin on his chest and closed his eyes. The wendigo whimpered and twisted, kicking ruts in the earth and grabbing fistfuls of dirt as spasms racked him.

“We’ll end you,” Thornsong said. “Take the pain away. Is there anything more you want to say?”

The wendigo turned his face to the earth.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, my beautiful one. Better we had wasted away together. My selfishness cost you your life and my humanity. I’m sorry.”

Thornsong reached out and put a hand on the base of the wendigo’s neck. The flesh was quivering so rapidly now it felt like he was dragging his hand through a quick stream.

“Are you ready?” he said.

“Now,” it said.

He palmed his meteoric iron dagger and slid it into the base of his skull, just below his hand. The wendigos arms and legs splayed wide, knocking Thornsong to the ground. Raspberry hefted the beechwood knuckle and rushed to his side. The limbs flopped and grasped wildly, the wendigo spraying steaming foam with each convulsion. The knife came loose and fell to the ground. Like a stopper coming out of a clay bottle, the knife released a torrent of black ooze.

It went still, and Thornsong realized he’d been holding his breath.

Stolen novel; please report.

“It was the right thing to do,” Raspberry said. “It was the only thing to do.”

“We were too late,” Thornsong said. “I’m always too late.”

Raspberry released a pained sigh.

“You’re not a monster,” he said. “No matter what you think. We’ve been traveling together a long time. You’ll see what I see, someday. And this - thing...this was deserved. Black and white.”

“Gray is harder,” Thornsong said.

Raspberry nodded.

“It can be.”

Thornsong retrieved the dagger and plunged it into the ground to remove the tar-like wendigo blood.

“We can finally turn south, friend-”

The wendigo lurched, crashing into Thornsong’s side and sending him sprawling. Burning rippled through his left arm and shoulder. He felt a rib crack.

“Thornsong!” Raspberry bellowed, moving in his direction.

The wendigo kicked like a whitetail in flight, catching Raspberry in the stomach and dropping the giant to his knees.

It rose up off the ground, howling. The sound was like February wind through bare trees. It was the calving of glaciers and the distant hymn of hungry wolves.

The wendigo drew itself up off the ground, stretching to its full height. All human intelligence had been burned from its eyes. They were white orbs, rolling in their sockets. Its teeth lengthened into two double-rows of slick, teeth - icicles in a bottomless chasm.

It howled again and reached for Thornsong, who was in turn reaching for the spear with his uninjured arm.

Raspberry brought the beechwood knuckle down on the wendigo’s grasping claw and it rebounded, as if he’d hit the surface of a hard-frozen lake. The wendigo turned in his direction, locking those eyes on Raspberry, and back-handed him hard enough to send him flying.

It howled again. It was hunger incarnate.

Thornsong rolled and picked up the spear. His left side was already turning purple as blood pooled under the skin.

The wendigo lunged at him. He twisted and held the spear vertically in front of him, doing his best to parry the blow.

Too slow. The claw traveled down the length of the spear and bit deeply into his thigh, just above the knee. He screamed and punched with the shaft, striking the wendigo on the sunken divot that had once been a human nose.

That bought him a second. He crouched and the claw ripped free of his thigh, misting the dirt with his blood. He brought the spear to his shoulder and leveled it at the wendigo, sighting along the shaft.

Raspberry was up and charging again, aiming a mountain-crushing blow at the thing’s legs. Another kicked put him back on the ground. The wendigo opened its mouth impossibly wide, like a snake, and turned to him.

“No,” Thornsong said. “Face me.”

He thrust with the spear. Its tip sunk into the meat of the wendigo’s haunch, eliciting another scream. Images flashed through Thornsong’s mind. Deer frozen in the snow around a mountain lake. A hut, a severed arm laying on the dirt floor, covered in dozens of gnaw marks. The skull of a bobcat perched on a stump in deep snow, its eyes the same unholy white as the monster’s.

He thrust again, but the wendigo grabbed the shaft. Thornsong couldn’t release it in time. It twisted its wrist and threw him to the ground at Raspberry’s side.

“Thornsong,” he gasped. “Its heart. Look at its heart.”

The wendigo approached. Thornsong saw a black bag pumping under its rib cage, outside of the skin. Each pump sent a new wash of black blood from the wound at the back of its skull.

“The brain is damaged, or gone,” he said. “Aim for the heart.”

He was back on his feet, spear tip to the monster and shaft resting on the ground. He stood on the butt of it.

“Now, come to me,” he said.

It was the wendigo’s turn to charge. Raspberry scrambled out of the way while Thornsong stood his ground. The wendigo didn’t even try to dodge the point. It sank through the monster, catching on a rib. It forced itself down the shaft, reaching for his throat.

Raspberry was up, hammering at the thing’s back with the beechwood knuckle. Every blow sent it deeper down the shaft, forcing Thornsong to backtrack his grip. He quickly ran out of spear and was forced to let it go. He bounded away, and the impaled wendigo turned to Raspberry.

“The heart!” he cried, pulling another blow short and bringing his hands to his face in a defensive stance. The beechwood knuckle deflected one, two swipes from the monster’s claws.

Thornsong pulled his stone tomahawk from his belt. The act sent new peals of pain through his side. He raised it above his shoulder.

“Raspberry, turn,” he said. Another blow glanced off the beechwood knuckle and the momentum nearly spun him completely around. He ducked as low as he could and scrabbled toward Thornsong. The wendigo reached for his legs and succeeded in just lightly scratching the bottoms of his feet.

Thornsong roared and rotated from the hips to throw the tomahawk. His eyes glazed over as the cracked rib gave way completely, the muscles of his abdomen completing the break. He fell to his knees before it struck home.

But his aim had been good. The stone point of the tomahawk crashed into the wendigo’s exposed heart. It burst like an overripe melon, spraying Raspberry’s back with gobs of black blood. Now it was the wendigo’s turn to fall.

One final scream. The taste of salt and blood and stringy meat filled Thornsong’s mouth. A fleeting image of a young woman, hair braided with sweet summer grasses, kneeling on a prayer rug. Her eyes were ghostly white.

Blackness overtook him. Thornsong fell to the ground, unconscious. Raspberry rolled to his back and watched the wendigo twist in its death throes. It was a reversal of the original change. The spasms turned to jerks and tics, and then an overall shivering. Finally, it sighed, slumped, and shriveled.

Raspberry got to his feet, dirt and blood and long-dead leaves clinging to his back.

The emaciated body of a man lay in place of the now-gone wendigo. His frame had been slight, even without the wasting effects of hunger. His eyes had returned to their original chestnut brown. They stared unseeing at the sky. Raspberry reached down, closed them, and turned to Thornsong.

He grimaced. The damage was plain. His left forearm was canted at a strange angle, and the deep purple bruise on his side was spreading to his shoulder and hip.

He was breathing, but just so. Raspberry snapped two nearby saplings off at the base and laid them at 45-degree angles to one another. He rummaged in Thornsong’s pack, coming up with a bit of braided fishing line. He lashed the saplings together and tied several stout sticks to the frame, forming a travois.

Carefully, he rolled Thornsong onto the sledge. He groaned, but his eyes remained closed. He picked up the travois poles, looked to the sun, and began to drag him away.

“South, friend,” he said. “We go south.”