The first route Cassie had planned took them down into Lancaster Sound to Hudson Bay and then east to Davis Strait. At the opening to the sound, Bear shouted that he felt a call. Cassie hung on as Bear leaped and crashed through pressure ridges and over creaking ice pans.
Bear braked without warning, and Cassie flew into his neck. “Hold on,” he told her. “We’ll take it slow this first time.” Gripping his neck fur, Cassie opened her mouth to ask what he meant.
He walked into a snowbank.
Snow melted like a mirage around them. Cassie shuddered as it slid through her. A few seconds later, she felt warm wet air on her face. Half her body was within the bear’s den; the rest was immured in the hard-packed snow. She listened to the sow pant in the darkness. She’d never been so close to a birthing polar bear in the wild. She didn’t think anyone ever had. This was amazing, she thought. This was impossible.
This was the power of a munaqsri. This was why he had power: to reach the bears as they were born or died. All the magic existed to make this moment possible.
“It is time. It is coming,” Bear whispered.
“Can’t see,” she whispered back. Suddenly, she could. She saw white: fur and ice. Bear, she guessed, had altered her eyes. He’d changed her body, in the same way he did when he kept her warm on the ice.
Bear inched forward and laid his face next to the sow’s stomach. Cassie wiggled closer too. “Do you have the soul?” she whispered.
“Watch,” he said. Bear opened his mouth, and a shadow fell like a drop of water. It sank into vast mounds of fur. Cassie didn’t breathe. A tiny wet shape, the cub, slid out of its mother and squirmed. In a soft voice, Bear said, “And that is how we make babies.”
“It’s… a miracle.” She had no other word for it. Bear created miracles.
The cub mewled. Blind, it wormed through its mother’s fur, and the sow licked it with a tongue that covered it in one swipe.
Silently, Bear retreated. They slid through the solid snow. Cassie felt as if she were being smothered, and she fought to stay calm. Bear would never hurt me, she told herself. She gasped in air as they emerged. Her muscles shook. “Are you all right?” Bear asked.
“Love the night vision,” she said. “Hate the walking through walls.” She took a deep breath to calm her racing heart.
Hands shaking, she took out her GPS: latitude 63° 46’ 05” N, longitude 80° 09’ 32” W. She marked it in a notebook, then tucked pencil, notebook, and GPS back into her inner layers. “We should head toward Churchill next. There are a couple mothers overdue west of Hudson Bay.”
“As you wish, O Glorious Leader.”
She snorted. “Cute.”
That night, Cassie lay beside Bear. “You awake?”
“Don’t kick me,” he said into his pillow.
She smiled and reached over in the darkness to touch his human shoulder. “It’s going to work,” she said. “That cub’s birth proved it.” She had a place here, not just as Bear’s wife. She had a future.
“Yes,” he said. She felt him shift. He was facing her now, she guessed.
“We’re a team now,” she said.
“Yes,” he said.
She reached out again, and her fingers touched his smooth cheek. She wondered briefly what he’d look like in the light. Not that it mattered. He was her Bear. Cassie shifted closer.
He stilled, like a polar bear by a hole in the ice, but she was hyperaware of how human he was right now. She felt him waiting. He said nothing. Cassie tilted her head up, and in the darkness, she kissed him. Not moving his body, as if afraid she’d flee, he kissed her back, soft and sweet.
CHAPTER 13
Latitude 83° 35’ 43” N
Longitude 123° 29’ 10” E
Altitude 4 ft.
As light returned to the southern Arctic, Cassie and Bear spent more and more time out on the ice. Every day under the blue-purple-pink sky, they patrolled the snowbanks of Alaska, Canada, Siberia, Greenland, and Norway. Every evening under the eyes of Bear’s ice carvings, Cassie refined her maps and plotted their route for the next day. And every night in the dark, she kissed her husband until she fell asleep, curled in his arms. She’d never been happier.
One afternoon, when they were north of the Laptev Sea, Bear said, “I feel a call.”
Fumbling for her notes, Cassie opened her mouth to ask which direction.
“Hold tight,” he said. “There’s little time.”
Flattening herself, she held on to his broad neck as he sprang into superspeed. Ahead, she saw blue blackness—ocean water. He lunged forward into the black waves. Under the waves, water soaked into her parka. It seeped through her face mask and around her hood. But instead of cold, the water was as soft as air. She grinned. She loved Bear’s magic.
On Bear’s back, she burst out of the water. He paddled toward shore. Head and shoulders in air, Cassie clung to his wet fur. On the other side, he scrambled onto the ice and ran.
She heard the thrum of a helicopter.
Up ahead, in the distance, on ice stirred by the wind from a helicopter, a lone bear ran toward a ridge of ice. The bear’s flank was streaked in red.
“Hold on!” Bear called. “We can’t be seen!”
She wrapped her arms tightly around his neck, and Bear impossibly increased speed. Around them, the world streaked into a blur of white and blue.
It slowed for only a fraction of a second. She saw a flash of red on creamy white as Bear sank his teeth into the throat of the wounded bear. Bear yanked, and Cassie saw a streak of silver—and then Bear was running again.
Behind them, the bear crumpled, and the helicopter landed, kicking snow into the air. She saw it all in a fraction of an instant before they rocketed away.
“Bear, the poacher!” Cassie yelled. “Stop him!”
Bear vanished in between ice blocks. He didn’t slow until they were miles north. When he did stop, he swallowed the streak of silver—the dead bear’s soul—whole.
Cassie shouted, “That bear didn’t have to die! We could have scared the poacher off, and you could have healed him, magicked his cells.” It was a waste. That beautiful polar bear… How could Bear have done that? Let that bear, one of his bears, die!
“Yes,” he said.
She choked down words she’d been going to say. Yes, he could have saved the bear. “You’re the Angel of Death for polar bears.”
“It is necessary. If I do not claim the soul, a munaqsri from another species will. If no munaqsri does, the soul will be lost. Without souls to give the newborns, the species will become extinct.”
He had prevented her from having hypothermia; he could have healed that bear. He could heal all the bears, all the time. But then where would the souls for the newborns come from? Those bears would be stillborn. She shook her head. All the implications…
“You knew my responsibilities.”
But it was the first time she had witnessed this part of it.
“Cassie?” he said, concern in his voice. “Does this change things?”
He had such enormous power. Did that change things? She took a breath. It was his job. He existed to transport these souls, not to choose who lived and who died. That’s what she had bought into—the continuation of the species, not the saving of individuals. Really, was it so much different from what a researcher did, studying without interfering?