Unbound (10 page)

Blood was splattered on the walls, had sprayed across the floors, and was spreading in a slowly increasing pool around the body of the deer. As he listened to Sachie making a frantic call to the Sheriff’s department, the wolf looked down at its brown eye, glazed now in death. Its coat was ragged, smelt heavily of sweat and sickness. An old wound on its haunch was oozing stinking yellow-brown pus onto the rug.

The white-tailed deer buck had to have weighed four hundred pounds, maybe. It wasn’t the deer with the midnight pelt that had chased him in the woods that night, it was just an ordinary deer, except that someone had carved a pair of sigils, one at the base of each of its antlers. The sigils appeared to have been powered by more sacrifice. Charging the sigils under the light of a full moon wouldn’t have provided enough power for the killer – he had to smear the antlers with blood mixed with yarrow, celandine, and belladonna instead.

One of the sigils was for maddening, and it had clearly driven the poor buck insane. The wolf wasn’t familiar with the second symbol, until he realized it was for unbinding.

Odd, the wolf thought, that the killer was now taking control of wild animals to do his bidding.

He turned his head to look at Eli, standing in the doorway to the kitchen and looking distinctly pale, with Sachie just behind his left shoulder, eyes wide and pupils blown with fear. Eli lifted his hand to make a twisting motion in front of his sternum before touching his thumb to his forehead. He seemed to do it almost without thinking.

As a police cruiser screamed to a stop outside Eli’s house and Detective Bower and Deputy Hostler burst inside, the wolf realized that the killer wasn’t done for tonight. The deer had been – a distraction? Or maybe not a distraction. Maybe it was another curse aimed at the wards surrounding the Old Hemlock Tree that contained the White Wolf of the Woods.

Only, wild animals were notoriously unreliable as carriers for curses. Perhaps the deer, in blind, agonized panic, had ended up running through the glass window and killing itself as it crashed around inside. Or perhaps it
had
been sent here. Perhaps that second sigil had been meant to do something to someone in this house.

Ranger glanced at Sachie and Eli again. Sachie’s father was hugging him tight, muttering reassurances, even as he took in the trashed living room and the dead deer. Eli had gone to sit on the bottom step of the staircase, looking shaky, and staring at Ranger.

“I’ll join you tonight,” he mouthed at the wolf, when their eyes met across the floor of broken glass.

There were still police cruisers parked in the street when Ranger scratched at the door and whined to be let out of Granny Florence’s house. Sachie looked at him for a long moment, then said: “I just got you dry, boy, and now you want to go back outside?”

Ranger yowled at him pitifully, and Sachie got up off the couch and opened the door for him.

The power was back on, and although it was still raining, the lightning and thunder had moved deeper into the mountains, away from the town. The wolf could still hear the occasional rumble as he padded across the wet grass, glowing golden in the patches of light falling from the windows of the house.

He went around into the back yard, past the twisted apple tree, and headed into the darkness between the trees at the edge of the forest, turning to one side to slink along just beyond the tree line towards Eli’s house.

There was a lanky, rusty colored wolf with a pale belly and a gray ruff and a green collar sitting underneath an alder tree, waiting for him.

They sniffed each other cautiously, body movements stiff and ears held to the side, whites of their eyes showing in the dark, but neither of them pulled back their lips to bare teeth, and their hackles stayed flat. Then the rusty wolf licked at Ranger’s ear, wagging his tail, and the tenseness between them was gone.

Ranger woofed at the rusty wolf quietly, turned to trot deeper into the woods. The rusty wolf gave two short whines of confusion, then followed after him.

The wolves climbed out of the valley Tamarack was nestled in, crested a ridge and descended down into the next valley, where they moved between leafless deciduous hobblebushes and evergreen leatherleafs, ghosting along silently in the night. They followed a babbling creek down the valley, stepping through rain-wet twinflowers and wintergreen. They passed a bedraggled wood sprite sitting in a hollow beneath the roots of a pin cherry. Ranger paused, occasionally, to mark a maple or a spruce or a fir, and once a tamarack, but the rusty wolf did not. This was not his territory to mark.

At the foot of the valley, where it opened out into a long meadow between mountains that would be green and dotted with wildflowers come summer, but was yellow and brown with the fall, the wolves paused to throw back their heads and howl.

They were met by distant wolfsong from the town behind them, but nothing from nearer by.

Ranger thought for a long moment, rain pattering down onto his back, then began to lope north along the meadow. He ignored the scents of deer and moose and bear, passed a startled coyote out hunting for mice without giving chase. They ran north until their paws ached and their lungs were burning and the rain had eased to a slow drizzle, and then the wolves headed up the slope of the mountain they had come to. They walked between paper birches and quaking aspens, balsam firs and cedars.

It was the first time Ranger had run with another wolf in too long. He’d forgotten the sheer joy of having a companion at his shoulder, quiet breath on his tail, a pack-brother to hunt with and fight alongside.

They paused when they reached a fallen tree, lichen growing on its sides, a drift of fallen leaves built up around its base. Ranger snuffled in the wet leaves, but everything was too damp and all he could smell was sodden earth and decaying vegetation, so he threw back his head and howled again.

From further up the mountain came an answering howl – not a wolf, but the warbling yowl of a human voice.

Ranger and the rusty wolf set off towards the human howl. As they went, Ranger became aware of the warm smell of wood smoke and the sharp cracks and pops of wet wood burning. At the edge of a rocky overhang, they came upon a fire in a shallow pit lined with stones, sheltered by the evergreen boughs of a fir tree.

There was no one tending to the fire, but someone had to have been here recently, and they would probably be back soon. Ranger settled down to wait, and the rusty wolf lay down beside him, sighing.

The fire had burned down to embers when Ranger lifted his head, pricking his ears. He could hear the crunch of boots on leaves, somewhere off away through the trees, followed by a muffled curse. A couple of minutes later, a young woman appeared.

Nicole Devereaux, not traveling abroad with her brother, but deep in the mountains behind the town.

She looked like she’d spent the past decade in the woods, though she couldn’t’ve been more than nineteen. She was clean enough, certainly, apart from a couple of twigs in her long dark hair, but her clothes were worn and tattered for all that she obviously tried to take care of them, and her boots were held together with duct tape and twine. There were holes in the knees of her jeans, and the elbows of her jacket, an old bloodstain on her thigh that she hadn’t been able to get out washing her clothes in a stream.

There were a couple of dead mink hanging around her shoulders, blood glittering on their teeth in the firelight.

Ranger got to his feet and ran to meet her, wagging his tail and rubbing his cheeks over her legs and hips, whining. She laughed, buried her fingers in his ruff, examined his collar with disgust, and kissed him on the head. She smelled like pack, like the forest and the rain, like wolf and family, like blood and smoke.

Nicole froze, looking over Ranger’s shoulder at the rusty wolf, her nostrils flaring, and for the first time, she spoke: “Ranger, who is this?”

Because the rusty wolf wasn’t pack, not really, even if he was distant family.

Ranger whined and slicked back his ears, licking at her chin in apology.

“He smells like – like soap and car exhaust and magic.” She turned her gaze to Ranger, staring at him incredulously. “You smell like magic, too. Old magic.” And then she seemed to come to an understanding, because she said, softly: “
Oh
.” Her face went ashen and she sat down in the leaf litter quite without warning.

There was blood on her fingers. It was fresh and salty and coppery, and Ranger busied himself with licking it off. After a time, the other wolf crept closer to nose at her hair and sniff the dead minks, then press his flank against her shoulder. She stared at the rusty wolf unseeingly for a long time, then with increasing recognition.

“I
know
you,” she said to the rusty wolf, wonderingly. “You used to be a lot smaller.”

The rusty wolf wagged his tail.

Suddenly, Nicole’s bottom lip wobbled, and she sniffed.

“I don’t want to go back.”

Ranger whined, long and low, and stared up into her glittering eyes, trying to convey just how very sorry he was.

She sobbed, quietly, in the dark for a while, and Ranger lay on the wet forest floor with his head in her lap, whining the whole time. The rusty wolf alternated between lying with them and pacing restlessly, his gaze turned eastwards, towards the horizon, listening.

Eventually, Nicole wiped her streaming eyes and nose with her sleeve, gave the wolves a tremulous smile, and got up to kick dirt over the embers of her fire.

“Shall we go, then?” she asked.

It was midmorning by the time they arrived at the outskirts of Tamarack. The rain had stopped.

Ranger went to the high school to find Sacheverell after he left Nicole on Michelle’s front step. He tracked Sachie to his Religion class, where he sat, frowning perplexedly at Professor Seybold, who was discussing the God of Abraham, Jesus, and Muhammad. Ranger didn’t pay much attention. He was weary to his bones, and he curled up on the classroom floor and went to sleep.

The wolf had heard the story, anyway. The God of Many Names and None had been bound fourteen hundred years ago to a rock in Jerusalem. Shortly afterwards, a man had built a temple with a golden roof over the rock. Thousands of people visited it each year without fully realizing what they were visiting. He’d been one the first of the gods to be bound down by man, back in the times of chaos, but He was far from the last.

The last had been Cern.

Eli wasn’t in school. Sachie worried about his friend at lunch time, asking Evan, Lori, Lincoln, and Alyssa if they’d heard from him. None of them had, but Lori told Sachie not to worry.

“Sometimes Eli stays up all night,” Lori explained, kindly. She was wearing a flower crown of purple salvias today, no doubt from her mother’s garden. “And then he just sleeps all day. We’ll go over after school and see if he wants to share notes.”

“What if he’s sick?” Sachie asked.

Lori shrugged. “Eli doesn’t really get sick very often. He’s probably fine. Didn’t you say a deer came through his living room window yesterday?”

“Yeah,” Sachie said. “It was really weird. Maybe it got spooked by the storm or something, but I wouldn’t’ve thought that animals that live their entire lives outside really get freaked out by storms.”

“Maybe it was cursed,” Alyssa suggested.

Sachie was in the middle of feeding Ranger some of his mashed potatoes, and he dropped his spoon on the floor with a ringing clatter. “What?”