Unbound (21 page)

“I think I saw the one that got Ranger,” Sachie said. “It was – it was huge. And black. I didn’t think wolves got that big. Or dogs, even.”

Whether wolf or man, Dale was two hundred pounds of lean muscle with bones like steel girders. Ranger would be surprised if any wolf matched his size, shape-changer or not.

“When did you see it?” Detective Bower asked.

“Last night,” Sachie said.

“Did it come into the yard?” There was a note of fear in his voice that Ranger understood. Dale shouldn’t be able to cross Florence’s wards. If he did, it meant they were failing.

“No,” Sachie replied. “In the forest.”

“You went into the forest? Last night? When?” Ranger could hear the note of anger in the detective’s tone now.

“In retrospect, it might’ve been a really vivid dream from the tea I had at Madam Watkins,” Sachie admitted. “There were talking dogs and I think I saw a unicorn.”

He rubbed his left shoulder through his sweatshirt, frowning and staring off out the window, and his father sighed wearily.

Ranger napped throughout Friday, Saturday, and most of Sunday morning, grumbling and groaning whenever Sachie disturbed him. He only hauled himself up to limp downstairs and scratch at the door so that he could go outside and relieve himself on the grass a couple of times, and Sachie worried about that aloud until he realized that the wolf was hardly eating or drinking anything – which the boy also proceeded to worry over.

Sunday lunchtime, though, Ranger came down the stairs of his own volition and poked around the kitchen while Sachie and Detective Bower were preparing lunch. He nosed at the counter where the detective was shredding lettuce, and sniffed at the garlic Sachie was crushing for the garnish, then he sat in front of the refrigerator, wagging his tail and glancing over his shoulder hopefully.

They ignored him and continued with their own lunches, so he grizzled at them.

Detective Bower laughed, loudly. “You heard the wolf, Sachie,” he said. “He’s feeling better now, and he’s hungry. You’d better feed him.”

Sunday evening, Claire Bower came over to lance the abscess forming on Ranger’s flank. The wolf lay on the cool tile in the downstairs bathroom with Claire at his side, and Sachie lingering in the doorway. Ranger wondered, in an idle fashion as she pressed the scalpel into the overheated and painfully festering flesh on his side – a memento of Dale’s broken canine tooth – where she even got her surgical blades from. She was neither a doctor nor a veterinarian, and she’d never trained as a paramedic.

Perhaps there was a website where she purchased them. He knew she definitely got some of her rarer herbs not from Madam Watkins or the apothecary, but from online stores. She was a surprisingly tech-savvy old witch.

The wolf followed Sachie to school on Monday morning. Eli wasn’t there.

“Is he really sick?” Sachie asked Lori at lunch.

Lori, who was only picking at her salad and not really eating it, shrugged. “His cousin Yani tore half his ear off during the full moon. Doctor Payne stitched him up the best he could, but it wasn’t looking very good.”

“Oh. Wow. That’s gonna make the next family Christmas sort of awkward, isn’t it?” Sachie said, sounding faintly panicked.

“We celebrate Yule in Tamarack,” Alyssa said.

“Oh,” Sachie said again.

Ranger put his head on the bench next to Sachie’s knee and whined, and the boy handed him a sandwich then winced and rolled his shoulder, biting his lip. Ranger wondered if he’d hurt himself, but couldn’t smell blood or pain on him. Perhaps it was another habit like fisting his hand over his heart?

“If Eli’s injured,” Sachie said, after a long moment. “Do we still have study group?”

Alyssa and Lori appeared to mull that over, before both of them agreed that they did.

“Safer there than anywhere, I suppose,” Lori said. “Dale Devereaux’s still on the loose and no one’s caught him to take him back to Fox Creek, so we might as well go see Eli.”

Eli’s whole house smelled like fresh coppery blood and bitter pain. It made Ranger’s leg and side ache and his chest feel tight, and he had to yowl at the door to be let out after just ten minutes. He went back to Granny Florence’s to wait on the porch.

Tuesday dawned overcast, and Ranger was restless and lonely for family. He broke away from Sacheverell on the way to the high school and went to see Michelle. It took her a long time to answer the door, even though he howled and
howled
, and her car was in the driveway so she was definitely home to hear him.

She looked tired. There were dark rings around her eyes, and her blonde hair was lank and greasy-looking. Her clothes were clean, though, still smelled like the sachet of rose petals she kept in her clothing drawer to make them smell pretty and not just like laundry soap. Ranger pressed his cheek against her knee and left it there for a long moment, not to scent but for comfort, until he felt her fingers carding through the fur on the back of his neck, and only then did he step into her house.

It smelled strongly of other wolves, like they’d brushed against every surface and rolled on every carpet. Ranger snorted, sniffing the kitchen archway disgustedly.

“Don’t you dare pee on anything,” Michelle said, but she sounded exhausted, like she didn’t really care if he lifted his leg against the armchair or not, even though she’d threatened to have him skinned and turned into a fur rug if he ever considered it in the past.

She collapsed on the couch, throwing her head back and covering her eyes with her forearm. “Dale went hunting in the woods, if you were wondering,” she said. “He took Yani and Clyde and Nicole with him. They left just after dawn this morning. What’s to bet he drags back a
moose
?”

Ranger wasn’t sure, but he didn’t like the odds. He climbed onto the couch beside her, rubbing his jaw against her shoulder and pressing his flank against the cushions to work his smell into them and make them right again, before pacing around the room and marking it as his own.

“Thank you, buddy,” Michelle said, after a time. “That really helps.”

He spent the morning with her. She told him what had happened with Dale – how after the visit to the diner on Wednesday he’d abruptly refused to go and see the progress on the old Devereaux family house, how he’d broken away from the nurse and made for the woods, Clyde and Yani on his heels, how he’d returned a couple of hours later not as a man but as a wolf that hung around the edges of the property until after the nurse and the police left late Wednesday evening, and nothing Nicole or Michelle had said could convince him to shift back.

“I don’t want him to be like you,” she said to Ranger sadly, as she prepared omelet for lunch. “We aren’t – we aren’t meant to stay one shape or another. It isn’t our way, hasn’t been since the White Wolf gave us the ability to share her form.”

Ranger whined and wagged his tail, leaning his shoulder against her leg. He knew, and he understood.

“And Yani and Clyde won’t change back either.”

She told him that Dale had failed to unbind Cern in the fairy ring on the full moon, that Cern’s host-body had escaped or the strength of Dale’s voice had been too weak for the god to hear him, trapped as He was, but Dale’s failure had been why he’d been so feral afterwards, why he’d turned on his own kin in his fury.

“He’s not right, even after all these years in Fox Creek. It’s the taint.” In the same way the taint had seeped down into Ranger’s bones, it had wormed into Dale’s mind and he’d been dangerously unstable since. It made a little failure seem like something huge to him, something that needed to be avenged, and that was why he’d been locked away. “I was hoping – I was hoping it would’ve eased by now.”

Sachie came over after school. Content that both Sacheverell and Michelle would be safe enough with each other for compan
y
, the wolf yowled at Michelle’s front door to be let out. Sachie frowned and shared a worried glance with his second cousin, but relented when Ranger began to howl and opened the door.

First, Ranger scent-marked Michelle’s garden, and then he set out to try and find the murderer, even though he had the feeling that it was in vain and Dale was right – the only way to sort this mess really
would
be to unbind one of the gods.

Tamarack was quiet. Everyone knew the pattern of the killer by now, and they were keeping themselves locked up indoors with their loved ones, hoping to be passed by. Ranger looped the town twice, casting for the scent of sweet rotting death, but he didn’t catch it, so he widened his circles and started through the forest.

He wasn’t expecting to smell the sweet rot until after the kill had been made, but the hope was there, a little fire in his chest somewhere behind his lungs, that if he could somehow just
smell
the killer; he might be able to stop someone dying tonight. He had no idea how he would stop the killer, they were in league with demons of bone and shadow and he was just a lone wolf, but he had to try.

And then, as he was running past the Old Hemlock Tree where the White Wolf of the Woods was lying in the wet grass, licking her paws, he smelt it.

Turning on a paw he headed deeper into the woods, wondering why the killer wasn’t heading towards the town and who would be out here on a night like this? He hoped it wasn’t hikers. How would Sheriff Hostler and Detective Bower ever explain to a grieving family from out-of-town what had happened to their relative out in the woods?

The wolf loped into a clearing in the birches, and froze in his tracks.

There was no hiker. The killer wasn’t here either.

Lying in the grass, in the center of the clearing, was a dead wolf. A ring of unseasonable dogbane had cropped up in a rough circle around it, pale pink flowers and bright green leaves standing out in stark contrast to the patches of melting snow and brown grass and moldering leaf litter around it.

The wolf had dirty black fur that stuck up in wet clumps. Its abdomen was bloated, and its eyes had been pecked out, leaving bloody holes. The smells of sweet rotting death and clean death and sulfur and flowers mingled in the air, and Ranger couldn’t breathe.

He stepped closer, lifting his paws carefully so he didn’t step on the dogbane, trying to work out if he’d known this wolf or if it was a stranger.

There were blue and purple monkshood flowers stuffed in its mouth, like some sort of perverse offering.

Ranger’s heart thudded painfully in his chest as he nudged the wolf’s shoulder, trying to search beneath the dead-smell to what the wolf had smelled like in life. Soft rotten flesh sloughed away from the bone. The dead black wolf sat up abruptly, fires awakening in the holes where its eyes should’ve been. It spat out the monkshood, and part of its tongue fell onto the forest floor.

Ranger leapt backwards, stepping in the dogbane by mistake. It stung his paw. And then he was running, breath sawing in his chest, headed away from Tamarack, away from the dying, away from the dead demon-wolf that he hadn’t known but which looked like his mother. Behind him, the demon-wolf cackled, high and shrieking.

He fled north, terror clawing at him, biting his tail and pushing him faster, on through sunset and moonrise and long into the night, long past the moment when he couldn’t hear the footfalls of the demon or its maddened laughter any longer. He only stopped when there was light on the eastern horizon, and he realized he had no idea where he was, except that he was standing on the edge of a sealed road.

None of the hills around him looked familiar. The air smelt different. He was wet – he’d jumped in a river and swum across without even noticing.

It wasn’t unheard of for a healthy and determined adult wolf to travel as far as a hundred miles in a single day. They didn’t do it often, but it was possible. Ranger’s foreleg and flank were burning, and he was trembling with cold and exhaustion. He couldn’t have run that far from Tamarack, but he’d definitely left his territory behind.

He curled up in the brush on the side of the road and napped, and when he woke he chose a random direction and started limping along the verge with the vague hope of wandering into a town and working out where he was, and where to go from there.

Cars drove past him. A couple of them slowed down, and people put their heads out their windows to look at him. He didn’t look back until after noon, when a big white station wagon stopped on the shoulder and two men got out. One was wearing a green parker, and a furry brown hat with flaps that fell down over his ears. The other man was dressed mostly in tan, and there was a logo on his shirt that Ranger couldn’t make out, but it was yellow.

Their breath steamed in the bitter air, and they stood in the ankle-deep snow, looking at him.

He moved to wander past them.

“I don’t know, Hall,” the man wearing the green parker said, doubtfully. “I don’t think it can be a coyote. It’s too big. Not a dog, either.”

“Wolf-dog?” Hall, the man in the tan asked.

“If it is, it’s high-content. High enough that there are no noticeable dog-traits at all. Got a collar, though. Someone’s pet? That’s not legal here,” the man in the green said. “Get the tranquilizer. See if you can tag him – we need to take him in, see if those tags on his collar have anything useful to tell us. Then I can take him over to the park. We’ve got the space, and a veterinarian who’s used to working wild animals. Looks like he needs a vet – he’s limping pretty badly. And look at his ear, and his face. Wonder what did that do him?”

“All right,” Hall said, walking around the back of the station wagon to retrieve something. Presumably the dart rifle.

Ranger felt a thrill of terror so bad that it made his chest hurt and his head dizzy. He considered fleeing back into the woods, but hunger gnawed at his belly and he didn’t think he could run on his leg anymore. He needed to rest.

Dropping his head and wagging his tail, he turned on a paw, walked straight up to the man in the green parka, and sat down in the snow at his feet. The man backed up into the car, blanching, and Ranger realized he looked too frightening, so he dropped onto the snow and rolled onto his back to show the man his throat and his belly, whining.

Hall came back with the tranq gun, and froze in his tracks. “Wright,” he said, slowly. “Are you – is it rabid?”

“Has a rabies tag,” the man in the green parka – Wright – replied tensely. “For all that’s worth.”