Unbound (6 page)

“None of that. There is no excuse. People are
dying
, wolf, and the pack can’t lead itself. Now, drink your tea and have a cookie and think about what you need to do next.”

Feeling a little bit sick, Ranger obeyed her anyway, taking a cookie from the plate on the tray on the coffee table. The plate was decorated with a circle of painted flowers around the outside, and in the middle there was a picture of a little glowing fairy, sitting on a toadstool and talking with a mouse that was wearing a bluebell on its head.

“It’s not very politically correct anymore,” Madam Watkins said, when she saw him looking at the plate. “Especially now that the Hunter-Merrills are living in Tamarack. But I’ve always liked those plates. They’re very pretty, and the flowers are painted quite accurately.”

Ranger crunched up his cookie, which seemed to have been made entirely without sugar, relying on the inherent sweetness of the little pieces of dried apricot to flavor them. He must’ve made a disgusted face, because Madam Watkins laughed long and loud.

“They’re not very nice, are they? I’m sorry. I should’ve warned you. Doctor Sorenson was very clear the last time I went to see him – no more refined sugar, it’s terrible for my diabetes. Told me I would lose my toe any day now if I wasn’t careful. I thought maybe I better do what he says, just for a change of pace.”

Ranger slid off the couch to sniff at her socked feet. Her right foot was okay, but her left foot smelled like wet turmeric leaves and infection.

“There’s a poultice on there,” she explained, when he looked into her face for explanation. “Good for drawing out sickness, or so Claire tells me. She was always better at the healing magic than I was. I’m better at the growing of things and the creating of life. Funny the way we all have our specialties, isn’t it?”

The wolf wondered whose specialty was the ending of life.

“Finish your tea, dear.”

He was obliged to lap the tea out of his mug, slopping it over Madam Watkins’ nice walnut coffee table. She didn’t seem to mind.

The wolf ran all the way to Michelle’s house from Madam Watkins’, hoping that Michelle hadn’t left for Norfolk already. He was in luck – she was still loading up her little white automatic when he arrived on her doorstep, panting. She blinked at him in surprise, then let him inside and offered him a drink of water.

After he’d lapped it up, he went out to her car and stood by the passenger side door, whining and wagging his tail.

“You want to come with me to visit Uncle Dale and Clyde and Yani?” she asked, looking and sounding confused.

The wolf could understand why. In the eight years since Dale and Yani and Clyde had been hospitalized in Norfolk, not once had he opted to go with her to see them. He whined, slicking back his ears.

“Well,” she said, slowly. “All right, if you want.”

She opened the car door for him, and he hopped into the front, circled, and sat down on the passenger seat. She got in beside him and regarded him for a moment.

“You look very much like a wolf today, you know,” she said. “I’m not completely sure they’re going to let us into the hospital. I know that other patients have had family members bring pets in for visits in the past, but you’re very big, and you look very mean.”

The wolf snapped playfully at her face, and she pretend-flinched away from him, laughing.

“Exactly, you brute! You’re going to need to be on your best, non-wolfy behavior, you understand? Or you’ll have to wait outside while I go in and visit without you.”

Ranger huffed, settling down as Michelle pulled out of her driveway. He watched the town of Tamarack give way to farmland, then red and gold autumn forest dotted with the odd evergreen conifer, before he squeezed into the back to curl up on the back seat and take a nap. It was a fifty minute drive through the mountains to Norfolk, and Fox Creek Psychiatric Hospital was another twenty minutes beyond, over the ridge and on the other side.

He woke up as Michelle reached the traffic lights entering Norfolk. Norfolk was a small city, but at least three times the size of Tamarack. It had a strip mall and a tiny airfield and a hospital that handled all the major surgeries from the outlying towns, like appendectomies and amputations, and even open heart surgery, though if someone wanted neurosurgery they were generally obliged to travel to Albany or New York City.

They drove down Main Street and then turned off towards the lake, winding through the suburbs around it until they turned again to start the climb up the ridge.

The wolf climbed back into the front, and Michelle wound the window down for him a little so he could stick his head out and enjoy the feeling of the cool air blowing through his fur.

Eventually, they reached the crest of the ridge, sprinkled with patches of melting snow, and started descending the other side.

Fox Creek Psychiatric Hospital was a private hospital surrounded by high green hedges, well-tended gardens, and low stone walls. The wolf had never been there before, and he looked around curiously at the big old oak trees planted along the drive, and at the three-story white-washed building with the gray slate roof.

It didn’t look particularly like a psychiatric hospital, Ranger thought, but his only experience with the places was from watching horror movies, so he suspected that he wasn’t really an expert. There were latticed bars over all the windows, though. That would indicate the sort of place it was.

“I hate this place so much,” Michelle muttered to herself, pulling into the parking lot and turning the engine off. “I’m glad you’re with me this time. Hopefully it’ll go better. Now, remember – you’ve got to behave yourself.”

Ranger twitched his tail, once.

“Yeah, somehow I still don’t trust you.” She side-eyed him warily, then leant over and opened his door for him, albeit a little awkwardly.

He padded at her side into the lobby, where there was a neatly dressed woman with a bob haircut and a funny little red hat sitting behind a high desk.

“Ah,” the woman said. “Hello there, Miss Devereaux. Here to see your family, then?”

Michelle nodded.

“I see you’ve brought a—” the woman leant over the desk to get a better look at Ranger, and her face contorted in an odd way. “—Dog.”

“My uncle’s old dog,” Michelle said, nodding. “Ranger. He was recently diagnosed with cancer – I don’t know how much longer he has left. I thought that it would be better if Uncle Dale saw him sooner rather than later, when it might be too late. I didn’t want to be bringing in a little box of ashes for him to say goodbye to. You know how distressed he gets.”

The woman took a moment to compose herself. “Right, yes. Quite a good idea, just so long as the dog behaves himself and doesn’t bite any of the residents and he isn’t incontinent. We can’t have animals tracking filth through the facility. It is a hospital, after all.”

Michelle nodded enthusiastically some more, and the woman with the funny little red hat let her sign in.

“I have a weekly check-in with Doctor Halliday after I see Uncle Dale,” Michelle explained to Ranger, as they walked side-by-side down a long, linoleum hallway. “Uncle Dale and Yani and Clyde don’t always tell the strictest truth about incidents that happen in here. Three weeks ago, Yani attacked another resident – bit him on the face. She didn’t mention it to me at all, even though I saw her three days after she’d done it, but Doctor Halliday explained what happened in full.” She paused in the middle of the hallway to cast the wolf a lingering look. “That sort of behavior might be acceptable in a wolf pack, but it isn’t here.”

Ranger huffed.

They reached the end of the hallway and were buzzed onto the ward by an orderly who greeted Michelle by name. Michelle returned his greetings with a tight smile.

The wolf found himself in a large, multi-purpose room, with a barred medication window off to one side, and a piano on his other side, and a half dozen low couches. There was a small television in the corner, playing a brightly colored cartoon about a boy with a stone on his chest, and three or four young patients were sitting watching it, along with an older woman who might’ve been nearly sixty, and a young black nurse.

Clyde and Yani were not with the young patients, though, and it took the wolf a moment to notice them huddled together under a low table strewn with playing cards and scrabble pieces. No one was sitting at the table, though a couple of the other patients were casting resentful glances at it, as if their game had been interrupted.

The wolf couldn’t remember how old Clyde and Yani were anymore. The last time Ranger had seen Clyde, he’d been a little boy with a crop of sandy colored hair and big blue eyes. Yani had been an equally little girl back then, strawberry blonde hair pulled back in pigtails. It’d been eight years, and they were both teenagers now, and no longer small children, but when Ranger looked at them he immediately thought of wolves.

Michelle seemed to read his mind, because she murmured: “Yeah, they’ve been like that ever since they transferred from the juvenile ward.”

Dale Devereaux was sitting by himself in an armchair, dressed in pale blue hospital pajamas, ratty gray socks, and a worn blue striped dressing gown. He was a tall, gaunt man with hair that had once been black as night and was now streaked gray, and with scruff on his cheeks and jaw.

He barely even glanced in Michelle’s direction when she stepped up to his side, resting her hand on his shoulder.

“Hi, Uncle Dale,” she murmured. “I’ve got a surprise for you.”

“Don’t bother with nonsense like that,” Dale said, without looking away from the grounds outside the window. “I already know that you brought the
mutt
.”

Ranger almost growled at him, then remembered the nurse sitting at the end of the sofa not six feet away keeping an eye on the patients watching the odd cartoon on the television, and swallowed the snarl in his throat with difficulty.

“I see that Mickie has you dressed up and playing the dog, then, Ranger,” Dale continued. “Don’t you find it offensive, having to pretend to be something you are not? Or have you spent so long acting like a lap dog that you really think you are one, now?”

Michelle inhaled sharply. “Dale, don’t be crude. Ranger just—”

Dale cut her off before she could really get started, though. “Ranger is here because he is
obliged
to be, and not out of the kindness of his heart. Don’t mistake his presence today as some sort of familial sentiment. We may be inmates of this godforsaken institution, but we still receive the news.”

“You’ve heard about the murders, then,” Michelle said.

“Don’t mince words, child. Call them what they are. They’re sacrifices. The spacing of the deaths, the timing, it doesn’t make any other sense. Ranger’s only here for one reason, aren’t you?” For the first time, Dale looked away from the window to throw a scathing glance at the wolf.

“No, it’s not true.” But even as she said it, Michelle’s voice wobbled badly, and she didn’t even sound like she believed her own words. The wolf certainly wouldn’t’ve.

Dale sighed. “You’re being dull, Mickie, and it doesn’t become you. You know that your pet wolf only came to visit us this time because he needs to assemble the Guardian Wolves, and since the pack is so thin on the ground back home that means he needs
our
help.”

Yani wandered over, walking on her toes, and made an inquiring noise in the back of her throat. “Us? Our help?” she asked, gleefully, smiling a toothy smile, her eyes wide. The pupil of her left eye was blown wide, reflecting the light in the room like a mirror. An old crescent-shaped scar, pale with age, ran through her eyebrow, down through her eyelids, and onto her cheek, where it ended.

Dale held out a hand to stroke her short, uneven hair, cut by the hand of someone who was not an expert hairdresser.

“Yes, my dearest,” he said. “The
dog
needs our help. Isn’t it marvelous?”

“Dog?” she repeated, her smile turning feral. “Oh, yes. This dog. I see it.” Her blind eye shone dully, but her good eye was sharp, and she stared at Ranger with the intensity of a hawk homing in on a mouse in a field of swaying grass. Ranger averted his gaze, turning his eyes to his paws, and Michelle’s shoes, which were incidentally lime green sneakers.

Michelle shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot, and the wolf watched her shoelace twitch across the linoleum, hopping like a bug. He was tempted to slap a paw on it, but restrained himself in the name of propriety.