Unbound (16 page)

Thunder rumbled in the mountains.

Madam Watkins sprinkled a handful of dried flower petals into the deer’s grave, and then Hadrian Lynch and Charlie LaVergne began to fill it in. People began to disperse. Detective Bower approached Ranger without even seeming to see the White Wolf of the Woods.

“Sachie and I are going to head on over to the diner,” the detective said to Ranger. “I’ll see you there, if you like.”

He turned and left.

Ranger was alone in the cemetery, apart from the two men filling in the hole. The wolf got to his feet and went to stand at the edge of the grave to stare down at the bloody matted fur of the dead deer, with dirt and snow falling down on it. Charlie had kept the buck in the spare freezer at the butcher’s shop while they waited for the right day to bury it, so it was still reasonably fresh and it didn’t smell bad, though there were ice crystals sticking to its muzzle and it looked stiff and misshapen.

He moved away from the deer’s grave to look at the neat row of new graves on the other side of the Old Hemlock Tree. There were six in total. Roy Bradshaw, who had been killed at the hotel while he was on vacation with his family, was from Connecticut. He’d been taken home for burial.

A seventh grave would have to be dug for Tristan.

Each grave had been marked, temporarily, with a large river stone. Eventually they would be replaced by proper headstones, the wolf imagined, but things like that took time and the murders had been sudden and unexpected.

Detective Bower and Sacheverell were sitting in a window booth at the diner. May Wilson had just served them a couple of plates of her husband’s famous bearberry pancakes and mugs of hot chocolate when Ranger pushed the diner door open with his nose and squeezed through it.

“Hi, Ranger,” May said to the wolf, smiling broadly. “Fancy meeting you here. The usual?”

Ranger wagged his tail to show his agreement.

“Ranger has a
usual
?” the wolf heard Sachie whisper with a note of something somewhere between horror and grudging respect in his voice.

May Wilson was fifty years old, give or take a couple, and she’d worked at the diner with her husband James for as long as Ranger could remember. James Wilson was an avid outdoorsman, and every autumn he went out to harvest wild berries, which he brought back and kept in his freezer beside the ice cream. Bearberries, chokeberries, blueberries, serviceberries, and even wild raspberries found their way into his cooking at the diner.

They used to have a daughter, Kylie, who would’ve been about Sachie’s age by now or maybe a little older, but she’d gone missing when she was a small child along with Noah Mueller. Ranger could distantly remember her tufty blonde hair and dark brown eyes, and the days and weeks after she’d disappeared that people spent combing the woods.

The wolves had eventually been called in to hunt for her and the lost Mueller twin, and they tracked their scents as far as Slag Creek Road, halfway up the mountain to the north of town, near the northernmost mine entrance. It had been decided that they’d wandered into the woods to play, like most of the children of Tamarack did, but on the day they went missing they took a wrong turn and got lost and wandered too near the old mines. The Unseelie Court was blamed, briefly, for leading the children astray, but the Court claimed no part in Kylie Wilson or Noah Mueller’s disappearance.

Kylie’s bones most likely lay deep beneath the earth, picked clean and cracked open for the marrow, but no one said that sort of thing in front of May Wilson.

Ranger padded over to the booth where the detective and his son were sitting and hopped up onto the bench beside Sachie, who yelped in surprise but didn’t try to push him off.

“Dad,” Sachie said, turning to gaze pensively at his pancakes. “A kid from my school died.”

“I know,” Detective Bower replied. “Were you still awake when I got in from the crime scene last night?”

Sachie shook his head. He’d fallen asleep around midnight. Ranger, who’d been curled up at the foot of his bed, keeping watch over him, had stayed awake until the detective got home around two thirty in the morning.

“What was his name?” Sachie asked.

“Tristan. He was a year above you.”

Ranger watched Sachie frown and bite his lip.

“I didn’t know him,” the boy said, eventually. “The only senior I know is Lori.” He tested the heat of his cup of hot chocolate with a finger, and appeared to decide it was still too hot to drink because he didn’t pick it up and sip it. “I think she’s one of the fair folk,” he added.

“That’s something you should probably discuss with her,” Detective Bower said, but he looked thrown.

“You’re not denying it, though,” Sachie said, shrewdly.

“Why do you even want to know?”

Sachie shrugged. “I found Great Aunt Florence’s bestiary the other day – I
told
you I found it. Florence was a witch, and everyone in the Devereaux line of the family is a werewolf. I’m fairly certain Ranger’s one, too. I tried to speak to Michelle about it, but she was kind of evasive about it. You told me to look at the books in the attic for a reason, huh?”

“You might be my son after all,” Detective Bower said.

“Can I look at the crime scene photos?”

“Definitely not.”

May Wilson came back over to their table and put a plate of waffles slathered in maple syrup down in front of Ranger, along with a mug of warm goat’s milk.

“There you go, darling,” May said, stroking the wolf’s neck a couple of times.

Sachie scowled, like he wanted to say that dogs shouldn’t eat waffles, but he bit his tongue and started on his pancakes instead.

“Dad,” he said, after a while.

“Yes?”

“The bestiary talks about all sorts of… different magical beings. But I haven’t seen any of them, not really. I’ve never seen a boggart, or a gnome, or a redcap,” Sachie said.

“Well, there aren’t any redcaps in Tamarack,” Detective Bower told him. “They’re not peaceable. Tamarack has been under the protection of the wolves of Tamarack, the Guardians of Lupa, for a very long time.”

“Why haven’t they stopped the killer?” Sachie asked.

Detective Bower looked at Ranger, who stopped scarfing down his waffles to stare back at him unblinkingly.

“I believe they’re trying their best,” the detective said, gently, though his eyes were hard. “But there aren’t a lot of them left. Most of the pack died during the incident nine years ago.”

“Oh.” Sachie also looked at Ranger, who suddenly wasn’t very hungry anymore. He kept eating the waffles regardless because he didn’t know when he would get to eat something as sweet next with Sachie taking such a keen interest in his diet.

“Anyway,” Detective Bower said. “Madam Watkins keeps a boggart around to help her out most of the time. I believe she calls it Humphrey, goodness only knows why, as they have their own names in their native language. If you want to see it, I’m sure Ranger can take you to her house this afternoon, but you won’t see a thing if you don’t believe. Believing is seeing, after all.”

“Uh,” Sachie said. “Dad, I think you’ve got that backwards. The saying goes: ‘
Seeing is believing
.’”

“Unless you want to go traipsing out into the woods to find a fairy circle during the witching hour on a full moon, and a sprite or a spriggan just so happens to be in the woods near you for you to spot, then it doesn’t work that way with the Little People,” Detective Bower said.

Sachie tested the heat of his mug of hot chocolate again and seemed to decide it was an acceptable temperature to drink now, because he picked it up, blew across it a couple of times, and took a sip. “How do you know so much?” he asked, after a long moment.

“My mother is a witch. She was quite disappointed when she learnt I didn’t have any natural aptitude for magic whatsoever.”

“Nan’s a witch?” Sachie said. “Why did you never say anything?”

Detective Bower smiled wryly. “If I had, would you have thought your dear old Dad had gone around the bend?”

Sacheverell thought about that, then nodded.

“I couldn’t’ve proved anything, and no one can do magic in Boston anyway,” the detective went on. “You’ve got to be close to a god, but sometimes you can carry enough magic with you away from a god and into the wilderness to do magic out in the middle of nowhere, for a time. Not in a big city, though. Human cities dampen magic. Think of what happens when you put a glass jar over a lit candle. The candle goes out, right?”

Sachie nodded again. “The jar is the city, and it smothers the magic, which is the flame?”

“Yes.”

“Huh.” The boy frowned, biting his lip. “You’re better at explaining than Professor Seybold. I think we went over this the other day in class, but he used some really long complicated words and I don’t have any idea what he actually meant. Is he even a professor?”

“He used to teach an anthropology class at Harvard,” Detective Bower said. “Everyone just calls him that now.”

A cold draft blew through the diner as a group of people came through the door. Michelle and Nicole were at the head of the group, followed up by a burly male nurse in heavy jacket over the pale purple Fox Creek Psychiatric Hospital uniform. Behind the nurse were Dale, Yani, and Clyde, dressed in wrinkled street clothes that looked like they’d been kept in a cupboard for years.

Unless the wolf were sorely mistaken, this was the first time the better part of the remaining Devereaux family had been in the same town in almost the past decade. If only Lowell were here.

He yowled excitedly and pounced off the booth seat to bound up to Michelle. She grinned when she saw him and held out her arm invitingly, and he jumped up on her to lick her face while she hugged him only slightly awkwardly.

“I know,” she murmured in his ear. “Isn’t it awesome? The house isn’t ready yet, but Doctor Halliday thought it would be a good idea if Dale and Yani, in particular, had a day-trip here before the move to make sure they could cope, so they’re just visiting.”

Ranger dropped back to the floor of the diner, his claws clicking audibly, wagging his tail like a happy Labrador.

The burly nurse swore softly under his breath. He’d gone ashen-faced and smelled strongly of bitter, acrid fear. Ranger stuck his nose in the man’s pockets, snuffling the packet of mint chewing gum, then danced around him to get to Yani.

The wolf sniffed her up and down, taking the musty odor of clothes kept in the dark too long and mothballs. She still had a couple of them in the pockets of her coat, and Ranger backed away from her, sneezing explosively. She laughed at him, an open, honest sound that made the nurse startle badly. The wolf wondered how long it’d been since the last time she laughed.

“I’ll be attending Council tonight,” Michelle said to the wolf. “You should come.”

He wagged his tail and grinned at her, showing off his fangs, then returned to Sacheverell and Detective Bower.

Sachie’s chest rattled as he breathed.

The afternoon had turned bitter cold. The wolf would have preferred if they had all stayed inside with a fire lit in the grate and a stew cooking on the stove, but Detective Bower had been called down to the Sheriff’s station to review evidence. When he realized his father was leaving, Sachie decided that he would like to go and see Madam Watkins’ boggart after all. He’d declined a ride, opting to walk.