Unbound (18 page)

Ranger led the way down the garden path, trying to ignore the skittering black rats with glowing red eyes that seemed to be scurrying in front of his paws, squeaking and chittering. A dog-shaped demon with a skull for a face and vertebra sticking up through the thin wispy shadows it had for skin reared up out of the gutter, eye-sockets burning like hot coals, twin ram’s horns curling around its head. It roared at them, a forked serpent tongue of darkness flickering in the afternoon sunlight, and the stink of brimstone filled Ranger’s nose.

Fear tightened the wolf’s pelt, and he broke into a staggering lope, his head dizzy, and the world too bright and too dim all at once. He tripped over the curb, stopped to retch up foul-smelling tea into the gutter. Behind him, he could hear Sachie running to keep up, and his sneakers sounded like hoof beats on the sidewalk.

“I’m dying,” Sachie wailed. “I’m dying, I’m dying.” His voice was distorted, like the wolf was hearing it from an old radio, or underwater, and a hundred other people were speaking all at the same time.

Crows white as snow filled the skies and flew about their heads, cawing about the end times. Sachie’s breaths came in little sobbing hitches, and when Ranger paused to turn around and look at him, his eyes were leaking souls.

Somehow, they made it back to Granny Florence’s house, where Sachie led the way up to his room where he kicked off his shoes, threw off the mittens and the scarf, and collapsed on his bed. The souls kept escaping from his tear ducts, even after he closed his eyes.

Sick, his head spinning, not sure what was real, what was a vision of the truth, and what was the tea playing tricks on him, Ranger jumped onto the bed and curled up into a tight ball beside Sacheverell, willing the bed to stop rocking because it was not a boat on high seas.

Detective Bower came into Sachie’s room at some point during the afternoon and shook his son awake. The wolf woke up too, blinking sleepily in light that burned orange and red like fire. The sun must’ve been setting. Detective Bower was frowning worriedly.

“Sachie,” he said. “You were supposed to be at Madam Watkins this afternoon. You didn’t even text me to let me know you were coming home.” He paused while Sachie blinked slowly, staring at him with a mute sort of horror on his face that let Ranger know that the tea hadn’t quite worn off. “Are you feeling all right?” the detective went on, when Sachie said nothing. “You don’t normally go to bed at this hour.”

Ranger watched Sachie open his mouth to run his tongue over dry, chapped lips, and the wolf suddenly realized he was extremely thirsty and his mouth tasted dreadful.

“I’m tired,” Sachie said, after several long seconds. “I don’t feel good.”

Detective Bower pressed his hand against Sachie’s forehead, presumably to check if he was running a fever. Ranger tried, in a distant sort of way, to remember the last time someone had done that for him. A long time ago, before his parents were killed, if he didn’t count the time Doctor Payne stuck a thermometer up his rear end.

“You aren’t hot,” Detective Bower said, thoughtfully. “You haven’t eaten anything that I haven’t. I’ll get you a drink of water, and then you can go back to sleep, and if you aren’t feeling better by tomorrow morning, I’ll call Doctor Sorenson to come and see you.”

“’Kay,” Sachie murmured, and his eyes were already falling shut. Ranger wished he could fall asleep again that easily, but now he was awake there was a buzzing in his ears like a thousand flies swarming a corpse, and his skin felt itchy and too tight. There was a full moon tonight – moonrise was in just a couple of hours – and were the circumstances different he might’ve thought he was feeling moon sickness.

Ranger was cursed, though. He couldn’t feel the moon at all.

He wondered if he was dying, if the tea he’d drunk for Sachie had been toxic to wolves.

Detective Bower turned his attention from his son to the wolf.

“I wish you would talk to me,” he said. “I’d ask you what’s going on, what’s wrong with my son. You could change back, you know. I know you can. I’m not sure
why
you just don’t.”

Ranger mewled sadly. There were so many things he would tell Detective Bower if he could, about the smell of sweet rot he’d found at the crime scenes, about what the Leshy had said about demons and old ones, about Tristan Houk’s liver on the art room floor and what it was doing there. He would ask about Bjorn, and he would tell the detective about how the killer was working by numbers, and how there would only be one more murder and it would happen next Tuesday, but the killer wouldn’t touch the Old Hemlock Tree until the Winter Solstice, in a month’s time.

Nine sacrifices, one every seventh day, and precisely twelve weeks after the first human death the killer was going to commit the ultimate sin and kill a god. Twelve –
three fours
.

But Ranger couldn’t tell the detective anything, couldn’t tell him that they only had a little over a month to find the killer or Tamarack wouldn’t be a safe haven anymore because Lupa would be dead and there would be no god here. He couldn’t tell
anyone
, and no one knew everything he did, not even Michelle.

“Tell me, Ranger,” Detective Bower pressed.

The wolf bared his teeth, snarling long and low, then got to his feet to shift so that he was lying with his back to the detective.

Detective Bower sighed and left the room.

Ranger wasn’t sure when he fell asleep, but he woke up again in the dark with the howling of wolves coming from the forest behind the house. Sachie stirred restlessly, rolled over, and settled back down. Yawning so wide his jaw cracked, Ranger hopped off the bed and wandered to the window to look out into the dark yard, and at the shadowy woods beyond. There was a golden light dancing between the trees at the edge of the forest.

The Council was meeting tonight, during the witching hour, which must be almost upon them if there were fairy lights on the path in the woods.

Ranger felt groggy and sluggish, like his legs were filled with wet sand and not hot blood, but his mind was clear again.

He needed to go to that meeting. He needed to know what people were saying, how much the Elders had guessed. He made for the door, but the jingling of the tags on his collar, or perhaps the clicking of his claws, woke Sachie, who sat up and blinked at him blearily.

“Where’re you going?” he asked, slurring just a little, but Ranger thought it was because he was still half-asleep and not because he was still affected by the tea.

He paused to twitch his tail a couple of times to acknowledge the boy before he stepped out into the hallway. The stairway light was still on, which meant that Detective Bower was still awake, and as he padded down the stairs he became aware of the sound of late-night-early-morning infomercials from the television. The detective was asleep on the couch, a manila folder open on the coffee table before him. The wolf glanced at it, and saw a toxicology report.

Unlocking the back door was a little difficult with only paws and teeth, but Ranger managed by pawing very carefully at the key until it turned in the lock. Then he opened the door, and stepped out into the chilly night. His first lungful of air was so cold it burned, and his breath steamed up towards the sparse clouds.

He was about to turn around and pull the door closed with his teeth when Sachie stepped out beside him.

“What’s that light?” the boy asked quietly, looking towards the trees.

Fair folk dancing along a fairy path, just beyond the tree-line.

Ranger started down the porch steps and across the snowy yard, but stopped because Sachie had ducked back inside, hastily pulled on his shoes, and run back out to follow him. The wolf whined, softly.

“I want to see,” Sachie said. “
Please
.”

Ranger considered growling at him, chasing him back to the house with lips pulled back from teeth and hackles standing up from shoulder to base of tail, but he couldn’t do it. He liked Sachie and Detective Bower too much. Sachie was a good kid who didn’t deserve it, and Ranger didn’t think that if he suddenly turned aggressive on both of them that he would still be welcome at Granny Florence’s house anymore. If he wanted to stay in Tamarack he’d have to beg at random people’s doors each night, crash with Michelle, or sleep under porches.

He sighed and continued towards the trees, and Sachie followed him.

The path was about thirty yards beyond the tree-line, and it looked like any other game trail as it wandered backwards and forwards between the trees with the randomness of a deer meandering along as it browsed on the vegetation. The snow beneath the trees was thinner, and the snow over the fairy path had been broken multiple times over this night. Ranger saw paw-prints and hoof-prints and boot-prints, and smelt the smells of dog and fox, horse and man, and magic old, new, and wild, all layered over the top of one another.

There was plant-smell, too, but not
bad
plant-smell. He could smell a dozen herbs and spices and tree cinders used for protection – rowan, High John the Conqueror, amaranth, mallow, wintergreen, oregano, arrowroot.

He sniffed an evergreen laurel plant that had been scent-marked a dozen times already, then moved to the maple tree a little further along the path and lifted his leg to mark it his.

A golden light bobbed along ahead of them for some time as they struggled along through the snow. Sachie struggled, anyway. Ranger, as a wolf, was made for snow, with large webbed paws to distribute his weight better and a narrow chest to push through deep snow like the prow of a boat.

“Where are we going?” Sachie panted, and Ranger wished he would go home.

They were almost to the clearing where the Council met on full moons when the soft golden light started drawing closer to them, rather than moving ever away. Sachie barely had time to inhale sharply before the little white-gold fairy fox appeared out of the shadows of the forest, a brass lantern with an orb of light inside it hanging on a rope of woven flowers around her neck.

A crow’s skull was tied to the rope by a thread of grass wound between its eye-sockets.

She yipped at them impatiently, running around behind Sachie’s heels to nip at them and hurry him along.

“You’re the fox from the other day!” Sachie said, and the little fox chattered irritably. “Okay, I’m coming, I’m coming.”

The clearing was free from snow. It didn’t look like it’d been cleared of snow, it looked like it had never fallen in the first place. The grass was still lush and green under the silver light of the full moon, and there were wildflowers growing, even though the season was wrong. Ranger stepped over the ring of mushrooms at the edge of the clearing and into the fairy circle. Sachie followed him, then stopped dead in his tracks to stare about himself with his mouth half-open.

There were already a dozen animals inside the ring of mushrooms, and more than half of them were wolves. The rusty wolf was there, and so was the black she-wolf with the white patch on her chest. There was a pale female wolf with only three legs lying in the grass with her chin resting on her single forepaw, and beside her there was an enormous brute of a wolf, black as night and almost the size of a small horse, his tail bitten short, muzzle graying. There were two young wolves, barely more than cubs, one sandy-colored, the other slender gray with one milky eye and a scar across her face, and another leggy teenager with fluffy brown fur and a gray ruff across his shoulders. A skinny wolf the color of fresh-fallen snow was slinking around behind the others, head held low, tail tucked, shoulders hunched. He looked terrified.

“There’s a whole pack,” Sachie whispered, and he’d turned his gaze to Ranger now. “There’s a whole pack here in Tamarack, but you aren’t with them.” Ranger could see the moonlight reflecting in his eyes, and he thought of the midnight deer with the starry hide. Sachie looked at the pack again. “So many of them have been hurt,” he said, sadly.

“A lot of people in Tamarack have been hurt, in one way or another,” Lori said from just behind Sachie’s shoulder, and he jumped, pressing a hand against his chest.

She was dressed in a simple white gown, and she had a lantern on a rope of flowers around her neck. Her feet were bare, her toes pink with cold.

“Where’d you come from?” Sachie asked.

“I’ve been here the whole time,” Lori said, reaching up to twist a lock of her hair around one of her fingers. “You just didn’t notice me.”