Unbound (23 page)

“Damn,” she said, softly. “He looks like a ‘Scruffy.’”

Ranger chuffed at her.

They took him to an outdoor kennel in a run with a concrete floor and a high cyclone fence that he didn’t think he could jump over, and put him inside. There was a lock on the door – not a latch, a proper lock, and Ranger wondered whether it was there so the wolves didn’t escape, or so that no one let them out.

There was a wolf in the nearest enclosure, which was small and on the other side of the walkway. She was slender and leggy, with big brown eyes and a somewhat patchy golden coat. He wondered if she had mange, and then he stopped wondering about anything except which was the furthest corner of his kennel from her, because she rushed the fence, snarling savagely, the whites of her eyes forming a wide ring around her irises.

The young black woman gave a nervous laugh. “Do you think they’ll be okay? She won’t disturb him?”

“Probably not,” Wright said. “Clover’s normally like that. She usually calms down fairly quick, normally when Sheepy comes out. Listen, Pearl, I’m headed home now – I would’ve clocked out two hours ago, except I had to go get him.” He nodded at Ranger. “You’re on night shift?”

Pearl, the black woman, nodded. “I’ll make sure he gets something to eat.”

“Good. See you tomorrow.”

Pearl and Wright wandered away. Clover threw herself at the fence again, scrabbling at it with her claws, barking and snarling. Ranger tried to ignore her. He also tried to ignore the scents of a dozen wolves all layered up over each other in his kennel as he went to the corner to lift a leg against a fence post. He ate some snow to cool his throat, then slipped into the little wooden shelter box to sniff around in the straw.

Pearl came back ten minutes later with a head torch on, balancing a couple of large metal bowls. Clover suddenly stopped throwing herself at the fence and moved to the door of her kennel, whining piteously, and only occasionally rolling her eyes in Ranger’s direction to lift her lip.

Pearl put the bowls down on the snow. Her keys were on a lanyard around her neck, and she unlocked Clover’s gate first, slipping it open just wide enough to push one of the bowls inside before she pulled it shut again. The golden wolf fell on her food ferociously, a little like a starving Labrador, and Pearl turned to regard Ranger thoughtfully.

“Are you going to maul me for this food?” she asked. It sounded more like a rhetorical question than like she actually wanted a response from Ranger, which was an odd feeling because Ranger was used to people talking to him like he was another person and not like he was a simple-minded animal.

He backed away from the gate, sat down, and stared at her expectantly.

She squinted at him. “Guess you were trained with manners,” she muttered to herself.

Ranger grumbled under his breath as she cautiously unlocked his gate and put the bowl down. He did not rush as she locked his gate again, sniffing the cow’s ribs and chunk of offal he’d been given cautiously. There were the quarters of an apple in his bowl, too, and though they were a little brown – the apple must’ve been cut up hours ago – he snapped them up.

“Good,” Pearl said to herself. “You’re eating. I’ll be back for your bowl later.”

She wandered away again, her hands shoved under her armpits to keep them warm.

Ranger took the ribs back to his little wooden shelter and crawled inside to lie on the straw and gnaw on them. As he nibbled little shreds of flesh off the bones, he wondered where he was, and how far from Tamarack he’d been taken.

He felt a hot sort of shame that made his skin prickle uncomfortably at the thought that he’d run away like a coward. The dead wolf, the demon wolf, he realized, must’ve been a distraction, deliberately placed there to chase him away from the town so that the killer would have free reign to hunt there. It was so obvious in retrospect.

One of the townsfolk would be dead by now. He wondered who, and selfishly hoped it wasn’t someone he knew.

The wolf decided that he needed to go back, and he felt sick, dropped the rib he’d been chewing on and pushed it away with a paw, then curled up and closed his eyes.

He couldn’t sleep. Clover was growling again.

It was midnight or sometime thereafter and Ranger’s heart lurched. There was something pale rustling about in the straw of his little shelter. Not a small something, like a mouse or a rat, but a very big something. The moon came out from behind a cloud, and suddenly he was face-to-face with a dark-eyed blonde girl with choppy hair.

She wasn’t wearing any clothes, even though it was below freezing. She was also quite dirty, with the sort of accumulated grime that only came if someone didn’t bathe for weeks – or months. She smelled like wolves.

Ranger saw a flea crawl down out of her short choppy hair onto her forehead then flick away into the darkness. His skin crawled. He couldn’t abide the idea of fleas, and he wanted to go jump in a stream immediately.

In the run next door, Clover was silent.

“You’re not a wolf,” the girl said. “You’re just pretending.”

Ranger blinked. How did she know? He thrust his muzzle into her armpit and sniffed, and he could only smell wolf.

She growled at him. Her teeth were very sharp looking, and he cringed away from her, flattening his ears.

“Why would you pretend?” she asked. “That’s stupid.”

He turned his head away to stare at the plywood of his shelter instead of at her, and she laughed, a high, giddy cackle that reminded him of a hyena more than a person.

“You can’t change!” she sang, gleefully.

Huffing irritably, Ranger pinned his tail beneath his paws and laid his chin on them. He hoped she would go away. She didn’t. Instead, she shifted in the straw and lay down next to him. He tried not to think about the fleas she might be shedding.

“They don’t let me in with any other wolves except Sheepy anymore,” she whispered, though why she was bothering to whisper when there was no one around to hear her was beyond him. Perhaps she had a flair for the dramatic. “I pick too many fights. They just – they make me so
angry
.”

Ranger wondered why they would let a wild girl with no clothes in to the wolf enclosures anyway. That seemed like a health and safety violation.

“They’re stupid,” the girl said, vehemently. “They’re just – they’re just
wolves
. They don’t care about anything except sleeping and eating and playing. If they were smaller and tamer, they’d be
dogs
. You know who I miss, other than my parents? Mickie. She used to babysit me. Do you remember? You came too, sometimes.”

Ranger twisted around to look at her more closely.

Blonde hair, big dark eyes, a petite face. Freckles on her nose. An old scar on her collarbone, keloid, in the shape of a crescent – a bite from a wolf. He remembered tagging along with Michelle when she went to look after May Wilson’s daughter, the little girl who went missing in the woods with Evan Mueller’s twin when she was very small, the year before the angry god came back to Tamarack.

What was Kylie Wilson doing in a quarantine kennel in a wolf sanctuary in Vermont? Where was Noah Mueller?

He wagged his tail in the straw and slicked back his ears to let her know it was okay. He did remember. Then he leant forward again and – much more politely this time, he’d been a bit rude sticking his nose straight in her armpit like that – he sniffed the bite on her collarbone.

She did not flinch and she did not growl at him, though she did curl her lip a little. Ranger imagined that if she were still shaped like a wolf, her hackles would’ve stood all on end.

He whined softly. He understood now what had happened to her.

“The wolf who took me was old and lonely,” Kylie –
Clover
– said, her gaze going distant. “His name was Solomon, and his pack was dead. He was the last. He came to Tamarack to see the White Wolf, and your mother and Dale chased him away, but he came back in secret and took me. He bit me, and I changed.” She sighed, softly. “He died that winter. The cold seeped into his bones and he didn’t get up one morning. I watched the ravens pick his bones.”

Ranger could smell the salty tang of tears. He wondered whether Solomon took Noah as well, or whether Evan’s twin was dead in the woods. He snuffled at her face, and she pushed him away roughly, but he persisted and she let him lick the tears from her cheeks. She did not sob. Sobbing was not a wolf-like behavior, and she’d been living as a wolf for a very long time.

They sat in silence for a time, until Kylie sniffed and composed herself.

“He told me a story before he died,” she said, a considering note in her voice as she regarded Ranger. “Actually, he told me a lot of stories, but you might find this one interesting.”

The wolf pricked his ears to listen, and Kylie started speaking in a sort of careful way, as if she were reciting something she’d learnt by rote. A couple of times she paused, frowning, and had to think about the story before she continued.

“Once, there was a little village of barely more than a hundred souls. They were beset by many enemies, and sickness went through them. There wasn’t enough food. On Midwinter’s Eve, a wolf came out of the woods to them, and turned into a man.” Here, Kylie smiled wryly. “At first they wanted to chase the wolf-man away, because they thought he was the child of the devil, but he beguiled them with tales of the prowess of wolves. So they let him bite them, and he bit them all, and on the next full moon they all changed and there was not a single man or woman or child left on two feet amongst them.”

Ranger thought she spoke quite well for a girl who had spent the better part of her life as a wolf and not a girl at all. He supposed she spent quite a lot of time each day listening to the sanctuary staff speak to each other.

“When the moon went down, not one of them turned back,” she said abruptly, and she looked him in the eye, like she expected that to mean something to him.

He stared back at her, his ears flicking backwards and forwards as he waited for her to say something more.

“I didn’t know what Solomon meant either,” she said, at length. “He had to explain it to me. You and I are neither wholly human nor wholly wolf. That’s why they say lycanthropy is a curse. Because if there are no people around – regular people,
human
people, to remind us of what we are – then we revert back to animals. Don’t you see?”

Ranger didn’t see.

“You’re stuck,” Kylie explained, slowly, as if she were speaking to a very small child. “Same way as you might lose the ability to shift to a wolf if you lived in the middle of the city with no nature around you to remind you of the animal.”

He wasn’t stuck, not like that. He was trapped in this form because of the taint laid upon him by Cern. He couldn’t feel the moon. He didn’t know how to tell Kylie that in the simplified gestures of canine language, though, so he settled for resting his head on his paws and whining pitifully.

“I can guess what happened,” Kylie said. “Something terrible happened back home and you ran away for a moon or two, and it felt so easy, so free, so
simple
, running around in wolf-skin, and then when the time for you to go back came you couldn’t, so you stayed away. Otherwise you wouldn’t be like this now. Am I right?”

He huffed and rolled over so his back was to her. It was the
taint
, not his own idiocy, which had him trapped in his fur.

She poked him with a clawed fingernail, and he side-eyed her, baring his teeth.

“Don’t believe me, then. But if you spend a little while with some trusted humans, you’ll be right as rain in no time. It’s just a matter of remembering.”

Ranger didn’t think it was that easy. He’d spent
weeks
with the Bower family already.

Suddenly, Kylie froze, cocking her head to the side to listen.

“I need to go back to my enclosure. Pearl’s coming for the midnight rounds,” she said, slipping out of his shelter and scrambling over the fence with a clatter. A moment later he heard her snarl, then bark. There came the crunching of boots on snow. Someone shone a flashlight in through the door.

“You all right in there, Ranger?” Pearl called.