Unbound (25 page)

Ranger thought he could eat.

He wondered, as he was scoffing a cheeseburger and fries from a drive thru, what would happen to Kylie. Would she be all right on her own with just a wolfdog called Sheepy for company? It might’ve been nice to let her mother know she was okay, and her corpse wasn’t decaying under a tree somewhere in the woods, or underneath the mountain.

“I would’ve come to get you sooner,” Michelle said, sipping her strawberry milkshake. “But the number that’s on your collar and registered with your microchip is the landline, and we were moving back into the old house, so we didn’t have the phone set up until a couple of days ago.”

They had parked at a highway rest area to eat.

“Then the people at the sanctuary kept asking for
Lowell
but giving no details,” she went on. “And I had no idea they were calling about
you
. I guess I should’ve realized – I thought it might’ve been someone doing one of those surveys. Then yesterday they called and told me they were going to put my brother’s former pet wolf to sleep because it was pining and hadn’t eaten or drank anything in ten days and it could barely even move anymore, in spite of being on an IV drip.” She turned her head to fix him with a firm stare. “The adventures you get up to, Ranger, honestly.”

The wolf licked his nose, wagging his tail slowly.

“I assume, of course, that you didn’t intend to end up in Vermont. It just happened that way?”

Ranger barked at her.

“You won’t object if I take you home, then?”

He couldn’t help it. His tail started thumping on the seat, hard, quite of its own accord. Home. That sounded nice.

It was a long trip back to Tamarack. They arrived sometime after dusk, and Michelle dropped Sachie and Ranger off at Granny Florence’s house. Ranger was beginning to feel better, and he made it up the porch steps without too much difficulty. He felt his legs tremble when he regarded the staircase to the top floor, though, and rather than heading up to Sachie’s room he padded quietly into the living room to jump onto the couch and spread out across it, taking up all the cushions.

Sachie laughed wheezily at him, ruffled the fur behind his ears, and went up without him, saying something about a veritable mountain of homework.

On the eve of the Winter Solstice, Ranger went to see Michelle at the old Devereaux family house.

It was an old sprawling timber mansion out in the woods, not too far from the cemetery. There was what used to be a stone stable out the back, though it was just a shed full of gardening tools, now. It had originally been painted pale blue, like the horizon at dawn. Ranger had a strong memory of picking at the peeling faded blue paint on the wall when he was small and watching it float down to litter the dirt like snowflakes in the shade.

It had been repainted since he last saw it, and it was now a cheerful lemony yellow color with white trim, which seemed somewhat old-fashioned to the wolf, but he supposed it had been Michelle’s choice. She liked bright colors.

The giant black wolf with the bitten-short tail that was Dale was lying in the yard in the middle of a patch of pink snow and surrounded by bones, chewing on an enormous foreleg covered in dark wiry hair. Behind him, sandy-yellow Clyde was nibbling tatters of flesh from the base of a huge palmate antler, and gray-furred Yani was napping, her flanks bulging. They’d brought down a moose between them, just as Michelle said they would.

When he caught scent of the gray wolf with the chewed up ear and the scarred muzzle, Dale lifted his head and growled. Ranger skirted around the edge of the yard to the back door, keeping a leery eye on the pack gorging themselves, then sat and yowled at the door.

Michelle beamed at him when she let him inside a minute later.

Ranger stepped cautiously into the boot room, ears flickering back and forward as he took in the pungent smells of fresh paint and turpentine and wood stain and leather oil, and beneath that the much older, mustier scent of damp and mold. He could smell the people who’d worked on the house, their sweat and their laundry detergent and the places they’d been tracked in on their work boots, the meals they’d had here eaten out of paper bags and plastic cling wrap, the lingering odor of roast chicken sandwiches and mayonnaise.

From a distant room came the smell of pigeons, though presumably the flock that had been nesting here had been shooed away and the window repaired.

And beneath it all, so faint that Ranger almost couldn’t smell it at all, was the smell of
pack
and
family
. Generations of Devereaux wolves had rubbed their flanks and their cheeks and their paws against these floors and these walls, but they’d been dead or gone nine years and the scents had faded with time.

The walls had been stripped of their floral paper and redone in a neutral creamy white paint. Ranger supposed mildew had eaten up the wallpaper, but he immediately decided that he missed the red and white roses curling down the walls, even as he was wiping he cheek along the wall that used to have the painting of the old ship rolling on the ocean on it.

“You look much better already,” Michelle said, looking him over thoughtfully. “I take it Detective Bower’s been feeding you up again?”

Detective Bower had taken Sachie to LaVergne’s butchery and come back with more meat than would fit in the freezer – and most of it was for the wolf. Ranger had found himself eating duck for breakfast, which was something of a novelty for December, followed by a salmon fillet with scrambled eggs and spinach for lunch, and green lamb’s tripe and rice and peas for dinner. Normally he was content with oatmeal and milk or perhaps a nice fat rat, or perhaps a squirrel.

Even though he’d been feeling a bit sick with all the rich food by dinner, he didn’t want to be rude, so he’d eaten what was put in front of him and then had to lie down for most of the evening because his stomach hurt.

“We’re having venison for breakfast,” Michelle said, wrinkling her nose. “I bought bacon two days ago, but then Dale dragged that moose into the yard, and I was obliged to take a leg. They won’t come inside, you know. The closest they’ve come is the porch. Anyway, can I show you around?”

He gave her a big, wolfy grin and twitched his tail, so she led him through to the living room, where he discovered that Granny Florence’s grandmother’s rocking chair had been salvaged, but the old couch hadn’t been.

“Rats got into it,” Michelle said. “They ripped out all the stuffing.”

The bear’s head mounted on the wall was still there, and while it was a little bald in a couple of places and one of its glass eyes had been replaced, it was almost as impressive as it had been when Ranger was small.

Michelle showed him the bedrooms upstairs. The master bedroom was empty, and paint on the walls was still tacky.

“No one wants this room,” Michelle said.

It had belonged to Lucille and Simon Devereaux. Ranger understood. There might be ghosts.

It was a home for ghosts, Ranger thought, as he peered into the room that Aunt Lilian used to share with Uncle Fritz, both dead nine years along with their children.

“No one wants to go in there, either,” Michelle said, mournfully.

There were a lot of spaces that didn’t belong to the living up here.

They went back downstairs and Michelle made breakfast.

“Winter Solstice tomorrow,” she said, as she was plating up some lightly fried venison. “You haven’t worked out who the killer is, have you? That’s not why you ran away?”

Ranger whined sadly.

“Yeah, I didn’t think so. We shouldn’t – should we trek out to see the Leshy again?” Michelle looked sort of sick even as she suggested it, and Ranger knew she really,
really
didn’t want to, but she was beginning to get desperate.

Going out to see the nature spirit in the woods wasn’t a good idea. The Leshy might decide to actually eat them if they went back to pester it about something they’d already asked it about – it was not known for its patience, but rather its desire for solitude and a certain enjoyment of playing the odd malicious trick. And devouring people.

Ranger imagined it picking his flesh its huge tombstone-like teeth with a broken shard of his femur and shuddered.

“Good,” Michelle muttered. “But what are we going to do? Just go to the cemetery tomorrow, wait for whatever happens, and hope we don’t all die?”

The wolf mulled that over as he chewed on his piece of venison and decided there wasn’t a lot more they could do.

If Lupa was loosed then they might all die anyway. They had kept her bound for so long she might turn around and eviscerate them all.

If Lupa was killed then they would be exiled from Tamarack, along with everyone else of a magical persuasion. Half of them wouldn’t make it to Colorado and Gaibhne. Some of them would be picked off by hunters of the supernatural, or by malevolent beings like redcaps or kelpies or vampires or older evils. Some of them would get lost in human cities. Some of them might head to Europe or South America or Asia in search of a better place.

And some of them would just sicken. Not the wolves and not the witches – they could live without the magic of a god. Of Lori and Runa, the sylphs and the sprites and the spriggans, the boggarts and the bogeys, the goblins and the hobgoblins and the changelings, and the ghostly doe in the woods with the single spiraling horn on her forehead, only a small handful would survive.

And either way, if Lupa left or if She was killed, then the things down in the mine would no longer be held in check and they would come boiling up out of the belly of the earth to roam free in the world and wreak terror and pain.

No, there was nothing to do but go to the cemetery on the evening of the Winter Solstice and hope that what remained of the pack would be enough to stop the ritual.

So that’s what they did.

Just before dusk on the misty Tuesday of the Winter Solstice, Ranger, Detective Bower, and Sacheverell set out for the cemetery. The detective and his son rugged themselves up in jackets and socks and scarves and struggled along slowly in the snow which went to halfway up their shins. The wolf ran ahead of them then circled around behind them, casting for scents, but all he did was startle a ginger tom cat sitting on a fence.

There weren’t many people in the cemetery – far fewer tonight than had come to the fairy ring on the night of the full moon. Just a handful of the oldest members of the Council of Elders, and the Guardians. Ranger could smell their fear and their unease. It was a bitter, acrid smell, so strong he could taste it at the back of his throat if he breathed too deep.

Madam Watkins had brought her iron brazier with her. She was burning alder branches and sage and some sort of pungent dried herb that Ranger couldn’t identify by smell. He suspected it was rare, and that she’d bought it rather than attempting to cultivate it this far north.

Hadrian Lynch and Professor Seybold knelt under the Old Hemlock Tree, their heads bowed, lips murmuring in a chant that the wolf did not understand but had heard before.

Claire Bower was trying to get the rotting human hand with red twine tied to each finger hanging from one of the branches of the oak tree on the other side of the cemetery down using a long stick.

And the wolves were circling, restlessly, around and around the graveyard. The Tamarack pack was gathered in its entirety. The few remaining members of the old guard were lean and scarred and shaggy-coated. The pale wolf with only three legs, the big black brute missing half his tail and his muzzle grizzled white with age, the younger black she-wolf with the white chest that limped on her left elbow, and the slender gray creature only that had one good eye. The rest of them were young, on the cusp of adulthood, all paws that they hadn’t grown into yet and lanky bodies and soft fluffy fur, untested by combat or trial.