Unbound (27 page)

Cern paused.

“You killed my family. My brothers are gone. My wife is gone. My parents are gone.
My little cousin is gone
. Because of you. And now you’re taking the White Wolf and my home from me, too.”

The great deer said nothing. His silence seemed to enrage Dale more than His penitence would have.

“Mickie’s dead. The little girl I held when she was just a few minutes old is
dead
,” Dale shrieked.

Ranger couldn’t look at the pale wolf with three legs, lying so still, her fur matted with mud and melted snow and viscera. Claire Bower, her hands bloody, looked, and stifled a rasping sob.

Detective Bower remained silent and frozen over the body of his son.

Cern looked, too, and He sighed tiredly.

“
All things must die.
”

Ranger wasn’t sure whether Dale forgot that wolves do not hunt large prey alone, but rather in a pack. Dale roared, bounding forward, limbs twisting, claws sprouting from his fingertips, fur appearing all over his body. Cern bounded to meet him, lowering his antlers and sweeping Dale off his feet.

There was a terrible sound, like the crack of a gunshot, and then silence. The great deer shook Dale off his antlers, and the enormous black wolf fell limply to the ground. He did not stir.

Cern was bleeding. One of His antlers had snapped off at its base, and the wound leaked golden blood down His brow and over His cheek. When a droplet of gold dripped from His chin and hit the churned up snow, the snow hissed and melted, and a small tree sprang up. The tree grew three feet, flowered, lost its leaves, withered, and melted away to dust in a matter of moments.

Yani whined, pacing backwards and forwards, and ran to her father. She nudged his shoulder with her nose, yowling desperately. Clyde joined her a moment later.

Ranger glanced from the bleeding god, plants springing up and dying again around its feet as glistening blood pattered onto the snow, to Dale and back again. He had to
know
. Fearfully, looking Cern in His silvery eye, the gray wolf with the scarred muzzle crept toward Dale’s body, belly low to the ground, his tail tucked up between his legs.

Cern watched him impassively, but did not try to stop him.

Dale was still breathing. His one eye was open and staring, glazed. The other was a mess of bloody jelly. Cern’s antler had entered his head just behind his left ear, broken off and lodged there. Silver-tipped tines streaked red stuck out through his left eye socket and had torn through his cheek. Ranger didn’t understand how he could still be
alive
.

Lupa stepped up to the wolves gathered around their fallen father and uncle. She sniffed at the antler, looked down upon Dale sadly for a long moment, then breathed on his nose.

Dale sighed.

“
All things must die
,” Cern said, again. “
But not tonight, Witch-wolf.
” And He and Lupa went away into the forest.

The full moon came and went, and after it the New Year dawned, dark and cold.

They never found Madeleine Knowles’ body. General consensus was the demons had eaten her the Tuesday night after the dead-demon-wolf ran Ranger out of Tamarack, three weeks before the Winter Solstice. They found her teeth on a bronze pedestal in an eight-pointed pentagram drawn in chalk in Madam Watkins’ basement, along with all the others. All the teeth had been meticulously cleaned, and they all smelled strongly of bindweed.

Dale lingered somewhere between life and death for several days. They took turns watching over him as his breathing rasped and his heart beat erratically. Claire Bower taught Nicole and Yani how to lift his huge, shaggy head and pry open his jaws to put little bits of snow and ice in his mouth to melt and trickle down his throat. She mixed up bitter-smelling pastes for them to wipe on his wounds so they didn’t become infected.

Ranger spent long hours curled up on the rug before the fire next to his uncle in the yellow-and-white timber mansion in the woods while Nicole cursed and swore over housework she was unaccustomed to, and Yani and Clyde played in the snowy yard.

On the thirteenth day after the great deer gored him, Dale woke up.

He was not the same. His feet seemed too big for him, and he tripped over them. He got confused. Sometimes he didn’t seem to recognize them. He hesitated at the doorway to peer out into the woods across the garden, ears twitching, nose quivering, eyes wide and darting fearfully from side-to-side, every time he went outside.

Ranger occasionally wondered if he was in pain, or whether the antler lodged in his skull didn’t bother him. Whether he couldn’t even feel it at all. Whether they should’ve just let him die in the woods because that might’ve been kinder in the end.

Wolves weren’t the sort of creatures to dwell on anything for too long. Someone on two legs might linger over the past, but animals lived in the present, and Ranger decided eventually that if Dale was really miserably unhappy with his existence he would stop eating and that would be the end of the matter, and then put it out of mind.

Ranger spent a good portion of his time at Granny Florence’s house, quietly keeping Detective Bower company. The detective spent long nights sitting awake with a glass of whisky in his hand, staring into the fire. He looked pale and drawn most days. People from around the town brought him casseroles and pasta bakes and soups along with words of sympathy and sad little frowns that they directed at him when his back was turned. The refrigerator and freezer were both full of food that the detective only picked at before putting his plate on the kitchen floor for the wolf to finish off.

The wolf ate a
lot
of casserole.

“He wasn’t my son,” Detective Bower said one night, just after the quarter moon, when he was sitting on the couch in semi-darkness, with the lamp on the side table lit and the fire in the grate died down to embers. At some point he’d replaced the lampshade with a hideous furry bile-green monstrosity with a hanging fringe, and Ranger was sorely tempted to steal this one and rip it to shreds, too because he hated it.

“My biological son died a long time ago, long before my wife. But he might as well have been mine. I treated him just the same anyway. I
loved
him just the same.”

The wolf whined and placed his chin on the detective’s knee. Detective Bower scratched him behind the ears, his eyes distant.

“I’m going back to Boston after Imbolc. There’s nothing for me here, now. I’ll come back at Beltane to visit my parents, but not to stay.”

Ranger understood.

Families steeped in magic were packing up and leaving Tamarack already, even though the magic left by the god Lupa had seeped into the ground here and would remain for months still, even though the White Wolf of the Woods was gone now. Runa was talking about going back to the Black Forest, to the headwaters of the River Danube, and taking Lori with her. The sylphs and the sprites and the gnomes and the boggarts weren’t migrating yet, but they would probably start to move west soon, towards Gaibhne.

Claire Bower would stay.

“I don’t need magic,” she said to Ranger, when he went to visit her and her husband. “I’m old, and this is my home with or without Lupa, and being able to cast little spells every now and again won’t change that. My parents are buried in the cemetery, and so are my sisters.”

The wolf could understand that, too.

The day before the full moon he went to the old Devereaux house late in the afternoon and herded Dale out the door, nipping at his hocks and his flank gently to drive the big black wolf forward when he balked. The two of them looped the town and then went out into the woods. Ranger kept getting whiffs of the sharp sweat of a big game animal and the electrical smell of old magic but Dale didn’t seem to notice.

They went by LaVergne’s butchery, and Charlie gave them both a long, considering look before tossing Ranger a rope of pork sausages and shooing them out the door.

Somehow, quite without knowing why his feet led him there, Ranger ended up in the cemetery, looking at the hemlock tree while Dale gobbled up the sausages over by the Mercier family mausoleum. The needles of the carcass of the hemlock tree had all turned yellow and the bark was falling away in great strips. It was deteriorating quickly – by this time next year, it would’ve probably rotted back into the ground.

Sachie and Michelle had been buried beneath the dead tree. Fresh snow had fallen since their interment, not far from the body of the white-tailed deer buck, but someone had stuck a couple of stones brought up from the river over the heads of their graves, so Ranger knew where they lay.

Madam Watkins’ body was not here. Hadrian Lynch and Deputy Hunter had dragged it out into the woods and burned it with a bundle of sage and sprinkling of myrrh.

The wolf was considering the graves when he heard a snort and spun around to face the forest, his tail tucking between his legs quite of its own accord.

The great deer stepped delicately over the low stone wall surrounding the cemetery. He looked lopsided with only one antler. The wound on His head had healed over, the fur grown back over, and a couple of glittering silver speckles like stars in its place. Cern approached the wolf slowly, picking His way between graves with care not to stand on any of them.

Ranger considered fleeing, but the deer did not seem angry. Cern did not stamp His hooves or lower His head rack first. Instead, He stepped up beside the wolf to regard the old hemlock tree quietly for a moment before twisting his head around to muzzle at Ranger’s head.

The wolf felt a hot whisper across his ears, smelt the sweet grass and peppermint smell of the great deer’s breath blowing over him. He steeled himself and glanced up at Cern, ready to flee if he needed to – but the great deer was gone, and in its place was a coltish boy, about seventeen, with eyes the color of amber that reminded Ranger of fall.

“Do you ever feel tired?” Sachie asked, and his voice was that of a teenager and not that of a thousand, thousand people and animals crying out in joy and anger and agony. “Like you’re sick? Like you’ve been sick for a long time and you’ll never get better, even though you’ve tried everything, every cure?”

Ranger wasn’t sure what Sachie was talking about. His heart from the time he was human, or something else?

“This world isn’t meant for gods or magic anymore. It’s for men and machines,” Sachie said. “All things die, wolf. Do you see? We’re relicts, every last one of us – you and I shouldn’t be here. Our time is ended. My kind has been hunted and killed, or caged – and we brought it on ourselves. And yours survives in small pockets, clinging to a way of life that is ceased. I feel, sometimes, that I was more awake when most of me was asleep and I had no idea about gods or magic or men that turn into wolves, or any of it.”

The wolf whined.

“Madam Watkins understood that the time of magic was ending, and she lamented that loss. I culled her soul myself – I know everything she felt, everything she intended. Things got twisted up because of the demons, but the foul beasts wouldn’t have stopped her long. She had a strong will that would’ve overcome them. She would’ve killed Lupa, and then she would’ve tried to put things back the way they were, back to when the gods were free and high magic was real. It doesn’t work that way, though, does it? We got ourselves bound up for a reason.”

Ranger hunkered down in the snow next to the headstones.

“You, of all people, seem to know how it feels. The sick-not-sick feeling of loss you don’t want,” Sachie told him. He smiled slyly. “You’re very resistant to it. The curse is lifted. You’ve been free for more than a moon, Lowell Devereaux, and yet I see you’re still on four legs. You going to stay that way forever?”

Ranger could feel the tug of the moon deep in his bones even now, like the drag of waves at the seashore as they washed back out, but he’d suddenly discovered that he was afraid to be human again. Things were so much simpler as a wolf.

“It’s not really losing something, you know. Just change. All things die to begin again. Anyway, I might stick around awhile. I like it here, as much as anywhere – we can be relicts together.”