Unbound (5 page)

And Sachie was sitting in an armchair, chewing on his pen. He appeared to have appropriated the crochet blanket that usually sat on the back of the chair, and it was wrapped around his shoulders as he squinted at what appeared to be a text for English class.

All four teenagers looked at the wolf when he walked into the room. Alyssa and Eli shared a significant glance.

“Oh,” Lori said. “Hello there, Wolf.”

Ranger whuffed at her, wagging his tail.

“You have something dead between your teeth,” she told him.

Ranger ran his tongue over his teeth, looking for it, and found a little piece of fluff caught between his incisors left over from the squirrel. He lay down on the floor at Sachie’s feet and set to working it out, and Eli and the others eventually got back to their homework, after a lot of silent glances at each other that just seemed to confuse Sacheverell.

When Sachie left for Granny Florence’s house at eight o’clock, Ranger followed him.

“You know,” Sachie said. “It’s funny. You’re a dog, right?”

Ranger nosed his leg, and Sachie scratched his head between his ears.

“Right,” Sachie said to himself. “But everyone always talks to you like you aren’t. Even I’ve started doing it, and I don’t know why.”

The wolf looked up and met his eye, holding his gaze for such a long moment that Sachie stopped walking and just stood in the middle of the sidewalk, staring at him.

“Why is that? I don’t understand.”

Ranger barked at him, making him startle.

On Thursday evening, Ranger lay under the table and chewed on a leg of raw lamb that Detective Bower had brought home from the butcher’s. Sachie and Detective Bower were eating Thai from the takeaway place one town over and discussing their respective days.

“Religion class with Professor Seybold is really, really weird,” Sachie said, his fork scraping across his plate loudly enough for the wolf to want to nip him on the leg because it hurt his ears.

“Oh, yes?” Detective Bower said.

“Yeah.” There was a pause. Then Sachie started to explain. “Okay, so, right, it’s mandatory. More mandatory than English, which I can apparently drop just so long as I take a correspondence course in another language. But, anyway, in Religion, we aren’t studying the Bible or the Quran or anything. Know what we’re studying?”

“No.” If he had any money, the wolf would’ve been willing to bet that Detective Bower was lying.

“This weird New Age magic stuff,” Sachie said.

“Uh-huh.”

“No, Dad. You don’t understand. Today we learned about how thirteen is actually good luck, but four is a number of ill omen, and seven is especially magical but three is better, and nine is the best. Then he taught us how to draw
circles
. It’s not art class. I didn’t sign up for
art
.” Sachie sighed. “And yesterday, Professor Seybold gave us a lecture on the significance of certain trees. I’m supposed to write a thousand words about the properties of elm and hemlock.”

Detective Bower hummed. “My Great Aunt was into all that stuff,” he said, nonchalantly. “Some of her old books might still be up in the attic. You should take a look after dinner.”

Sachie went up to the attic after he’d put his plate in the dishwasher. The wolf followed him up, and watched in amusement as he fumbled, searching for the light switch. Eventually he found it, and then he stood there, staring at the boxes of musty books stacked around the edges of the attic, and the dried herbs and flowers hanging in bunches from the rack over in the corner furthest from the window, and the deer’s skull, complete with antlers, which had an intricate Celtic knot carved onto the center of its forehead.

“What is all this stuff?” Sachie murmured, staring at the deer’s skull.

Ranger wagged his tail, stirring up the dust on the floor, and sneezed.

“Florence was up to some weird stuff,” Sachie said to himself, as he opened up the first of the boxes and pulled out a leather bound book. “Look at this, Ranger.
Practical Runes
.” He set the book aside on another box, then pulled out a second book, the leather stained black, a sinister flower etched on the front. “
Death in the Garden
.” He pulled out a third book. “
A Beginner’s Guide to the Arcane
.” Sachie turned to look at Ranger. “I should start with this one, then, right? It says it’s for beginners.”

Ranger sneezed again, and Sachie took that as confirmation. He went downstairs to grab a blanket and a pen and a pad of paper, and came back up to curl up beneath the dark window in the attic, where someone had carved something in old French that Ranger couldn’t read on the sill. The boy chewed his pen as he worked, occasionally frowning or muttering to himself about nonsense, or exclaiming when he encountered something they had covered in class.

The wolf stretched out beside him and closed his eyes, letting himself drift. He dreamt of Sachie getting bored partway through the third chapter of dry literature and flipping to the back of the book to look at the basic spell pages there, then flicking through the pages randomly until he had the book open on a page with the R-shaped Raidō rune. He dreamt of Sachie squinting at the explanation under the rune, then copying Raidō onto a fresh sheet of paper.

“
Riding is of sitting a blessing,

And swift journey,

And horses toiling.
”

In the dream, Sachie frowned as he repeated the poem beneath the rune in the book over and over to himself. Horses were galloping outside, Ranger could hear their hoof beats, and Sachie kept saying the poem, words turning to a sort of humming noise like bees in Ranger’s ears.

The wolf woke with a start when Sachie leapt up, swearing and jumping around like a live spark had landed on him. There was a clatter as half a dozen little pebbles fell to the floor.

“Did you
see
that?” Sachie asked, stopping to look at the wolf expectantly.

Ranger blinked, nosing at one of the pebbles curiously. It wasn’t a pebble at all, but a little flat piece of polished glass with a rune painted on it. He squinted at it in the semi-dark of the attic, and made out the H-shaped Hagalaz rune. It smelled strongly of old magic.

“I was – they were—” Sachie tried to explain, breathlessly. “The book, I just did what the book said, and the stones were
floating
—”

Detective Bower came up the stairs into the attic. “Is everything all right? I heard a lot of noise.”

Sachie froze, glanced at the wolf out the corner of his eye. “Yeah, Dad. Everything’s fine. This stuff up here – it’s weird, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is, I suppose,” the detective agreed mildly. “Great Aunt Florence was somewhat eccentric. You heading to bed soon, Sachie? It is a school night.”

Sachie nodded. “Give me half-an-hour, maybe. I’m almost done with my essay.”

“All right. I’m going to turn in now, so try to keep further shouting to a minimum, okay?”

Detective Bower headed back down.

Sachie sighed, then yawned widely, cracking his jaw. “You didn’t see anything at all, did you, boy?” he said to the wolf. “You were asleep. I was probably asleep too and just imagined it. You can’t make stones levitate just by thinking about it and saying a few funny words while you stare at a squiggle on a page. It doesn’t work that way.”

Sachie hastily scribbled out a couple of pages of what he called nonsense for class, packed everything back up, and headed down to bed, just as the first droplets of rain hit the windowpane.

Ranger went down to the ground floor to peer out into the darkness and check for the midnight deer with the moonlight eyes, but it wasn’t there tonight. In the kitchen, he nosed the refrigerator door open and helped himself to a packet of raw chicken thighs sitting on the third shelf up, carefully ripping open the plastic packaging and spitting it on the floor.

When the first arc of lightning flashed across the sky, he went back up to Sachie’s room and nosed his way inside, where he found Sachie just getting under the covers.

“Hey, boy,” Sachie said, as Ranger lay down on the rug on the floor with a sigh, keeping an eye on the window.

Outside, the wind was whistling around the house.

“Where’s your owner?” Sachie wondered. “Why do you spend so much time with us, when your collar has someone else’s number on it? I don’t understand.”

From far away in the hills, there came the thin sound of a lone wolf howling. Ranger pricked his ears.

“What can you hear?” Sachie asked.

Ranger whined, getting back to his feet to push aside the blinds and stare out into the darkness.

Nearer at hand, another wolf started howling, and then a third, and a fourth.

“Those aren’t coyotes,” Sachie murmured. “They sound wrong for coyotes. There haven’t been wolves in New York State since the early 1900s, though.”

Ranger knew those howls. Those were the voices of his family, his pack, and they were hunting in the woods tonight. Feeling miserable, he dropped down onto his belly and crawled under Sacheverell’s bed, tucking his nose in underneath his tail and squeezing his eyes shut and trying to ignore both the calls of his sister and his cousin and the distant rumble of thunder.

The autumn progressed inexorably. The wooded mountains were resplendent with red and gold. The wolf encountered black bears fattening up on the fruits of autumn, while in the trees, squirrels hid away acorns for the winter. Deer migrated. One afternoon, in the autumn sunshine, he brought down an elderly buck a dozen miles from town and feasted until the coyotes and the crows moved in to drive him from his kill. There were frosts at dawn most days when it wasn’t raining.

Two more people were killed, in spite of the wolf spending consecutive Tuesday nights prowling the streets of Tamarack, alert and listening for screams or the smell of sweet rotting death. The first person was Roy Bradshaw, a man from out of state, staying with his family at the little hotel just to the south of town. He’d gone outside to get something from the family’s station wagon, out in the parking lot just outside their room, and then failed to return. His wife, Celia, had raised the alarm forty minutes later.

The police found his body dragged into a ditch, a hundred yards down the road.

A week later, Juliana Haskell was killed when she went outside to put her chickens away. Ranger had been two blocks away, and he heard her cry of alarm, cut short with a gurgle, but by the time he arrived in her yard, her killer was gone having taken her jawbone with them.

The wolf tried to track Juliana’s killer, but he lost the trail when he hit plant-smell infused with monkshood and foxglove and myrrh barely out of her driveway, and backed away, snorting and blinking rapidly. So he’d returned to her corpse, put his head back, and howled until one of the neighbors came over to see what was going on. The man promptly called the police.

When he was not actively trying – and failing – to hunt down the killer, Ranger took to shadowing Sacheverell.

The human boy who smelled like old magic had made firm friends with Elijah Copeland from Aunt Abby’s house just down the street, the one with the green door and the rosebushes. Sachie never missed study group, as peculiar as that may have seemed to the wolf, who took to napping while the teenagers worked on their homework together.

Lori Hunter-Merrill, the very small girl, and Alyssa LaVergne were staple members of the group who showed up every Monday and Wednesday. Friday night, which was movie night, was somewhat more popular with other members of their year. Lincoln Hostler, the Sheriff’s son was often there for movie night, and so was Evan Mueller, a quiet boy with pale skin and pale eyes and pale curly hair, who reminded the wolf somewhat of a very timid lamb. He’d been different before his brother disappeared. The wolf recalled a pair of loud rambunctious twins, but then Noah went missing and Evan became withdrawn.

Ranger liked these teenagers, and made a habit of rubbing his cheeks against all of them except Eli, whose hands he liked to nip playfully.

Sachie spent many of his evenings after dinner and homework up in the attic, trying to get the little glass rune stones to move again, a frown of concentration on his face, but he never managed. Ranger would watch him with his head on his paws and his tail tucked in close, trying to ignore the wolves howling in the hills outside.

On the Saturday night after Juliana died, Sachie went to bed at eleven, before Detective Bower got home. Ranger waited downstairs on the couch for the detective, who eventually came in near two in the morning, smelling of fear-sweat and bourbon, with a wobble in his step.

Rather than going straight up to bed, the detective staggered into the living room and collapsed onto the couch in the dark beside Ranger, sighing noisily.

“I can’t work it out, Ranger,” Detective Bower said, running shaking fingers through greasy hair. “No one – no one knows who it is. But Runa Merrill came into the station today. She’s been keeping an eye on the wards out by the Old Hemlock Tree. Someone’s been countering them and putting up curse markers in their place.”

Ranger nudged his leg with his nose, whining softly.

“They’re… terrible curses. Very dark magic,” Detective Bower continued, idly running his hand over the back of Ranger’s head, massaging the wolf’s ears. “Tooth of a rabid coyote bound together with dried viper’s bugloss and thread stained with the blood of the innocent. Four dead mice tied by their tails with a crow’s skull and hanging from the branches of the Hemlock Tree. A flower of false hellebore tucked into a forked branch broken off an elder tree and planted in the ground, surrounded by nine pieces of obsidian.”

Like Detective Bower said, that was very powerful dark magic. The wolf considered, taking the time to lick his front paws clean. There were only so many people in the town of Tamarack who had access to all of those plants, and the ability to trap and kill crows and mice and rabid coyotes. And there were only so many people skilled enough in magic to hide the smell of sweet rotting death, and to throw off the nose of a wolf so completely when he had their trail.

Unless, the wolf supposed, it was someone from out of town, but surely the police would’ve investigated everyone spending inordinate amounts of time in the local hotel? Or were they staying one town over? Or in the next county and just coming to Tamarack to kill on Tuesday nights?

The wolf thought of Dale Devereaux, wild-eyed and ranting, with his hair in disarray and spittle on his lips, as if he was rabid himself. He would be exactly the sort of person to do something like this, but as far as Ranger knew, Dale was safely contained in the Fox Creek Psychiatric Hospital in Norfolk.

He sighed.

“I don’t know what to do,” the detective said, sounding broken. “And I’m afraid the killer will go after Sachie soon. He’s – he’s vulnerable, you know? You’ll keep him safe, though, right?”

Ranger wasn’t so sure he could.

He hopped off the couch, yawning widely, and went upstairs to curl up on the floor in Sacheverell’s room.

Late on Sunday morning, while Sachie and the detective took a drive down to Norfolk to go to the specialty crêpe café there as a special treat, but mostly because the detective was hung-over, Ranger went to visit Madam Watkins over on Cedar Quill Street. He found her out in her garden, preparing it for the winter by pulling out the dead and dying annuals and bedding down the perennials. A squat, hairy, warty little boggart was helping her by ripping up withered plants.

Madam Watkins was a short, round, old woman with a face creased by long years of smiling and short-cropped gray hair. Were it not for the swirling tattoos creeping down onto her hands from beneath her sleeves and the dangling wren-feather earrings hanging from her ears, she might’ve been anyone’s grandmother. She certainly
looked
the part.

“Oh, hello dear,” she said to the wolf, as he stepped over the dogbane and skirted around the mandrake warily. Her garden could be a dangerous place to the unwary – she supplied everything from poisons to herbs to the local apothecary in town. “Give me just a moment to finish with the datura, and then we can go inside and chat. I’ve got apricot-oatmeal cookies, and I can brew tea. How do you feel about chamomile?”

The wolf sat down next to her and watched as she ripped up the withered old plant that she said was datura.

“End of its life,” she explained to him, digging it back into the soil for reasons that the wolf could not fathom. “It’s not annual; this one was three years old actually, but this plant tends not to live very long, for the most part. Can be a hallucinogenic, under the right circumstances. Very good for visions. Usually just very toxic.”

He twitched an ear, to show he was listening.

She got to her feet a little laboriously, her knees and back creaking. “Right, then. How about that tea? Did you perhaps prefer Earl Grey?”

Ranger snorted, and the boggart scurried off into the bushes, cackling to itself.

“Bother. I’ll have to catch him again the next time I need his help, and he’s a crafty fellow. Chamomile it is for you, young wolf, and you’re not to fuss.” She wagged a finger at him as she wandered slowly towards her back door, shaking the cricks out of her feet as she went. By the time she was kicking her rain boots off at the door, she seemed quite spritely.

The wolf followed her into the kitchen, knowing better than to nose curiously at the plants hanging on the drying rack against the wall.

Madam Watkins opened up the cookie jar, laying out a half dozen cookies on a little ceramic plate, then she set about filling the kettle with water and heating it up on the stove. While the tea steeped, she talked about the upcoming autumn equinox, mentioning that she’d forgotten to grow any pumpkins at all this year and she’d have to buy some instead.

“I’m getting old,” she said. “I can’t remember as well as I used to. I should’ve put them in back in May, but it just didn’t occur to me for some reason.” She smiled to herself. “That’s the nature of things, you know, Ranger? All things get old and die.”

Ranger stared at her.

“Even the stars,” she told him. “But the way people think about death these days isn’t really right, did you know that, little wolf? Because you die and then you become something else. Your body goes in the ground, and out pops a tree, or a lovely laurel bush!” She cackled gleefully. “And then we eat the fruit of the tree, and we continue, on and on, forever.”

The wolf continued to pretend to be paying complete attention to what she was saying, although she had lost him utterly.

“And so it’s been going on forever. The stars died, years and years ago, and we’re made up of stardust from those stars. Even the gods will die eventually, and then they will become something else, just a little shift in energy, in power.” She sighed. “All things come to an end. Seems like just yesterday that Baba Yaga died. I was fifteen, you know, and I met her before she went.”

Baba Yaga had been the last of the high spellcasters. She’d been five hundred and three.

People didn’t get that old anymore.

The tea was steeped. Madam Watkins fell silent as she put the mugs and the plate of cookies on a tray and carried them through to her little living room, which was cluttered with odd knick-knacks and piles of dusty old books. On the mantelpiece there was a crystal orb on a brass stand, a dozen feather quills in a pottery jar, an assortment of semi-precious stones, and an old iron dagger with an intricate engraving on the hilt. On the side table, on top of a teetering stack of leather-bound tomes, there was the skull of a mouflon sheep, horns intact.

On the windowsill, she had an assortment of little cactuses in pots, and in the corner was a spinning wheel with skeins of wool still to be spun.

The whole room smelt like dust and peppermints.

“Well, here we are,” Madam Watkins said, setting the tray down on the coffee table and taking a seat in a floral armchair.

Ranger climbed onto the matching loveseat, lying against the cushions.

“I assume you’re not here for a social visit, then, old wolf?”

He thumped his tail a couple of times. She seemed to have forgotten the tangent about old age she’d gone off on, which was good because he couldn’t ask questions to redirect her with his mouth full of wolf-teeth instead of human ones.

“Yes, yes,” she said. “You’ll be here about those poor souls who were killed, then? I’ve already had the Sheriff, three of his deputies, and that nice young detective from Boston come and talk to me about that.” She paused, pensively, reaching for a mug of tea that she did not sip, but instead stared at, considering.

The wolf chuffed at her to try and prompt her to speak.

“I know as well as you do why those people are being murdered,” she said, at length. “Someone’s trying to evict the White Wolf of the Woods, and they’re using very dark means to do it. There isn’t a lot those dear police officers could do about it, though – if they went up against that murderer, they would be certain to be killed. This is a matter for the Guardians.”

The look she gave Ranger then was significant. He withered under it, shrinking into the couch and flattening his ears.

“I know it’s a frightening prospect, Ranger, but it needs to be done, and you can’t do everything alone. Don’t think I don’t know. You’ve been in town almost a month now, and that’s just about unheard of behavior for you. There has to be a reason, and the reason is the murders. Well, I’m telling you I might not know who’s committing them, but I know why, and I know what you have to do about it. So do you. Yet you’re dallying.”

The wolf whined piteously, and she narrowed her eyes.