Unbound (15 page)

At breakfast on Sunday morning, Detective Bower said: “I have to go down to the station today to look over some files. I thought you might like to head on over to Michelle’s house and get to know her a bit, see what she needs doing around the place.”

Sachie paused halfway through chewing his mouthful of cereal to consider that.

“Okay,” he said, after he’d swallowed. “Sure. Where does she live?”

Detective Bower told him, and Sachie frowned.

“I don’t know where that is.”

Detective Bower sighed. “You have a phone, son, and you have a maps app. If you get lost, you can always ask Ranger to lead you. He knows the way.”

Sachie glanced doubtfully at Ranger, who was sitting beside Detective Bower at the kitchen table, begging for scraps.

“Uh, Dad,” he said. “Ranger’s a dog.”

“He’s smart,” Detective Bower said. “He’ll know what you’re asking him.”

“If you’re sure.” Sachie picked up his bowl to drain the milk, then put it on the floor for the wolf to lick clean. “Well, I guess I’d better go get ready, then.”

He headed upstairs, and Detective Bower shared a look with Ranger, before handing him a strip of bacon.

Sachie spent the walk to Michelle’s house with his shoulders hunched around his ears against the cold, his hands shoved deep in his pockets as he kicked at the day-old snow that had half melted and refrozen overnight. Ranger padded along in front of him, stopping at intersections and before crossing the street to wait for the boy to catch up.

“I’m trusting you,” Sachie told Ranger. “If you get me lost, you’re getting broccoli at dinner.”

There was a big black she-wolf lying on her belly with her head on her paws on Michelle’s porch. She had a gray ruff and a patch of fluffy white fur on her chest. Sacheverell stopped on the sidewalk and stared at the black wolf for a long moment before turning to look at Ranger, who was standing at his side. Ranger wagged his tail.

“There’s more than one of you,” Sachie said, slowly, wonderingly. “Is the entire town of Tamarack just one big, fenceless sanctuary for you guys?”

The big black she-wolf got to her feet and stretched, yawning, before padding across the little front garden to nudge at Sachie’s pant-leg. Sachie froze on the spot, his eyes going wide and terrified, and his hand twitching to fist in his jacket over his heart, though he didn’t look like he was in pain. Then the she-wolf turned to Ranger and they sniffed each other. Ranger took in the scents of soap-breakfast-pack-wolf-home, and added his own scent to it by rubbing his cheeks and flanks against her.

“Guess you know each other, then,” Sachie said, watching them closely. “This is Michelle’s house?”

Ranger yipped at him, once, and led him up to the front door, where he hesitated for a long moment, taking deep breaths and raising his hand to knock before seeming to decide he wasn’t quite ready and dropping it again. He went through this routine three times before he swallowed audibly once, and finally rapped his knuckles on the door and stepped back to wait.

Michelle answered the door after a moment, still dressed in her pajamas, her short blonde hair messy from bed.

“Hi,” Sachie said to her, a little too quickly. “I think I’m your second cousin. My Dad should’ve called you to tell you I was coming over today.”

Michelle stepped back to let him in, casting a faintly terrified glance at Ranger over Sachie’s shoulder.

The big black she-wolf followed them inside, stepping over the threshold quietly as a gentle breeze on a summer afternoon. Once they were all in the living room, everyone stood around awkwardly, and Sachie seemed to be trying very hard not to look at Michelle’s empty right sleeve.

“You can ask, you know,” Michelle said, at last, when the silence was becoming oppressive.

Sachie let out a long, slow breath that sounded a lot like relief, and said: “How many werewolves are there in Tamarack?”

Michelle froze like a deer in headlights and Ranger looked at him sharply. “What?” Michelle said, because that was clearly not the question she’d been expecting.

“Werewolves.” Sachie shrugged. “Ranger’s way too smart to be just a dumb animal, no matter what Dad says. I just figured that if magic is real, why aren’t werewolves?”

“Oh. You know about that.”

Sachie stared at her. “It was kind of hard to miss, in the end. Everyone at school was talking about it. We take a
class on magic
. And there are these books in the attic and I started reading them.”

“You’re Sacheverell,” she said.

“Sachie,” he corrected her, and the corner of her mouth twitched as if she was trying not to smile.

“Did you know that’s a family name?” she asked, beckoning him to follow her into the kitchen. “Not on the Devereaux side, on Granny Florence’s side. Our great grandfather was called Sacheverell. Do you want tea?”

“No thanks,” Sachie said, sitting down at the kitchen table. “So, let me get this straight – I’m actually Sacheverell the Second?”

“More like eighth. It’s been a favored name in the Gonthier family for a long time. I know for a fact that if Alyssa has a son, she intends to call him ‘Sacheverell,’ too.”

“What? She never told me that!” Sachie squawked.

“I suppose it’s somewhat awkward telling someone you’ve barely met that you’re going to name your kid after them,” Michelle said.

Sachie shook his head, looking bewildered. “I pity the child already. Anyway, Ranger’s your brother’s dog, right? Except he’s not
really
a dog at all, so he doesn’t belong to anyone.”

“No, he’s not really a dog, though he likes to pretend he is.”

“To each their own, I guess. How many wolves are there in Tamarack, then?” Sachie asked again, glancing at the big black she-wolf with the white patch on her chest.

“More than you’d think,” Michelle replied.

Ranger settled down on the kitchen floor, tucking his nose under his paws, and the black she-wolf curled up next to him with a contented sigh. Michelle told Sachie about the nature of wolves, werewolves, how they were often shy and skittish around people, and how Ranger and the black wolf – who she called
Coal
– had grown up in the town and lived there for years. They knew everyone, and felt safe.

Sachie listened, raptly, and asked intelligent questions. Then Michelle got out a photo album and showed him pictures of her brothers and sister from when they were all small children, and even managed to find a couple of pictures of Sachie and his mother sitting on a wooden swing under a tree.

“This was taken at the old family house,” Michelle explained. “Just before you had to leave for Boston to be closer to the hospital.”

She ignored him while he sniffled quietly, though Ranger pressed his nose against Sachie’s hand, and he startled and yelped, then grinned apologetically and told Ranger that he’d given him a fright.

Shortly after that, Detective Bower turned up at her door. “I’ve finished what I needed to do,” he said to Sachie. “I can take you home, now.” He said to Michelle: “Do you want him to come back?”

“Sure,” Michelle said. “I like him. He reminds me of my little brother.”

The Tuesday evening before the full moon, a teenager from Sacheverell’s school was murdered. Tristan Houk was eighteen years old, and a senior, and he was killed in the art room just after four o’clock. He’d stayed late to finish an art project. No other murder had occurred until the sun had set and night had fallen completely. He probably thought he’d be safe until almost six.

His body was discovered by a member of the janitorial team at nine o’clock at night.

School was cancelled the following morning. Ranger went to the crime scene to sniff around, but the smell of sweet rotting death was stale and he couldn’t track it beyond the school field. He went back to look at the mangled corpse, because there was something not right about it.

Like Bjorn Einarsson, Tristan appeared to have struggled with his attacker. Blood was splashed across the walls and even on the ceiling, and his stomach had been torn open, his entrails spilling out over the linoleum. Ranger could see the poor boy’s liver had been dragged out.

It took several moments for that information to click.

The
liver
.

Haruspicy was the art of divination using entrails – specifically, the liver of selected sacrificial sheep. The killer wasn’t sacrificing sheep, they were sacrificing people. Looking at a dead
man
’s entrails was anthropomancy, Ranger remembered that. Sachie had covered it in class just the other day.

Tristan Houk was the eighth death. As numbers used in ritual went, four and its multiples were extremely unlucky, but perhaps that was the point?

Bjorn Einarsson had been the fourth death. Had his liver also been pulled out and examined by the killer? Ranger had never seen his body; the police had already taken it away. The crime scene at the mill where he was found had certainly been bloody enough to suggest it might’ve, though.

The scene in the art room had been processed by the detectives late the night before, but the medical examiner’s van had a broken axle and an ambulance wouldn’t be free to transport the body until later in the day. No one was at the scene any longer except for Deputy Hunter, who was standing guard just outside the classroom door to deter anyone who fancied a gander at a dead body. Ranger wanted to ask him about Bjorn, but he couldn’t, because he was just a dumb wolf and he couldn’t convey a question that detailed to a human. It was so frustrating he could’ve bitten his own tail in despair.

He left the school, dragging his toes and holding his head low.

It started snowing as he walked back to Granny Florence’s house. Ranger didn’t mind snow, particularly. It settled on his back but did not melt there because his coat was thick and well-insulated against the winter. He paused in the middle of a quiet street to stare up at the leaden gray clouds, trying to decide whether winter had arrived in the Adirondack Mountains already, or whether they still had another few weeks of rain.

A car came creeping around the corner, no chains on its tires, then it stopped a dozen feet from Ranger and a man wound down his window.

“Get out of the road!” he shouted at the wolf, leaning on the horn, and Ranger recognized Andrew Hilliard from the post office behind the wheel.

Pinning his ears back and tucking his tail, the wolf scurried off the street and ran the rest of the way to Granny Florence’s house.

Detective Bower and Sachie were just locking the front door when he came bounding up the garden path. They were both dressed for the cold, and Ranger recalled that the burial of the deer was today. He’d forgotten – he hadn’t planned on attending, so it had gone out of his mind entirely.

“Hey, Ranger,” Detective Bower said, reaching down to ruffle the fur between his ears. “You coming with us?”

The wolf supposed he was attending the deer’s interment after all. He hopped into the back seat of Detective Bower’s black sedan when Sachie opened the door for him and lay out across the entire back while Sachie and the detective sat in the front.

“I don’t suppose there’s much point asking you not to shed on the upholstery, is there?” Detective Bower asked, glancing in the rear vision mirror as he turned the key in the ignition and the car purred to life. “You’ll do it anyway.”

Claire Bower performed the rites over the deer’s carcass with a burning stick of tightly bound herbs that spat and hissed whenever a snowflake touched it. Sachie seemed surprised to see his grandmother presiding over the funeral of the deer that had crashed through Eli’s living room window, and he frowned in a puzzled sort of way and gave his father a thoughtful glance, but Detective Bower was watching the ceremony closely.

Ranger sneezed when the wind shifted and the smoke from Claire’s smudge stick blew in his direction, so he moved to stand beneath the Old Hemlock Tree. Lupa, the White Wolf of the Woods appeared next to him, fading into existence as if she’d stepped out of a fog.

She sniffed his ear curiously. Ranger heard Her snuffling breath, but did not feel even the gentlest brush of air against his fur. Then She lay down on the hemlock needles beside him to watch as they lowered the dead white-tailed deer buck into the rough hole in the ground near the tree. Her nose was pink. So were the pads of Her paws and the skin around Her eyes, which were the palest gray, like the sky just after dawn on a rainy day. She was big as a small horse.