Unbound (4 page)

“Well,” Sachie said, when the clock read seven thirty. “I guess I better get going. See you, Dad. Don’t get killed today.”

“I won’t,” Detective Bower muttered, sighing heavily. “You’ve got your note for gym?”

“Yeah.”

The wolf followed Sachie out the front door, down the porch steps, slippery with early morning dew, and across the overgrown front garden. As Sachie fiddled with his phone, the wolf pricked his ears listening carefully and sniffing the air for any hint of gamey deer-smell, but there was nothing. It was like the deer hadn’t even been this way. All Ranger could smell was the earth-detergent-socks-toothpaste-old-magic scent of Sacheverell, and the wet concrete, and the heady lavender from the bush in Aunt Abby’s front garden.

Aunt Abby’s green front door banged open, making both the wolf and Sachie jump. Eli came tumbling out, breath steaming, backpack bouncing on his back.

“Bye, Mom,” he called over his shoulder, as he tripped over a rosebush, recovered himself, spotted Sachie and broke out in a wide grin. “Hey, Sachie!” He noticed Ranger and skirted around him cautiously, with a soft: “Hey, dude.”

Ranger lifted his lip at him to show tooth.

“Why’s Ranger hanging out with you?” Eli asked. “He doesn’t usually come to this part of town anymore, not since Granny Florence died.”

“I have absolutely no idea,” Sachie replied. “Wait – Granny? She was
your
grandma too?”

“Hm? Oh, yeah.”

Sachie was obviously doing the mental math, because he said a moment later: “That makes you my second cousin as well!” He swore to himself, shaking his head.

“Well, yeah,” Eli said. “You didn’t know?”

“Why does everyone keep asking me that?”

Ranger left the two of them walking to school together and headed downtown, keeping his ears open for the tell-tale stamp of a hoof on concrete or snort of a deer. None came.

He hoped to catch the scent of sweet rotting death again, and downtown was the best place to do it. Everyone in town shopped between LaVergne’s butcher shop and the Mercier family’s grocery. Chain stores hadn’t managed to get a foothold in this small community – though that was perhaps because the Devereaux family had refused to sell them the land they would need to set up both a store and a parking lot anywhere within the town boundary, rather than for lack of trying.

It probably didn’t help that no one had been able to reach Lowell for the past nine years, Ranger thought, as he wandered past the little hardware shop with his nose to ground.

At the butcher’s shop, Charlie LaVergne greeted the wolf cheerfully when he stepped through the door and offered him a slab of lamb.

“We don’t often see you in town, Ranger,” Charlie commented. “What brings you down from the mountains?” His expression hardened, as he said: “Have you been hanging around since we found old O’Reilly?”

Ranger whuffed at him.

“Right. You’re looking into it? You know, Madam Watkins doesn’t know any spells that need human teeth. You don’t think it’s just a regular serial killer, do you?”

Ranger flicked an ear. He didn’t. A normal human serial killer wouldn’t stink so much like dead things.

“Yeah,” Charlie agreed. “It seems more like forbidden magic, doesn’t it? Good luck.”

Ranger picked up his piece of lamb and carried it out of the shop and into the little flower garden at the town center, where he lay down in a drift of red and yellow leaves beneath a hickory tree to eat it. When he was done, he fossicked around in the leaves until he found a sizeable stick, which he chewed up into splinters and spat out onto the grass to wear off some of the frustration building in his chest and jaws.

The sheriff and Madam Watkins and possibly even Detective Bower were all chasing their own tails, and they didn’t even know that there was something evil hunting them, and it would come and kill again in two days’ time! And worst of all, Ranger had no way of letting them know. All he could do was whine at them and wag his tail and they would talk at him and pretend to understand, but there was really no way to tell them what was happening.

After, the wolf went into the Mercier’s grocery and padded up and down the aisles, but all he smelt was perfume and oranges.

In a huff at his own lack of success, he wandered towards Michelle’s house to see if she’d returned home from Norfolk yet, but she didn’t answer her door, so he padded down to the school and made his way through the halls, looking for Sacheverell.

Ranger found him sitting on the bleachers in the school gym, watching the other students from his class play dodgeball. A couple of kids were distracted by the wolf, and were tagged by other students, and Coach Moth yelled at them to focus.

“You’re a really strange dog,” Sachie said, when Ranger hopped up onto the bench beside him.

Eli took a ball to the nose and started bleeding and Coach Moth sent him off to the bathrooms to get some toilet paper to staunch it. When he returned with a paper towel held up against his nose, already spotted with blood, he sat down on Sachie’s other side.

“Want to come to mine after school?” he asked. “We do a study group on Mondays and Wednesdays, and movie night on Fridays. If you’re interested.”

Sachie looked guarded. “Who else would be there?”

“Just a few people from class.”

Sachie glared at Eli, like that wasn’t a good enough answer.

“Uh, well,” Eli said, thoughtfully. “Lori and Alyssa always come. Lori’s a senior, but she helps us out a lot. And Evan and Linc sometimes come too, just depending.”

“All right, then.”

Rather than accompany them home after school, Ranger went to the police station to view the bodies being kept in the morgue. The smells of disinfectant and embalming fluid were overwhelming. He didn’t find anything new there.

Discouraged, he returned to Granny Florence’s house and curled up on the wooden bench by the door where he napped until Detective Bower came home, a faraway expression on his face.

Ranger roamed Tamarack on Monday, returning to Granny’s house before dark rather than risk another encounter with the deer. On Tuesday, he went to Michelle’s and bark-whined outside her door until she let him in, and then he stayed with her the entire day and then all night.

He knew that the murderer probably wouldn’t try to kill Michelle. Like the rest of the Devereaux family, Elijah included though his surname was Copeland after his father, the Hunter-Merrills, the women of the LaVergne line, and various members of the Council of Elders, Michelle carried a taint on her soul not easily scrubbed away. And from what the wolf could tell, the murderer was only taking the cleanest human souls as his sacrifices.

Still, Michelle lived on her own. The wolf worried about her.

The following morning, they were eating waffles in the kitchen when someone knocked on the door. It was Sheriff Hostler, expression grim.

“Who was it?” Michelle asked.

“Bjorn Einarsson,” the Sheriff said.

Ranger only knew Bjorn distantly, more by sight than anything. He’d been a tall, broad-shouldered, powerful, blonde-haired, blue-eyed man originally born in Iceland who’d come to Tamarack a long time ago, back when he was young. He’d been nearing fifty last time Ranger saw him, but that was a couple of years ago at least. Granny Florence had had him around for afternoon tea one rainy day while the wolf was hanging around like a bad smell, and they’d shared cookies and stinky fish.

The wolf watched Michelle tangle her fingers in her pajama shirt and clench until her knuckles went white. She smelled like fear. “Where was he?”

“Down by the mill,” the Sheriff replied.

“And his teeth?”

The Sheriff hesitated, and swallowed a little sickly. “Taken. It was worse this time. Bjorn clearly put up a fight. He was – he was quite torn up.”

Michelle’s brow furrowed, and she hugged herself as well as she could with only one arm. “Right. Okay.”

“Is there anything you can tell us?” the Sheriff asked.

The wolf knew that there would be five more deaths to make a full nine. Three threes. The strongest number for sacrifices.

Michelle shook her head, catching Ranger’s eye as she did so. “No, there’s nothing more.”

When the Sheriff left, Ranger let himself out also. The mill was only a couple of miles away, and it didn’t take the wolf long to run there. When he arrived, they were still processing the crime scene. Bjorn’s body had been taken away, but Ranger didn’t need to see it. Instead, he started casting for scents, searching for anything beneath the overwhelming coppery tang of fresh blood.

Deputy Hunter walked past him, bringing with him a whiff of the sweet rot so powerful that the wolf almost retched. Ordinarily, he didn’t mind the smell of rotting meat. It sometimes meant that there was something tasty to eat. But the sweet rot left behind by the killer got caught in the back of his throat and sickened him.

He traced Deputy Hunter’s footsteps to another part of the crime scene, where little yellow markers were placed along a line of blood droplets. There was something wrong with the blood, though. It was tarry, and it stank.

Bjorn had wounded his killer, and his killer had left a trail as they fled the scene.

The wolf could follow a trail like this. There was nothing easier!

He took off along the trail, nose to the ground, tail wagging, claws skittering over gravel.

“Ranger’s caught a scent!” one of the Deputies shouted behind him, but the wolf ignored them, bounding along Mill Road and turning right onto Cedar Quill Street.

And, as he was passing Madam Watkins’ little cottage, he got a nose-full of burning plant-smell. It was mulberry juice and sage cinders, myrrh and monkshood. The wolf backed off, sneezing violently, his eyes watering. He pawed ineffectually at his nose, whined high in his throat.

“What is it?” Deputy Hunter asked, panting as he caught up to the wolf. “Did you lose the scent?”

Ranger wasn’t sure. He went further down the street, searching for further droplets of the rotting black blood, but found nothing, and he could no longer smell the sweet rotting death smell. He doubled back and found it again, followed it to the plant-smell, then circled around, searching, but the sweet rot smell ended here.

Suddenly, he understood.

The killer knew the wolf was hunting them. That was why they had left such a mean trick behind them, in the form of the burning monkshood smell. And the killer could hide the sweet rot, make it disappear.

“False alarm, everyone,” Deputy Hunter called to the other police officers. “He lost the trail.”

Ranger snarled to himself. He hadn’t
lost
the trail. The trail went dead. There was a distinct difference, but he couldn’t explain that to anyone.

Irritated, the fur along his back prickling, Ranger left the crime scene behind and went to run in the woods behind the town for a while. He hunted and killed a squirrel, then crunched it up, spitting out tufts of fluffy tail, though it was hardly even a snack. He went further afield, miles into the hills, wading through two streams and a river, crossing a valley floor and wandering along a high ridge where a cold wind ruffled his fur, to mark the trees that edged his territory.

As the sun began to sink into the mountains to the west, he returned to Tamarack, giving playful chase to an unwary coyote about five miles from town. He went first to Detective Bower’s house and scratched on the door. No one answered, and there were no lights on, so Ranger assumed no one was home.

He recalled that Eli had study groups on Wednesday evenings after school, and ambled up the street to the house with the green door edged by the rose bushes, where he sat on the doormat and yowled.

Aunt Abby opened the door.

Aunt Abby was a dark-haired woman with dark eyes and a warm smile. She had crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes already, although she wasn’t even forty, the wolf didn’t think. She must’ve only just got home from work, because she still smelled strongly of old blood and sharp-sterile alcohol and formaldehyde.

“Hello, Ranger,” she said, looking bemused. “What are you here for?”

Ranger brushed past her into her house, following the sounds of teenage voices to the den.

He found Eli lying on his belly on the floor, papers spread out around him. A small girl with strawberry blonde hair, at a glance a child but at second glance actually a young woman, was sitting on the couch, propping a textbook open on her knees. Ranger recognized her as Lori Hunter-Merrill. Alyssa LaVergne, Charlie’s daughter, was curled up at Lori’s feet, long dark hair pulled back into a braid and tied off with the LaVergne colors of blue and green, a pencil behind her ear, scribbling in a notebook.