Unbound (12 page)

It didn’t bear thinking about.

“Do you remember when I wanted to be a mechanic?” Sachie asked.

Detective Bower must’ve been used to Sachie’s leaps in logic, because he didn’t even blink at the change in topic. Ranger wondered if it was genetic.

“Yes. You were… eight years old, I believe. That was also the year you wanted to be a fireman.”

Sachie nodded. “Okay. I never want to be a fireman, I don’t know what I was thinking, but maybe I should drop out of high school and apprentice to the local auto repair shop?”

“Is this about dying?” Detective Bower asked. Ranger thought that was a shrewd question.

“What?” Sachie said. “No. This is about my allowance being too small.”

Detective Bower blinked slowly, processing that. “You get thirty dollars a week, Sachie. What do you need to buy?”

Sachie just shrugged. “I don’t know. Stuff.”

The detective raised an eyebrow, and Sachie shifted, looking uncomfortable.

“There’s this book,” the boy said. “At that funny little second-hand bookshop, you know the one between the grocery store and that weird spice shop?”

“I know it,” Detective Bower said. “
Ink and Vellum
? It’s been there since I was a kid. So, this book.”

“Great Aunt Florence had this almost complete set of encyclopedias from the 1800s on herb lore, except for the sixth volume, which was P through S, I think. I wanted to buy it, but it’s like five hundred bucks.”

Sachie looked like he was worried his father would ask why he needed to complete a set of books on herb lore from two hundred years ago, but Detective Bower just nodded thoughtfully, and said: “I don’t want you to drop out of school. But you could get an after school job for Tuesdays and Thursdays. In fact, I think I already know what you can do. Have you ever met your second cousin Mickie?”

“How many second cousins do I have?”

“None on your mother’s side of the family. She was the only child of two only children,” Detective Bower replied. “On my side, you’ve got seven. There were actually ten, but Maxine, Vasiliy, and Emma all died a few years ago. Most of the others live here in Tamarack, incidentally, though I believe you’ve only met Alyssa and Elijah, and not any of the Devereaux family proper yet. Anyway, Mickie might appreciate some help around her home occasionally. She was in an accident a few years ago, and she was quite badly hurt.”

“Uh, maybe. What sort of help would I be doing? Because I can do dishes, I guess, but vigorous vacuuming isn’t really my thing.” He knuckled his chest, absently. Ranger didn’t think he did it because he hurt so much as rubbing his chest was a habit he’d formed a long time ago. Perhaps he was checking for his own heartbeat, like he sometimes doubted he was even still alive.

“If I thought she was going to ask you to do something like that, I wouldn’t’ve suggested it,” Detective Bower said.

Sachie was frowning, still massaging his chest. “I’m not sure how I feel taking money from family.”

“You take money from me all the time.”

The boy twitched, threw both his hands into the air. “That’s different,” he exclaimed. “You’re my Dad. You’re contractually obliged to pay for everything for me until I’m eighteen. And then some.”

“All right,” Detective Bower said, mildly. “If it makes you feel any better, fifteen dollars an hour won’t make much of a difference to Mickie. She’s a Devereaux. She’s managing her brother’s properties and finances while he’s abroad, but she’s wealthy in her own right as well. Simon and Lucille left each of their children a sizeable inheritance.”

“And Lowell got the land?” Sachie asked. “And – there are other siblings?”

Detective Bower nodded. “Yes, and yes.”

“Huh. Well, I guess I could meet her.”

Shortly afterwards, Sachie headed upstairs to get started on his history homework, and Detective Bower wandered into the kitchen to get a beer from the refrigerator then came back and put his feet up on the coffee table. Ranger nibbled idly at his paws then laid his head down to nap a little while before he was let out for the last time that evening.

He was almost asleep when Detective Bower spoke.

“We need to talk, you and I.”

The wolf opened one eye to peer at the detective in the half-dark living room. Detective Bower was staring right back, his brow furrowed.

“My mother called me today to tell me you’d been around for a visit. She said it was nice to see you, but she pointed out that it’s been
nine years
. You’re not stuck like that, you’ve changed back twice that people know about, maybe more while you were up in the mountains.”

Ranger whined, flattening his ears.

Detective Bower’s frown deepened.

“Is it just easier to be a wolf?” he asked. “Except, you’re not doing a very good job pretending to be a wolf. You look like one, sure. But you don’t act right. Sachie’s got that worked out already. He researched phenotyping to find out what you were, and came back with wolf or high content wolfdog. But you’re not behaving like one, and he can tell your behavior is wrong. You don’t even chase cats.”

Perhaps he was just a
very
well trained wolf, Ranger thought darkly.

“I can tell what you’re thinking, it’s all over your face right now, and I don’t think so,” Detective Bower said. “Sure, you chase and eat bunny rabbits when you’re out in the woods, but you won’t chase the town cats? Know why? Because you know them. You grew up with them. When you were younger, before, I know you looked after the Meadowbrook’s cats when they went on vacation, and you wanted to keep their kitten. An actual wolf wouldn’t think about that sort of thing. If it’s small and furry, you’d chase it and kill it.”

Ranger huffed, offended.

“Don’t you give me lip,” the detective said. “Look, the way I see it, is you’ve got two choices. The first is you can face your responsibilities and what happened and you can be human again. No one’s going to blame you for your little break in the mountains. The curse has affected us all in different ways. The second choice is you can keep pretending to be a wolf, or a dog, or whatever you’re pretending to be here, and you can just ignore everything else and hope it goes away.”

The wolf got to his feet and went to the back door, scratching at it to get out. Detective Bower sighed, then hauled himself up and came over to open it for him.

“Think about it, okay? By the way, you’ve got an appointment with Doctor Payne at nine o’clock tomorrow for your rabies, distemper, and parvovirus vaccinations. If you’re going to continue to pretend to be a dog, you’re going to do it properly.”

Ranger slipped past him out into the night, and he didn’t look back.

Doctor Payne was the town veterinarian. He had specialized in large animal medicine, and he worked mostly with cattle on farms around Tamarack, though the wolf suspected he saw his share of cats, too. There were a lot of cats in town.

He was a short man with close-cropped black hair, tanned skin and a strong Northern English accent. Ranger had never had reason to visit a vet before, but he knew Doctor Payne distantly from the Council of Elders, and he’d always thought the doctor’s name was somewhat ominous.

“Ah, Ranger,” Doctor Payne said, when he came out of his examination room following a woman carrying a rather hefty ginger tom cat to find the wolf in the lobby of the vet’s office. “Come on through. I’m expecting you.”

The cat spat at the wolf as he slunk past it into Doctor Payne’s examination room, which smelled like antiseptic and fear.

“Hop up on the table for me, would you?” Doctor Payne said, collecting vials and needles from a cabinet over by the sink.

Ranger eyed the table doubtfully, which really wasn’t wolf-sized, then leapt onto it anyway and lay down on his belly.

“This isn’t the first time I’ve had one of your kind come through my doors, looking for help,” Doctor Payne said. “Though it’s the first time since I took over these offices.”

The wolf fixed him with a baleful stare and lifted his lip to show his teeth.

“None of that. I’m doing you a
favor
, you idiotic creature. Anyway, I suppose it was only a matter of time before one or another of you came through my doors,” the veterinarian went on as he prepped one of the vaccines. “Now, I’m trusting you not to turn around and bite me, Ranger. If you do, I will be extremely offended.”

Ranger growled, licking his nose when Doctor Payne took a handful of his scruff and pressed the needle into the skin of his neck, but he didn’t twist his head about to bite the veterinarian’s hand, no matter how much he
wanted
to.

When the vet had repeated the process twice more he got out a liver flavored dog biscuit, which Ranger took grudgingly, and told him that he’d done well. Then he took Ranger’s collar and added a rabies tag to it before slipping it back over Ranger’s head.

“There you go,” he said. “You’re done. That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

With a disgusted huff, Ranger stalked out of the veterinary office and started loping towards Michelle’s house.

Nicole was wearing an enormously disgruntled expression when she answered Michelle’s front door, wearing a pajama shirt that Ranger recognized as one of Uncle Dale’s old shirts from before he went away. It hung from her slender shoulders, looking a little like a tartan tent, and the sleeves fell down to cover her hands entirely. She smelled like lavender soap and laundry detergent, and not like the woods at all.

“Clyde’s coming home,” she said to Ranger, as she stepped aside to let him in. “Did you know?”

“He knew,” Michelle called, from somewhere deeper in the house. It sounded like the kitchen. “He came with me to Fox Creek!”

“You went to Fox Creek,” Nicole repeated, glaring at the wolf even as she closed and locked the door. “After we
promised
.”

Ranger growl-whined at her, showing her his teeth.

“You didn’t promise?” she asked incredulously, as if he’d spoken actual words, though they both knew he was just making animal noises.

He barked.

“I can’t believe you right now!” Nicole shouted, and stomped off upstairs. She was wearing a new pair of socks, too, instead of the tatty pair of gray ones that had served her faithfully for the past two winters. Ranger thought her new socks – bright purple – might’ve belonged to Michelle.

Ranger padded into the kitchen, where he found Michelle, frying bacon and making toast. He rubbed his cheeks against her knees and then sat on the floor beside her, staring up at her expectantly.

“No,” she said, without looking at him, presumably because she knew she would fall to the puppy-dog begging if she did and slip him a piece of bacon. “You’ll get sick if all you eat is rubbish, and you can’t fool me. I know you go around town begging from people like a stray cat. I hear things from people.”

The wolf gave an indignant huff, but Michelle continued as if she hadn’t heard him.

“Charlie LaVergne was kind enough to give me some marrow bones when I was in buying some steaks, yesterday. You can have a couple of those. They’re in the freezer – I’m sure you can find them yourself.”

Grumbling quietly to himself, the wolf got up and wandered over to the fridge-freezer unit beside the pantry. It wasn’t easy to paw the freezer open, but he managed, sneezing when cold air spilled out into his face. He located the marrow bones wrapped up in a piece of waxed paper by smell, pulled the parcel out onto the kitchen floor, kicked the freezer shut, and began to crinkle the paper obnoxiously as he tried to get one of the bones out.

The parcel had been taped shut. He resorted to tearing it and spitting out little pieces of shredded paper all over Michelle’s kitchen floor, just to be spiteful.

“I should’ve just given you the bacon,” Michelle said, sadly, examining the mess as she waited for the second lot of toast to pop so she could spread it with butter.

Ranger ignored her and focused on gnawing on the frozen marrow bone instead.

Nicole came back downstairs, presumably lured by the delicious smell of frying bacon. She shot the wolf a filthy glance as she sat down at the kitchen table. While she and Michelle ate, they discussed the logistics of cleaning up the old family home, which was on a back road out near the cemetery. Michelle had hired a small local building company to repair the sagging porch and replace the leaking roof tiles and fix the broken windows, but she wasn’t sure what colors to have the rooms repainted, or how to get rid of the pigeons.