Unbound (7 page)

“Look,” Michelle said, her voice a note higher, sounding strained. “Even if Ranger was here because he needed your help, you can’t leave.”

There was a pause, during which the wolf became aware that Clyde had joined them, moving as silently as a ghost to sit down by Michelle’s other side with his knees tucked up under his chin.

“I think you will find, Mickie, that we can leave this institution in more than one way, right now,” Dale said, and although he sounded calm, there was threat implicit in his tone.

“You
wouldn’t
,” Michelle said.

“Ah, but my girl, I most definitely would. I’ve spent entirely too long languishing here. Wouldn’t you agree, my dearest?”

“Definitely,” Yani echoed.

The wolf chanced a glance at Clyde’s face. The boy was biting his lip, staring at Dale, his eyes wide and fervent.

“I’ll – I’ll speak to Doctor Halliday,” Michelle said, then turned and headed for the exit.

Ranger followed on her heel, whining softly.

Doctor Halliday agreed to release Dale and Yani and Clyde on a provisional basis. It would need some time to arrange, she told Michelle, while Ranger lay on the rug at their feet and tried not to lick his nose over and over again in anxiety. Halliday wanted to know if Michelle would be living with Dale and Yani and Clyde alone, or whether there was someone to help her in light of her disability and the challenging nature of her relatives’ illness.

Michelle replied that she would be living with her brother, Lowell, and her sister, Nicole, in the family’s old home, and that she could ask her Aunt Abby for help if she needed it. Ranger glanced at her in surprise when he heard that, because everyone in Tamarack knew that Lowell was never coming back. The wolf supposed it wasn’t knowledge that had spread outside of town.

Doctor Halliday said that it would take some time to organize a nurse to travel in to Tamarack daily to make sure Dale and the two teenagers were having their needs adequately met, and a while to make sure they had their medication and belongings sorted, but they would probably be ready to leave Fox Creek in about two weeks.

Michelle agreed.

Halliday wanted to know why Michelle suddenly wanted Dale and Yani and Clyde at home with her, and Michelle shrugged lopsidedly and replied that her brother was home from abroad now, and it was time.

In the car, on the way down to Norfolk to find a dog-friendly hotel where they could stay the night, she admitted to Ranger: “It won’t take them two days to get Uncle Dale ready to go, and he’d take the longest out of all three of them. It’s probably paperwork or some bureaucratic nonsense holding things up. I don’t mind that much, though. Have you
seen
the family house recently?”

The wolf had not.

“I haven’t been there in, like, five months,” Michelle said, only a little sheepishly. “But last time I was there, the window around the back, by the kitchen, was broken, and there were birds nesting inside. It’s probably going to take at least two weeks to get the place tidied up. I’m going to have to hire an entire work team, oh my god.
Why
did I agree to this?”

She pulled over on the shoulder at the top of the ridge and leant her head against the steering wheel, groaning nauseously. The wolf nudged her empty sleeve gently with his nose, whining.

“This is your fault, you know,” she said to the wolf.

Ranger stopped nudging her and sat back in his chair with an offended huff.

Michelle turned her head slightly to glare at him out the corner of her eye. “Don’t you sass me, buddy. You knew what you were doing the moment you decided to come with me this morning.”

She sighed and sat back up, turning the key in the ignition. “Well, there’s nothing I can do about it now, since I’ve already talked to Doctor Halliday. If you weren’t a
wolf
, I would very much be holding you accountable for your actions, you know.”

Ranger slicked back his ears and tried to look as endearing as possible, but she was watching the road so he didn’t think it worked.

In the end, they couldn’t find a dog-friendly hotel, so Michelle just checked into the hotel she usually used when she visited her family on Sundays and snuck Ranger in while the woman working the reception desk took a break to go to the bathroom. Ranger nosed curiously around the hotel room she let him into, before climbing onto the bed and settling down with a drawn-out sigh.

“You’re lucky it’s coming up to winter, and you aren’t shedding much right now,” Michelle told him, standing at the foot of the bed with her hand on her hip. “If it were summer, and you were blowing your winter coat, I’d have to tell you go be a wild animal in the woods outside of town and to meet me at the car in the morning.”

The wolf rolled onto his back, all four paws in the air, and made a satisfied noise deep in his chest.

Michelle ducked out at dinner time to buy fast food, which she brought back to the hotel room, and the wolf gorged himself on fried chicken and greasy fries and stole all the little packets of ketchup, to Michelle’s consternation. The following morning, they went through a doughnut place drive-thru on the way out of Norfolk.

The wolf napped with his head against the window in the front passenger seat, feeling faintly ill. Doughnuts and fried chicken and fries were not made with wolves in mind.

“I need you to find Nicole for me,” Michelle said, as she carefully took a hairpin bend, waking the wolf. “You’ll do that for me, won’t you? Bring her home?”

He blinked at her lazily then went back to sleep.

When they got back to Tamarack, he bid Michelle goodbye by licking her on the hand and rubbing his cheek against her knee, then he spent the early part of the afternoon roaming in the woods near the cemetery. He ran the length of the ward lines, noting the cat’s skull hanging from the branches of an aspen tree, a bloody thumbprint on its forehead and four eagle owl feathers tied to it. It was too high up for him to reach and tear down, though, so he had to hope that Runa Merrill would see it and destroy it.

Afterwards, he went to Granny Florence’s old house and curled up under the chokeberry bush to wait for Sachie to come home.

Sachie wasn’t happy to see him when he crawled out from under the bush to greet him on the garden path, however.

“Where
were
you?” he asked, angrily.

The wolf wagged his tail hopefully, even as Sachie stomped past him and on up the porch steps. Sachie spun around to face him when he reached the front door, yelling and throwing his arms around.

“You were gone. You missed dinner, you didn’t come in to sleep. I thought you’d been hit by a car!”

Ranger snorted. He wasn’t a
dog
. He wasn’t stupid enough to get hit by a car.

“Yeah, you wouldn’t be sorry,” Sachie grumbled, irritably, unlocking the door. For a moment Ranger thought the boy was going to shut the door in his face, but then Sachie held it open, while glaring angrily at the witch hazel tree in the garden. The wolf slipped inside, wagging his tail as he went.

“Are you hungry? Did you even get anything to eat while you were gone?” Sachie asked, still not sounding very friendly, but heading for the kitchen all the same.

Ranger was still regretting the doughnuts, so he didn’t follow him and instead wandered through to the living room to curl up on the couch.

“Suit yourself!” Sachie called.

He came out the kitchen ten minutes later with an apple and a couple of oatmeal cookies that smelled a lot like Madam Watkins and sat down beside the wolf, shrugging off his backpack and dropping it on the coffee table. Ranger opened one eye to watch him rifle through his pack for a moment, then closed it again, drowsing as Sachie began to work on a history assignment.

Night fell. Sachie got up and turned the lights on.

“Dad’s gonna be home late tonight. The murders always happen on Tuesdays, and that’s tomorrow, which means that someone’s gonna die tomorrow night, so they’re trying really hard to pin the killer down,” Sachie explained to the wolf, sometime around seven. His tone was softer now, and he shifted from foot to foot, looking almost apologetic. “So it’s just you and me. Did you want dinner?”

The wolf thumped his tail against the couch.

“Yeah, okay. We have some lamb in the freezer. Would that be okay?”

The wolf yipped, bounding over the back of the couch towards the kitchen, where he spun around, bowing low with his tail flopping over his back. Sachie laughed out loud.

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

After dinner, they went up to the attic, where Sachie was beginning to go through some of the other boxes. He’d decided that he probably imagined levitating the rune stones with his mind, and he’d given up on trying out the magic spells in
A Beginner’s Guide to the Arcane
. Tonight, he found a box full of tiny bones that had been painted with delicate little swirling symbols in faded brown ink.

Ranger sniffed the bones and backed away, sneezing, from the plant-smell and dust. It wasn’t necessarily a
bad
plant-smell. There was no dogbane or monkshood or foxglove, just simple pokeweed.

“What are these for?” Sachie asked. “This is gross. Who keeps old animal bones in their house and
paints them
?”

Next, Sachie found a whole lot of semi-precious stones. They were dusty, too, but he seemed to like them a lot better. He took them downstairs to the bathroom to wash them, then brought them through to his bedroom where he lined them up on the windowsill. He explained to the wolf that he’d done a science project on rocks and minerals back in elementary school, and he’d always thought they were awesome.

“It takes millions and millions of years for rocks to form,” he explained to the wolf, cheerfully, as he was getting ready for bed. “Sometimes you can cultivate crystals, if you know what you’re doing, but these stones are all really old.” He picked up the brownish-red pebble that he’d put down on his bedside table. “I’m, like, ninety percent certain that this is petrified wood that was a tree from ages ago. And there’s about three different types of quartz over there. It gets its color from impurities, which doesn’t make sense, because the colored bits are even cooler. I don’t know why they call it ‘impure’ and not ‘enhanced.’”

Ranger lay down on the floor and tucked his nose under his tail, listening to Sachie rattle on about crystals for another five minutes.

Just before he flicked off his bedroom light, Sachie froze and turned to the wolf.

“You’re not really a dog, are you? Like,
really
.”

Ranger sat up in alarm.

“I wanted to know what you were. Back in Boston, we had these people living in the apartment under us, and they had this big German Shepherd – not as big as you though – and you look nothing like that dog. So I looked up wolf-like dogs on the internet.” Sachie frowned. “You don’t really look like a husky or a malamute, either. There are whole websites that tell you the difference.”

He turned off the light and got into bed. Ranger lay back down, feeling unsettled, and was almost asleep when Sachie spoke again.

“You’re definitely a wolf. You’ve got the build for it, and the right head shape, and your paws are
huge
. Your fur is right, as well. But here’s what I don’t understand: All the sites I’ve been on have said that wolves are really bad in the house. Like,
really
bad. They’re supposed to tear things up and be impossible to house break and are sort of… unpredictable. You apparently need fences eight feet high that are dug into the ground so they can’t dig out, and they’ll chase small animals and kill and eat them. Even wolfdogs are terrible.”

Sachie was silent for another minute or so, but the wolf was wide awake, his heart beating like a drum against his ribcage.

“I don’t think people would let you roam around Tamarack if you were going to eat their cats,” Sachie said. “I saw you with Mister Liddell’s cat last week. Tippy Cat. You know? The little tabby with the blue collar with the bell. She walked right past your nose and you didn’t do anything. But maybe you’d been out in the forest eating elk or something, so you didn’t need to eat her. I don’t know. You spend a lot of time in the woods. Is that where you were last night. In the woods?”