Unbound (8 page)

The wolf wondered what Sachie would say if he knew that actually, he’d been curled up safely in a hotel in Norfolk with Michelle Devereaux, eating salty, greasy fast food. He whined, softly.

“Maybe you’re just a really weird dog,” Sachie said, after a while. “You don’t look like one, though.”

On Tuesday morning, Detective Bower sat down with Sachie at the breakfast table, his expression so unusually grim that Ranger wondered if someone had been killed a night early.

Sachie must have noticed it, too, because he put his piece of toast back on his plate and said: “Whoah, Dad. What happened?”

Detective Bower blinked, running a hand over his face. “Nothing. We didn’t manage to catch him.”

“Okay.” Sachie drew the word out disbelievingly. “Then why do you look like someone spat in your cornflakes?”

Ranger choked on the cream of wheat he was eating out of a ceramic bowl with violets on it, regurgitating a mouthful of milk onto the kitchen floor. Both Sacheverell and his father cast him disgusted glances before returning to their conversation as if nothing had happened.

“I need you to go to Eli’s place after school today,” Detective Bower said.

“I was just there yesterday, and I’m going again tomorrow. Is there a reason you want me to go to Eli’s today as well?” Sachie asked.

Detective Bower nodded, pensively. “The killer only targets people who are alone. He’s willing to kill men and women on their own property. I just – I don’t want you here alone in the evening when I’m not back yet. Do you understand?”

“Yeah,” Sachie said, then paused for a moment. “Wait, does that mean when I was here last Tuesday, alone, for five hours before you got home, I could’ve been brutally murdered?
Dad
!”

“I don’t know,” Detective Bower said. “Maybe. Maybe not. The killer – they’re only killing certain types of people.”

“Healthy people?” Sachie asked, his hand drifting to his chest to hover over his heart.

The detective shook his head. “No. I wouldn’t have called at least a couple of the victims
healthy
, as such. Just – what have you learnt about the town of Tamarack in school, Sachie?”

Sachie blinked, looking a little thrown by the abrupt change in subject. “Not a lot more than you told me,” he said. “It was founded in the 1700s by a guy called Absolon Devereaux, who came here and made a treaty with the local indigenous people for an area of land to hunt on and farm, and the Devereaux family’s been here ever since. He named his home after a
tree
he saw, Dad, and that’s why the town’s called ‘Tamarack.’”

“Sounds like you’ve learnt a lot more than I told you,” Detective Bower said. “What do you know about things that have happened in the last couple of decades?”

“Uh, that’s pretty recent history, Dad,” Sachie replied.

“Well, nine years ago… there was an accident. A lot of people from the town died. Half the Devereaux family was killed. Your great, great uncle, Anthony died. A lot of your classmates lost family members. Your friend Alyssa lost her mother, and Eli lost his father. Russell Copeland was a good man. Sheriff Hostler’s wife was killed.”

“I know his son,” Sachie said. “He’s in my class.”

“Yes, I suppose Lincoln would be about your age,” Detective Bower agreed. “He’s a good kid, helps out around the police station after school sometimes and on weekends. I like him.”

“What does any of this have to do with how the killer is choosing the people who die?” Sachie asked, looking perplexed.

“The killer isn’t taking people who lost family members during the accident nine years ago,” Detective Bower said.

Because of the taint, the wolf knew. It hadn’t been an accident that killed half the Devereaux family and cursed the rest of them, either. Rather, they’d run afoul of an angry god’s souls that’d come frayed from their anchor and were wandering loose in the woods outside of town. Not the White Wolf, a different god that had taken the shape of a white-tailed deer doe with hooves made of fire. The people who died nine years ago had fallen trying to kill it, and others sacrificed themselves trying to bind it back down tight, and in the process the angry god had cursed entire clans with the taint.

It was odd that the taint could be saving lives now because the killer couldn’t use them.

“Could the killer be a grieving relative?” Sachie asked.

“We considered that,” Detective Bower said. Ranger hadn’t, but he supposed that was why the detective was a detective and he was just a wolf. “Nine years is a long time to hold onto a grudge without acting on it, and the people dying now didn’t have anything to do with the incident back then. We don’t like anyone as a suspect at the moment.”

“So it’s just a random guy killing people
because
?”

“That’s the long and the short of it,” the detective said, glancing at the clock on the kitchen stove. “You’d better finish your breakfast and go take your meds, then get going, or you’ll be late.”

Sachie looked at the clock too, grabbed his toast from his plate, and went bounding off upstairs. Ranger could hear the shuffling of papers and mild swearing, and guessed that he was trying to find all the various pieces of homework he’d left lying around.

“By the way,” Detective Bower shouted. “I don’t think Ranger likes cream of wheat very much! You might want to try eggs in the future!”

Ranger wagged his tail.

He followed Sacheverell to school that day, curling up in the corners of different classrooms. Sachie’s algebra teacher seemed unsettled by having a wolf in his class, but Professor Seybold, the Religion teacher, welcomed him cheerfully.

“Well, hello there, Ranger,” he said. He was an old man, with an old quavering voice, thick glasses perched on his nose that magnified his eyes and made them look huge. His back was hunched from a lifetime spent working at a desk, and he carried a carved wooden walking stick, vines and leaves crawling up the length of it. His clothes were old people clothes, formal and neatly pressed. He smelled like mothballs and Earl Grey tea and sour milk. “It’s so good to see you in my classroom at last. I’ve been waiting for this day entirely too long.”

The wolf flattened his ears and bared his teeth at Seybold, but the old teacher just laughed wheezily, and almost lost his hand by patting the wolf on the head too familiarly. The only reason he didn’t lose a finger or two was because he was on the Council of Elders, and the wolf didn’t want to have to face a tribunal in front of them all on the next full moon.

With a swish of his tail, Ranger turned on his heel, walking between rows of students who either ignored him or leant away, and went to lie on the floor beneath Eli’s desk. He was just getting comfortable and tucking up his paws when Professor Seybold called the class to order, asking Stephen at the back to please focus.

“Today, we are moving on from wards and circle magic,” Seybold said from the front of the classroom, as Ranger delicately took the end of one of Eli’s shoelaces between his front teeth and began to pull on it. He could see Sachie watching him out the corner of his eye, looking fascinated. “Some people believe that a long time ago, magic occurred free and uninhibited. We discussed this late last year. Can anyone remember why?”

The wolf knew.

He left off pulling Eli’s shoelace to look around as hands went up around the room. Eli shifted in his seat – he must have his hand up too, which was unusual, because he’d sat there with a perpetually muddled expression on his face in every other class the wolf had sat through with him and Sachie, apart from gym.

“Victoria?” Professor Seybold asked the pretty blonde-haired girl sitting near the front of the class, the one who smelt like the sharp metallic tang of new magic.

“In ancient times, the Old Gods still walked the earth,” Victoria said in a rush, her words tumbling out over the top of each other. “It was an inherently more magical place. Things could happen back then that can’t now.”

“And what happened to the Old Gods?” Professor Seybold’s eyes passed over the students, searching their faces. “It was in the summer reading material.”

A couple of hands dropped.

“Evan?” Seybold said.

Evan was one of the only people – bar Sachie – who hadn’t had his hand up. He gave an angry half-shrug without looking up from his desk, and didn’t say anything. Professor Seybold just sighed.

“Stephen?”

Stephen Vinter was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed boy sitting down the back of the class whom the wolf remembered Michelle mentioning sometimes, usually in connection with Eli and some sort of schoolyard shenanigans that the wolf wasn’t particularly interested in. Stephen rode a motorcycle to school. Ranger saw him out on it sometimes, cruising around the streets of Tamarack. It was a sleek, black thing that reminded the wolf of a panther, all gleaming chrome and shiny paint.

“They got bound up,” Stephen said.

Professor Seybold nodded slowly, reminding the wolf somewhat inanely of a chicken bobbing its head up and down. “That’s right. The Old Gods were bound, usually to old trees, or great stones, to weathered vessels that could withstand their might. They have to be periodically rebound, of course. Stones crack. Trees die. Gods escape and wreak havoc.”

Ranger lay his head on his paws and sighed. He’d never sat through this lecture before, but he already knew where it was going.

“We have already studied the White Wolf of the Woods and the Hemlock Tree in some depth,” Professor Seybold said. “It’s time we moved onto the Horned God, Cern.”

Cern, Cernunnos, the Horned God, the Old One, the Great Deer. The most recent Walking God, more feared than beloved.

According to Professor Seybold’s lecture, Cern had been bound in a small grove of trees near Argol in France for centuries before His tree was cut down to make way for a housing development twenty-nine years ago. He’d been loose in the world for ten whole years, bringing plague and disaster as he moved at a glacial pace from east to west.

“He was trapped in an admittedly unusual fashion,” Professor Seybold said. “Does anyone remember from the reading?”

No one did, except the wolf.

“Ah, well. It wasn’t touched upon in any great depth. Just a passing mention. ‘
And the Old One was bound to a mortal body.
’ You would have had to have gone down to the library and looked it up if you wanted to find out anything more. Or asked one of the Elders.” Professor Seybold looked them over with his eyebrows hiked up. “None of you took that sort of initiative, though, did you?”

Murmurs broke out, and heads shook.

Professor Seybold just laughed. “Ah, youth. So self-important. So uncurious. Never mind. I’ll tell you. The god Cern was bound to an infant child’s corpse, dead seven days, born at precisely seven months, survived seven days outside the womb. Three sevens. Powerful numbers, and a potent binding. Tragic for the young parents who lost their child, though. Absolutely tragic.”

Sachie put up his hand.

“Yes, Sacheverell?”

“If a god can escape a dead tree or a cracked stone, then how can it be bound in a dead baby’s corpse? If it’s bound to one of its bones or something, what happens when it finishes decomposing? I don’t understand.”

That was actually quite a good question, the wolf thought, pricking his ears to hear the answer.

There was a pause. Most of the class was looking at Sachie, who shrank down in his seat and flushed in embarrassment. He probably thought he’d asked something stupid and everyone would laugh behind his back at his lack of knowledge later.

“That would be something we would normally discuss next year, not now,” Professor Seybold said, slowly. “It’s part of the advanced syllabus. But I will cover it in brief, so that you might understand.”

Ranger crawled out from under Eli’s desk to sit in the aisle between the desks so he could watch Professor Seybold as he paced the front of the class.

“Human beings are inherently
fragile
creatures,” the professor began. “You might not have noticed, but it is very, very easy to kill us. Sometimes, just falling over is enough to do it. Other times, a little cut that gets infected. A human baby is the most fragile of all, beside the very elderly. But we have bright, strong souls that burn short and sharp and then are gone. That’s what sets us apart from the animals, which are dim and distant as the furthest stars, and the trees, which smolder for hundreds of years.” He paused, as if considering his next words carefully. “Gods are infallible. When they choose to manifest a form, they cannot be harmed, cannot be killed. Their souls are not one but a million strong. Cern is a force of the rawest, purest nature. The baby that died – it was
empty
. It could not be sustained, not with all of the cutting edge medical techniques. Its soul had flickered and gone out, and there’s nothing you can do once that happens.”