Unbound (26 page)

Claire Bower knocked the clawed hand into the snow then came back over to the Old Hemlock Tree, shaking her head.

“The wards have fallen,” she said. “They went sometime last night, I believe.”

Ranger peered into the trees beyond the low stone wall at the edge of the cemetery. Wolves were diurnal, and could see best at dusk, but the mist was thick, and visibility beyond fifty yards was poor. He doubted he would even spot an elephant out there, should a terribly misplaced elephant happen to be wandering through the woods in the mountains in the snow.

The wolf lifted his nose and tried to smell anything but the smell of smoke and burning herbs blocked other scents out, hear anything but the snap and pop of burning elder branches.

The killer could be out there right now, about to mount an attack, and they wouldn’t know until it was maybe too late. The wards were down, all that was required to unbind Lupa was a simple incantation, which could be shouted from across the cemetery before anyone could do anything.

“I wish you would’ve stayed at home,” Detective Bower muttered to Sachie.

“You couldn’t keep me away unless you locked me in the basement. Uh – what’re we doing here, though?”

“A vigil,” the detective replied.

Sachie didn’t look convinced. “Do they do this every Yule? Because it’s sort of weird, going out to stand around a tree in a cemetery in winter in the middle of the night. Shouldn’t there be hot spiced cider and apples spiked with cloves and a roaring bonfire? I hardly think that little fire over there counts as anything, and definitely not as a bonfire. Don’t look so surprised, Dad! I pay attention in class, and I know what Yule is now!”

Detective Bower nodded slowly. “I suppose you do,” he conceded.

Night fell. Sachie shivered and his teeth started to chatter. He crowded close to the little brazier, regardless of the fact it wasn’t a bonfire, and Madam Watkins handed him a pouch of herbs for him to sprinkle on the wood every half-hour while she went to pray. The wolf paced.

A gentle night breeze stirred the settling mist. The fragrant smoke rising from Madam Watkin’s brazier eddied and swirled.

Ranger caught a sudden whiff of death and brimstone and monkshood. His back prickled as his hackles all stood on end. Almost as one, the other wolves froze where they stood, their heads lifting, ears twitching and nostrils flaring as they peered around them into the woods.

Ranger could smell the sickly sweet rot, too, now that the smoke was shifting. It was faint and seemed to come from all around, like the killer had already crossed and re-crossed the cemetery a hundred times a week ago, rather than lingering on the other side of the stone wall, waiting for their chance to strike.

Laughter, away in the trees on the other side of the Old Hemlock Tree.

Michelle, the pale three-legged wolf, went bounding away through the snow, a snarl low in her throat, the rusty wolf and the big brown wolf and one of the sandy-colored wolves close on her heels. Not Clyde, the other sandy wolf. Ranger didn’t know who he was, but he must’ve been bitten reasonably recently.

Ranger hesitated. Madam Watkins started praying louder. Detective Bower made a twisting motion in front of his chest then touched his forehead, swearing under his breath.

A yelp of pain. Snarling.

Ranger pounced through the snow and into the woods after Michelle and Eli and the sandy wolf, with Dale and Yani at his shoulders.

Michelle and Eli and the sandy wolf were fighting a pair of demons. One was free, a twisted mass of bones and shadows, and the other was possessing the body of the dead wolf Ranger had found in the woods. Its fur had rotted almost completely off, now, and its flesh had fallen away in places exposing its skeleton held together by burning ropes of sinew.

Eli, the rusty wolf, and the sandy wolf were tag-teaming the free demon. One would dash behind it and nip at its shadowy hamstrings while the other feinted at its face, snapping and snarling and dodging out of the way before it could close its jaws on them. It had taken a chunk out of Eli’s shoulder – blood stained its grinning maw and flowed down Eli’s foreleg, spattering the churned up snow with droplets of pink.

Michelle leapt upon the dead-demon-wolf and tore out its throat, but it did not breathe so it did not die. Instead it shrieked with maniacal laughter and twisted its head around to sink its yellowing rotting teeth into the side of her neck. It must’ve been very strong, because it shook her like she was a ragdoll, even as her claws scrabbled at it, scraping away stinking blackened skin and clumps of dirty fur from its flank.

Dale roared with incomprehensible anger and threw himself at the dead-demon-wolf, bowling it over and pinning it down. Michelle was thrown clear. It struggled, but Dale was too big and too powerful and it couldn’t escape from beneath his paws. The rest of the pack arrived, slavering and furious, spittle flying from their jaws as they fell upon the demons.

Ranger darted to the side of the three-legged pale wolf, his heart thudding painfully.

Michelle was panting shallowly, her eyes wide, a high-pitched whine crawling up her throat as her blood soaked her fur and spread across the snow beneath her body. The dead-demon-wolf had ripped open her jugular.

Madam Watkins was shouting something Ranger didn’t understand as she walked towards the fighting wolves and demons, the rest of the Council of Elders at her back, and behind them Sacheverell and Detective Bower. Was it a prayer, maybe? An exorcism, they desperately needed an exorcism.

The Leshy’s words came back to Ranger all of a sudden, and his next breath hitched and his skin all felt too tight as the free demon broke away from the wolves tearing at it, bowled through the Elders, shoved the detective aside, and drove one of its horns straight into Sachie’s chest, too close to his weak and faltering heart.

And then Dale was there, naked as the day he was born. He’d let the dead-demon-wolf up, left it to the rest of the pack, shifted forms mid-leap, and was furiously shouting a banishing spell at the demon with its horns in Sachie’s lung. The demon wailed and fled like a scalded cat, leaving behind a terrible whiff of sulfur in its wake. Dale caught Sachie before he fell, and together he and Detective Bower lowered the boy onto his back in the snow.

Ranger understood with dreadful clarity that the killer hadn’t been hiding out in the woods, waiting to ambush them. She had been with them in the cemetery the whole time, waiting for the opportune moment to act.

Be wary of the old ones.

Triumphantly, Madam Watkins crowed out the final verse of her prayer, and behind her the Old Hemlock Tree broke with a resonating crack. The bark split down the middle, splinters shattered outwards, and the two halves of the tree leaned away from each other, groaning ponderously.

Lupa hopped from between the split, bright and resplendent, even in the misty woods. Her eyes glowed like two stars. She seemed unconcerned, her movements unhurried as she padded across the snow.

Ranger yowled angrily as he ran into the group of Elders, still trying to pick themselves up. Madam Watkins threw stinging powder at him that turned his yowl into a cry of pain. He dodged around her heels and tore at her Achilles’ tendon, forcing her down, and when she was down he buried his teeth in her throat, the same way her demon had buried its teeth in Michelle. She gurgled as he crunched through muscle and vein, tendon and cartilage, and then she fell on the ground and he ripped out her bottom jaw and spat it on the snow.

Her blood tasted dead. It was sticky and rotten, just like the rest of her insides. The wolf retched.

Claire Bower picked the jawbone up and hastened away with it, back towards the brazier, to burn her teeth, to sacrifice them.

Dale was crying.

Sacheverell Bower was born with a different name. When Ranger first met him as a new-born baby, premature, tiny, with a little squished-up red face, he’d been called Rémy. Ranger had been seven years old, and the wolf recalled that he’d been phenomenally revolted by babies at the time – Clyde had been born a couple of months earlier. Infants had a way of losing their novelty to very small children after a very short amount of time, and Ranger hadn’t been thrilled to look upon his miniscule cousin at the hospital any more than he was to come home from school to baby Clyde or the toddler Nicole.

And then Rémy Bower had died when he was seven days old. He’d been born two months too early with a bad heart.

Fourteen days after Rémy Bower was born, and seven days after he died, Florence Devereaux had bound the god Cern to his body, and he had lived again, but not really. It was a facsimile of life only as the god slept within him.

Rémy’s parents had renamed him after that – renamed the body that housed the god, because Rémy Bower died when he was seven days old, his souls had flickered out, and he was something else entirely after. ‘Sacheverell’ was a family name, but it was fitting because it meant
leap of the roe buck
, and the god bound up within the child was the Horned One that most often took the form of a deer.

Ranger didn’t remember much of Rémy’s death and reawakening. He’d been too young to understand, and probably sheltered from it, though he was told in later years.

Sacheverell Bower spent his seventh birthday in bed with a terrible sore throat. When Sacheverell Bower was seven years and fourteen days old, the god within him woke up while he was visiting his paternal grandparents in Tamarack. Cern was not powerful enough to break the tether that bound Him to His human host entirely, but He could wander, and while He wandered Sachie was rushed to hospital suffering congestive heart failure.

Without the god, he was a shell, an empty husk, soulless and lifeless, and if he died completely then Cern would be free.

A dozen people died trying to kill the god.

When that proved a failure, nine people sacrificed themselves so that the god might be bound down and put to sleep so deeply that He would not reawaken unless He was asked to, and the god Cern struggled and angrily cursed their families even as they gave up their lives. Ranger lost more than half his family that night, one way or another.

The wolf never found out if Cern stirred when Sachie turned fourteen. He spent that year in the mountains with Nicole, both of them as wolves, and they hunted and roamed and were
wild
, their little pack of two, and they didn’t care about anything that happened in Tamarack anymore.

Detective Bower curled over his son in the snow and sobbed as Sachie struggled to breathe. Sachie’s face was ashen and his eyes were wide and terrified, but the hands that grasped at his father’s were trembling and weak. Pinkish foam flecked his bloodless lips.

“Cern,” Detective Bower murmured, and Dale scrambled away. “Cern, Cern.” The god’s name spoken three times to wake Him. “I release you.” The words to break the bond, simple, because Florence hadn’t been fond of ceremony.

Sachie’s body convulsed, back arching off the ground, muscles in his neck clenching, fingers clawing, and then he fell still. A whispery white mist twisted up out of his mouth and nose and escaped his eyes as little orbs working their way from his tear ducts, rising upward towards the stars like raindrops falling the wrong way.

The mist grayed and darkened and began to take form. First the head and the ears, the antlers and the neck and the powerful shoulders and long slender legs. The orbs spiraled and became the eyes and the tips of the antlers and a spattering of glowing constellations on the great deer’s pelt.

The deer stood amongst the carnage for a long moment, ears flicking and pelt twitching as He looked around before fixing his gaze on Madam Watkins’ corpse.

He stamped a hoof.

“
Show your true form, demon.
”

When He spoke, the noise was cacophonous, a million, million voices speaking all at once. Toddlers shrilled, men shouted, women sang, the whispery sounds of old people’s dying breaths rattled through the dry branches overhead. Horses whinnied, bison bellowed, kittens mewed and cats yowled, and a wolf pack howled, the pack mother and the pack father’s voices mingling with the voices of their children.

Ranger quaked where he stood, even though the god was not speaking to him, but instead to the corpse of Madam Watkins.

Madam Watkins’ blood was slowly turning the snow around her corpse a dark brackish red. Her eyes, unfocused, rolled in her head. Blood bubbled up from the hole where her bottom jaw had been and spilled down her neck. Then a black fog started spilling from her nose and her ears and her eyes and from the hole. It hovered in the air above her, taking on a skeletal form with shadows clinging to the spaces between the bones, and great spiraling horns sprouting from its head.

It hissed malevolently at Cern. The god snorted, pawed the bloody snow, and said: “
Be gone. You grow wearisome.
”

The demon squealed, spiraling up and disappearing into the darkness of the sky.

The dead wolf fell to the ground as smoke poured from it, and that demon disappeared, too, cackling madly as it went.

Cern studied the dead witch for a long moment, his majestic face unreadable, and then He turned and began to pick his way around the fallen towards the trees. Lupa fell in beside Him.

“Wait!” Dale was shaking, whether from fury or exhaustion Ranger couldn’t be certain. “You’re leaving? Just like that? Tamarack will
die
!”