Free Unbound by Meredith Noone

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