Read Online Unbound by Meredith Noone - Free Book Online

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.