Read Online Unbound by Meredith Noone - Free Book Online Page A

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