Those kids had thought that vampire was their friend. They hadn’t seen the world like Will and Lily and Anna and Russ had. They didn’t yet know vampires and humans couldn’t be friends.
Will sighs and rubs the heel of his hand against his brow. He’s only in his twenties. Teenagers aren’t supposed to feel like naïve kids to him, not yet.
He should be checking the day’s newspapers for anything they should know about, but the columns of newsprint keep drifting in and out of focus, so now he’s playing around with the hardware instead.
He’s working on another Taser. Tasers, especially ones modified to increase their voltage, make for much more dependable weapons than any crucifix or wooden stake could hope to be. Will’s an atheist, so he’s never relied on the flimsy mysticism of vampire lore. The vampire is a predator, a parasite reliant on its host species to survive, like the sunless meat-flowers of the rainforest who leech sap from other plants and cannot process light, whose pollen migrates on carrion flies. Vampires are a part of nature, no stranger than any other natural strangeness. Will has seen too much to believe in the supernatural, in heaven and hell and good and evil beyond the bounds of reason.
Eventually he takes off his glasses and pinches at the bridge of his nose. His head aches from eye strain. He probably needs a stronger prescription, but even going to the doctor to ask about getting a referral for an eye test is outside his means right now. He’ll have to make do with painkillers and fortitude.
He’s bent over his work again, engrossed in the wires and fibers, when he hears the snick of the lock on the door opening.
“Heya,” he says, not looking up. Anna and Russ won’t be back for a long while yet, so it must be Lily.
“Will,” Lily replies, her tone hollow and strange, the voice of someone shocked out of themselves and barely present in the world. Will looks up.
She is a mess of blood. Her hair is a dense tangle of gore clinging wetly to the shape of her skull, which seems to dent in, soft and formless, in a purple patch above her left eyebrow. The sclera of her left eye is bloody with burst vessels and the lid has swollen almost shut. Her clothes are dark with stains and blotches and there’s a smeared handprint on her shirt above her belly, as if someone held her down as she struggled.
There is newer blood around her mouth, and her fangs are white and sharp.
“You have to promise I won’t wake up,” Lily says in the same dull voice, wavering on her feet, eyes locked on Will’s. He’s up and moving before his mind knew he was going to move at all.
She falls to the cement before he reaches her, crumpling like a stringless puppet. Will crouches beside her, pillowing her head on his knees as best he can. The pupil of her left eye is blown wide, the right a pin-dot, and her beautiful brown irises are red and dark, but there’s recognition and clarity in her gaze as she looks up at him.
“Promise,” she repeats.
“Whose blood is this, Lil?” he asks, trying to keep his voice gentle. He wants to scream. “On your mouth. Did you bite somebody?”
Her eyebrows draw together as she tries to answer, the movement making the skin over the injury on her forehead shift into hollows and shadows her forehead shouldn’t have. Will, who is more experienced in combat triage than most people will ever dream of needing to be, feels sick at the sight.
“A bird,” Lily murmurs. “I caught it and… I knew I shouldn’t. But I was so hungry. Poor bird.” A tear slips down from the outer corner of her right eye, leaving a streak of clear skin in the grime of blood on her face. Her eyes stay locked on Will’s. “Poor bird,” she says again.
Will breathes out a rush of relieved air. Not a person. Lily hasn’t hurt a person. That will be important when he has to talk to Anna and Russ. Will had learned long ago to be thankful for small mercies.
Lily is crying in earnest now, choking on gulping sobs. Will makes shushing sounds and carefully strokes her hair, uncaring of the sticky red coating his palm.
“You have to promise I won’t wake up,” she pleads. “I can’t. Not like this.”
And Will has no real choice at all to make. Vampires are evil. There are no exceptions.
But Will has never believed in evil.
“I promise you won’t wake up,” Will lies.
LILY
The first thing Lily feels is the sun setting, the first time she wakes up dead.
It’s like emerging from a clammy restless sleep, though Lily is somehow aware that she was awake already. Her fingers, hooked into claws, are skittering uselessly against the locked door of the closet, nails shredding the posters torn from magazines and taped there when she was younger.
Panic arrives split-seconds after consciousness, and she lets out a frightened, yelping scream. She feels strange. Lightheaded and hungry and cold. Also, she seems to be locked in a cupboard. And her hands are cuffed together.
She tries to remember how she got here, but there’s an empty spot in her head. One time she’d been put to sleep in the hospital and it was like this, just a gap where there should have been an awareness of time and wasn’t. It had scared her then because of how much like death it felt. Non-being. She’d ceased to be Lily for a few hours. This feels like that.
“Lily?” It’s Anna’s voice. She sounds tense, like when they have to talk when they’re in the middle of a skirmish.
“Get me out of here, please,” Lily begs. She’ll be able to cope with anything if they just get her out of here. She feels like she can’t breathe.
Maybe she doesn’t need to.
Terror starts flooding through her and she’s about to scream again when the lock on the cupboard clicks and the doors swing open. Anna has her favourite short knife gripped in one hand, face stony.
“Hi?” Lily hazards. She’d give a friendly smile, but suspects the new fangs in her mouth might cause the gesture to be misinterpreted.
“Come on,” Anna snaps, grabbing the chain linking Lily’s wrists together and pulling her out of the bedroom into the kitchen area. Will is sitting at the table, watching steam rise off a full mug of hot tea. He looks up as they come closer, and his eyes tell Lily everything. She can feel her lips curling back over her fangs in a snarl.
“You son of a bitch.”
Anna never would. Russ never would. They’d have killed her. Will’s the only one who would have wavered. Lily can tell, looking at him, that he isn’t sorry even now. Even under the blistering force of her anger, he isn’t sorry. He’d rather go through this than kill her. It makes something bright and hot well in Lily’s chest to know he loves her that much, loves her enough to be that stupid.
“Can we unchain you?” Anna asks, businesslike.
Lily glares at her, and then down at her wrists.
“I don’t know. Do you usually let blood drinking monsters run around your home while they’re feeling thirsty?” Lily asks. Her voice is colder and sharper, now. Their age-dotted old mirror, the one without a frame that Russ found at a garage sale, is propped against the wall to her left, where Anna left it after getting ready for a show.
Lily’s still as pretty as she ever was, but the blithe, scrappy youth she had while she was alive is gone, replaced with something less forgiving, less messy, even in the rumpled jeans and shirt she’s wearing. She doesn’t remember putting them on. She doesn’t remember a lot of things, her brain like a poorly-lit room inside her head, everything shadows.
“I’ll make fresh tea,” Will says automatically. “That cup’s been brewing a little too long.”
Lily barks a laugh, and it sounds harsh and mocking to her ears, but Will goes to the kettle anyway. It’s what he does. He makes tea. He’s done the unthinkable, and didn’t kill her when he had a chance, but at least that much about him still hasn’t changed. In a crisis, Will makes tea.
Or, at least, that used to be what he did. He hasn’t in a long time, not since the time they found a house that had been raided by vampires, and there was a teapot and cups laid out neatly on the table, as if the v
ampires had sat down for a cup and a chat while three kids, two parents and a dog bled to death slowly, upside-down above the bathtub. They’d all lost their taste for tea after that. Lily can’t even think about it without gagging. Which is weird, really, because now that she’s a vampire, surely thoughts of gore should be just the kind of stuff she’s into. The thought of that house, that night, shouldn’t still make her want to hurl.
She can’t let Anna know. If Anna thinks there’s anything left of the old Lily, Anna might not kill her. Lily’s relying on Anna to kill her. Lily sits down in the chair Will’s vacated.
“There’ll be more tannins if it’s been brewing too long,” Anna points out, her tone calm and flat. Lily glances over at Will. He has their ancient stove-top kettle in his hand, the one Russ uses to make the instant coffee he drinks as soon as he wakes up to kick-start his system.
Since the first time one of them was bitten in a fight, the four of them have taken every chance they can to try to refine the combinations of ingredients that blunt the blood-cravings best. Properly managed, the after-effects of a vampire bite don’t last very long. A week, maybe two, depending on the person’s health and how badly they were bitten.
A week, maybe two, and then they’re back to normal. Drinking blood makes the infection stronger. Makes the cravings stronger, makes them last longer. The stronger the cravings, the more likely it is that the person will come back a vampire if they die.
Lily looks around. The warehouse doesn’t look any different. The vampires who killed her must have fed her a hell of a lot of blood, to make the infection take hold so strongly in such a short amount of time. She gags at the thought.
There she goes again, being icked out by the thought of blood. Trust her to become the contrariest vampire ever known; grossed out by her main dietary requirement.
Tannins have an effect on the blood. Tea and wine have them. In the past, when Lily’s been grumbling her way through the after-effects of a bite, she’s found great comfort in cups of tea.
“We don’t know if anything we’ve used in the past works on full vampires,” she points out. Her voice sounds hoarse. Her throat stings with dryness.
“We’ve documented cases of vampires ordering wine in hotels, and there was that house… the one with the, um, teapot,” Will reminds her. “I think they might… slow your system. Mellow you out. So they’ll slow your metabolism, too, if I’m right.”
“Or, genius, they might whet my appetite,” Lily counters, baring her fangs at him again. The gesture should be absurd, comical, but Lily can tell from their expressions that it’s scary and real and Will is starting to realize what it is that he’s kept alive. Lily hopes he won’t mourn her too much. She doesn’t like to think of him being sad without her there to try comforting him.
“If you don’t calm down, I’ll stake you now,” Anna warns, a little of her usual composure coming back. Lily stands up again, taking a step towards Anna.
“Good! Do it now, Anna. Kill me, I need you to, c’mon you pussy –”
“Everyone shut up,” Will interrupts, raking his hair back from where it’s fallen over his glasses. “Anna, you’re not killing anyone. Lily, will you let me try, at least? We might be able to retard your craving enough for you to function. It… god, shit, I don’t know. Can we at least try? It’s better than being dead, isn’t it?”
“This is pathetic,” Lily says flatly. In one violent movement she pulls her arms apart, snapping the chain linking the two halves of the cuffs. She steps toward Will slowly, like she’s got all the time in the world. He holds his ground.
“Lily,” says Anna, tone warning.
“It’s okay,” Will says.
“Is it?” Lily asks. “Is it okay? Because right now, I gotta tell you, I feel pretty not okay, William.”
“Please try the tea,” Will says softly, and she can hear the plea.
Lily just stares at him for a long, endless beat, then reaches out and grabs the kettle out of his hand, pouring a cupful into the waiting mug. She gulps the hot tea down without stopping, then slams the mug on the top of the workbench beside her like she’s just done a shot.
“More,” she orders him, voice harsh, her breath ragged. Will hurries to refill the kettle.
“Here.” Anna’s offering Lily the little flask of holy water that Anna always carries. “Try this.”
Lily drinks it all down in three swallows, throwing the bottle aside when she’s done. Then she clutches at her stomach. In the mirror she can see her face contorting with sudden pain, fangs white and obscene in her soft mouth.
“Shit, shit,” she mutters, falling to her knees. Will crouches beside her, resting a tentative hand on her back.
“Lil?”
“Don’t touch me!” she growls, whimpering and rocking a little, doubled over. It’s not pain, not exactly. But she has never felt so wrong or strange.
After a long, long time – it may be as little as a few minutes, but it feels closer to forever – Lily raises her head and looks at them.
“Better,” she tells them. “I feel a bit better. I -”
Her face crumples, and she begins to cry quietly.
This time, she doesn’t shrug Will away when he tries to hold her.
WILL
Will’s mom is big on keeping journals. She’s got one of those ones that have places for school photos and hand-prints from daycare and things like that, a record of Will’s formative years and one for his brother as well. Will’s stepmom—former stepmom, actually; it’s kind of fucked up that somebody can just stop being a parent like that because they stop being married to someone’s dad—isn’t into things like scrapbooks. That means Jenny, Will’s little sister, probably doesn’t get anything like that written for her. Will thinks it’s a shame, because Jenny has always been an excellent kid and deserves to have a stupid froofy book all about her.
Will keeps journals too, but his aren’t like a scrapbook or a diary. He tries to keep an impartial record of the work they do. He’s seen so much and had to do some awful things, and there should be a record of that. Those sights and acts should all amount to something, even if that something’s only information collection.
He was writing in his journal at the moment when it first truly hit him that, when he died, he would die doing this. He’s not going to have a stroke in his bed when he’s seventy-eight, or get in a car accident on a wet day when he’s forty. He’ll die young, and he’ll die fighting a vampire.
Will’s pen had paused mid-sentence on the page, ink welling into a dark blot. He’d blinked, taken a breath, and then gone back to writing.
He’s done his best not to think about it too much since then. About what’s in store for him. He knows he’s going to die, but that doesn’t mean he wants to think about it all that often.
One thing that never occurred to him was that Lily would die like that as well.
Her hunger seems to come in waves, making her lethargic and aggressive by turns as she goes from weakened to craving, weakened to craving. It reminds Will of those awful months when they were twenty, before Lily was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and started taking medication for it. Her mood swings now are just as wild as they were then.
He writes it down, all of it. Lily is his best friend, his partner in crime, the bane of his existence and the light of his life. In order to keep himself from going mad, Will pushes all of that to the back of his mind and writes down every snap and snarl and violent outburst. He records the crying fits and the silent, brooding hours she spends curled in the corner of the sofa, forehead resting on her crossed forearms atop her knees. He makes her a subject, and tries to keep his heart from breaking.
Day 5: Her amnesia of the hours following her death seems to be complete and irreversible. My suggestion of regression therapy through hypnosis was met with hostility. She was able to sew and dress the laceration made in my hand from the glass she threw without being tempted by the blood, but requested that I leave her alone for several hours followi
ng the first aid. She came to me just after sunset this evening and promised me she would be calmer tonight. There are healing blisters on her arms, suggesting she has been experimenting with self-inflicted sun exposure again.
~
Lily and Will were fifteen when they first saw a vampire. It was after a dance—well, not a dance exactly. It was one of those youth things organized by a local community group to teach kids that they didn’t need drugs to have a good time. The goal, in the hands of concerned parents and citizens, naturally translated into a refreshments tables centerpieced by a bowl of watery punch, decorated with limp fruit, and a dance floor where kids shuffled awkwardly to a top forty playlist. Lily, in her typically arbitrary way, had decided to adore everything about the evening and was consequently having the time of her life.
Anna had left in disgust hours earlier, leaving Will and Lily to enjoy paper plates of radioactive-colored Jell-O Jigglers, damp crackers, cheese cubes, chopped up raw carrots with ranch dressing, and pathetically determined cheer on their own.
They had been sitting outside against one of the hall’s golden-lit windows, arguing about whether summer or winter was better and why, when they saw the vampire. They saw another kid first, a girl a few years older than they were. She was weaving on her feet as she walked, humming quietly to herself. Her t-shirt was stretched wide at the collar and there was a giant hickey on her neck. As she came closer she swayed violently, leaning against the wall to steady herself, and made a spacey, giggling sound.
“That’s gonna go down great at a ‘Just Say No’ event,” Will observed dryly just as Lily punched him on the arm and said “Will, look.”
Will followed her gaze to the edge of the deeper shadows the girl had stumbled out of. There was someone standing there, a guy even older than the girl, barely on the upper edge of his teens. He had white skin, and not the pale pink fleshy shade like Will or Anna that most people called white. This guy was whiter than that. His eyes were dark enough to look black in the evening light, and his hair was barely a few shades lighter. He was dressed in a long pale gray coat and a gray top hat. When he smiled over at the two of them there was a strange gleam to his teeth, more like the flash of a knife than a smile.
The Wolf House: The Complete Series Page 19
