The Wolf House: The Complete Series

by Mary Borsellino

  “It’s another child from his school. A recent friend of Bette’s. She’s been badly brutalized and turned. She was coherent, but barely so.”

  Timothy remembers the mindless thing that had once been a boy, and the fire that had consumed what had been left. He feels ill.

  “Will she need to be killed?” he asks Blake. He’s only a few more minutes from the townhouse now. In other circumstances, the speed and freedom of his sprint would be exhilarating. Now, however, Timothy is just grateful that his pace will get him home fast.

  “I don’t know yet. We’ll see,” Blake answers cagily, which Timothy knows straight away means that yes, they almost certainly will need to kill her, but that Bette is in earshot of Blake’s conversation.

  “Alexander thinks it’s Cora, doesn’t he?” Timothy asks.

  “I’m becoming increasingly convinced he may be correct,” replies Blake. Timothy slows his pace to an ordinary jog as he reaches the townhouse’s block.

  “I’ll be there in a moment,” he says, and ends the call.

  The downstairs apartments are emptied; it’s practically high noon by the inverted rhythms of vampire life, and the majority of the gang is out enjoying the delights of the city. Timothy heads upstairs, toward the muted hum of conversation.

  Mikhail and Alexander are seated together at the main parlor’s table, a sleek black laptop open on the warm-hued wood in front of them. Timothy likes Mikhail, but Mikhail is usually skittish and unnerved around him. It’s because of Mikhail’s obvious discomfort that Blake chose the extravagantly spacious townhouse as the gang’s home; it’s large enough for everyone to inhabit it without being in constant interaction.

  It would be hard, Timothy thinks charitably, to have to deal with someone you’ve known for years but who doesn’t know you at all.

  “Even if Jason says he still has his, we can’t rule it out. It’s the most common method,” Mikhail is saying to Blake as Timothy enters the room. Blake is pacing, a nervous habit he only exhibits when he’s especially annoyed. Timothy hasn’t seen him do it since before Blake took up Lily, Will and Jay as hobbies.

  Alexander shakes his head. “Cora would never bother to do something so gauche as steal a teenager’s cellphone. She’d take over the service provider and get the numbers that way, if that’s what she was after.” He types rapidly on the keyboard of the laptop, so rapidly that Timothy clears his throat. Alexander scowls at the screen, slowing the pace of his fingers to a more human speed. It’s not that Timothy really cares if Alexander ruins yet another computer by overloading it with quickfire commands, but he knows that if that happens Alexander will end up in an even grumpier mood than he’s already in.

  “Where are they?” Timothy asks, knowing that wherever the damaged girl is, Bette will be there too.

  Blake nods his head toward Bette’s door. “In there.” He strides towards it himself, entering the room ahead of Timothy. Ash, the hot-mess girl with the sad dark eyes, is curled into a fetal position on Bette’s bed, unmoving, hair in drying tangles across her waxy cheek. Bette’s spinning herself back and forth idly on the desk chair, feet making listless semi-circles on the carpet as the seat moves.

  “The cat isn’t scared,” she says to Blake, as if this fact alone is incontrovertible evidence of Ash’s sufficient quality of life. The cat is sitting contentedly on Ash’s feet, emitting a soft rumble of a purr.

  “Cats are not good judges of character,” Blake retorts, voice breezy but not unkind. “That’s why they like me.” He picks Bikini Kill up by the scruff of the neck and carries her to the door, where he tosses her gently out into the main room and closes the door. Timothy leans against the edge of Bette’s comics-strewn desk, content to wait in vigil with her for Ash to wake up.

  Bette looks weary and worried and deeply, deeply upset. Timothy’s seen her angry before, and hysterical, and despairing, but he’s never seen her this quiet and still and sad.

  “This is what I meant,” Blake tells her gently. He stands beside where Bette sits, resting one regally pale hand on her shoulder. “About keeping your heart away from the board.”

  Bette blinks up at him, uncomprehending. Then her eyes widen, aghast, and the familiar heat of her fury electrifies her features. “You… you fucking asshole.” She stands, shoving Blake away from her. “She’s not a fucking chess pawn and this isn’t a fucking game. Christ, get the fuck out of here.”

  She shoves him again, hard, in the direction of the door. He stumbles a little from the push, and that’s how Timothy knows that Blake expected Bette to respond just as she has. If he didn’t intend to be moved, no shove of Bette’s could have made Blake take even the smallest of steps. Blake wanted to wake her up from her unhappiness; would rather see her angry than sad.

  Sometimes Timothy wonders just how intricate the orchestration Blake performs on the lives of those around him really is, how many careful and invisible plans he has in motion at a given time. It’s probably wisest not to speculate.

  Alexander knocks and enters, closing the door behind him. Timothy does his best to bite down on a smile. Whether he’ll admit it or not, Alexander likes Bikini Kill enough to protect the cat from harm.

  Ignoring the murderous glare Bette is still giving Blake, Alexander pockets his telephone and addresses them all. “I’ve just been speaking to Gretchen. She had no especial reason to call tonight, and yet tonight is when she called. It’s astonishing how some vampires have a magnetic attraction to even the smallest traces of drama in the atmosphere, isn’t it?” He casts a sly and pointed glance at Blake, before turning his attentions to Bette. “She was rather dismayed to hear that you’ve joined the household. I believe her exact words were ‘well, that’s the last time I do the noble thing instead of what I want’.”

  Bette’s smile at the joke is hard and sad. Timothy wonders if she wishes that Gretchen had been the one to kill her, instead of Lily. It would have been a gentler end, almost certainly. Timothy can guess that much even without having ever met Gretchen. Bette died terrified and alone and cold, dumped behind a grocery store by an injured and new-born vampire. Any death Gretchen might have given her would have been better than that.

  “She says that one of her brothers was much like this when they first found him,” Alexander goes on, nodding to Ash’s tiny shadowed form on the bed. “And suggested what we can expect, should we choose to take the risk of keeping her alive.”

  “When we take the risk,” Bette interrupts. Alexander gives her a dry look.

  “I’ll oversee her first hunt and if I think it goes acceptably, we’ll make plans in the longer term. Is that satisfactory?”

  Bette looks mutinous, glaring at Alexander and Blake both, but she nods. “Okay.”

  Alexander’s answering nod is brusque. “Good. There’s a shopping complex I’m a shareholder in a short drive from here. We’ll go there tomorrow evening. It’s popular enough to have an excellent damage-control protocol in place for those times when an overdose is found in the restrooms or a child goes missing.”

  Bette’s expression turns revolted. “Don’t make her hunt a kid, Christ. That’s gross.”

  “I was offering those as examples,” Alexander answers patiently. “I’ll make sure her prey are adults. Adults are easier, anyway—they’re far less likely to believe vampires are a genuine threat until it’s too late.”

  “Good.” Bette looks down at Ash again, and her face looks as unhappy as Timothy’s ever seen it. “Only a scumbag would want to hurt a kid.”

  BETTE

  Bette stabs the blade of the pocketknife in hard as she can, grimace curling her glossy red lip open enough to show a flash of gritted white teeth. She draws the blade back and strikes a second time, and the dark rubber of the rear right tire of the station wagon exhales its life out slowly through two punctures.

  “It’s nice to see that real vampires live up to the standards of refinements and culture set by their fictional counterparts,” Jay says in his standard deadpan monotone. Bette
flips him off wordlessly and moves on to the next car in the lot.

  The rooftop parking lot of the mall is mostly deserted; they’re the only people there, and there’s only a handful of cars still around for Bette to inflict casual vandalism on. Jay’s perched precariously on the low cement wall which divides the roof level from the long three-storey drop to the road below. To Bette, their choice of pastimes seems indicative of their respective attitudes to the universe at large: when Bette wants to distract herself from worry, she destroys things, and when Jay wishes to do the same he flirts with the possibility of destroying himself.

  “Stop that,” Jay demands as she vents her frustration on yet another tire. Bette shrugs, closing the knife and putting it back into the pocket of her pants. She walks over to where he’s sitting and jumps up, balanced as a cat, before walking along the barricade in ostentatiously dainty steps.

  “Did you ever read the Oz books when you were a kid?”

  Jay shakes his head. Bette does a slow cartwheel, pausing on her hands for a few moments to observe the late-night vista of the suburb upside-down before standing again.

  “My favourite was the one about the patchwork girl of Oz,” she goes on. “She’s, you know, made of patchwork. Scraps sewn together. And she looks pretty nuts, but she loves it. She’s totally proud of being this freakish creature, and wouldn’t be any other way even if she had the choice. She thinks dignity is the stupidest thing that she’s ever heard of. She was my absolute hero when I was tiny.”

  Jay, in characteristic Jay fashion, lets Bette chatter on without interruption.

  “But I don’t know,” Bette says, jumping back down onto the tarred surface of the lot and facing him. “I feel like I’m a patchwork girl now, and it sort of sucks. Like, I know I’m fantastic, right, but I’m just pieces of other fantastic stuff that’s all sewn together. I make up all these comparisons of what stuff about me means, but since all those things I’m comparing myself to already have meanings, there’s no meaning that’s just me, you know?”

  “I know you’re the only existential juvenile delinquent I currently know,” Jay offers in a tone that manages to be teasing and flat at once. Bette makes an annoyed face, stalking away and over to one of the cars, climbing onto the hood. She sits down, cross-legged, and starts to talk again at a slightly louder volume, so that Jay can still hear her over the increased distance.

  “All the things I am are just bits I stole from somewhere else. I’m a playlist, a mix tape, not an album of my own. And only one, maybe two songs on my compilation come from the Bette I was before. I’m not even her now, you know?”

  “Of course I know,” answers Jay, and he sounds almost frustrated. “The alive version of Bette was someone I had sex with and knew almost nothing about. The vampire version of you is one of my best friends in a totally non-sexual way. Even I can tell the difference.

  “Look,” Jay tells her, climbing down off the wall and coming over to sit on the edge of the car’s hood. “It’s sorta like this conversation I had with Timothy one night, I think while you were over at Tommy and Rose’s. You’re like… you’re like the Bride of Frankenstein, and I don’t mean that you’re an undead creature made of stolen parts. Or at least, I don’t just mean that. Because okay, what Timothy was saying was pretty much this: the Bride of Frankenstein is only on-screen for four minutes, and yet she’s this icon everyone recognises and she means all kinds of stuff to different people. And, like, Timothy had all these other examples of it too. He was saying how Lolita never actually gets to tell her bit of the story even though the book she’s in is called Lolita, but that now the name Lolita and the idea of her is so, so, so much bigger than the book that’s meant to be about her but isn’t really.

  “So I guess basically what I’m trying to say is that you might think you’re just reflections of stories that already existed but you’re not—you’re a new thing, a chemical compound. You’re your own thing with whatever different crazy meaning you end up having as time goes on.”

  Bette’s quiet for a while after Jay stops talking. She looks up at the black-gray sky above them. The stars are currently invisible and the wind is listless. People think the night is just daytime but darker, but Bette knows better. The night is utterly its own, full of different cultures and rules and places and spaces and silences. It’s the other side of a barrier as glassy and black as lake surfaces become after the sun goes down.

  “Do you mind?” she asks Jay in hesitant tones. “That we don’t have sex anymore, I mean.”

  Jay pauses before replying, like he wants to be certain in himself that the answer he’s giving her is true. Bette’s grateful for that. Honesty is like a comb, helping her unravel the knots of her world.

  “Nope,” he says finally, giving her a grin. “I’m. I don’t know. I guess things are kind of serious with Blake now, maybe? I don’t really feel like sleeping with anyone except him, I know that. God, can you imagine how hilarious it’ll be if he and I are still together when I’m sixty? Everyone’ll think I’m a creeper pervert cradle-robber, when really he’ll still be the chicken-hawk one.”

  Bette giggles, then blinks in surprise. “You’re not gonna become a vampire?”

  Jay shrugs one shoulder, face remaining in its habitual brittle expressionlessness. “Not by choice. Not now that I’m talking to Sofie again.”

  Jay almost never talks about his older sister. All Bette knows is that she’s currently somewhere out on the West Coast, that she and Jay are finally in contact with each other again after years of silence, and that things are not exactly sunshine and roses between them.

  If a sibling bond that fractured and frayed still feels like reason enough to stay human, then Bette can only imagine how strong the need to stay alive along with Tommy must be for Rose. And Jay and Blake’s relationship is much healthier—for certain values of ‘healthy’, anyway—than the relationship between Rose and Bette.

  “I can’t believe we’re missing the opening night of the musical right now. What a let-down,” Jay complains. “I mean, Michelle made me promise that I wouldn’t go, but I didn’t intend to honor the promise or anything.”

  “Ash had the worst timing ever to get murdered,” Bette agrees, matching his straight-faced delivery. “She needs to learn to be way more considerate, god.”

  “I know, right?” Jay gives a dramatic sigh. “But seriously, though, I’m kind of bummed out that I’m missing it.”

  “Me too.”

  “Are you going to see Rose later?”

  She shrugs. “Maybe. Depends on how stuff with Ash ends up going.”

  “Mm,” Jay offers as his noncommittal response, but Bette knows him well enough to be able to tell when he doesn’t really believe her. That’s probably fair enough; chances are Bette will desperately want to go see Rose whether things go well or badly with Ash.

  “We were tiny kids when we became friends,” she tells Jay. “And as we grew up we changed, of course, because that’s what people do, but somehow we always changed in the same direction as each other. We always had most of who we were in common. Now she’s alive and I’m not and there’s no way for me to go back and so that’s all fucked.”

  Neither of them voice the fact that while Bette can never be human again, Rose could easily become a vampire. There doesn’t seem a point, Bette thinks, in saying something so obvious and so unspeakable.

  Or is it? Is it so terrible an idea? Bette didn’t want this, after all, but now that she has it there are many things she loves about being a vampire. And Ash, if things go well… Ash will learn to love it, too. With Bette and Ash and Rose all vampires, things could be good. Fun. Bette loves her little family, but misses having a female confidante so much her heart feels as if it’s bruised. She wishes Gretchen was still in the city.

  Would Rose forgive her, though, if Bette turned her without permission? Bette’s forgiven Lily, after all—some stuff about being a vampire is shitty, but enough of it is sufficiently fantastic that it’s hard to hold
much of a grudge for very long. Rose would get over it soon enough and then things could be like they always should have been, Bette and Rose together and the same.

  Bette thinks of Rose, pretty sad angry clever talented messy living vulnerable prickly weird soft Rose, and knows in her heart that there’s really only one way that things can go when Bette goes to see her next.

  Only one choice left to them, for all they’ve been to each other and all that’s been lost.

  The thoughtful, anxious quiet of the parking lot is disrupted as the sliding doors of the elevator open and Alexander and Ash join them. Alexander is tucking a slightly blood-spotted linen handkerchief into the inner pocket of his coat, and Ash’s face has the fresh-scrubbed look of someone who’s just had their cheeks attacked by a very thorough linen handkerchief.

  “It went good,” Ash tells them before they can open their mouths to ask. Alexander gives her a withering look of disapproval.

  “It went well, please. Don’t make me regret your continued life by committing atrocities on your grammar.”

  Bette’s heart feels a thousand times lighter. She jumps off the car, launching herself at Ash for a laughing, delighted hug.

  “I knew it, I knew it, thank fuck,” she says, clinging to Ash’s skinny shoulders. “How do you feel? Did hunting help?”

  Ash answers without trying to push Bette away, allowing herself to be clung to crushingly tight. “It’s not any worse than being really stoned,” Ash says, her voice the same vaguely spacey musing it was before, if a little slower. “Not… much worse, anyway. I went to a gymnastics meet on Percocet once. Came fifth. Twelve girls and I was the only one high. I’ll… I’ll be fine.”

  Bette can tell that Ash’s assurances aren’t the complete truth; her voice is halting enough to make obvious the difficulty she has stringing a sentence together, and her hug in response to Bette’s is a little awkward, like Ash can’t quite remember how to be a real person.