And he knew—they both knew—that nobody could stay suspended in such a state. Eventually the choice had to be made: kick for the surface and for air, or sink down into the murky green silt of the riverbed.
So it was no surprise to Timothy that they walked further into the woods on this night than they had on any other. He wasn’t sure if he was scared, but that didn’t surprise him either. Since the very first time he and Ilia had kissed on a tart autumn afternoon, Timothy had never been completely certain of his own feelings at any given moment. There were too many of them and they were too thrilling to decipher calmly. He supposed that this must be what romance felt like.
Alexander has told Timothy that they crossed paths with a young-faced vampire named Ilia in France in the nineteen-sixties. He had owned substantial amounts of Paris real estate, having made a recent fortune through munitions manufacture and related industries. According to Alexander, the animosity between Ilia and Timothy practically crackled in the air, but they’d kept a strained pretence of civility whenever they encountered one another.
Timothy has no way of knowing what history between them led to that state of affairs. He doesn’t even know for certain that the vampire in France in the nineteen-sixties was the same Ilia—he’d had more than enough time in the interim to meet another by that name, after all. All Timothy knows absolutely is the truth of the memories he still holds from his short human life. He knows nothing about any later fallings-out; his last memories of Ilia are of awe and love.
They walked together into the forest and sat down together on the log of a fallen tree, the wood blackened and split in a long streak where lightning had struck during a storm.
“I should take some of this back to Ledishka,” Timothy said, gesturing to the wood, even though they both knew that he wouldn’t be going back to Ledishka again. “She could make a cross for herself from it. She likes carving. She’s quite good. She has a scar on her thumb from before she was as good as she is now, though. That’s always what she’s been like. She’s not afraid of getting hurt in the process of learning a thing, if she wants it enough. She’s not afraid of scars. She doesn’t wear a cross usually. Father scolds her for that. She doesn’t put faith in anything she can’t see, except for music. We both love music. But I think she’d put faith in a cross she carved out of this wood. Wood struck by lightning would be visibly wondrous enough to satisfy her, I think.”
Ilia stayed silent as Timothy prattled nervously, not interrupting and not replying. In the branch-shadowed moonlight of the wood, it seemed like Ilia could be a carving too, from a ghost-white tree as pale as snow. He was as unmoving as a carving, his profile as defined and noble and sharp as a carving. Timothy felt as if he could see every dark lash that framed Ilia’s eyes. Ilia’s eyes had become strange since he died, red as blood, shadowed as if by exhaustion or bad dreams.
“Will I ever see her again?” Timothy asked quietly. He would miss Ledishka horribly, but he knew that she would never forgive him if he stayed in the village and lived an ordinary dull life for her sake. She’d box his ears for it, and if there was one thing Timothy had absolute faith in through the whole of the world, it was his little sister’s temper.
“I give you my word,” Ilia said, and the way he said it made Timothy believe that there was worth to the word of a dead man, at least in this single instance. “I promise you we’ll see her again. We’ll let her grow up a little more, first, and then we’ll come back for her. I don’t think she’d like to die so young as she is now.”
Timothy doubted that Ledishka would like to die at all, but the thought that he’d see her again someday was too enticing for him to protest. He simply hummed agreement, scuffing the sole of his worn leather boot against the ground.
“You can say no, if you want to,” Ilia said kindly. Timothy’s spine shivered at something in the tone of the words.
“You’ll kill me anyway, though, won’t you?” he asked in reply, not especially worried or unhappy or scared. He didn’t feel much of anything, except the cold. He wondered if it was truly colder this year than in other years, or if there was just less in the world that kept him warm now.
He wondered, distantly, what his family would think had become of him. He wondered if his father and Zoscya would have any more children. He wondered if Ledishka would fall in love, have a first kiss, have a husband or a baby or adventures, before he saw her next. All of these wonderings seemed terribly, terribly far away, though. They were like wondering what the stars looked like up close. Not anything real enough to devote too much energy to thoughts about.
“Yes,” Ilia answered. “I’d kill you anyway.”
Timothy sighed, and scrubbed at the damp end of his own cold nose with his gloved hand. “I’ll wake up though, right?”
“You’ll wake up,” Ilia echoed, his sharp profile giving a sharp nod.
Timothy swallowed. He was starting to feel afraid, in his belly. Little flutters of fear, growing quickly and making his heart beat faster.
“One more question,” he demanded, and there was a tremble in his voice. “Do you… do you still love?”
Ilia turned then, facing Timothy, looking at him, lips open and red and his fangs white, so white, a mouth like the mouth of a wolf, like the mouth of a nightmare.
“Oh yes,” Ilia promised.
And then his jaw closed on Timothy’s throat and that was the end, and the next thing Timothy can remember is waking up in Alexander’s arms, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years later.
~
“My parents have already lost one daughter this year,” Ash says again, giving Alexander an extremely pointed look with the repeated words. “I’m not going to make them lose another.”
Jay looks a little embarrassed, shuffling his feet a little as the argument rages in the centre of the room. He’s still in his school uniform, an outfit Timothy doesn’t often see the boy wear. It makes him look different, less mature, which Timothy suspects is probably the reason why Jay doesn’t wear it to the townhouse if he can help it. The t-shirts and jackets Jay chooses for himself at least convey personality, even if they don’t add many years to his teenage looks. Better to be ‘Jason’ than ‘schoolboy’ if given the choice.
But Jay promised Ash that he’d be over as early as he could be, and so here he is directly from school. The sun’s still heavy and gold outside the thick blockout drapes of the parlor, and until night falls there’s nothing for Ash and Alexander to do except argue back and forth while Timothy and Jay watch.
Blake and Bette are still asleep. Timothy hopes the shouting won’t wake them. He heard Bette’s return at sunrise, and wants her to have as much rest as she can after that. Whatever happened between her and Rose, it wasn’t a happy parting. Timothy hopes that Rose is still alive, and even more than that he hopes that Bette has not done something which will haunt her with guilt. A vampire’s lifespan is a long time to carry around regrets. Timothy knows that extremely well.
“Even if the circumstances of your death and turning were absolutely textbook normal, I would still be against this idea,” Alexander says, ignoring the remark about Ash’s sister. Timothy suspects that Jay will have to deal with some very barbed remarks in the near future, as punishment for telling the girl who it was behind Jenna’s death, but beyond that it seems unlikely that there’ll be any repercussions or revenge undertaken by any party involved. Vampires feel loss deeply, but cannot recapture a sense of grief for any pain they felt before they died.
Were Jenna to die now, Ash would mourn her forever, but Jenna died when Ash was alive, and so Ash will never conjure more than an echo of the pain she carried as a human. Timothy has never personally known a vampire who remembered loss in a way other than this, but now that he considers the concept he realises that he has heard of one: Cora, who never forgot what the loss of her family felt like.
Timothy feels a sudden pang of sympathy for Cora, because there have been times when he has wished that Ledishka had died before he di
d, so that he wouldn’t still carry the unknowable mystery of her fate like a pebble in his heart.
“I’m very, very grateful,” Ash repeats; they’ve gone in circles around the same ideas a hundred times in the last forty minutes, and neither will budge in their position. “Don’t think I’m not. But I’m not staying here. I’m going home.”
“I can’t let you do that.”
“You don’t have power over me.”
Timothy’s going to get a headache if he has to listen to another minute of this. He slips out of the room and heads downstairs. The sun is low enough that he can go outside, though it won’t be comfortably dark for another few minutes. Still, anything is better than listening to more argument. An observer would never guess how vocally and often Alexander complained about having teenagers around, considering how forcefully he’s petitioning to keep Ash under his roof.
Timothy walks toward Will and Lily’s, enjoying the rush-hour foot traffic on the streets, the daytime people and the night people all mingling together as they negotiate their shared territory of the twilight. He loves this city, with all its mess and its drama and its problems. It’s his home.
Lily’s sitting on the edge of the sidewalk outside her warehouse, booted feet resting in the gutter and a cigarette hanging limply between her lips. Vampires can’t smoke, not really, but it’s not uncommon for those who did so in life to continue after being turned. Timothy’s read that the same is true among humans who lose their sense of taste; they’ll continue to eat the things they used to enjoy, and avoid the foods they never liked. Memory can be a powerful thing in that way.
“Hey,” she says when he sits down beside her. “You left pretty abruptly last time. Everything all right at the evil lair on Skullcrusher Mountain?”
Timothy shrugs. “Usually. Eventually. Yeah.”
“Pity.” She tilts her face up to the sun’s last rays and closes her eyes, as if the sensation of the light on her skin is pleasant rather than itchy and borderline painful. Then she stubs the cigarette out and stands.
“You can come in,” she offers. “We could probably do with some practice in fighting an actual evil vampire.”
~
He spars against them both, and ends up quite impressed by what they can do. Since they don’t drink blood, neither Lily nor Will can match him for strength or speed, but they’re disciplined, skilled combatants and they’re both extremely cunning, dirty fighters. Blake will be delighted. Timothy ends up with a black eye.
After they’re done, Will boils the kettle and makes a pot of tea. They don’t offer Timothy a cup, and for a moment the mood turns awkward as they’re all reminded of the strangeness of this truce, this almost-friendship between mostly-enemies. Timothy sits with Will and Lily as they drink their tea, the warmth and herbs and tannins of the drink infusing their bloodless cheeks with faint color.
“Do you want me to see if I can hear you?” Timothy asks Lily. “Your mind might be guarded by reflex, and I know ways of circumventing that. I’ll be able to teach you how to open up, if so.”
Lily and Will exchange a wary glance; that wordless shorthand between lovers which runs deeper even than the sending and receiving of ideas that Timothy can do. Then Lily turns to Timothy, shrugs, and nods. He smiles. He’s got a trustworthy sort of face, and Will and Lily have already made clear their pathological need to believe in redemption and goodness. Really, shooting fish in a barrel would have been more of a challenge than getting these two to let down their guard for him.
Timothy looks at Lily and concentrates, slipping past the protective psychic shell around her. She probably began to build it quite unconsciously, a long, long time before she died.
He sees the earliest years of her life and he sees her late childhood, when the other girls in her class all began to have their growth spurts and she lagged behind and how that made her a target for bullies so she learned to fight, and how the adrenaline rush that the fighting gave her made her want to fight more and more, and how disappointed her parents would look when they were called up to the school yet again after she’d blacked another eye or knocked loose another baby tooth from one of the children who tried to intimidate this small, light-brown-skinned little girl with wild curls of hair and fierce eyes.
And he sees how nobody, not her parents and not the guidance officer and not the expensive child psychiatrist with colourful building blocks and anatomically correct cloth dolls on the shelves in his office beside the picture books, not a single one of them could understand the thrillseeking that Lily seemed to have an addiction to. The acting out was inexplicable, they all said. She’s a bright little girl, but she’s not bored with her lessons, because she’s in a gifted program. She’s from a good and solid home. She had some problems with teasing for a while, because she’s small, but no more so than other children deal with regularly.
For a little while they thought it might be racism, and Lily laughed outright at them for that, because that was something that she’d dodged, her genes had managed to cheat that whole fucked up system. She was mixed ethnicity but didn’t look it, her skin no darker than a deep tan and her curls gone sun-blonde from the games she’d play at every moment she could, t-ball and soccer and football and sprinting and anything else that being short didn’t matter for.
After an especially bad fight—two black eyes and three teeth lost on the boy she was up against, and none of the teeth had been baby ones—Lily spent three weeks in a juvenile detention facility, in the hopes that seeing real problem children would scare her straight. Instead, it introduced her to Anna, who ended up as her best female friend right up until the day Lily died. Anna was too tough for anyone to mess with, and through the memory-eyes of Lily’s childish first impression it’s easy to see why Lily loved her, this vicious little girl with her perfect little teeth bared in a threatening frown at the counselors, her eyes dancing with laughter as she and Lily whispered and giggled together in the dormitory after lights out.
And Timothy sees the children’s ward after a fall from a horse, how Lily hated the pain because pain meant vulnerability but even worse than the pain was the fear, was the future stripped bare of all the opportunities sport had offered her, and how she didn’t care if her brain was a good brain or any of the other options she still had for a future because sport had been the one she wanted, the one she chose, and now it was wrenched away from her and made her feel smaller than she’d ever felt.
And then there was Anna, suggesting that they start a band because Anna hated seeing Lily lost, and then the band brought Will to them, and maybe, Lily’s mind says to Timothy, just maybe losing sport was worth it for gaining Will.
But underneath all that, under the quicksilver flashes and images and moments and scents and tastes and smells and temperatures and songs, under the sprawling incomprehensibility of the collage of memory, are the truths of who Lily is. There’s her love for Will, and deep affection for her friends, and the bittersweet pang she feels when she thinks of Anna, and the strange protective ferocity which Rose has ignited in her and which Lily doesn’t have a name for. There’s longing for blood, and hatred of the dark, and nightmares, and anger, and passion, and sharp shining intelligence. Mostly, though, there’s love, defining and shaping and shading the vibrant self that lives inside the being known as Lily Green.
Timothy knows, in a way he’s never truly known it before, that who someone is—whether they call it a personality, or a soul, or a consciousness, or something else entirely—contains much that is separate from memory. Experiences shape, but rarely define. Lily would still be intrinsically Lily, give or take a neurosis or two, even if she woke up with a complete blank where her memories should be.
Shaking himself out of his daze, Timothy gives them both the best approximation of a winning smile that he can muster. “You’re fine,” he promises Lily. “I can teach you. But I should go for now.”
Without waiting for a response, he leaves the warehouse, striding back through his city’s street
s and suburbs and tall, dark buildings. He’s on his way up the stairs to the top floor when he notices the door to one of the soundproof rooms on the studio floor ajar, the sounds of a compilation CD threading mutedly through the air.
Bette’s sitting on a beanbag beside the large dubbing system, which is currently copying the CD to a second disc as the songs play. “Making one for Ash,” Bette explains, looking up from the book she’s reading as Timothy leans against the doorframe. There’s a stack of several more books on the floor beside her, hefty texts on management practises in the entertainment industry and how-to guides on hospitality business. “I’m doing some homework for when I open the nightclub,” she goes on as her eyes narrow and she looks more closely at his face. “My dear sir, that is one badass shiner you’ve got there.”
“Have you done all your real homework yet?” Timothy asks, as if there’s any question as to what her answer will be. Bette grins cheekily, the childlike expression turned strange by the gleam of her fangs.
“Nah,” she confesses. “Alexander’s probably gonna skin me alive for it, one of these days. Between your black eye and my lousy attitude to school, I guess we’re both more trouble than we’re worth, huh?”
Timothy smiles back at her, and shakes his head.
“No,” he says. “We’re not.”
FIRE PROOF HEART
BOOK FOUR
OF THE
WOLF HOUSE SERIES
Hey Nat and Erinna, your faith in this story kept me writing at times when I would have given up. So this book is for you, and so are my thanks.
BLAKE
“I’m going to die.”
The Wolf House: The Complete Series Page 48
