Blake glances over with mild interest as Jay’s dire prediction proves true, the flat wide screen of the television exploding with vivid gore as the hero meets yet another violent end. Jay pauses the game, makes a tally-mark on the notepad beside him, and resumes playing.
“Does this study you’re doing for school include incidents of la petite mort, the little death?”
Jay doesn’t bother to look at Blake as he answers. “The shining wit which once enchanted Oscar Wilde is now making the same sex jokes that all the fifteen-year-olds in my psychology class already made when we were given the assignment. I hope you’re as ashamed of that as I am.”
It’s four-thirty in the morning, and Jay is already dressed in the blazer and slacks he’ll wear to school once daylight hits. Blake, watching from against a bank of pillows on the bed, is still in the light wool charcoal suit worn to the interminable police function he’d attended earlier in the night. Someone had been graduating, or possibly retiring. There had been matronly women and portly men looking proud and tearful, at any rate.
Blake loves fat bodies, the voluptuary and the rolls of lush flesh of them, but the creaking constriction of the too-tight garter garments most large people wear in order to appear smaller is something he can do well without. One should treat a body, Blake feels, in the same fashion that one might treat an especially exquisite velvet coat: a care bordering on reverence, not by crushing it into a too-small container and ruining the natural fall of the lines.
Hm. The analogy perhaps needs work. Blake’s metaphors are often a little convoluted when he first thinks of them.
Jay is far from voluptuous, his body the spare near-starved angles of a teenage boy who is burning fuel faster than he can consume it, but Blake likes Jay’s body anyway. There is the ghost of a yellowing bruise along Jay’s sharp jawline, the sole lingering remainder of the battered state he had appeared in a week earlier when his sluggish feet had dragged him up the stairs to Blake’s rooms shortly after midnight.
The rest of his injuries are healed, even the broken finger, thanks to liberal doses of Blake’s blood, but that sepia shadow is proving tenacious.
“I’m gonna head off. Crash in the darkroom for a couple of hours sleep before classes start,” Jay says, switching off the television and standing, yawning as he does so. They’d slept a little at dusk, as they often did, but apart from that Jay has had no rest at all; while Blake endured speeches and unattractive corsetry (two words which, by rights, should remain mutually exclusive) Jay had gone with Bette to her Chinese lesson.
“Or you could sleep here,” Blake points out. “What with this being a bedroom, with a bed, and the darkroom at your school being, presumably, not a bedroom of any sort.”
Jay shakes his head. “If I sleep here, I’ll never get to school at all. And the darkroom’s not really anything anymore, since the photography classes use digital cameras and Photoshop now. Kids crash in there all the time.”
Blake sighs, stretching luxuriously atop the Egyptian cotton comforter on the bed. “In my day, no concubine worth having would have abandoned their vampire master to an empty tomb before the sun rose.”
Jay snorts in a most unromantic fashion, resting his hands on his hips as he looks down at Blake. “Oh, please, you were born in the 1820s; you’ve never had a concubine. Or a tomb, for that matter. The darkroom is way more like a tomb than this.” He gestures to the brightly-lit, tastefully decorated (Blake had overseen the interior designers himself) bedroom surrounding them. “That’s something I love about being here at the townhouse. All the light and colour. It always makes me feel… better.”
Blake frowns slightly, disliking the implicit suggestion that Jay otherwise feels less than good. Then he gives the boy his most charming smile. “I solemnly swear I will wake you up in time for school.”
“Liar. You sleep like— the dead?”
“A log,” Jay retorts, mouth twisted in a wry smirk.
“Set that horrible alarm on your phone, then. I suspect you’d rise from the grave itself if that contraption summoned you.”
Jay rolls his eyes— a gesture so often repeated in their conversations that Blake sometimes fears for the boy’s ocular health— and pulls the phone from his pocket, pressing a few keys and then resting it on the shelf beside the bed. “All right, but I’m sleeping in my uniform, so I don’t get too comfortable.”
Blake’s smile widens to a grin. “Capital. I’ll remain dressed as I am as well, then. There’s something delightfully debauched about awakening in the rumpled clothing of the night before, I find.”
Rolling his eyes again, Jay flops onto the bed beside Blake, resting his forehead in its usual position against the crook of Blake’s neck. Blake finds their typical arrangement of limbs rather wonderful; it makes him feel as if Jay is curled in against him for protection, and yet leaves Blake’s own throat utterly vulnerable to Jay’s soft mouth. There’s a wordless poetry to that give-and-take of power, even if Jay is human— human teeth, after all, are still capable of terrible violence, and Jay’s mouth is currently home to one broken-edged incisor of particular wickedness, the point wearing a raw spot on the inside of Jay’s lip and making every kiss between them laced with the faint taste of blood.
Which is, of course, not something Blake would ever complain of, per se. But the sight of that chipped fang-tooth in Jay’s mouth is too much a reminder of the beating the boy has so recently suffered; of the human vulnerability and breakability of him. Jason dislikes dentists, and has not yet allowed Blake to make an appointment for him, but Blake has far from given up.
As Jay’s breathing quietens and evens out into the rhythms of sleep, Blake’s thoughts stray back to the evening a week earlier, to the fear and fury he’d felt at seeing Jay’s injured state.
“I was out at Scrimshaw,” Jay had explained as Blake had wrapped and splinted his swollen, wrong-angled index finger. His voice was thick behind his split lip, the thin skin cut deep by the razor-edge of his chipped canine. “And we were just, you know, goofing off. Michelle was complaining about how everyone thinks it’s normal for guys to think two girls making out is sexy, but girls who think guys making out get called freaks. And Tommy said okay, that’s a fair deal, if you kiss Ash then I’ll kiss Jay.”
Blake had quirked one teasing eyebrow, and in other circumstances may have made an offhand remark regarding his own proprietary rights to any and all kisses of Jay’s, but as the poor boy was clearly in substantial pain Blake remained quiet and let him speak.
“So the girls kissed, so then Tommy and I did, whatever, and then we just kept hanging out for another hour or something after that, and didn’t even think about it being any kind of big deal. But then when we left, Ash and Michelle got a cab back to Ash’s place, and these three guys were… they’d been waiting for me and Tommy to be on our own, I guess. Tommy’s okay, he just got a black eye, I think. They were mostly going for me, because I’m shorter I guess. Maybe they could just tell that I was for-real queer, not just making out as a show for his girlfriend like Tommy.”
Blake pressed a neat square of gauze dressing over the scrape down Jay’s forearm. “I’m going to kill them,” he told Jay. “Painfully.”
Jay gave a weary laugh, his face mottled colourful with sore-looking bruise-blotches. “Okay. Yeah, okay.”
It had occurred to Blake later that night, as he twisted an arm of one of the three thugs free from its socket, that it was possible that Jay had thought Blake’s announcement had been a request for permission, and that Jay’s “okay” had been in response to that presumed request. Blake was charmed that Jay would offer such a prompt endorsement of bloodshed in his honor— it showed a healthy self-respect in the boy— but felt puzzled that Jay could entertain the notion that Blake would ever feel compelled to seek someone else’s permission for anything.
Which isn’t to say that Blake has no sense of responsibility beyond his own desires; it was simply that, in this case, Blake’s sense of responsibility had do
vetailed neatly with his equally healthy sense of possessiveness.
He felt it was the responsible action of one of Scrimshaw’s major shareholders to clamp down on any threat to the club’s patrons, and the possibility of violence certainly fell under this category. Eliminating the three bullies had been a public service to the club’s customers.
But far more importantly, the snarling thing of fangs and claws which Blake knew himself to be had not taken kindly Jay being damaged.
~
Sometimes humans— and those vampires who playact at holding the same ethical stances as humans, like a petulant child who would rather swelter in a favourite coat than admit that summer has arrived at it is time to put away winter garments— misconstrue Blake’s opinions as moral stances. When he tells them that he dislikes homophobes, they take this to mean that he is opposed to homophobia. And while it’s true that he thinks that this particular form of prejudice is meaningless, stupid, and arbitrary, it’s also true that Blake feels that the very fabric of the universe itself is meaningless, stupid, and arbitrary. To fault a creature of random coincidence for behaving randomly seems pointless to him.
But nevertheless, Blake dislikes homophobes. Their clothing decisions are almost invariably tacky, and they have a tendency to make life difficult for people Blake is rather fond of. Blake likes killing homophobes.
Another personal preference which the insufferably kindhearted interpret to be virtue on Blake’s part is his refusal to attack or kill streetwalking prostitutes. He doesn’t do this out of any gallantry; it’s Blake’s experience that sex workers are just as autonomous and cognizant as those in any other profession, and far be it from him to treat them like abused animals in need of careful treatment. In past years he’s known a few harlots well enough to call them friends, and all of them would have bristled at being looked at with high-minded pity, no matter how well-meaning that pity might have been.
No, Blake refuses to kill hookers because— as well as being pedestrian, and rather tawdry— killing hookers is something that society understands as a crime. When streetwalkers go missing, or are found dead, it’s easy for bystanders and police and the media to comprehend that someone has attacked the victim. And while Blake knows that the police force is just another bureaucratic institution whose rules can be circumvented with judicious application of funds, there’s no reason to get tangled up in such complications in the first place.
This is one of the simplest tenets of vampire life, and the fact that it is so rarely known is a puzzle to Blake: almost everybody perceives reality in a way which confirms the hypothesis they’ve already made about it. Prostitutes get murdered; people already know that’s how the world works. Murders have culprits, which means that sufficient investigation will uncover a culprit, and so when a prostitute is killed by a vampire it often eventually leads to all sorts of bribery being necessary before the police will go away and leave the vampire alone. Blake can do well without all that needless fuss, thank you very much. None of the vampires in his gang would do something so dull-witted and dreary as murder a streetwalker, and that’s got nothing to do with any human concept of chivalry.
When, by contrast, a wealthy college frat boy is found bloated and green in the lake a week after vanishing, his money still in his pockets and his expensive watch still clinging to his putrid wrist, murder just doesn’t make any sense as an explanation. He must have drowned, people say. Too much to drink and fell in. Reality continues on its neat, predetermined course. Blake finds the whole thing rather wonderful.
There are, it must be confessed, two vampires whose infantile refusal to act like vampires Blake is pleased about. Lily and Will were vampire hunters before they were turned, a fact which should, by rights, make them more flexible in their modes of thought than the general population. Most minds cannot deal with being derailed from normalcy by the notion that vampires are real, and so simply ignore all evidence proving this. Anyone capable of making the perceptive leap to accepting vampires would, one would think, have no trouble at all making the comparatively minor shift in thought required to embrace their new lifestyle as one of the undead.
And yet Lily and Will, bless them, cling as tenaciously as a child with a security blanket to their ideas of good and bad. In fact, it feels almost lazy to employ metaphors to describe them, when some of the metaphors fall so close to the truth.
For instance, Blake has it on good authority that there have been evenings when one or the other of them has stayed too late at Rose’s home, and has been forced to spend the daylight hours sleeping in the closet. In the closet! Any similes Blake could construct regarding the denial of one’s true nature pale in comparison to that truth.
Will and Lily are in the closet and oh, Blake finds their breathless repression so delicious. The whole drama will probably have a dreadfully messy end— to begin with, Lily and Will occasionally swear some sort of tiresome revenge on Blake and his gang (something which Blake suspects happens more often at the times when Lily and Will can’t find anything good on television)— but Blake has never let the threat of future misery deter him from a present pleasure. He loves their scowls and glares, their accusations that he is evil and that he must pay for killing them. Blake doesn’t have the slightest belief in the concept of evil, and he knows that someday the two of them will see what a gift it is he’s given them in turning them into vampires.
Or perhaps they’ll never see that. Blake doesn’t really care. Either way, the adventure will be entertaining to the last, and that’s all that matters.
ASH
In the five weeks since she died, Ash has been to school eight times, which means her attendance record looks pretty much the same as it did when she was alive. It’s a bitch of a thing, attending classes in open-plan, many-windowed buildings when your body’s typical reaction to sunshine is to break out in painful blisters and hives and then roast slowly, but Ash is doing okay. She got good at avoiding the brightest patches of campus during the last months before she got killed, because for most of that time she was enduring school while she was hung-over or coming down from a buzz.
She’s not shy about calling in favors to get her through the day, either.
“I need another batch of blood today. Same as last time should be fine.”
Alexander makes an irritated huffing sound on the other end of the phone line. “It’s five in the morning. You couldn’t have let me know about this any earlier?”
“You’re not going out there and harvesting it yourself,” Ash snipes back. “I didn’t realise you needed prep time before putting your credit card numbers into a website.”
“Your parents give you credit cards of your own; I fail to see why I should foot the bill for these excursions of yours.” Alexander sounds cranky and bored, but Ash can hear the faint hum of his laptop booting up in the background on his end, so she knows that he’ll do as she’s asked. “How long do you intend to take advantage of my better nature like this? Is this to be a permanent fixture of your routine, these thrillseeking trips into daylight life?”’
“I don’t know, Alex. How about I stop calling when my sister stops being dead. Does that count as a permanent fixture?” Ash asks nastily, rubbing another brand of sunblock into the skin of her forearms. The lotions don’t do a huge amount of good, but there’s no harm in putting them on anyway.
Alexander sighs. “All right, all right. The booking is made. Happy?”
Ash makes a rude noise in the back of her throat. “That’s a stupid question.”
“Have a good day at school, Ashley,” says Alexander, and while it’s not exactly an apology— Alexander isn’t really an apology kind of guy— it’s well-meaning, and as close to kind as he ever sounds.
“Yeah, you have a good sleep,” she replies with a sigh, ending the call and turning back to her reflection in her floor-length wardrobe mirror.
A few nights after Ash became a vampire, her hair went white. The others told her that it happens sometimes. She wasn’t re
ally all that bothered; she’d never felt especially attached to her natural red shade or anything. Jenna had always been sort of defined by her hair, loving the glossy golden weight of it around her face, the way it made her into some cartoon cliché of America’s sweetheart and a sexkitten slutbomb all at once just by being blonde. But Jenna’s dead now, and there’s only Ash left, and Ash doesn’t care about her hair like Jenna did.
Ash has dyed the stark white into a kind of crazy anime blue, which clashes with her white-blue skin tone but whatever, like she gives a shit if she looks like a pretty corpse or not. Her school uniform hangs baggy off her shoulders, because she lost a lot of weight before she died and now can’t gain it back, and the general effect of her hair and her skin and her skinniness and her ill-fitting clothes is one of vaguely pathetic invisibility, which is exactly what she was shooting for.
Jenna never would have been able to get away with skulking around the school as a dead girl walking. Jenna was the centre of attention wherever she went, and in her shadow Ash never had to worry about the glare of the limelight.
~
The sun’s still not properly up when Ash arrives on-campus, stashing her bike in the special low-built lockers behind the gym for cyclists to keep their stuff in. The school had the lockers built to encourage students to be more environmentally conscious in their transport choices, but it’s a rare day when there are more than four or five bikes stowed in there.
She heads directly to the photography darkroom, just to make sure that the delivery went off without a problem. She knows there’s almost no chance that anything went wrong; long, long before she was a vampire, Ash already knew that money, if there’s enough of it, makes everything go smoothly, and Alexander’s got far more money than even Ash’s parents dream of.
The cooler bag is there, like she expected it would be, the neat little medical packets of blood stacked inside, everything perfectly arranged. Ash puts the slightly smelly sleeping bag she keeps in the darkroom as camouflage over the bag, and then leaves the dark room again, heading to her first class long before the bell so she can choose the desk that seems most shadowed.
The Wolf House: The Complete Series Page 49
