It’s way, way above and beyond masochistic to attend school, even infrequently, as a vampire. Alexander is always telling Ash that it’s just not done. Ever. Vampires don’t have day jobs, they don’t get hobbies that require them to be awake when the sun’s up, and they don’t stay enrolled in the prep school they barely used to show up for when they were alive anyway. End of story.
Like Bette. Bette’s basically the same age as Ash, just a little older, but when Bette died she pretty much stopped being a teenager right away. She still gets lessons and homework and stuff from Alexander (one of these days, Ash is going to have enough courage to suggest to Alexander that seriously, he just needs to accept the fact that he wishes he had a teenage daughter of his own, no matter how much he might try to hide it by complaining about having to look after them. Even with courage, though, she’ll make the suggestion by telephone, from very far away) but lessons and homework aren’t the same as school, exactly. Adults get general education diplomas and stuff all the time.
Maybe it’s because Bette lives with other vampires, instead of in the same house where she used to when she was alive. Or because she’s killed a lot of people since then. Or… well, whatever the reason is, the basic truth is that even if Bette might not actually be any older than Ash, Bette has already acquired an agelessness to her, a particular edge to her manners and movements which suggests that she’s not actually the kid her appearance makes her look like.
They might both be newly-born vampires from the same zip code and the same school, but Ash and Bette are otherwise in different realities. Blake and Timothy and Alexander bought Scrimshaw for Bette to run— it wasn’t called Scrimshaw then, of course; Bette chose that name herself— and so she’s there most nights, overseeing her trendy-but-fun little nightclub, then going home at dawn to her townhouse full of other vampires to sleep the day away in luxury.
On the other hand, there’s Ash, who could have had all that— still could, because Alexander and the others are constantly trying to persuade her to stay with them and let them look after her, like they do Bette— but is obviously even crazier and stupider now that she’s dead than she ever was alive, because she’s trying to carry on with her routine as if nothing’s changed.
Her mom and dad have already lost Jenna this year, and Ash is absolutely not going to make them go through that a second time.
In the past, her role in the family was that of the fuck-up daughter, the boring one, always the spare and never the heir. But that’s okay, because it means that there’s less for her to keep up with, now that keeping up with everything is so, so, so much harder than it used to be. For instance, back in the old days it never used to matter if Ash’s history teacher acted like a nasty bitch and picked on Ash in class. That was just one of those things that happened in life. But now Ash’s emotions are hair-trigger fine, ready to blow up huge at the slightest provocation. And now when Ash gets angry, she gets hungry. Not just mildly peckish, but a deep gnawing space inside her that seems to grow larger and larger, wilder and wilder, with every second that ticks by.
By the end of the class, she’s ravenous, and has already taken two steps towards the teacher’s desk when Tommy grabs her arm and steers her in the direction of the doorway instead. Gripping her thin wrist with his own bony hand, he marches them through the corridors towards the darkroom, but Ash knows in every parched vein and tiny branching vessel of her body that she can’t last that long; she’s going to fucking die if she tries.
“Please, shit, oh fuck, Tommy please, I swear to god I won’t take too much,” she begs, trying to keep her voice quiet enough that the people around her don’t hear as well but she doesn’t really care about that either anymore, not when Tommy’s long lean throat is so fucking close and she could shove him up against a row of lockers and bite down and drink, tear his skin open and wet and red and just swallow and swallow, his body jerking and spasming against hers as he died.
Because Ash knows her promises are lies. If she starts, she won’t be able to stop after just a bit. She’ll tear him apart. Ash doesn’t get to be some suave, seductive vampire taking sexy sips from humans in the dark recesses of Scrimshaw late at night like the others. She’s a monster from one of her own nightmares, mindless and slavering and terrible.
And Tommy knows that, just like he knows that if she really wanted to there’d be no way for him to stop her from pinning him to the lockers or the floor and ripping him apart. He knows that and yet he’s still here, holding her steady as he works the tricky latch on the darkroom and opens the door. Ash is so fucking grateful for her friends.
The blood from the bag is room-temperature in her mouth but she doesn’t care, it could be congealed and cold and horrible right now and it would still be so fucking good. Ash can’t help the little groan of pleasure that rumbles in her throat as she drinks, and Tommy coughs awkwardly, embarrassed, but Ash doesn’t care about that, either. Anyway, she knows about heaps of completely mortifying stuff that turns him on, thanks to Michelle, and it’s not like blood is a weird kink for a vampire to have. Comparatively, she’s probably the most vanilla of her friends by a mile, which is amusing but not unexpected. She’d be surprised if ordinary, non-weird people had vampires as their friends.
Ash wishes she was a normal vampire. Maybe she’d care less about her stupid parents if she was a normal vampire; Bette stays in touch with her mom but lies to her all the time about where she is and what she’s doing. Maybe Ash would be able to spin a crazy lie about a scholarship to some far-off school like Bette can, if Ash was normal. Ash could drink from people, instead of from bags like a kid with a juice box, if she was normal. But she’s not, she was tortured to death and sent halfway to crazy in the process, and her body under her baggy school uniform is a puzzle of scar-lines from it. Which is more than shitty enough just in and of itself, but what makes it a thousand times worse is that Ash can’t even fucking remember any of it.
It’s not like the memories are missing; she doesn’t have a gap of lost time in there or anything. It’s more like her brain put police tape up around the edges of that part of her life, and won’t let her get near enough to see anything clearly. Everything that happened is there, she just won’t let herself think about it.
Timothy and Blake and Alexander tried to do hypnosis on her, to get her to regress back or whatever, like they do with people on talk shows and stuff. Timothy can influence people’s minds, usually. But when they tried to put Ash into a light trance she went all violent and awful on them, and when she’d woken up properly from it, it had been to find that they’d had to tie her down to keep her from hurting herself or anyone else. The monster is only ever the thinnest membrane of self-control away from taking her over completely, and so hypnosis was ruled by all involved to be out of the question.
Ash can imagine exactly what Jenna would say about all of this. It’d be just like it used to be, when the two of them would sit on Jenna’s bed in the late afternoon, when the sunlight was turning red-gold outside the picture window in Jenna’s room, and they were waiting for the uppers to kick in before they went out in search of whatever the best party of the night was.
Jenna would stretch her slim tanned arms above her head, catlike, and laugh a lazy laugh. “Trust you to be the screw-loose vampire that even the other vampires can’t handle,” she’d’ve teased, smirking as she prodded Ash’s leg with one pedicured toe.
Ash swallows the last dregs of blood out of the bag and throws it aside, blinking hard as she forces herself to stop thinking about Jenna.
~
After History is Geometry and Architecture, which is Ash’s favourite and least favourite class all at once. Favourite, because it’s the sole subject where being a vampire has made things easier, not more difficult: drawing out orthographic projections with a 2H lead pencil and some graph paper is as easy as breathing with her senses sharpened and her reflexes needle-fine. She’s getting aces for every assignment, and Mr Flannerty has told her that she should serious
ly consider becoming a graphic designer when she grows up. That put her on cloud nine for about twenty minutes, until she remembered that she’s never going to grow up in the way he meant it. Even if she becomes a graphic designer someday, she won’t get there through the normal route and she won’t get to enjoy it like a living person would.
Still, despite the occasional reminders that her life is crappy and technically not a life at all, because she’s dead, Ash still loves Geometry and Architecture. What makes it her least favourite class is that it’s in one of the sunniest rooms of the school, and no matter how careful she is with sunblocks and long-sleeved shirts (which she’d have to wear anyway; her scars are way too hardcore to let anybody see. If the teachers caught sight of even the least of them, she’d be in a world of concerned faces and possible police statement-giving, and at some point a doctor would probably try to examine her and then the other vampires would really flip their ship at her) and all the other protective precautions she uses to survive the school day, Ash always walks away from Geometry and Architecture in pain, her skin blistering under the cotton of her clothes and her face aching under the foundation she has to wear to cover the red patches which bloom up and sting.
Jay shows up in third period, which Ash and Michelle have off and which Tommy skips Math for. The four of them hang in the darkroom, which Ash thinks is completely sweet of them. With the low red developing light on and another bag of blood in her hand, the soreness of the sunburn fades and heals quickly as she chatters with her friends.
“I can’t believe I got here earlier than you,” Ash grumbles at Jay. “I’m not even alive and I’m better at getting to school than you.”
Jay shrugs. “I set my alarm to wake me. I must have kept hitting snooze without really being conscious. Like sleepwalkers.”
“Sleepwalkers that are too lazy to walk anywhere, maybe,” she replies, opening another bag of blood. Even in the dim tinted lighting, she can see the fresh puncture wounds peeking over the edge of his uniform collar. Ash will probably never be able to do with anybody what Blake does with Jay: sleep beside him, take small sips of his blood when they’re intimate.
Ash cares, kind of, because she’s lonely all the time and it would be nice not to feel like that, but at the same time she doesn’t care, not really. Ever since Ash died she’s had absolutely zero sex drive, which is funny because just after Jenna’s death Ash felt horny all the time, which was kind of gross and creepy and weird but sort of made a strange kind of sense as well, like her body was suddenly, urgently trying to be as alive as it could be, trying to remind her that she was still breathing. She doesn’t really breathe anymore. Not like people do. Only to talk. And she never feels horny, ever, so it’s hard to miss sex.
Maybe vampires are meant to be halfway-insane and so bloodthirsty they can’t feed off a human without causing a massacre. Maybe Ash is the one who’s built like they’re supposed to be, and it’s all the rest who are broken and wrong. That’s why they still have sex and she doesn’t; their wrong-turned bodies still have old drives from old lives, while her body seems to have forgotten what it was to be a person completely.
Which is ironic, in a sick fucked-up way, because her brain seems like it remembers being a person better than most vampire brains do. She’s clinging onto her old life much more tenaciously than any other vampire she’s ever heard of, even the ones who stayed as vampire hunters after they died.
In their fourth period English class, Michelle and Tommy have an epic fight via the instant messenger function on their phones, sitting on opposite sides of the room, and they break up, so Jay eats lunch with Tommy out in the thin cold sunshine of the quad and Michelle and Ash spend the break sitting back in the darkroom. Sometimes Ash feels weirdly sorry for the faint chemical scents still hanging in the still air of the darkroom. Evolution left them behind to fade into the wind, shut up and forgotten.
BLAKE
After Jay finally leaves for school, making a mad dash as if he isn’t already irrevocably late, Blake attempts to fall back to sleep and finds that he can’t. He listens to the calm, muted tick of his clock for a few hours, enjoying the suspended timelessness of the daylight hours and the sense of calm that brings: he cannot go anywhere, and so must rest whether he wants to or not. It’s a liberating feeling, and one of the many small pleasures Blake takes care to savor in his life.
Eventually growing bored of such intense idleness, Blake gets out of bed and leaves his room, going into the darkened main parlor of the top level of his townhouse. The blackout curtains are drawn tightly closed, the space illuminated only by the lit lamps and sconces. Timothy’s cat, Bikini Kill, is sleeping on the leather ottoman they acquired at some point and have never bothered to rid themselves of. It has always struck Blake as a markedly uncomfortable piece of furniture, but Bikini Kill seems perfectly at peace on it, stretching out as long as her spine will allow her and making a demanding mewl for attention when she hears him approach.
Blake scoops the cat up into his hands, ignoring her half-hearted protests against being moved, and settles into an armchair with her on his lap. She purrs approvingly as he scratches behind her ears. Blake has always liked Bikini Kill, since he first chose her out of her litter in the pet-store window. He likes her enough that he sometimes buys live mice and lets her play with them, but Blake only does this if he’s at least fairly sure that Jay won’t see. Jay labors under the misapprehension that, just because she is fluffy and small and adorable, Bikini Kill doesn’t have the same vicious, cruel streak common to all cats. He says Blake’s being ridiculous when Blake points out, quite rightly, that the fluffy, small, adorable pet that they’re all fond of would cheerfully disembowel them all if she were large enough or they were minuscule enough for her attack to be viable.
After Jay left for school, Blake changed into sleeping clothes, which means that Bikini Kill’s constantly shedding tabby-gray fur now has fashionable matte black raw silk to cling to. Blake feels that he doesn’t get nearly enough credit for the sartorial sacrifices he makes in the name of affection. It’s truly saint-like of him, really.
“I can’t decide who looks more self-satisfied, you or the cat,” Alexander remarks, leaning against the doorframe leading through to his room. He’s dressed in a pair of immaculate dark blue jersey sleep pants and an extremely well-worn Team Dresch t-shirt. Blake is sure the t-shirt is Timothy’s, as Alexander has never shown any particular inclination towards queercore punk music, and even less inclination towards frayed or faded clothing.
“I was just thinking to myself how good it is of me, to let the cat sit on my lap when I’m wearing dark silk,” Blake explains as Alexander sits in the opposite armchair.
Alexander quirks an eyebrow, looking amused. “Yes, it’s truly saint-like of you,” he says in a dry voice.
Blake beams. “That’s what I thought, exactly, yes.”
Alexander’s own smile turns serious. “Restless again?”
Blake ignores the question in favor of paying especial attention to Bikini Kill. Alexander narrows his eyes, disapproval evident on his patrician Chinese features. “You know, the common phrase ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead’ is actually rather good advice, Blake.”
“Have I made any lapses in judgement? No. So it’s not anything to concern yourself about,” Blake snaps. “We’re doing very well. This past year’s been the most profitable since—” He cuts himself off before the words ‘since Timothy was almost lost’ can escape his mouth. That’s not a memory any of them like to bring up. “…it’s the most profitable in decades,” he finishes lamely.
The irritation on Alexander’s face is halfway between amused exasperation and attempted homicide. “I’m not saying that as your second-in-command, you ludicrous half-wit. I’m saying it as your friend. Of course your leadership is good; I’ve never seen it otherwise, and I’ve seen you under far worse conditions than a little mild sleeplessness.”
Blake sighs, his shoulders slumping a little. “I know. I’m sorry
.”
“Now I know for certain something is wrong, if you’re apologizing for your behavior.” Alexander’s habitual smirk settles his face into its usual expression. “Is it because of what happened to Jay? I thought you said you killed all of those that were responsible already. I’m sure word will get around, as it always manages to, and he won’t have any trouble again.”
“It’s not the thought of another, similar attack which concerns me,” confesses Blake, trying to articulate the amorphous, nameless worry which has been coalescing behind his breastbone over the past few nights and days. “Nothing so specific. It’s that he’s… he has a spirit made of pure steel, and that makes it easy to forget how fragile he is. I’ve taken apart so many bodies over the years, you’d think I’d know that much about them for certain. And yet his body, which I know so well… I forgot that simply wanting it to be invincible doesn’t mean that it is.” Blake stills both his hands on Bikini Kill’s fur, hoping that Alexander won’t notice the tremble in Blake’s fingertips and palms.
“You love him,” Alexander surmises simply, not sounding the least surprised by the revelation. “It’s not just another of your little intrigues, like Lily and Will, or Cora.”
“That’s all it was, when it began,” Blake counters. “I found his superciliousness and sarcasm highly entertaining, and his blood was very sweet. That’s all it was, and then… I’m no better than the brooding immortal from some bodice-ripper, am I? Falling in love with a pretty young human.”
“I pray no author is ever demented enough to create a romantic hero quite like you,” replies Alexander, smirk curving up into a sharp half-smile for a moment. “But what can you do, really, apart from wallow in worrying like you seem determined to? You can’t shut him up in a box of cotton wool so the world can’t hurt him.” The advice sounds as if it’s born from deep experience, which Blake has no doubt is exactly the case. When they nearly lost Timothy, had to rebuild their lives with a companion whose memories of his entire vampire life were gone completely, Alexander had just picked himself up from the depths of defeat and started again. It had been inspiring, if a little heart-rending, to observe.
The Wolf House: The Complete Series Page 50
