The Wolf House: The Complete Series

by Mary Borsellino

  Min gestures to Jay’s throat, where the faint scars of old bites from Blake are visible in strong light. “He owns you,” she says again simply, like Jay is the small child and she’s the older, wiser party in the conversation.

  The girl tugs at the stiff lace collar of her dress again, and Blake decides that philosophical debates about families and ownership can wait until another time. “Do you want different clothes?” he asks Min. “Are you hungry? What food do you like best?”

  “Tangyuan with red beans,” she answers promptly, her wariness overridden by the possibility of her favourite dish. “Yes please.”

  Despite everything, Jay gives Blake a small smile at Min’s reply. The boy has recognised that the little girl, like him, is a survivor at heart.

  ~

  They return to the townhouse, now accompanied by the little girl. Mikhail and two vampires whom Blake vaguely recognises as having met in Trenton several years earlier are on their way out the door as the motley crew arrives, but the two parties offer no acknowledgment of each other beyond nods of greeting. Blake regrets that Mikhail has pulled away from the once-close friendships he enjoyed with Timothy and Alexander; even after so many years, and so much of it, Blake does not feel especially comfortable with change. Not, at least, in the things which he has come to think of as constants.

  Jay carries Min up the stairs, then vanishes alone into Blake’s room with a firm click of the door locking behind him. Bette and Ash, interrupted halfway through a game of checkers on the antique chess-table, watch with wide-eyed surprise as Blake, Alexander, Timothy, and Min regard each other in helpless uncertainty.

  “There’s always Amy and Nicole…” Timothy offers uncertainly. Alexander appears to still be preoccupied with being furious at Cora for setting this particular disaster in motion. Blake sighs. He utterly hates it when it’s left to him to be the practical one; such a role doesn’t suit him in the slightest.

  “There are some of Daisy’s childhood nightgowns in one of the trunks in the attic,” he states. “They’re old, but they’ll do for tonight. We can buy the girl some new clothes-“

  “Min,” Min puts in, lifting her chin as she meets Blake’s gaze with her own. “Not ‘the girl.’”

  Despite himself, Blake is charmed. “Of course, Miss Min. My apologies. We shall buy Min some new clothing tomorrow evening. And Jay is without doubt calling Sofie at this very moment, so we’ll wait to hear what she has to say before we make any decisions on where Min is to go. Amy and Miranda and Katherine have had to deal with quite enough of Cora’s meddling lately, but that may prove to be the best solution.”

  “I hope Sofie pays us a visit,” Alexander replies, brightening visibly. “Perhaps she’ll bring the lovely Jennifer with her.” He turns to address Timothy. “You’ll love her, I’m certain. She’s far more interesting than her brother.”

  “Her brother?” Ash asks, and there’s a note in her tone that Blake would probably pay attention to, under other circumstances, but he’s irritated and weary and thinking of a thousand things already, so he lets it slide.

  “Jennifer is Will’s younger sister,” Alexander explains.

  “Oh,” Ash answers. She turns her attention back to the checkers game, gesturing for Bette to take her turn. The abrupt frostiness in the mood of the room is impossible to ignore, so Blake gestures for Alexander and Timothy to lead him and Min into their suite instead.

  Bikini Kill comes to greet them as they step inside, meowing petulantly for attention. Blake scoops the cat up and deposits her out in the main room. She makes an affronted yowl and scampers to Bette and Ash, seeking affection from them instead.

  Blake remembers all too well Jay’s stories of childhood birthdays and Christmases, all the times the boy asked for a pet and was firmly told no on the grounds that Sofie might hurt it. Blake isn’t going to let Min and Bikini Kill meet if such a meeting can be avoided.

  A large table runs the length of the wall beside the door, and laid out on its surface is Alexander’s tool kit, the tiny screwdrivers and pins he uses to work on the musical boxes, pocket watches, and other small mechanisms he steals from his victims or buys from antique shops. Spread carefully on the rectangle of black velvet are the silvery workings of a jewelry box, the sort with the figure of a tiny ballerina inlaid into the lid, which can be made to twirl in a tinkling dance by the turn of a key.

  Min lifts one of the springs from the clockwork carefully, turning it in the light to inspect it from all angles. She replaces it in exactly the position it was before she touched it, and then repeats the action with one of the largest of the cogs, which is still barely bigger than her thumbnail.

  “You make these?” she asks Alexander. He shakes his head.

  “No. I just repair them,” he replies. It’s obvious that the answer relies on a word she doesn’t know, but Min gives little sign of this, laying down the cog primly and turning away from the table. “Xiū bu,” Alexander explains, and that makes Min smile in comprehension.

  “You’re okay,” says Min, addressing Alexander in the same frank tone she’d used to tell Jay that he belonged to Blake. “I like you.”

  ASH

  She lets Bette win the game, and then leaves for home. Home, what a joke. Like anywhere is home anymore.

  Ash is in a shitty mood. Will’s sister gets to be all important to Alexander, someone he has an interest in and who gets to wander in and out of the lives of the vampires in the townhouse as the vagaries of fate dictate. But Ash’s sister was just… lunch. A meal. A victim killed for her necklace, because it was pretty and Alexander likes pretty things.

  The pragmatic part of Ash— which is, ironically, the bloodthirsty, monstrous part of her, not the remaining human part at all— knows that this way of things is just, well, how things go. She kills people without knowing who they are, and those people probably have sisters and families and friends who miss them afterwards just as much as Ash misses Jenna. It’s just the luck of the draw. Will caught Blake’s eye, and that gave Will’s sister the extra attention, the moment of grace, that gave her time to register as interesting to Alexander. Ash never registered as interesting to anybody, and neither did Jenna. They never had a chance. It’s only by pure horrible luck that Ash stuck around after her own murder, and thereby gained a role in the world that went on afterwards.

  It sucks. It all sucks, worse than anything has ever sucked before. It’s not fair and it’s not fun, and Ash hates it. Being a vampire shouldn’t be this awful so much of the time. She is in the very shittiest of shitty moods, and there isn’t even anyone she can complain to about it.

  The puppy catches Ash’s eye before the boy does. She was always a puppy person more than a kitty person when she was alive, which she chalks up to the fact that dogs tend to be more extroverted— or at least more social— than cats. Ash used to be totally extroverted and social and a people-person, even if she always played second to Jenna at parties and clubs. It’s kind of funny, almost. Nobody would ever guess it, to see her now.

  The puppy is a tiny French Bulldog, and it’s all Ash can do not to crouch down and coo at it. It’s that adorable. She smiles nervously instead, staying a good distance away.

  “You can pet her if you like,” the boy says. He’s a little younger than her, brown-skinned and a bit chubby. His voice and body language are as shy as Ash’s own.

  She shakes her head. “Thanks, but dogs don’t like me, mostly.”

  “Oh.” He tilts his head a little to one side, like he’s seeing her properly for the first time. Ash doesn’t really make a strong first impression on people anymore. She thinks maybe normal people have this special sense, like ESP kind of, which stops them paying proper attention to anyone who looks too broken or needy or fucked-up. A filter that stops the broken people’s shit from messing up their lives. It explains why homeless people seem so much more present in the city now than they ever were before for Ash, at least as far as she can remember. Now that she’s invisible too, she can see t
hem better.

  “You’re a friend of Bette’s,” the boy hazards, and the statement is so random that Ash can’t help but laugh awkwardly at it.

  “Is that, like, the new code word for it?” she asks. “Gay people are friends of Dorothy, and vampires are friends of Bette? Because I think she’d maybe get a bit weirded out by that.”

  The boy looks embarrassed. “Sorry. I didn’t want to say, you know, vampire. You might be incognito or something.”

  Ash gestures to her threadbare Ramones t-shirt and frayed black skinny jeans, her green Chuck Taylors and the slushy grey-brown remains of snow on the pavement underneath her lightly-dressed form.

  “Do I look like I’m making much of an effort to pass here?”

  The bulldog paws at the boy’s ankle, obviously unamused at this stop in its evening walk. Ash motions for him to keep walking, and falls into step beside him. The dog ignores her.

  “You’ve got a sister, don’t you? I used to see you rollerblading with her, when it was warm.”

  “She’s dead,” Ash replies. The words don’t hurt to say. The words never feel really real.

  “Is she a vampire, like you?”

  “No. Just dead.”

  “Oh.” They walk without speaking to the end of the block, then turn the corner and start making their way past another row of houses just like the last lot. Ash wonders at the fact that she’s never lost her way, walking around the neighbourhood. Somehow she’s always known where she is, even if there’s no obvious landmarks around to guide her.

  “Her name was Jenna,” she tells the boy. “I’m Ash. Short for Ashley, but nobody except my parents really calls me that anymore.”

  “I’m Carlos,” the boy answers. “Do you drink people’s blood?”

  There’s something nervous, almost anticipatory, in his tone, and Ash casts a sly glance at him. Sure enough, there’s a little snakebite scar on Carlos’ throat, two tiny puncture wounds that’ve healed up cleanly.

  “No, sorry,” Ash replies. “When I bite people, I tear them apart. It’s pretty unsexy. I guess serial killers would think it’s sexy, but I don’t really want to date a serial killer. That’s weird, right?”

  “Uh.” Carlos’ brow furrows as he considers the question. “No? Not really. I mean, I’m pretty sure most people don’t want to date serial killers. It’s not something you see listed in personals ads all that much. I think sense of humour and liking walks on the beach is more common.”

  “I like walks on the beach, too,” Ash assures him. “Walks on the beach are great. But I like them at night, which I think is back in creepy territory.”

  “But you’d be looking for creepy, wouldn’t you? Or, at least, for somebody who was okay with creepy.”

  Ash shakes her head. “Not really. Like I said, I don’t think I’m holding out for a serial killer in shining armor to come rescue me from a tower or anything. Serial killers are probably totally anal about housework and stuff, anyway. I’m kind of a pig.”

  “I think everyone our age is, aren’t they? I mean, I’ve never met anybody who wasn’t,” Carlos replies.

  It’s funny; back when Ash was still Ashley, she never would have talked to someone like Carlos at all. He’s got Geek written all over him. He probably has subscriptions to online games and knows the rules to Dungeons and Dragons and everything like that.

  Once upon a time, Ash would have given him one nasty look and crushed him like a bug, and that would have been the full extent of their social interaction. But now that things are different, and she’s talking to him, he seems like an okay guy. Ash blames Bette. Bette is totally weird enough to know the rules to Dungeons and Dragons. It’s Bette’s fault that Ash has become this weirdo geeker kind of vampire, instead of a cool suave stylish one like Blake and Alexander and Timothy. Blake and Alexander and Timothy probably would have drained Carlos and left him dead in someone’s trash can by now. They wouldn’t be discussing the relative tidiness of their general peer group.

  “Are you my age? Sorry, is that a bad question to ask a vampire? You might be like five hundred or something

  Ash cuts Carlos off with a withering look. “You used to see me rollerblading with my sister. You know I can’t have been dead long.”

  “Right, sorry.” Carlos looks down at their feet. “Sorry.”

  Ash sighs. “Whatever, it’s cool. I don’t know the etiquette rules either.”

  “Do you ever think about contacting her? With a Ouija board? I’ve heard a ton of people say they’re dangerous, but if they’re dangerous that means they work, that they’re powerful, right?”

  Ash shakes her head. “I don’t think Jenna would want me to do that. She never liked it when I woke her up on Saturday mornings when she was sleeping in, and this is kind of the same thing. Disturbing her rest. If she wanted to… haunt me, or whatever, that’d be one thing, but I’m not going to chase her down. That doesn’t seem fair. The dead should get to stay dead if they want.”

  BLAKE

  Finally the night draws to a close, as it must do even when filled with the most unwelcome kinds of complications, and in the grand scheme of things, one little girl is hardly the most unwelcome of the complications Blake has had to deal with. She’s certainly much smaller and more easily quietened than either Bette or Ash, for instance, though Blake wouldn’t call them unwelcome either. It’s a rare disaster which Blake doesn’t find at least some small measure of true enjoyment in.

  They find an unoccupied room for the child to sleep in on the ground floor of the townhouse, with all the other residents under strict instructions to leave her unharmed. The risk is minimal; all the vampires in Blake’s little pack find the thought of biting a child as young as Min extremely distasteful. Even Cora never had a stomach for the notion in the past, though Blake isn’t surprised that she’d make an exception in order to make life awkward for Alexander.

  Her run-in with Will— and, by extension, with Alexander, when Alexander had extricated Will from the execution Cora had planned for him— had come about because a hunter Will had been traveling with had freed the teenagers and children being held captive by the vampires Cora worked for. Only the teenagers had been prisoners of Cora herself, but the association had been close enough that Blake is not especially surprised by her more recent actions. Cora never did care much who it was that was hurt by her plans, so long as her own satisfaction was to be found by the end of it all.

  The hunter who’d been with Will was Sofie, Jay’s sister. Blake is rather interested to see what happens next, now that so many pieces are being brought into such complicated play on the board. It all looks to be even more riveting than a well-played chess game, in fact, since there are so many more than two sides clashing against one another.

  Jay is standing by the largest of the windows in Blake’s room when Blake comes in, good-nights having been said to the rest of the household and sleep finally seeming like a possibility. Jay has his hands on the pull-cord for the thick drapes, which still sway from having recently being pulled into their closed position. Jay’s phone is on the nightstand beside the bed, uncharacteristically switched off.

  “Well, that was interesting,” Blake says flippantly, shrugging off his coat and beginning to unfasten the buttons of his shirt. “I marvel at those vampires who claim that existence becomes monotonous with the passing of time. Clearly they just don’t know the right people.”

  He approaches Jay, touching the boy on the shoulder as Jay finally, distractedly lets go of the pull-cord,

  but Jay shrugs the light caress off and steps away.

  “How do you keep doing it?” The usual flintiness of Jay’s monotone is dulled by exhaustion. “I’ve only got sixteen years’ worth of shit to drag around in my head and it feels like it’s going to kill me. You’ve got centuries. How do you keep going when things like… like what was meant to happen tonight happen? Fuck, even what did happen tonight was bad enough. That poor kid…”

  Blake shrugs. “It helps to be naturall
y shallow, selfish, and attractive. Given sufficient education, you could manage a scraping pass in all three qualities, I’m sure.”

  Jay scowls, moving back in close enough to shove at Blake’s shoulder with the heel of his hand, scolding. Blake lets himself be pushed a little by the gesture.

  “Don’t be an asshole. You’re always so glib when I’m trying to be serious.”

  Blake considers pointing out that trying to be serious when Blake is being glib is rather rude on Jay’s part, and that this means that surely they are equally at fault. But there are more important matters to discuss. Blake pushes a product-stiff lock of hair out of Jay’s eyes. His hair looks no more ridiculous and disarrayed than usual, but somehow Blake has learned the secret incomprehensible language of trendy styles, and so knows that Jay’s hair is looking terrible.

  “Sixteen?” he asks, raising an eyebrow. Jay raises one shoulder in a momentary and half-hearted shrug, his gaze sliding away from Blake’s.

  “My birthday was last week. I didn’t think it was a big deal.” His mouth is a tight frown. Blake sighs.

  “One of the easiest methods of surviving centuries of turbulence is to avoid creating unnecessary dramatics. I’m not so naïve to think that any teenager could ever accept such wisdom as truth, though.”

  “That’s why I didn’t tell you,” Jay snaps, and he’d probably leave the room entirely— perhaps even with a slam of the door behind him— if he were in a livelier mood. Blake’s glad that the boy is too tired to bother with such theatricality; arguments are much easier to get over and done with if the participants hold their ground.

  “Spare me the chore of guessing at what you mean, please,” Blake replies, his own voice cool. He’s being charitable because he knows Jay has had a difficult evening, but patience has its limits even in the hearts of saints, and Blake has lapsed a little in his virtues lately.