She never came near the bed, but that was no promise that she never would. A few more years, a little more boldness… Blake, his thirst still a wild, only half-controlled thing in his most lucid moments, seemed like a threat barely worth contemplating. Once or twice, he’d wondered why he cared so much at all about the girls and their mother. It seemed odd that he could feel so little for some humans, struggling and troublesome creatures with pulsing, delicious blood singing to him from their intricate veins, and yet feel very strongly about the welfare of others.
He didn’t dwell on the contradiction much, though. Even at his most serious, as a still-living student in London once upon a time, Blake had never been the sort to be too deeply bothered about anything, however odd, provided it worked well enough as it was. He did not care about all humans, yet cared about some; what more was there to be discovered through contemplation?
But those days of taking precautions against Daisy’s inquisitive adventures are long, long passed, and Blake now trusts his body enough to regularly share a bed with Jay. He wakes in the same position he often finds himself in, one ear resting atop the curve of Jay’s elbow, the sounds of the boy’s heartbeat a sweet murmur on the edge of his hearing. Blake smiles sleepily, nosing at the warm skin and breathing in the smell of it. Jay’s scent has changed, subtly but certainly, in the months they have been lovers. Neither Bette or Jay know that this is the reason why they no longer feel any kind of sexual desire for one another, despite having coupled prior to Bette’s death. Jay’s scent marks him as Blake’s and Blake’s alone, and as long as Bette remains a loyal member of Blake’s pack, she won’t even think of Jay as a potential partner for herself.
There have been times in the past when Blake has felt a little bothered by the strange details of such relationships between vampires and the humans near to them but, as his disquiet would do little good and have no effect on the situation, he has come to terms with the notion as best he can. And there is, he has to admit, a particular kind of contentment for the more animalistic parts of himself in knowing that Jay is his, bound blood to blood.
“Urrrgh. Quit it,” Jay complains, shoving Blake’s head away from him and rolling over, pulling the coverlet up over his face despite the near-total dark of the room around them. “Oh god, I want to die. I forgot to have a glass of water before I fell asleep. Or did I pass out? If you drained me until I passed out, then it’s your fault that I feel like this and I hate you forever and ever.”
Blake chuckles softly, smoothing down the wild tufts of Jay’s hair still visible above the quilt. Jay swears at him and groans again.
“Here.” Blake bites at his own wrist with one fang, tearing the vein open just a little.
“Hair of the dog that bit me, huh?” Jay asks, turning his head and then wincing slightly at the movement.
“Blood of the wolf, more like,” retorts Blake, curling against Jay until their bodies nestle together in a loose spooning shape. He likes being able to hold Jay when Jay drinks from him, to feel the greedy shivers of delight in the boy’s form at each swallow.
When they eventually, and with no small amount of regret, get up out of bed to face the evening, it’s to find the rest of the household already well entrenched in their activities and routines. Jay calls Sofie again, arranging where the girl should meet him when she arrives in the city later in the night. Blake is rather looking forward to meeting her; at the very least the situation is almost guaranteed to give Jay massive amounts of frustration and annoyance. Blake enjoys seeing Jay in a vexed state— between that, and Lily and Will, it’s no wonder that Alexander despairs of Blake’s incorrigibility. But truly, it’s hardly his fault that most of the people he knows are so entertaining when they’re angry.
As they wait for Sofie and Jennifer to arrive, Blake offers to mind Min and leave the others free to do whatever it was they would be doing if not for the interruption. Bette looks surprised that he’d volunteer for the task, but doesn’t voice any objection.
Blake enjoys the company of children for the same reasons he enjoys the company of vampires: their needs are uncomplicated and their wills demanding, which simplifies things greatly. Most adult humans make things as difficult as possible with a tangle of needless worries and wants, things even they themselves are never certain of, and teenagers are even worse still. As delightful as Blake finds these conflicts of conscience, he also appreciates the chance to regroup and remember the more important things in the world. Keeping an eye on the little girl will help him prepare for whatever comes next.
Most of the remnants of former lifetimes in the attic belong to Blake, who enjoys keeping mementos despite the near-photographic capabilities of his memory. There’s a strange irrational comfort in handling the objects which decorated the happy or important moments of one’s past.
Some of the items stored away belong to others in the household, though. A motley crew of vampires can collect an impressive amount of ephemera, given sufficient time.
Min sits on the carpet in her well-made little clothes, playing with a set of matryoshka dolls— Russian nesting dolls— which had once belonged to Timothy but had been banished to the storage trunks after his accident. Alexander had been the one to pack them away, along with so many other trinkets and tchotchkes of the existence and home they’d all shared before that night. He’d said it would be better if they all did their best to start again. Blake’s never been sure of that, but then again the loss of Timothy’s memories had hit Alex far harder than it had Blake— Blake has always been relatively unconcerned with both the past and the future, and so Timothy’s changed situation had only required Blake to readjust how the ever-moving present should be dealt with.
This attitude has, for the most part, spared Blake from the depths of grief which can come with loss, though he occasionally wonders if it has also cut him off from the joys of anticipation and the bittersweetness of nostalgia. Still, no matter. Things are as they are.
Min has the little wooden dolls lined up in a row, from the largest to the smallest. This is the fifth time she’s put them in such a formation, but she shows no sign of tiring of her game yet. Carefully, she opens the second-smallest of the dolls and places the tiniest inside, closing the larger of the two and sitting back. Apparently satisfied with the now-shortened line of rotund little dolls, she opens the third-smallest and places the second inside, repeating the action, the pause, and the action time and time again until the whole set is contained within the largest, at which time she begins the process in reverse.
There is something unsettling about the careful way in which the girl plays with the dolls, an air of methodical precision that makes Blake notice for the first time how curious the whole game is. Each little doll is devoured by the next in line, like a food-chain or a particularly metaphorical political hierarchy. To see a child as quietly damaged as Min place a tiny doll inside the belly of a larger doll is somewhat unheimlich. And then, as she unpacks the set into its line-up once again, the belly of each doll splits and frees its prisoner once again, like Little Red Riding Hood being revealed inside the stomach of the dead wolf.
“I think we should get you some Barbie dolls,” Blake tells Min dryly. She ignores him.
Sofie and Jennifer arrive rather late in the night, after Blake has had time to call Ashley and request that she bring over some less antiquated toys for Min to enjoy. Min, aided by Ashley and Bette, has transformed a lounge set upholstered in peach ostrich leather into a castle for an array of plastic ponies of garish pinks; colors which resemble the array of colourful anti-nausea tonics Blake has seen on sale in drugstores.
“When Tommy was sick, when we were kids, we’d spend heaps of time in his bedroom, because he never had much energy to go anywhere else,” Bette tells Ashley, as the girls attempt to follow Min’s imperious orders as to where their ponies are meant to be positioned on the sofa. “Between the three of us we had about a zillion GI Joes. You know, the action figures? I don’t even know how many we had. Half of th
em were crappy knock-off ones, and Rosie would paint them up so crazy with her model paints, like zombies and aliens and shit.
“We played with them but it was… I don’t know, this sounds pretty fucked-up and anti-feminist but I totally don’t mean it like that, okay, but when we played with them it was funny, because Tommy and Rose played all these war games and shooting and sometimes the GI Joes fought dinosaurs and enemies like that, but I always used to, like, play doll house with them. I’d use a shoe box and make it all up pretty with popsicle-stick furniture and tissue curtains and everything. These fuckin’ little ninja action figures serving dinner to Rosie and Tom’s action figures. It’s fucking hysterical to think about now, but I was so into it then.
“Rose never liked girly stuff, not until we got older and she found out about riot grrrl bands and drag and things like that. She never voluntarily wore a skirt until she found out that there were ways of wearing skirts that fucked with the whole idea of wearing skirts, you know? About the only typical girly thing I ever saw her do was cut her arms up with razors, but pretty much everyone does that.”
“Jenna said bulimia was more useful,” Ashley replies, making her little plastic horse gallop over to where Min’s collection is grazing quietly on the textured leather. “But I liked not eating at all. Everything was just simpler that way.”
“Mm. I always liked food way too much to get anorexic,” muses Bette, and then their conversation is cut off by the intrusive buzz which signals that the intercom on the front door has been pressed. Since Jay is already down there waiting, none of them move to answer the sound, but the mood of the room changes completely. Sofie and Jennifer are an unknown factor, not yet friend or enemy, potentially useful and potentially a liability. Only Min plays on, ignoring the shift in atmosphere around her.
As soon as the three teenagers— Jennifer, Sofie, and Jay— enter the room, Blake sees what Alexander meant about Jennifer’s allure. The girl is absolutely lovely to look at, a Rubenesque beauty with a quaint, quirky sort of personal style. But even more striking than that is the confidence with which she carries herself, a self-possession which few adults and almost no teenagers ever embody. At fifteen, Will’s younger sister is completely at home in the world, with a bright-eyed alertness which it’s impossible not to like on sight.
For the first time, Blake understands why Nell refused to turn the humans she fell in love with. To take away Jennifer’s vitality and life would be to deprive the world of one of its small, important jewels.
The body language between Sofie and Jay is superficially awkward, the two of them made uncertain of each other by time and choices. But underneath that, their forms move in concert, the easy trust of loved family too real to be broken by something as trivial as argument. They stand beside each other as if they have never been apart, and Blake can’t help but wonder how different things might be if that were true.
He takes a moment to envisage who Jay might have been, had the boy and Sofie stayed side by side over the past few years. It’s so easy to imagine that the image is almost chilling; for a fraction of a second it feels realer than the real world, like that road is the one which fate expected to be taken. Jay’s face is already a little haughty and closed-off and hard when he addresses those who are not his intimates, and so the imagined-Jay’s expression is no different to that of the real boy. His body would be a little more solid, lean muscle where now there’s thinness which borders on skinny. Perhaps he would be scarred, not as he is scarred now with the ghosts of sharp-toothed kisses on his wrists and throat but with the marks of hungry days without shelter, of fights, the faint traceries which skitter across Sofie’s own pale skin.
It’s hard to imagine Jay swapping his painfully ugly up-to-the-minute fashionability— Blake doesn’t care what the boy says, his clothes are consistently ridiculous— for the utilitarian garb Sofie favors. Shapeless, faded shirt and jeans in hard-wearing fabrics, patched neatly but without especial worry about the look of it. The girl would be beautiful, perhaps as beautiful as her brother, if she took a little care, but as it is she seems like a half-wild thing, a child with no parents save for the shadowed places on the edges of cities.
Would Jay and Blake have seen each other, loved each other, in that other world? Would Blake have bothered to notice two more scrappy little hunters when he’d already made a game of watching the more charismatic, more entertainingly complicated Lily and Will? If Sofie hadn’t run away and left Jay to fend for himself, would Jay have learned the dry sarcasm, the biting monotone deadpan humor that he uses to keep the world at arm’s length, or would he be just another pretty flint-eyed fighter, a would-be Van Helsing for Blake to defeat and drain, as he had so many others over the years?
Or would they have felt the spark regardless, the odd alchemy which had seemed to shock lightning on their skins from the very first occasion of their touch? Perhaps, perhaps. Blake, thankfully, will never have any way of knowing, for things are as they are, and Jay is his, and Sofie is giving him a look filled with the sort of disgust which Blake has only otherwise seen in Cora’s eyes. Even Lily and Will don’t hate him quite so utterly— once again proving themselves entertainingly complicated— and Blake, just as he was with Cora, is oddly enchanted. To hate someone as much as Sofie clearly hates him is to give that person power over you; it ties the two of you together with a poisoned kind of passion which is as strong as any love.
Before Blake can say anything to Sofie, or Sofie can say anything to Blake, Jay looks and the both of them and shakes his head, the corner of his mouth quirking up in a smirk momentarily before smoothing into a slight frown once more.
“I’m going to rethink our relationship if you start up drama with your prospective in-laws,” he warns Blake, tone flat. “I get along with your family, after all.”
“But my family are wonderful,” Blake retorts. “You’d like them regardless of their connection to me. And some of them like you better than they like me, come to think of it. Lily and Will have been known to spend whole evenings voluntarily in your company, which has never yet been true for the pair of them and myself.”
“Will?” The hard look Sofie has aimed at Blake manages to become even harder. “He’s not part of your…” her mouth twists as if the words taste bad. “Your family.”
“On the contrary, my dear.” Blake feels a serpentine smile curve nastily on his own face. “The bond between myself and William is undeniably there, whatever the man himself might claim.”
“Can I play too?” Jennifer asks, addressing Min as she crouches down beside the child, completely ignoring the argument about her own brother’s possible allegiances. Min shrugs, apparently uncaring either way, but offers Jennifer one of the ponies and gestures for her to join in the complex choreography demanded of Ashley and Bette’s toys.
ASH
Ash wants to hate Jenny, for being someone important’s sister, for catching Alexander’s attention enough to avoid meaningless death. She almost wants to hate Jenny just for having a name a bit like Jenna’s name, in fact. But Jenny’s hair is blue dreadlocks, the same color as Ash’s hair had been before she’d dyed it back to just red, only Jenny’s hair isn’t anything like Ash’s, it’s nothing like anybody’s that Ash has ever seen before.
Jenny in general isn’t like anybody Ash has seen before. She’s plump— Jenna would have called her an ugly fat cow— but she doesn’t hold herself like she’s ashamed or afraid of people looking, like most bigger girls Ash has known hold themselves. And Jenny’s tall, as tall as Tommy or Will, and the other tall girls Ash has known try to downplay that, too, but Jenny is wearing a pair of chunky aqua boots with thick soles and a bit of a heel, which make her even taller still. She’s wearing a shimmery green A-line dress which only falls to mid-thigh, and glittery silver tights which make her fleshy legs look so lush that Ash thinks that maybe if was still remotely interested in sex the sight of Jenny might have made her a bit gay.
And, perhaps most strikingly of all, Jenny doesn
’t seem afraid of the vampires in the house around her. Not in a stupid way, like she didn’t know the risks or thought she was special and safe (which Ash thinks she probably is, but it would still be stupid to think even if it was true), but in a way where Jenny knows how dangerous the creatures are, but doesn’t let it bother her.
Sofie looks younger than Jay, though not by much. She looks at the very least fourteen or fifteen, but Ashley can’t help but wonder how much of even that scant maturity is the result of the shrewd, worldly look in Sofie’s expression. Asleep, defenses down, how young would she be then? Thirteen, fourteen? Whatever the answer, the reality is that Sofie is without doubt the younger-seeming of the siblings, despite being the older of the pair.
Ashley remembers hearing Jay once say that Sofie is nineteen, almost twenty. But she’ll never look it, just as Ashley will never look it. Their clocks are stopped. And, just like Ashley isn’t properly a vampire, Sofie isn’t properly human.
Her hair is clean and very pale. Not quite white, like parts of Will’s hair are, though; it’s more like the downy blonde that only very young kids have. Jenna and Ash were both born with hair that shade, but Jenna’s deepened to a richer gold when she was eight, and Ashley’s started turning strawberry red even earlier. She’s never seen anyone as old as Sofie with hair so fair.
It’s clear that Sofie hasn’t brushed or combed her hair in at least a few days, and probably hasn’t cut it in years. A few stringy locks hang around her face in an unkempt curtain, but most of the heft of it is pulled back into a braid at the nape of her neck.
Ash isn’t good at being able to sense the thoughts of others, like some vampires are. Things are noisy enough inside her own head, without any outside interference adding to it. When the others have talked about doing it, she’s always assumed that it’s kind of an instinct-sense thing, a heightened version of being able to discern someone’s mood. But what hits her when she looks at Sofie is on a wholly different level.
The Wolf House: The Complete Series Page 55
