“You’re cruel, Alex. Your words wound me.”
“Probably more than drinking that ridiculous blended concoction did, yes,” agrees Alexander. “I can make a call and get some blood bags delivered, if you want those.”
Blake pouts. His skin, already preternaturally pale, is clammy, hollowed dark beneath his eyes, and sweat dots his tousled hairline. The fact he looks like a languishing virgin dying of poetic consumption is almost without a doubt entirely deliberate, and even if it isn’t Alexander is unmoved by the sight.
“Blood bags! You probably cover bullet holes with Band-Aids, too.”
“No, I avoid being shot in the first place,” Alexander says dryly. “I don’t know what you expected; you already know that Will and Lily are self-styled martyrs; you can’t have thought that their horrible smoothies would taste good.”
“I didn’t expect them to be agony.”
Alexander wonders just how Blake manages to make the emphasis in a phrase sound especially italicized. It’s quite the unique talent.
“They do an adequate job of being both ambulatory and irritating when they drink it, and they drink it a lot more often than the once which seems to have poisoned you.”
“We have to cure them. Nobody should be allowed to suffer through this agony for eternity. We have to get them drinking blood instead,” Blake declares, any dignity the words might have had completely lost as he mumbles them into the bedding.
“What a noble vow.” Alexander takes a hold of one edge of the comforter and pulls sharply, stripping it away from the bed and leaving Blake exposed in a tangle of dark nightshirt and pale skin. “Get up. You’ll feel better once you’re out hunting.”
Blake sighs and climbs off the bed, the vast majority of his sickly demeanor falling away. He does look a little ill as he walks to the closet, though, and Alexander decides to find them some easy prey in the city tonight.
“You’d be a terrible nurse if faced with true illness, Alex,” Blake says reproachfully.
“It’s a good thing I have almost no chance of ever doing so, then, isn’t it?” Alexander retorts, and leaves Blake to dress. “I’ll see you downstairs. Do try to make it down without swooning.”
~
Tonight the group is Alexander, Timothy, Blake, Bette and Mikhail. They choose Kenilworth as their hunting ground, being in the mood for something rich, and set out on foot together.
At first they have idle, light conversation comfortably between them, but as their senses sharpen and the jagged, brittle energy which precedes a kill begins to course through them they grow silent.
Alexander selects a house with an elaborate alarm system, because he enjoys the challenge. The circuit boards and electronics give him pause for a few minutes as he examines their system and finds the point where a broken wire – nothing more than a pinch of his fingertips – will unravel the whole thing into uselessness.
Inside they are as quiet as cats, cheetahs in the long grass, as they cross the parquet floor. They climb the stairs and break off into two groups, Blake and Tim and Bette veering left, Alex and Mikhail moving right. There is soft recessed night lighting set into the walls, throwing more shadows than illumination over their lithe forms as they move across the landing to the closed bedroom door.
The room beyond the door smells of perfume and fresh flowers. There’s almost no light, but Alexander and Mikhail both see very well in the dark. The room’s furnishings are a vanity with an ornate gilt frame bordering the oval mirror, doors through to the ensuite and walk-in closet, and a king-sized bed with only one bedside table.
The bedding is ivory cotton trimmed with lace, and Alexander wonders how long it’s been since anyone stood where he stands now, since someone looked down at the bed’s occupant with hunger and desire. Perhaps the last before him was a business associate, or a discrete friend of the family. Maybe it was a teenaged compatriot of the woman’s son, nervous and eager as he took in the sight before him.
Alexander highly doubts that it was the woman’s husband, whose muffled screams and cries from across the way tell that Blake and Tim and Bette have found their prey. No, everything about this room suggests that the woman within was cut off from being a wife in anything but name long ago.
She’s awake now, roused by the screams, and looks at them with cool regard as she sits up. It’s more difficult to judge ages now than it was in Alexander’s day, but he would guess her to be in her early sixties, face refined and proud, her eyes a pale green. Her hair is long and fair, a loose braid hanging over one shoulder, dyed to a muted red with one lock of dignified grey left at her brow. Her nightgown is satin the colour of mint and ice.
“I don’t want to die,” she tells them. Mikhail gives a small shrug of his shoulders as if to say, who does?
The screaming from down the hall has stopped now. At her throat, her skin smells of vanilla body lotion and the delicate fragility which the years bring. It’s like tissue paper, petals, a peach against Alexander’s lips as he bites deep into her vein. Mikhail is at one of her wrists, cradling her hand in his as he drinks, as if it’s a bird he is nursing to health.
It’s a long, blissful time before her tenacious heart begins to falter, and she gives a soft sigh as the rhythm of it ceases and she dies.
They take some of her jewelry to sell, the nondescript rings and pendants that will be harder to trace. They don’t own every cop in the city, after all.
There’s a slim silver watch, the hours marked by numbers laid with sapphire and diamond. Alexander takes that, too.
He finds Bette in yet another opened bedroom, this one devoid of occupants. It has the careful, absent air of a place preserved in wait for the return of its owner. There are photographs collaged across a pinboard, pictures of a smiling boy with sandy hair and the same pale green eyes as his mother. Pictures taken in the bright glare of a sunny ski-slope, on a beach at sunset with a group of friends, outside a college dorm. There’s a pile of acceptance letters dated from two years ago still resting on one of the shelves above the desk.
The same knack which lets him puzzle out clock-work and alarms makes it easy for Alex to read the hidden story in the pictures of the boy. The body language in one picture, the direction of a grin in another – the boy is gay, and does not intend for his parents to know.
Alexander wonders if the boy will regret not telling them, now that they’re dead.
“You’ve got blood on your face,” he tells Bette. She sticks her tongue out at him, turning her chilling visage ridiculous. Alexander smiles back at her, glad his remark has broken her melancholy mood. There are so many memories in this room of experiences which Bette will never have. She hadn’t wanted to die either. But then, who does?
“Tim was looking for you,” Bette says now. “I think he’s gone downstairs already.”
Timothy’s by the front door, his cellphone in one hand and his eyebrows knotted in a frown. He’s a tidier killer than Bette, with the only evidence of the new blood in him to be found in the brightness of his eyes and a flush to his well-shaped mouth.
“Everything all right?” Alexander asks, leaning in to kiss the stolen warmth in Tim’s lips. They both taste of blood, teeth sharp and hard against each other’s tongues for a few happy sated heartbeats.
“Hmm,” Timothy answers. Then, when they’ve moved apart again, he says “I’ve got a voicemail from the university. They want me to come in tonight, if I can.” His hand is shaking, ever so slightly, where it holds the telephone.
Alex knows how important and terrifying this news must feel to Tim. He’s had researchers looking for years to find any trace of the village where he was born, with no luck. Even the smallest shard of information is like the first chip of tile being replaced in the reconstruction of a mosaic, a glimmer of light being thrown on the darkness of the years lost from Timothy’s memory.
“I’ve wanted… it’s…” Timothy says haltingly. “And now I’m so scared I can’t move.” He laughs quietly to himself. “I can
drain the blood of a man, but I’m scared of going to talk to an academic.”
“I can go,” Alexander offers. “Let me find out what it is, and then we can discuss it together when I get home. You’d do the same for me.”
Tim smiles at Alex fondly, kissing him again. “Thank you.”
They’re interrupted from their moment of peace by Blake’s arrival. He’s holding a pair of ornate pewter goblets inlaid with small geometrically cut rubies.
“They’re engraved on the bottom; a 40th anniversary gift to our late host and hostess,” he tells them.
“And you’re going to drink blood out of those, aren’t you?” Alexander asks.
“My dear, it would be a crime not to drink blood out of these,” Blake replies with a grin.
Alexander shakes his head with a laugh, resting his forehead on Tim’s shoulder.
“At least they don’t have bats on them,” Tim offers comfortingly.
~
Professor Chloe Papageorgiou’s office looks no different to any of the other offices of humanities academics that Alexander has had reason to visit over the years. It’s been a while since he was last in one, so there are some new additions: a pad computer on the arm of the broken-in armchair in one corner, a tiny silver cellphone in amongst the clutter of coffee cups and ballpoints on the desk. But there is the same collage of notes and postcards and cartoons torn from The New Yorker decorating the cork board, the same pile after pile of earnest and obscure books teetering on the shelves.
Alexander doesn’t find the familiarity a particular comfort, but he smiles a little at how predictable people can be.
“Professor,” he greets her, knocking lightly on the half-open door.
“Call me Chloe,” she says, standing from her spot behind the desk and coming around to shake his hand. She’s in her late sixties, her short hair still peppered with black amongst the white, the angular frames of her glasses sharpening the otherwise rather friendly look of her face. “May I call you Alexander?”
“Yes, that’s fine,” he replies, sitting in the chair she motions to beside the desk. Chloe resumes her earlier seat, unlocking the top drawer of the desk and drawing out a sheaf of papers in a manila folder.
“I’ve destroyed the electronic copies of all this communication, and as much of the online trail to them as I could. These print-outs are the only record.” She hands the folder to Alexander. “Several weeks ago, one of my PhD students found something which he thought might possibly link to the rural histories which Timothy has long funded research into. Before I had a chance to inform Timothy of the lead, and our intentions to follow it, however, I was contacted by a French couple who demanded that I turn all future findings over to them and cease communication with any other interested parties immediately.
“They promised that they would share any relevant research information with whomever it was that had originally commissioned me to look into it, and asked for their contact information—that is, they wished to know who Timothy was, and where he could be found. I felt there was an implicit threat in their emails, that to disobey them would result in harm coming to me.” Chloe’s tone is dry. “And I felt quite sure that to obey them would result in harm coming to you.”
Alexander raises an eyebrow. “I commend your sense of self-preservation for recognizing that Timothy and I pose a larger potential threat than this French couple.”
Chloe gives an amused snort, shaking her head. “Professional loyalty and ethics are a larger motivation for me than any sense of fear. I like to hunt down the mysteries of the past, but there’ve been others in my family who preferred more literal forms of hunting. I’m more than capable of holding my own against a pair of skinny vampires in expensive suits, however intimidating you and Timothy may believe yourselves to be. But I don’t take kindly to being bullied in my email inbox, or being ordered to surrender my research.”
Putting aside his curiosity over the mysterious French couple with an apparent interest in stalking Timothy through the most obscure of channels, Alexander leafs through some of the topmost pages in the folder. “What was the research?”
“Not much of anything, to be honest. A few references in some documents to someone whose birthplace seems to match the location and context Timothy gave us for the village. Until now we haven’t had any concrete evidence that such a place even existed. These are secondary and tertiary sources, of course—stories passed down orally for several generations from their source before they were written down. Here’s the earliest form we could uncover, this one here,” Chloe says, pointing to the sheet of paper which Alex has just reached in the pile.
“Sveta Ilinichna, who comes in the night…” Alexander reads aloud, then blinks in surprise. “Ilinichna?”
“The surname literally translates to ‘daughter of Ilia’. It caught my student’s eye because ‘Ilia’ is on the list of flagged names Timothy gave us, and makes the location cues in the rest of the story seem more likely to match those of an actual place.”
Another vampire, made by Ilia. Alexander isn’t sure whether to be pleased or not on Timothy’s behalf. On one hand, she may have memories of people Timothy knew, may have answers to the questions which Alexander knows plague Timothy every night. But on the other, she does not seem especially pleased at the prospect of a reunion—seems determined, in fact, to keep her past dead and buried.
“Thank you,” he says to Chloe, standing up. “I appreciate your loyalty. Tim will too, when I tell him. If anything else happens, don’t hesitate to let us know.”
“If I wind up dead from this, you’re buying houses for my grandkids,” she answers. “Close the door on your way out.”
MICHELLE
They have their pot in brownies, because smoking makes Tommy cough and not be able to breathe. They make them in the school Home Ec kitchens, because Tommy’s got a mom who knows what’s going on and would ground him forever, and Michelle’s family have cleaners and maids and stuff who would either know what’s going on or tell Michelle’s parents, who would probably ship her off to rehab or something equally ridiculous. And Jay never lets them visit his place. Michelle’s not even 100% sure that he still has his own place; for all she knows he might be living with Blake all the time now.
Michelle’s usually the one who makes the brownies, because her parents are contributors to the school’s cultural fund as part of their philanthropic work. If she got caught, she’d get in trouble, but she wouldn’t get expelled, whereas Tommy and Jay are just ordinary students, and not outstanding ones at that.
She makes spinach and onion omelettes at the same time, to cover the smell of the herb mixing into the butter before she bakes the brownies. The spinach smell almost covers the pot, and the faint edge that’s left is only enough for suspicion, not for incrimination. Then she’s got a fresh omelette to eat while she sits and waits, guarding the baking treats and making sure nobody else comes in and discovers what she’s doing. It’s a weird little routine, but Michelle kind of loves it. It makes her feel comforted to have something that’s exciting and predictable at the same time.
While the brownies bake and she eats her omelette, Michelle reads a book. It’s the only time of the week she has where there’s nobody expecting her to be somewhere else or doing something important, so she tries to pick books that make her happy, rather than ones she’s meant to read for school.
This week’s book is The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. Michelle’s read it a dozen times before. Her parents think it’s creepy and awful that she loves it so much, of course. But her parents think everything she does is creepy and awful anyway, so she’s mostly given up on changing who she is just to make them feel more normal or less worried.
It’s not a morbid love that she feels for the book, despite what they think. The real reason Michelle feels so fond of Anne, loves reading and re-reading the girl’s words so much, is how alive Anne is in every moment. Most people who haven’t read the book, or have to for school and so just kind
of read it half-heartedly, think that Anne’s this chaste, pure, winsome girl. That she’s practically an angel to start with, even before her murder in a concentration camp.
Michelle thought that too, before she actually sat down with the book. Instead of someone who was teeth-rottingly sweet and good and kind, a Pollyanna stuck in an attic, she found… someone pretty much like her and Tommy and Jay.
Anne is bitchy and cliquey and popular at school, mouthy and charming at her teachers, totally harsh about her mom and the other people around her. She’s more vivacious than Michelle is, because Michelle’s pretty quiet a lot of the time, but even so Michelle knew from the first pages that this bright, chattering voice in the diary belonged to someone that Michelle could have been friends with.
Anne Frank was this real person, not just in that she actually existed but in that she was real, just like the people around Michelle. And that made it even sadder, a million times sadder, that she’d died so young and so horribly. For a real girl, a girl who made an effort to get along with her mother but kept getting into stupid arguments with her about stupid stuff, to die in rags and squalor when she was still a teenager… to Michelle, that seems a tragedy far beyond what could ever be possible if Anne Frank was the perfect flawless person most people seem to think that she was.
Most people seem to think that it’s somehow not as awful, when victims are imperfect in some way – when someone who gets raped was wearing a short skirt, or when a gay person gets bashed up, or when a witty, catty teenage girl dies and leaves behind her diary. Like somehow the rape would be more horrific if it were the rape of a virgin, the bashing more terrible if inflicted on someone deemed morally pure. Like Anne Frank is more useful as a symbol of tragedy if she isn’t so complicated and funny and mean.
It doesn’t make sense to Michelle. Not at all.
The Wolf House: The Complete Series Page 67
