Alexander doesn’t think his own personality was so worthwhile at such an age, despite his life having included a
solid serving of hardships. He returns Ash’s crooked smile with a small one of his own. “We should count ourselves lucky that Timothy was a charming, guileless young man before he died. I’d hate to think of anyone being saddled with a rebirth of the boy that I was when he killed me. That boy was,” Alexander can feel his small smile become a smirk on his mouth. “Unrefined, in the E. E. Cummings sense of the word.”
The most frustrating part is that Alexander loves the current Tim, the reset Tim, with an intensity that’s perhaps even greater than that which he felt for the first.
He’s fallen utterly in love with Tim’s fierce politics, astringent humor, friendly nature. Tim’s kills are more violent and more graceful now, and the aspects of humanity which this Tim engages with are more constructive, more creative, more beautiful: music, and counterculture, and the messy, vibrant, defiant electricity of people and movements who are themselves without apology.
But Alexander doubts that Tim would believe him if, in one of their frequent clashes, he said “I loved you always, but I love you now even more than I ever loved the boy you were before.”
“Anyway,” he says now to Ashley. “Enough of my petty dramas. Let’s talk about your petty dramas instead. How is your regime of no-killing serving you on this fresh and frosty night?”
She gives him a quicksilver laugh and shakes her head. “It sucks. I feel like I’m dying. I feel even crazier than I used to, but that’s okay because at least I’m in control of the fact I feel this crazy, you know? So that’s not so bad. But fuck, it’s tough. It’s really tough.
“I know I won’t be able to keep it up forever. But for now I’m going to stick with it, I think. As long as I can manage, anyway.”
“I would offer to help you in any way I can, but I haven’t got any idea of how I could be of aid,” Alexander admits. Ash shakes her head.
“You don’t need to do anything except let me do my own thing. And you already do that,” she assures him.
~
After Alex has hunted and killed, and Ashley has purchased and consumed a smoothie made with blueberry sorbet (she swears it helps with the hunger; Alexander makes revolted faces about it anyway), they run into Timothy and Mikhail.
Tim and Alexander carefully avoid talking to one another beyond the absolute basics of group conversation, still too irritated and unhappy from the earlier argument to try to make amends.
The four of them are discussing whether Jay and Blake’s constant rounds of argument will ever settle down or not when, at the same moment, they all catch the scent of blood in the air and turn in its direction.
“We’d make excellent sniffer dogs,” jokes Tim, and Alexander laughs before he remembers that they’re on eggshells with one another. He gets a tentative smile in response, though, which makes his heart a little lighter.
As they move closer to the blood smell, Alexander makes sure to take hold of Ash’s wrist, so he’ll be able to restrain her if he has to. Sometimes she goes into a frenzy when she’s tempted like this, and he knows she wouldn’t want her hard work at staying abstinent undone by base instinct like that.
It’s Cora. Alexander should have expected that: random public attacks by unknown vampires have become increasingly rare, as Blake’s measures of control and the hunters’ zealotry have become more prevalent. Only someone like Cora would be brazen enough to dare, these days.
Within a few seconds of recognising her in the otherwise-empty parking lot, and the slumped form of her dead victim, Alexander also realises that it’s a trap. Cora learned to play chess from Blake, after all; she knows all the tricks for manipulating an opponent’s pawns.
She walks right up to them, until she’s almost toe-to-toe with Alexander, and then grins a bright and evil smile at him with her bloodied mouth.
“I can only assume that you’d continue your tendency to get in my way, if I let you. And I have better things to spend my time worrying about,” Cora says. “So I’m going to deal with you sooner, rather than later.”
She laughs and pulls a heavy-looking black pistol from a holster hidden beneath her coat. In less than a moment she’s crouched low and aiming up. To give herself more control over the angle with so little space between them, Alexander notes in the show-motion second as she curls her hands around the weapon.
“Don’t cross me again,” she says, meeting his eyes, and then she fires. But the gun isn’t pointed at him.
The bullet tears through Timothy’s frightened face, up from his jawline at an angle that rips open the corner of his mouth, the meat of his cheek. Both the corner of his eye and the top of his ear are turned to mincemeat.
The white of his skull is visible where his hairline was a moment ago.
It’s as if time fractures. Alexander doesn’t register that Cora has run away; it simply occurs to her that she must have gone, because otherwise somebody would have killed her by now. He can’t hear his own voice, but his throat is raw, so he must have cried out.
Gunshot wounds are almost always messy, especially to the head, but Alexander isn’t horrified by that aspect. If anything, gore is the one thing in this moment that’s not difficult. Blood and bone and viscera, these things he’s used to. Flesh, in this state, has no personality to it. It’s just sticky and red. Familiar.
~
He covers Timothy’s head with a sheet when they get the body home and onto the bed. The blood seeps up quickly, a blooming stain of red. Most of the core healing will be done within a day or so. Alexander has watched the process once. He doesn’t want to see it again.
He doesn’t want to leave the room, either, so he sits on the floor, his back against the wall. He’ll stay here until it’s over. He’s slept in worse places. Decade upon decade of soft beds has not erased the memory of the hard, dry ground of the railway yard. A night sitting on carpet will be nothing.
There are others in the room. They helped him carry the body back, so of course they’re here. But Alexander barely notices them. They’re like ghosts. The whole world is like ghosts, which doesn’t make any sense, because it’s only Timothy that’s died.
“Alex.” It’s Ashley, crouched before him. Her mascara’s run from her tears, black scribbled streaks on her white face. “Alex, what do you need?”
The numbness inside him breaks like a storm cloud, too dark and heavy to stay intact. “Him,” he whispers. He wants to scream it until his throat is raw again, but he’s so tired, too tired to even hurt properly now.
“I know, sweetheart, I know,” she says, another tear leaving more makeup streaked down her cheeks. “How about you just stay here and I’ll get you something to drink, okay?”
He nods, grateful to have even those small thoughts taken care of for him. He stares at the body on the bed until his eyes sting, reminding him to blink. Then he stares again. Timothy. Timothy. More memories lost. Everything lost. Time to start at the start again.
Blake comes in and says something, and Alexander answers, and then Blake goes away again, but it’s all just ghosts, a world under glass.
The hours pass. Ashley brings him people to bite. She doesn’t have a talent for mesmerism (Timothy was going
to try to teach her someday. Timothy. Timothy. Timothy.) so she simply drugs them to make them unobservant and pliant as she leads them home. The narcotics in their blood make Alexander feel detached and distant. He likes that, but it makes the time pass more slowly, and he doesn’t like that. Eternity has rarely felt so daunting. So incomprehensible.
He teaches Ashley a few of the words of Timothy’s language, the only one that Timothy will know when he wakes. It’s a dialect, an antiquated rural form made up of scatterings of Ukrainian and Russian. Unless there are other vampires left in the world from that time and place, it’s probable that they are the only people in the whole of the world who know this little language ever existed at all. History
and memory are such fragile things. They become nothing but gore so easily.
He teaches her the songs Timothy loved, the ones he won’t remember now. They sing Bikini Kill and Hole and Team Dresch at the top of their lungs, because Alexander’s remembered how to breathe now. They sit against the wall in the darkened room and sing and sing, while the body on the bed slowly knits itself back together. Somehow, the laughter and the singing is as cleansing as the crying.
Tim’s face is whole again faster this time. Alexander notices that, the observation dulled down to dim monochrome in some distant corner of himself. That same small refuge from the howling inside him notes hollowly how unfathomable it is that he has previous experience of this same process to draw on, to compare to. That he could survive this once, much less twice, seems far beyond the realms of possibility.
It’s almost morning by now. By evening, after another day of healing, Tim’s body will be repaired enough that he will wake up.
For a thought as brief as an eyelash flicker, Alexander entertains preventing that. Of a knife or sword or axe, sharp—such things are easy enough to get at short notice, with a few well-placed phone calls—in his hand. One swing down at the throat and it would be done. Tim’s throat, Tim’s beautiful throat, where Alexander has kissed and bitten and buried his face against soft skin for year after year after year. It would hurt as sharp as a blade in Alexander’s own heart to destroy that smooth and lovely throat. But he could do it. He could.
And then he could take the axe or sword or knife, and swing it at the thick resilient glass of the bedroom windows and crack their tinted panes. Knock out every shard, cut the heavy drapes to ribbons on the floor. He could lie down next to Timothy’s body, throat a ribbon of loss, and wait for sunrise.
For a moment Alexander imagines it, lets the scenario play out to its end inside his head. Then he slips his Cartier watch off his wrist and leaves it on the nightstand, same as he does on mornings when the world hasn’t ended around him, and climbs into bed beside the deceptively healed shape of Tim’s form, and buries his face against Tim’s throat, and sleeps.
MICHELLE
School is shitty and boring and shitty, as usual. Michelle nearly falls asleep in Math class, which earns her a massive fit from the teacher when she gets caught dozing and a threat of detention if it happens again. Whatever. Michelle pretty much never gets detention, because the school is terrified of getting curt letters from psychiatrists saying that Michelle is a special delicate flower whose disciplinary needs are being met through her private treatment program.
The system suits Michelle, so she doesn’t complain, but she thinks it’s pretty much total crap. Being forced to shelve books in the library through her free period wouldn’t make her into an unhinged psycho. As far as she knows, anyway. But who knows, it’s not like she’s an expert in this stuff, she’s just the mouse in the maze.
Jay isn’t in, which is pretty usual too these days, and doesn’t answer his phone when Michelle calls to chew him out about it. She sits with Tommy and Sofie at lunch, behind the art rooms where kids used to come to smoke before the school cracked down on it. There’s still graffiti left on the walls, though, names and slogans scratched into the paint. One of them reads BETTE WAS HERE, which shows the kind of subtlety and self-preservation instincts which Michelle expects from Bette at this point.
It’s kind of sad, though. For those words to be there like that, bold and fearless and in the past tense. Bette was here, and now she’s not anymore.
~
Sofie’s got an after-school job in a hospital kitchen – “Jenny says I have to make up for the stuff I steal from the pharmacy,” she explains when Tommy asks – so Michelle and Tommy go hang out for a while at his place, taking advantage of the fact that his parents aren’t going to come home and interrupt anything.
They’re back down in the kitchen by the time Rose gets home, though, looking happier and more excited than Michelle can remember seeing her.
“It looks so awesome. My shit! Hanging up like it’s legitimate and serious!” Rose says, making herself a coffee even though it’s getting close to nightfall. “I’m so fucking over the moon about this. I gotta show you guys this, they only just made it today, it’s the official pamphlet about the show, look at it.”
The little brochure is glossy and very respectable-looking, not just a photocopied thing like the one Tommy showed Michelle. And instead of just lines of simple black text, the front cover is a photo of one of the artworks from the show itself.
There, in Rose’s idiosyncratic, darkly quirky style, is Anne Frank. Her feet, in their old-fashioned saddle shoes and ankle socks, are wrapped in a tangle of barbed wire and thorny vines, which curl up her legs and over her skirt, blouse and sweater, caging her in place in the centre of the canvas. But Anne looks defiant, triumphant even, staring out directly at the viewer, a glint in her eyes. Behind her, huge pale batlike wings stretch up, membrane and cartilage made of paper and ink, a faint light shining through them as if there’s a candle somewhere behind her, despite the near-black background covering the rest of the image.
It’s weird and beautiful and horrifying and sad, like most of the art by Rose that Michelle’s seen.
“I did this picture of Joan of Arc a while back,” Rose explains. “About her heart, because they couldn’t destroy it, even when they killed her. And I wanted to do one with Anne to go with it, after I read the book you loaned me. It was… it wasn’t like I thought it would be. I cried a lot. But even when they killed her, they couldn’t kill her words. Joan’s heart was fire-proof, and Anne’s words couldn’t be caged, not even in a concentration camp. So I painted this.
“This is probably a totally stupid thing to say, but when I was reading, I felt like Anne was someone I could have been friends with, you know? There’s one part where she and Peter get dressed in their parents’ clothes, and she dresses in her dad’s clothes and he dresses in his mother’s. And I kept on thinking about how, if I wasn’t in this stupid fucked-up love thing with Bette, I’d’ve liked to have ended up in love with a boy who dressed up in lady’s clothes sometimes. Someone like Timothy. That all sounds so stupid, sorry.”
Michelle shakes her head. “It’s not stupid,” she says.
Rose shrugs, like she doesn’t believe Michelle, and walks toward the door down to her basement. “Anyway, I gotta go work on some other stuff. Not for the show; they only let me sneak that one in so late because they thought it’d be cool for the cover, fuck if I know why. But an artist’s bullshit is never done.”
And with that, Rose is gone again.
“Your sister’s kind of a whirlwind sometimes,” Michelle observes.
“I think the technical term is ‘train wreck’,” suggests Tommy.
ALEXANDER
Waking up is a cruelty of its own, that soft warm moment just before memory arrives to crush the needless breaths out of his chest all over again. Alexander wants to stay unmoving, just for a little while, just until he recovers from that new blow of grief, but he can feel the first stirrings of consciousness in the movements of the body against his.
Alexander lifts his head, the distant part of him feeling mute surprise that he can be so calm when every part of him is screaming, and rests his palm lightly on Tim’s cheek. Tim’s mouth curls in a sleepy half-awake smile, and Alexander’s very bones feel as if they’re made of ash and razors, and then Timothy opens his eyes.
Words choked but determined in his mouth, Alex speaks softly. “You are safe, and you are loved,” he tells Tim, in the lost old Eastern European dialect of Timothy’s human life. It’ll be the only language Tim knows, now. At least the experience of going through all this before has given Alexander knowledge enough to speak words Tim will understand, this time around.
Timothy’s eyes lose their unfocused look as he wakes up properly. His eyes are still beautiful. Alexander can’t imagine a world where Timothy’s eyes aren’t beautiful. Delicate, threadlike crow’s feet appear at the corner
s of his lashes as his smile broadens, just a little.
There is still a pale criss-cross of scars across the new skin where the bullet left its wake.
“Alex, it’s me.”
Alexander can’t move. The shock is so large he almost can’t understand it, can’t make the shape of it fit within the world he comprehends. Tim’s own hand comes up to cup Alexander’s cheek, mirroring Alex’s own position, the two of them lying face-to-face, unmoving, for a long and frozen second.
“Tim?” Alex asks, afraid to believe. His voice is hoarse and sounds so young, so roughened from sobs and so terribly wary. As if he’s the one reset back to who he was to that moment when he first died. The dark oceans of loss inside him are churning.
“Alex,” Tim says again, as confirmation, his smile widening a little, a gentle curve over the sharp teeth Alexander knows lurk just behind.
And then, without registering that he is going to move at all, Alexander is clinging to him, holding on so tight it’s sure to hurt the tender flesh of Tim’s healing body, but Alexander can’t make himself loosen his grip even for that. He clutches at Tim and buries his face in the crook of that beloved throat and the sound that comes from him then isn’t even close to human, to joy or happiness, it’s a keening, howling, pre-verbal wail of agony.
It seems strange to him, even as he’s doing it, to be reacting like this. He’s happy, he’s so happy he feels like he might shatter from it, the loss inside him gone so fast his head is dizzy. But instead of laughter it’s sobs which rise up in his throat, robbing him of all the words that want to tumble out.
“I’m here. I’m here,” Tim repeats over and over, remaining still while Alex cries. “It’s all right.”
“I love you, I love you,” Alex answers, palms splayed now against Tim’s back, against Tim’s skin where it stretches over his dear ribs, those dear ribs which cage and shell his dear viscera and lungs and blood and every other part of him that Alexander adores, that Alexander will adore until the end of the world, and it seems so strange for him to be grateful for these physical things with such force right now, when those weren’t the things he thought he’d lost. He presses his damp mouth to one of Tim’s eyelids and then the other, leaving soft and frantic kisses, marveling that the mind inside that precious brain has managed to survive.
The Wolf House: The Complete Series Page 72
