“See? They’ll heal back just like they were,” Lily whispers to him. “Even after this.”
He looks at her in disbelief, like he can’t believe she still has time for him, still has care for him, when he’s just saved the life of the man who took so much from them. Lily’s eyes narrow, glinting with the fiery anger she seems to constantly carry inside her, barely half-banked at the best of times.
Alexander’s aware of Quinn and Timothy and Jay all speaking with Blake, discussing Nell’s eventual arrival and where the poison came from. Since Alexander’s already explained to Tim about the message board he found, he lets the conversation flow without him, and stays fixed on watching the tiny power-plays at work between the pair by the door.
“You’re the one who left,” Lily is saying now, furiously, her voice hushed and harsh. “I never ran away from you. I won’t. No matter what.”
“We don’t fit anywhere,” Will answers, in a voice that’s even quieter than hers. He sounds resigned and unhappy. “We could kid ourselves for a while, but we don’t. We’re hunters, but when there are other hunters around, we don’t fit with them. We’re vampires, but we don’t fit with other vampires. We’re—”
“We fit here,” Lily says, and holds Will close. “We fit here.”
She says it like she believes it’s enough.
MICHELLE
Bette doesn’t just walk anywhere. She kicks stray empty bottles along the sidewalk, she balances along low fences, she runs ahead around corners and lags behind to look at things in gutters. This leaves Michelle to walk beside Gretchen with no intermediary.
Michelle decides that maybe she’s going to end up using the stuff she learns from Anna against Bette after all. No jury would convict her.
“You’re right, of course.”
Michelle looks at Gretchen in surprise. “What?”
“About what I’m doing. I know it’s wrong. But I tried doing the right thing, and Bette still died, so what’s the point?”
Michelle huffs out a breath, which steams faintly in the air for a moment before it vanishes. Gretchen’s breath doesn’t steam.
“I don’t know, isn’t there a saying about how virtue is its own reward?” Michelle offers.
Gretchen makes a small amused noise. “I stopped looking for rewards from the universe a long time ago. You get what you take. That’s all.”
Michelle doesn’t speak for a few minutes, scared as always of what Gretchen might do if she doesn’t like what Michelle’s got to say.
But Michelle thinks she maybe understands Gretchen, maybe better than most living people would. Because Michelle’s not quite human – not a normal human, anyway. Her brain doesn’t work like a human’s is meant to.
She remembers hearing her mother talk with one of the doctors, once. Michelle’s mom had read an article in a magazine about the warning signs in kids who grew up to be psychopaths. Bed wetting, setting fires, lying, self-injury, stealing, difficulty playing well with others. She was scared Michelle was going to be a psychopath someday, some drooling nutcase who got true crime books written about the awful shit they did.
All the doctor said in reply was, “We don’t diagnose antisocial personality disorder until a child reaches 18.” Not “No, no, of course not. Michelle isn’t going to turn out like that”. Nothing so reassuring. Nothing to stop Michelle from lying awake at night, worrying that it was true, that she was going to just get weirder and weirder as she grew up.
Later, when she read more about it, she knew that even worrying about it in the first place was an indicator that she wasn’t a total sociopath. But she’s never felt completely reassured – after all, she’s still not 18, so she can’t be certain that the worrying part of her isn’t going to fall away like a shed skin.
All the books she found about it said one of the big flashing danger signs was substance abuse, too. And since Michelle and Tommy and Jay formed their tight-knit little trio (that doesn’t really count as ‘playing well with others’, Michelle thinks, because they’re as weird as she is), they’ve abused pretty much any substance they could find.
Not because it’s fun, exactly. Just because it’s something different to feel, for a while.
“If you really believed it was that simple, you wouldn’t bother with loving people,” Michelle says to Gretchen, thinking again of Tommy and Jay, of how important they are to her. She doesn’t really remember how to be Michelle without having the two of them there to be Tommy and Jay beside her. “They wouldn’t be worth the risk.”
Gretchen seems oddly satisfied with the retort, like Michelle’s confirmed something that Gretchen suspected. They walk together unspeaking for a while. Bette, apparently bored with her meandering, falls into step on Michelle’s other side.
“Objectively, the most poignant aspect of living forever may well be how notoriously difficult all hearts are to destroy,” Gretchen says. “Even the human heart, comparatively fragile as it is. It survives fire, when so much else just burns.”
Michelle gets that vampires have eternity, but they’re all so fucking wordy about everything. She braces herself for another speech.
“Artie was so much to me. Nobody will ever know how much. The rational mind isn’t large enough to comprehend the true scope of love. That’s what blood and chemicals and hearts and bones are for. And every drop of me, all the marrow and lightening I am made from, loved Artie with all that I am.
“And yet I’ve healed from him. The heart grows back. That wound healed in less time than it will take for my eye to recover. A shiver of nerves, some pain, a few tears, and then the heart’s restored. Forever can seem like such a long time, then. When it becomes apparent how resilient we are when faced with the losses which by all rights should destroy us.
“But we don’t fall, we don’t lie and rot and become nightmarish horror-stains upon the dewy grass. We get up and walk on into the coming night, and the night after that, and the night after that, forever. Not even the loss of our hearts destroys us, for our hearts grow back.”
“Mine hasn’t,” Bette says.
“Oh, my darling girl.” Gretchen’s smile looks old on her young face. “You haven’t even lost it yet. That’s still to come.”
“Then I don’t think I want to be here to go through it,” Bette says, sounding like she knows exactly what her words imply and meaning every bit of it. “How do we get up and talk and smile and pay for bus tickets and find matching socks and do all the rest when it hurts so fucking much to be alive? When every happiness is only sweet because we can already see the heartbreak lurking, the old withered cat-skeleton waiting inside the smallest kitten?”
“This is why I can’t live with Blake, right here,” Gretchen says to Michelle with false levity, gesturing at Bette. “You stay here too long, and you start to talk like him.”
“I think you’re a little guilty of it too,” Michelle mutters, but is ignored.
“It’s too hard!” Bette snaps. Michelle feels her own eyes prickle, because she knows exactly how Bette feels, she knows what it’s like to feel the sharp-needled teeth of being alive.
It seems unfair that Bette feels that way, when Bette isn’t even alive anymore.
“Nobody ever said it would be this hard.” Bette’s voice is quieter now. Defeated. The light, icy wind makes her dark hair stir a little, listlessly, around her pale face.
“Hard compared to what, exactly?” Gretchen asks, pausing mid-step and putting her hands on her hips. Bette and Michelle stop walking too.
Gretchen’s voice is gentle but exasperated, like somebody scolding a small and unhappy child who’s done something wrong. “This is all there is, dear heart. Living, dying—that’s it. This is as easy as it gets. So harden the fuck up.”
She starts walking again. Bette, head bowed, makes as if to follow her. But Michelle’s had enough of this bullshit. She stands her ground.
“You’re not actually very good at talking people down off ledges.”
Gretchen glares at h
er.
Michelle glares right back. “’Life sucks, get over it’? You can’t do any better than that?”
“It’s the truth. That’s the best anybody can offer,” Gretchen replies.
“It’s your truth,” retorts Michelle. “Here’s mine. Bette, I know it’s hard. And hell, maybe Gretchen’s right and it only gets harder. But you never know for certain until it happens. Like, did you predict that Gretchen was going to give you the most nihilistic excuse for a pep talk ever? No. So you don’t know what else is coming, either. And maybe what’s coming is beautiful.”
Bette looks skeptical. “You don’t actually believe that yourself, though.”
“I try to,” Michelle tells her honestly. “I don’t always manage it. But I try.”
They reach the townhouse soon after. The recognition Michelle feels is shot through with surprise and the floaty, not-really-awake feeling she associates with being high. It’s like seeing something she’s dreamed about. She’s been half-convinced for years that she must’ve imagined the night she visited a house full of strange, off-centre fairy stories, back when she was the little difficult girl Phenex had to bring along.
But it’s real and solid, in front of her, and they’re walking up the front steps to the door. Bette reaches into her purse for her keys, but the door swings open before she finds them. Timothy – and now that Michelle has recognised the house, she recognises Timothy, not just as Jay’s friend but as Phenex’s too – has his face half-turned away from them, speaking to someone in the room beyond.
Michelle is about to tell them about her memory, about the childhood evening she spent here once, but as Timothy turns to face them his eyes lock onto Gretchen’s and his face goes even paler than usual.
“Ledishka?”
ALEXANDER
Tim,
Oscar’s trial continues. Blake is making out as if he doesn’t care at all. I can’t tell if the bluster is for Oscar’s sake or for his own.
As one outside the dominant race of this country – human and white alike – I find myself endlessly puzzled by the arbitrary outrage which constitutes morality. There are brothels full of children to be found throughout the city and nary an eye is blinked, yet adult sodomy may well prove to be Oscar’s ruin.
If spoiled, demanding Bosie had been a petulant girl of twelve and Oscar had fallen in the same utter and foolish love, there wouldn’t have been even the mildest of scandals. It doesn’t seem right.
~
Alex and Tim lead Lily and Will downstairs and to the front door. If the pair were trusted to find their own way out, they might stumble across something they find attractive or interesting on the way, and then they’d have to go home and flagellate themselves to drive out any ambiguity they might feel.
Alexander stopped having patience for martyrs a long time ago.
Timothy opens the front door and then freezes stock-still. Alexander has a half-second of panic, because Tim never checks the cameras or the peephole before he opens the door; he somehow still blithely trusts the universe.
Then Tim says “Ledishka?”
Alex rushes to Tim’s side. On the steps stand Bette and her human friend Michelle and Gretchen, who used to be Anastasja and before that Nell. Alex tries to always think of people by the names they’ve chosen for themselves, but the echoes of who she used to be are an invisible nimbus of memory around her.
“Your eye,” Tim says, in the language of his human life.
“Your cheek,” Gretchen answers in the same tongue, small hand reaching through the space between them and then stopping, as if she meant to touch the silvery scars of Cora’s bullet and then became afraid that touch would break the dream.
It seems to occur to them both at the same moment how close they each came, after so long, to dying. To missing this. They grab one another into a hug which would break human bones.
Alexander knows how miraculous and precious this moment is for the pair, which is why his own mind turns to mundane practicality. “Come inside,” he says to them, in the vanished dialect they share, because he’s sure it would take more effort than they have to spare to remember the meaning of English words. “Reunions deserve better locales.”
He ushers Lily and Will out as he guides the others in. Lily and Will don’t deserve to see this, and Gretchen and Tim don’t deserve their questioning looks, their judgement. Alexander would protect Tim and Gretchen from the world if he could.
“What’s going on?” Bette asks, when the front door is safely shut again. Gretchen and Tim, still clutching at each other’s arms, are talking as fast as their mouths can manage it, asking questions and then asking more before they’ve given time to answer.
“They’re brother and sister,” Alex explains, feeling more than a little awed himself. “I’ve known them both for more than a century, and I never thought… It never occurred to me as even a possibility.”
He debates with himself whether it’s worth trying to get them upstairs. Gretchen will want to see Blake eventually, of course, but for now seems to want nothing except the opportunity to stare at Tim in wonderment. Alexander can sympathize. He decides to leave upstairs until later, and opts instead for one of the unused rooms downstairs, the one where Min stayed until Jenny and Sofie took the apartment.
“I remember this room,” Michelle murmurs, but Alexander leaves that mystery until later and instead listens to Tim and Gretchen’s garbled, happy conversation.
“That was you, researching through the university? I thought that it must be a hunter, trying to track me through my history.”
“How self-centered of you,” Tim teases, glowing at the sight of her.
“I was half-right though, wasn’t I? Because it was my history you were hunting. You just didn’t think it would be me at the end of the trail.”
“No, never. I had no – what happened? Was it Ilia?”
Alexander, even though he’s desperate to witness this, to see every moment of the siblings rediscover one another, knows that this is a conversation that they deserve to have alone. He turns away from them, towards the other girls.
Michelle is looking at a framed photograph left on one of the bookshelves which line the room. The picture’s an old one, from about a century ago, the blacks and whites yellowed to ivory and sepia by age. Sebastian, with the thoughtful stillness lent to all old photos by their slow shutter speeds, standing somewhere in Rome, dressed in a grey suit and a derby hat, his tightly-rolled umbrella at his side like a gentleman’s walking cane.
The picture was taken in the last years of Sebastian’s human life, and the sunlight stretches the silhouette of his shadow out long on the ground beside him. Sebastian’s face is impatient, his mouth closed only to hold in a cigarette. He looks as if he’s only stopped talking for the sake of the snapshot, and plans to begin again as soon as the photographer is done, which is probably exactly what the reality of the moment was.
“I knew him. Well, I met him, once,” Michelle tells Alexander. “When I was a kid. He read me fairy tales.”
“He’s somewhere in Europe now,” Alexander replies. “Or was, the last time I spoke to him. He’s in a wandering phase. We all get like that sometimes.”
~
In the months since her death, Alex has seen Bette pout, whine, tantrum, slam doors and smash cups and plates. He’s never, however, seen her with the kind of ageless fury that’s on her face now.
“If she poisoned you at my club, I’ll tear every piece of her apart before I let her die,” she snarls. Blake looks flattered. “That’s fucking neutral ground. Everyone knows it’s fucking neutral ground.”
Michelle clears her throat, looking surprisingly at ease for someone who’s one of the only two humans in a room full of vampires. Alexander thinks her composure might be due to the fact that she’s the kind of girl whose closest friend is someone like Jay. Or it might be because Gretchen is still downstairs with Timothy.
“I don’t think Anna cares about things like that anymore, if
she ever did. She’s not, what’s that term, she’s not playing by Queensberry rules anymore.”
“I met the Marquess of Queensberry once,” Blake says, propped up into a sitting position on the bed by a mountain of pillows. “Didn’t like him. Brutish little man. No style or grace at all. Horrible father, too.”
“Getting a little off the topic,” Alexander interrupts dryly. “If Anna is now ignoring all the rules we guide our conflicts by, and being given help by Cora, we need to be more serious about the threat. Next time, we might not have the help we need.”
~
It’s almost an hour before Gretchen and Timothy come upstairs. By then Blake’s gone back to sleep, and Quinn has warned Alex that he’ll probably need a lot of rest for some months. Which doesn’t sound too bad in Alexander’s opinion, because when Blake’s sleeping it means he isn’t talking.
Jay and Michelle are in Bette’s room with her and they are “hanging out”, which seems to involve playing obnoxious music loud enough to wake the proverbial dead. Or would, if Blake wasn’t so soundly asleep.
Alexander and Quinn are arguing about corporate business getting involved in micro-lending and the possible impacts that will have on developing countries when Gretchen and Timothy join them in the sitting room. The cat has been attacking Alex’s shoe laces in a life-or-death struggle, but callously abandons him as soon as Tim becomes available as an alternative.
“Tim, this is Quinn. Quinn, this is Timothy. You’re both my brothers,” Gretchen says, introducing two segments of her life to one another with hopeful trepidation. Quinn and Tim shake hands, not sure yet of what to make of the whole strange situation but willing to offer the benefit of the doubt for Gretchen’s sake.
“Nell?” Blake calls. “If that’s you, I demand to be doted on.”
Gretchen makes a face of mock-exasperation and goes in to see the convalescent. Tim follows her – Alexander suspects it will be a rare thing for some time for the two to be out of each other’s sight – and Quinn and Alex trail after.
The Wolf House: The Complete Series Page 78
