“The photographer’s name was Yva. She was Helmut Newton’s teacher. She died in a concentration camp. I thought you might like it to go with your Anne,” Gretchen explains. Rose grins, clearly touched.
“I love it. It’s amazing.”
“Bette! Gimme a hug,” Rose’s mom demands, grabbing Bette in an embrace before Bette gets a say about it either way. “We’ve missed you.”
She steps back, holding Bette at arm’s length to give her a long look. “You’ve gotten so grown up. It’s so sad you’re so far away. Your mom misses you too, I know.”
Bette gives her a tight smile. “The school I’m at now is a really good opportunity, though.”
Rose’s mother snorts. “You’re a kid. Worry about that shit later. Be where your heart is.”
She gives Bette a kiss on the cheek and leaves the five of them alone again. Nobody says anything. On the TV, Westley assures Buttercup that death cannot stop true love, only delay it for a little while.
Michelle wants the armchair to swallow her up and save her from the awkward angst.
“This was a mistake. I’m gonna go,” Bette says, walking to the front door and out into the garden.
Rose throws off the blankets and follows her out, dressed in ratty black slippers and plaid flannel pajamas. So Michelle and Tommy and Gretchen are kind of obliged to follow too, because it would be pretty awkward to stay and watch the movie while there was a fight outside.
“Fuck you!” Rose shouts after Bette, who stops and turns. Rose is holding onto the doorframe for support, and her voice is sharp and poisonous. The hurt underneath her fury is like a vein in jagged marble.
“Fuck you for your daydreams about our future. So things aren’t how you want? That’s enough reason to give up on everything? What kind of weak, spineless shit does that make you?
“What if I said I don’t care, I don’t give a shit about happy endings. I don’t fucking give a shit about poetry. I just want you.
“We’ve grown up. Or… changed is a better word, I guess. But you’re different to who you were. I’m different. My mom can see it.
“I just want you,” Rose says again. “I don’t know what happens next. I’m fucking scared. And I miss you.”
For one endless beat of time, Bette just stares at her, frozen motionless by the onslaught of words. Then she steps forward, toward Rose. Michelle can’t remember the last time she saw Bette so hesitant about anything.
“I—” Bette says, but then they both step together and grab one another in a hug, faces buried into shoulders too tightly for speaking. They cling to one another, not moving, just clutching like they can merge and fuse and be one person if they just try hard enough.
“I love you,” one of them says, the words too muffled for Michelle to be certain which one of them it is that’s spoken, but it doesn’t really matter. The words open the floodgate in both of them even as they stay locked in their hug, wracking sobs shuddering their shared form as both girls cry for all the things they’ve lost, all the futures they didn’t get, the present they almost lost because it seemed like something that they couldn’t have.
In those moments they’re locked together in their hug, Michelle can’t imagine that there’s any force on earth strong enough to break the embrace apart, not time or death or anything. But in the end it’s rain that does it, sleet-cold drizzle splattering down and making them break apart to stare up at the sky with shocked laughter at the freezing interruption.
“Come on,” Rose says, offering her hand out to Bette. “Let’s go back inside.”
ALEXANDER
The formal dining room in the Kenilworth house has a long table bisecting it. Instead of playing host to a lavish banquet, however, this table is currently serving as a spacious desk for Nicole and Jenny to spread papers and notes across.
There are jottings about meal plans and drug suggestions and the names of psychiatrists on bright yellow sticky squares, photocopied newspaper clippings, and X-rays. The pair are doing their best to plan a future for Min, one that will last as long as possible.
“She won’t get to average height for her age, but if we can get her to eleven or twelve, she’ll at least have time to get some benefit from estrogen injections,” Nicole says. Jenny makes more notes.
Alex’s phone chirps quietly, earning him a matching set of glares from Nicole and Jenny. He meekly leaves the room, possessed of sufficient self-preservation instincts to know he’s no match for them.
The message is just a random chatty missive from Tim, who’s gone out with a bunch of his creative friends. One of the other artists featured in the same show as Rose, a blunt and delightful pixie of a creature named Leo, has decided to employ Tim’s help in experimenting with the eternal question of how much coffee a human needs to drink before a vampire gets a buzz from their blood.
This has, of course, led to one very caffeinated human, and a vampire in similar condition. Alexander fully expects to be getting slightly hyperactive text updates throughout the night.
He can hear running footsteps and a crash upstairs, and goes to investigate. All traces of the murders have been thoroughly removed, of course, and the rooms refurbished. The noises are coming from the room where the woman with the delicate skin had lived and died.
It looks as if the crash Alex heard was caused by the chair of the dressing table being knocked over, as Min launched herself from it onto the springy mattress of the bed, where she is now jumping along with Ash. Sofie stands and watches them with a smile twitching at her lips.
“Hello, hello!” Min says with one of her rare smiles, waving at him. Alexander smiles in return and waves back.
MICHELLE
Rose’s energy falters as midnight approaches, but she’s making a valiant effort to stay awake, basking in the happiness of having Bette on one side of her and Gretchen on the other as they sit on the sofa, commentating with glee as zombies destroy humanity on the TV.
It makes Michelle miss Jay, the third point of her own triangle, so much that her throat chokes closed. She sends him a text.
How are you?
Okay, he writes back. You?
Tired.
Go to bed thn, dork :)
She smiles a little at that. You are, she writes.
He’s right, though. She should get some sleep.
“Can I stay?” she asks Tommy. “Will your parents be weird if I do?”
“They’re always weird,” he answers. “Stay. I’m going to bed now too. Night, guys.”
“Night,” the three girls say, almost in unison, then grin at one another. Michelle rolls her eyes. People in love are so goofy and gross.
She and Tommy head upstairs to his room, holding hands as they go. Jay is sitting in the middle of Tommy’s bed, and stands with lithe grace as they step inside.
He looks different, even more different than when he woke up again. His clothes are the same trendy stuff that the three of them always wear, but seem to hang on him differently now.
Now he looks – and Michelle wants to laugh at herself for evening thinking this – sexy. She wants to touch him. She can tell from the way Tommy squeezes her hand that he feels it, too.
“Hey guys,” Jay says, with a smile that’s nothing like Jay’s smile. It makes Michelle shiver.
This isn’t something they do. They’re as close as lovers, all three of them, and most of the time Michelle can barely remember the time before that was true. It seems like it’s always the three of them against the world, a pack-family as truly and completely as any gang of vampires in a townhouse.
But this isn’t something they do, not the three of them together. The chemistry between Tommy and Michelle has always been its own monster, something separate from the triumvirate they make. Sometimes Tommy and Jay will kiss, if Michelle goads them into it, and there was one memorable but abortive attempt between Michelle and Jay to do something more, but that’s as close as it’s gotten.
It’s not that they never wanted to, exactly. The
possibility has always been there. It’s just never been the right time. The maybe-feeling has always held a promise to it, a promise of things working out properly some day.
But someday didn’t ever come, and now it never will, not like it might have, because that Jay’s gone now. He died, even though he’s in front of Michelle right now.
She reaches out and presses her hand against his chest, determined to feel the beat of his heart, reassuring herself that he’s here, he’s real.
Everyone dies. Everything changes. Those are just the truths of the world. Everyone changes. Jay is still Jay, even if he’s different. Even if his chest only rises and falls with breath when he wants to speak, now.
“Chelle?” he asks her, same vague quizzical expression on his face as in the days when she’d get all dreamy and quiet from their brownies and sit without speaking for hours while Jay and Tommy argued about dragons or mimes or whatever. The familiarity of it makes her heart catch in her throat.
“Nothing. It’s nothing,” she answers, giving him an attempt at a smile, even though she knows that he’ll be able to see the tears pricking at her eyes. “I’m just sad, that’s all.”
“You’ve always been sad,” says Tommy, standing against her back, a reassuring and familiar shape that’s always seemed to fit perfectly against her own body, like they were made to click together, to meld into one form.
“Yeah,” Michelle agrees, because it’s sort of true. There’s always been something empty in her, something lonely, something that only music’s ever filled up. Sex didn’t do it, drugs didn’t do it, but rock and roll did. Maybe that’s why so many musicians die young. They give up once they realize that they’ve found the only perfect high, and how fleeting and elusive it can be.
“You don’t have to be sad,” Jay says, and there’s a promise in his voice, the same kind of soft, soothing kind of promise that Michelle thinks that maybe the serpent in the garden of Eden might’ve had in its voice, if it wasn’t just a fairy story.
She shrugs one shoulder, giving him a crooked smirk. “My favourite band broke up a while back. I guess I’m still kinda bummed.”
It’s a joke, but it’s kind of true as well. Michelle’s never felt as right, as complete as she did in those moments with Jay and Tommy, standing and watching Remember the Stars play. That was her perfect happiness, and it’s gone forever now, and she’s sad and scared and lonely, because what if there’s never anything else that good ever again? What if they never find another place where they fit, the three of them together, that’s as right as that one?
As if he can read her thoughts—and fuck, maybe he can, Michelle doesn’t know how this vampire crap works, not really—Jay reaches out and rests his hand on her arm, squeezing gently, just enough of a touch to reassure her that he’s there.
“It’s okay,” he says quietly. That’s not fair, and it makes Michelle’s heart hurt and her eyes sting even harder that Jay has to be the one to keep it together right now, to make her feel better, when he’s the one who died.
They’ve always been there for each other, all three of them. It shouldn’t be about Michelle freaking out and feeling sad, not right now. She should be keeping it together for Jay.
A wave of self-loathing, of anger for how she’s failing her best friends right now by being such a mess, hits her in a shudder. Michelle slips out from between Tommy and Jay, stepping away to the edge of the bed and sitting down.
“I just. Just a second. I’m sorry,” she stammers. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.” It’s Tommy who says it this time, to Jay in a soft voice.
“Okay,” Jay echoes, tilting Tommy’s head to one side and leaning in against his throat. Michelle’s a deer in headlights, unable to look away as Jay opens his mouth, fangs gleaming for a moment before they break the skin.
~
The next day at school, Michelle decides that of all the places she’s been in her life, algebra class is by far the most absurd. How’s she meant to sit here, drawing aimless things (eyes, lips, flowers, thorns) across the edges of her page, when every movement of her shirt collar chafes against the marks on her throat, every motion of her hand brushes her shirt cuff against the bites on her wrist?
There’s a whole dark important world going on that nobody around her understands, or even knows is there.
And her collar keeps rubbing her neck, making her breath catch and her knees feel weak as she sits in goddamn algebra.
Finally, after about a thousand years, the bell rings. Michelle manages to stumble out of the classroom and down the hall, toward the old darkroom where they used to hide out with Ash when Ash still came to school.
Tommy’s there already, looking as wrecked as she feels. She slams the door behind her, fumbling to find him in the sudden dark, kissing him frantically.
Is this what vampires feel like all the time? It’s so good, and so huge, and so hungry. It’s too much. Michelle feels like she’s burning up from the inside, from fires lit in all the places Jay bit her. She runs the edge of her thumbnail over the underside of Tommy’s wrist, over the small wound there. Tommy gasps against her mouth, and Michelle smiles.
Distantly, she can hear the bell ring for the next class, but it doesn’t matter. She can’t imagine that it’ll ever matter again.
When they crack open the door an hour later, Sofie is waiting outside, her face cold and pale.
“Was it my brother?”
Michelle smiles at her. “It’s okay,” she assures Sofie.
Sofie barks a bitter laugh. “Is it?”
~
The high begins to wear off on their walk to the townhouse. Sofie’s kind of a mood-killer like that. Michelle starts to feel the crash.
“It’s kind of creepy. Feeling like this. Isn’t it? Like, I don’t know. Like Jay kind of owns us?” Michelle says. Tommy shrugs.
“I don’t mind it so much.”
“I do.” Michelle shakes her head. “I don’t want to belong to anyone. Not Jay. Not even you. How can you be okay with that?”
“I’m a twin. I guess I’m used –“
“Used to feeling like your identity relies on other people? Ugh.”
Tommy looks annoyed. “Used to knowing who I am even inside a context. Way to make me sound like part of the Borg or something, Jesus.”
Michelle takes his hand and squeezes it in a wordless apology. “I’m sorry. This is just. You know.”
He gives her a crooked smile. “Yeah. That it is.”
Michelle feels bad that this is all such a crappy thing for Sofie. Even with the best of the high fading, Michelle feels like her blood is made of electricity, crackling lightning through her. But Sofie’s expression is grim and set and sad, and she raps her knuckles against the townhouse’s front door with a stony finality.
It’s Rose who answers. “You know that most of the people in here are asleep, right? If I hadn’t been here, how would you have gotten in?”
“Rosie?” Tommy looks surprised. “Does Mom know you’re here?”
“I told her I was going with Bette around to her place,” Rose answers guiltily, stepping aside to let them quietly file into the foyer. “It’s not technically a lie. And it’s what we’re talking about, anyway. Bette going around to see her mom.
“Ash is awake too, but everyone else is still asleep.”
ALEXANDER
Alex wakes with a start at the sound of his phone. It’s the song that’s programmed to ring when Tim calls him, but Tim is fast asleep beside him, which means it’s Cora playing her games with the lines again.
He hits the answer button and moves into the bathroom, so Tim won’t be woken by whatever she’s decided to bother Alexander with now.
“I have to be honest,” Cora tells him. “I’m feeling quite low. I’d hoped that Nell’s little artist girl’s brother would go to Lily and Will when he found his sister kidnapped, and that they’d do away with poor tragic Jay entirely.”
“You planned, you mean,” Alexander sn
ipes back. “Your plans have a habit of going wrong, don’t they?”
“Not nearly so often as you think,” she retorts. “But I’ve ironed the kinks out this time, so it hardly matters. My reliable little vigilante Anna is so useful. I’ve given her the tip-off myself; no need to rely on teenagers to pass on my messages this time. Unless Will or Lily sees the message board first, I suppose. Will might try to come and save the day again. Be a hero. He’s beaten me before, after all.
“Oh well. Whoever finds it first wins. All’s fair, as they say.” She feigns a yawn. “Anyway, must be going. Don’t try to wake Tim or Blake, Alex. I’ll kill them for real this time if you involve them. I’ve proven that I can if I want. This game’s just for those of us who were there in Colorado.”
“And what’s the game, Cora?” Alexander asks. He knows she’ll tell him. Her little horrors need an audience, or else there’s no point to them at all.
“I’m going to turn Jennifer, of course,” she answers with a laugh. “Duh. I’ll leave her locked in the adorable little panic room in the closet of the house here, with Min and Nicole. Nicole will have to kill her, or let her kill Min. Isn’t that just beautiful?”
The line goes dead while she’s still laughing.
Alexander dresses as quickly and quietly as he can, taking only what weapons he can gather from the hiding places in his room.
He doesn’t have to see the message Cora’s left for the hunters to know that it will be written in such a way so as to ensure the hunters can’t ignore it, no matter how obvious it is that it’s a trap. That isn’t who they are, any of them. It’s never been who they are.
And he’s rushing out to do whatever he can to stop it because, for all his talk of pragmatism and strategics, it’s who he is, too.
~
Like a piece of performance art portraying ‘very frustrating road blocks’, there’s a gaggle of teens, human and vampire mixed, gathered around the front door of the house. Alexander suspects even Cora couldn’t orchestrate something like this, so he chalks it up to just another of the universe’s little sadisms.
The Wolf House: The Complete Series Page 84
