“But since I was bitten, it’s the perfect chance for tests. I got it,” Bette finishes his sentence with a nod. “What are they?”
“I’ve been working on making a mix of plant and herbal ingredients, fruits mostly, that help hold off the cravings. That way, the infection doesn’t get any stronger, but you don’t walk around feeling like you’re dying, either. Otherwise we’ll just suggest you eat a small portion of black pudding each day, reducing the amount throughout the week until —”
Bette makes a grabby-hands gesture with her fingers, curling them greedily. “No way. I’m a vegetarian. Black pudding is a scab disguised as food. Gimme your experiments, please. I will so totally be your test rabbit for this. Your own personal feral child.”
“I warn you, some of the mixes have been pretty foul-tasting. Last time Russ had to try one, he told me it was more disgusting than those don’t-bite-your-nails varnishes.”
Bette shakes her head, glad to be back on topics she already knows her feelings on. “I don’t even care. It’s better than blood. I feel sick at myself for wanting that.”
“Okay, great.” Will smiles. “I’m working off the fact that we know vampires are capable of ingesting tea and red wine, and possibly other liquids we haven’t got photographic evidence for.”
“Tannins,” Bette says promptly, then ducks her head. “Sorry. Science geek.”
“You are? That’s excellent. You can help me solve the mystery, as well as being my lab monkey.” Will’s smile turns into a grin. He has an awkward, reserved charm that’s as different to Lily’s brassy charisma as a person can be. “So, tannins, right. I’ve tried mixes with cranberries, chokeberries, every kind of tea you can think of, black currants, red wines, white wines, sour cherries… I’ve wondered for a while what particular properties make something useful as a blood substitute for vampires.”
“Maybe it’s not tannins… maybe proanthocyanidin? That strengthens blood vessels.” Bette wonders out loud. “And helps protect skin from sun damage. Sounds like something vampires would try to include in their diets. Have you tried apples?”
Will nods. “That’s what I was thinking. But I haven’t tried apples yet, because the results don’t seem to show any trends, any sign that it actually is proanthocyanidin. Or, if it is, that’s not the only element we need, if we want to make something that removes the need for blood completely.”
Bette has a light-bulb-over-her-head moment. “I read this article online a while back about allicin. You know, in garlic? And it was saying that allicin activates perivascular sensory nerve endings. Relaxed blood vessels means better blood flow. We can try stuff around that idea, maybe? And garlic’s in so many vampire myths… maybe there’s a reason for that, one that’ll help us.”
“Fantastic. That’s a brilliant idea.”
“What about holy water?” Rose asks, head tilted to one side as Russ tapes butterfly bandages over the cut to keep it closed. “That’s in a lot of stories too. Does it work?”
Will makes a face. “Anna wipes her weapons down with it before hunts. I don’t believe it works at all, but she says she notices a difference. She uses a mixture of Sikh amrit, Buddhist dutsi, and Islamic zamzam, as well as Christian holy water. She says vampires draw life from blood, why can’t we from water? Some hunters I’ve heard of even clean bites with it.”
“I prefer to use things that actually work, personally,” Russ puts in dryly.
“I feel like it’s a disservice to all the people who’ve been killed by these monsters to treat the whole thing like it’s some mystical magical game,” Will goes on. “Rather than a real danger in need of real weapons and medicines.”
“Got it.” Bette nods. “This isn’t a game.”
JAY
It takes longer for Jenna to answer Jay’s second chat request, a few hours after they finish their first conversation, and he’s about to shut his computer and go find something else to do when his speakers sound the reply tone. He switches on his webcam and settles back in his slightly squeaky second-hand swivel chair, waving hello at her.
She’s dressed in the same outfit she was wearing at the party, and Jay can’t help but remember the sounds the fabric made as he touched it while they kissed. He’s starting to think that he’s incapable of having any friendships whatsoever that aren’t at least partially colored by his endless and exasperating hormones.
Jenna looks grumpy as she waves back, raising her other hand to her mouth and taking a bite of a carrot stick with a frown.
“Wow, you look cheerful.”
“I hate carrot sticks,” she answers, sighing. “We’re going to another stupid party tonight because Mom wants to impress another stupid client. But it’s at the Marina, which means the menu’s going to be full of shellfish, which is total bullshit because it’s not like it’s any harder or easier for caterers to get seafood dishes for events on the waterfront, is it? You don’t only get steak sandwiches when you’re near cow farms or whatever. It’s not even the right kind of water! And anyway, I’m allergic to shellfish, so.” She brandishes the carrot at the screen. “I gotta eat before we go.”
“So you chose a food you have a particular hatred for. You’re even smarter than you look.”
Jenna rolls her eyes and pops the last of the carrot stick into her mouth. “You’re such an asshole.”
“I hear you got the lead in the school musical. Congrats.”
Jenna shrugs, but Jay thinks she might be trying to hold a smile in. “It’s not really the lead. That stupid bitch sister of your friend Tommy got Peter Pan. I’m just Wendy. That’s going to look pretty pathetic in all my unauthorized biographies, isn’t it? That I could only get second place in the school play?”
“I’m not sure it’s exactly like that,” Jay says, but since he sort of sees her point he doesn’t push the issue. “Tommy’s sister is okay. I don’t really know her, but I don’t think she’s a bitch. Just kind of weird.”
Jenna makes a face. “More like a psycho freak. Her and that Bette girl are totally going to grow up to be serial killers, I bet you a thousand bucks.”
“Sounds like they’re the ones who’re gonna get the unauthorized autobiographies, then,” Jay suggests. “Why are you intending to have those written about you, again?”
Jenna shrugs. “I dunno, the usual. I’ll do movies and have a perfume and whatever. Singing’s the one I really want to do. I want to have tons of albums and crazy stalker fans and shit.” She grins, baring her teeth and hooking her manicured fingers into hands in a pantomime imitation of a crazy stalker fan.
“And people say that the young don’t aspire to anything anymore,” says Jay. “Good luck with that. Am I allowed to sell my story to the tabloids?”
“Sure. I’ll let you know when I’ve been out of the news for a couple of days. You can boost my profile and make some cash at the same time. Everyone wins,” Jenna says airily, like she’s only half-joking. In that moment she reminds Jay quite a lot of Blake, of the careless way he treats the business of managing a secret empire.
Apparently Jay has a romantic weakness for evil masterminds.
“Jeeennnnnnnnnn!” A loud, petulant voice calls from somewhere behind Jenna. She turns away from the camera and yells “What?” in reply.
“We have to go! Mom says hurry up!”
Jenna turns back to Jay and gives a rueful smile. “Looks like our secret rendezvous is being cut short. I’ll talk to you again soon, okay?”
“Have a good time,” Jay replies.
“That’d be more likely if you were gonna be there,” Jenna mutters. “See you round.”
The window with her webcam feed in it closes itself, and Jay shuts his laptop screen.
BETTE
There’s no way that Bette’s going to manage to sleep again, ever, and so she’s still awake when Rose texts her a little after three in the morning and asks if she’s got any peroxide left.
Bette packs all her hair-dye stuff into the Batman backpack she used to use
in elementary school and cycles around to Rose and Tommy’s. Maybe now that she knows that vampires are real and the world needs saving and stuff she’ll get better at saving up her money and she’ll get an excellent pink Vespa with shiny chrome bits and drink tiny bitter coffees and read big ancient books about famous monsters and her skin will clear up and she’ll be stylish and mysterious and enigmatic and totally punk rock. Vampire hunting is completely and utterly punk rock.
Rose is wearing a Veruca Salt shirt that looks seconds away from total collapse, the red eyes of the octopus on the front long chipped away to nothing, and a pair of tartan boxer shorts. Her skin is scrubbed pink and her hair’s an even knottier tangle than usual.
“I wanna go blonde. Blonde as I can go,” Rose says by way of greeting as Bette clambers down through the window and onto Rose’s desk. Rose has this awful tarantula paperweight made of glass with a real spider inside that used to belong to her great-great-uncle or someone like that, and Bette hates it so much, because she always thinks it’s real for a second when she sees it.
“Your paperweight is gross. Why can’t you like sparkles and rainbows and unicorns and shit like a normal girl?” Bette snipes as she jumps down from the desk to the floor and waits for the fuck! spider! shock to wear off.
Rose deflates a little, frowning. “I’ve never dyed my hair before. Aren’t you surprised?”
“I figured you probably didn’t want the peroxide for drinking,” Bette points out reasonably. “Your hair’s nice, anyway. Why mess with it?”
Rose pushes a hand back through it, guiding the snarls away from her forehead. “I kept… it’s too dark when it’s wet. I feel like… it… it looks like there’s still blood in it.”
“Oh.” Bette blinks. “Uh. Um, okay. Right. Want to do this in the bathroom down here, or upstairs? Does Tommy know?”
Rose’s eyes go laughably wide. “No, no! Don’t tell him. I don’t want to risk him asking why.”
“He’s gonna notice if you bleach your fucking hair, you know,” Bette says. “And wait, you’re not telling him?”
“I’m not gonna tell my brother that I nearly got killed by a creature of the night!” Rose looks aghast at the idea.
“It’s not protecting him if you don’t,” Bette says, trying to keep her voice soft and sympathetic so she doesn’t sound like she’s giving a lecture. “He lives here same as us, and there might not be a bunch of super badass monster killers around next time he’s out walking late, you know.”
Rose shudders visibly at the implications of the thought, then gestures in the direction of the bathroom door. “Come on, let’s do this. Those guys were pretty cool, weren’t they? Lily and Will and everyone.”
“Yeah,” Bette agrees, following Rose into the tiny basement bathroom. “I wonder if they’ll train me if I ask them. You know, for self-defense.”
Rose starts dragging a comb through the worst of the knots, wincing and swearing under her breath at the pain.
“Lather it up with conditioner,” Bette advises. “It’ll untangle easier.”
“I don’t use conditioner.”
“Seriously?” Bette snorts a laugh. “You are the worst girl ever, you know.”
Rose ignores the comment, swearing again before scrunching her face up thoughtfully and saying “I don’t think I’ve got time to learn self-defense stuff. Not until the musical’s done, anyway. I’m trying to get more serious about my art and stuff. I’m gonna do this series of paintings based on quotations, with weird creatures and stuff. Not monsters, exactly. But, like, freakish. You wanna see ‘em?”
“After we’re done here.” Bette uncaps the bottle of solution she’s been shaking to mix. “Bend your head over the sink and remember, it’s not my fault if this looks awful.”
~
An hour of lathering, rinsing, scrubbing and combing later, Bette appraises the result tentatively.
“It looks… not awful, exactly?”
Rose switches off the hair drier. “What?”
“I said, it doesn’t look too awful,” Bette repeats, spinning around on the desk chair and breathing out a plume of smoke. The dawn chorus of neighborhood birds has started up outside, but there’s no morning light visible yet through the basement window.
Rose, sitting on the edge of the fold-out, holds her hand mirror up and turns her head from side to side. Her hair is a shock of coarse champagne shade, almost white in places and a red-gold in others. “I think it looks great.”
“It makes your face look kind of hard, though. And you’re not hard,” Bette says, because that’s as close as she can get to explaining that the blonde hair makes Rose look vulnerable and sad and tough, like she’s suffering through something that hurts but is determined to survive. And even though that may be true, Bette doesn’t want to think about it being true.
JAY
The next day at school, while they’re eating lunch on the bleachers, Tommy turns to Jay and says “You play guitar, right?” and Jay shrugs and says “A little, I guess.”
“My sister and her friend wanna start a band. I’m supposed to drum. It’s going to be awful. Want to come with me this afternoon?”
Jay shrugs again. “Sure, okay.”
It turns out that it’s actually really, really fun being in a band. They don’t do much in the way of playing music, at least not in their first practice, but it’s always cool to hang out with Tommy and it turns out that Rose, Tommy’s sister, is pretty cool too. She’s a total freak, just like everyone at school is always saying she is, but Jay and Tommy are both kind of freaky in their own ways anyway, so it’s not like Jay’s all that surprised or turned off by it.
Bette’s a bit harder to get along with. She seems like she’s angry, but not about anything that anyone can help her fix. Tommy and Rose just ignore it, or maybe they’re so used to it that they don’t notice anymore. Jay’s no stranger to violence in his life, or rudeness—he’s worked too long in the food service industry to be unfamiliar with sharp words—but outright anger isn’t something he’s had much experience with, and even just spending three hours screwing around with instruments in Bette’s garage with her and Tommy and Rose leaves Jay feeling high-strung and nervy.
It wasn’t that she was particularly rude or bitchy at him directly or anything (and anyway, Jay considers bitchiness to be an art form worthy of respect, not a character flaw), just that there’s a palpable sense around her all the time that she’s a second or two away from flying off the handle and getting furious at someone for some tiny dumb thing.
But even that isn’t enough to counteract how fun it was, teaching Tommy how to play random scraps of songs and laughing when his own fingers skittered well away from where he meant to put them.
Jay’s never played music with anyone else before, not outside a classroom context. It’s actually more like sex than he expected it to be—he’d always thought statements to that effect were probably just douchey rockstars being douchey rockstars, but it really does have that same joyful, collaborative sense to it. He likes it. Jay can’t remember the last time he liked something that was relatively simple and uncomplicated.
After evening falls, Jay makes his way back to the townhouse. Every time he visits, it feels less like a decision and more like an inevitability. Not a compulsion, exactly. He doesn’t think they’re mind-controlling him into hanging out there or anything. But maybe a bit like an addiction.
There’s nobody home on the lowest level, and nobody’s in the main room upstairs, either. Jay knocks on Blake’s door, knowing that Blake must already be aware that he’s there.
“Come in,” the reply comes from inside. Blake’s lying back against a bank of pillows on the bed, fully dressed but barefoot, a thick novel in his hands. Blake doesn’t say anything when Jay joins him on the bed, curls against his side with one cheek resting against the smooth dark silk of Blake’s vest. After a few minutes, Jay feels a light touch on his hair, the apparently idle stroking of Blake’s fingers through the product-stiff
locks. Jay knows it’s not idle. Nothing Blake does is idle.
Blake reads and Jay drifts, listening to the slow thump of Blake’s heart and the motionless silence of no breathing but his own. It’s comfortable, intimate, and Jay feels a little dumb for feeling as safe and content as he does. Lying in a vampire’s arms shouldn’t feel so much like home, but Jay knows it always will for him.
“I feel like Bikini Kill,” Jay says after a long time of quiet, stretching his legs and shifting a little so Blake’s hand rests lower on the nape of his neck.
“I can assure you, Jason, I’m not in the habit of keeping pet humans,” Blake teases lightly, closing his book and putting it to one side. His thumb brushes back and forth over the thin skin behind Jay’s ear. If Jay could purr, he’d be purring now, but he settles for smiling and opening his eyes a little.
“Not a pet. Just… something warm and living that you like, even if you won’t admit it.”
“Hm,” Blake says as Jay’s eyes slip closed again, and Jay smiles because he recognizes the sound. Blake makes that sound when he’s amused. “I keep telling you, I chose Bikini Kill for Timothy because cats are elegant predators. You’re mistaken if you think I have the time or inclination to open my house up to fuzzy kittens and large-eyed waifs because of some sort of inner softness.”
Jay snorts, rolling onto his back and opening his eyes. Blake’s fingertips ghost over Jay’s cheekbone, the length of his nose, his lips. There’s an ink-stain, from a fountain pen, on one pale knuckle.
The nails are bitten to the quick.
“Nervous habit?” Jay asks, raising his eyebrows.
“Oral fixation,” replies Blake, covering Jay’s eyes with his palm.
The Wolf House: The Complete Series Page 8