Russ is the only one there when she arrives. He’s drinking tea and watching a movie on the TV, but he turns the set off and offers her a cup as soon as she’s inside.
“Yes, please,” she answers. “I’m starved.” The hunger’s getting worse, every hour. At this rate she’s going to be eating raw hearts from the butcher before the week’s over. The thought is actually starting to sound very appealing.
He boils the kettle, shooting her searching looks as he adds a teabag to a second mug and then carries everything to the low-set table near the couches. “Bette, I’m glad you came. I wanted to have a talk to you. The others don’t know I’m doing this, but… I think it would be best if you stopped coming here. If you went on with your life.”
Bette stares at him, her thirst and the tea both completely forgotten. Russ glances down at the cups and then gives her a small smile. “I know, let’s have a beer instead, shall we?”
Without waiting for an answer, he takes the newly-brewed tea back into the kitchenette area, leaving the cups on the countertop by the sink and retrieving two bottles of beer from the fridge. He keeps talking as he does all this, not looking at Bette.
“I know you’re probably angry at me for saying this. But I’ve only got your best interests at heart. All of us here… we’ve all lost someone very close to us to these vampires. It’s a terrible, terrible price to pay, but I think it’s necessary in order to treat hunting with the gravity it deserves. Otherwise you won’t —”
“Fuck you,” Bette cuts him off as he returns to the sofas and sits down. “I know more about dying than most kids my age. I know about the smells of it, and how people look when they’re scared of it, and how people look when they’re secretly pleading with God in their heads that they’ll do anything if they can stay alive.”
“But you don’t know vampires. You aren’t part of this world. In a few more days, your infection will wear off —”
“No it won’t! Drinking those mixes with Will made it stronger, I can feel it! I feel thirstier than ever, I —”
“And then you’ll never have to think about vampires again,” Russ continues, ignoring her outburst. “You can go back to your life, Bette. Don’t you want that?”
“What makes you special? How come you’re allowed to do this and I’m not?” Bette challenges, sticking her jaw out. She feels like she’s being kicked out of a party because she isn’t cool enough.
Russ shrugs. “I was born on a Saturday. In some cultures, that means I was destined to be a hunter.”
“Yeah, and I was never baptized, so in some cultures that means I’m destined to be a vampire,” Bette retorts without missing a beat. “What’s the real reason?”
“It’s really none of your business.”
Bette glares. “Fine, it’s none of my business. That means it’s none of your business why I do or don’t want to be here, either.”
Russ looks at her for a moment, then takes a long swallow of his beer and nods. “All right. It was my little brother.
“He was on the local soccer team… my theory is that the vampire who attacked him was watching the evening practices and night games. That’s what other kinds of predators after kids do, so it makes sense.”
Russ takes a deep breath, pausing in his story for a moment before going on. “Whatever the specifics were, he barely made it home. It sometimes presents like a very bad flu, the kind of fever any child might get. There were eight of us, so my mother never bothered getting too worried when one of us was sick—in the colder months, at least one of us was always sick.” He smiles a little at the memory and raises the bottle to his mouth again. Bette takes a sip of her own drink, trying not to wince at the gross taste of the beer.
“My sister knew what it really was, though. I don’t know how. I wish I’d had the chance to talk to her about it, to find out how vampires had become a part of her world. She was sixteen. I was fifteen, our brother—the one who was bitten—was twelve. We had an older sister and brother but they’d already left home, and the other three were still very young. We were the ones in the middle, and tried to watch out for each other.
“She found the bite. That’s how she knew for certain. It was on his upper arm, disguised as a scrape. Nothing remarkable on a sporty little kid, unless you already knew. I wish I knew how she already knew.
“Sometimes on weekends, if Dad let her have the car, the three of us went to the drive-in to watch the horror features. They terrified my brother, but he loved them.” The memory earns a small smile of nostalgia from Russ. “My sister and I would be in the front seats and my brother would climb through and curl up on her lap, wrapping her arms around him like a safety belt.
“That’s how I found them that night. He looked so sick… pale, horribly pale, and his eyes were so shadowed it looked like bruises. He skin was clammy and it would have been obvious to anyone that he was really ill. Dying.” Russ stops and scrubs his eyes with the back of his hand, breaths shaky. Bette looks away and swallows a mouthful of her beer, just for something to do. After a few seconds Russ collects himself and starts speaking again.
“He was on my sister’s lap on the floor, and she had her wrist pressed against his mouth, and he was holding it there, and there was blood on his mouth and these… slurping sounds. She looked up at me and just said ‘I had to save him’. Simple, like it was all she had to say. Maybe it was.
“I stood there and stared. It was the strangest and most frightening thing I’d ever seen. My little brother, gulping my sister’s blood like he was starving.
“Then she told me to put the kettle on and make her a cup of tea. Of all my sisters, she was the one most like our mother. When she told you to do something, you couldn’t help but pay attention.
“I went to the kitchen and I put the kettle on, just like she told me. Our kitchen window looked out into our garden and I can remember staring out at it while that water boiled, like I was in a trance. The dark trees, the sky. It all looked so quiet and normal.
“After a while my sister came in. She’d wrapped her wrist and was holding it up against her shoulder to slow the blood flow. She looked pale and exhausted but otherwise just the same, just my sister.” Russ blinks again, his eyes bright, but he doesn’t stop talking. “‘He’s going to wake up,’ she told me. She didn’t explain anything more than that. She sat down and drank her tea, then made another cup and drank that too. Neither of us said anything until she was finished, and then she asked me if I had any money.
“I had forty-seven dollars in a shoebox out in our garden shed, where none of my siblings would find it. She had twenty, and we found another seventy-two in our father’s wallet and mother’s purse.
“I’d been out late. On a date. That was why I’d been awake, why I’d found them. I shared a room with my brother but my sister, as the eldest still at home, had a room of her own. If she’d taken him in there I never would have known, I never would have come home and interrupted them. Sometimes I think that it was just bad luck—it was an emergency, and she didn’t have time to move him. Mostly I think she did it on purpose. She needed someone in the family to know the truth of what happened. She didn’t want to do it all alone.
“She’d shut the door to my room with my brother still inside, before she’d come out for her cups of tea, and I didn’t try to open it. I helped my sister take linens out of the cupboard and out to the car, and make a bed on the back seat with my brother’s Star Wars sheets, fresh from the laundry. I helped her stuff her schoolbag with her clothes and my brother’s. I suggested she take some tea bags, just in case she couldn’t find the kind she liked in stores right away, and she cried a little then, but we kept on working.
“When the car was all packed up we went back inside and my sister said ‘help me carry him,’ and opened the door to the bedroom. My brother was sprawled across his bed, arms and legs at strange angles. He looked like a forgotten doll, a GI Joe toy discarded on the carpet after one of his games. His eyes were closed and his mouth was
slack and open, the lips bloodied, the smears starting to go dry and rusty.
“It was horrific.
“I lifted him, glad for a moment that he hadn’t gone through a growth spurt yet and so was still light and small enough to carry easily. Then I realized that I didn’t know if he’d ever grow, now, or if he’d be stuck just as he was in that moment. I’d seen a dozen films about vampires, at least, but I’d… this was nothing like a movie. It was nothing like anything.
“He wasn’t breathing and his head lolled over my arm as I carried him to the car. We laid him in the back seat and my sister covered him with a blanket—completely covered him, toe to forehead. He looked like a dead body. I started shaking then, and I couldn’t stop. My sister hugged me and held me, and we cried. She said ‘I wish you could come too, I wish you could come too’ over and over, but she pushed me away just the same before she got in our father’s car and drove away.
“It took a long time before things went back to anything like normal at home. I never told my parents that I’d played any part in what happened. The mystery was kinder than any lie I could think up.
“I started watching the evening soccer practices. Photographing them for their league yearbook. My parents thought it was because I missed my brother and maybe part of it was, but it was also because I needed to protect the kids who were still there and make sure nobody hurt them.
“I noticed that there was this lady who watched them a lot, too. Not how the moms who sometimes came along watched, either. There was something sharper in her eyes.” Russ huffs a laugh. “We almost had knives at each other’s throats before we worked out that we were both there for the same reason. Her name was Charlie, short for Charlotte, and she’d heard about what happened to my brother and put two and two together. She’d been hunting vampires for a long time; she could spot a pattern where most people wouldn’t see a thing. She started training me, and that was that.
“I asked her once why my sister had done what she did. Not saving my brother, that I understood, but leaving me behind. Charlie told me it was because that was the only way my sister could stand to do it, that it was the same reason why Charlie’s daughter lived with her dad. Because hunters have to believe they’re keeping somebody safe. That someone, at least, gets to keep on having all the ordinary happy stuff they have to give up.”
“But you became a hunter anyway. It didn’t work,” Bette points out quietly. Russ nods.
“Yeah. But that’s because I’d lost my brother, same as her. The fight was already personal for me, there was no way to keep me from it. But you and Rose both got out safe from that fight near the overpass, Bette. You’ve got no stake in this war—and don’t tell me that you’re in it because you want to help, because that’s not enough. I won’t let it be enough. I can’t keep on if I believe that everyone I save winds up a soldier. I need to hope for better than that.”
Bette shakes her head. “But it all feels like bullshit. It’s all such stupid shallow crap, now that I know that all this real stuff’s going on.”
“Then don’t let it be shallow crap. Become a scientist and make new medicines. Teach kids to read. Be in a punk band and start a revolution. There’s a thousand important things you can do. Do them for the ones who never got a chance.”
“Okay,” Bette says, because Russ is looking at her like she’s a living embodiment of all his aspirations. It’s the same way Rose and Tommy’s parents look at them, or how the art teachers look at Rose sometimes. People don’t look at Bette like that very much.
“Okay,” she says again. “I will.” She clinks the neck of her bottle against his, and they drink together in silence. She feels like she’s been making promises to everybody lately. She’s got a lot of people’s dreams to live up to.
JAY
Amusingly enough, Jay is using Timothy’s laptop to check his email when he receives the letter from Alexander, and Jay knows that Alexander is just downstairs in the recording studios, transferring more of his old records into digital format.
Timothy’s playing Silent Hill on the flat-screen and Jay is, in theory, watching him in order to appreciate what a master he is at games or something ridiculous like that. Jay’s mostly using the time to catch up on stuff on the internet. He opens the message from Alexander.
Jay —
One of the things Blake has mentioned during his frequent listings of your virtues—and while I have no doubt of your worth as a person, I feel it’s only fair to tell you that you are an exceedingly dull topic for extended conversation—is that you like things which are, in one way or another, quaint. I hope you don’t mind, then, that I’m writing to you in a more formal style than I imagine your inbox usually sees. Be at least a little grateful that I am sending this by email and not writing it with a fountain pen.
(To tell the truth, I have done exactly this. I like my fountain pen, and hate keyboards. Blake’s scanner can translate written pages into text on the screen, and I shall transfer this message in that manner when I am finished.)
I don’t like to talk about what happened to Timothy. Twenty years may seem like a long time to one not yet sixteen, but for me the wounds are still quite raw. But I think you should know it, if you’re going to be his friend—and you are already his friend. Also, I think I am better equipped than Blake to tell the story clearly and coherently, and I know that if I don’t tell you, you’ll just ask him what happened. Blake is too given to letting the poetry of the memories overwhelm sense and logic, though. It’s better if I grit my teeth and get it done myself.
To begin: I met Timothy and Blake in the winter of my twentieth year. It may have been my nineteenth, or even my eighteenth, but I am fairly sure it was my twentieth. My father, who had been doing the counting to calculate my age, had been dead some years, and though I did my best to keep my tally accurate after he was gone I cannot be certain.
I was born in San Francisco during its first boom from town to city, during the gold rush. Some say that’s when America as we know it now began, too: the idea that there is a fortune to be sought and claimed, somewhere out past the edge of the familiar. That started with the gold rush.
I cannot remember if we were rich or poor, which most likely means we were not especially one or the other. They died and I spent a few difficult years without very much except my feet and a road to put them on. When I was twenty I worked at a rail yard in Nevada, and this is where Blake and Timothy first caught sight of me.
Blake had distractions of his own—his tendency to be bewitched by lovely people is a lifelong weakness, and I’m sad to say his taste has not always been as discerning as it’s proved to be in the case of yourself. He’d fallen starry-eyed for the daughter of the local doctor, a young newlywed with a fiery temperament.
The less said about Cora, the better.
Timothy hated the desert climate, especially for the way seasons blurred together in the heat and dust. He bought the rail yard from the old owner and would come down at sunset to spend time with the workers and hear stories of the places we’d come from—Madrid, Venice, Sydney, Cardiff. All the rail workers were foreign save for me, who simply looked foreign. Since I’d grown up in San Francisco, and couldn’t offer stories about strange and distant worlds, Timothy would tell me about where he was from. He told me about thick dark trees, growing so densely together that woodsmen had to chop paths between them and out into the clearings around houses and towns.
Those woods were so packed tight, he said, that daylight never truly filtered in. The light was green and dim and one day became another almost without notice, except that different birds made sounds when the sun was down. That was where he’d come from, but he’d been so many other places too. He told us about the music in Vienna and the intrigues of Russia and the majesty of India, sitting there at our dusty campfire in his finery as if he wasn’t the owner of the yard.
Some recognized him for what he really was, and warned the rest of us, but nobody cared. We’d seen the greed and cruelty that
ordinary living humans could carry inside themselves, and Timothy was no worse, and kinder than some. He’d beat workers for stealing or lying, but not for being ill as the last one had done. Those of us within the rail yard had no reason to make use of this vulnerability of his we knew of. If he ate no food, that meant more for us. If he appeared only at night, it left us uninterrupted by visits in the day.
We would hear about terrible murders in the city, but there were always terrible murders in the city.
But this is not the story I set out to tell you. The abortive sweetness of first courtship, and the ways it was thrown off course into emergency and my death, is a story for another time. The important tale I wish to recount is how I lost that Timothy forever.
Ah, but now I remember why I began to tell my own beginnings. I wanted you to know the end: the first night I awoke as a vampire, I found myself held in Timothy’s arms on the thick feather bed he shared with Blake.
Panic gripped me. Even the bravest of my kind have gone through that first horror, when they wake up and find their body dead. But Timothy held me still, and stroked my hair, and whispered “It’s all right. You are safe, and you are loved.”
He needn’t have bothered with the words, really. Past the initial moment of dread I was already calming down just from his scent. Vampires who are kin can recognize each other, though ‘recognize’ is a poor approximation for the sensation. Perhaps there’s no true equivalent in the realm of human experience, for this sense is not familial, nor erotic, but it does contain elements of how those connections feel. It is the pack. It is knowing you are close to another of your pack.
Other vampires can scent it on you, Jay. That you belong with Blake, and Timothy and myself, and Raoul and Sebastian and Mikhail and Carrillo and the rest. You are marked as Blake’s pack, in your blood, though you yourself will only become aware of it once you are turned. If you aren’t turned, and your blood is given the chance to revert eventually to normal, the scent will fade. Or, at least, so I am told—it’s highly uncommon for a marked human to do anything but become a vampire, sooner or later.
The Wolf House: The Complete Series Page 14