The Wolf House: The Complete Series

by Mary Borsellino

  “You are safe, and you are loved.” He didn’t need to say the words, but they were a comfort in the beat of time before I recognized him and recognized the room and remembered what had happened.

  Vampires are creatures of packs, and we are highly territorial. Population densities have made the situation far worse in this last century—now border skirmishes between the packs are almost as common as battles with roaming groups of the wild misfits.

  It was during one such border skirmish that Timothy was killed. We lost members from time to time, but not as frequently as some packs, for Blake is a smarter, stronger leader than his frivolous heart might suggest. We lost members but I had never thought for a moment that Timothy could ever be among their number. A silver crossbow bolt had punctured through his right eye, into his brain. We are a difficult creature to kill, but it can be done.

  Damage the brain, remove the head, destroy the heart—we are not all that much less fragile than humans, in the end, just a little more durable.

  Blake tells me that an apt modern metaphor you will understand is that of a ruined computer. A dead vampire’s body heals itself if it can. This is, after all, what vampire bodies do. Provided the remains are mostly intact—not ashes, or too badly dismembered; some things even we cannot rebuild from—the body will repair. It will even wake up, and go back to its previous state of robust undeath. But—and here is where I rely on Blake’s proffered computer analogy—the memory banks are restored to the factory defaults.

  To elaborate: I am twenty. My face is twenty, my body is twenty. If I take this fountain pen and stab it into the back of my hand, my clever skin will knit and regrow to the pattern it’s locked to: me, aged twenty. It did this when I was twenty-one and, should I live this long, it will do it when I am twenty-one-thousand. I stab my hand and it grows back to exactly as it was the day I died, when I was twenty.

  The same is true for brains.

  I wept for Timothy, of course. He was, and is, the love above all loves for me. And then, when I was done weeping, I readied myself to begin again. I held him carefully, cradled him, as his body healed itself. I waited for him to wake up. And then he did, with a violent start, looking at me with terror and no recognition in his beautiful eyes.

  “It’s all right,” I said to him, doing my best to smile. “You are safe, and you are loved.”

  His brows furrowed in confusion, and he answered me in a language long-ago lost to time. He was, it seemed, far, far older than either Blake or I had supposed. He knew none of the languages our Timothy had, not even the dusty cadences of Latin and ancient Greek.

  He has never told us what memories he has, what life was his in those years before he first became a vampire. He learned English quickly, and other languages as well, but even once we could converse with ease he would never say.

  I know he loves us, but I know too that our love is a heavy burden for him to bear. He feels he has no claim to it, since he is not the Timothy who earned it. He is, in many ways, scarcely older than you are.

  And so I am sincerely grateful for you, and for the role you play in our family. You are the brother he needs very much. I regret deeply that I gave you cause to pull away from him, and I am glad that you returned.

  As a token of my gratitude to you, I have asked a number of those who owe me favors to find out whatever they can about Liam and Sofie. You must never doubt that you are a part of the home here in this modest townhouse, but the faraway look I see in Timothy’s eyes sometimes has taught me the importance of knowing what has become of the family one grew up within. I will let you know as soon as I have answers to give you.

  With respect and fondness,

  Alexander

  BETTE

  It’s distressingly easy to go back to ordinary life. Bette does extra shifts at work, and gets into fights at school, and everything’s just boring and normal for three days. When her cell phone rings one evening and the display reads ‘Gretchen’, the mere fact of something different and unpredicted excites Bette enough that she answers before the second ring.

  “Hey, it’s Bette.”

  “Hi Bette. It’s Gretchen. Are you busy tonight?”

  “Nope. All homework is successfully procrastinated until a later date. What’re you up to?”

  “Well. This probably sounds like the dumbest idea ever, but a friend of mine has a tattoo studio, and when I mentioned that I had a friend who wanted to get a tattoo done, she said I could borrow it tonight. The studio. She’s out of town this week, so it’s all shut up. Do you still have the drawing Rose did for you, of the bird?”

  Bette’s smile is so wide it practically makes her face hurt. Thank goodness her ordinary-life rut didn’t last long enough to send her crazy. “I certainly do indeed.”

  Which is how she winds up in a tattoo studio downtown, sitting as still as she can manage as Gretchen transfers the bird design carefully onto her arm with a pen as a template for the needle. Gretchen is meticulous and careful, and the design looks exactly right. Bette’s glad of that, but it’s not like she would have kicked up a fuss if it was slightly wrong—sixteen-year-olds getting tattooed illegally by their friends probably aren’t allowed to bitch about things like that, Bette figures.

  The tattoo needle makes an earsplitting sort of whir as Gretchen begins to ink the design on permanently, but even over that din Bette can hear the beauty of Gretchen’s voice as she sings softly to herself.

  “You should make an album,” Bette says when Gretchen pauses to load more ink onto the needle. “Or at the very least record one of your shows. You have an amazing voice. It’s really beautiful.”

  Gretchen gives Bette a small, almost sad smile. “Artie always used to remind me that not all beautiful things must be preserved beyond their moment. I sing because I love to sing. I have no reason to keep a record.”

  Bette opens her mouth to argue, but Gretchen keeps talking before she’s got a chance to say anything.

  “Have you heard the story of Elena’s Tomb? It was a story, but it really happened. In the 1930s. There was a man, a Count. From Dresden, actually. He fell terribly, terribly in love with a girl named Maria Helen, though his pet name for her was always Elena. She was twenty-one and the most beautiful girl in their village. The Count showered her with jewels and clothes and riches and his undying devotion, but none of that mattered. It didn’t matter if his devotion was undying, because she was not. Elena had tuberculosis, and in those days that meant certain death, and so she died.

  “The Count built a beautiful tomb for his beautiful dead love, and visited it every night. She was still the only thing that mattered to him and, though she was gone forever, he could not let her go.

  “Two years later, the Count stole her away from her tomb and kept her in his house. He rebuilt her face with silk strips dipped in plaster, and made her body lovely again with disinfectants and perfumes and stockings and jewels and wire loops to hold her bones together. For seven years he held her every night, close in his bed, until her family discovered what he’d done and took her back to be buried once more. So then he took a death-mask casting of her face as it had once been, when her flesh was lovely and her spirit only just gone. Out of the mask and silk scraps and wax and ribbons, he remade his twice-lost love again, and lived with her until he died. Now his bones are on display, alone, in a Believe-It-Or-Not hall.”

  Bette mimes a retching motion. “God, no wonder Rose has a total girl-boner for you. You’re as gross as her. Gross, gross.”

  “Do you know what the moral of that story is?” Gretchen asks, head tilted to one side, staring at Bette intently.

  “Uh, that you’re totally disgusting, and that some people are freaks?”

  “That there are some lovely things that perish no matter how much we wish that they would remain, and that trying to hold onto them when they’re gone kills a part of us in the process.”

  Bette rolls her eyes. “You’ve made a mountain-metaphor out of a molehill there. I suggest that you tape a
couple of songs and you give me a parable about corpse-fucking. A sense of perspective might come in handy, you should think about one.”

  Gretchen nods seriously, like Bette’s given her a piece of genuinely useful advice, instead of Bette just being a sarcastic jerk as per usual.

  Bette scrunches her face up and fidgets in her chair, squirming around as much as she can without moving her arm. “I hate all that stuff. Sick guys doing awful things to girls. I guess that sounds weird from someone who likes violent movies as much as I do, but that’s how it goes. The only monster I’ve ever had nightmares about is Jack the Ripper.”

  “No.” Gretchen shakes her head. “He wasn’t a monster. Do not make him one. He was just a man with a sickness. There is true evil in the world, yes, but there are no monsters. Just people, and when they are dead they are dead. No need for nightmares. He’s gone and his mad thoughts and deeds are gone with him.”

  “Do you really believe that? That… are the dead always completely gone?” Bette asks awkwardly, looking at Gretchen’s dark bangs and paper-white skin and even, sharp little teeth. Gretchen’s elegant eyebrows furrow in confusion at the question, her eyes with their forest-green contacts and inky mascara narrowing.

  “Are you talking of ghosts?” she asks Bette. “There’s no such thing, I promise.”

  “No. It’s silly. I just thought… I don’t know, sometimes with you I think… it’s dumb. Never mind.” Bette looks away, blushing.

  “It’s all right.” Gretchen turns off the tattoo gun and rests a cool palm on Bette’s forearm. “What is it?”

  Bette swallows. “Vampires.”

  “Hm.” The sound Gretchen makes is non-committal. She folds a paper towel into quarters, wets it with disinfectant, and wipes excess ink and blood away from Bette’s skin. The bird’s wing and face are colored, a brilliant vivid blue, and the paper towel comes away patchy and purple. Bette’s skin feels like sunburn, tender and hypersensitive.

  “Do you remember the first time you discovered something terrible about the world?” Gretchen asks, still carefully cleaning Bette’s arm. “That all things age and wither, or that your parents had human flaws?”

  Bette nods. “Sure, I guess.”

  “Do you remember how, once you knew this thing, you could never un-know it? How you felt a little part of who you were die, and re-grow as someone older and sadder for the wisdom? What you speak of now holds that threat. Be certain it’s a price you truly wish to pay before you ask.”

  Gretchen turns to the work table and begins refilling the ink dishes with fresh splashes of color. Bette swallows nervously, then shakes herself to clear her spine of shivers. Gretchen really is just as bad as Rose with all this crazy diva stuff, acting like this is some big dangerous threshold that Bette should hesitate at. She already knows that vampires exist, and Gretchen’s reaction makes it pretty clear that she does too. Bette’s got more than a hunch that Gretchen might even be one herself. It’s not like there’s much innocence on the subject left to get crushed if she asks questions.

  “So you’re a vampire?” Bette asks. Gretchen doesn’t look at her. Bette’s arm is beginning to sting.

  “Yes.”

  Bette breathes in. “Sorry to disappoint, but that doesn’t really compare with finding out that Santa’s not real.”

  Now Gretchen does turn, and her expression is rueful and fond and frustrated and sad. “What a young darling you are, Bette. You have no idea how young.”

  Bette scowls. “I’m not a kid.”

  Gretchen hefts the needle gun in her hand once again, and wipes away the newest blood welling on Bette’s little blue swallow. “You don’t even understand yet what it means to have a vampire as your friend.”

  “Tell me, then.”

  Gretchen tilts her head and looks at Bette silently for a long, long second. “There’s only ever one reason for a vampire to notice a human, or spend time in their company.”

  Bette swallows nervously, and feels her heart rate kick up to a faster beat. Her voice is quiet and breathless when she speaks. “Because you want to bite them?”

  Gretchen’s smile is sad and old and strangely gentle. “No. We bite so many that we hardly notice them. They’re shadows flickering on fireside walls. But you are so sweet to think that.”

  Bette swallows again and feels a little bit like she did the day she realized that dragons only existed in stories. It’s awful to think that Gretchen doesn’t think of people as people, doesn’t notice them. It’s sad and horrible and okay, maybe Gretchen kind of had a point with her warnings about what this would feel like to know. Bette forces herself to speak normally. She’s not going to get dragged into this melodramatic crap.

  “Okay,” she says. “What, then? What’s the reason for a vampire to notice a human?”

  Gretchen smoothes a lock of hair off Bette’s forehead with soft, soft fingertips, the whorls of her fingerprints ghosting coolly against Bette’s skin before Gretchen drops her hand down to hold Bette’s wrist in place.

  “We notice those we long to turn,” she explains, and then the whir of the tattoo needle cuts, abrasive, through the quiet, and Gretchen goes back to working on Bette’s design.

  “Is this difficult for you? Being next to somebody who’s bleeding, I mean,” Bette asks, to fill the noisy silence.

  Gretchen makes an ‘mm-hmm’ noise. “A little. We get used to it as we get older. Accustomed. At first it’s harder to resist… like teenagers with sex, I suppose.” She gives Bette a teasing smile. “It’s such a new sensation, and it overwhelms. But I haven’t been a teenager for a very long time. To be quite honest, the smell of your blood is very pleasant for me. Much like the smell of coffee or pizza might be for you when you are only a little hungry and can wait.”

  “Does music sound different?”

  “No. Music is the one thing which remains the same.”

  They’re quiet after that, until the tattoo is finished. It looks absolutely beautiful, and Bette is awed by the idea that this is a part of her now, something Rose designed for her will be on her skin forever. She can’t stop smiling.

  The night is cool and quiet around them as they leave the tattoo studio. Gretchen seems distracted, caught in her own thoughts. Bette lights a cigarette and they linger together, neither suggesting that they should go anywhere but where they are.

  “I’ve seen… it doesn’t feel like so much, not really. It all fits inside my head,” Gretchen says after a long time of quiet, tilting her head back to look up at the stars. “I suppose it is a lot. I don’t feel the wiser for it, most of the time. Just tired. I remember when these stars looked different, you know. I used to be so scared of them. That sounds silly, but I was. I was so scared of the stars, because they were such a long, long way away, and so terribly huge. It was impossible not to feel hopeless and small beside that kind of scale.

  “But now I find them a comfort. They take so long to move that I can reconcile myself to the passage of time. People…” she sighs, and closes her eyes, her head still tipped back. The shadows beneath her lower eyelids are very deep and dark. Those bruise-like purple smears come from a lack of oxygen in the blood. Bette remembers that from science class. She wonders if such marks happen to vampires when they need new blood in them, or if exhaustion governs that thin skin for them just as it does for people.

  “People are so fast,” Gretchen says quietly, her voice terribly sad. “They’re too fast. I can’t keep up. I can’t run the treadmill of days and nights and months and years. I fall behind. The stars, I can almost keep up with. And sometimes… sometimes the idea of being tiny and unimportant and meaningless is.” She pauses and straightens her posture, glancing at Bette for a moment and then shaking her head. “I was going to say a comfort, but it’s not. It’s never a comfort. But it’s an absolution. Everything I feel, no matter how overwhelming… it’s just tiny. Conquerable, compared to the stars.”

  They walk a little, along the cobblestones of the gutter to the corner of the s
treet, where the lights are a little brighter and there is intermittent traffic. Bette’s glad of that—Gretchen’s slow words and the quiet darkness of the road were beginning to send shivers up Bette’s spine.

  “I’ve been married five times,” Gretchen says, her tone more conversational now, as they pass the late-night shops with fluorescent windows and the dark glass of those already shut up for the night. “Not all of those had ceremonies, of course. I didn’t have a wedding with Artie. But there have been five, five people that I’ve spent time with. Until death do us part. The vows would mean less from me than from most other brides, I think.” She smiles, her eye teeth dimpling the plump of her lower lip. “There have been others as well, of course. So many others… but those five are the five that hurt the most. I carry those five holes inside me. Artie is the newest and the rawest, but the others ache as well. I…”

  Gretchen stops walking mid-stride, outside a closed store with woodblock prints and cards and calendars on display in the window, and takes Bette’s face between her hands. Her palms are trembling.

  “Are you another Virginia Poe, Bette?”

  Bette makes a puzzled noise. “I don’t kn —”

  “Edgar Allan Poe’s wife,” Gretchen elaborates. “He was a hopeless romantic, more hopeless than most. He always fell in love with the dying, with doomed and beautiful girls, thin and pale and already sick with what would kill them. She was playing the piano and he thought she’d burst a blood vessel in her throat because the blood just came and came, past her lips and down her chin, but it was tuberculosis. She took such a long time to die.

  “She was only one of the pattern, the one we know the most about. There were other girls, right back into his childhood, other women who were just the same. It was like he had some compulsion to repeat the pattern, to fall in love with the dying as if eventually he’d find the secret to saving them. He never just fell in love with a healthy girl, one who’d stay at his side for the whole of his life.