The Wolf House: The Complete Series

by Mary Borsellino

  “Don’t,” Lily said, grabbing Will’s forearm, and Will realized suddenly that somehow they were both standing up, and that he had been trying to step towards the man when Lily stopped him.

  The man tilted his head to one side ever so slightly, as if they had surprised him.

  “Don’t,” Lily said again, but her tone was less certain this time, and her hand fell slack from Will’s arm.

  The sound of screaming wrenched their attention away, and whatever odd spell had been at work on them was gone. They hurried back into the dance without a glance behind them, and got caught up in the chaos caused by a girl stumbling in and collapsing to the ground in a faint. She died in the hospital just before morning, and Lily and Will did their best, over the years following, not to think about how close they’d come to ending their careers as vampire hunters before they’d even begun.

  LILY

  Vampires don’t catch fire after a few seconds outdoors, like movies and TV make out. Not that Lily knew that when she stuck her hand out the window, of course, but she knows it now.

  It was like putting her arm into an oven, the superheated kind used for melting metal. Her skin began to sting and turn red immediately, but she didn’t pull her elbow back for long, long seconds, gritting her teeth against the pain and watching as her flesh started to bubble up into blisters and to peel in curls of skin.

  She buried her face in the cushion of the sofa and screamed and screamed and screamed. It was good to feel something. To be able to know exactly why she hurt so much, for a change.

  By nightfall the burns were mostly healed. Lily never freckled much, and the skin underneath the burns showed no mark at all.

  Lily’s tattoos don’t look right on her new skin. And it will always be new skin, even if she ends up living inside it for hundreds of years. The unfamiliar white and cool of it will never feel like hers. Her tattoos belong on the gold-brown of her human shape, on the shade that mixed her multiracial genetic history with summers spent at skate parks and on the soccer field.

  On one arm, her left, she has a half-sleeve from shoulder to elbow of the Addams Family, in the style of the original Charles Addams cartoons, ghoulish gleeful children and strange adults. The black ink lines are more vivid now, their canvas paler.

  The red heptagram on her other shoulder, a seven-pointed star inside a circle, looks as stark as a brand on Lily’s newly-different body. The heptagram is a symbol of protection, a jailhouse door between her psyche and the world outside and all its monsters. She traces the edges of the design, the tiny scars where the needle pushed the ink too deep, with the edge of her thumbnail. Even now, after everything that’s happened, having that tattoo there comforts Lily. Makes her feel a little safer.

  On her wrist is her favorite, little black letters. “All you need is love”. She wishes it were true.

  She’s been thinking a lot about tattoos lately. She doesn’t know if she can still get them. Probably not. All her experiments with knives have shown that all cuts and injuries heal completely, without even the smallest of marks left behind. Lily hasn’t told Will about these experiments. He’d be angry at her for hurting herself, and offer a more controlled environment for future tests. Lily doesn’t want that. Her relationship with her own flesh has never been controlled before, and she’ll be damned if that’s going to change now.

  Lily doesn’t believe in damnation. Not really.

  She believes in a God that loves, and if God still loves her after some of the stupid shit she’s pulled over the years then, well, being a vampire is comparatively small potatoes. Lily’s sure that all this would be much harder if she was an atheist like Will. He believes in a cold, rational, inherently meaningless universe, and Lily doesn’t think she’d be able to cope for a second if she had to face all this with no promise of a grander plan behind the scenes. It would be like drowning, swimming up and up for air, carrying the knowledge that there was no surface above, no point in it except for the futile refusal to give up.

  Thinking about atheism makes Lily feel a little ill. She doesn’t know how Will can face the day. Sometimes she thinks that maybe she doesn’t really believe in God at all, and that she’s just too scared to let herself think about what it might mean if she was honest with herself.

  ~

  The four things that make her afterlife vaguely tolerable are: killing vampires, playing music, killing vampires, and Will Cooper.

  The four things that make her afterlife completely miserable are: vampires she hasn’t killed yet, her goddamn nightmares, her goddamn tea smoothies, and Will Cooper.

  That’s not really fair, and Lily knows it, but she figures that being made an example of in the fight against the legions of the undead is adequate grounds for some irrationality. Plus, “Please don’t let me rise from the dead and thirst endlessly for blood,” doesn’t typically translate to “I don’t mind becoming the thing I hate the most, honestly I don’t, and it will be absolutely perfect if you make me drink endless cups of disgusting crap in the search for vampire methadone.”

  So it’s not really fair that Will’s on the shit list, but maybe it’s a little fair.

  The worst part is that Lily can’t even be truly angry at Will, because Will’s got a fairly robust guilt complex doing the work already. Any shitty thing Lily does, Will just works around, even if it’s ripping up one of Will’s meticulous observation journals, or fucking with their computer setup. Nothing gets Will angry anymore. Not at Lily. It’s like that’s the thing Will let die on the floor that night, in exchange for the choice he made.

  Every night, Will tries a different recipe for the smoothie, the blood replacement. Lily drinks it; fights down the nausea that wants to bring it straight back up; waits until it settles enough so she can open her eyes. Will takes the empty glass, or mug, or bowl, or whatever container they’ve still got left that Lily hasn’t hurled against a wall. And then, they wait, and plan hunting strategies, and sometimes they call up Anna and Russ and the four of them jam for a while before heading out to kill as many of the bastards they can.

  Anna and Lily try not the end up left alone in a room together if they can help it. The silences between them are awkward, guilty things. Anna and Russ don’t sleep at the warehouse anymore. Lily doesn’t know where they go. They haven’t moved out; all their stuff is still there. It’s just them that isn’t.

  At the end of the night, as the sun starts coming up and Lily starts getting drowsy, Lily and Will sit against the wall with their legs stretched out and argue about music, and TV, and movies from the eighties, just bitching at each other in the same careless way they used to when stuff made sense. Lily drifts off to the sound of Will explaining some totally crucial insight into something totally irrelevant, and so it’s all kind of okay. For the moment.

  WILL

  Day 9: She has expressed a desire to mix the cocktails for herself whenever possible. A minimum of five cocktails throughout the night seems required to keep her from a psychotic break. Perhaps, if we find sufficiently controlled circumstances in which to undertake the experiment, we might be able to compare this to the minimum amount of blood needed each night. With Lily in her current state, however

  Will pauses in his writing and crosses out Lily’s name, hard. He can’t call her by her name. He can’t think about the reality of the words he’s writing.

  With the subject in her current state, however, such an experiment is out of the question.

  He looks up from his notebook, which is resting on his knees as he sits cross-legged beside his drum kit. Being near the instruments makes Will feel a little calmer, as if they’re his own personal adult version of a kid’s security blanket.

  Lily is in the kitchen, chopping garlic at such a rapid rate that her hands and the knife blade are almost a blur. If it’s chopped and added to the mixture quickly enough, the bitter edge to the taste doesn’t get a chance to set in. After a lifetime of being able to burn water and ruin toast, Lily’s now learning all kinds of little tric
ks known mostly to chefs. The irony would be funny, if it didn’t break Will’s heart.

  She tips the chopping board, adding the garlic into the blender mixture already made up of stewed black tea, lemon rind, tomato juice, spinach, kale, holy water, blueberries and pomegranate arils. It sounds repulsive enough to Will’s human taste; he can’t imagine how gross it is for Lily to gulp down. She complains sometimes, but not much. Will suspects it’s hard for her to separate one small misery out of the general tangle of her nights.

  Will’s phone rings with the dumb tinkly tone that Lily’d set as his default weeks ago. He hadn’t been bothered to change it, and to do it now seems like an admission that things have shifted irrevocably since those recent distant days.

  “Hey, it’s Russ.”

  “What’s up?”

  “We’ve been offered a spot tomorrow night. Second billing. Okay money,” Russ says, hesitation obvious in his words. “Should we take it?”

  “Hang on.” Will moves the phone away from his ear and turns to where Lily is putting away the ingredients from her smoothie. Her face has the revolted greenish cast it always gets after she’s had a dose of the mixture. “Lil. Do you want to play a gig tomorrow night?”

  Her face lights up, flickering for a moment to an expression so animated and happy that she looks like the old Lily, the living Lily. The illusion only lasts a second before reality steals her smile, but it’s enough to make Will’s heart twist all over again.

  “Yeah, I think so,” she says cautiously. “Let’s give it a shot.”

  ~

  Lily goes through more explosive fits of self-pity and frustration and brooding quiet before the show, but that’s not so different from how she used to get before going onstage before. It’s comforting for Will to roll his eyes at Anna and Russ as Lily storms around being obnoxious to everyone while the other support acts get through their sets.

  And then they’re on the stage and the lights come up, and just like every other time it feels to Will like he’s finally come home, back to the only place he’s ever been where everything made sense.

  It’s just like it ever was, with Lily smirking and flirting and prowling the stage, her new fluid grace not so different from the lithe rockstar poses she’s always had. If her voice is richer and stronger now, her smiles a little more savage, then the crowd don’t notice. Even Anna and Russ seem happy for a change, something Will is happy to see—he doesn’t want to hate them for not being able to handle what’s happened. It’s good to remember why he loves them. They’re part of his band. He could never do otherwise than love them.

  Just like she always has, Lily seems to feed off the energy of the crowd, their enthusiasm urging her to greater heights of reckless abandon. She leaps off the edge of the stage and onto their waiting grasp, carried on the hands of the crowd with her arms outstretched, as if she’s daring them to tear her apart. By the time she makes it back onto the stage her clothing’s torn and askew, her hair a mess. Her eyes are alight with life and she gives Will a feral, joyful grin. He has rarely loved her more than he does in that moment, and she has rarely seemed more alive.

  After the show, they load their equipment into the van and Anna and Russ drive it away, promising to bring the instruments back to the warehouse next time they stop by. It’s a vaguely awkward end to the night, the broken pieces of their life reasserting all the jagged edges that the music and the crowd had smoothed away. Will feels a little lost.

  Before he can suggest that it’s time to head back to the warehouse—it’s been hours since she had a smoothie—he sees a boy, some local teenage kid Will doesn’t know, approach Lily. Before he can decide what to do, they slip off into the dark together, talking softly. And then they’re gone.

  It’s the first time Lily’s been out of Will’s line of sight in public since she died. He’s so tired. It feels more like defeat than exhaustion. He goes home alone, and tries not to think.

  LILY

  Will is waiting on the sofa when Lily gets back to the warehouse, his ankles crossed on the edge of their ever-wobbly coffee table, the soles of his bare feet dark from the dirt on the uncarpeted areas of the vast space. The television’s on, quietly, flickering and whispers, but the lights are all off.

  “You’re cutting it close. It’s nearly dawn,” Will says, a note of tension thrumming underneath the mild words. Lily clenches her jaw and tries to keep her own voice even.

  “I hope you have kids someday. They’ll chainsaw you in self-defence as soon as they hit their teens. Why the fuck are you waiting up for me?”

  Will turns the television off and sits, face turned toward her, expression closed-off and difficult to read. Lily doubts he can still see her with so little light in the room, but she can still see him, can still see every detail of his face. There are sleepless shadows under his eyes, and a small pinker dent in the pink of his lower lip where he’s been biting at it distractedly. He looks so worried about her. It makes her feel so helpless and sad that getting angrier seems like the only way to endure it.

  “You’re not my keeper,” she snaps. “What’s it to you if I’m out all night? I didn’t want to just come back here and sit around watching old movies on our shitty TV set until the sun came up. Is that a crime all of a sudden?”

  “I saw you with that kid.”

  “So what?” Lily stamps her foot, but that feels childish and ineffectual so she kicks the coffee table instead, cracking the unstable leg closest to her with the toe of her boot. The table crashes sideways and Will lifts his feet out of the way, sitting up straighter.

  “Are you scared I bit him? Do you think I killed him, is that it?” Lily asks, shouting now. “Have you been sitting here imagining all the ways I might have done it?”

  “Lil, I’m just worried -”

  “Do you wish it had been you?” Lily stalks closer to the sofa, kicking the ruined coffee table out of her way and sitting herself down on Will’s knees, one leg on either side of his, her face in close. She can feel his breath against her mouth and she wonders if vampires can smoke like this, shotgunning out of the mouth of somebody still human, letting their exhale stand in place of the inhales that vampires can’t do properly anymore. She can speak and sing, but not smoke.

  “Lily.” Will’s tone is warning, and he puts one hand on her shoulder to push her back, but Lily growls and shoves his own shoulders back against the thin cushion of the sofa.

  “Will,” she echoes, mocking the concerned inflection of his voice. “What? Isn’t this what you’ve been wondering about? Isn’t it what you want?” She leans in close to his neck and opens her mouth, just enough that the points of her fangs graze lightly over his carotid artery, leaving the skin unbroken. Will’s pulse is racing and his breath is fast, hand still shoving ineffectually at her shoulder.

  “Don’t,” he says, but the plea sounds futile, despairing and hopeless, and his head falls back a little, pulling the skin of his throat tighter over the rushing blood so close underneath it.

  Lily stays frozen, poised, for a heartbeat’s worth of time, and then she climbs off Will’s lap and walks away toward her bedroom.

  “It’s nearly sunrise,” she says in a voice as bitter as almonds. “I’d better go lock myself back in my closet.”

  She can still hear Will out in the main area, even after she’s shut inside her safe little cupboard. She can hear that he doesn’t get up from the sofa for a long time.

  WILL

  Despite going to bed well after sunrise, Will wakes before nightfall. The days are getting shorter fast. He’s forgotten what comfortable rest felt like.

  He sits on the front step outside the warehouse door, listening to the sparse afternoon traffic in the neighbourhood around him. He keys his sister’s number into the pad of his phone, hesitating briefly before connecting the call.

  “Will?”

  “Hey, Jen. Is this a bad time?”

  “No, no! I was just surprised, ’cause you never call. How’s life?”


  “It’s okay. What’s the world like in the mile-high city?”

  “Pretty good. I’m hanging out in a line this afternoon—going to a show tonight and everyone’s lined up early. I honestly did not think that there were this many black t-shirts in the state. It’s slightly epic.”

  “Can something be ‘slightly epic’? That seems like a contradiction.” Will’s smiling already. Talking to Jen has always made his heart feel lighter, ever since he was a little kid. Somehow he always forgets how much better he feels after interacting with her. The brain’s often merciful inability to retain the strongest of emotions for very long isn’t always a blessing.

  “I’ll take a photo and send it, once we’re done talking. You’ll see. Slightly epic is the perfect description, and I’m offended that you doubt me. Oh! I pestered Shelly into letting me drop out of school for a year. She doesn’t like it at all, naturally, but I’m old enough now that I can do it without her permission if I want, so I guess this way she figures she’ll at least be able to suggest some rules. I wanna go to India, or maybe New York. I haven’t decided yet. Somewhere I can be useful. You should come visit me and help me decide. Your band hasn’t played a show in Denver in about a hundred thousand years, I swear. You should come. I miss my big brother.”

  “I wish I could, Jen,” Will says truthfully. “I miss you, too. But the band’s been pretty messed up lately. Lily and Anna haven’t been getting along very well, and Lil’s… not doing all that well in general. There’s no way we’re in any shape to tour. We played a show last night and hanging around afterwards was the most painfully forced politeness I’ve had to go through in a long time. And I don’t wanna come on my own and leave Lily like this, either.”