“So bring her too. Lily’s cool. Remember when I used to wish all the time that you guys would fall in love or need a tax break or something and get married, so that she could be my sister-in-law? Come visit me and bring her. Sounds like she could use a vacation too.”
“Hmm. Maybe.” Will doesn’t think Lily will seriously entertain the notion even for a second, but it’s distantly possible.
“I gotta go; I think the legions of the black-clad are actually being let into the auditorium. But call me again, got it? I want you to actually make an effort to keep in touch for a change.”
“Cross my heart,” Will promises. “Love you, Jen.”
“Love you too. Bye.”
“Bye.”
Will ends the call, dries his eyes on the cuff of his shirt, and heads back inside. Lily’s awake, standing at her workbench with the smoothie ingredients scattered out in front of her. She’s trying to slice the garlic but her hands shake too much, their white-wax texture sheened with clammy sweat. Will takes the knife from her gently and finishes the task, adding the other elements to the mix while Lily watches.
“If you weren’t here, I wouldn’t have this option at all,” she says. He can’t tell if she’s thanking or accusing him.
“Maybe things will get easier over time,” Will replies.
“Do you trust me?” Lily doesn’t look at him as she asks. Her face is very pale and drawn, her eyes bruised with deep shadows. It seems very unlikely that she’d look like that if she’d bitten the boy last night. Will feels his heart lighten with relief.
“Yes,” he tells her. “I trust you.”
“I want to go out on my own tonight. Hunting. Vampire-hunting, not people-hunting, I promise. I want to see what kind of fighter I am alone. You can hang with Anna and Russ. It’s gonna be easier with them if I’m not here. No, don’t -” Lily cuts him off before he can do more than open his mouth to speak “It’s okay. That’s just how things are now. So I’m gonna go out alone, do some hunting, maybe go dancing or something after.”
He wants to say no. He wants to be an asshole and demand she stay close, no matter how crazy that may drive them both. But Lily has been his best friend for far longer than she has been his case study. Despite everything, Will wants to do whatever makes her happy, even if that’s something vaguely dangerous and stupid—this is hardly the first time Lily’s choices have had those characteristics, after all.
Will hands her the completed cocktail. “Okay.”
Lily smiles shakily at him, gratitude in her eyes. “Okay,” she echoes, and brings the cup to her lips.
LILY
“Did she bite you?”
“What? No, of course not. She’s -”
“There’s blood on her mouth. If she bit you -”
“Rosie, she didn’t bite me.” Tommy’s words are clipped with annoyance. It’s so funny to hear him genuinely pissed, rather than habitually disdainful, that Lily slurs a laugh against his shoulder. Funny, cranky, warm Tommy. So warm.
“She’s practically nuzzling you.” Rose sounds utterly disgusted. “What the hell do you think you’re doing to my brother? Hey, Lily, look at me.” She claps her hands loudly in Lily’s face. Lily raises her head for long enough to scowl, then drops her face back down against Tommy’s shoulder.
“I didn’t bite him,” Lily tells Rose. “Nope.”
“She’s drunk. You brought a drunk vampire to our house.”
“I need to put her in the basement. It’s almost dawn. My room gets too much light.”
“Like hell you do.”
Lily’s out cold—haha, out cold… she’s always cold, so fucking cold—before she hears Tommy’s reply.
~
The band Lily remembers most of the stupid collection of stupid bands she’s amassed over her short life is Lungbutter, the crappy-ass hardcore one she’d had when she was eighteen. The screams and roars and wails she’d unleashed at the microphone had been more than a catharsis. They’d been something like how old punk guitarist dudes used to smash their instruments against the stage, destroying their beautiful objects, their outlets. She’d screamed her lungs out, smashed her voice on the stage until it lay in splinters. Destroyed herself as utterly as she could with nothing but her throat and heart. And then she’d lie there, spent, and stare up at the rafters above the stage. Drained dry of everything inside her.
Other girls her age cut themselves. Anna did, on occasion, and Lily knew others who did it more often. But Lily never needed to, because she had those nights in basements and tiny clubs, mic in her hand and ruin on her mind.
Will was Lungbutter’s guitarist, and Lily remembers that, too. Remembers how the intensity he brought to his drumming had been so confronting when it was unbound from the back of the stage, moving and making sound just there off to the left of her at the front. It had made her want him, more than she’d ever wanted a boy, and wasn’t that just so typical and lame, that she’d get all lust-addled at the idea of a guitarist. Talk about groupie clichés.
But it was still true. Will with a guitar had made Lily’s insides flip and twist, had made her screams more confused and furious and uncertain as she wailed them into the fist she clenched around the microphone. His confidence made her wish she knew herself as well as he seemed to know music. Offstage, he was as calm and wry as ever, but under the lights he became somebody new.
When Lungbutter broke up, and they started a jangly pop thing they called Pipi, Will asked if he could be drummer again, back where he felt more comfortable. Lily didn’t protest. Sometimes she misses how it was.
~
Lily wakes up hating herself, same as always, so it takes her a few seconds to care that she’s waking up somewhere different. It takes her even longer to bother to open her eyes.
Rose is bent over a large-paged sketchbook, a short piece of charcoal in one thin hand. She’s lost weight, a lot of weight, since the last time Lily saw her, even though it wasn’t all that long ago. Rose has lost the puppy-fat roundness of adolescence that made her offbeat prettiness so striking - the smooth swells of her waxen cheeks, the soft pout of her pink mouth. That’s gone, her features pared down to something sparer, older, sadder. She’s still pretty, but her youthfulness has been burned away. At sixteen, Rose’s face has become timeless, young and grown-up at once. She’s wearing dark makeup, emphasising the harder cast of her features - lipstick the color of wet black plums, eye shadow like deep bruises.
The strangest change of all is Rose’s hair. The first time Lily saw her, Rose’s hair was long, heavy, uncombed waves around her face and neck. She’d dyed it blonde soon after, but even that switch wasn’t so dramatic as the one Lily’s looking at now. Rose’s hair is gone, nothing left but a dark fuzz across her scalp. It’s so stark and unexpected that Lily can’t help but gasp. Rose looks up from her drawing with a scowl. “You’re awake.”
Lily sits up. She’s lying on a blanket in the darkest corner of a generally dark basement. “What time is it?”
“Around noon.” Rose looks back down at her sketchbook. “You can stay here until it’s dark outside. Then get out.”
“I didn’t bite Tommy,” Lily says. “I swear.”
“I know.” Rose doesn’t look up. “He told me that when we brought you down here. I trust him.” The venom in the final word makes it clear that Lily, on the other hand, is not someone Rose trusts in the slightest.
“Well, I didn’t,” Lily grumbles.
Rose sighs quietly, closing her sketchbook and giving Lily a flat, angry look. “Vampires are liars. Your word is nothing to me.”
Lily feels her own face settle into a matching glare. “The way I remember it, you used to trust vampires too much.”
After a crackling moment, Rose is the one to break eye contact, looking down at her charcoal-stained hands where they rest on her lap. “Things change.”
Lily touches the tip of one fang with her tongue and barks a humourless laugh. “You got that right.”
They lapse
into an unhappy silence. Lily, being Lily, has to break it. That’s all silences are good for.
“You’re bald.”
Rose’s eyes flick back up to her, surprise at the words shocking a small smile out of the girl despite her obvious intention to hate Lily without hesitation.
“And you’re a vampire,” Rose responds. “When Tom brought you back with him, and I saw the blood on your mouth…” She shakes her head. “For whatever it’s worth, I’m sorry.”
Lily has to blink back a sudden sting in her eyes. “Thanks,” she manages to say around the tightness in her throat.
“Do the others know? Will and Anna and Russ?”
“That you’re bald? Not that I know of,” Lily says with a smirk, unable to stop herself.
Rose rolls her eyes and Lily can see a ghost of the old Rose in the expression, the prickly schoolgirl who’d needed saving in the late summer rain near the overpass. Just a ghost, though. A lingering phantom. That’s all that’s left of who either of them used to be.
“Yes,” Lily answers, more seriously. “They know. They’re probably worried about where I am. I should call them.”
Rose’s gasp is harsh in the still air of the basement, as if she’s more astonished by this than anything else Lily could say or do.
“They… you still talk to them?”
“Yeah. Well, more ‘argue with them’ than ‘talk to them’, but the fundamentals are the same.”
“But…” Rose looks genuinely shocked, utterly confused. “You’re… you…”
“It was my blood. On my mouth.” Lily licks at her now-clean lips. “Sometimes when it gets… when it gets really bad, I bite the ball of my thumb, or my arm. I’ve never bitten anybody else, ever. The thought of drinking blood…” Lily pauses. The thought of drinking blood is an ever-present part of her conscious mind, insidious and wheedling and so powerful she can barely hold it at bay. “It grosses me out, to tell the truth. Pretty funny, huh?”
Rose looks sceptical, like she can see the complicated reality behind Lily’s over-simplified explanation. Then she shrugs, and looks back down at her sketchbook. “Okay.”
“What’re you drawing?”
“A picture.”
Lily rolls her eyes. “Yeah, I got that. A picture of what?”
Rose holds the paper up for Lily to see. The sketch is of an androgynous, soft-faced figure, adolescent and slight in a suit of gleaming battle armour. The breastplate is polished bright and there are flames reflected in it, the tongues of fire licking up to curl around the base of the young knight’s throat.
“Joan of Arc,” Rose explains. “I draw her a lot. The image speaks to me as an artist, I guess.” She smirks at her own words, but Lily can hear the pain in them.
“What’s that?” Lily asks, gesturing to a glow in the corner of the otherwise-darkened background. Haloed in light, like old images of saints, is an anatomical drawing of a heart, bleeding down from its torn arteries and into the black.
“The accounts of her death…” Rose explains. “They… she was burned at the stake, and she didn’t go quietly like a martyr ought to go, all solemn and pristine, she screamed and begged and wept like anybody with nerve endings and consciousness would. The accounts all say that her heart wouldn’t burn. ‘Destroy the mind, destroy the body, but you cannot destroy the heart’. That’s lyrics from a Smashing Pumpkins song. They’re Tommy’s favourite band. Me and Bette saved up and bought him that album on vinyl, because he’s a lame hipster snob who’s into stuff like that.
“I thought the stuff about Joan’s heart not burning was just, you know, Catholic bullshit, a propaganda thing put out by people who didn’t think that murdering a teenage girl in a horrible way was a compelling enough story without embellishment.” Rose shakes her head. “But it’s not, because I looked it up and she’s not the only one. You know that Buddhist monk who set himself on fire to protest Vietnam? His heart didn’t burn either. Both the bodies were cremated again later, and both hearts remained intact through all of it. So now I’m not sure what I believe.” She turns the page back to herself, sketching again.
“Shelley’s heart was the same,” Lily offers. “Percy Shelley, the poet? He was cremated but his heart didn’t burn, so it was sent to his wife. She wrapped it in some of his writing and kept it in a box.”
“That’s Mary Shelley, right? The wife. She wrote Frankenstein?” Rose asks. Lily nods. “Bette was way into her stuff. She wanted Frankenstein tattoos all over, stitches like she was made of pieces, you know? I drew a bird for her like that, a patchwork bird. I got so self-important about that—about the idea that something I drew was gonna be a part of somebody’s skin forever.” Rose smiles a little, ruefully. “But nothing’s forever, is it?”
Lily looks down at her own tattoos, the black lines stark against her pale unchanging skin. It’s almost as black as the dark of the cupboard she spends her sleepless hours in. “Nothing is the only thing that’s forever, yeah,” she agrees.
Rose swipes at her eyes with her fingertips, the lashes in spider-legged dark clumps from the tears she stopped from falling.
“Did you and Bette have a fight?” asks Lily. She remembers how fraught and dramatic teenage friendships can be, how life-or-death.
Rose’s eyes go wide and her whole body stills completely. “You don’t know,” she says, voice flat, and from her tone Lily does, abruptly. Everything falls into terrible place: Rose’s animosity, her blistering anger at Tommy for bringing Lily back here, her sadness and spareness and new, hard-won maturity.
“Bette’s dead,” Lily says, the words sounding hollow to her own ears.
Rose flinches, eyes blinking closed and letting two tears free down her cheeks. Then she shakes her head. “No. Vampire. Bette’s a vampire.”
If Lily had to breathe, the breath would be knocked out of her. As it is, she forgets to inhale for long, long seconds. Her stomach feels cold. Bette was one of those kids who always seemed doubly alive somehow, burning with bright, still-forming strength, and curiosity, and energy. To think of her becoming a creature like Lily is horrifying almost beyond words, and Lily is a lyricist, she should have words for anything.
“She kills people,” Rose goes on, matter-of-fact and emotionless, standing and turning away from Lily, going over to sort the art supplies on the desk. “She drinks their blood. She’s livi… staying with Timothy and his friends. Timothy’s the one you tried to shoot. I wish you’d shot him. I wish you’d shot them all. Her mom thinks she’s at some special science program. They faked the papers and everything. She has heaps of money now. She tried to buy Tommy a new stereo but he wouldn’t take it. I don’t see her. Ever. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I…” Rose sits down on the floor suddenly, clutching at her legs, shuddering with sobs she isn’t letting out. Lily doesn’t know if Rose wants her to hug her or not.
“No wonder you didn’t want Tommy hanging out with me,” Lily offers finally, not knowing what else to say. “I wouldn’t either. I mean, not that I know from personal experience,” she goes on, knowing she’s babbling a little but unwilling to let Rose’s shuddering breaths be the only sound in the basement. “Because I don’t have any younger brothers or sisters, but Will’s got a little sister and if it were her, he’d go on the warpath just like you, I’m sure.”
“We’re twins. He isn’t littler,” Rose reminds her.
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah,” Rose says.
“I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah.” Rose hugs at her own legs, voice young and small and terribly alone. “Me, too.”
WILL
She doesn’t come home. Not that night, not the next. Will feels like his head’s gone blank. He doesn’t even feel sad or worried. He can’t feel anything.
None of them can sleep. Anna and Russ stay at the warehouse with him, sparring more and more violently as the morning stretches on. Will thinks about telling them to chill, but he doesn’t. He just goes back to his journals, back to the formul
as. They’ll find a cocktail combination that works even better than their current formula, and when Lily gets back things will be okay.
In the early evening Will walks back from collecting the mail from their box at the post office. Hands grab him and shove him against a wall. He has time to think ‘so, this is it. I’m sorry, Lily’ before he realizes that it’s Lily holding him.
“They tried to make me drink,” Lily snarls at Will, her pretty face contorted into something savage and furious. “They tried to make me kill a girl.” With a final shove, she lets Will go, stepping back. Will steps toward her.
“Who? What did they look like?”
“One of them was the one I tried to shoot,” Lily answers, the muscle in her jaw tensing visibly. “They must have been the ones who killed me, too. They grabbed me on the way home from Tommy’s. Bette’s a vampire now. Rose told me.”
“You got away?” Will manages to say after a moment, which is a completely pointless question because well, obviously.
“Is this worth it?” Lily rages, pacing around Will, ignoring the question. Her movements are smooth and efficient. She’s a natural hunter now, as much as any predator in the wild. “Playing with your goddamn cocktails, drinking Anna’s holy water… you can’t save me. We all know it.”
She’s behind Will now, and Will knows he should turn and keep Lily in his line of sight but he hates that, it’s not fair. He doesn’t want to stop trusting Lily. That’ll be the end of something Will still isn’t ready to let die.
He’s not sorry for the choice he made, there on the warehouse floor. He’ll never be sorry.
“They want me to be a monster. You wanna save my soul. Who do you really think’s gonna win?” Lily murmurs in Will’s ear, leaning close. Will could still twist away. He’s been in more precarious situations on hunts before.
“It’s not about s—” Will starts, and then Lily’s fangs drive deep into his neck.
LILY
They don’t talk about it. Ever. Lily figures there’s probably an entry about it in one of Will’s journals, but they never say a word out loud.
The Wolf House: The Complete Series Page 21