The Wolf House: The Complete Series

by Mary Borsellino

  Will wears high collars for a week, and then seems to scratch at an old scar pretty regularly, but that’s all that’s different. Lily starts getting nightmares while she’s awake, and gets used to finding herself curled in an arm chair with the heels of her palms pressed to her eyes and her shoulders shaking.

  “There’s something broken in my head,” she says sometimes, when she notices that Will’s there. Sometimes she doesn’t say anything, and Will just lets her be.

  They’ve found a mix of the cocktail that seems to work, and there’s an optimism back in Will’s voice when he talks about the future. He still seems convinced that everything’s, somehow, going to turn out okay.

  Lily dreams about the taste of Will’s blood.

  One evening she’s working out a little on the practice mats they’ve got scattered in one corner of the warehouse, knife throwing mostly because she’s pretty jazzed about how good her aim is now. She can hit a target dead-on with her eyes shut, provided she’s had a second to see where it is.

  After that gets boring, she decides to try jumping. She’s always had a pretty good spring for someone so short, and now she’s practically Supergirl with what she can leap in a single bound. Well, three or four bounds anyway, which is still fairly impressive. It takes her that many attempts to get a handhold on the exposed rafters of the warehouse’s high ceiling. She hooks her knees over the beam and braces her palms against the wall nearby, her body hidden from view from anyone below. She giggles to herself, unable to stop feeling at least a little delighted. She’s a stealthy bat, hiding up in a belfry. Cool.

  Before she can get bored of the new trick—Lily would be the first to admit that she has the attention span of a kid on red Kool-Aid—Anna and Russ arrive. Lily frowns. Will’s still asleep, and so she hasn’t had to grouch her way through any uncomfortable silences or tense conversations yet tonight.

  She’d managed to make herself a somewhat sloppy but otherwise serviceable cup of her smoothie, and was feeling pretty okay about stuff for a change. Now Anna and Russ are going to be weird at her, as usual, and remind her all over again that she had to go and die and spoil it all.

  Lily wonders if weird still counts as weird if it’s status quo. Probably not. Stupid vampires took that away from her, too.

  “I just think it’s sort of shitty,” Russ says to Anna, collecting a couple of his favoured weapons from the cabinets just below Lily’s hidden perch. “Creeping off.”

  “It’s not creeping off. I’ve written them letters. They have our cell numbers. We’ll still see them out in the city sometimes, I’m sure. This is just too fucked up for me. I can’t handle it any more, talking to her and working with her like everything’s normal. It’s only a matter of time before she snaps and kills him, or you, or me. I don’t want to stand around and do nothing until then.”

  “We don’t even know if she really did bite him,” Russ argues as they move away from the weapons and through to where they used to sleep. They’re keeping their voices low, obviously thinking both Lily and Will are still asleep. Lily can hear every word and every step and rustle of their clothing. “We haven’t asked. There might be a logical -”

  “Stop. Don’t. Just get your things. I want to be out of here. I…” Anna gulps, breath heaving. “If I have to look her in the eye, I’ll never be able to make myself go. I’m not gonna watch all of us die just because I’m too stupid and weak to kill her.”

  Lily’s anger feels red-hot inside her chest, blood-hot, furious. She wants to tear Anna apart for betraying her. Wants to make Anna scream until Anna admits that she’s wrong. But that would just be proving Anna right, of course.

  Not that it matters. Lily’s lost them either way.

  She clings to the rafter and the corner where the ceiling joins the wall for the endless minutes it takes for Anna and Russ to gather their stuff. As soon as they’re gone she drops to the ground, ignoring the shock the landing sends shooting through her feet and legs. She wonders if cats have to deal with that same jolt when they fall from high places.

  There’s an old dulled knife blade, a ragged leather arm brace, two stray suspender stockings, and three CD cases left on Anna’s bed. Lily picks up the brace, rubbing her thumb against the buckle. The topmost album cover is the first EP that Remember the Stars put out. It’s called I Was a Teenage Alchemist. Lily remembers recording it, sleeping each night on the pullout beside Will in the basement of the friend of Anna’s and Russ’s who was producing the thing for them. Will had been entranced by the production console, running his fingertips over the dials and switches with a look of bliss that had made Lily want to be a success as a band more than ever. She wanted to give Will a place in that world forever if she could.

  Lily picks up the CD and sits down against the wall, curling her knees in close against her chest as she opens the case and pulls free the thin glossy booklet. She’d written little stories for each song, paragraph-long tales she’d dreamed up in the middle of the night when insomnia chewed at the edges of her sanity and all her nightmares came to visit. The stories all had names like The Girl with the Rat on Her Wrist and Rapunzel Houdini. They were weird things that made Lily uncomfortable to think about too much, so it’s been years since she’s read any of them. She opens Anna’s discarded album now, turning the pages carefully to the last of the stories.

  Little Red Hood

  The children in the village all know the story of the girl in her cloak, red felt hood around her face, hair as white and eyes as blue as an arctic wolf’s. Her homespun dress is ragged and her feet are bare, and all across her skin is a lattice of scars, deep tears knit together in broken white lines.

  She haunts the woods where she died, flitting from tree to tree in the evening light. They say a wolf ate her grandmother, tore the old woman apart, and then lay in wait in the old woman’s cottage for the girl.

  She tried to run. All the children in the village agree on that point, though none of them could say why they’re so sure about it. She tried to run.

  A hunter out tracking in the forest heard her screams and killed the wolf, but it was too late. It had ripped open her throat with its hard, cruel teeth and the girl bled to death on the floor with tears in her eyes.

  But there were still wolves in the woods, and children who would need to navigate the branches and paths, and so the girl asked Death if she might stay even though her life was over. And Death allowed it, and took the hunter instead of the girl, and his blood filled up her thirsty veins.

  And now she walks the forest, her grandmother’s woodcutting axe in her hand. Hunting wolves.

  WILL

  With only the two of them left, they need better equipment. Will’s never been the most gifted of mad scientists, but necessity has taught him more than a little about soldering and circuitry. His latest design is a little hand-held grenade which lets off a blinding flash, bright enough to hurt vampire skin pretty seriously.

  He’s only been able to make a prototype so far – which Lily promptly stole and covered in anarchy symbols drawn in sharpie – but, with the right equipment, he thinks he’d be able to make it a major element of their supplies.

  Will calls around—trying not to think about the weighty phone bill lurking in his future, and it seems so crazy and strange that they still have things like phone bills to worry about, after all that’s happened—until he finds a supplier up in Milwaukee who’s got the stuff they need.

  Lily comes with him, sitting curled on the passenger side with her knees to her chest and her ragged sneakers on the seat as Will drives through the sunset streets.

  “It’s like Batman and the Joker.”

  Lily looks away from the darkening sky, giving him a tiny bemused smile. “Elaborate, please? I’m guessing there was a context for that statement when it was inside your head. Though that might be giving you a little too much credit.”

  It’s good to see her smile. She hasn’t since the others left. “At the end of the first movie.” Will punches Lily
in the arm, mostly on principle. “When Gary Oldman’s talking about how the bad guys just keep getting worse to keep up with the good guys.”

  Lily scratches her eyebrow. “So that would make us the Joker, then. Since we’re the ones upping our arsenal, so we can keep pace with the gangs.”

  Will wants to roll his eyes, but instead he just shakes his head. “No. Well, yeah. But we’re… a good Joker. Fighting an evil Batman.”

  “I think you might want to take that whole comparison back to the drawing board,” Lily says with another twitchy smile, tapping her fingers on her knee impatiently. Driving makes her nervous, Will knows. At least on foot, she figures, they can always run away.

  “Can I have a sword?” she asks.

  “No. I’m going to get some more of those throwing daggers we used to use, though,” Will answers, distracted by the light traffic around them.

  “Aw, c’mon.” Lily pouts. She used to be better at pouting before she had fangs, but she’s still Olympic-grade at it now. “Why not?”

  “Because I’ve seen you use a sword.” Swords were always Anna’s weapon, and often Russ’s. The four of them had all tried to begin with, spending practice afternoons in the park like an especially deranged RenFaire troupe, but Lily and Will had both admitted defeat early on. “Posing like a Frank Frazetta poster, that’s something that you were fine at. Actually hitting things, not really.”

  “That was when I was human. I bet I’m great with it now. I bet I’m a master swordsman. You’re making a mistake to let my new powers go unused.”

  “Lil, you do know that you became a vampire, not a Jedi Knight, right?”

  “You suck,” grumps Lily.

  “I think that’s you, actually.”

  “Oh, haha. Suck, vampire. That’s witty. You’re very witty.”

  “And you’re still not getting a sword,” Will says breezily, playing along with the illusion that they’re happy and relaxed and that everything might be okay again someday. “I prefer not being accidentally decapitated, if it’s all the same to you.”

  LILY

  One day, in the early afternoon, Lily is dragged out of her deep sleep by the feeling of the cupboard around her. It happens, sometimes. Occasional claustrophobia and the need to sleep in a light-proof enclosed space aren’t two concepts that blend together well. When it happens, all she can do is wait the feeling out and pray that she won’t dream if she goes back to sleep.

  This time it feels too strong to wait out, though. She decides to brave what little sunshine they haven’t been able to hold at bay, and get up. She tamps down on the reflexive panic that rises, making herself count to ten before pushing the doors open.

  The warehouse is almost as dark as the cupboard, though there are enough small cracks of light through the curtain edges and door frames to make Lily wince a little. Will, already fully dressed, is at the table drinking a cup of tea. She wonders if he’s still getting cravings from when she bit him. She can’t ask, though. That would require them to acknowledge that it happened at all. So instead he drinks tea, and she refrains from comment.

  Lily can’t stand the stuff, and would never drink a cup except to slake her thirst. Caffeine has made her double-jittery as hell ever since she was turned.

  “Couldn’t sleep?” Lily asks, yawning.

  “Nah.”

  “Bad dreams?”

  Will just shrugs a little, pushing the other chair out with his foot so Lily can sit down too.

  They’re quiet together until the sun sets.

  WILL

  Life goes on. Chicago’s still got more vampire packs than any other major American city, and Will and Lily are still hunters.

  It says something deeply profound about how fucked up their lives are that it feels comforting and familiar to be hiding in the shadows of a nightclub, watching the tight-pressed crowds of bodies around them for any glimpse of too-pale skin or too-sharp teeth.

  They can’t kill every vampire they see, of course. Even when there were four of them hunting, that was never a possibility. They’ve always been out-numbered, but tonight it seems to Will like they’re even more out-numbered than usual.

  Lily’s noticed it too. “What the fuck is going on? It’s like a Monster Mash here tonight.”

  “We’re probably big news on the vampire grapevine. Well, you probably are, anyway,” Will offers.

  “Oh, yeah, I’m special,” Lily says sarcastically. “Whatever. They don’t care who we are. It’s gotta be something else.”

  LILY

  When Lily gets back to the warehouse after a solo hunt, three nights later, and finds everything trashed and smelling like Will’s blood, the first coherent thought she can hear herself think is ‘okay, so maybe it is us.’

  She doesn’t have the time or patience to go back to Will’s suppliers to get a really good sword, but she’s still got enough connections to the Chicago underworld—the living underworld, that is, the hunters’ underworld—to find a fairly good one easily enough without going too far afield.

  The people she speaks to all ask how things are going now that Anna and Russ are gone, and how they’d heard rumours, and it’s really good to see Lily around again. Good to see she’s still okay, because they’d heard things…

  Lily keeps her mouth shut as much as possible, and fakes as much general conversation as she can stand. Inside she feels crazed, as raw and ferocious as she ever has. As bad as the first days after she died, when Will didn’t have the courage to keep her dead.

  Considering how many times the warehouse has been compromised as a location, they really should just suck it up and move somewhere new. But it’s home, or the closest thing they’ve got to one. This is where they all learned to fight as a team, where Lily died, where Lily came back. And now it’s where Lily’s trying out her brand new sword.

  She manages to slice one of the practice dummies in half on her first swing at it; the two halves clattering to the floor. Up, to the side, down, spin, she’s a natural at all of them.

  “Sweet,” she mutters to herself, triumphant. Despite the grimness of the situation, she can’t help but give a tiny smile. That’s what Will’s friendship has given her back over these terrible weeks: her ability to smile. She’s not giving that up. He’ll be pissed if she’s back to being grim when she saves him. And she’s going to save him, no matter what.

  Lily throws the sword across the workout space, where it lands right in the heart of one of the other dummies.

  She should know. She should be able to tell. She should have some kind of fucking Will-sense superpower or something that tells her if he’s okay. TV’s always full of people getting premonitions at the moment the people they love die, like there’s some magic psychic connection that’s supposed to come along with the deal, instead of just the vulnerability and problems love really brings with it.

  But Lily can’t feel anything. She has to keep on going as if Will’s alive, because otherwise she’s just gonna curl up and die right here on the floor.

  She curls her knuckles against the ridge above her eyes and presses the heels of her palms to her cheeks, willing herself to cope. A breath in, a breath out. She’s not sure if she technically needs to breathe anymore or not, but it calms her down a little anyway.

  The part of Lily that could’ve been a successful songwriter, in a different world, always hangs back a little from the rest of her. It’s the little shard of herself that catalogs her reactions when the bad shit happens, and notes the way a laugh feels when things are going well.

  That part of her has only been overwhelmed and struck silent twice in her life, once for a bad thing, before she was medicated, when she desperately wanted to kill herself; and once for a good thing, one calm, clear morning at Will’s house when they were teenagers, waking up after a late night out.

  It’s not silent now, and as Lily walks into Englewood, where a lot of the vampire packs lurk, that part of her starts working through all the different quips she could make when she finds
who she’s looking for.

  She hasn’t thought of any good ones yet, though. She’s walking through a shitty part of town with a sword strapped to her back, messenger bag on her hip and the hood of her jacket up around her face, daring any of the lurking vampires watching her to give it a try. There aren’t any of that group of well-dressed ones who killed her in sight, and Lily gives thanks for small mercies. They make everything complicated, and right now Lily needs nothing but simple.

  She’s been walking for a few minutes when she sees a lithe, dark shape up on the roof of one of the low tenements, about three stories off the ground. As Lily stares up at it, it shifts and vanishes out of sight.

  “Just like fighting an evil Batman,” Lily mutters, and jumps for the roof.

  She makes it, just, her palms grabbing the edge firmly enough to spring herself over. “Yeah, I’m a Jedi Knight,” she says, a little more delighted than is really necessary.

  The vampire she followed is waiting for her on the rooftop, and now he’s got another vampire with him. And Lily would be bothered by the savage kind of joy she feels as she reaches for her sword, except that she knows that her love of violence isn’t due to her vampirism. If it had shown up along with the fangs and the washed-out complexion, she’d feel more conflicted about it, but making vampires die had been one of her favorite hobbies long before that.

  There are probably all kinds of parries and thrusts she could be doing, fancy sword moves that would cause all kinds of damage. But just swinging the blade with enthusiasm seems to work fairly well too, especially when she’s got a possessive, furious energy welling up inside her. Will is hers. How dare they touch him. How dare they.

  ~

  When Lily’s the last one standing, she hears the sound of slow applause from the shadows.

  “You’re appalling with that sword, but that was impressive in its way,” the new vampire says. She sounds older than the other two had looked, though her face is no older than Lily’s own.