~
By the time Lily breaks out of the cell the cops have thrown her in—an underground one, thank goodness, because they’re crooked assholes who know exactly what she is—it’s five nights since the brawl and all evidence that anything happened at all has been eradicated. Somewhere in her heart, she knows she’s too late this time. Will’s dead. Will’s dead and she’s alone, and yet somehow the world hasn’t stopped turning and she’s still here.
The warehouse is trashed. Half the ingredients for the cocktail are strewn across the floor and the others are missing completely. Will’s journals are a clump of ashy rectangles on the bare concrete of the floor. When Lily touches them, the soot stains her fingers with crumbled gray.
Only the musical instruments are completely untouched, lying in their cases like they’re waiting, still, to be played.
~
She finds out later that Russ and Anna have left Chicago completely. Lily tries to be glad for them. She wonders if they’ll keep hunting, or if it’s time for humans to admit defeat and simply run while they can.
It might be because she hasn’t had the cocktail in a week, or it might be everything else, but Lily’s in the mood to kill something.
WILL
Will hits the ground running and doesn’t stop. Cities, faces, everything blurs, and he lets it. Maybe it’ll blur enough that it’ll all run together and become a mess, a void, and he’ll be dead again.
He knows now how Lily must have felt when she realized that Will had lied to her as she was dying. Even with everyone around her, Lily must’ve been so alone. Now they’re two of a kind, but Will can’t go back. Can’t go forward, either. Just away, forever. As far as he can get.
When he looks in mirrors now he can’t help but feel a kind of sad, sardonic amusement. So much of the vampire lore he’s read and studied says that vampires don’t show up in reflections, but the vampire is all he can see when he looks. Will Cooper’s gone, engulfed by this strange, dramatic, fierce new creature, whose long musician’s fingers and skinny, knobbly wrists are white, graceful, unfamiliar, strong enough to snap a quarter in two as if it were a chocolate coin.
He steals a newsboy cap, the kind he always used to wear, and pulls it low over his forehead. He puts his glasses on his nose and his sharp, clever vision adjusts itself to see through the prescription he’d once relied on. It makes no difference. The vampire in the mirror is wearing a Will costume but his eyes are a deep black-red and his teeth are sharp and wrong when he tries a tentative smile and, worst of all, there is an unshakable look of loss and horror in the face of this unfamiliar Will-ghoul. His thoughtful, worried, sarcastic expressions have been consumed forever and now there’s only this, only loss.
He moves from place to place whenever it’s dark, sleeps when it’s light.
Some nights Will wonders if, because his death was not an absolute, he is still dying by small degrees. Maybe this is the true way humans become vampires: all that they used to be falls away piece by piece, until only the monster’s left behind.
He drinks from humans now, drug addicts and drunks, the homeless and the hopeless. People as lost as he is. Heroin, like sunlight, makes Will feel dizzy and terrible, his sensitive synapses so overwhelmed that he curls up and shakes, teeth rattling and a clammy, slick sweat blooming on his skin as he waits for it to pass. Crack and meth are easier. They taste like despair and addiction. That’s not so different to ordinary blood, for Will.
There’s no point in trying to mix the cocktail. It was one thing to do it for Lily, but when it’s just for himself it seems like too much work for no good reason. It wouldn’t make any difference to anything, not really. Nothing is going to make any difference to anything ever again.
One night, there’s a teenage boy. A junkie. The veins in his left arm are collapsed from the needles, and so Will bites down into his right wrist. The heroin makes the taste of the blood sticky and too sweet, like wet warm sugar. It’s thick, and he gags, and the next thing he knows he’s waking up beside the still and cooling body of the boy. It’s almost dawn.
Sometimes he feels sure that the overdose would have been enough to kill the boy anyway. There was a lot of heroin. Too much. But the thought’s no comfort.
When he’s in Detroit, he spots another vampire. He thinks at first that it’s from the same group as the one Lily tried to shoot. One of the ones who answers to Blake. But after a few hours of watching, Will knows he’s wrong. This one’s different. She kills, but she doesn’t seem evil in the way Will’s always thought about evil. There’s no malice in her. She doesn’t toy with her prey.
“You’re very young, aren’t you? Barely dead,” the vampire says, so Will gives up on pretending to be stealthy and steps out under the street light.
“Uh, sorry I was fo—” he starts. The vampire raises a hand, gesturing for him to be quiet. She’s pale, as pale as bone. It’s been weeks since Will looked at anyone face to face, and when he looks at her he realizes with a horrified jolt that he recognizes her. Her name is Gretchen. She was in a band that opened for Remember the Stars once, just a few months ago. She looks so different now that he didn’t recognize her.
Gretchen is dressed in white, a shift with lace at the low neckline and the knee-length hem. It has no sleeves, and the expanse of bare white arm is almost shocking. Her hair is loose and her lips are very dark, and she looks like a girl from a fairytale. Not a sanitized cartoon with singing birds; she is a remnant of older stories, a king’s daughter kept alive by a hunter who gave the heart of a deer to the wicked queen instead.
“I’m so sorry, Will,” she says, with a look of awareness, as if she’s just recognized him at the same moment he recognized her. Will wonders how different he looks from the last time she saw him. If he is as changed as she is.
“I’m sorry, too,” he replies. She smiles, almost. It’s closer to a smile than any other expression, at least.
“I was dead long before you met me. But thank you nonetheless. I really am sorry, by the way. Not many hunters are forced into your fate. I imagine it’s terrible. Are you travelling alone?”
The first time—the only time, before this moment—Will met Gretchen, it was backstage in a club, and they were both too busy arguing with their respective bandmates and venue staff to pay one another much attention. He remembers that she was young, and energetic, and had a thick European lilt to her words. The accent’s been shed completely now, and Gretchen’s voice is the polite, elocution-clear speech of someone who comes from nowhere in particular except the dusty past.
“I am.” Will nods. “I won’t trouble you, if you’ll give me the same courtesy.”
Gretchen laughs. It’s a high and lovely sound, but her amusement sounds dangerous and a little cruel. “You wouldn’t last half a moment against me. If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead.” Gretchen shakes her head, and then tilts it to one side as she looks at him. “Even now, you think yourself a vampire hunter. It’s fascinating.”
Will doesn’t know what to say to that, so he stays quiet and waits.
Gretchen speaks again after a few silent seconds have passed. “How was the city when you left it? The nightclub owned by… by my family, I suppose you might call them. They used to be, at any rate. It’s doing well? How are those children who followed your band, Tommy and Rose and Bette?”
Will’s senses, though not as honed as those of the vampire he faces, are still exact enough to catch that the last question sounds different from the rest. Gretchen isn’t making idle conversation for the sake of it; she really cares.
Will thinks of Bette as she was when he last saw her: the elegant flame-like dress and the dirty fingernails, the smile like a wicked secret.
No matter how strange and frightening this version of Gretchen may be, no matter how inhuman, Will can’t bring himself to tell her what’s been lost since she left.
“They’re fine.”
“You have a scar on your neck. Someone bit you, quite some time before you died.�
�
Will claps a hand to cover the side of his throat. If he could still blush, he would be. Every night, from when it happened until he died, the feeling of Lily drinking, holding him still, replayed in his dreams. Sometimes nightmares. Sometimes not.
“That was, um. That was Lily. But. It wasn’t her. Who killed me. I mean. It was —” Will shudders, swallowing hard. He’s not going to think about that. He’s not going to remember. “Others.”
Gretchen raises her eyebrows. “Lily? But she’s not with you now.”
Will doesn’t answer, not even with just a shake of his head. There are some things he’ll tell Gretchen, and some things he’ll lie to her about, but that’s a subject he won’t talk about at all.
Gretchen tosses her hair back from her thin face. Her deep red eyes look softer now, like she sees something in Will that she understands terribly well.
“Someday you’ll be glad that she’s forever,” she tells him quietly. “Constants like that are comforting. When I’m feeling at my worst, I often seek my brothers out, even now.” She tips her head back, motioning to the dark behind her. Three slim shapes step forward, smooth as shadows. They were completely invisible before, even to Will’s heightened senses. He feels a shiver of fear, even though it’s obvious that they won’t strike him without her order, and that beyond protecting her they aren’t interested in him at all.
“You can call them Jack, Arthur, and Quincey if you like.” A small smile tugs at the corners of Gretchen’s blood-dark lips. “Three husbands for a vampire bride. Bram wrote a rather tasteless decapitation scene for me in his novel, have you read it? All that thrusting and arching and gasping.”
Whenever he’d re-read Dracula, Will had always felt incredibly sad for Lucy Westenra. Mina Murray was an adult woman already at the story’s beginning, sensible and faithful and clever and useful. But Lucy, Lucy was so young, laughing and bubbly and silly, falling in love with all her suitors and unable to make a decision between them. She was incomplete, a work in-progress, a teenager with all the promise and all the lack of wisdom that teenagers contain. Her death had given Will more than one pause over the years.
“You knew Bram Stoker?”
Gretchen nods, then gives a very un-vampire-like chuckle. “I like authors. I’ve known a lot. Sometimes they write me into their stories.”
Despite everything, Will finds himself returning her laugh with one of his own, looking at the heavy fall of her dark hair and the lively light in her eyes. He can’t help feeling a tiny spark of gladness at knowing that Lucy had managed to survive beyond her death. “I’m glad the truth is better than the fiction,” he tells her, meaning it.
In very different circumstances, Will would have called the look that Gretchen gives him kindly, compassionate. “You can travel with us if you like,” she offers after a moment. “Time in the company of others often provides the answers to questions asked in solitude.”
For a moment Will imagines what that would be like. Slipping in and out of humanity as the years go by, never wholly of the world but never completely free of it either. It’s a tempting offer, and Will is very tempted, but he knows that he won’t find the unnamed things he’s seeking there.
“Thank you, but no,” he says as courteously as he can. Gretchen nods, unsurprised at his answer.
“Perhaps another time. Be well, Will. If you see Rose and Bette again, tell them… tell them I said hello.”
LILY
Lily wakes up tired. Lily always wakes up tired.
“That might be because you don’t drink blood,” Tommy suggests when she mentions it. “Or it could be depression. Back when Bette first went vegetarian, when we were in ninth grade, she fainted on the way home from school this one time because her iron was so low. I bet your body needs a heap of iron, from blood, and since you don’t drink blood you’re tired.”
He pushes his glasses up his nose, squinting through them as he inspects Lily’s face closely. “Depression drains all your energy away too, though. You are sorta miserable all the time.”
“I was on medication. For bipolar. Before I died,” concedes Lily. “But I haven’t taken it since. I can’t keep the pills down. I don’t think vampires are meant to be able to take drugs.”
“Drugs are just chemicals. Everything in the world is chemicals. How could your body tell which chemicals were drug ones?” Tommy asks, puzzled. Lily shrugs. “Anyway,” Tommy goes on. “Do you think you still have it? Bipolar?”
“I don’t get the manic part anymore. Just the darkness.”
Tommy rolls his eyes. “I don’t understand why everyone thinks the whole vampire thing is such a pity party. You’re going to be a hot goth super-heroine forever, you’re never going to get old or sick, and kinky people into blood play will be lining up to go to bed with you as soon as you stop mooching around feeling sorry for yourself.”
Lily, despite herself, gives Tommy a tiny smile. “You think I’m hot?”
Tommy rolls his eyes again.
It’s dusk and they’re walking home from the charity thrift store where Tommy’s doing his community service hours. He got busted selling pirated software online, which Lily secretly thinks is pretty funny because Tommy’s always struck her as someone who’s more likely to wind up sticking a fork in a toaster than someone who commits electronic fraud. He had to pay a fine - the money, as far as Lily knows, came from his sideline business in counterfeit DVDs - and now all that’s left is the occasional indignity of giving back to his community.
They run into Jay and Michelle as they pass the latest try-hard hipster cafe attempting to sink down roots in the neighborhood. Lily gives the business three months, tops, before it bombs. She’s been a part of the local scene long enough to know that even the posiest of posers won’t trade great decor for bad coffee. She can smell the burnt beans from outside.
“New look for you,” Lily says, nodding to the henna-like face paint looping and curling in red-orange swoops over the dark brown-gold of Michelle’s cheekbones.
“I feel like I’m raping about twelve different cultures here,” she gripes. “The dress rehearsal was this afternoon and it turns out that ‘Peter Pan Musical’ is actually spelled ‘C-L-U-S-T-E-R-F-U-C-K.”
“It wasn’t all bad,” Jay protests, obviously doing his best to be diplomatic as the four of them walk toward Tommy’s house.
“Don’t listen to him. It was all bad,” says Michelle. “See, right, okay, Jenna was our Wendy, and then she dies and we thought whoa, fuck, they’ll cancel the production for sure, right? And rightly so, because we were all feeling gross about it, even if some of us thought Jenna was a mean cow. Even mean cows don’t deserve to get their throats ripped open, you know? But then the drama teachers decide to cast me as Wendy instead, and everyone knows they’re gonna change their mind about that in like four seconds, because we all know that they’re the kind of people who think it’s ‘theatrical’ and ‘interesting’ to paint Princess Tigerlily up like she’s auditioning for some kind of cut-rate Bollywood knock-off made by LSD-heads.” Michelle pauses in her rant, takes a deep breath, snaps her gum, and continues. “So they then decide to put me back as Tigerlily and convince Jenna’s little sister to play Wendy instead. But Ashley is, like, stealing her mother’s sedatives or her painkillers or something, and she’s a complete wreck who’s high all the time and who rocks up to rehearsal with cigarette burns all over her arms or black eyes or whatever. Meanwhile Peter Pan has shaved her head and is wearing more eyeliner than me, which is saying a lot. In short: clusterfuck.”
Lily, Jay and Tommy absorb this.
“Actually, that sounds pretty cool,” offers Tommy.
“I’d see it,” Lily agrees.
“Told you so,” Jay tells Michelle smugly.
As they walk up the path to Tommy’s house they hear the sharp brutal crack of a door slamming somewhere below them. The windows of the house are lit up, the glow doubly bright to Lily’s sensitive vision. Tommy’s house isn’t just a house, it�
�s a home, that’s obvious in every tiny detail and imperfection. The edges of the front garden are mowed sloppily because Tommy would rather be inside playing games online than out doing chores. There are beautifully tended rose bushes along the sides of the house, a few hardy blooms clinging tenaciously even now.
In the front living room Tommy’s mom is sitting on the plump white leather sofa. She’s wearing these amazing, high, leopard-print pumps with black pedal pushers and a black blouse, and for a few seconds Lily wishes that she was the sort of person who wore heels rather than sneakers, because Tommy’s mom’s shoes are fucking cool.
Tommy’s mom is talking to another cool-looking mom-aged person as they come in, saying “Everyone warned me that raising a teenage boy would send me gray, but he’s not half the trouble she is. It seems I can’t have a conversation with her without starting a war these days.”
“Mmm,” the other mom agrees. “I’m finally getting my breath back with Bette away at her science course. She fit their scholarship criteria perfectly, which is lucky. It’s a great opportunity for her.”
Lily feels Tommy and Jay grow tense at the mention of Bette’s name. Michelle doesn’t. That’s interesting, that Tommy’s told Jay but not Michelle. Lily wonders why.
“Heard from her recently?” Tommy asks Bette’s mom, his voice almost pitched in his habitual disinterested monotone but not quite. Bette’s mom nods.
“Yeah, she sent a photo the other day, of her in the lab she gets to use. Hold on a sec, I think I have it with me.” She rummages in her bag, pulling the photo free a few seconds later and passing it over.
The picture shows Bette at a chemistry bench, a notebook and several bottles of different compounds and solutions scattered in front of her. It’s sunny outside and the light streams through the windows in the airy room, throwing bright rays onto Bette’s young face. She’s grinning happily, and all her teeth have ordinary human bluntness.
The Wolf House: The Complete Series Page 25