“Great Photoshop job,” Jay says softly, under his breath so the moms won’t hear. They’re talking again, though, and aren’t paying attention to Lily and the kids.
“Wouldn’t know,” Tommy says, eyes still fixed on the image of Bette. “I’m practically blind, even with my glasses. Plus, I never got the hang of Photoshop. I was better at selling it than using it.”
Tommy hands the photograph back to Bette’s mom and they head upstairs to Tommy’s room. Lily can hear significantly better than humans, now, which is how she picks up words after the mothers think that they’re out of earshot.
“I wish Rose made friends easily, like Tommy does. She seems so lost since Bette’s been gone.”
~
Up in Tommy’s room, Michelle and Tommy start a game of boxing on one of his gaming consoles. She beats him on every round, the grin of victory softening her sometimes-brittle features. In between punches they argue about Michelle’s new cat, which is hairless and so won’t set off Tommy’s allergies.
“I still don’t want to cuddle it,” he says. “It looks like a freaky alien monster without fur. It’s weird.”
“It’s a kitten! I can’t believe you’re insulting a kitten.” Michelle’s on-screen character knocks Tommy’s character down in an indignant KO. “You have no heart.”
It’s like watching two pre-schoolers who like each other pull on each other’s pigtails. Lily has pretty much never seen two kids worse at being broken up than Tommy and Michelle. She thinks it’s sweet, in a vaguely co-dependent way.
Jay’s leafing through an old music magazine, and Lily can see that he’s trying not to smile at Tommy and Michelle’s bickering. His hair falls forward over his eyes because of the impractically trendy cut he keeps it in, and the shadows on his face are dark and angular. It makes him look haunted and bleak for a moment, incredibly sad underneath the small half-smile. It’s in that second that Lily notices the healing bruises, mostly covered by the collar of his shirt. Jay has been bitten by a vampire, and more than once.
It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair that there’s nothing clean and sweet left in the world, not even these funny weird kids Lily knows and likes. Even they aren’t safe from the dark.
Of course they’re not. The hunters are all dead, gone, or dead and gone.
Lily’s hands yearn to go out and hurt. She has to tamp down a desire to snarl. She has to go kill some vampires, to avenge the innocence that Tommy and Jay have lost already, and the inevitability of Michelle’s own knowledge about the things that gulp blood in the night.
Lily waves goodbye to the others. “I’m gonna go see how Rose is doing. See how fatalistic she’s feeling about the great Peter Pan Musical Disaster,” she jokes. More than almost anything, Lily wishes she could stay in that comfortable bedroom, doing pointless things with Tommy and Jay and Michelle. But somebody has to protect what little happiness those kids have left, and it makes sense for that to be somebody who’s got nothing more that can be taken from them.
That’s Lily. And maybe it’s Rose, too.
Lily goes down to the basement, knocking on the door before she goes inside. The place is a mess and smells like cigarettes and teenage stink. Rose is chain-smoking on the bed. Her hair is a glossy dark bob, dramatic around her face.
“It’s a wig,” Rose says when she sees that it’s Lily who’s come to pay her a visit.
“Come help me kill vampires,” Lily says by way of reply.
Rose stubs out her cigarette, then nods. “There’s a bus in ten minutes.”
~
“I went to a hairdresser’s. Not the one my mom works at, a different one. I already gave my mother a heart attack when I shaved it off in the first place, so I figured she deserved to be spared the indignity of having to sell me a wig. Of course, that meant she got crabby at me when she saw I’d gotten one from somewhere else, because it meant she hadn’t been able to use her employee discount. “Rose rolls her eyes. “My mom is nuts. I feel kinda bad for her sometimes, because I’m not the daughter she expected to have. I think there’s a part of her that’s disappointed that I don’t measure up, even if she’d never say so.”
“You’re a great kid,” Lily protests angrily. Rose is thoughtful and unique and protective of her brother, and Lily hates to think that a girl like that could feel like she doesn’t measure up. Rose’s words aren’t a surprise to Lily, though—Lily can tell that there are thin cuts on Rose’s wrists, underneath the cuffs of her worn, long-sleeve black tee. Some old and healing, some new, hairline-slim slices from sharp little blades.
Lily wants to warn Rose that such wounds are dangerous, that the blood is easy for predators to smell, but there’s no point. Rose already knows that.
Rose screws her face up and shrugs. “I’m not pretty, or clever. I don’t cheerlead or have a boyfriend. I know that’s the kind of kid my mom wanted.”
“Then that’s her problem, not yours,” Lily growls.
Rose shakes her head, but doesn’t argue directly. “Anyway, as I was saying before we got sidetracked. I went to a hairdresser’s and the lady was weird about it when I asked for a wig. She kept saying ‘it’s for a good cause’ when I was bitching about how ugly my naked head looked, as if I’d shaved it off for one of those cancer fundraisers or something. Even though I kept telling her that I did it because I went crazy for ten minutes and thought it was a good idea. It was like she didn’t really hear what I was actually saying, just this script in her head. I dunno.
“Gretchen says it’s cheating to wear a wig when you’ve gone and shaved your head, because you’re avoiding the whole point of it. But I didn’t really have a point, not like dykes who get buzz-cuts to make a statement, or… or anything. I just wanted to make the person I was disappear. Shave her off at the root.” Rose shrugs again, the helplessly inarticulate gesture Lily recognises from her own teenage years and from the other teenagers she knows now. It’s the universal sign language of the young, the loose-shouldered ‘I don’t know what I mean, and I think maybe nothing really means much anyway’. Lily sympathizes with the feeling.
“So I got this one. It’s too fashionable to feel like it really works on me, though,” Rose says, gesturing to the classic black wig, silent-movie blunt across her forehead and jaw line. In that moment Lily can see a little of the adult woman Rose might one day become, a clever scatterbrained artist dressed in clothes a little more stylish but just as uniformly black, face settled into grown-up planes and proportions, skin clearer and perhaps a little less pale, a flush of contentment in her cheeks.
There’s still the promise of that in Rose, in Rose’s sharp teenage smell and cigarette-laced breath and the warmth of her body, a warmth Lily can feel even from the other side of the bus. Lily will never be warm again, but Rose is warm. Rose will get older, and maybe even wiser, and fall in love and have her heart broken and learn and become so many things.
Lily understands, suddenly and completely, that it wasn’t just familiarity and affection mixed up with this new terrible hunger that she felt for Will. There’s something else entirely at work as well, something she can feel pulling her toward Rose now. The fragility and the potential and the possibilities living people have within them is an intoxicating mix. It’s like watching a fractal pattern replicate and flower. Seeing a universe expand. And all inside a person, a pliable blood-filled person that Lily could pin down and…
Lily swallows and closes her eyes, turning away from Rose. “Oh,” she says. Then, to distract herself, “Gretchen? The German girl from that band? How’s she doing?”
“Okay, I guess. Her family moved away, which blows. I liked her.” Rose frowns a little. “We still talk online, a bit. It’s nice. Not about vampires, or death. I got her email address from her uncle at the club. We talk about bands and books and art and things like that. I miss her. I miss what the world was like when I knew her. When things were easy and the biggest thing I had to worry about was a crush I had on a girl in a band.”
The bus
arrives at their stop, and Rose and Lily climb down into the suburban chill of late-night neighborhood air. It looks so safe and nice, the houses with their gardens and fences and driveways, the pavements with hopscotch grids and the bus shelters with tags sprayed on the seats. Lily does her best not to think about the fact that it was somewhere just like this that Bette was killed, somewhere just a few blocks away from where they walk now.
She’s obviously not the only one with Bette on her mind, though, because abruptly Rose stops mid-step and turns to Lily.
“It’s your fault. She wanted to help you,” Rose says, sounding sad and angry and hopeless. “You tried to push her away, like that would save her. You didn’t let her learn from your team anymore. But that didn’t save her, because pretending things aren’t happening doesn’t make them go away. Hiding under the blankets doesn’t get rid of monsters. And now she’s dead, and you’re dead, all for nothing. There aren’t any bystanders left in this fight. Nobody gets to stay out of it. You’re a victim, or a soldier. You made Bette be a victim when you didn’t let her be a soldier, and her death’s on you as sure as if you’d been the one to kill her.”
The explosion of words passes as suddenly as it arrives, and Rose deflates with a weary look on her young features. “Come on,” she says tiredly. “Let’s find some vampires or something.”
WILL
Straight after high school, the band they had was an angry, noisy, political, not-especially-good scribble of sound that they named Lungbutter. The name came from Lily, from the wracking cough she had for long weary months, because if she couldn’t get rid of it then at least she could gross out other people with the idea of it. Will remembers evenings spent sitting on the roof of Lily’s porch, where the red tiles slanted down from the window of her bedroom at an angle just forgiving enough that her parents didn’t stop them from sitting there. The vantage point made the back yard strange to see, a tip-tilted world of dark trees and faint stars stretched out below and above, with them caught somewhere in the middle.
Will remembers those evenings, when Lily was too tired to venture far from her bed, when they’d sit and talk about all the places they’d love to see some day. They were going to eat fried chicken in tiny Southern diners, and wade in the shorelines of marshy lakes where the reeds were high and the mud was warm between their toes. Everything they wanted was just around the corner, waiting for them to grow up enough to grasp it.
Remember the Stars was never intended to be the band. It was just a band, the latest in an ongoing parade of dabbling projects they’d tried out. There were four of them by then, with quiet, laid-back Russ making up the quartet. They’d been hunting for a few years and had day jobs of varying professional fulfilment—Will in a record store downtown, Anna selling overpriced jeans and kitschy accessories at a boutique in Lincoln Park, Russ in the mailroom at a law firm, Lily doing data entry for a sporting goods supply company. They were young and passionate and still trying to decide what they might want to be if they ever really grew up, and then somehow their latest light-hearted attempt at a band started getting noticed by the street press and the radio.
Lily named the band, stealing a quote from one of the biographies her mother read constantly. Some writer or artist had once put it in a letter, and Lily had never been able to shake it out of her head. “Remember the stars and infinity on high. Then life seems almost enchanted after all.”
Will knows that it was mostly the way the words sounded together that appealed to her, rather than any philosophy in the phrase. Lily’s concept of faith was a puzzle to Will at the best of times; she seemed to believe in God in the same way that children will shrilly demand that their parents deal with perceived unfairness.
Remember the Stars was just another band, like Lungbutter and Pipi and all the rest. Then somehow it became bigger than that.
~
Will travels light. He emptied his bank account before he left, on the first night after the end of his life. He’d been in a daze, and it had seemed like a concrete activity to undertake. Go to the ATM. Withdraw all the money he’d been putting aside for no particular eventual use. He bought a car with some of it, just a nondescript light green sedan being sold cash-in-hand by its owner. He gave the guy a wad of bills, the guy gave him a ring of keys, that was that.
He keeps the rest of the money in the glove compartment. The car isn’t nice enough to bother stripping for parts and it isn’t crappy enough to torch for kicks, so he’s never had a problem with leaving it parked. There’s a pillow on the back seat and a few changes of clothes in the trunk, and that’s it. That’s all Will needs.
Before dawn he finds a basement garage and parks in a distant corner and sleeps fitfully on the back seat until night falls again. Then he goes and finds blood, and then he drives. Sometimes when he reaches a new town or city he walks around the streets for a few hours and watches people go about their lives. Sometimes he buys a book and reads it. Very occasionally he turns on the stereo in the car and searches for a radio signal, listening to random pop and rock in the still of the darkness.
The world looks different at night, so much so that he can’t say for certain where he is. He drives through fields upon fields upon fields, repetitive as a drumbeat. The sidewalks in the tiny towns he drives through are cracked and buckling. Grain elevators and water towers make unfamiliar shadows against the dark horizons of low stars. Will thinks he must have passed at least a thousand Waffle Houses off the highway.
One evening, like any of the other evenings, he leaves the car parked on a city block and goes walking. It’s a pleasant night, milder than the weather had been in Chicago when he left. He’s been moving West and, he thinks, a little South.
A squirrel scurries along a branch, small and warm and twitching. Will watches it and smiles, not feeling much of anything at the sight but knowing that he used to smile at squirrels when he saw them, in another life. They always reminded him of his little sister, because of the time she brought an injured one home wrapped in her school sweater and then nursed it slowly back to health. Its fur had been a tawny brown, just like Jenny’s hair. Will thinks he misses his sister. It’s hard for him to tell under the haze of refusing to feel anything.
His eyes narrow in puzzlement as he approaches his car on his return. The hood’s up, and someone’s rummaging in the engine. As Will gets closer he can see it’s a girl, maybe fourteen or fifteen, wearing a dark knit cap and jeans and a threadbare black t-shirt. Her arms and wrists are pale and very thin, and her face has a nervy, pointed sort of loveliness to it, like a fox.
“Of all the cars you could steal the battery out of, this one is the one that drew your eye? Really?” he says, half-curious and half-mocking. She startles, eyes going round. A moment later she’s got a hand holding a small knife coming up in front of her body instinctively.
Her irises are vein blue and the small curls of hair visible under her cap are the palest blonde Will has ever seen, too soft in their fall to be peroxided, only a hint more vibrant than her skin. She curls her pink mouth back in a sneer, as if the hard expression could ever be enough to counteract the fragility of her features.
They look at one another for one long moment, and then she bolts. Will is after her in less than a second.
It’s instinct, a new change in Will that’s been waiting somewhere deep in his hind-brain until it’s triggered by the girl’s quick escape. Something runs, and the predator in him is automatically primed to give chase. He’s following her down the street at a run before his conscious brain catches up with what he’s doing.
“Wait!” he calls. And then, even though he can’t be certain that it’s true, he adds “I won’t hurt you!”
She’s fast; he’s faster. Near the corner, where the narrow street intersects another, he catches her shoulder and she whirls, crouching low in a posture of defense.
“I’m not mad about the battery,” Will assures her. The savage expression on her young face doesn’t soften. “Can I buy you some foo
d or something? Please? You look half-starved.”
She thrusts one thin grubby palm out. “Give me money. I’ll buy food with it.”
“I’m not gonna just give you money. You might blow it on drugs.”
She gives a shrug, voice still flat, eyes still wary. “I steal all my drugs.”
Will resists the near-overwhelming urge to roll his eyes. “Oh, yeah, now I totally trust you to look after yourself. Come on, all my money’s in my car. I’m buying you food.”
The girl snorts. “I’m not getting in a car with a vampire I don’t know.”
Will blinks, then rallies. “Okay. Right. We’ll go get the money and go to a diner. No riding in cars involved. I promise.”
“I’ll kill you if you try anything,” she threatens. She doesn’t sound afraid, or like she’s bluffing. She’s just warning him what’ll happen if he attempts to hurt her.
“I’d rather you didn’t,” Will counters, though he can’t make himself feel strongly one way or the other. He doesn’t really care what happens anymore.
The wariness in her expression is becoming more like puzzlement. “Why would you help me?”
“Because you look like you need it.” Will shrugs. “I don’t care about the car. I’m not going to hurt you. You can put the knife away.”
Slowly, never taking her eyes off him, the girl slips the knife into the pocket of her jeans. There’s a tattoo on one wrist, but Will doesn’t get a good look at it. “I’m not scared of you.”
That makes one of them. Will smiles, a little ruefully. “I’m glad. I’m not scared of you, either, if that helps.”
The girl smirks. “Maybe you should be. It’ll be dawn in forty minutes.”
There’s no fear in her eyes as she meets his stare with a frank one of her own, just weariness and hardness and something lost, the same something Will sees in his own face in mirrors.
The Wolf House: The Complete Series Page 26