The Wolf House: The Complete Series

by Mary Borsellino

  “Come on,” he says. “Let’s get you that food.”

  They walk to a diner around the corner, introducing themselves as they go. Just first names. No surnames, no context of who they are or who they used to be. Sofie says she’s nineteen. She seems streetwise and self-contained and old beyond her years, but she’s alive and that means she’s aging, and the youthful lines of her face are nowhere near the shape of someone almost twenty. Fifteen, tops.

  The diner smells of burnt coffee and grease. Sofie orders tea and two blueberry pancakes. The waitress is too bored to be surprised at the order, but it makes Will look at her with a new eye. Has she been recently bitten, and needs to stave off cravings of her own?

  It’s none of his business if she is, anyway. Will orders a tea of his own.

  “Do you kill people?” she asks him when the waitress has left them alone in their booth, with its cracked red vinyl seats and peeling linoleum tabletop. There’s no challenge in her tone. It doesn’t sound like there’s a right or wrong answer, just curiosity on her part. Like she genuinely thinks she could still hold her own, even if he was the worst of vampires.

  “I try not to,” Will answers honestly. He thinks about adding ‘never on purpose’, but decides not to. She doesn’t need his whole bleak life story. “Are you homeless?”

  Sofie shrugs, playing with the little dish of creamer buckets on the tabletop. “I’ve got a room. I’m done in this town anyway. I’m leaving today.”

  “Done with what?” Will asks as the waitress brings their orders over. The pancakes look a little stale, pre-made and then warmed when someone wanted them, but Sofie cuts off a generous slice and stuffs it in her mouth without hesitation, chewing heartily and swallowing before she answers.

  “Done with what I was here to do,” she replies. “You’re better off not knowing.”

  “Why?” For the first time in his death, Will feels a spark of curiosity about something. He’s reluctant to let that go. It’s easier when he doesn’t care about anything, but that doesn’t mean it’s better. “Are you a hunter?”

  Sofie shakes her head and takes a long drink of tea. “No. Never. Sort of. I don’t kill anyone. I steal from them.”

  “What, car batteries?” Will asks, smirking.

  “People. Kids. A lot of vampires keep people as prisoners. Blood on tap. It’s usually children, because they’re easier to control and because vampires are usually fucking disgusting. No offense.”

  Will gives a shrug. “None taken.”

  “I find out where they’re being held, the people. And then I get them out of there.” Sofie slices off another generous portion of pancake and stuffs it into her mouth.

  “Why not kill the vampires while you’re at it, though?”

  “Hunters wind up dead,” Sofie says flatly.

  Will can’t really disagree with her, considering his own condition, so he just waits for her to elaborate.

  “Vampires rarely feel strongly enough about their prisoners to give much of a damn one way or another if they escape. A week, maybe two, and they’ve stopped caring. They won’t bother to take revenge on me if I can keep out of their way for that first stretch of time. But kill a vampire and you’re fucked. The rest of his gang will get you sooner or later, even if it’s a lot later.”

  “So where are you going next?”

  Sofie drinks the last of her tea and shakes her head. “I’m not that stupid. I don’t tell anyone that.”

  “I could drive you. I’ve got nowhere else to be.”

  Her look is piercing, like she can read every layer of him and spot the smallest of deceptions. After a second she nods, coming to some silent agreement with herself, and pulls a piece of newspaper gone soft with folding out of her pocket.

  “These kids. Sisters, three of them. They went missing in Santa Monica a month ago. The bodies of their parents were found in their home. There’d been a fire. I know the signs.”

  “Okay, Santa Monica it is,” Will agrees, then pauses. “Uh, where are we now?”

  “Kansas.”

  “Really? Huh. I’ve never been to Kansas before,” Will says, and somehow he finds that funny and strange and a little awful. He’s seeing new places for the first time, but he can’t appreciate them. He’s going to live forever, but it doesn’t feel like living at all. “Can we go through Denver on the way? I should say hi to my sister.”

  Sofie shrugs one bony shoulder. “Sure. I don’t care.”

  ~

  Sofie lives in a water-damaged room in a boarding house, furnished with a bed that sags and decorated with strange ghostly shapes of leaking stains on the faded sage-green wallpaper. There’s an overhead light with a pretty rose-colored shade, but there are old cobwebs between the bulb and the shade, and Sofie doesn’t pay any attention to the switch by the door as they step inside.

  Instead, she lights a collection of candles on the sill of the single window, fat, squat, yellow blobs of wax that have dried and dripped in streaks down to the bare wood floor. The little flames illuminate the streaked glass of the panes and throw strange gold shadows under Sofie’s face.

  “Those’re my books,” she says, gesturing to a huge, teetering stack beside the bed. “You can have a look if you want. I’ve read them all, so I’m not taking any with me. I need another cup of tea. Do you want one?”

  Will nods. “Yes, thank you.”

  “Okay, I’ll be right back.” She heads back toward the door into the hallway. The rest of the house, what Will saw of it as they walked through to Sofie’s room, isn’t as run-down as her part of it is. Just old, and creaking, and a little faded.

  The collection of books isn’t much different from the ones on Will’s shelves back in the warehouse, back when he’d had a home of his own. There’s everything from crisp new editions to old paperbacks falling apart into a spill of soft-edged pulpy pages, to leather-bound tomes that smell like still rooms and old perfumes, to computer print-outs bound together with a clothes pin. Anything and everything that’s ever been theorised or daydreamed about vampires.

  Will eases the topmost book open to Sofie’s bookmark and skims the page. It’s an old Slavic folk-tale, awkwardly translated, with pencil scribbles in the margin. Sofie’s handwriting is neat and pointed, all the tops and tales of letters stretching out in flicks and half-loops.

  He doesn’t need the candle light to see by, but it gives a lived-in feeling to the room, so he’s glad that Sofie left them burning when she left. Putting the book down carefully—he’s read enough to last lifetimes, and it seems silly to read any more now that he can learn from practical experience.

  Her clothes seem to be kept in a suitcase left open against one mildew-marked wall. Dark jeans and dark shirts and jackets, plain cotton underwear in black and the grimy white that comes from being washed with black. There’s nothing pretty or frivolous that he can see in the haphazardly folded piles, and the only softness comes with age. There aren’t any novels or magazines except those that might provide Sofie with new things to learn about vampires. It’s the room of someone who keeps going for one reason and one reason only, and has long since ceased making a pretense at having any interests outside of it.

  It’s the first place Will has felt comfortable since he died.

  There’s a small grey mass of something high on the wall that Will first takes for a wasps’ nest but then realises is actually the shells of empty chrysalides, abandoned by the butterflies or moths that grew within them. When Will was still in elementary school, his class had kept butterflies, but he’d never been particularly interested. He was always more interested in the tadpoles in his biology textbooks. The chance to watch their evolution was a powerful draw. Caterpillars changed inside their soft little winding sheets, the process hidden from observation. But tadpoles grew to frogs as they swam and darted.

  The most amazing moment was the brief time half-way, when tiny legs pushed themselves out of the wriggling brown little body and began to kick, though the rest of the crea
ture was still the same thrashing baby as before, still brown and tailed and underwater, not nearly a frog yet but no longer just a tadpole either. The overall effect was of something strange and awkward and short-lived and beautiful, miraculous in its metamorphosis, wriggling and swimming and waiting to become.

  Sofie returns, her footsteps almost as soft and muted as those of a vampire, and hands him a chipped mug with the name of a local computer repair business on the side. “Here.”

  “Thank you.”

  She sits on the floor, gesturing for him to take a seat on the edge of the mattress. He joins her on the threadbare carpet. He’ll have to find a place to park his car for the day, soon; it’s almost daylight.

  Sofie shakes a handful of pills out of a bottle and swallows them down with a mouthful of tea and a wince. “Garlic,” she explains. “They give me bad dreams if I take them at the end of the night, but if I take them earlier they make me tired. I have to decide which is the lesser of two evils.”

  Garlic, blueberries, tea. There are no bruises on Sofie’s throat, and at fourteen or so she’s right on the borderline for being able to survive a bite at all. Pre -pubescent or adolescent vampire victims can’t recover from the infection with time as adults can. If they aren’t turned completely, they die.

  “You’re wondering what I am,” Sofie states, slurping another mouthful of tea.

  Will nods. “Sorry. Was I staring?”

  “No. But I’m used to it, I can tell when somebody’s dying to ask. I’m an urban legend; it makes people curious.”

  “An urban legend?”

  “The common term is dhampir, though technically that’s just for boys.” A small quirk of amusement ghosts across Sofie’s serious mouth. “Half-vampire. I don’t know if there are any alive in the world apart from me right now. Probably not. It takes a lot of luck to end up as one. Mostly bad luck. And we rarely last long.”

  Will shakes his head. “I don’t understand. How is that possible? Once somebody’s bitten, the infection fades or they die and come back. How can —”

  “I was nine. There are ways for children to survive being bitten. If this is what you call surviving. I was being held… look, maybe it’s easier if you just read my journal.” Sofie stands, balancing her now-empty mug on one of the tall towers of books, and rummages in her suitcase. After a moment she holds up a battered spiral notebook with a ballpoint pen stuck through the wire coils. “It’s funny how many hunters keep journals, isn’t it? That even makes it into the books and TV shows and stuff. You’d think that a bunch of people so scared of the impermanence of experience would be less hell-bent on destroying immortals. It’s funny.” She throws him the notebook. “There’s space in the basement for you to sleep, if you want. You’ll be safe there.”

  “Thanks,” says Will.

  “You’re saving me the hassle of conning someone out of a bus ticket to California. Least I can do is keep you alive,” Sofie answers with a hard smile.

  LILY

  Lily hates it when people are nice to her. It sounds so pathetic and masochistic when she puts it like that in her head, but that’s what it really boils down to. She hates being coddled and cared about when she’s being a shithead. Will and Anna and Russ used to know how to act when she got drunk—they left her alone, then told her off later when she was hungover and regretful and cursing herself colorfully over a plate of greasy food.

  “Okay,” Tommy says, sounding a little concerned but mostly amused in that kind of rueful, you-gotta-laugh way people get when someone they care about is acting like a dick but you can’t really hate them for it because you know how unhappy they are. “I think we’ll get you home now, all right?”

  Will and Anna and Russ knew not to try to put her arms across their shoulders and walk her out of the club if she was too wobbly on her legs to stand straight on her own. That’s what Tommy and Jay are doing now, and she wishes so badly that they wouldn’t. She feels humiliated when people are careful. She’s not frail, she’s not made of glass, she doesn’t need this. When she’s this drunk she wants jerks with smarmy grins and too much confidence to take advantage of her, to lead her out to their car and then to their apartments, to kick her out afterward with money for a cab and a pop tart.

  Lily likes being used like that because it makes her feel powerful and strong and alive. She can lie there while some dude gets himself off using her, and doesn’t care about her or if she’s having fun or anything, and she can hate him and hate how he’s treating her. In those moments, she genuinely believes she deserves better than to be treated like shit, and knowing she deserves better and is surviving anyway is a thrilling, wonderful feeling.

  But when people are nice to her—and Christ, Tommy and Jay are teenage boys, surely there’s some universal law that states they’re incapable of chivalry and decent human behavior, isn’t there?—Lily just hates herself. She feels like she’s fooled them into thinking she’s worth their care and effort.

  Lily sometimes suspects she’s way crazier than anybody knows, and Will and Russ and Anna sure knew that she was pretty damn crazy.

  But Will and Russ and Anna are all gone now, and there’s only Lily left. Lily, and two teenage boys who’re helping her walk down towards the train station. Tommy and Jay used to be fans of her band. They’d come to as many shows as they could manage, and sometimes flirt with her in an awkwardly charming fan-boy way afterwards. Sometimes she’d flirt back, because their mix of haughty cool-kid confidence and shy wannabe-groupie nerves was endearing, and because it made her feel a little bit like a rock star.

  “Do you miss it?” she asks them now, as the chill of the early-hours autumn air sobers her up slightly. “The band?”

  Tommy shrugs, which Lily has learned is Tommy-speak for ‘yes’. Except when it’s Tommy-speak for ‘no’, or ‘maybe’, or ‘I don’t know’. This one’s a yes, though.

  Jay says, “Sometimes.”

  “Yeah, that’s me too. Sometimes,” Lily says. “You’d think it would be all the time, every second, except that there’s so much other stuff I miss as well that it all has to take turns. So the band only gets to be the thing I miss sometimes.”

  “Yeah,” Jay agrees, and holds her up a little more firmly. Lily leans her head against his shoulder, because he’s a little shorter than Tommy, and smells a little better. Tommy smells like guys his age usually smell, sort of sharp and overheated and organic, like there’s so many chemicals and hormones and stuff inside them that it seeps out into the air. It’s not unpleasant, exactly, but Lily doesn’t like to breathe it in too much. It makes her want things she knows she shouldn’t.

  Jay smells like that too, but there are other, calmer smells overlaying it, a delicate aftershave and subtle cologne and a strange, smoky scent that Lily can’t place. It isn’t cigarettes, or alcohol, or night air. There are tiny scars on his neck now, two of them, right over where his vein traces its path under his skin. The scars make Lily feel horrifyingly sad.

  “She can crash at my place this time. The closet’s big enough,” Jay says to Tommy. “Chelle will start getting jealous if she finds out that you keep having Lily Green sleep over at your house.”

  “Michelle and I aren’t together anymore,” corrects Tommy.

  “Yeah, yeah,” says Jay dismissively. “Whatever you say, champ. I’m gonna take Sleeping Beauty here back to my place in a cab. You go enjoy the comforts of your post-nuclear family.”

  When it’s just the two of them, Jay re-wraps his scarf at his collar – covering the scars from Lily’s view – and puffs warm air into his hands. “I’ve got tickets to this movie premiere thing next weekend, if you wanna go,” he says.

  “Sounds fun,” Lily answers. She’s starting to sober up. Alcohol never lasts that long for her. She wonders if it would work better if she drank it via someone’s blood, instead of out of a glass like she’s a normal person. She’s horribly tempted to test the theory. “What movie?”

  “It’s not one I’ve heard of. Some Mexican
art-house thing.”

  Lily makes a face. “I’m not really into magical realism.”

  “Not all Mexican art-house movies are magical realism, doofus. And you were saying just the other day how you love Pirates of the Caribbean—how is cursed gold and undead pirates not magical realism?” Jay gives her an exasperated look.

  “That’s fantasy. Totally different,” Lily answers, glad of a topic other than blood to distract her. “Magical realism is, like, whimsical levitating umbrellas and teapots that pour liquid wishes.”

  “Whatever.” Jay rolls his eyes. “Do you want to go to the movie or not?”

  “Yeah, I guess. How’d you get the tickets?”

  “My… a friend gave them to me. He doesn’t like going to movies. Projectors give him headaches.”

  “Wow, sucks to be him,” Lily says flippantly. Jay’s hand has come up to his throat, and he’s rubbing the fabric of his scarf over where the bite scars are underneath. Lily huffs in frustration.

  “You shouldn’t let anyone do that to you,” she tells Jay. “Bite you.”

  “You sound like -”

  “An after-school special, I know,” Lily agrees. “But listen anyway, m’kay? Humor the drunkard.”

  Jay snorts a laugh. “I thought that’s what I was doing already.”

  “Don’t be clever.”

  “It doesn’t always… feel bad,” he says, tone more serious now. “It can feel good. It… it’s complicated.”

  “Everything is,” Lily says, and lets him guide her home.

  WILL

  Sofie’s Journal:

  One of the names of a part-vampire in Bulgarian folklore is also that language’s word for hawthorn. These days, the accepted reason behind this meaning is that it’s after the kind of wood these part-vampires would use to carve stakes. Part-vampires usually do as much killing of full vampires as they can. It’s a dark and lovely irony that they make us terrible enough that we can destroy them with impunity. Somehow they never learn better, and we continue to appear in the population from time to time, a side-effect of them.