The Wolf House: The Complete Series

by Mary Borsellino

  But the hawthorn name: It doesn’t come from the wood at all, but from the berries. The hawthorn-children, the half-vampires, needed the berries to survive. They’d eat them freshly plucked, or dried, or crushed into juice. If they had enough, then they would survive, after a fashion. They wouldn’t turn and they wouldn’t die. It was a kind of life. Better than the other options they had left to them.

  My name when I was born was Sofie Emily Emory-King, but now I just go by Sofie. I was the second child in my family. My older brother was named Curt Elijah Emory-King. We had two mothers, Bettina and Joanne. Bettina was a veterinary anaesthesiologist, Joanne owned the restaurant we lived above. Joanne was our birth mother because she was white. She and Bettina thought that we would have easier lives if we were white too. They used a white sperm donor. But when I grew up a bit and went to school I wished more and more that I looked like both my parents, that my skin marked me as belonging to them both. I was cut off from experiences that should have been my birthright, even if those experiences were things my mother wanted to spare me from.

  The irony of it all is that all my memories of my childhood are golden, happy things, sheltered seemingly in a world without bigotry of any kind, and the one sadness of those early years is my frustration at my coloring and the fights I’d have with my mothers over it. I had gay parents but didn’t feel the stings of homophobia. I was a girl but didn’t know the frustrations and injury of sexism. Bettina was Puerto Rican but I never saw her faced with racism.

  One of the incontrovertible truths about any childhood, however - even the happiest of childhoods - is that childhood ends.

  The vampires who killed my family burned our home. Vampires often do that. They like the look of fire, and it removes most of what little risk there is that their victims will rise again. I tried to break free of the vampires and run back inside so I could die with my family. I was young and stupid. I thought my pain was larger than I could survive. That seems so naive now. It’s almost sweet.

  I found out later, much later, that vampires and child pornographers often consolidate their needs into a single cache of children. The vampires who killed my mothers and brother didn’t do this. I’ve been told I should be grateful for this fact. I’m not. Nothing those vampires did or did not do was out of mercy for me or the other children they kept. I will not mete out credit and thankfulness simply because some depravities were not to their taste.

  I’d been a bright child but with nothing to read and a near-constant state of dizzy tiredness I backslid quickly. The vampires didn’t care if their herd of easy prey spent all hours of the day and night in a listless stupor, and that’s what we invariably sank into. Even I, though I fought to begin with, was broken down. It probably made us easier to take care of, if the rudimentary meals and bedding we were given can be called care.

  That would be where both my story and my life ended, if not for Jay. I think I was so desperate to have something to love that I would have loved anything, and I think I chose him to love because I missed my own brother so much. Once, scientists studied what would happen if baby monkeys were given warm cloth mothers in their cages. The monkeys would cling to the rag dolls, even if spikes were hidden in the fabric. The urge to love something, anything, is deeper in us even than our humanity; it’s been there since we were creatures in the trees. Driven by that impulse, Jay and I made ourselves a tiny, lonely family of two in our sterile home of dying infants. And when I broke out, I took him with me.

  ~

  They’ve been driving for several dark quiet hours of the next night when Sofie asks “What’s your sister’s name?”

  “Jenny,” Will replies. “She’s fifteen now, I guess. I always forget her birthdays. I think it’s because I don’t really want to admit she’s growing up, I don’t know. She had really bright red hair the last time I saw her, but that’s probably different now. She changes it a lot.

  “Our dad and her mom split up when she was five and I was fourteen. I saw her at Christmas for a couple of years after that, when my father still lived in Denver as well as Shelly—Jen’s mom—and Jenny. You ever been to Denver? My older brother’s always bitching about the altitude when we go to visit Dad, but it never really bothers me. It did this one time, when I went to a concert and I was dancing, and afterward I was lightheaded and couldn’t breathe.

  “When Jen was about seven, Shelly started moving her around all different places, and I didn’t really get to see her again. They only came back to Colorado last year. I spent a couple of weeks staying with them in Utah when Jen was thirteen.

  “Jenny’s kind of strange in some ways. She has both the CDs my band put out, and she made me sign them, and she gushed about how much she loved us and hoped we’d come play a show she could attend. But the rest of the time she treats me normally, just her big geeky brother. It’s like she can put bits of her life into a bunch of different little drawers, and open and shut them when she needs to.

  “She liked Utah a lot, I know that. She hated leaving. I teased her and said that was just because she liked being able to say she was an SLC punk, but I know it was more than that. She loved being so close to nature. She’s kind of a hippie. She does correspondence school because she moves around so much. She likes volunteering at all kinds of places; she wants to be a professional fundraiser when she’s older. She wears glasses, like I used to. I’ll have to put them back on, when we go see her and Shelly.”

  “You’re not going to tell her?” Sofie sounds surprised. Will wonders if she can even really remember what it was like to live without knowing about vampires, or if it’s all the golden childhood haze she described in her journal. He drums his fingers on the steering wheel.

  “Maybe. I don’t know yet.”

  ~

  There’s a drawing of a hideous drooling rodent creature, all warts and sores and nervy shaking lines, on the inside of Sofie’s left wrist.

  “Ratfink, right? The Ed Roth cartoon?” Will asks, nodding at the tattoo.

  “Yeah.” Sofie nods. “I hate it. It makes me sick.”

  “Then why get it etched into your skin?”

  Sofie looks at the road, the black empty stretch of highway between them and the invisible horizon, but Will suspects she’s seeing something else. “Because I hated the scars more. The bites,” she answers finally, voice cold. “Because if there was going to be something disgusting on my wrist, it was going to be something I chose. Not something that was chosen for me.”

  “But why not get something beautiful?” Will asks. Sofie just shakes her head, like there’s no way she could explain so Will would understand.

  ~

  “So if she’s a vampire who doesn’t want to kill people, and now you’re the same thing, how come you’re not with her?”

  Will presses his lips together, thinking carefully before he replies. “It’s… I don’t know,” he manages lamely, shaking his head. “What’s happened… nothing makes sense in my head anymore. It’s too complicated. I don’t know what I’m looking for. I just know I haven’t found it yet. It’s… it’s complicated.”

  “Your tattoo says otherwise,” Sofie says, nodding to the small black words on Will’s own wrist.

  ~

  They got the tattoos on what would prove to be one of the last perfect golden times of the band, a quick six-show tour around the Midwest, in weather sharp enough to shock the skin awake but warm enough for long lazy afternoons with the windows of the van down and the wind like a roar as they moved. They didn’t know that the good days were ending and that soon there would be too many vampires to handle back home for even the shortest of tours, and so the memory is bittersweet because the future, seen from that moment, had seemed so full of promise. The band was doing well and they were happy and young and so alive.

  After the last show, once the equipment and their tired, wired bodies were packed into the van, they started back home. Somewhere along the line that drive had become a tradition, the all-night drive after the last show
. It wasn’t that any of them were homesick and in a hurry to get back, not exactly - if home was anywhere, it was out on the road, moving and playing and bitching about Russ eating the last of the Doritos and the chemical stink of Anna’s hairspray and Lily being a moody bitch again and not taking her turn driving and Will forgetting to fill the gas tank for the millionth time. That’s where their hearts were, that was home, and killing time in a local motel after the last show of a tour was done with meant a night of knowing that they were leaving that behind, at least for a little while. They all hated that feeling, the after-the-party feeling, and so they’d fallen into the habit of the all-night drive.

  Anna and Russ were sleeping in the back and Will was driving. Lily was sitting up front with him, because Lily had a weird fascination with the turn-off signs that marked the way to Canada. She said that seeing them made the world feel smaller.

  They had the radio on, softly, so it wouldn’t wake the others. All you need is love by the Beatles, and Lily had her head against the glass of the door beside her, and that made a faint reflection of her face appear in the glass like a ghostly halo of her real skin, and the night was quiet and vast and they were young and happy and there was music on the radio and Will wanted to capture it all in amber, to leave a part of himself behind in this moment for the rest of time.

  “Let’s get tattoos when we get home,” Lily said suddenly, as if she’d somehow managed to read Will’s mind. “Just because.”

  “What should we get?”

  “All you need is love,” Lily replied. “Love is all you need.”

  So they did, on their wrists, in small and neat black letters. “All you need is love,” on the inside of Lily’s right, over the tracery of her veins and the thick red scar she’d put there when they were eighteen and Will had found her before she’d lost too much. She’d needed stitches and a transfusion and counselling and Will had been so angry at her that he’d been silent and furious for a week before being able to even look at her.

  But now when he looked at her arm the scar wasn’t the first thing that drew his eye. The tattoo was too vivid for that. All you need is love.

  Will got the second half, the ‘love is all you need’, on his left wrist, so when Lily held his hand and squeezed their words would press together, become a fragment of a song. From the first time they’d written a song together Will knows that the pair of them weren’t simple arithmetic—they were alchemy, a reaction of ingredients mixed to make a potion. And now their bodies were too.

  LILY

  All dislike of magical realism aside (which is a legitimate dislike; Lily likes her flights of fantasy with more swords and less whimsy), Lily wakes up on the evening of the premiere feeling like complete shit. If she’d felt like this back when she was alive, she’d have called her doctor about having her meds adjusted, and then curled up on the couch in one of her softest hoodies with her legs across Will’s lap, watching old cartoons from the eighties and waiting for the cloud to pass.

  But she can’t do any of that now—the electricity got shut off in the warehouse a couple of days ago, so even the cartoons are out, and Lily doesn’t know which power company Will had their account with—so instead she pulls her phone out and messages Jay.

  i cant come 2 movie. feel shitty. srry

  He writes back almost straight away, because his hand is grafted to his phone. Lily thinks it’s cute, and it’s distinctly different from Anna and Russ’s habitual lack of technological accessories. Lily likes that her new friends can’t seamlessly slip into the void left by the old.

  ok, Jay’s message to her says.

  i’ll invte ash insted.

  Then he sends another. Take care.

  She calls Rose and Tommy’s house line, because Rose is so lacking in technological expertise that her phone is practically never on.

  “Hello?”

  “Tommy? It’s Lil. Is Rose there?”

  “Yeah, sure.” There’s a scuffling sound as he pulls the phone away from his face. “Rosie! Lily’s on the phone!” Then, back in conversational tones. “You’re not coming to the movies tonight?”

  “Do you and Jay share a brain or something? Because that’s pretty kinky, you know.”

  “I’m just generally psychic,” Tommy says, voice in his usual deadpan monotone. If Lily didn’t feel like utter shit, she’d laugh. “Here’s Rosie.”

  “Yeah? Rose says. She sounds about as cheerful as Lily feels.

  “I want to kill things,” Lily says.

  “Okay,” answers Rose. “Meet me downtown in forty minutes. You can crash back here after.”

  “Okay. Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  Lily washes her face and gets dressed and drinks three cups of cold, old tea from a thermos to damp down her thirst, then steps outside to face the night.

  ~

  Rose isn’t an especially good fighter, but Lily thinks that whatever small amount of poetic justice there is in the world is centered on letting Rose win her tangles with the vampires they come up against. She fights like willpower alone will keep her burning; a rage too big to be taken down by enemies.

  They kill a few, and wound a few more. It’s a good night. The darkness inside Lily doesn’t lift or lighten, and so she pushes on despite it, and then lies in Rose’s basement and stares at the sunrise shadows on the ceiling until sleep finally pulls her down.

  ~

  Next evening, the wait to get outside becomes more frustrating after night falls. Lily fidgets and paces, restless, unable to concentrate on anything. The sensation’s enough like hunger that for a minute she’s afraid of herself and what she might do to Rose, but after the feeling sharpens a little more she knows that it’s not hunger for blood. It’s hunger for movement and touch and smell and starry air above and lighted windows and sidewalk crowds and everything else it’s possible to experience.

  Vampires are born starving, and nothing will calm the ravenous need in them after that. Lily’s beginning to understand just how big the change in her is. The blood’s just the drug. The high is everything else in the world.

  Finally, finally, after ten, Tommy and Rose’s mom and dad go to bed, and Tommy leads Lily through the dark house to the back door. The kitchen smells like the spaghetti the family had for dinner, and the traces of cigarette Rose brought up from the basement on her hair and clothes, and hairspray and deodorant and soda and wine and coffee. Life carries so many scents with it, so casually. It makes Lily realise how stale and still the warehouse has become, nothing but damp herbs and garlic to show that even the dead inhabit it. Maybe she should get one of those room atomiser diffuser things they advertise on TV to make houses smell good. The commercials usually have cartoon butterflies and flowers and shit in them. There should be a special vampire one with crimson cartoon roses and bats coming out of it. Makes your crypt smell graveyard-fresh.

  The garden air is chill and wonderful on Lily’s skin. She feels like she’s able to breathe again, which is pretty hilarious since breathing’s not something she needs to make a habit of anymore.

  A soft sound in the branches of the tree that grows up beside Tommy’s room catches Lily’s attention. It’s a tiny sound, almost silent, just a twig snapping, but Lily can hear everything in the night now.

  Bette is perched, lightly balanced as a cat, on one of the topmost central branches. She’s dressed in ankle boots of supple black leather, fastened with tiny silver buckles, fishnet stockings that make her white skin underneath look even whiter, colder. Her well-cut skirt and close-cropped bolero jacket are midnight blue velvet, and her blouse is soft, clinging silver silk.

  Her black hair is in sweet little spit-curls around her impish face, but her inky lashes can’t distract from the red of her eyes, her candy-bright lips don’t hide the fangs in her grin. Bette looks beautiful, and dead.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Lily growls, hoping her voice is too quiet to alert any of the people inside the house.

  “Well, sunsh
ine,” Bette answers, dropping soundlessly to the grass, crossing her arms as she smirks at Lily. “I was thinking I’d go in through the window, sprinkle fairy dust on them, and tell them to think happy thoughts.”

  Lily’s tone is low and forceful. “You stay away from them.”

  Bette snorts. “That’s rich, coming from you.”

  “I’ve never touched them.”

  This earns a roll of Bette’s eyes. “Yeah, yeah, okay. I’m just returning some comics I borrowed off Tommy. Is that okay, oh princess of the moral high ground?” She reaches into a slim black leather purse hanging from one shoulder, drawing out a care-worn book. “I’ll drop it off and be on my way, if that’ll save me a scene from you.” Bette smirks, scratching at the forearm of her jacket sleeve absently. “I learned the hard way not to get on your bad side.”

  Lily shakes her head, not having the faintest idea what Bette’s on about. “Huh?”

  Bette scowls. “Whatever. Ancient history.” She nimbly scrambles up the branches again. “I’ll be out in two minutes. You can stick around and time me.”

  Lily waits and worries, wondering if she should go in and play chaperon and make sure that Tommy’s safe. Weirdly, she trusts Bette—if Bette wanted to kill Tommy or Rose, they would probably be long dead by now.

  Bette slips down the window and lands gracefully on the ground, giving Lily a shit-eating I-told-you-so grin. “Howdy. What are we doing now?”

  Lily grits her teeth. “Well, I’m gonna go kill some vampires. So you might want to go the hell away, if you don’t want to be one of them.”

  “Ooh, can I help?” Bette’s grin gets even wider. “That sounds awesome fun.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Testy, testy.” Bette shakes her head. “Come on. I dare you. Reform me. Let me come kill vampires with you.”

  Lily needs to believe in redemption right now, God help her, so she says “Okay. Follow me.”

  WILL