The Wolf House: The Complete Series

by Mary Borsellino

  Sofie heads for the little book display at the truck-stop and focuses on the non-fiction, and Will follows.

  “I should read up about… hm.” Sofie chews on her lower lip. “What do you think? Homeopathy or martial arts? I should get both, really, but I’m feeling lazy.” She flashes him a smile that’s still twitchy and on-edge, like all her expressions, but her posture is a little more relaxed than her usual poised stance.

  “Can you read while a car’s moving, or do you get motion sick?”

  Sofie sighs and nods ruefully. “Yeah, I can read while we drive, you’re right. I’ll get both.”

  “No, no. I meant you should get some fun stuff. If you try to study while you’re moving, you’ll fall asleep. Trust me, I napped every commute to and from my last few years of high school. It’s the most reliable sleeping pill on earth.”

  Sofie raises her small sharp chin a little, her expression proud. “Not me. I’ve got discipline.”

  Will forces himself not to roll his eyes. “Nevertheless. Get something fun. Something you actually want to read, not what you think you should be reading.”

  “Okay, okay. You buzz off and browse and let me pick, then.”

  “The fiction’s on the other side,” Will points out helpfully.

  “I enjoy non-fiction,” Sofie insists obstinately. “Go away.”

  Will admits defeat, smiling as he walks away. He doesn’t want to get anything, but wanders the few bare little aisles of the store anyway to give Sofie time to fire up her long-neglected ability to like things just for the sake of liking them.

  When he’d been younger, he’d had to read a lot in order to teach himself all the science and engineering they’d needed for their weapons, and for the cocktail mixture. He’d never had any brain cells left over to fill up with fun.

  Sometimes Lily would demand that he read some book or another, so she’d have someone to talk to about it. She and Anna’d always argued about anything they both had an interest in, and while Will knew that Lily loved those arguments, he also knew that sometimes she wanted someone who could chat about things without making it a battle. That always made Will smirk, just a bit, because Lily was the most aggressive conversationalist of any of them. That was why Russ was an unsatisfactory reading-buddy for her—he’d give any idea, no matter how pretentious or simplistic, due thought. Lily preferred being able to speak in absolutes from time to time, wild conjecture and outright dismissal.

  When Will had presented these theories to Lily as the reasons why she kept on giving him Kerouac and Ginsberg to read even though he wasn’t clever enough for them, she’d grinned her big, wide, awkward smile that always seemed too big for her face, like a Photoshop manip gone askew.

  “It’s because I like talking to you, weirdo. You’re such a dumbass.”

  Which had been Will’s point in the first place, but Lily never listened.

  LILY

  When the last vampire’s dead, Bette goes over to the only human on the empty street, the almost-victim, who is sitting against the wall, trembling and sobbing. Bette offers a hand down and the girl takes it, and in a movement that Lily can see clearly but which must be quick as a zipping dragonfly to the girl, Bette has the girl’s arm twisted behind her, into the small of her back. Bette’s other hand pulls on the bright garland of beads hanging around the girl’s neck and snaps their cord, letting the necklace fall in a light clatter to the sidewalk, and then tangles her hand in the girl’s thick brown hair, wrenches the girl’s head back, and bites down on her bare, bare throat.

  It’s a good-quality necklace. There are knots between each bead to stop them spilling every which way if the string breaks. It lies in one little line, rainbow colors dull in the dark. A tiny scribble in the night. The girl is trying to scream, but the sounds coming from her mouth are the small whimpers of an animal that doesn’t comprehend what’s causing it to hurt. Bette is making a mess, gulping and slurping at the wound in a way that leaves much of the blood free to slide in rivulets over the girl’s thin white collarbones and the soft turquoise of her summer dress.

  Lily’s mouth aches to taste.

  Her hunting knife is still in her hand. Bette’s vulnerable like this, lost in a moment Lily can only imagine. It’s probably too late to save the girl, but Lily could avenge her, and all the other girls and boys Bette has doubtless killed on this and other nights. Would it be easier for Rose and Tommy to mourn and move on if Bette was really dead? Would the human Bette was before want Lily to do this, to destroy the creature she’s become?

  But Rose’s words to her from another night echo in Lily’s thoughts, a swirl of darker misery mixing in with her hunger, with the lure of the blood. It’s Lily’s fault that Bette has become this, as surely as if she’d killed the girl herself.

  Lily wonders if Bette can remember the particulars of how she died, or if those first hours and days are a blank in her memory like they are in Lily’s.

  The girl is dying now, and Bette works at the wound, trying to catch the last pulses of the faltering heart. The turquoise dress is streaked with long dark ribbons from neckline to hem, and Lily bites at her own lip to keep from moving any closer to it. Her palm tightens involuntarily around the handle of the knife, but she can’t bring herself to step in and plunge it into Bette’s temple; to incapacitate her for long enough that Lily will be able to sever her head and kill her forever.

  The girl dies with a final gasping choke, dimming eyes fixed on the light-haze that hides the real night sky from view above them. It’s never dark in the city, not truly. Bette lets the body slump to the ground, a skew of limbs at wrong angles and sticky, marked skin. She tilts her head to one side, staring at Lily as Lily stares at her and at her prey, and then Bette laughs. It’s an unkind, mocking sound.

  “Does it break your stupid code if they’re already leftovers?” she asks, turning on one booted heel and walking away without waiting for an answer.

  “See you, Lily,” she calls, glancing over one shoulder for a moment as she speaks. “It was good to catch up.”

  When she’s gone, Lily’s left alone with the body. The torn side of the girl’s throat is down against the sidewalk, a trickle of blood spreading out and working its way into the tangle of her hair. The unmarked skin of the other side of her neck is naked and turned up to the air, and Lily takes a step toward it before turning and running away.

  There’ll be other vampires out tonight, hunting, and Lily’s going to kill as many as possible before morning.

  WILL

  Sofie’s Journal:

  It took me a long time to recover from my grief enough to notice that I was still alive. In fact, it took the looming reality of my own approaching death to remind me that I wasn’t dead yet. It’s funny how that can happen. How you feel most alive in the moments when your life’s most fragile.

  I wasn’t kept for long. I think the vampires could tell I was a threat. Jay told me that they rarely took in children as old as me—they preferred babies or toddlers, children who barely knew what being human meant to begin with. Jay didn’t know how long he’d been there. He couldn’t remember anything else.

  Once the vampires decided that I shouldn’t be kept alive any longer, their routine with me changed. No longer the hypodermics, the long awful needles they used to draw blood out of our femoral arteries. Now they bit. My wrists, usually, to reduce the risk that they’d get carried away and kill me all at once. It wasn’t often they had the chance to drink from a living body. They wanted to draw it out as long as I could survive.

  So I got out. It wasn’t so difficult, even with Jay in tow. Jay was five. But the security system was designed to stop people getting into the premises. The vampires had never thought any of the children would be able to think enough to break out.

  I’d had a book on Harry Houdini when I was a very little girl. I’d gone to a magic show and talked incessantly about it on my return home—the preschool version of arch hinting, because I wanted a fluffy white bunny rabbit of m
y very own. What I got was several books on illusion and tricks and escapism. I became obsessed with one particular story from Houdini’s career. He’d been performing a trick in Melbourne, Australia. The city’s notorious even now for its organised crime syndicates, both human and vampire, and has been for most of its life.

  Houdini was dropped into Melbourne’s river, bound in his straitjacket, and as he began the process of extricating himself he noticed that he wasn’t alone, down in the gritty green silt. There was an execution victim, weighed down with stones so that the body would stay sunken. That image horrified and fascinated me. Haunted my dreams.

  I learned to pick locks and to move like liquid through tiny spaces, to twist my malleable young bones out of confining cocoons, never dreaming I would need the trick for anything more important than showing off to my family.

  But I did. I needed to save my life, and to save Jay. And I did.

  Our body clocks weren’t used to sleeping through the night, but by day the city was too noisy and alive for Jay to settle. I stole food for him, and clothes, and hoped that his wide stares and enchantment with the most mundane of sights would be taken by those around us as some kind of special-needs condition, rather than the evidence of terrible neglect that it really was.

  It was my fault we were caught. I did my best to make Jay presentable, but didn’t even think to look at myself. It’d been so long since I saw the image of my face in a mirror. But I was blood-smeared and my hair was a mass of knots and snares. In hindsight I am surprised and saddened that it was almost two days before anyone reported two children on the street who looked like they needed help.

  We were taken to a hospital, and when the doctors told us that our father was on the way to pick us up I began to look for ways to kill Jay and then myself. I couldn’t go back there. I couldn’t let him go back there. I was only nine years old. Vampires make the whole world monstrous.

  I don’t remember the next few days at all. Jay told me his recollections of them, later, but my own memory is a confused mess, like the snatches of dreams that stay with us when we wake. I remember clean water in a bathtub, and somebody brushing my hair. I remember a soft bed, and clinging to Jay as I fell asleep to the sound of morning birdsong. I remember porridge with raisins and cinnamon in it. It was the best food I had ever tasted in the whole world.

  And I remember, one evening, when I was clean and rested and safe, sitting down in a leather armchair much too big for a little girl, sitting opposite a vampire with a long scar down one cheek and old, thoughtful eyes, and I remember that when he promised me he’d protect me from now on, I believed him.

  ~

  They begin the next night with a pit stop at the first burger place they drive past. Families and tour groups and truckers are all eating dinner, and the dining area is lit up and noisy and plastic-bright.

  Sofie goes to the counter and orders a truly stupendous amount of food, while Will goes to the rest room and washes his face. There’s a young man in there as well, age somewhere in his mid-twenties, with a choppy asymmetrical haircut dyed in wide streaks of red and black. His skin is honey-brown and he’s short and athletically built, and reminds Will so very much of Lily that Will can’t help but stretch his mind out tentatively, trying to nudge the man’s consciousness without hurting him.

  Will’s never tried to do anything like this since… since before he died, and then only by accident against Timothy and Blake, and so it’s a lot like shooting in the dark. The young man slumps over the washbasin, unmoving, and it’s not until Will checks his pulse and breathing that Will even knows if he’s accidentally killed this poor guy or not.

  Will carries the young man into one of the stalls and snaps the lock on the door closed, the fingers of his other hand still pressed down against the steady pulse in the man’s soft throat. Will opens his mouth and bites down and drinks and drinks and drinks. Then he pulls back and grabs a length of toilet paper from the roll, blotting the wounds on the man’s neck and wiping his own mouth clean. He props the man against the wall and, feeling guilty, tucks a couple of twenties into the man’s hand. The guy’s going to wake up with a bad headache, at the very least.

  He washes his face at the basin a second time, then goes out to join Sofie. She’s working her way through her own evening breakfast, munching on her large side order of fries with a contented look on her face. The knapsack at her feet, which was empty the last time Will saw her, is stuffed almost to bursting.

  Knowing he’s going to regret it, Will picks the knapsack off the slightly sticky linoleum floor and opens it slightly.

  “Did you take this stuff out of the kitchen?”

  Sofie nods. “Not my fault if they didn’t notice me wandering around in there. Some poor kid could get hurt by one of those deep fryers, you know. It’s pretty unsafe that they don’t try harder to keep customers out.”

  “I imagine they never thought their sugar packets, industrial fire blankets, and supply of ketchup posed a significant theft risk,” Will retorts dryly. “And how many children’s meal toys are in here? You’re fourteen, you can’t still be that into Sesame Street.”

  “I told you, I’m nineteen,” Sofie replies. “And when I rescue those little girls in Santa Monica, you’re gonna be glad I’ve got something shiny to keep them occupied. Bored kids are a liability.”

  “Oh,” Will says, abashed. “Right.”

  Sofie moves on from her fries to her burger. “Want some of my soda? I get free refills.”

  “No thanks, I’m not thirsty.”

  “I think I can see why.” Sofie nods in the direction of the men’s room, smirking. Will turns to follow her line of sight. The young man, looking pale and sickly, has stumbled out and is now walking in a wavering path toward the door to the parking lot. “You know,” Sofie goes on. “When you said you tried not to kill people, I thought you were just spinning bullshit to get me to trust you. You’re a surprising dude.”

  Will gives her a long, searching look. “You thought that, and still let me into your home?”

  Sofie shrugs. “I told you. I’ll kill you if you try to hurt me. And I don’t spin bullshit.”

  LILY

  Lily’s phone wakes her. She never used to keep it near her when she slept, because of lingering paranoia about getting cancer from the invisible radiation and all the other evil stuff that the TV was always saying could happen. But now she’s pretty sure that she’s not going to get any less healthy than she already is, since she’s dead and all. She checks the caller ID on the display screen as she presses the accept button.

  “Hi Jay, what’s up?”

  “If you had, uh, a hypothetical friend, and he was. Hypothetically. He, uh. Had a fight with some vampires. Not the kind of fights you get into with vampires or anything. Nobody killing anyone else. Just an, um, argument, and he was feeling kind of crappy and wanted to talk to someone about —”

  “My hypothetical friend Jay, would you like to get a hypothetical cup of coffee and talk about these hypothetical problems?” Lily asks, trying not to smile.

  “I’ll meet you at that new place?”

  “Ugh, they burn their beans; does it have to be there?”

  “It’s not like you’re going to be drinking the coffee, what do you care?”

  Lily sniffs. “Principle of the thing. Bad coffee is a human rights abuse.”

  “I need friends who are grown-ups,” Jay sighs.

  ~

  The too-fashionable decor inside the coffee shop is pretty comfy for sitting around in, that much Lily is willing to grudgingly concede. She sips at her cup of tea—ugh, seriously, how do they get black tea wrong? You put the bag and the water in a cup, who ruins that? Aside from that time in HomeEc class when Lily managed to destroy Teflon with the power of her mind or something, that shit was crazy, and Anna was way out of line to laugh at her over what was obviously a freak act of God or something.

  “What’s funny?” Jay asks. Lily shakes her head, still smiling a little.
<
br />   “Nothing. Good memory. What is it you wanted to talk to me about?”

  Jay takes a small drink of his hot chocolate. “It’s dumb.”

  “You’re talking to a girl who once played a Halloween gig dressed in a Rainbow Brite costume. I can handle dumb.”

  Jay sighs. “I didn’t know who else I could call. Tommy’s got enough to worry about with his sister spending all her time trying to be some badass monster killer or getting drunk and picking fights with people online. And Michelle, I dunno. I want to keep her out of this if I can.”

  “Rose says there’s nobody left out of it. That everyone’s a soldier or a victim, and I made Bette a victim when I stopped her from being a soldier,” Lily says quietly, fiddling with her teacup to give her hands something to do. It’s been served to her on a little china saucer, but instead of making her feel dainty and ladylike she just feels awkward and grubby and tomboyish. She wishes she could’ve gotten a soda or a milkshake or something instead.

  Jay gives her a weird look. “Do you and Rose talk about Bette much?”

  “What’s to talk about? Rose lost her best friend and now there’s one more vampire running around out there, killing other people’s best friends. I don’t think Walgreens sell a condolence card with a little poem inside that’s really appropriate to the situation.”

  “I meant, because, you know…” Jay gives her the weird look again, and then looks troubled when it doesn’t get whatever reaction he was obviously expecting. “Um. Never mind.” He presses his lips together in a thin line for a moment, like he’s coming to a decision, and then asks. “Have I ever told you about Timothy?”

  Lily shakes her head.

  “Okay, well. Timothy’s, um. The guy you tried to shoot, in the club that night.”

  It had been just another night, a little club show, and then Lily had caught sight of all the kids sitting together in one of the little booths off the dance floor. Michelle, Jay, Tommy, Rose, Bette, and a boy she didn’t recognise. Lily had been watching them because she liked the kids, liked seeing them at shows, liked the way they made her feel like she was just a messed-up kid too, rather than an adult who should be starting to know better about things.