If she hadn’t been watching, she wouldn’t have seen the way the boy she didn’t recognise tipped his head back a little as he laughed, or the way his fangs caught the light for a split-second and flashed.
She hadn’t really been thinking. She’d just acted by instinct, stupid gut instinct, and it’s sort of hilarious how she was still idiotic enough to trust her gut when she knew how often she made shitty choices and how many of her impulses were bad ideas. But she didn’t stop and consider any of that. She just saw a vampire, there among the kids she cared about, the kids she thought of as part of the world she’d built around herself. Her little gun had been in her hands and her finger had twitched on the trigger, like it couldn’t believe that one little pull of tiny finger muscles could do so much damage so easily. She’d grazed the vampire and the kids had all scattered into the night. It’s one of the last memories Lily has before the blank empty patch that spans the events of her death.
“Right,” Lily says, noticing suddenly that Jay’s waiting for her. “Timothy. Got it.”
“Well, um. The thing about Timothy is that he got hurt. Really badly hurt. A couple of decades ago. I don’t know how long he’d been around before then, but when he got hurt he kind of… reset. It’s what vampire brains do. They grow back when damaged, same as the rest of your body can if it gets hurt or anything, but the blueprint it has to work off for the growing-back is a blueprint of the brain you had when you stopped being alive. Everything he’d done since then got… wiped, basically. It’s not like the memories still exist somewhere in his head but he’s repressed them or locked them away or something. They’re physically gone.”
Lily considers all this for a few long seconds, then nods. “I think… something like that happened to me when I died. I showed up at the warehouse with a serious head wound. I was already a vampire. My skull was fractured. Will shut me in a closet to keep me out of the light, and when I woke up I couldn’t remember much of anything—nothing at all after becoming a vampire. That sounds like the same thing that happened to Timothy, except that I only lost a couple of hours or so. My brain only lost a little bit of new data when it reset.”
Jay looks at her. Jay doesn’t go in for big expressions that often—he and Tommy tend to stick to ‘aloof condescension’ as a general rule—but right now he looks shocked and a little sick. “You don’t know any of what happened on the night you died,” he says flatly. It isn’t a question, but Lily shakes her head in reply anyway.
“Nope. None of it.”
Jay presses his lips together in a thin line and looks away from her, like he can’t bear to meet her eyes. “Do you want to?”
“I know it was your friends,” Lily says, trying to keep her voice calm. She’s not angry at Jay, not really. Lily’s willing to bet that being him isn’t any less difficult than being her is. “That didn’t take rocket science to work out. I tried to shoot… Timothy? Is that right? I tried to shoot Timothy that night and then a couple of days later I get killed by vampires. That’s a pretty simple chain of cause and effect to follow. All you could tell me is why they brought me back. That’s the only part I’ve never understood.”
Jay shakes his head. “That wasn’t how it went. Alex was angry about Timothy. That’s why… that’s why you died so violently. Alexander is. Is another vampire I know. God. This is so, so fucked. It’s good… it’s good you don’t remember, I think. It was bad. Alexander wanted to make it last for longer than it did, but Blake made him stop. Blake said it was tedious and that they had better things to occupy their time. I think that was for me as much as for you. He knows I like you. That I like your band. He likes you too, that’s why you came back. It was never about punishment. But -” Jay lets out a weary breath. “- I don’t think that’s enough to stop him. It wouldn’t be. I think he’d torture somebody he liked in a situation he felt suited that decision. If it would be interesting, or entertaining. He knows I don’t like it. I think that’s why he stopped Alexander, when Alexander was hurting you. Because he knows I don’t like it when he tortures people. God, I’m rambling, aren’t I? Shit.”
“It’s okay, dude. Deep breath,” Lily says, feeling a little worried. She’s never seen Jay lose it like this.
“That’s getting away from what I was saying. What I was getting at was that it wasn’t like that. Blake didn’t kill you because you shot at Timothy. That was just the… it was like the match that hit the gunpowder, I guess. The explosion was always going to happen eventually. It was planned.”
Lily is completely lost. She gives Jay a quizzical look. “Huh?”
“Blake picked you out. Years ago. He wants you and Will to be part of his gang someday.”
WILL
Sofie’s Journal:
And so began the second patch of calm in my life. It was as different to the first as two stretches of safety could be, but I nevertheless felt a little of who I’d once been returning. Like buds after winter—or snails on sidewalks after rain, before soles come down and drive sharp splinters of their shell through their soft bodies.
I became obsessed with always having a contingency plan. I demanded Liam teach me all he could about the things he knew: forgery, theft, breaking into houses, killing. Though I had more than my share of bloody nightmares and an eccentric appetite, I didn’t have any sort of personal interested in blood and murder yet. I didn’t want to be a vampire, I hated all vampires but Liam, and I only loved him grudgingly.
Jay was young enough to be enrolled in an ordinary school, a very exclusive one. I’d missed less than a year of classes, and my cleverness had begun to reassert itself, but I was too bruised psychologically for a mainstream education to do much of anything for me. I utterly adored the stern Catholic reform school Liam enrolled me in, full of other girls with their own difficulties and furies, and the nuns who tried to speak to me in the sternest of tones, as if anything in the daylight world of classrooms and lessons could ever be frightening again.
We had to change cities twice, when Liam thought his secret was compromised. I don’t think Jay liked moving very much. He was always a quiet kid, but there was something about him—an unchildlike intensity—that gave him a spiky charisma. He never had a problem making friends. I never had a problem keeping potential friends away, and thus unencumbered I loved these changes of location. It was escapism on the largest of scales, breaking free of all the ties we had to a life and place.
I got sicker. We tried drugs for my paranoia and my rages, and some of the strongest ones helped a little—Abilify, Clozaril, Clozapine, Ziprasidone , Risperdal, Seroquel, Zyprexa; the list became a nursery rhyme of names that sounded like black magic spells—and counselling helped a little more. There’s a psychiatrist or two in every city who knows how to listen to problems that sound more like the half-boiled plots of b-grade horror than mental health conditions. The nightmares got worse anyway. I was expelled from one school for biting another child.
I knew that my chances of survival were never very good. Children almost never survive being bitten by a vampire, and I’d been bitten multiple times. I would be all right if I became a vampire, but I told Liam flatly and with no discussion that I would never, ever consent to that. So we tried other treatments: fruit extracts, drug cocktails, iron-rich diets, iron-deficient diets. I didn’t go through puberty naturally, so we added hormone therapies to the mix. As I write this, I’m just shy of turning nineteen, but my body hasn’t changed since I was thirteen years old—no height, no puppy fat. I’ve never menstruated and I don’t expect I ever will.
My heart began to fail around the same time I stopped growing. I hated having to be careful with myself, not wearing myself out—what thirteen-year-old wouldn’t? And I put myself through more punishment than most thirteen-year-olds. I wanted to be strong enough, quick enough, clever enough that I would never, ever be captured again.
Shortly before my fourteenth birthday I began sleep walking. I’d had a few incidents of it as a very, very little girl, but none since then,
until now. I’d wake up and find myself standing in Jay’s room—he slept slightly different hours to me, because he didn’t flinch at daylight as I had come to do. Sometimes I had a knife in my hand, one of the sharp clean ones Liam kept in his study, the ones well-practiced at slicing human skin.
I always woke up before I hurt him, but how could I be comforted by a mercy that small?
I went to Liam and wept. I begged him to kill me. I demanded that he find some way to save me. He held my wrists, stopping me from hurting myself with the knife I still clutched, and told me in his soft, kind voice that he couldn’t do that. He wouldn’t kill me. And I was already as saved as I could be, after what had been done to me. His only suggestion was that he could buy a lock for Jay’s door, to keep Jay safe from me as we slept.
But I knew that couldn’t fix anything. What about if I got worse, and tried to attack Jay while he was awake, doing his homework in our dining room or practicing his guitar in the lounge? He’d never asked for the self-defense training I’d demanded. He’d be no match for me. And what was the remedy for that? More locks on more doors, making prisoners of us both once again. I hadn’t gone through all the heartache I’d endured just to put Jay inside a cage again. I wouldn’t.
On my fourteenth birthday I packed a small suitcase before dawn, then hid it away in the bottom of my cupboard and sat through my early morning celebrations, as Liam and Jay gave me presents and hugs and smiles and tried to be cheerful. Then Jay went to school and Liam went to bed, and I took the suitcase out and went to the bus station and bought a ticket for as far as I could go.
And that’s the way it’s been ever since. I move from place to place, breaking into the strongholds of vampires and freeing their captives whenever I can. Sometimes there’s someone who reminds me of me; a boy or a girl with bite bruises healing on their skin. Sometimes when I’m falling asleep I wonder what happens to them after I turn them loose. If any of them will live long enough to end up like me. I hope so. My life is not an easy one, but even a difficult life is a better fate than death.
I don’t kill vampires but I’ve killed some rapists. It’s much less dangerous, and the bloodthirstiness needs an out somehow. Nobody ever thinks much about that term, about the literal meaning of the two words mashed together. It’s like ‘cocksure’. When I see it, or just ‘cocky’, it makes me think ‘confident’. Maybe a little too confident. Someone a bit self-important and puffed-out, like a rooster. Cock-a-doodle-do. But the word is much simpler than that. Cock-sure. Power-sure. Prowess-sure. And bloodthirsty is the same. It’s a terribly simple word. Blood-thirsty.
Sometimes I think Liam is following me. I’m a skilled tracker; I can spot the signs. I don’t think Jay’s with him. There’s no evidence, and Jay’s social network pages say he’s still living in Chicago, which is where I left him when I ran away. He’s looking older than me, lately. I’m not sure how I feel about that. Pride and envy, perhaps. Envy and pride.
I think about sending him an email, but I don’t know what I could possibly say apart from ‘I’m sorry’, and even that’s a lie. I’m not sorry I gave him a chance to grow up and have a safe human life. I never will be, no matter how alone I am.
That’s my story. There’s nothing else to say. The drugs are still working. I’m not dying yet. I just go on, escaping as often as I can.
~
At the next gas station Sofie steals an insulated bag from the small grocery area, the kind people use to keep refrigerated food and drink cold on picnics and road trips.
“I could have paid for that,” Will says in a weary tone. Sofie ignores him.
“I gotta swing by the hospital in Denver,” she says instead, putting her hair back into a tangled pale ponytail and fastening it with a broken, re-knotted elastic band. Like all the things owned by Sofie, the hair-tie seems determined to carry on despite wear and tear well beyond its lifespan. If it weren’t so true, Will would think the observation forced metaphor, but instead it just is what it is. Sofie doesn’t seem like the kind of person who’s ever had much use for abstract narrative concepts like metaphors, for all that they pepper her too-old-for-her-years written voice.
“I’ll drive you,” Will says, because he knows she’ll go either way, so he might as well save her the walk.
“What about your sister?”
Will’s been thinking about that. “I think… I think I’m gonna tell her everything. I’ve never lied to her about anything before. I’m not sure I even know how. So the only way I’m gonna be able to keep her in my life, without lying to her, is if I tell her the truth.”
“Brave soul,” Sofie replies, but Will doesn’t feel brave. He doesn’t feel brave at all.
~
Like Will, Jenny was heavyset as a child—he tends to think they probably ended up that way because of their father’s inability to have anything resembling a stable home life, much less a child-nurturing growth environment—but, unlike Will, she didn’t slim down when puberty hit. Instead, her newly gained height and her lingering weight combined to make her body kind of decadent, a graceful frame of curves and flesh that could have given her a tidy career as a plus-size model if Jenny had ever had any interest whatsoever in being a model. The only ambition Will had ever know her to have was to save the world.
Since the last time he saw her, she’s switched her bright red hair for vivid blue dreadlocks. It’s after ten at night, which Will only realizes after he’s knocked on her door, but she’s still dressed in jeans and an old olive-green army surplus jacket with a collection of random shirt buttons sewed onto the pocket.
Jenny’s always been a cute kid, but since Will last laid eyes on her she’s grown up beautiful.
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me you were coming,” she says instead of hello, grabbing him in what would be a breath-stealing hug if he breathed. “You’re practically frozen! Are you looking after yourself?”
“Hi to you, too,” Will replies, laughing, as he pulls back from the hug. Her eyes narrow as she looks at his face.
“What’s wrong with your eyes?”
So much for passing as human. Good thing Will had already decided to tell Jenny the truth; it doesn’t look like he’d’ve had the option to do otherwise.
“I can explain. I will explain, I promise,” Will says. “Maybe we can go inside, or -”
“Let’s go in your car. Shelly’s asleep,” Jenny answers.
Sofie’s moved to the back seat, leaving the shotgun free for Jenny to ride beside Will.
“Jenny, this is Sofie. Sofie, this is Jenny.”
“Hey,” Jenny says brightly. Will’s always been vaguely baffled at how his disaster of a family managed to generate someone as unflappable as Jenny. She likes everyone, rolls with all the punches, and believes that the world is a wonderful place. If they didn’t have similar features and complexions—back when Will had a complexion that wasn’t dead white, anyway—Will might have been tempted to think she’d been switched at birth, and that there was some excellent family out there burdened with an awkward, neurotic girl of just Jenny’s age.
“Hi,” Sofie manages, the brittle antithesis of Jenny’s naturally open nature. Sofie gives Jenny a hard, short-lived smile of greeting, then turns her attention back to Will. “Can we go to the hospital now?”
Jenny looks at Will in worried surprise. “Hospital? Are you okay?”
“ I’m just driving Sofie there,” he promises. “Jen… all the stuff I gotta tell you, you can’t tell Dad any of it. Not a word.”
“When I email Dad to say I miss him, he puts money in my bank account. We don’t talk about much. You’re safe.”
Will smiles. “Yeah, that’s Dad for you.”
“He’s not great at mimicking human emotions,” Jenny agrees jokingly. Sofie busies herself testing the Velcro fastening on her stolen cooler bag. Will clears his throat.
“What do you need at the hospital?” he asks her.
“Gauze. Suture thread. Tape, bandages, hydrogen peroxide.
Almost all my supplies are low.”
“Can I buy you a first-aid kit instead? Please? One little instance of law-abiding won’t hurt, I promise.” Will tries to keep his tone light and good-natured, but he hopes Sofie can hear that it’s a serious offer.
“Blood,” Sofie goes on in the same breezy tone, giving Will a thorny look in response to his interruption. “Bitter melon extract, if the pharmacy stocks it. St John’s Wort. Morphine. Plasma. Oestrogen, the sort male-to-female transgendered people use. I can use ordinary birth control pills if I have to, but my body behaves better with the medical dose.”
“Bitter melon extract?” Jenny asks, apparently untroubled by Sofie’s shopping list. “Shelly’s taking that. She says ginger ale’s good too, if you’re into alternative complimentary therapies and stuff.”
“I chew ginger root,” Sofie answers, giving Jenny a tentative, friendly look in the rearview. “Thanks.”
“Shelly’s sick? Is she okay?” Will asks.
“Yeah, yeah, she’s good. She’s not sick. She’s been seropositive about six months or so. You know, HIV.” Jenny looks out the window, her voice quiet.
“Does Dad know?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry. I wish… I’m just sorry.” Will doesn’t know what else to say. Jenny shakes her head.
“It’s cool. It’s not like we’re the closest family,” she says, still quiet. Sofie watches the dark road out her own window, a faint look of surprise on her small features. Like she didn’t expect ordinary people to have lives as screwed up as the ones in her world.
“I’m a vampire,” Will says then, because there’s nothing like dropping a bombshell to break a silence.
“What? No you’re not.”
“Am.” Will glances away from the road for long enough to open his mouth and bare his teeth at her. Jenny readjusts her glasses on her nose, peering at him and shaking her head.
The Wolf House: The Complete Series Page 30