The Wolf House: The Complete Series

by Mary Borsellino

  She told Timothy she rather liked ‘tranny’, though. The slur was short for transvestite, cross-dresser, but to Rose it could also be transform and transgress and transitory. It meant she was changing from one thing to another. It meant she was breaking out of limits that had been set too small to comfortably contain her. It was her cocoon, and she was growing secret wings.

  “The point of drag,” she’d explained to him, bright-eyed and earnest. “Is to NOT pass. It’s to wear the clothes like the dress-up costume that they are. That’s why boring people get so pissed off at drag queens and kings. The boring people want everyone to keep on pretending that the mask is a face, you know? They don’t want anybody to stop and think about the fact that women’s legs aren’t naturally hairless and their lips aren’t glossy red and their feet aren’t shaped like high-heels shape them and boobs only do that with a push-up bra. Drag mocks the fucked-up games they play with each other, because drag points out that that’s all it is. All a game.”

  Rose’s drag went both ways. In her schoolboy tie and shirt and slacks, she was a gently curved girl dressed up in the old-fashioned signifiers of young virile male power, and so they became a parody of what they’d been. And when, very occasionally—the night Timothy met her had been one such rare occasion—she dressed up in the sweet soft skirts and bows of a teenage girl, she wore it skewed: the lips too dark and full to look like anything but pretty paint, the hair brittle from dyes and showing regrowth at the root. She was a girl in girl-drag.

  Timothy had known even before he’d talked to her that she shared his love of the riot grrrls and kinderwhores and queercore performers he’d adored for so many years, because she wore her membership to that tribe on every inch visible. Rose’s very person was political, and Timothy thinks that maybe, in their short meeting, he fell a little bit in love with her. He thinks that maybe he still is.

  He’s in a mood to play tonight. But Rose is young and vulnerable and human, and Timothy’s not in the mood for a particularly cruel kind of game tonight, and so decides not to trouble her. Rose is Bette’s now, anyway, and Timothy has a healthy level of fear for Bette. Her wrath is not something he intends to bring down on himself if he can help it.

  Lily and Will are Blake’s, as sure as Rose is Bette’s, but Timothy knows that Blake won’t mind if Timothy uses them for sport; there’s an open season on tormenting the hunters. So long as they aren’t damaged too badly—only Blake is allowed to cause lasting harm to them—anything goes.

  Timothy looks down at his hand, flexing the fingers in toward the palm and then back out again. It’s all completely healed and smooth now of course, but even so he feels a pins-and-needles sensation where Lily’s bullet ripped through flesh and bone. He’s not afraid of her, not really, but probably wouldn’t find prolonged interaction with her especially entertaining. Will, on the other hand, Timothy has quite a fondness for.

  Bikini Kill had purred when Will stroked her, when Will had been held captive in the townhouse before Blake killed and turned him. Timothy thinks that endorsement-by-cat is as good a reason as any to like a person.

  Smiling to himself, Timothy begins to plan.

  ~

  Timothy’s never understood why some gangs carry weapons. His teeth and nails are excellent for the task of tearing flesh, and he knows by instinct how to use them to best advantage. Yet for some reason there are vampires who opt to use straight razors, or swords, or other kinds of blades. Even Blake seems to consider this kind of behaviour an affectation, and it’s almost beyond the realms of comprehension for something to be so silly that Blake thinks that it’s pretentious.

  Still, this quirk of fighting style is useful for the plot Timothy has come up with. He takes a town car out to the area most heavily favoured by Will for solo patrols—and really, it’s surprising that the hunters kill any vampires at all, considering how predictable so many of their movements are—and roams until he finds the location of the latest fight. Will’s fighting a few of the gang that the city’s hunters have nicknamed ‘scrabblers’, because of all the gangs, this one cares least about appearing human. Their often filthy clothing and lack of verbal communication makes them seem a little like zombies, if zombies were cunning predators and carried switchblades.

  Timothy watches from the shadows, waiting until the fight is almost completely done with before he brings the little knife in his own hand up to his throat and jerks it down sharply. The pain is blunt and hot, which seems almost funny considering that the steel was cold and razor-edged. The blood throbs out of the wound, a sluggish spreading stain down the front of the Armani jacket which Timothy remembers, belatedly, is actually one of Blake’s. Whoops.

  Timothy cups his palm over the gash and stumbles out to where Will has just killed the last of the ragtag little group he was up against. The smell of his own blood is making Timothy’s heartrate step up in excitement, which in turn is making the cut bleed faster.

  “Will?” Timothy says, and the stumble in his footstep isn’t entirely faked. It’s difficult for him to be this close to this much fresh blood without feeling a little overwhelmed, and he’s still got a hearty night’s feed in his veins. He can only imagine what a hammer to the senses it must be for blood-abstinent Will.

  “Timothy?” Will looks absolutely astounded. “What… whoa, steady.” He reaches out to help Timothy keep his balance. Will evidently has all the survival instincts of a lemming; Timothy’s not surprised he ended up dead. “That’s a nasty cut.”

  “Just a flesh wound,” Timothy replies with a shaky smile.

  Will gives a small concerned smirk. “If you’re capable of quoting Monty Python, you’re probably all right, yes.” He starts to guide Timothy in the direction of the hunters’ warehouse. “I think you should have stitches, though, come on.”

  “If I’d picked Spinal Tap, would you have decided I was terminal?”

  “Gravely ill, but probably not terminal. The really bad sign is lines from Blackadder Goes Forth.”

  Timothy can hear Will’s pulse, which has begun to quicken. The game is going just as Timothy hoped. Despite the increasing pain he feels, he manages to wince another smile.

  Will doesn’t even hesitate in bringing Timothy back to the high-ceilinged, chill warehouse that that Lily and Will have called home since before they died. And while Timothy has known the warehouse’s location since the first days it was inhabited, Will doesn’t know that Timothy already knew where they were headed.

  It’s vaguely disturbing, kind of like Timothy imagines that the crooked old carnival owners on Scooby Doo must have felt. Having your ghost-themed schemes thwarted by a high-functioning imbecile and his dog couldn’t possibly be any more emasculating than being confronted with evidence that the scourge of the city’s vampire underworld is as blindly trusting as Snow White had been when she let the witch in the door and ate the poison apple she was offered.

  The air inside the warehouse is stale, like it has hung suspended and unbreathed since before the season turned. It also smells of a combination of unappetizing ingredients: garlic, various berries, tea, melon.

  “Wow. At least when humans go crazy and replace all their food with those protein shakes, the shakes have the decency to taste like something other than gym socks,” Timothy observes conversationally as Will sits him down at the small kitchen table.

  Collecting a hefty first aid kit off a nearby shelf, Will gives Timothy a hard look, like it’s only just occurred to him that Timothy is a) a bad guy, and b) Will’s sworn enemy. Or a roommate of Will’s sworn enemy, at the very least. Timothy, still pretending to staunch the slash on his neck—really, he’s letting it gush out freely, and his shirt is slick and sticky with it—tries to look innocent.

  Well, he tries to look other than outright malevolent, anyway.

  “Hold still,” is all Will says, as he draws a curved suture needle and surgical thread out of the riot of supplies in the kit. Timothy obeys, dropping his hand away from the cut and tilting his head to gi
ve Will clear access.

  Will looks taken aback. “Don’t you want to clean some of the blood off first?”

  “No point.” Timothy shrugs. “It’ll just bleed more. I’ll clean it once it’s sewn up.”

  Will takes a needless breath, like it’ll help him centre himself, and presses the edges of the cut together for the first stitch.

  Timothy closes his eyes, trying not to smile, and lets Will work. Will’s pulse is thunderously loud and fast, like the quick thudding beat of dance music. It’s so all-encompassing that Timothy is amazed that his own heartbeat hasn’t been forced into time with it, that the tempo of the blood in their bodies doesn’t match and throb together.

  “Something got you worked up?” Timothy asks playfully, because Will has to be aware that the thud-thud is probably audible from space by now.

  “Don’t talk,” Will chides. “It makes your skin move.”

  So Timothy sits silent as the stitches are put in place. There are seven by the time Will’s done, and both of them are smeared heavily with the dark cooling blood.

  “Sweet, thanks,” Timothy says when Will clears his throat and steps away, muttering “okay, you’re done.”

  Then Timothy looks over at Will.

  The sight actually feels like a physical force striking Timothy, knocking him back. Will is standing a few feet away, hands and t-shirt washed in gore, and the look on his face is sheer, undiluted want.

  Even Alexander doesn’t look at Timothy like that. With Alexander it’s affection and exasperation and familiarity and intimacy and sadness and love, but it’s never this. It’s never a desire so strong it promises to swallow them both whole.

  “I -“ Timothy starts to say.

  “You need to go now.” Will’s voice trembles. His eyes don’t leave Timothy’s. Will isn’t even blinking. “Right now.”

  Timothy is more than a little awed by Will’s resolve. It seems this game will last considerably longer than a single night.

  Standing up, Timothy slips the ruined Armani jacket back on over his even more ruined shirt. He nods in farewell to Will, who stands as still as marble.

  “You have a lot more self-control than your protégé, that’s for sure, and she doesn’t even need the blood like you do,” Timothy offers with a smile, because he’s never been able to resist a chance to set the proverbial cat among the pigeons. He leaves the warehouse with a spring in his step.

  Back out in the now-waning night, Timothy walks—bloodied clothes and all—to an outer suburb, then leaps out in front of the first car which turns down the street he’s on. It swerves, avoiding him, and brakes sharply. He snaps the necks of the three people inside quickly, before any of them can scream. The driver is a boy in his late teens, breath stinking of cheap booze, and so Timothy decides not to bite him. The health warnings always say not to have alcohol on an empty stomach, after all.

  The two passengers are younger, both girls in their early teens. He drains them both, then rummages in the handbag of one until he finds her makeup case. Using the mirror of her powder compact and her little silver nail scissors, Timothy snips away the careful row of stitches holding together the now-healing cut in his neck.

  Then Timothy aims the car at a streetlight pole, weighs the accelerator down, and guns the engine. The car blooms into a bright puff of flame, the lights of nearby houses coming on as if in an answering call of brightness. Timothy slips away before the first witnesses arrive.

  On his walk home—Alexander will complain if they incur another cleaning fine with the town-car service—

  Timothy crosses paths with the boy from the missing persons posters.

  Will and Lily think the knife-carrying vampire gang are zombie-like, but that’s only because they’ve never met a vampire who truly fits that description.

  There are a few circumstances which can cause it, all of them mercifully rare. Being buried before awakening from death can traumatise and disorient a new vampire enough that they lose their minds before they find the surface.

  Even in the village where Timothy grew up, they’d known that—it was why the families always sat up with the bodies of the dead, on the first night after their loved one passed. Any vampires which woke in such circumstances would have been beheaded immediately, but that was simply the natural order of things: the dead should stay dead. To allow someone to wake up underground was a cruelty beyond justification.

  Other villages buried their dead upside-down, so that any awakened souls would be unable to scrabble to the surface, and this had always seemed to Timothy the most nightmarish and inhumane pragmatism that anyone could ever devise.

  Extensive torture prior to death can cause it, or a death caused when the victim was almost dead from thirst.

  Timothy’s heard stories that some vampires have recovered from the madness, at least partially, but he’s never met any himself. The two occasions when he’s encountered such a creature—both times with Alexander and Blake at his sides—it’s seemed kinder to kill it as quickly as possible.

  The boy stares at him with unseeing, starving eyes, a sick parody of the want Timothy saw so recently in Will’s face. His chin is bloody, the rest of his face covered in a patina of greyish grime. There are old tear tracks at the corners of his now-dead eyes.

  Timothy still has the switchblade in his pocket, but even that would take too long. Opting for the fastest way to end the boy’s existence, he clenches one hand into a tight fist and punches into the boy’s chest, uncurling his fingers inside the cold mess of viscera and pulling back quickly, bringing the heart back with him as he does so.

  The boy makes one abrupt sound, almost like a grunt of surprise, and falls to the ground. Timothy searches his pockets quickly, finding a cellphone and a wallet with no cash in it. He has to be fast, because eventually the boy’s heart will grow back, and Timothy can’t stand the thought of letting that happen.

  He piles crumpled newspaper on the body and sets the whole mess alight, staying to watch until there’s nothing left but ash and a few larger fragments of bone. That’s one small grace: vampires burn far more efficiently than human bodies.

  Among several dozen texts in the phone’s memory bank there are a couple of messages from Jay, dated a few weeks ago. The pair had both been part of a group preparing a presentation due in English class, and Jay was worried that this boy was going to let them down. Timothy wonders if the assignment was completed before the boy met his death. Bette would be delighted if some academic misfortune would fall on Jay, rather than her, for a change. Timothy must remember to ask Jay how the presentation turned out.

  It’s nearly dawn, and the night has been a long one. Timothy heads for home, letting himself forget the faces of those who make up the night’s death toll, the fires which have already had their heat dispersed by the winter cold.

  BETTE

  Unsure about whether she and Rose are fighting or not, Bette decides to err on the side of caution and take Rose a peace offering of a DVD, which always used to work as an argument-ender back when the world made sense. Back then, she used to shoplift stuff, but now she can just pay for it with the glossy onyx credit cards which clutter her wallet.

  (The wallet itself is Chanel, designed to look like a Union Jack flag. It’s the only even vaguely punky thing Bette still uses regularly, and had been a gift from Blake with the suggestion that she conceal the purchase from Alexander— “Coco threw in with the Nazis, you see, and Alexander has ridiculous notions about principles affecting sartorial choices.”)

  Somehow, in a totally weird and illogical way, the gift feels less meaningful to Bette because she was able to pay for it so easily. People always say it’s the thought that counts but she didn’t have to put all that much thought into it at all, about where the security cameras were or if there’s an alarm tag in the box or anything.

  She’s chosen The Prestige, because she and Rose saw it on TV once and Rose enjoyed it. Rose has always had a thing for the idea of escape artistry, Bette remembers.
There was a while there when all Rose’s drawings had chains and locks and straight jackets in them, like they’d been outfitted with leftover equipment from a 19th-century insane asylum.

  Plus, The Prestige has the guy who played Batman and the guy who played Wolverine, which meant Bette and Rose had had an excuse to argue about which superheroes would make the best magicians. The answer is obviously Catwoman, because she can escape from anywhere and hide jewelry with her excellent skills of sleight of hand, but Rose had been all no, no, technically Catwoman is a villain not a superhero, which was total crap and obviously Rose just hadn’t been able to handle the fact that Bette was right.

  Bette goes around to Rose and Tommy’s, but it’s too early in the evening for Rose to be around yet. For some reason the hunters always strike early in the evening. Which, on one hand, kind of makes sense, as that’s the time of night when Lily and Will’s senses are sharpest, their reflexes most responsive. The trouble is, that’s the time of night when all the other vampires have the same advantage going for them. So it’s totally dumb, and if Rose and Tommy didn’t like Lily and Will so much Bette would totally kick their stupid asses just to teach them a lesson.

  Since Rose isn’t around, Bette climbs up the tree and enters the house through Tommy’s room, but he’s not around either. This is so lame, she’s this super-excellent evil vampire and she’s sitting around in a stupid gross messy teenage bedroom waiting for her stupid friends to get home so they can hang out. This sucks ass.

  She flops down onto the unmade bed, sighing at the injustice of her existence. Then, bored of wallowing in self-pity about her social life, Bette clambers off the bed and starts rummaging through one of the scuffed cardboard longboxes Tommy keeps his comic books in.

  Even though Bette’s monster-of-choice is and always will be Frankenstein (and some smarty-pants asshole guy inevitably tries to correct her by saying that Frankenstein was the name of the scientist, not the monster, which isn’t even true because the scientist was Victor Frankenstein sure but the monster’s name was Adam Frankenstein, so they’re wrong and Bette’s right, ha) she really loves the old Tomb of Dracula comics from the seventies. Those books are the best monster comic ever, and Bette seriously covets the complete run of them that Tommy’s managed to put together by bargain-hunting on the internet.