It would be worse, the young warm-blooded Timothy had thought, to live out a long and comfortable life knowing that you had said ‘no’, than it would be to say ‘yes’ and then to die.
“You won’t,” Ilia promised, taking Timothy’s hand and pulling him to his feet. “Not tonight, anyway.”
Ilia bit Timothy for the first time that night, high on his arm, above the hinge of the elbow, where the sleeves of his shirts would cover the bruises even if the cuff fell back from his wrist. Somewhere deeper in the forest, a young wolf howled a high note, and Timothy couldn’t help but wonder if the wolves were afraid of Ilia, and what it said about Timothy that he still didn’t feel any fear of his own at all.
In the morning, back in his bed and with his lips sealed in a promise to keep the secret, Timothy woke up late and groggy. He felt distracted, tired and ill, and knew from Ledishka’s forthright remarks that he looked pale and drawn and sickly.
His father found him mid-morning, splitting wood to replenish the high stack of small logs they kept beside the fire in the main room of the house. Timothy had never been a strapping youth, never gained the bulk and strength of some of the other boys his age, but he could split wood well enough, even when he felt out of sorts.
“Is it Ilia, that’s got you like this?” his father asked, and Timothy nearly fell over in surprise. Not trusting himself to say anything, he nodded, his skin prickling with a cold sweat of fear at being found out.
Timothy’s father simply nodded, a sad look in his dark eyes. “It gets easier. You’ll learn to breathe over the hurt in your heart some day, I promise.”
He patted Timothy on the shoulder, kindly, and left him to his chores. Timothy watched him go, relief at the secret’s safety making his knees feel weak for the second time in as many minutes.
It had never really occurred to him, before, that perhaps his father still missed his mother. Timothy wondered if Zoscya minded.
He wondered if the similarity of losses between them would be enough to make his father understand, if the truth about Ilia ever really did come out.
Timothy doubted it.
~
Bette and Blake have gone out, and Alexander’s on one of his interminable conference calls. It’ll be time for another business trip abroad soon, Timothy can tell. Alexander will probably opt to go on his own, to get away from the whirlwind of “intrigues and melodramas” he teases Blake for habitually creating wherever the household settles. Timothy’s not sure whether he’ll go with Alexander or not. He likes to travel, but he also wants to see what happens next.
There’s another dress rehearsal of the school musical tonight, and Timothy decides that he’ll attend.
Timothy has never been a snob about art. At least, not that he can remember. If anything, his tastes run counter to established critical acclaim: he loves the lowbrow and the underground and the difficult and strange. It’s how he got involved in zine culture, and the various post-punk scenes in England and America that’ve been around in the last couple of decades.
He seeks art and vibrancy in whatever form it takes, even wholly unexpected ones, and there is much of both in the way Rose plays Peter Pan.
With her soft cheeks, painted in a blush, and the short brown locks of hair around her face, she looks the perfect androgyne in her green stockings and belted tunic, an adolescent not yet decisively man or woman. Wistful with an edge of frustration, she transforms the story. It seems to Timothy, watching from the rafters, that this Peter convinces Wendy to come and be a mother to his Lost Boys because Peter needs somebody to reaffirm for him that life goes on as it always has, that the winds of change have not begun to blow.
Peter wants to be a child living an uncomplicated adventure, but Tigerlily and Captain Hook’s plans for him all demand that he become more grown up, in one way or another. The escape of the Darling children to Neverland seems, here, like Peter and Wendy giving each other excuses to stay young: she will not have to stop sleeping in the nursery, as the time has come for, and he won’t have to acknowledge that his relationships are evolving and taking on more adult elements.
Of course, Wendy soon makes it plain that she’s come to Neverland too late in her own childhood for Peter’s needs: like Tigerlily, she feels romantic love, and Rose plays it as a tragedy for Peter. She’s the boy who won’t grow up, no matter what the cost, and watching her makes Timothy realise for the first time just how high that cost is.
In the final scene, as Peter returns to Wendy’s window a year later and it becomes clear that he’s completely forgotten the now-dead Tinkerbell, Timothy has to blink back tears. Rose has made Peter Pan’s eternal agelessness into something wholly horrific, the boy himself into someone broken.
Timothy wonders how Rose would have played the role, if Bette were still alive. He finds himself thinking of the grim joke Lewis Carroll slipped into one of his Alice adventures, about how the girl could have stopped her age at seven if she’d made the effort. Rose has put that simple truth on display, centre stage: the only children who never grow up are those who die.
It’s less a performance than it is an open wound, and Timothy feels sure that by any standard other than his own the play is an utter disaster. He’s heard the word ‘clusterfuck’ bandied around by a couple of cast members, and it’s an apt description.
When the disaster that passes for a rehearsal is done for the evening, Rose and one of the other actors—the boy Jamie, owner of the iPod which caused Bette such misery on Timothy’s last trip up to the rafters—linger together at the front gate of the school grounds, sharing a cigarette and talking in the shy, smiling way that young lovers have had since before the days of villages and shepherds.
They kiss goodbye, a gentle and nervous peck of their mouths together, and a real blush rises under the remnants of rosy paint still on Rose’s cheeks.
After that, Rose walks to a nearby bus stop and waits, apparently deep in quiet thought until she breaks the silence and says “I know you’re there. Come out.”
It seems only polite to do as she asks, so Timothy emerges from the shadows which hid him from view. Rose’s eyes widen in brief surprise; Timothy’s guess is that she probably expected it to be Bette who’d followed her in such a way.
“Hi.” Timothy sits beside her. “You know, it’s pretty dangerous for a teenage girl to be out on her own after dark. There are vampires around.”
“I’m a vampire hunter. I think I’ll be okay,” she answers.
“Are you on your way to Lily and Will’s now?”
Rose’s eyes narrow. “Why?”
“Because if so, I’ll come with you. Will saved my life recently. I should thank him.”
She gives him a hard look, like she’s certain that there’s a con of some kind being pulled. “It defeats the purpose of him being a vampire hunter if he goes around saving vampires. Why would he?”
Timothy holds up his palms in a ‘beats me’ gesture. “Perhaps he was feeling uncharacteristically sociable.” Then, more seriously, he offers “Most vampire hunters in the world—most throughout history, in fact—have known a vampire or two they couldn’t bring themselves to kill. That seems to just be a part of life. In fact, physicists have theorised that it would be a bad idea for vampires to be eradicated completely, if they really existed. From a scientific point of view.”
Rose makes a face. “Bette was the science girl, not me.”
“Is, not was. Bette still loves science.”
Rose’s expression hardens again, angry and sad. “I… I gotta start putting her in the past tense. It’s so fucked up and… and it’s just fucking hard, it’s so fucking hard, and I’ve got a brother, okay? I have a brother and a mom and a dad and school and I’m gonna go to art school after I graduate and if I keep thinking of Bette as still being real, still being Bette, then all that other shit gets fucked up.”
It’s a dilemma Timothy sympathises with, even understands, but he’s got no doubt that in the end Rose will choose just as he himself
did. The pull and promise of the dark is too strong to permit any other choice winning out.
Letting the matter rest, for the moment, he changes the subject.
“I’ve enjoyed what I’ve seen of the musical.”
“I hate it,” Rose replies. “I want it to be over and done with so I’ve got one less think to think about. I can’t stop thinking. I lie awake and I can’t sleep and I’m so fucking tired. All the time.”
The bus arrives before Timothy can think of a reply, and they climb aboard. Rose doesn’t protest when he sits beside her, and they ride in silence.
~
Rose has a key to the warehouse door, which she keeps on a braided string of yarn around her neck. The yarn is old, frayed and faded, an oddly childish note on a girl so rapidly discarding all the things which her younger self held dear.
The thought comes into his head like a half-heard whisper, the static crackle of someone else’s earphones heard from nearby: Bette made it when we were in second grade it’s a friendship necklace we used to keep our diary keys on them when we were little and then later the keys for our bike locks and now I use it for this I don’t know why.
Timothy steps back automatically. Contrary to most fiction, it’s much easier to tell somebody what to think than it is to hear what they’re already thinking; it would be very little effort for him to murmur a suggestion in Rose’s ear and have her follow it. Picking up her existing ideas as they pass through her mind, on the other hand, is something he’d usually have to concentrate hard on in order to manage.
She’s staring directly at his face, and he realises with surprise that he wasn’t reading her thoughts at all. She was telling them to him, offering them up like a station on a radio.
“Guess that worked, then,” she observes flatly as she shoves the door open. “Me and Will have been working on it, as a way for him to hear me when we’re out hunting, but I guess it’s no good if you can hear me too.”
“I still say it’s unfair for you two to use it, when I can’t,” says Lily, standing just inside the door with her arms folded. She gives Rose a sharp look, which blooms into a full-blown glare as she redirects it to Timothy. “Get out.”
“Lily.” Timothy nods a greeting. “Good. I haven’t been shot through the hand in a while. I was hoping we’d catch up.”
Rose swears exasperatedly under her breath and stalks off toward the corner of the echoing space that’s been strewn with exercise mats and work-out equipment. One of the overhead bulbs flickers languidly for a moment before returning to full brightness. Lily doesn’t blink. “I wasn’t trying to shoot you in the hand, in case you’ve forgotten.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. You guys send out some really mixed signals.” Timothy shakes his head, sighing theatrically. “You try to kill me, Will saves my life… I never know what to expect with you two. You’re so spontaneous and unpredictable. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great, you’re obviously both passionate people and I admire that, I just-”
“Blake’s rubbing off on you,” interrupts Will, wiping what smells like fresh garlic from his hands with a wet cloth as he approaches them both from whatever dark recess he was hiding in. Timothy’s got to admit, the hunters have picked a headquarters that’s got atmosphere in spades. Trust Blake to pick unconsciously stylish adversaries.
Timothy does his best to look scandalised. “Well, that’s just none of your business.”
Will just rolls his eyes at what even Timothy will admit was a pretty pathetic joke. “I mean, Blake was the chatty one, the way I remember it.”
An only half-disguised look of shock flitters across Lily’s face. Timothy suspects that Will rarely, if ever, mentions the short—and ultimately fatal—time he spent as a captive in the townhouse. Lily is probably surprised to hear Will bring it up at all, much less so casually in conversation.
This game becomes more enjoyable by the minute. Timothy can’t keep himself from smiling.
“You probably have a point. I think I’m just running off at the mouth because I’m intimidated by being in a room with a woman who can shoot me dead.”
“Two women,” Rose corrects from the other side of the room. “I had a gun in my bag the whole time we were on the bus.”
Timothy looks at Lily and Will and raises his eyebrows. “You gave the troubled, angry teenager who lives in a basement full of horror movies and paintings she’s done of women being burned at the stake a gun to take to school? You two are the worst mentors I’ve ever met.”
Lily and Will both look pissed off at his words, but worried as well, like Timothy has put voice to something they already knew about themselves and already hated.
“I knew being a good guy was the more complicated choice and all, but you two have found a whole new level of ethical conflict to flagellate yourselves over.” Timothy shakes his head with a smirk. Then he drops his gaze and lowers his voice, as if genuinely dismayed. “I wish I knew how you managed to do it.”
“What do you mean?” Lily asks. Timothy’s surprised. He’d expected that Will would remain the one out of the pair who was more sympathetic toward Timothy’s vulnerability and apparent moral crisis. Then again, Lily’s been a vampire for slightly longer. She’s had to fight her instincts for a greater length of time.
“All I’ve known, since I woke up as a vampire, is the world Blake’s built. The only place I’ve known for myself within that world is as an apex predator. Taking, seducing, hunting, killing… that’s the only life I can remember. I don’t know any other way to be. Drinking blood, as much blood as I want, every night.” He can see Will’s lips part and Lily’s pupils dilate, though neither of them say anything. “But you two, you fight it. It must be almost impossible. I know how strong the hunger gets. That your sense of right and wrong is stronger than that…” He makes his own eyes wide and awed as he looks at them both. “It’s amazing.”
As bullshit goes, he’s laying it on astonishingly thick, but the skepticism is gone from their faces. Even Rose appears to have interrupted her warm-up routine to listen. Timothy had hoped they’d react like this, but there was no way to be sure—sometimes people are savvier than they look. But Lily, Will and Rose need for what he’s saying to be true, they need it desperately. Of course they’ll believe him if the lie he paints is alluring enough. Comforting enough.
Because if he can see the value in denial and repression and struggling every night to pretend that they aren’t what they are, then maybe their lost Bette can too. The nauseatingly sanctimonious hope in their faces makes it hard for him to keep his own expression earnest. These three go out and slaughter vampires every night, why on earth would they find comfort in the thought that even the worst of vampires can be redeemed? The hypocrisy tastes more bitter to Timothy than their sick little blood-replacement cocktails ever could.
But maybe he’s being too harsh. They’re all very young. They’ll grow up one day.
“Anyway.” He shakes his head, deliberately breaking the spell his words have woven. Let them think it over later and decide then whether they’re going to try to save him from himself or not. He looks at Lily. “You can’t send a thought to someone else? At all?”
She looks surprised at the switch of subject, and the surprise makes her shake her head before she’s really thought about it. “No,” she tells him. “I can’t.”
He furrows his brow, considering. “Have you tried saying the words aloud at the same time? I’m pretty skilled at mesmerism, and even I usually speak at the same time, just because it’s easier.”
Partly, he wants to keep them talking, keep them thinking of him as someone they can have conversations with. A confidante. But partly he’s genuinely interested in the problem at hand. That Rose, who is still human and has only—as far as Timothy knows—tasted Bette’s blood once, can project her thoughts better than Lily can is both weird and interesting. And Timothy loves things that are weird and interesting.
Before he can offer his help to them, however, the sleek little ce
llphone in his pocket chirrups cheerfully. Timothy enjoys obnoxious ringtones, and so has assigned a different song to each of the numbers stored in the phone’s memory. This one’s Girlfriend by Avril Lavigne, which is the tune Timothy feels suits Blake best—Blake can be quite the motherfucking princess at times.
Will looks politely horrified as the tinny notes play; Lily grins despite herself. Timothy smiles apologetically at them both and accepts the call, turning away as he brings the phone to his ear.
“What’s up, fearless leader?”
“We need you back at the house,” Blake answers, and it’s not the brusque, businesslike tone that makes Timothy worried, it’s the trace of accent to the words. Blake’s voice only sounds this English when he isn’t thinking about how he sounds, and it practically takes the end of the world to get Blake to stop thinking about how he presents himself.
“Is everyone all right?” Timothy demands, already walking to the door of the warehouse. He gives the deeply perplexed-looking Lily and Will a distracted farewell wave as he departs, and a tiny part of him is amused to hear a muttered “what the hell was that all about?” from Will.
“The gang is fine,” Blake assures him. “Alexander and Bette are both here with me.”
“Is it Jay?” Timothy is moving fast, up the exterior fire escape of a textiles warehouse onto the roof, then over a narrow drop to the next roof, then a wider space over a street to the roof after that. He’ll make much better time up here than he even would in a car, and the bare sharpness of the windchill up this high makes things seem clearer and easier to process.
“No, Jay is fine. He’s at his friend Michelle’s house tonight. He’ll stay there until it’s light and then come here,” Blake answers. Timothy leaps from one building to another without breaking stride, glad that he doesn’t tend to accent his apparel with hats as regularly as Blake does. He’d have lost it to the wind several miles ago.
The Wolf House: The Complete Series Page 45