The Wolf House: The Complete Series

by Mary Borsellino

  “Yes, a cotton wool box is certainly not an option,” Blake agrees. “Considering I’m yet to successfully persuade him to even go to the dentist and have his broken incisor capped. Jay values his autonomy above all other comforts.”

  “Hm.” Alexander appears to be deep in thought for a long moment, before apparently reaching some kind of internal consensus with himself. “You could always suggest the other way to remedy his broken tooth, you know. If he prizes control over his life as much as you say, he’d probably prefer to be asked for his opinion, rather than for you to do your usual trick of turning someone first and courting them after the fact. Which, might I add, has an astonishingly poor success rate as a seduction technique.”

  Blake blinks in surprise. It’s true, Jason’s particular tooth injury had inevitably led Blake to thoughts of turning the boy— human eye teeth fell out during the transformation, like a child’s milk teeth, and were replaced with the slightly longer, sharper canines vampires used as their primary weapon— but it had seemed like an impossible fancy. Quite aside from whether or not Jay would want to be turned, there was Blake’s coterie as a whole to consider. They’d kept their numbers static over recent years, and the only reason Blake had felt comfortable turning Lily and Will was because he knew it would be years and years before they came under his wing properly, if they ever did at all.

  Alexander, obviously guessing the direction of Blake’s thoughts, shakes his head. “I know we haven’t expanded the gang since… what happened to Tim. But it’s like you said; this has been our strongest year yet, in a succession of strong years. Cautiousness has never been the most becoming emotion on you, and I think it’s time to let yourself be the bold Blake I remember from before.”

  Blake smiles a little at the friendly words, but doesn’t feel convinced at all by the thread of Alexander’s argument. “I don’t know. There’s Bette and Ash to consider, after all. How many fledglings is too many for one nest?”

  Alexander waves a dismissive hand. “Ash, as she so firmly reminds me at every opportunity she gets, wants no part in our little family. And Bette is hardly a stumbling newborn these days. You’d think she’d been a vampire forever, to watch her at work. It’s quite remarkable.”

  “Mm,” Blake agrees noncommittally. It’s true that Bette seems for all the world to have grown into herself, becoming the capable and clever manager of a club and excelling in her studies. She’s an efficient killer, a snappy dresser, and entertaining company. But Blake was the one she came to, the night she parted ways with Rose and broke two young girlish hearts in the process. Blake was the one who held her as she wept, curling against him like a far younger child, and as she sobbed he had been reminded so sharply of how Daisy had been at that age that his own heart had felt an old, stiff tug from one of its dustier strings.

  Blake knows that underneath her polish and her poise, Bette is nursing deep, aching wounds, ones that may never turn wholly to scars. Some losses, a vampire carries forever.

  Will Jay become such a loss for Blake, someday? Will Blake watch his dear boy grow up, grow old, fade away to gray and death? Or will death, as Shakespeare once wondered, prove to be amorous, and take Jay while the boy is still young and lovely? Blake knows that he could bear such a loss, if he had to, just as Bette is bearing her own heartbreak now. But know that he could survive that psychic wrench, should he have to, is cold comfort indeed.

  Alexander makes a rather Jay-like noise of longsuffering irritation. “You’re overthinking it, of course, just like you do with everything. Ask him. If he says yes, turn him. If he says no, decide from there what to do next.”

  “You make it sound so easy,” Blake remarks, his words a little more scathing than he means them to sound. Alexander remains unruffled by the barb.

  “No, it’s not easy. Of course not. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t simple,” he replies. Blake’s got no response to that, and so they sit in silence together, Bikini Kill’s rumbling purr the only sound in the room.

  ~

  Jay doesn’t often come to the townhouse directly after school; he and his friends have that uniquely teenaged need to be in one another’s company for an apparently limitless amount of time each day. And when they’re not together, they’re talking on the phone, or messaging each other, or conversing via webcam or email. So much contact with such a small number of individuals strikes Blake as a particularly exhausting method of socializing, but it appears to be woven into the very fabric of Jay’s being.

  This afternoon proves to be one of those rare occasions when Jay isn’t drafted into an afternoon of ‘hanging out’, however, and the sound of his footsteps on the stairs up to the third level rouse Blake out of the doze he’d managed to slip into in the armchair, the cat still curled on his lap. Most dogs cannot abide vampires without being substantially trained to do so, but cats naturally give vampires the same haughty disdain and demands for affection that they present humans. Upon hearing Jay’s arrival, however, Bikini Kill callously abandons her spot on Blake’s lap and rushes over in greeting, tangling herself around Jay’s ankles with a meow and a purr.

  “How was school?” Blake asks, stretching his arms high over his head. He feels tired, not having had as much sleep as he might’ve done, but Jay’s presence always invigorates him. It had taken several weeks of observing the phenomenon in himself before Blake realised that the reason for this was because Jay makes him happy, and consequently makes the exhaustion seem less important to his mood.

  Were Blake a prouder, less self-assured sort of person, he might feel threatened by the fact that his feelings for the boy hold such sway over him. But Blake has never been afraid of emotions; he revels all the more when they have an intensity to them. He suspects this is the key reason why he’s fallen for someone so young as Jay, because while Blake finds people across the whole spectrum of human ages beautiful and desirable, he cannot escape noticing the fact that no other age loves with the all-encompassing, potentially destructive power that adolescents bring to romance.

  “…I don’t see why you bother asking me, if you’re not going to listen to my answer,” Jay is saying, shedding his blazer and tie and leaving the clothes in a haphazard heap over the arm of one of the long sofas. He starts to fiddle with his wristwatch, the clasp refusing to unbuckle easily.

  “Sorry,” Blake says, cheerfully sounding nothing of the sort. “I was bewitched by the sight of you.”

  Rather than dignifying Blake’s flattery with a direct response, Jay comes over to where Blake sits, gesturing for help with the removal of his watch. “I was saying that Ash was there today. She seems to be doing better. Less crazy, I mean.”

  “Dear one, no type of vampire but the utterly insane would choose to attend school in the manner she does. She is quite irrefutably a lunatic,” Blake replies, unhooking the stiff buckle on the band of Jay’s watch. The movement presses the leather of the band down against the pulse of Jay’s median antebrachial vein, where the faintest of scars from old bites are visible like whispers on the texture of his pale skin. Jay makes a muted, sharp inhalation at the touch, almost swaying on his feet, and Blake feels a wave of a sad sort of affection at the reaction. How can he think of ending this boy’s life, turning Jay into a vampire, when Jay barely knows what it is to be human yet, what range of desires might lurk in his subconsciousness? Blake was scarcely older than Jay at the time of his own death, really, and there have certainly been dark moments when Blake has wondered who he himself might have become if he had been left to live and thrive into true maturity without being halted so abruptly and so early.

  Still, there’s no reason to dwell on the past, or the future, at this particular moment in time. Blake very deliberately wraps forefinger and thumb around the thin circumference of Jay’s wrist, squeezing gently at first and then growing more forceful. Jay’s chin drops low, his breath going ragged at he stares down at Blake with dark eyes. Blake feels a slow, reptilian smile widening on his own mouth.

  “It’s
rather grossly unfair to reprimand me for not paying attention, Jason, when you seem to be somewhat distractable yourself,” Blake says, letting go of Jay’s arm and standing up. Jay blinks, returning from whatever momentary haze he’s been caught in, and looks Blake up and down.

  “Did you get much sleep at all?”

  Blake waves a dismissive hand in response to the question. “Enough. I’ll feed a little extra tonight, it’ll be fine.”

  “All right,” Jay nods, accepting the solution. If there’s one thing for which Blake can always be relied upon, it’s a healthy appetite.

  ~

  Alexander has been teaching Bette and Jay— and Ash, on the rare occasions she can be persuaded to attend the lessons— spoken and written Chinese. It isn’t a personal cultural heritage which motivates Alexander’s actions, since he was born in San Francisco and knew four or five other languages already by the time he came to his own study of Chinese beyond conversational use. It’s simply that Alexander has seen enough ebbs and flows in the communities of the world to know the signs of a culture about which it would soon be prudent to learn. China’s on the up and up, in Alexander’s estimation, and so it makes sense for them to forge what ties and strengths they can for that future.

  “Their school’s primary language class is Latin,” Alexander says, disgust practically dripping like venom from his tone. “Latin, in this day and age! It’s unconscionable.”

  Blake’s own long-ago education heavily favoured the classical and largely ignored the practical, so he feels a modicum of sympathy for the criticised curriculum. Still, he can see Alexander’s point, and keeps meaning to do his own series of lessons in the language.

  Tonight, however, he is otherwise occupied. A small, independent gallery is opening a new exhibition, and Blake intends to attend. He hasn’t told any of the others of this plan, because there will be an incredibly tiresome hue and cry, and everyone will expend a lot of energy wringing their hands and being indecisive and troubled and furrowing their brows. Blake can do without any of that.

  The reason that the destination he gives the town car’s driver would cause so much sturm und drang among his compatriots is because the artist responsible for this new exhibition is Rose, sometime-sweetheart of Bette and twin sister to Jay’s friend Tommy. Blake knows that Bette’s decision to break off the pair’s star-crossed dalliance carried in it the implicit demand that the rest of the vampires leave her alone, too, but Blake feels that to follow such an edict would be, well, boring. He very much likes meddling in the affairs of humans, and he rather likes Rose, and feels no impetus at all to stay away just because Bette made a dramatic exit from the girl’s life.

  The gallery is small, and rather poorly lit as galleries go, but Blake’s eyes adjust easily enough. There’s a small haphazard crowd wandering the space, glancing at the paintings now and then but mostly there to see and be seen by all the other people doing the same thing. Blake finds this somewhat tacky; there is a time and a place for such displays, and that time and place is surely better decorated and features some sort of catering, or at least an open bar.

  The paintings, at least, prove to be worth the trip. Blake genuinely enjoys the artworks which Rose creates. There’s a sophistication to her techniques when it comes to depicting anatomy and viscera; it reminds Blake of Frida Kahlo’s autobiographic paintings, or Joel-Peter Witkin’s silver gelatin photographs of cadavers. Rose sees the divinity of blood and the blood of divinity.

  The three paintings on the widest wall of the small space seem to be her most recent completions. They are a triptych, marked with a small hand-written title card naming the series Epilogues. Each images is done in the illustration style of a particular era; Blake’s offhand guess puts them in Regency England, Civil War America, and late Victorian London. Three times in history, three portraits, each with the carefully drawn diagram of a heart in one corner, white edged with gold in such a way that the lines seem to glow, as if they were drawn in the air in static light.

  The subjects of the portraits are androgynes all, three smooth youthful faces infused with the reckless hope and determined steel which is common to both sexes on the cusp of adulthood. There’s frustration in their eyes, in the wild tangles of hair which snake around their throats like eager nooses, in their pretty painted dresses which bind their painted flesh too tightly and leave seams threatening to burst and let free their pent-up energies.

  Blake is not surprised to see stylistically incongruous memento mori icons in the lower corners of each panel. Rose’s penchant for the gothic and the dramatic is something Blake has great appreciation for; the girl wears her despondence with flair and makes the dark seem romantic. The little skulls she has included in her pictures are yellowed and smooth, resting atop a little leather-bound book as if pillowed on velvet. The title of the book— different in each panel— is picked out on the spine in the same white-gold glow as the floating light-hearts. Sense and Sensibility, Little Women, A Little Princess.

  Rose herself comes to stand beside him, arms crossed tightly over her white shirt and black waistcoat. The formal look is spoiled somewhat by an old and faded bloodstain on one knee of her jeans, and by dark mud splatters on the hems at her ankles. Her hair has grown a little since she and Bette parted ways and it falls, shifting shades of carmine and copper and jet, to just above her collar. Too much mascara has left her lashes almost alien in their darkness. Oh, little red, what big eyes you have…

  “Margaret, Jo, and Sara, yes?” Blake asks her, nodding at the three paintings. “All three of them wish that they had been born as boys, so that they might go out and fight and have adventures. They wish for swords. And then they all have to grow up and put aside their wishes at the close of their respective novels. These are portraits of their boyhoods’ death at the hands of their womanhood.”

  Rose nods, the hostility of her posture relaxing a fraction. Blake smiles. The temperaments of artists and teenagers are rife with charming contradictions: even a vampire will be tolerated, provided he properly appreciates the message of a painting.

  “I was never an Austen kid. Not my thing.” She shrugs. “Not when we had to do the books for school, anyway. I wanted to read Borges and Lovecraft instead. But I always felt sorry for Margaret in movies when my mom would watch them, you know? She got a raw deal, stuck as a girl in a time when it seriously, seriously sucked to be a girl, even more than it does now, and nobody ever paid attention to her because her sisters are both such huge drama queens. I felt sorry for her, so I painted her.” Rose smiles, almost, making a quiet half-laugh behind her closed lips. “Bette would’ve said this stuff was just my sneaky way of keeping up my fanfiction habit, I bet you. I used to do that all the time, make up stories about characters from movies and shows and comic books and stuff. She ragged on me all the time for it, but I was having tons of fun. Then she…”

  Rose’s almost-smile fades quickly, leaving a distant, soft-lipped frown in its place. “Then it wasn’t fun anymore, so I stopped. But because of the fanfiction, doing stuff like this—” she gestures to the triptych. “—always feels kind of like cheating. Like I’m just stealing stories that already exist.”

  “No.” Blake shakes his head. “You’re taking art which others crafted, breaking it upon the floor, and then creating your own collage from the pieces that remain. It’s an act with more complexity than you credit yourself with, I promise you. Look up Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. There’s more in common here with that book than there is with the Edward Scissorhands sequel you wrote when you were thirteen. Oh yes, I know all about that.”

  Rose looks mortified for a moment, then bursts out laughing. Her laugh has developed a catch to it, a richness borne of sorrow which Blake finds he rather likes. Every knock and stumble which the world gives to the girl only serves to make her lovelier. It makes Blake think again of how enchanting Jay may yet become, if only he is given the opportunity to survive.

  ASH

  In the few memories Ash has of watc
hing vampire movies or reading vampire books, back when she was alive, it seems like the vampires were always either up in the sky, transformed into bats and flying around, or down under the ground in their coffins, digging their way out with dirt-covered hands hooked into claws and the ragged arms of a burial suit coming into view through the disturbed dirt of their graves.

  But the truth is that vampires, as far as Ash can tell, are happiest somewhere caught between these two extremes. Not floating up in the sky, untethered— plus, they can’t transform into bats, at least that she knows of— and not down underground, either. And any unease that vampires may or may not feel around running water doesn’t extend to Lake Michigan, even when there’s wind making the surface of the water fret and tremble enough that Ash thinks it probably counts as running water just because it’s so far from still.

  Sometimes, very late in the night, Ash likes to visit the lake. She used to when she was alive, as well, though never on her own— Jenna used to go with her, the two of them in boots and jeans and jackets, the least glamorous clothes they owned. Only Ash ever got to see Jenna dressed like that.

  She’s not out at the shore tonight, though. After school was done for the day she slept a little, then pushed food around her plate while her parents talked about stuff Ash didn’t care about, then got a lecture from her mother about how Jenna’s death was hard for all of them but that didn’t mean it was an excuse to let the anorexia win again, Ashley, the world might be a frightening place but remember what the doctors said, the way to take control wasn’t by ignoring your body when it says it’s hungry.