The Wolf House: The Complete Series

by Mary Borsellino

  That made Ash want to laugh at the bitter irony of it all, but instead she nodded and apologised and made herself an apple and grape smoothie. Apples and grapes are both on the list of foods Bette wrote out for Ash, the foods that don’t make vampires feel super-sick. Sometimes Ash drinks hot tea, when she can’t sleep from the gnawing in her gut, but this was the first time she’d tried anything else apart from blood. The smoothie was okay. It didn’t stop her feeling hungry, or like she was halfway out of her mind, but it made her mom look relieved and that was good.

  She’d snuck out and gone into the city once they were asleep, and met her friends at Scrimshaw. There was a band onstage but they weren’t that great, so Ash ignored them and watched the crowd instead. Vampires from all over the city had started coming, not just ones from Blake’s gang and solo flyers like Ash, but ones from the other gangs as well. The club was getting a reputation as neutral ground, a place where all vampires and humans could go and be safe from each other. Neutral ground was apparently pretty rare, so Bette was kind of thrilled that her little place was shaping up that way.

  Bette’s mood hadn’t been great this particular evening, though. Tommy and Jay and Michelle and some of their other friends were all heading out to see an art exhibition that Tommy’s sister Rose was putting on, and so Bette was staying behind the bar and not talking to them and looking pissed off and hurt by turns.

  Ash had never been able to get a straight answer from anyone about what exactly had happened between Rose and Bette, except that it was obvious that Bette was still completely obsessed with Rose but wouldn’t let herself go anywhere near her. Ash thought this was kind of stupid, because Rose was human and humans always died and how would Bette feel then, when the chance was gone?

  When the others left, Ash didn’t go with them like they’d expected her to. She went and talked to Bette and then when the band had finished their set and Bette had paid them and everything was running smooth as butter in the club, Ash and Bette climbed up onto the top of the building with a wine bottle full of blood and looked up at the sky, which is almost starless because of the ambient light of the city.

  “Did you know that if you put caustic stuff on a leech while it’s drinking your blood, it vomits all the blood in its stomach back into your veins and you can get HIV?” Bette asks in an almost dreamy voice, quiet and a little sad and a little spacey. Ash giggles.

  “The ‘you’ here actually being neither of us, since we can’t get HIV,” she replies. “Also, you’re so gross. That is the grossest thing I have ever heard. You are such a freak.”

  “I think it’s sort of interesting, actually,” Bette answers. “Alexander’s making me do this project on the way humans interact with blood-borne threats from parasites, like leeches, right?”

  “That’s a fucking disgusting project to make you work on. See, this right here, shit like that, that’s why I don’t go to Vampire Homeschool. Ugh.”

  “He says I’ve lost my natural curiosity for the sciences,” Bette explains with a frown. “I guess maybe he’s right, I don’t know. I used to be, but it’s hard to be curious about anything now. But the leech stuff is cool, right?—”

  “Yeah, cool if you’re a freak, maybe.”

  “—The books says that the way to get one off you, if you even notice it, is to get your fingernails in underneath and pry it off. Don’t put anything on it that makes it sick or poisons it, because then it’s barf time.”

  “Any more talk about vomiting blood and I’m going to be giving you a practical demonstration here, Jesus,” Ash mutters, feeling queasy. She’s never, ever had the kind of fascination for bugs and creepy things that Bette so obviously still retains.

  “Mosquitos are kind of interesting too, you know—”

  “No, I don’t, and I’m okay with that,” Ash interrupts. “We are finding a new topic right now. One with no insects or slugs of any kind involved. Let’s talk about shoes or purses or makeup or something normal, please.”

  “I saw this cool fashion shoot where the jewelry was all made out of taxidermied rodents and stuff. There was this comb made out of a gerbil and a hairband made from a rat and these brooches—”

  Ash gags. If she wasn’t paper-pale all the time, she’d probably be going green.

  ~

  They pick a dorm building at random and sit themselves down outside, chatting idly and watching the slow sequence of lights going off and on in different rooms inside as the students come and go. After a little while two guys walking past stop to talk to them, and ten minutes later they’re in a beat-up Toyota, windows down, the wind whipping cold as they drive.

  They take the boys to a late-night action movie— Bette pays for the tickets, Ash for the boys’ popcorn and soda— and laugh and cheer at the explosions and cheesy one-liners. As the night wears thin they go to a nice, discreet hotel and Bette uses her credit card again to pay for the room. The girl behind the counter is smooth and perfectly groomed and beautiful, like a million other well-paid attendants Ash has met throughout the years, and she’s looking at Ash and the two boys with a distant kind of pity. Ash realises with a flutter of mild surprise that the girl thinks that Ash, like the boys, is an unsuspecting victim, an ordinary human kid who’s been picked out at random by Bette, the glittering perfect vampire with a black credit card on Blake’s account.

  Ash wonders what the attendant will think when there are only two dead bodies in the room come morning. Will she assume that Bette is holding Ash captive somewhere as a source of fresh blood? Vampires do that, sometimes. Alexander has told Ash all about it. The vampires keep kids and teenagers and adults, whichever they like best, locked up in rooms like pets or something. Alexander thinks that’s probably what was done to Ash herself, if only for a little while. He even knows who probably did it: a vampire named Cora, someone Blake knew years and years ago. The name doesn’t ring a bell for Ash, so maybe it wasn’t Cora who killed her. Or maybe it was, and Ash just never heard her name.

  Jay was captive once too, when he was a kid. He and his sister Sofie managed to get away. Or, at least, that’s what Alexander told Ash. Considering that Jay’s boyfriend and most of his close friends are vampires, Ash isn’t sure it’s all that correct to say that he got away. Maybe his sister did a better job of escaping.

  In the hotel room they tie one of the boys to a chair and gag him so he can’t scream. The other one Bette silences by clamping her hand over his mouth as she tears a ragged gash open in his throat with her teeth. Ash sits on the edge of the bed, fingers clenched in the high thread count of the ivory sheets, and watches mutely with hungry eyes as Bette feeds slowly, luxuriously, biting the boy again and again on his wrists, elbows, the meat of his arms and the tendons of his neck, drawing the show out for as long as the shuddering body against her will last.

  The second boy is sobbing, making hysterical keening noises against the gag in his mouth, eyes and nose streaming as he struggles. Bette presses a sticky red kiss against Ash’s forehead on her way to the bathroom. Bette knows that Ash hates anyone being there when she feeds, and Ash is grateful for Bette’s tact. Ash gets pretty self-conscious about how out of control and messy and wild she gets. It’s embarrassing.

  Bette closes the door of the bathroom, and Ash can hear the water in the shower begin to run. Ash stands up from her place on the bed, smiling at the boy as she approaches him and sits down across his lap, one leg on either side of his lean hips. He smells of aftershave and sweat and fear as Ash bends her face to the crook of his shoulder, and she smiles.

  It’s a good night.

  BLAKE

  “And the evening had begun so well,” Blake says with a frown.

  Blake’s not one to give himself over to causeless optimism, but the evening really had begun with remarkably good spirits. Bette had been in especially cheerful form, because she’d had an excellent hunt the night before with Ashley and, more importantly, she had a rare reprieve from her lessons, as Alexander was busy with preparations for an im
pending business excursion to China.

  Bette and Timothy had indulged in the hilarious pastime of painting each other’s fingernails, a fact which Blake doubted Jay would ever let them hear the end of. The polish had been black, of course, but Jay seemed to feel that the essential principle of the thing was hilarious on a level Blake could not begin to fathom.

  “You understand that punks and rockers don’t spontaneously get black nails without painting them that way, right?” Timothy had asked, blowing on the still-sticky lacquer now covering his short nails. “Unless they’ve got some sort of, I don’t know, plague or frostbite or something, I guess. But I don’t think that’s very common.”

  “I know, I know,” Jay had conceded, pretending to wipe tears of laughter from his eyes. “It’s just… I come over and you’re giving each other manicures. You are the absolutely least menacing creatures of the night in the entire world.”

  As if on cue, Bikini Kill had come to see which of her two-legged minions had arrived to pay attention to her, winding herself around Jay’s legs with a noisy meow. Jay’s laughter intensified, until Blake was fairly sure that the boy’s eyes really were starting to water.

  “I think that’s why Alex is running away to the other side of the world,” offered Timothy with a charming grin. “Kittens and nail polish and teenagers; we’ve turned his home into a fair approximation of his perfect hell.”

  That was when Jay’s phone rang in his pocket, and the pleasant calm of the night was ruined.

  “Hey, Alexander, it’s… what? Yeah, I guess… Um, sure, we’ll be there soon, don’t worry,” Jay said, a crease forming between his eyebrows. Upon ending the call, he looked at Blake, puzzled and concerned. “Alexander says there’s been a problem. He needs you, me, and Timothy to come meet him at the Park Hyatt. Me especially, he said.”

  Which is the point at which Blake regretfully notes that the evening had begun with a promise which now seems likely to remain unfulfilled. It irritates him when complications get in the way of simple enjoyments such as good company and leisurely time spent in one’s home. And anything which Alexander needs Jay’s help with is almost certainly strange enough to be particularly bothersome.

  They take a limousine to the hotel, in order for the three of them to travel comfortably, with extra room available in case Alexander has company in need of transport. Blake doesn’t dislike limousines per se; he enjoys their ostentatious decadence and their unwieldy degree of luxury as an occasional extravagance. But he cannot imagine ever being the sort to enjoy their comforts regularly, any more than he can imagine himself being a resident of the Palace of Versailles for an extended period of time without becoming a little tired of it. Blake prefers the simple elegance of a sleek sports car, all told. Limousines seem to try too hard to look expensive and stately, and so overwhelm; they don’t revel in the energy and the brash, showy confidence which Blake enjoys so much in other costly automobiles.

  Alexander meets them in the foyer of the hotel, the white seersucker suit jacket and black silk tie he’d worn to his meeting now discarded, his linen shirtsleeves pushed to his elbows and his glossy hair showing signs of having hand a nervous hand run disruptively through it several times. Were the circumstances less obviously stressful, Blake would take the time to commend Alexander on the particular style-under-pressure

  je ne sais quoi his disheveled appearance exudes. As it is, Blake decides to make the observation later, when Alex is less likely to be snappish in response.

  Alexander leads them to one of the larger suites, which has been furnished with simple bouquets of lilies and bottles of several excellent vintages of red wine.

  “As you can see, they’ve made an effort to make a good impression on me,” Alexander says. Blake nods, accepting this state of affairs as natural— Alexander expects nothing less from prospective business liaisons, a fact widely known among those who might wish to do business with him. “However, our dear old friend Cora saw fit to suggest the best methods for currying my favor.” Alexander’s voice drips with ice and venom, his expression going from bothered and annoyed into a look of genuine anger. “Her games are becoming increasingly irritating. I almost regret coming to Will’s aid against her in Colorado. She’s such a boorish adversary.”

  “I’m glad she grew bored of her little murder games of students at Bette’s old school, at least,” remarks Blake, brushing his knuckles against the back of Jay’s own fingers between them where they stand side by side. He’s surprised at how relieved he feels to know that particular danger against Jay is no longer a concern. Jay gives him a momentary glance, as if the boy can guess Blake’s thoughts, but Jay’s next words are addressed to Alexander.

  “Why did you want me here? What’s Cora done?” Jay asks, a certain hardness in his voice making it clear that he has already guessed the answer. The comfort of a family— even a family comprised of somewhat eccentric vampires— has softened Jay’s brittle edges somewhat in recent months, but no amount of affection could ever touch the cool core of the boy, the unflinching strength which kept him going through the horrors of his childhood. Jay could survive anything, Blake sometimes thinks. Jay could survive anything simply because he’s always expecting the worst.

  “They gave me a girl,” answers Alexander. His voice is steady but he leans into Timothy’s touch when Timothy puts a supporting arm across his shoulders. Even without that small but telling display of a need for comfort, Blake would know that Alexander is disgusted and insulted at having his name associated with such a proclivity. “I think she’s about six years old, perhaps a little older if the malnourishment has been going on for some time. She’s terrified of me, naturally. I thought it best if someone human tried convincing her that I’m not a threat. I know your Chinese is still at the beginner level, but…”

  Jay nods, his own face emotionless, eyes flinty. “She’s in the bedroom?”

  “Yes.”

  Blake expects for Jay to go alone, but Jay clamps his hand around Blake’s in an iron grasp and pulls him toward the bedroom door as well. Blake glances at Alexander, checking for a protest at the action, but Alexander simply looks relieved to have the problem momentarily out of his hands. Jay’s knuckles clutch at Blake so tight that they’ve gone as white as Blake’s own skin, but Jay gives no other sign of how deeply all this must hurt him.

  Blake has always appreciated Jay’s diamond-hard pragmatism in theory, ever since the first night they met and Jay had responded to what had appeared to be impending death with some well-chosen barbs regarding Blake’s seduction techniques. But it’s not until now that Blake realises that he has never before seen Jay deal with anything truly terrible, but has rather only heard Jay recount the experience later. The fatalism of all teenagers underpinned that first interaction between them, and so it does not really count.

  The little girl is multiracial, probably a Chinese and Slavic mix— a guess Blake bases not only on her features and colouring, but also on the particular cruel glee Cora would have taken in suggesting such a combination to the unwitting corporate lackeys trying to curry favour with Alexander, as a child with a mix of Alexander and Timothy’s heritages would make the offering twice as obscene.

  The girl’s hair is long, pulled into uneven pigtails and tied with red elastics. Her face would be adorable if not for the tear-stains on her pink cheeks and the dull-eyed look of mild, disinterested fear in her expression. Blake knows there is nothing so vile as a sanctimonious sinner, and so would never attempt to decry another’s actions from his own extremely low moral ground, but he has a deep personal prejudice against those who hurt children. Even now, with Callie and Henrietta and Daisy all long ago grown and gone, there’s something of the protective father still in Blake, something which wants to defend this damaged little person from further harm.

  Her clothes are high-quality but she does not seem to like them, one small hand tugging uncomfortably at the collar of her red velvet dress as the other clutches at a fraying toy rabbit.

&
nbsp; Reluctantly letting go of Blake’s hand, Jay approaches the bed. In halting, nervous Chinese, he tells the girl that his name is Jason. He opens his mouth to show her that he doesn’t have fangs. She tilts her head to one side, a tiny flare of curiosity animating her face behind the veneer of detachment which wounded children learn in order to survive, and says something in reply. Her voice is high and piping, as painfully young as the rest of her.

  “She says her name’s Min,” Jay tells Blake.

  “Min,” the girl echoes, pointing at herself. “I know English words. Not many. You know Chinese words?” she asks Jay. Jay does his best to make the expression he gives her look like a smile.

  “Not many Chinese words,” he confesses. She seems impressed nonetheless. She points at Blake, asking another question in English.

  “Owns you?”

  Blake decides the best response is no response, and so he remains still as Jay shakes his head and answers Min’s query.

  “No. I am his friend,” Jay replies. “Nobody owns me. Nobody owns you.”

  Min replies in Chinese, shaking her head, and then frowns in frustration when she sees that they don’t understand. “The man outside,” she says finally. “His now.”

  She pushes her white knee-sock down to her foot— whoever dressed her didn’t bother to include shoes, a detail which renews Blake’s discomfort at Cora’s game— showing Jay the track marks and healed bites on her ankle. Jay swears loudly, giving Min’s English vocabulary a variety of colourful new additions.

  “She’s been bitten,” he says, appalled. A bitten child never recovers from vampiric infection, as those past puberty can: the only outcomes for such victims are complete turning, and the resultant immortality in an underdeveloped form, or a bitter, tragic sort of half-life, not quite human or vampire, struggling to live in a body which doesn’t properly remember how to be alive, and dying young anyway.

  Jay’s seen that second choice play out in his sister, Sofie; he only escaped that fate himself because the vampires who’d kept him captive as a child had drawn out his blood with hypodermic needles rather than their teeth. Blake can’t imagine what a violence to Jay’s calm it must be to see the markings of what is essentially a death sentence Min’s skin, a death sentence Jay himself only avoided by pure chance.