The Wolf House: The Complete Series

by Mary Borsellino

  Sofie’s thoughts are fractured, half-mad things, kaleidescoping in an array of bright sensation, the memories of repeated routines overlapping and mirroring like an echo-chamber of the mind. Dark spiders scuttle at the corners of her consciousness, whispering horrors and making her itch to hurt something, to make the outer world scream in harmony with the landscapes within her.

  Sofie doesn’t free children from vampire prisons out of revenge, or a desire to spare others the hell she went through. She frees them because vampires are the only foe it’s safe for her to fight. If the hysterical, heartbroken violence inside her found any other outlet, it would become a monster itself, and drag her into the dark along with it.

  Among the scattered fragments of a life lived on the teetering brink of lunacy and bloodlust— it seems to Ash like these things are always two compulsions which exist in close proximity, and they practically feel like one and the same inside Sofie’s head— Ash can catch the shards and fragments which make up the childhood that the other girl shared with Jay.

  Not the time they’d spent as captives of the vampire gang, alongside other children who did not survive to escape as Sofie and Jay did. Those memories are not thoughts Ash cares to examine closely in Sofie’s mind, and even if they were she’s got them locked up tight. Ash doesn’t know if that’s deliberate or if Sofie can’t make her brain remember the things, if she’s like Ash, big dark blank spaces in her memory cordoned off from view.

  The glimpses Ash can catch come from later, from the years which followed, before the rain and sobbing in Sofie’s head grew too loud and she knew she had to run away from Jay, lest she taint him with the same madness living in her veins.

  It hadn’t worked, of course. That sacrifice. Jay had ended up just as doomed and damned as Sofie, in his own way. There’s regret inside Sofie’s head at that; she hates that she gave up so much and it was all for nothing, she could have stayed with what little family she had left to her and the ending would have been the same.

  She’s furious at Jay for ending up here, in the townhouse, among the monsters and the wolves, after she worked so hard to set him free from all this.

  The memories of her younger years are bright-edged in Sofie’s thoughts, as if she has taken especial care to preserve even the most minor details of the moments. There are mornings when her arms were too tired and sore, the wrists red and chafed from the nights her hands spent knotted tight inside drawstring mittens, because otherwise her fingernails would scratch and scratch and scratch at her throat as she slept, not stopping even when she drew blood.

  And on those tired-and-sore mornings it would be Jay, serious little nine-year-old Jay, never very talkative but always observant, who’d pick up her comb and smooth the tangles from her long pale hair, making it look as neat and pretty as the hair of a girl who wasn’t crazy would have been. Sofie had known she was nuts even then, but at least her brother still liked her, so that made all the rest almost bearable.

  Jay would braid her hair for her, one long plait down between her shoulder blades, and if she was too weak and tired and sad to go to school then he would stay at home as well, and they’d sit together on the sofa and watch the mid-morning re-runs of ancient Star Trek episodes from the nineteen-sixties. There was something about the overbright colors of the scenes which always made Sofie feel better.

  Ash shivers, doing her best to cut her own mind off from the maelstrom of Sofie. She feels Bette tense up beside her, too, and wonders if Bette can sense the same tumult that Ashley can.

  “Ni hao,” Jenny says to Min. “Wo jiao Jenny.”

  “She listened to ‘learn Chinese’ tapes the whole way in the plane,” Sofie explains, addressing Jay as if he’s the only person in the room besides herself, Jenny, and Min.

  “Hi,” Min replies, giving Jenny a shrewd look. “Who do you belong to?”

  Jenny blinks, friendly expression faltering slightly before she recovers. “I belong to myself.”

  Unimpressed with the answer, Min puts down her toys and sits up, turning her attention to Sofie, giving the older girl a long once-over with a hard, puzzled expression. “You are dakuan?”

  “Vampire,” Alexander puts in. He and Timothy are at the far end of the long room, holding back from the already crowded greetings. “She asked if you’re like the vampires she’s known. It’s the same word some Chinese speakers use for corrupt business leader.”

  “Hi again,” Jenny greets him, giving a small wave. Min’s perplexed expression grows even more confused, her little black eyebrows drawing together above her nose.

  “His?” She asks Jenny, but before Jenny can reply Sofie says “No,” in a sharp voice.

  “No,” she says again, more calmly, with everyone now looking at her following the outburst. “I’m not a vampire.”

  Min doesn’t seem convinced. She looks at Sofie again, then at the rest of the inhabitants of the room, her gaze finally coming to rest on Ash. “Oh. Like you,” she states, turning back to her game with Jenny before Ash can ask her what she means by that.

  Everyone is quiet for a beat after that, trying to pick up the dropped threads of conversation. Jay clears his throat. “Where are you staying in town?” he asks Sofie.

  “Jenny’s brother lives here, so,” she answers, shrugging. “He says it’s cool for us to stay with him for as long as we want.”

  “Yes, provided you don’t mind staying in a barely glorified garage with a pair of deluded idiots,” disparages Blake. Ash recognizes his tone as the same one he uses when he’s trying to get a rise out of Bette or Jay. She glances over at Alex and Timothy, who return her look with longsuffering eye-rolls of their own. Blake may be a brilliant leader and a clever killer, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t also an insufferable little shit a lot of the time.

  “Sounds like better company than I’d hope to find here. Your house looks like it used to be a high-class brothel, and then all the class left,” Sofie replies, giving Blake a nasty look. Ash can’t decide whether to be offended or impressed.

  Jay covers his eyes with his palm. “If I killed you both, no jury would convict me.”

  “Everyone who’s more interested in having a hair-pulling contest than talking about this little girl’s future can leave now,” interrupts Jenny in a cheerful, no-nonsense tone. “No, seriously. Shut up or get out, the lot of you.”

  “I’ll be in my study, then,” Blake says, bowing low to Jenny where she’s kneeling beside Min on the floor. “Please let me know what you decide. I’ll see you later, Jason.” He blows a kiss in Jay’s direction and saunters out of the room, closing the door with a distinct click behind him.

  “Dick,” Sofie says when he’s gone, as if any of the other occupants of the room might have failed to miss that particular aspect of Blake’s character. She stalks over to a straight-backed wooden chair placed beside the chess table, sitting down with her arms crossed and glaring at the room in general. Ash feels like telling Jay that his sister’s kind of short on charm herself, but thinks that it’s probably better if she leaves the sniping to Blake. He’s better at it than Ash is.

  “So what do you think?” Jay asks Sofie.

  “I think I’m staying in town for a damn long while to keep an eye on you, because that vampire you’re fucking is an asshole and I want to check he’s not treating you badly.”

  “I can take care of myself,” snipes Jay. “Which is lucky for me, since you took off.”

  “Yeah, you’re clearly doing a bang-up job of self-sufficiency, since you’ve gone and made yourself the concubine to the biggest shithead of a vampire you could find.”

  “Why does everyone keep using that word, ‘concubine’, about me? It’s a really, really lame word.”

  “Don’t say ‘lame’,” Jenny says, interrupting the sibling argument. “It’s like calling someone a spaz or a retard. Very uncool. And didn’t either of you hear what I said three minutes ago? You can talk about the little girl, or you can get the fuck out. It’s your call.”

/>   “See?” Alexander says quietly to Timothy. “She’s wonderful.”

  Jenny turns her schoolmarmish gaze on Alexander. “Thank you. Now shut up.”

  Everyone shuts up. Jay sighs, nodding his head toward Min. “So, like I asked before. What do you think?”

  Sofie’s answer is flatly spoken. “I doubt she’ll live to adulthood. Whenever it is that she does die, she’ll rise again for almost certain, from what I can tell by looking at her. So it’s a matter of keeping her alive until she’s old enough to decide if she wants that. To wake again, I mean.”

  “Mm,” Jay replies, tone just as flat. “I think we should look at how to get her into a situation like we had, then.”

  Sofie gives a rude snort. “We aren’t models of health and stability, Jason.”

  Ash is starting to understand how Jay wound up with a boyfriend like Blake. Sofie is even shorter with her conversational contributions than Tommy and Michelle tend to be. If this is what Jay’s had from his closest family and friends for most of his life, Blake’s florid way of contorting the English language must have been attention-grabbing, at the very least.

  “Jenny and I will take her,” Sofie goes on.

  “You’re kidding, right?” Ash asks, surprising herself as much as anyone else by speaking up. “She’ll need medications and special care, not to mention a set of papers like a birth certificate and everything. That needs money and connections.”

  Sofie’s look is cold. “My foster father was— is— an expert forger. I can make one phone call and have a perfect birth certificate, passport, health record, and school record for her in three hours. And Jenny’s mother is HIV positive, so Jenny already knows what it’s like to live with someone who has to manage a condition. This isn’t any different. We’re more than qualified and it will be fine.”

  “Uh, I’m calling a time out, hang on a second,” Jenny says, looking from Alexander and Timothy to Jay to Ash and Bette, grabbing Sofie by one arm and dragging her out of her chair and over to a corner by the door. Their discussion is hushed, but Ash is pretty sure that everyone in the room— except maybe Jay and Min— can hear perfectly clearly anyway.

  “I’ve been living with you a few months now, Sof,” Jenny says sharply. “Which is more than long enough for me to know that this is pretty damn well ‘any different’ to HIV. It’s -“

  She sighs, then collects herself and begins again, her tone a little more gentle. “I’ve helped out at playgroups of kids with all kinds of conditions and disabilities, both back home in Colorado and now in San Francisco. And so I’ve seen kids with diabetes and nut allergies and yeah, even HIV. Vampirism’s not analogous to any of them, and you’re kidding yourself if you think it is. They go through things you never have to think about at all, and you go through things they never have to think about at all. Easy comparisons don’t help anyone. If you want to do this, then we’re going into it clear-eyed and without any of your bravado pissing-contest bullshit. Got me?”

  Her voice is firm and businesslike again by the end of the lecture, and Sofie just gives a short nod in reply. Jenny sighs.

  “Okay then.”

  Jenny sits down again, so she’s at eye-level with Min. She takes out a slip of paper that was in her pocket, having clearly prepared for this moment in advance, which tells Ash just how token Jenny’s protests to Sofie were. This was always how it was going to go. People are so funny and strange about not letting other people think they’ve got the upper hand. Ashley thinks she’ll probably never get tired of watching how people interact.

  “Yi qi qu, hao ma?” Jenny asks haltingly, reading from the paper. She gives Min an uncertain look. “Um.

  Do you want to come with me?”

  Everyone is silent, waiting for the answer. Those that breathe, hold their breath.

  “Yes please,” Min says after a beat, giving Jenny a small smile. Then she looks at Sofie, and the smile shifts from friendly to triumphant. “You are wrong. I will grow up.”

  The little girl sounds more certain of that simple fact than Ash herself ever felt when she was alive. Ash kind of hopes that such conviction counts for something, that being determined enough to live can tip the balance in some circumstances.

  It seems that Sofie’s mind has gone a similar direction to Ashley’s, because her response to Min is to nod and hold out her arm for a handshake.

  “Deal,” Sofie says, as Min takes the offered hand and shakes firmly.

  ~

  Ash slinks away to hide in Bette’s room for a while after that. She’s not sure what she feels about anything that’s happened, except that she misses her mom a lot and wishes she could just curl up with her head on her mom’s lap, like she did when she was little and something made her feel confused or sad or when Jenna was being a drama queen and Ash needed a break from listening to the tantrum.

  She’s always lied to her parents, half the time purely out of force of habit. Most of what she and Jenna got up to was against some rule or law or another, and it was just easier to keep them in the dark about everything. But Ash kind of misses what it was like when she was still young enough that she told her mom things, because her mom was always on her side and always knew the exact right thing to say. Ash wishes she could just go up to her mom and say ‘Mommy, I’m a vampire, and I’m scared.’

  “I’m putting in a book order. You want anything?” Bette asks, tapping away at the keyboard of her laptop.

  “Nah.” Ash shakes her head, pulled back to reality. Or, at least, as close to reality as she ever manages to get these days. “I haven’t been able to get into novels, really. Not since… I wasn’t really ever much of a reader anyway, but now I just can’t really at all. It’s like I, I don’t know. It’s like I’m too exhausted to get engaged with stories in novels, or even in short stories, mostly. I’ve barely read anything since I died, and the stuff I have has been books I’ve read before. I think I’ve re-read my Kipling stuff about a dozen times now.”

  “I was like that when I was a kid,” Bette answers, nodding in understanding. “After my dad died. I totally get what you mean. Have you tried non-fiction? That’s what I’m ordering anyway. I’m buying pretty much all the biochemistry and homeopathy books I can find on here.”

  “Yeah?” Ash sits down beside her, glancing at the screen. “You were into that when you were still… when you still went to school. I remember that.”

  “Uh-huh. That’s where my mom thinks I am now, you know. On a science scholarship. It was always my favorite subject, even if I goofed off in class a lot. I was never that good at taking shit seriously at school. I used to boil molasses in the beakers and test tubes to make candy, using the Bunsen burners, you know? Rose always used to warn me I’d end up some kind of deformed toxic freak when I ate it, but the worst that ever happened was I’d sometimes puke it back up.”

  Ash shakes her head, half-amused and half-revolted. “You are such an idiot. Seriously. I’m surprised you survived as long as you did.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s not like that was all that long, really,” Bette points out, voice going soft and sad for a moment before perking back up. “Anyway, so, after I died I kind of got into a funk with it. I’d helped Will out a little bit with the cocktails and whatever that people could drink after they got bitten, but I never really cared about doing any more experiments once I was a vampire. It seemed totally pointless, because I like drinking blood, I like it a lot, so why would I bother pursuing stuff that was only useful if I didn’t want to do that anymore?”

  Her voice is livelier than Ash can remember hearing it, except for the rare times when Bette asks Blake or Timothy if they’ve seen Rose recently and what she’s up to.

  “But tonight, when Min said that thing about you and Sofie being the same? That was like bang, total lightning-bolt revelation,” continues Bette. “Because she’s right, sort of, only not at all. Like, you and Sofie aren’t the same as other vampires, but you’re not the same as each other. She’s alive but her body’s not the
same as a normal person’s, and you’re different to other vampires, and…” She makes a face, shrugging, her eyes bright and fascinated. “I want to know why. I want to find the answer to the puzzle. I forgot how awesome that can feel, when there’s a new mystery that I just need to work hard on to find the logic to. It’s so fucking cool.”

  Bette is Ash’s friend, and Bette looks happier than Ash can remember seeing her, so Ash decides not to say that being a test subject for a science experiment sounds like a totally shitty thing for her to spend her time doing. For Bette, she’ll suck it up and deal. Instead of that objection, she says cautiously “Sofie might not want to do that.”

  Bette waves Ash’s concern away with a shake of her head. “She’ll do it. You can see just from looking at her how desperate she is to be normal. Who knows, maybe my experiment will find out something that’ll help her.”

  The logic is callous, but Ash is oddly relieved by that. Vampires like Bette, proper vampires, seem to have happier existences the crueler they learn to be. Between her renewed interest in science and this new disregard for the welfare of others, it seems like Bette is finally finding her niche. Ashley is glad for her. Maybe in this new order of being, Bette will finally get over Rose.

  “I’m going to school in the morning,” Ash tells her. “Want me to steal any textbooks for you?”

  Bette frowns. “I wish you’d quit that. Going to school, I mean. It’s so fucked up.”

  Ash shrugs. “If the shoe fits, I guess.”

  ~

  She isn’t hugely surprised when she slips into her chair, five minutes after the start of class, and sees Sofie sitting on the other side of the room. If Sofie is keeping an eye on Jay then it makes sense for her to be a student at the same school as him, even if Jay doesn’t turn up all that much more often than Ash herself. Maybe Sofie’s here to keep an eye on Ash, as well. Jay did mention that Sofie gets suspicious when vampires don’t behave like vampires are meant to behave.