The Wolf House: The Complete Series

by Mary Borsellino

  It is far easier, after all, to apologise than to ask permission, and so if he saw a particularly delectable bit of prey at the club he would not hesitate to take full advantage of the opportunity. Bette would forgive him, eventually; Blake’s sure of that.

  Tolstoy’s assertion that happy families are all alike was probably not written with vampires in mind, but there’s still a truth to it in a vampiric context. Any pack has a degree of acceptance and unconditional loyalty built into its workings. If Blake broke Bette’s rules, she would pardon the transgression after a time, just as Blake would give her absolution for any wrong she perpetrated. That’s what families do, whether comprised of blood relations or otherwise formed.

  Mikhail is here tonight, having an animated argument near the bar with two particularly dramatic looking vampires dressed as if they were doing their best to channel the spirits of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood circa 1971. Blake is pleased to see that Mikhail himself has chosen a frock coat of shell-pink brocade with black trim and a white silk cravat. It’s been a number of years since Blake’s seen Mikhail take such care with his appearance, and to see a return to previous form feels like a good omen of sorts. The fortunes and moods of the gang are all on the up, as it were.

  Jay is holding court over near the low stage, as usual, flanked by his friends Tommy and Michelle on one side and Ash and an older girl Blake doesn’t know on the other. Tommy and Michelle have their skinny, black-clad arms wrapped around each other’s skinny, black-clad waists, matching expressions of vague interest on their faces. Blake takes all this as an indication that the couple are, in Jay’s vernacular, ‘on again.’ Ash is tapping a quickfire message into the keypad of her phone, soft tendrils of her newly red hair curling around her face.

  If it wasn’t for the twitchy, erratic way her features shift from mood to mood, expression to expression as she types, Blake was almost say that she was looking well. She’s looking better than she has, but it’s impossible to fail to notice the unfocused, perplexed set to her gaze or the nervy tremble of her shoulders and hands.

  “- but I think she’s just being obtuse for the sake of it,” Jay concludes whatever he’s been saying, voice in its typical declarative monotone. It flattens all his statements, makes even the most innocuous remark sound withering, as if the world at large has failed to live up to the standards Jay expects of it. Blake likes that about the boy; it’s better to be perpetually disenchanted than to never expect very much in the first place. “Blake, this is Natalie. She was a tech for Remember the Stars on Warped tour last year. Bette’s hired her to do front-of-house sound on nights when bands do gigs here. Nat, this is Blake.”

  “A pleasure to meet you,” Blake says, nodding hello to the young woman. She’s better dressed than most rock stagehands Blake has met— and decidedly less pungent— but he suspects that Jay will be annoyed at him if he flirts too much with any of Jay’s friends. Jay isn’t at all the jealous type, save for occasional fits of pique when Blake talks on for too long to him about Will and Lily, but he has a depressingly low tolerance for Blake’s social charms.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me, however,” Blake explains to Nat, allowing himself one wicked grin in her direction and a light kiss on the back of her hand. Jay can’t expect him to behave like a stuffy proper adult, after all. There’d be no point in being a vampire at all if Blake was forced to act like a grown-up human all the time. “I’m on the prowl.”

  He turns and leaves them be. He can hear a soft, slightly dreamy sigh from Nat, and a mutter of discontent from Jay which sounds a lot like it might be “…fucking cat metaphors, I swear to god.” Blake grins, sauntering across the open space of the dance floor toward one of the far edges of the room, over to where he has spotted another of his favorite games sitting at one of the corner tables.

  Will’s eyes are narrowed as he looks at the crowd around him, a detail which Blake finds ludicrously precious. Vampire eyes are perfect, especially in low light, but the habits of being near-sighted during his life have stayed with Will beyond his death. The stubbornness of Will’s refusal to embrace his new talents is inexplicably adorable to Blake; it’s like seeing a small child wail and cling to the side of its crib when the time comes to graduate to a proper bed.

  The notebook Will is scribbling his observations into is another matter entirely, however. It’s a cheap, cardboard-covered affair, the kind students use to record their school lessons in.

  “I’ll have a variety of Moleskines sent to you,” Blake states, sitting himself down in the unoccupied second seat at Will’s small table. “If you’re going to insist on recording my every move, I feel it’s only right that you choose a tome worthy of my presence within it.”

  Will’s shoulders stiffen, but he doesn’t turn, speaking his reply to the page in front of him with a voice full of forced mildness. “Sorry to deflate your egotism, but I’m not writing about you.”

  He glances up again, then back down, and writes a few more words. Blake follows Will’s line of sight with his own glance; Will’s focus seems to be the side of the stage, where Natalie and Jay are still arguing exuberantly.

  “Well, I can’t fault your choice of subject there,” Blake remarks. “Though you may find that your records become weighed down by numerous instances of afternoons spent on arguments with his friends about insufferably post-modern novels, evenings filled with questionable coffee shops, bars, concert halls and other venues for the watching of people and for being watched by them. Also his taste in music is wearyingly pretentious more often than not. Might I ask why you’re devoting your attention to the boy?”

  “Music isn’t the only thing he’s got wearingly pretentious taste in,” replies Will, still looking anywhere but Blake, still sounding like he’ll keep his voice bright even if it kills him. His knuckles are white where he holds his pen, his pale jaw tense. Blake grins, leaning in closer, his next words quiet against the shell of Will’s ear.

  “Tell me why you’re stalking my lover, William, or I’ll tear your throat open.”

  Will’s eyes slip closed, sandy lashes trembling softly, mouth pulled tight and tense. His scent is a mix of those three most vital smells, fear and hunger and desire, the braided thread of them overlaid with ink and soap and tea and rain. Blake moves closer still, inhaling the heady stink of it, his nose brushing against the soft fall of Will’s hair. Will’s nervous thrum of a pulse grows even faster, the faintest of blushes rising on his bone-white cheeks. Blake smiles.

  “Oh, so you’d like that, I see? If I… hm…” Blake traces light fingertips up the inside of Will’s wrist, which is frozen as still as a statue’s, the pen poised mid-line above the paper. “Dragged you into some dark corner and ripped into your carotid artery with my teeth. Drank until you fainted. It’d take a long time before you would, you know. You’d be almost drained. You’d wake up starving.”

  A violent shudder jolts through Will, coupled with a whine that’s audible even though his staunchly closed lips. Blake digs two sharp fingernails into Will’s forearm, piercing the vein just enough to draw beads of blood up to the skin. The groan Will gives at the smell seems to be entirely involuntary.

  “I’m not stalking him,” Will grits out, eyes still closed. “I… take notes,” he goes on haltingly, clearly trying to ignore the way Blake is pushing at the soft meat of his arm to make the tiny cuts bleed more. “Notes on anyone I see that I know… oh, god… that I know has been bitten. A record of their… fuck… their health.”

  There are six little punctures between Will’s wrist and elbow now, the first two now joined by a neat row made by all four of Blake’s fingernails. “You’re going to bleed on your horrid little notebook in a moment if you don’t move,” Blake reminds him, but Will remains as still as stone. “Ever the sociologist, aren’t you? You can’t help but catalog the ways we all behave. The science, these absurd cocktails of berries and teas which you and Lily insist on choking down… those were never where your passions lay. Bet
te’s the chemist. You’re the anthropologist. I do love that about you, William.”

  When he’s done talking, Blake waits one second, two, staying motionless for long enough that Will can gather what few wits he has left about him and grab at his notebook and pen, vacating the table as fast as he can and heading for the exit of the club. The look he gives Blake over one shoulder as he leaves is one of terror and confusion. It makes Will look like a frightened rabbit. Blake can’t help laughing at the sight. Oh, he’s so terribly glad he took an interest in Lily and Will. They are endlessly amusing.

  “Has Will left already?” Natalie asks as she and Jay come over to where Blake sits alone, still chuckling to himself. Her face shows the longsuffering annoyance common among those tasked with relying on musicians.

  “I’m afraid so,” Blake answers. “I think he had to go lick his wounds.” He smirks at the words; he rarely has an opportunity to be so literal when the tells the truth.

  “See?” Jay gestures at Blake, speaking to Natalie. “Cat metaphors. Told you.”

  ~

  Blake had run into Nell again, quite unexpectedly, in the 1970s. He’d been passing through Europe, checking in on old real estate holdings and discarding some of the properties he no longer wanted.

  It had been in Austria, which was lucky because Blake had found that he felt a growing distaste for Austria and so any distraction was welcomed. Nell, he discovered, felt almost exactly the same way.

  “There’s something sick in the heart of this country now,” she’d said with a sigh as they meandered their way along the dark bank of one of the wider rivers. The water was the rotten, soup-scum texture of pollution and decay, and Blake felt inclined to agree with Nell’s statement.

  “It’s that fucking war,” she went on, a scalpel’s razored edge audible in her pretty voice. “It released a poison inside the people. Just because they got an armistice in the end doesn’t mean the poison went away. There’s more rape and violence in this country now than there ever has been before. But everyone turns away from it, just like they turned away from the camps and all the rest. This country makes me ill, now.”

  Nell was always one of the few people Blake was content to simply listen to, without offering much commentary of his own. He thought this was perhaps because she was so much older, so honed and refined by centuries behind her smooth teenaged face. She had a greater capacity for both cruelty and kindness than any other being Blake had ever met.

  They made a lovely pair together that night, that much was for certain— her hair darker than his, long loose curls held from her face with thin lace ribbons of ice-blue and winter-green. Her coat was a sable fur and her stockings were pale wool above her buttoned black boots, making her look like a heroine from some ancient Russian fable about a princess caught in the snowy woods, found and nurtured by some witch or wolf. Blake, for his part, wore a long thick grey cloak with soft fawn-colored fur at the collar. He’d tried to keep up with modern fashions, but in recent decades the fabrics and cuts had become increasingly ugly and so he had abandoned fashion in favour of style. It suited his features better; Blake knew he was handsome, but also knew that his looks were not particularly modern.

  He missed Edwardian clothes; he’d liked that era for men’s style. The twenties and thirties had been best for women, in his opinion. Modern clothes could be beautiful on occasion, but they were almost never elegant.

  “The world is nothing if not predictable, if you take a long enough view. Things will settle back to normal soon enough,” Blake answered Nell blithely, though he wasn’t sure how strongly he believed that. Even the Great War hadn’t felt as shattering, not on that bone-deep level. That war had just been carnage on a scale rarely seen. The second great war of the twentieth century had felt like something different to that; a remembrance of a capacity for evil on par with the worst atrocities of history, perhaps worse than even that.

  Nell gave him a crooked smile and shook her head. “A hundred and thirty years of drinking blood, and you’re still so young and innocent,” she said in a tart, amused tone. Then, clearly bored with contemplating mankind’s slide into depravity, she changed the subject. “I read the book Oscar wrote for you. It was very pretty.”

  “Thank you. I’ve always been fond of it myself.”

  “I tend to like his fairytales best, though,” Nell went on as they walked. “They’re such sad, fragile little things. I always liked unhappy stories the best when I was a child, and the inclination seems to have stuck. I own all of Andersen’s work, as well.” She glanced at the night-rainbow slick of the river’s surface beside them, dark-red eyes narrowed in a glare. “I think that’s why I hate what’s happened to this river so much.”

  “Hm?”

  “It used to make me think of my brother, in the winter when the ice would rush through it. Now that’s been swallowed up by this new poison, this pollution. I had brothers, you know. When I was alive. Two of them, and a sister, though I wasn’t so close with the younger two as I am with the vampire-brothers I have now. My older brother, he was my world, though. He was such a thoughtful, wistful boy. The stories he’d tell me at night before we slept always turned thoughtful and wistful too when it was him telling them. That’s why I like that sort best even now. Even the happiest endings had a sting when he recounted them: the woodcutter slicing the wolf open to save the little girl, or Hansel and Gretchen’s witch-mother burning to death in her own oven.”

  “Gretel,” Blake corrected. “It’s Hansel and Gretel.”

  Nell shrugged. “Gretchen’s prettier. And the point remains the same. Fairy stories are meant to break the heart, I think. If children are too comforted and contented by the stories they’re told, what is there to make them dream up stories of their own?”

  “Perhaps you should be a novelist, next. Offer the world some dark new stories.”

  “No, I’d rather play music again, I think. I always miss the song when I try to put words together without one. Sometimes I feel certain that there must be a God, after all, who put me on this road to eternal night for the sole reason of letting me learn the joy of music. I didn’t really know it until I’d been dead for years and years already, you see. I was a very late bloomer. But when it comes to words without a tune, I’ll stay content to whisper ideas in the ears of other writers, and let them make out of me what they will.”

  “What became of your brother?” Blake asked. He remembered, vaguely, that Nell had once told him she’d kept an eye on her family after her own death. She’d been trying to assure him that it wasn’t the strangest thing she’d ever heard of a vampire doing, helping a widowed relative raise her little human daughters. Now that Blake’s known Ash, he knows that Nell was right. There are much stranger things possible than that.

  Nell had frowned a little, the memory clearly giving her a little pain even so many years later. Blake had never known for certain how old she truly was; she’d told him a variety of answers but they had all been contradictions of each other.

  “He died,” she told him. “Before I did. I think that’s why I was so fast to agree, when I was offered the chance to be a vampire. I couldn’t bear the thought that the memory of my brother would fade into nothing after the rest of our family eventually died as well. And nobody knew him like I knew him, so it was best if I could stay alive forever. I thought that’s what this would be, you see. Living forever.”

  They shared a smirk at that, at the simplicity of the long-vanished girl’s mistake. It wasn’t living forever. It was the very opposite.

  “What about your family?” Nell asked. “Do you still follow the branches of that tree?”

  Blake nodded. “Yes. Daisy’s… there are a number of ‘grand’s, I’ve quite forgotten how many; one of the children of her children’s children to some degree or another, she’s a student at a college now. She wears blue jeans and plays a guitar in coffee shops. You’d probably like her very much.”

  “Probably,” Nell agreed. She looked up at the stars
and breathed out a sigh. Vampire breath has no warmth, and so doesn’t mist. The night air stayed clear around her. “I wonder if you’ll ever love a human so much that you wish you could grow old beside them.”

  “Oh, Nell, not again,” Blake said, unsurprised and maybe just a little bit amused. He knew it wasn’t really a laughing matter, if it was making her melancholy, but she did have such a habit of falling in love with just the sort of people whom vampires should never fall in love with.

  “I… I truly do hope you fall in love one day, Blake. It feels such a cruelty to wish that, but I’m never sorry I did. Not even when it hurts the most.” Her smile went crooked. “At least, that’s what I tell myself now. I’ll probably feel differently when it’s time to mourn again. Because that’s how it always ends.”

  “No,” Blake had answered her. “It never ends. Not for us.”

  “We have fed our sea for a thousand years; and she calls us, still unfed,” murmured Nell, seemingly speaking mostly to herself.

  “Kipling?” Blake guessed. She nodded.

  “Yes. When you fall in love, Blake, you must find me and tell me. Will you do that?”

  “All right,” he said lightly, laughing at how earnest she sounded, the serious look on her small pale face. “You might be waiting a while, though, dear heart.”

  Nell shrugged. “We have nothing if not time.” Her expression shifted sadder. “Lucky us.”

  ~

  He wakes from the dream sharply, as if his consciousness has wrenched itself free from the memory with no small effort.

  Blake showers, dresses, checks his emails and the emails of those he monitors: Mikhail and Amy are considering a foray into racehorse breeding, an enterprise Blake seems to recall the two of them trying their hand at once before. Still, if it keeps them entertained then he has no quarrel with it; Nicole’s gang and Blake’s own have a long history of profitable collaborations. More importantly, the two packs are friends, which is not common between groups of such equally matched strength and cunning.