The Wolf House: The Complete Series

by Mary Borsellino

  “We can drink wine and appreciate the atmosphere, jeez,” Ash retorts. She makes a show of spotting someone over on the other side of the room. “Sofie’s over there, and I think Rose has just shown up too. Come over and say hi with me.”

  She grabs Blake’s wrist in her hand, gripping as tight as she can so that he’ll get the message not to turn around and look at Cora. She all but drags him across to where Sofie and Rose are standing, both of their expressions confusion as she meets their eyes and gestures for them to follow her and Blake out the exit.

  Blake waves for the waiting town car across the street to pull up beside them, and the four of them climb in.

  “Um, can I ask what just happened?” Rose ventures. Sofie is still staring at Ash with a totally flabbergasted look on her face.

  “That was like poetry. Incredibly fucked up poetry,” she manages.

  “I agree,” Blake says, a surprised smile on his face as he stares at Ash. He looks like… like he’s proud of her. “You’ve turned out to be quite the perfect little Lady Lazarus, my dear. But I should warn you. Cora will do her very best to make you pay dearly for that humiliation.”

  Ash shrugs. “I’m not scared of her,” she replies, and it’s the truth. For the first time since she died, Ash is free and unafraid.

  ~

  She’s spent a lot of her time feeling like the shittiest kid in the entire world ever. Worse than kids who did stuff like getting caught drunk driving or smuggling drugs or whatever, even, because those kids mostly either had families who were too fucked up to really give a shit what their kid was doing, or families who’d get tearful and sincere and promise that they loved their kid no matter what.

  Or maybe that second kind of family only exists in TV shows and made for TV movies and stuff like that, Ash doesn’t really know. Her family never gets like that.

  Her parents…

  Ever since Jenna died, Ash’s parents just seem really hollow and fucked up and sad, like they’re trying to walk off the worst leg cramp ever but a million times worse. A soul-cramp. They always seem only half-awake, as if being properly aware of the world around them would hurt too much.

  They never say outright to Ash that they’re disappointed in her for not trying harder at school and not being prettier and more polite and all that stuff. For not being more like Jenna.

  They’d never say to her that they always thought she’d turn out better, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t know it’s true anyway. It has to be. People like her parents don’t have fuck-up daughters like her, who get eating disorders and take drugs and who get attacked and murdered.

  Ash knows that if she ever said that out loud, Bette and Michelle and everybody would shout her down and say that what happened wasn’t her fault, that something like that can never be the fault of the person it happens to. That Cora’s where all the blame should lie.

  And Ash sort of agrees, almost, except that so much else is her fault, that she feels like surely she’s to blame for this too.

  Most of the time, she doesn’t feel like this anymore. If she did at the beginning, then that’s mostly faded now.

  Except that right now, standing by the door to the living room, where her Mom’s sitting on the sofa reading a book, everything Ash doesn’t really feel anymore has come rushing back a thousandfold. She feels sick in her stomach, a roiling acidic guilt that feels like it should be too awful to bear. As if she wasn’t enough of a disappointment already, now she has to tell her mother the worst, most disappointing thing ever.

  But she has to say it anyway. Even if it’s the worst thing. Because no matter how much she wants to protect her parents from the truth, she wants even more to be herself without subterfuge. Maybe she’ll have a better idea of who that self is, that way.

  “Mom?” she asks, hesitantly, stepping into the living room, going over to sit on the sofa. “Can I talk to you?”

  BLAKE

  Almost since the day he died, Blake has loved optimists. He loves the ones he can destroy, the ones whose faith in goodness and hope for triumph wear down like the points of pencils. He loves to watch them break and become worthless, all their light gone out, but even more than those he loves the optimists who never cower, who bend but refuse to snap. Lily tended to be one of the second sort, and that’s why Blake delighted in killing her. Lily’s light dimmed after that, of course, and flickered a little, but there was never more than a slim chance of it going out completely.

  Then there was Will, and so Blake killed him too, and the pair of them resolved to live happily ever after. They’ve taken the spiraling nightmare Blake crafted for them and twisted it into a quirky kind of domesticity. It has been a long time since any of Blake’s projects entertained him quite so thoroughly.

  At this particular moment they are delivering a lecture to Rose in the cracked-vinyl corner booth of a diner, with Lily taking the lead. This means their concern for Rose is becoming more urgent; usually the sterner side of things is left to Will, who has a more diplomatic streak to his temper than Lily.

  “Half your face is scraped up!” Lily hisses. It’s a mild exaggeration; the graze is bad but relatively small, covered already by gauze and surgical tape. “What’s your school gonna say? What’s your mom gonna say?”

  “I get into fights at school,” Rose answers sullenly. The diner’s young waitress offers to refill Blake’s cup of coffee, but he waves her away with a smile. She’s rather pretty; perhaps he’ll kill her later.

  “No prom queen or cheerleader leaves a mark like that,” Lily tells Rose.

  “Look,” Will puts in, clearly sensing the rising tempers between the girls. “I don’t want you to think we’re not pleased to have another hunter helping us. But you’re going to get yourself hurt if you go on like this. Take it from me, there are a shitload of crappy things vampires can do if you get too strong on their radar. Anna says you took down three of them just last night.”

  Rose scowls down at the table top. “If I kill three vampires and Bette kills two people in one night, what’s the math on that? Does the difference balance it?”

  Lily hisses in frustration. The unconsciously animalistic sound makes Blake smirk. He’s terribly proud of himself for having spotted what a lovely vampire Lily would make.

  “At least Anna and Russ think I’m useful,” Rose snaps. Blake, already only half-visible at the far end of the room, turns to face the waitress again so that Rose won’t see him as she storms out. Blake leaves a large tip and follows her quietly.

  She’s walking away at a brisk pace, talking into the small cell phone which Blake knows she only carries at Will’s insistence.

  “Hey Tommy. Yeah, I know it’s getting late, tell Mom I’m… thanks, yeah. How’s your Chem home— no, I barely scraped a D on that, sorry. Hey, has anybody come by?” Blake can see Rose’s shoulders slump in disappointment as her brother answers.

  “Oh, okay. I guess I’ll see you when I get in, or in the morning if you’re… yeah, I’m gonna go to school tomorrow. Sleep well. Bye.”

  She ends the call and punches in another, the rhythm of her footsteps never faltering. “Hey, Russ. It’s Rose. Want some company tonight?… Okay, I’ll meet you there.”

  Deciding it would be a poor decision to continue stalking the girl as she begins a night of killing vampires, Blake turns his own path away from hers and heads for home.

  ~

  My dearest Nell,

  I hope this letter finds you well, and even more than that I hope this letter finds you at all. I’m posting it to Quinn, as his is the only address I have for your family which is even close to being current.

  Do you remember visiting me in London after Daisy died? I thought that my acceptance of her death was indication of how wise and worldly I’d become. You knew I was a childish idiot, and what I took for an unsentimental understanding of loss on my own part was actually a case of not understanding it well enough to feel it properly at all. You dragged me to Egypt to see the ruins of the tombs, despi
te my protestations that the desert lands were hardly a suitable place for creatures of the night.

  You showed me the picture-epitaphs hewn into the stones, neat rows of figures and eyes and birds and shapes, put there by hands of four thousand years ago and just as sharp and vivid as the day chisel struck stone.

  “Do you know why they did it?” you asked me, your small white hands clutching at the lapels of my coat, your small white face deadly serious.

  “Artists are compelled to create,” I told you.

  “Not all of these were made by artists,” was your reply, and you pointed out the rougher slabs to me, the imperfect birds, the blurred shapes. “These are monuments much older than either of us, sweet one. They were put here by soft human hands, but they will quite probably survive long after we will. Do you know why?”

  I had no satisfactory answer for you that night. As was proper to do in such circumstances, I arranged for a headstone for Daisy’s grave, a simple marble thing marked with her name and the dates of her birth and her death. I gave the other girls enough money to provide them with very comfortable lives and then I went to America, where a colleague and I tried our hand at being railway barons.

  There are so many stories I could recount to you, my Nell, but this is the one which compelled me to write to you: I understand the tombs of Egypt. I know why you mourn the icy winter rivers now gone from Europe.

  The tombs were made to honor the dead, to mark their memory into the world so indelibly that it would remain there forever. You mourn the river because it should have been eternal and was not.

  Humans are so fragile, so brief and slight, but the love they have within them is capable of lasting out the ages. A bird cut into a stone four millennia ago remains, even as both mourned and mourner are forgotten dust. The bird does not tell us that someone died, for that much is obvious, as all people die. The bird tells us that someone was loved, loved enough that their passing was marked by one they left behind. Four thousand years have passed and yet the love remains, tangible beneath our fingertips.

  Beside that disappointing river, you asked me to tell you if I ever fell in love, and so now I’m writing to you. I have fallen, Nell, and it is glorious and terrifying.

  Your dear friend always,

  Blake

  ASH

  The boy hits the wall of the alley hard, the back of his head striking against the bricks with a loud, loud thud. The physical noises a body’s capable of making have always enchanted Ash, even when she was a human and learning things like how her knees sounded when she stumbled and fell on asphalt from too-tight heels, or the stupid moans and grunts that happened when people did sexy things to each other, or even just the whisper-whisper of a brush through her hair. And now, as well as all of those, she’s learned new sounds, red wet sounds.

  The impact of his skull against the wall has knocked the boy unconscious, and if Ash was thinking clearly she might think that’s a mercy for him, really, that he’s knocked out and won’t ever know what hit him. But she’s not thinking clearly, she’s barely thinking at all, and the starving— always starving, always— vampire-part of her that’s in control right now doesn’t care at all about whether the boy has an easy death or not. It’s far too ravening to care about playing with its prey and prolonging the kill.

  The bones in his arms snap like the little hollow bones of a bird under her hands as she holds him, and holds him up, and tears open his throat with her fangs. The blood spills into her mouth in a messy gush, slicking her chin and cheeks. The wound is too big for her to seal her lips over and so she doesn’t try. She just gulps and gulps, feeling the shattered limbs under her palms twitch and seize as the boy begins to die.

  She’s lost so deep inside that red, draining the last throbs of life from the body against hers, that she very nearly doesn’t hear the running footsteps coming nearer. But even if she is an imperfect, damaged specimen, she’s still a vampire, and if there is one thing vampires do very, very well, that thing is avoiding their own end.

  The hunter is still seven or eight feet away from her when she turns, letting the body drop to the sidewalk, its blood leaking out in a waste across the dark cement as she crouches and readies to pounce, snarling.

  The hunter is taller than her, more solid, and has a weapon in his hand, but her hands are weapons themselves and she hooks her fingers into claws, raking a scratch on his face as he tries to get in a stab at her belly. The strike makes him gasp out a surprise of pain, so she tries to get in a second hit, but he knocks her feet from under her and she falls backwards, unsteadied.

  The hunter’s blade is sharp and heavy, well-made and lightly nicked from other battles. It is going to be the last thing she sees, because he is standing over her now, bringing the razored edge of the metal down toward her throat. Beheading is a sure way to kill a vampire.

  The part of her that was Ashley is far, far back in her mind, muffled by layers of instinct as old as the world and by interrupted satiation and unexpected danger. But, muffled as it is in the noise of other voices inside her head, the Ash-part yells out, determined to be heard and heeded.

  I will not die like this.

  She rolls, just enough to keep her head, the blade biting deep into the muscles of her shoulder and rendering her right arm temporarily useless. She has a clearer opening on her left, anyway, and punches that arm up with all the strength in her thin hungry body. Past cloth and skin, into the hunter’s chest. Her fingers clench around his heart and pull back through spongy tissue and hard, breakable bone.

  She doesn’t want to know what kind of sounds a body makes as it dies like that, but she hears them anyway.

  And then it’s over, and the vampire part of her fades back as much as it ever does, and she’s Ash again.

  The body atop her is heavy, but she pushes it off with the easy strength the boy’s blood has given her. As it flops onto its back, Ash can see its face, and she feels an ill roil of recognition as she looks at it with a coherent gaze for the first time. Russ. She’s killed Russ. Torn his heart out.

  “Hey!”

  Another set of footsteps coming nearer, these ones lighter and faster, younger. “Hey!” the voice shouts again. Ash scrambles to her feet and darts into the darker, more shadowed section of the alley, out of sight of whatever hapless idiot is about to see something terrible.

  “Jamie?” the voice says, quieter this time, shocked and disbelieving. Ash is confused for the briefest of moments, and then remembers. Oh. The boy. Of course. She’d almost forgotten him in the shock of what she’s done to Russ.

  Ash realizes abruptly that she still has his heart in her hand. She drops it, wiping her palm on her jeans before remembering that her jeans are just as bloodied as her hand is.

  “Jamie,” the girl kneeling beside the first body says again, sounding choked up and sad and alone. That’s when Ash’s mind catches up with her eyes, and sees that the girl is Rose, and that she carries a blade just like the one which Russ nearly managed to kill Ash with. The two of them must have been hunting in a pair. Any second now, Rose will notice his body.

  Ash runs.

  She stumbles and slips and skitters from fire escape to rooftop to balcony to rooftop, across the distance as fast and as far as she can go with no real destination in mind. She hopes there aren’t any kids in the apartments she passes, looking out their windows at just the wrong moment and catching sight of a bloodied dead thing moving through the dark.

  Ash drops down into the laneway behind the kitchen of one of the big hotels, the kind that have that special goldy-tinted light in the foyer and that subtle scent of money in the air so their guests feel comfortable and at home. The laneway isn’t that different or special to any other laneway, though; expensive dumpsters look just the same as regular dumpsters.

  There’s a busboy having a cigarette, which falls from his fingers in surprise as Ash appears. She catches it in her palm before it hits the pavement. The ember burns her skin and the pain keeps her attention sh
arp enough that she can speak over the hunger clawing and screaming in her belly.

  “I want to see the concierge,” Ash demands, her voice hoarse as gravel. The busboy nods, unspeaking, and flees inside the kitchen.

  She wipes at the blood on her face, uselessly, and gives up once she remembers that her hands are as sticky and gory as her cheeks and chin, and she’s probably just making it worse. She takes a shaky drag on the cigarette, then another one when the action proves to provide a slight distraction from herself. The blister on her hand has healed and vanished, leaving a tiny circle of clean new skin in the streaks of blood.

  The concierge is a slim, middle-aged white man with salt-and-pepper hair and an immaculate suit. If there’s anything out-of-the ordinary about his being summoned to the kitchen door by a blood-soaked teenager, the coolly professional expression on his face certainly isn’t giving that away.

  “May I help you, ma’am?”

  “I know Blake,” Ash answers, taking a final inhale off the cigarette and abandoning it to the damp ground. “I need a shower and clothes.”

  “Of course. Right this way.”

  As Ash follows him to the kitchen elevator, up to the first floor of rooms and into the suite he unlocks for her, her brain manages to have two thoughts which aren’t about blood. The first is that this hotel is no different to any of the ones she and Jenna would stay in on the nights they couldn’t be bothered going home after partying late. It seems weird that things seem to be the same now as they were then, like this vampire stuff was already going on invisibly back then and Ash never knew. That idea makes her feel vaguely ill; she doesn’t want to taint the past with information like that.

  The other thought is that she wants to be just herself someday. Not somebody who knows Blake, or the daughter of her father, or Jenna’s little sister, or anything like that. Ash wants… no, it’s more than a want, it’s like a craving, a desire almost comparable to her lust for blood, to someday be powerful enough in her own right that when she turns up at the back entrance of hotels they let her in just as herself, on the strength of her own name.