The yearning for that kind of influence and freedom is so strong that Ash thinks it must be part of being a vampire. She never had it when she was alive. Maybe she’s not even supposed to have it now; maybe it’s just the leader-vampires like Blake, the Alphas of their packs, that are meant to feel that drive to control. Maybe she’s only got it because she’s all fucked-up and broken and not-right.
The concierge leaves her alone in the room and Ash turns the shower on as hot and hard as the water will go, letting the heat pink her pallid skin until she looks nearly living. She thinks about the play they were doing in English class at school. Lady Macbeth had it all wrong. Blood washes off skin just as easily as anything else does.
Clothes are laid out for her on the bed when she emerges from the bathroom, smelling of soap and shampoo and almost feeling like she can’t remember the glorious slick sensation of coppery red pulsing over her skin from newly ripped flesh. Ash closes her eyes, takes a deep and needless breath, and concentrates on dressing in the jeans and shirt that have been provided for her.
The phone on the nightstand rings, making Ash jump in surprise.
“…hello?”
“I would have appreciated an invite to your party, if I’m being left with the clean-up bill.”
Ash sighs, relieved. “Hi, Blake. I can pay you back whatever the hotel charges, it’s just that I-“
“It’s so sad that you can’t tell when I’m being facetious. I could care less about paying the hotel. I only hope that whatever you were doing which preceded your dramatic arrival there was properly scandalous.” Someone says something in the background behind him, the words indistinct but the tone sharp. Blake gives a sigh of his own. “I’m being reprimanded for my lightness of tone. Really, you children are insufferable, whatever happened to the callow carelessness of youth?… all right, all right, I will show some sensitivity. Ashley, my dearest, are you distraught and suffering a dismal crisis of conscience and in need of comforting? Please say no, as I cannot bear it when Bette looks smug.”
Ash laughs, the sound only a little shaky, but she doesn’t know how to answer. She honestly can’t tell if she’s okay or not.
She’s grateful when, rather than prompt her for a reply, Blake starts to talk again. “The ever-marvelous Rose has just telephoned Bette. She’s at the hospital, and in quite a state. We’re going there now, and I wanted to check if you wished to come along?”
No. No, absolutely not. She can’t look Rose in the eye, she can’t watch someone mourn for deaths that were her doing. She can’t face the aftermath. Never in a million years.
“Yeah, I’ll meet you there,” she tells Blake.
~
Ash used to think she knew the night-city as well as she knew the day, but now that she’s a part of the night herself she knows that she never really knew it at all. The daytime rejects her with discomfort, the threat of pain in the harsh brightness of its glare, her eyes half-blinded and made vulnerable.
The night used to do all those same things to her, back when she was a day-person. Back then she’d thought she had good instincts, when the cold and dark of narrow alleys made her shiver in fear and turn away, and keep to the wide lit sidewalks with all the other day-people who foolishly thought they were at home in the night. Now she walks down those alleys, unafraid, the shadows black and smooth as cool silk against her skin. Ash knows the night, now. It’s the only place that she’s got left.
The hospital smells of sick blood and cold blood and thick, cloggy, old blood. It’s not an appealing scent at all, a little bit like rotted fruit. Ash tries not to grimace visibly.
Rose is sitting alone in the emergency room foyer area, her hair a mess and her face streaked from tears. She looks very young and desperately alone. Ash can relate. Rose is folding and re-folding a little piece of gauze between her fingers, the edges stuck with ragged, filthy surgical tape. Ash gently takes the whole thing out of Rose’s hands and puts it in a nearby wastepaper basket, which is half-full of empty paper cups and wadded tissues.
“There’s a coffee machine,” Rose tells her. “But it just gave me a cup of creamer when I tried to get one.”
Ash gives her a small crooked smile, sitting in the chair beside her. “I’ll pass. Um. Blake called me. He and Bette are on their way.”
“I feel like such a stupid asshole for calling her,” Rose says, sniffling a little and wiping at her nose with the back of her hand. “After I calmed down a bit I called Lily and Will, too. They’re on their way. It makes sense for me to call them, because… because one of the people that died was their friend.” Voice wavering, Rose pauses to take a steadying breath before she goes on. “But when it happened, all I wanted was Bette. It’s so fucked up, because we aren’t even meant to be friends anymore, and I’m maybe starting to get back on my feet a bit. Just a bit. I watch movies with Tommy and I work on my art and I talk to my friend Gretchen in email and it’s okay. Not awesome, but okay. But as soon as this happened, all I wanted was her.”
Ash wants to resent Rose for that, because Bette was starting to be okay again too, with friends and her club and starting to get interested in chemistry again, and now she’s going to get all fucked-up over Rose all over again. But Ash can’t find the strength to hate Rose for needing Bette. People don’t choose who they love. It just happens.
Bette and Blake arrive a few minutes later, just as Ash is starting to give serious thought to getting a cup of creamer from the machine after all. Bette takes a step towards Rose and then stills, like she’s only just remembered that she can’t run over and hug her.
“Jamie’s dead,” Rose says to her, eyes fixed on the floor. “Russ is dead. Lily and Will are going to be so cut up about Russ that everybody’s going to forget about Jamie. But he… he made me laugh again, after you were dead. He was sweet and funny, but I was too hung up on you. I dumped him. And now he’s dead too. Every mouth I ever kissed is dead.”
Bette makes a gulpy swallowed-sob sound. Ash doesn’t know where she’s supposed to stand, what she’s supposed to do.
Rose, still looking anywhere but Bette, meets Blake’s eyes. “Lily and Will are going to be here soon. You have to go. All of you should go.”
“I don’t want to leave you alone,” Bette whispers, heartbroken. “I never wanted that.”
“Ashley can stay,” Blake suggests. With Bette and Rose being all weepy and star-crossed and not looking at each other, Ash can’t exactly reach up and smack Blake across the cheek or call him a fucking jackass, which is what she really wants to do. Seriously, dude is a grade-A crap merchant.
His only response to her death-glare is to give her a charming smile. “You’ll feel better for it in the end, trust me,” he says. “Come on, Elizabeth, we should leave before Lily and Will arrive.”
So then it’s just Ash and Rose again, which fucking sucks on every level. It was bad enough seeing Rose and Bette standing face-to-face, the gulf between them almost palpable, feeling their temptation to throw their tiny seedlings of their new separate lives away and run to one another despite the inevitable disaster that would be. But to sit here with Rose after Bette is gone, with one more tragedy heaped on the girl’s already-heavy shoulders, is even worse.
Ash buys Rose a cup of coffee— it comes out just as white and lukewarm as Rose warned her it would— and finds a months-old gossip rag for her to read, and then there’s nothing to do but wait.
Half an hour later, Will and Lily come in, and Ash slips off to the bathroom so the three of them can grieve in relative privacy for at least a few minutes. Ash’s reflection doesn’t look any different to how it did in the hotel bathroom mirror, or her own mirror at home before she’d gone to talk to her mom. Of course she doesn’t look any different; she’s immortal, she’s never going to look any older than she did the day she died. But it doesn’t seem fair that there’s no change at all. Dorian Gray at least had a portrait he could watch. Ash wishes there was some mark on her now, some indication of the struggle and the conf
usion and the fucked-up-ness she’s feeling.
She washes her face, finger-combs her hair, paces back and forth a little, watching the skinny red-headed teenager in the mirror do all those same things. There’s a knock on the door, and Lily pushes her way into the little bathroom area. She’s been crying, but her eyes are dry now.
“I’m gonna sit outside for a minute. Get some air,” she says. “Want to come?”
The sidewalk beyond the hospital driveway is littered with cigarette butts and blackened matches and discarded, used-up plastic lighters; the junk that gets left over when everybody comes to the same spot to linger and smoke to pass the time. Lily lights up a cigarette of her own and offers the pack to Ash. Lucky Strikes. She and Jenna used to smoke that crap when they were barely out of elementary school, when they were first learning how to be edgy and cool and didn’t know about which brands were better and things like that.
“Thanks,” Ash says, taking one and the proffered lighter from Lily. She takes a long drag, feeling the smoke just swirl around uselessly in her lungs, and then breathes out. “I miss being able to really smoke.”
“I never did, much,” Lily answers, sitting herself on the back of a nearby bus stop bench, feet on the seat part and her ass perched on the top of the backrest. Ash sits beside her. Lily’s hair looks very dark in the late-night streetlamp glow of the mostly-deserted road. Taxis and ambulances drive by occasionally, tires hissing on the wet road. Everything feels spacey and unreal.
“It was me,” Ash says, looking at her feet and speaking quickly. “I don’t. I don’t feel bad about it. But I don’t want to have secrets anymore. I was trying to start over. I had a bad fight with my mom and. And. This was gonna be just one last hit. One last go. Then I was gonna find another way. Buying blood bags or just drinking tea and red wine or, I don’t even fucking know. I was going to find another way. I just wanted one last go. For closure, I guess. One last time and then I could give it up. It was just because I had a bad fight with my mom.”
Lily doesn’t look at her. Lily says “Fuck,” quietly, and curls her hands into fists, and looks like she’s almost going to cry but doesn’t. Then she takes in a deep breath, as useless as inhaling smoke, and says “Did you get it? Closure.”
Ash can’t stop the shaky laugh that escapes her mouth at Lily’s question. “No. I feel just as ripped open as ever.” She looks down at her hands. “Sorry. Poor choice of words.”
“Vampires kill people. It’s what happens,” Lily says, sounding hollow and resigned. She turns and meets Ash’s gaze. “I wish I could say that the closure thing was gonna work, for your sake. I really do. But it never does. We fuck up and we stumble and sometimes there’s blood when that happens. The need never goes away. That’s why alcoholics never get to use the past tense, you know? Because you never stop having the addiction, once it’s got its way inside you like that. And this isn’t even just an addiction, this is what we are. You can’t get closure on that. Every night is as hard as the first one, and some nights are harder. And you just gotta… you keep going anyway. That’s all.”
Ash considers this for a little while in silence. “Sucks to be us.”
Lily snorts. “Yep, pretty much.”
“I’ve been here— to the hospital, I mean— a couple times before,” says Ash. “I was never one of those kids who got hurt all the time, you know, getting fractured wrists and concussions from sport. The idea of getting hurt kept me from playing many games.”
“Bet you regret that now,” observes Lily. Ash nods ruefully.
“It’d be hard not to, wouldn’t it, now that I know I was going to die young whether or not I played t-ball with the other kids. But anyway, my point was, I never spent time here when I was a child, and I’ve only been here twice before since then, and neither were for me. I guess I’m just gonna be always the visitor, never the patient.
“The first was a couple of years ago; Jenna needed the morning-after pill and didn’t want to go anywhere that she’d get recognised by our family doctor or anybody like that. So we came here and waited forever in the waiting room, and I was scared that she’d have to see a whole bunch of counselors before they’d give her the pills but they didn’t, it was fine. Jenna was always fearless with telling people what she wanted. She was totally in-your-face. She always forced people to see her in the terms she set, no matter what. And then, bang, suddenly she’s fucking dead and none of that fucking means anything, or ever meant anything, all of a sudden.
“This one time when we were little, we’d been reading old Reader’s Digests and picking up all these phrases we didn’t really understand, because we’d been on vacation to the beach and it’d rained the whole time and there was nothing else to read. And Jenna was about nine or ten I guess, and getting into that stage girls— well, some girls, the girls I know, you might not’ve, it might be different for jock girls— go through where they totally wanna be mommies and have husbands and babies. She used to get so pissed off at me because I said I was going to leave my babies in the jungle to get raised by wolves, like in The Jungle Book.”
“Did you ever see Tale Spin?” Lily asks as Ash’s words wind down to silence. “That cartoon had the most random, trippiest concept ever. Kipling characters flying freighter planes in the nineteen-thirties. How’d they even think of that one? I want a pound of whatever it is they smoke at Disney.”
“Yeah, I loved that one!” Ash gives a sudden laugh. Lily can shatter any contemplative mood, if she gets a whim to. Ash kind of loves that about her. “I never even thought about it like that. I had a crush on Shere Khan—”
“You’re a furry? Kinky.”
Ash ignores Lily’s lascivious smirk and keeps talking. “- from the time I first read the books. It’s weird that I read the books before I saw the cartoons, because I’ve never been a reader all that much. Not really. Maybe I saw the cartoon first and it made me want to read the books, but I don’t remember it in that order. I just remember getting absolutely obsessed with the story about Fear and Death and how tigers got stripes. Did you ever read that one?”
“Yeah, yeah.” Lily nods. “That’s the one where they’re all down by the waterhole and Shere Kahn rocks up and there’s blood all around his mouth, and says he killed a man, and the animals lose their shit at him because they’re all like dude, seriously? You couldn’t find anything else to eat apart from a person?”
“And he just looks at all of them, cool as anything, and drawls ‘I killed for choice, not for food.’ I thought he was the most badass thing,” Ash agrees. “Actually, now I’m thinking about it, I guess I must have seen the cartoons first, because he’s not all that cool in the stories, apart from that one, the one with the watering hole. The rest of the time he’s not that great. But in the cartoon, he’s the coolest guy in the whole fucking world, this sophisticated boss-man who slinks around and purrs.”
“Wow, you really are a furry,” Lily teases, her stupid smile managing to get even wider and more stupid. “Don’t go yiffing me or whatever it is you furries do.”
Ash snorts. “You’re the one who knows furry jargon.”
“You’re the one who knew it was furry jargon,” retorts Lily. “So there.”
Ash decides to be the bigger person and let the teasing go. “What I was saying in the first place was, in Tale Spin, where he’s the leader of the shady corporations and stuff, doing secret business deals and controlling everything? He’s, god, so hot. Yes, I know I just called a cartoon tiger in a business suit hot, shut up,” Ash says quickly, before Lily can interject another wisecrack.
Lily gives her an innocent, wide-eyed expression and mouths ‘who, me?’, but at least she stays quiet.
“In Tale Spin he’s not a villain, not like in The Jungle Book, but he’s not a hero, either. I thought that was so weird and exciting. I’d never seen anything with a character who was on whatever side suited him at the time, you know? Sometimes he helps the goodies and sometimes he helps the baddies.”
“Yo
u were totally creaming your little junior-high heart out over a cartoon tiger,” Lily says with characteristic class. Ash kicks her in the shin with as much force as possible. Lily yelps, outraged, and rubs at her wounded ankle.
Then, thoughtfully and with something almost like hesitation, Lily adds “Blake’s kind of like Shere Kahn, you know.”
Ash thinks about it. “Yeah, I guess he is.”
“Only not a tiger.”
“Yeah,” Ash echoes with a humoring grin. “Only not a tiger.”
They sit in silence for a few minutes, smoking together and lost in their own thoughts, before Ash speaks again.
“Like I was starting to say before, Jenna went through this phase where she wanted to be a mommy. And we were at school one day a couple of weeks later, and her teacher is asking her class what everyone’s interested in doing when they grow up, right? And Jenna’s learned all these different phrases and sayings and whatever from Reader’s Digest that she doesn’t really understand properly, because she’s just a kid, but she uses them anyway.
“So when it’s her turn to answer— and, okay, if you think the school I go to now is conservative, let me tell you that it’s got nothing on the one we were at then. This was hardcore old-school values. And Jenna wants to answer that she wants to be a mom and set up a home and be married and all that stuff, only she uses a term she’s heard in the magazines, and so here’s a sweet little blonde kid telling a nun, a nun, I am not making this up, that when she grows up she wants to work in Family Planning.
“The headmistress called our parents up to the school, like, that same minute. Mom and Dad couldn’t stop laughing, even though they knew the school thought it was serious. Jenna was the apple of their eye.”
For the first time, it feels okay for Ash to be laughing at the memory of Jenna’s exploits. It still hurts, like a spike in her heart, but she can laugh at the same time as it’s hurting.
The Wolf House: The Complete Series Page 62