The Wolf House: The Complete Series

by Mary Borsellino

  “And then the next time I came here was when she died,” Ash goes on. “That’s what I mean about nothing meaning anything. She did all this stuff, she had this personality and people who loved her and this whole life, and then one night it just stopped, and everything it ever was is meaningless now, it doesn’t matter if her hair was blonde or black because she’s dead, it doesn’t matter if she was funny or serious or smart or stupid, because she isn’t anything anymore, she’s just dead.”

  There’s no sound to tip them off that Will’s approaching before he walks into view beside the bench where they sit. Ash hardly ever manages to be that quiet. She thinks that vampires probably get into so many stupid turf wars on the boundaries of different neighbourhoods out of something a bit like evolutionary boredom— they’re natural predators, but predators so good at what they do that only others of their species are any kind of real match for them. No human could have crept up on Ash and Lily like that without them knowing.

  That must be why wolves fight one another to be alpha, in the snow-covered forests of fairy stories. Why cats yowl and hiss at one another. Who do you fight when you’re no match for anyone but yourself?

  Will’s deep red eyes look very dark and sad.

  “Anna’s here,” he tells them. “She… she’s asked us to leave.”

  Lily’s pale face goes ashen, the sadness she’s been holding back for Ashley’s sake crumpling her features into a devastated expression. She reaches out to Will, standing up as she draws him close so she can hug him tight. She holds him like she’s really holding herself, keeping herself restrained from rushing into the hospital despite Anna’s request.

  Lily is shorter than Will, but his posture is stooped with tiredness and Lily is on the tips of her toes, making small soothing noises as she strokes the white-streaked curls at the nape of Will’s neck, the strange albino locks still shot through his hair from when he was burned.

  Ash still doesn’t feel any kind of sexy feelings anymore— she thinks maybe they’ll be gone for a long time, if they ever come back at all— but, watching Lily quietly comfort Will and the way he squeezes her hand with his own as they stand together, Ash thinks that it’d be nice to have that again. Closeness, touch, someone so close it’s like they’re the other part of her. She can remember what it was like, from when she and Jenna were little and would sleep side-by-side with their arms around each other, but Ash doesn’t think she’s ever found that same security since. Not like Lily and Will have found in each other.

  “Come on,” Lily says to Will and Ash. “Let’s go. I know exactly where.”

  So Ash trails behind them as they head back to their car, a clunky black thing with an interior that smells faintly of old, old blood and adrenalin and garlic. Ash sits in the back seat, putting on her seatbelt out of habit, and trusts Lily to drive them to wherever they’re going next.

  Will gives the radio dial a few spins, but there must be something wrong with the car’s reception because there’s just static and half-heard words, snatches of song that don’t sound like anything without their context. He gives up, and they sit without sound, lost in their own awful thoughts.

  “I guess this means Anna’s the last girl,” says Lily, desperation to fill the quiet giving her voice an overbright edge. “You know, like in horror movies? The one who gets to survive all the way to the end. We used to joke about it when we were teenagers. When dying was still this crazy impossible thing that happened to fictional characters in movies, you know? Not to real people. Not…” Her voice cracks and stumbles. “Not to us. We were invincible, so we could joke about it. I said she was too girly-girly to be the last girl, ‘cos they’re tomboys mostly, but she said I was way too dirty and gross and obnoxious for it to ever be me, which is kind of true too. So we decided that we must both be doomed, and that there wasn’t gonna be anyone as the last girl. But I guess she got to be it after all.”

  “We… well, we didn’t always know we were going to die doing this,” Will explains in his quiet, even voice. “Because like Lil says, you can’t really imagine your own death when you’re just a kid. Not really. But then we got older and it got easier to believe, and from then on we did. Being a vampire hunter isn’t like… I don’t know. It isn’t even like being a musician, because with a band there’s always the option to scale it back without stopping all the way. You can just play in local bars once a month on a Saturday night for your friends and then go back to the ordinary world once you’re finished. But this— vampire hunting, I mean— wasn’t a game where we had the choice to be weekenders. It was all or nothing, and we picked ‘all’, and knew that dying in the line of duty was going to be part of that. And now… and now three of us have, and there’s just Anna left alive.”

  “I guess she gets to kill the monster, then,” says Ash, and nobody’s got anything else to say after that. Horror movies don’t seem as fun anymore when the character you relate to most is the psycho with a mask.

  ~

  Lily drives them out to a noisy, kind of shitty looking bar out in the middle of practically nowhere. There’s still a band on the stage despite the fact that it’s so late into the night now that it’s really starting to count as ‘early.’ There are kids slamming against each other and dancing and making circle pits in the crowd, and everything smells like smoke and sweat and booze. Ash thinks that Lily may be kind of a loose cannon a lot of the time, but she sure knows great methods of coping. It’s impossible to feel quiet and melancholy when brawny drunk dudes are shouting demands for songs at the vaguely evil-looking punk band on the stage.

  “Come on,” Lily says, tugging them both into the thick of the crowd along with her, shoving and pushing until they make it to the front of the stage.

  And it’s not that Ash stops feeling dead, because she’s always going to feel dead because that’s what she is now, cool blue-white flesh too stupid to know it isn’t meant to move anymore. But in the crowd, even feeling dead, it’s like she’s been plugged back into something warm and real and electric in the world. She’s not alive, but she’s a part of a something larger than herself, and that something’s alive.

  That something moves and knocks and sways to the beat of the drums, it laughs and smiles up at the snarling singer on the stage and holds up a hand for a high-five with the guitarist. As her palm smacks against his, the impact seems to snap everything into perfect place for Ash, the world gaining a moment of absolute clarity all around her. She is here, now. And Russ isn’t, and that’s because of her, and Ash doesn’t want that to be true of any more people. She doesn’t want to take anybody else out of the weird communal life-feeling that she’s stumbled across on a sticky dance floor in a crappy bar.

  Maybe, if she really works at it, she’ll be able to make this not-biting-people thing work. It won’t be easy, and she’ll probably fuck up sometimes. But she’ll keep doing her best.

  Lily is laughing beside her, smooching a hard kiss against Will’s mouth as they stand pressed together, overtaken with the release of the moment. And Ash feels overtaken too, transported out of herself in a way she hasn’t felt in way, way, way too fucking long, and so when Lily turns to her to exchange a grin, Ash hooks a hand around the back of Lily’s neck and pulls her into a kiss as well.

  “Holy shit, we got some lesbians down the front here!” the lead singer says over the dirty grind of the bass and the guitar. “Fuck yeah! Come up here, ladies! Can we get some tongue action, too?”

  Ash and Lily break apart, laughing too hard to kiss, and Lily flips off the band as she scrambles up onto the stage, reaching down to help Ash up to join her.

  Will is shaking his head at Lily’s smarmy cat-with-a-canary grin, but the fond amusement is a far lighter expression than any other Ash has seen him wear tonight. It makes her think of that old song she used to play skipping games to the tune of, with Jenna at elementary school. “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy, when skies are grey…”

  Will may be stuck in the dark
forever, same as Ash is, but so long as he’s got Lily, Ash thinks that he’s maybe got his own little bit of sunshine, too. She’s never seen anybody else— not her parents, not Blake and Jay, not even Rose and Bette— so clearly love-struck as Lily and Will look at that moment as they grin at each other. Their lives might suck, but at least it’s a life they share.

  Lily takes a few steps back as a run-up, then hurls herself into the crowd. She’s caught and held up high, smacking at the guys who get too handsy at her boobs and whooping in feral joy as she’s carried, lurching and dipping like the crowd is an unstable ocean under her.

  Ash takes a pointless breath, steels herself, and jumps too.

  EPILOGUE: BLAKE

  “I still don’t see why I need to have a birthday party.”

  Jay’s protest is voiced in his usual flat, sardonic tone, as the boy watches his friends from school and Blake’s gang mingle together in the restaurant’s opulent surrounds.

  “And I still don’t see why not,” Blake answers breezily, plucking a champagne flute of a passing tray. “Though it really is a shame that Rose and Lily and Will declined their invitations.”

  Jay gives him an unimpressed look. “On some level, unconsciously, you do understand the basic concept of enemies, don’t you?”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” Blake assures him with a smile. “They’re like friends, but they don’t like you. I still think they could have made the effort. Sofie’s here, and I’m sure she hates me just as much as any of the others do.”

  “Yeah, but Sofie’s my sister.”

  “And the others are your friends, even if they insist on disliking me. Please try to keep your arguments logical, Jason,” replies Blake. Jay sighs in a longsuffering fashion.

  Ashley and Bette are sitting in a pair of rather overstuffed-looking leather armchairs in one corner, with Timothy and Alexander perched on an armrest each as the four engage in a somewhat meandering argument.

  “I simply find it strange that people can expand such vast amounts of time and energy protesting the use of a little fur in the making of clothes and yet disregard the fact that Chanel told the Nazis that the co-owners of her perfumes were Jewish, so that she could gain full control.”

  Oh. Alexander and his Nazis again. Blake moves closer, joining the circle of conversation as Jay wanders off to chat to Tommy.

  “She only owned 10% of her company,” Ash says to Alexander. “They owned the rest. That’s why she hated them so much. Sometimes when Jenna hated someone, really loathed them, it was like she couldn’t even think right. All she could do was lash out and make them hurt as much as possible. It was like hate ate up the rational part of her.”

  Bette makes a derisive sound. “Look, I fucking hated Jenna. You know that. But shoving me in a locker at school or writing a vicious blog post about what a two-faced bitch one of her friends turned out to be hardly puts her in the ‘selling out Jewish colleagues to the Nazis to get ahead in business’ category.”

  Ash shrugs. “I know. But at least Chanel hated them because she knew them and disliked them for who they were as people, not just because they were in the group of people everyone was supposed to hate. When someone looks at you like you barely even exist, it’s the worst feeling in the world. I’d much rather get killed by a vampire hunter who knows who I am than one who kills me just for being a vampire.”

  Her voice brightens. “Anyway, there are heaps of current designers who are way more gross than anybody who’s at Chanel now. You should meet some of the sleazebags Jenna worked with. But Jenna didn’t care. She never cared about that stuff; she probably wouldn’t even have been all that freaked out by the Nazi crap. She always used to say that she wasn’t interested in if fashion designers were good people or not, just if they were good fashion designers or not.”

  “An excellent attitude,” Blake agrees. “We use the word ‘good’ to mean ‘admirably adept’, and our clumsy language turns around and re-uses the same word to mean ‘morally righteous.’ One can be an admirably adept dressmaker without being a morally righteous dressmaker; that is as plain as day when couched in those terms. But because we use one weak, milquetoast little word for both attributes— ‘good’— we fall into the trap of thinking we should expect one along with the other.”

  “I hardly think ‘not a Nazi’ is an unreasonable attribute to desire in an associate,” Alexander points out in a dry voice, but Blake’s enjoying his diatribe too much to interrupt it for logic.

  “What’s a good vampire, after all?” Blake starts. He sees Ash and Alexander exchange a fleeting smile at Blake’s faux-philosophical tone, then school their faces into looks of polite interest as they listen. “Will and Lily are the closest to what we might call morally righteous, but that very fact prevents them from being admirably adept. If there’s such a thing at all as a good vampire, then that is us, and yet we are very wicked.”

  “I do kind of see Jenna’s point, though,” Bette muses, completely ignoring Blake’s little speech. “It’s like how I love Doctor Who, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t like Russell T Davies at all if I tried to hang out with him. Being really great at one thing doesn’t mean you’re great otherwise.”

  “You are such an incurable nerd,” Ash tells her. “No wonder you spent so much time shoved in lockers at school, seriously. Jesus Christ.”

  “Fuck you,” Bette sneers. “Better a nerd than a Nazi sympathizer.”

  “Isn’t there some special internet nerd rule that says you lose an argument when you use Nazis as an analogy?” Ash asks with a nasty grin.

  “Yeah, it’s called Godwin’s Law, and I think it should have a Bette’s Corollary that says that you’re a total bitch,” answers Bette.

  “Children, children, shut up,” Alexander says, cutting them both off in their sniping match. “All three of you— yes, Blake, you as well— have reached the limits of my tolerance for stupidity.

  “Ash, being a vampire hated by vampire hunters is not comparable to being Jewish under Nazi occupation, and next time you stumble into making a metaphor so clumsily ridiculous you might not be in such forgiving company, so please refrain from such remarks. Blake, I challenge you to go twenty-four hours without mentioning Will and Lily in unrelated conversation, and that includes sending me emails in the middle of the day from another room in the house which detail why you think that Winston and Julia from Orwell’s 1984 are just who Will and Lily might have been in a very different world.

  “And Bette… I suspect Ashley may be right, and you may in fact be an incurable nerd.”

  Bette squawks in outrage, rolling her sleeves back to the elbow as if she intends to fight Alex physically until he takes it back. Ash is chewing on her thumbnail, looking thoughtful.

  “Chanel used to say that gay men were awful fashion designers who made dresses as ugly and uncomfortable as possible, because they were jealous they couldn’t wear them.”

  “Well, that’s just stupid, isn’t it?” opines Timothy. “If I was in charge of designing dresses, I’d make them as beautiful as I could, because I’d want to wear beautiful things if I could. And who’s she to say I couldn’t, anyway? Chanel stole styles and fabrics from men’s fashions and put them on women. How’s that different?”

  Alexander raises his eyebrows in surprise but does not remark, looking at Timothy with deep affection and amusement.

  “Nobody could live in a household this vain without picking up a few bits of the history of fashion,” explains Timothy, correctly guessing at Alexander’s wordless reaction.

  “I agree,” says Ash. Then she waves one hand expressively. “Oh, not about the vanity thing, you guys haven’t even seen

  vain until you’ve lived with Jenna. I meant about the skirt thing. If I was a fashion designer, I’d make everything unisex, so boys and girls could wear skirts or pants or whatever they liked the best. It’s not fair otherwise.”

  “You totally should be,” Bette says. “I mean, if I got a night club, why shouldn’t you have a label?
”

  “It’s so charming to see other people be proprietary with one’s own money, isn’t it?” Alexander remarks to Blake dryly. “Do you think we’re sufficiently cut-throat to enter the world of couture?”

  Blake smiles a sharp smile. “We’d manage.”

  Ash grins shyly at them all, ducking her head to make her hair shadow her face. “Thanks guys, but I’m good. I think I’ll get used to homeschooling and drinking cocktails first. Just be a kid for a while, you know?”

  Blake has heard that most vampires go through an abstinence from blood at some point in their early years— Blake never did, but then Blake is hardly most vampires— so he’s not especially worried about Ashley’s recently-announced plan to stop drinking blood entirely. At least she has moved into the townhouse now. She seems wiser, and perhaps a little sadder, but also more at ease with herself than Blake can remember. All in all, the change seems to be for the better.

  “You seem to have come out stronger for your troubles, dear heart,” he tells her now. If he can’t give her a fashion label, he can at least offer a compliment.

  “Thanks,” Ash says, and there’s a new element to her smiles now, a calmness in her eyes. “I guess it’s like that saying about how oysters can only make pearls if they’re forced to deal with grit.”

  “Yes, yes, and coal only becomes diamond when placed under pressure, indeed,” Alexander offers in a bored voice. “I believe there’s even a Leonard Cohen lyric which suggests that all things must be cracked in order for light to get in.”

  Blake can tell Ash is doing her best to conceal how much Alexander’s disinterest hurts her. “You don’t need to be a jerk about it,” she retorts, trying for a flippant tone. Blake hopes she wasn’t hoping for a career as a professional poker player; she isn’t very good at keeping her emotions hidden behind a facade.

  “My only point is that you do not need to assume that just because you are different, then that means you must be flawed,” Alexander explains, what had sounded like boredom revealed to be patience in his tone. “Don’t resort to platitudes about how there’s worth to be found in broken things. You are not broken. You are strange, which is a different thing altogether. Homilies about oysters and coal make me feel as if I’d back in some overdecorated salon, listening to Blake and Oscar trade what they considered to be witticisms. I survived it once, please don’t force me to endure it for a second time.”