Watching Ash’s tentative smile at Alexander’s encouraging words, and the way the two of them lean in close to one another as they converse, makes Blake’s mouth curve into a smile of his own. For all Cora’s cruel games with the child Min, the plotting and taunting has created exactly that which she meant to mock: Alexander and Timothy now have a daughter.
And while Ashley may be considerably less able to pass as their biological offspring, Blake thinks that the teen is probably in far greater need of a mentor and confidante than the self-contained little girl currently eating a large bowl of chocolate ice cream at a nearby table. Jenny is keeping an eye on her, chatting to Sofie and Jay nearby. Blake will be fascinated to see what becomes of such a motley crew of people.
A tall, smooth-postured woman with glossy fair hair, clearly part of the restaurant staff, walks past the reserved party area and towards the back of the restaurant. Blake bids Ash and Alexander’s conversation a farewell, listening to its ebbs and flows behind him as he walks over to where Jay is talking with his sister.
“I believe I’ve thought of just the gift to give you,” Blake whispers softly into the boy’s ear. Jay turns, smiling in a puzzled fashion, clearly having forgotten their conversation of some time ago, on the matter of how Blake might best demonstrate his evil nature to Jay. Ah, well. That just meant that it would be a surprise. The woman was very lovely; her death will be quite a sight to see.
“Come with me,” Blake demands with a wicked smile, taking Jay’s hand and leading the boy away from his friends, into the dark.
LAST GIRL
BOOK FIVE
OF THE
WOLF HOUSE SERIES
For Tara, who made it worth doing; for Deena, who gave me a chance to do it; for everyone who came along for the ride, who made it an awfully big adventure.
ALEXANDER
When Alexander was a child, the demand for those who could translate messages from Chinese to English or English to Chinese outstripped the supply. Translators and scribes made a solid living in bridging the gap between the languages, and so his father made sure that Alexander was proficient in writing and reading.
The thing that Alexander realized quickly (and that his father never did), was that being a bridge meant never really being on one side or the other, but instead being stuck in the middle.
Another thing he was clever enough to understand was that words were powerful, and he was otherwise powerless, and most people didn’t want the powerless to get their hands on any kind of power. Most people would do whatever was necessary to push the powerless right back down where they belonged.
Understanding these things about the world and losing his parents, and the loneliness that came after, made Alexander grow up mean. Softness got you hurt, so he learned all the ways of being sharp instead.
He grew up, fell in love despite having no real belief that love even existed, and then he died young. He hadn’t wanted to die, but he hadn’t wanted most of the things that had happened to him in his life prior to dying, either.
He’d been dead for just a few years when Blake asked if he wanted to come along on a short trip to England. Alexander was reluctant at first, because Timothy wasn’t going, and Alex hadn’t yet been away from Timothy for more than a few nights at a time since becoming a vampire. Of all the things Alexander had wanted in his short, hungry life, he’d wanted Timothy the most, loved him with a sharp intensity which matched the teeth and blood and burning danger of their couplings.
But eventually curiosity about the world won out – Alexander had been a wanderer in life, and that travel-itch was still in his blood, even if the blood itself was ageless now—and he’d decided to go.
Only one huge worry weighed at him. Timothy and Blake respected Alexander, his pragmatic mind and his dry sense of humor and his ruthlessness, but Timothy and Blake were hardly ordinary. Their lives, their secrets, kept them as much in the margins as any migrant.
But while Blake would be able to pass for human in London, Alexander would never pass for anything but Chinese.
When he said all this to Timothy, Timothy laughed, striding across the room to press his smile to Alexander’s mouth in a happy kiss. Their love affair was still new—hell, Alex himself was new; the sleek, cold form he had become was still new and strange and wonderful—and Timothy’s laugh sounded beautiful enough to Alex to be able to break hearts.
(The first starry-eyed sheen of infatuation has worn off, after so many years between them, but even now Alexander still loves the sound of Tim’s laugh.)
“Trust me, Alex, when somebody is as rich as you shall be, London couldn’t care less if they were a sea monster or the man in the moon. Being Chinese is nothing at all; the wealthy are a race of their own.”
~
The kitchen, like the rest of the apartment, is impractical in a quaint, earnest way that makes Alexander want to smile. No matter how down-to-earth and sensible she may be for her age, Jenny has only recently turned sixteen years old, and so there’s a large Tupperware tub filled with packets of ramen on one of the shelves, and an impressive array of food coloring shades on another. There’s one loaf— an organic fruit bread speckled with raisins— and five boxes of cereal with a variety of sugar percentages ranging from ‘high’ to ‘insulin coma’ on the shelves too, but no milk in the fridge. The vegetables present, despite being in the crisper, do not have any discernible crispness to them.
On the front of the fridge are a couple of magnets advertising local take-out restaurants, which hold several drawings in place on the door. Simple shapes and bright colors, like any child’s scribbles, but Min’s drawings have something odd and cold about them. Her angles skew too far outside of expected proportions, making elbows and rooftops and skirts all seem a little like the edges of predatory teeth on the white of the paper.
“That one’s her plans for our Halloween costumes,” Jenny explains, gesturing with the spoon in her hand to the drawing Alexander was looking at. “She’s dressed Sofie as Rorschach from Watchmen, which I think it hilarious. Sofie just kind of grunted when she saw it, which made it even more hilarious. And Min’s made herself Hit-Girl from Kick-Ass, of course. I’m sure she’s going to wear out that DVD one of these days, even if you aren’t meant to be able to wear out DVDs. That one and Lilo and Stitch are her favourites.”
Alexander leans against the wall, watching Jenny as she stirs. He’d offered to help—because he may be a monster, but he’d like to think he’s a polite monster—but she’d declined. He can hear Timothy and Min discussing dinosaurs in the living room.
It had surprised Alexander a little how readily Jenny had accepted the apartment when he’d suggested the idea to her, but in retrospect he’s not sure why he’d doubted her pragmatism. A townhouse full of vampires was no place for a child to stay, not in the long-term, and nor was the dreary warehouse squat where Jenny and Sofie were staying with Jenny’s brother an appetizing accommodation for anyone. Better for everyone, this way, with Sofie and Min and Jennifer all comfortable and warm and safe.
And if Jenny’s brother didn’t like it, well, that was just something that Will would have to live with. Or not, as the case may be, as Will hasn’t been alive for quite some time now. Additionally, Alexander would pay good money to see a battle of obstinacy play out between Jenny and Will, as he suspects that Jenny would win any such argument. The girl has more important things to think about than Will and Lily’s continued crusade for self-destruction, or whatever it is they play at in their little warehouse lair.
“Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great that she’s learning English so fast,” Jenny goes on. “I just sometimes wish she wasn’t learning quite so many school-inappropriate words before she’s even got all her basic vocabulary in place. That third figure is where Min’s put me as the Bride from Kill Bill, another favorite movie of hers; even though I explained to her that I’d sooner eat glass than wear a jumpsuit. Plus, I bet even the Bride doesn’t make mashed potatoes as good as mine.”
The drawing, in Min’s eerie sparse style, is a surprisingly accurate depiction of the three of them—Sofie, smoke-pale and frowning and skinny; Min’s equally serious expression on her childish face; Jenny’s kind, non-nonsense smile and soft, curvy body. Even Jenny’s blue dreadlocks look as they should, depicted carefully in bright crayon.
“See,” Jenny chatters on, glancing occasionally at Alexander with the real-life version of that same smile as she speaks. “My mother is a completely awful cook. She’s not even awful, she’s… it’s like if you said that a giraffe was a completely awful bird. She’s not even the right species for it. But there was this one winter when Will kept getting the flu. He had it three times or something. My other brother only got it once, same time as when Will had it first, and I didn’t get it at all, but Will had it constantly for the rest of the winter.
“And my mom’s a bad cook, but she’s a good doctor and a good mom, and so as well as making sure Will was as comfortable as she could make him with cough syrups and vaporizers and everything, she wanted to give him home-cooked food, you know? Except she can barely make a cup of coffee without burning something, so it was kind of a lost cause. All she could manage to make that he’d actually consent to eat was mashed potatoes.
“So we ate mashed potatoes practically every night for dinner, just me and Will. It’s the best memory I have of before my parents split up, just sitting there watching cartoons in the living room, Will lying on the sofa with a blanket and a pillow and a box of tissues, me on the floor with my Lord of the Rings action figures, both of us with mashed potatoes and orange juice.
“Now the best comfort food in the world for me is mashed potatoes. When I feel most miserable, it’s all I want to eat. Stupid, huh? But it makes me feel looked after, even now. Even now that Will’s not… not the same anymore. Even now that my mother’s one of the things to feel worried about all the time in my life, instead of being the thing that could help my worries go away. Even… sorry. I’m babbling about fucking mashed potatoes.” Jenny shakes her head, wiping the back of her wrist across her eyes quickly.
“I don’t mind,” Alexander assures her. “I enjoy hearing the origin story behind aspects of who you are. I find you captivating.”
Jenny ignores this, using the wooden spoon to stab at the already well-mashed mashed potatoes. “Have you ever heard the saying about how childhood ends when you first understand the idea that one day you’re going to die?”
She pauses, as if giving him time to reply, but goes on speaking even when Alexander doesn’t volunteer an answer. “I don’t think it’s true. Or maybe it is. But not completely. I think that there’s another part of being young that ends when you first understand that your parents aren’t immortal.
“My mom’s HIV positive. I’m not stupid, so I know that she’s not dirty or diseased or anything because of something that’s different in her blood. But it’s like her being alive means this different thing now.
“It’s ridiculous, but I keep thinking of one of those time bombs from comic books, the ones with sticks of dynamite and an old-fashioned alarm clock? I keep imagining one of those, ticking away. Maybe that’s the new, postmodern version of the hour glasses people used to put in paintings as a reminder of death.
“I don’t… it isn’t that I feel like my mother’s dying. I know she’s not. Her cell counts are good and she’s careful about taking her medication. I don’t feel like she’s dying.
“For the first time, though, it’s like I know, I finally understand that someday she will die. That she isn’t going to be alive forever. Do you know how scary that is? Of course you do. Your parents must have… you’ve probably got a different take on mortality and everything anyway. But it’s a new thing for me. And it’s weird, but I feel like the entire world is different now. Everything is different now, because of that one piece of new knowledge.
“It makes no sense, but I feel like it opened the floodgates. Like Will wouldn’t have… wouldn’t be different now, if I hadn’t learned this new thing about how the people I love aren’t indestructible. Like Sofie wouldn’t have the problems she has. Like Min… I feel like there’s all this bad stuff in the world that wasn’t there before. And most of me knows that isn’t true, that the bad stuff was there and I just didn’t see it, but that doesn’t stop me feeling like everything would still be okay if I was still a kid, like the problems in the world weren’t as big and impossible then. Now I’m here making mashed potatoes, like eating them is going to make the world go back to how it was when I used to eat them with Will. How fucked up is that?”
For a beat, there is sorrow and quiet in the kitchen.
“I think you’ll find that most vampires advocate comfort food as a problem-solver,” suggests Alexander.
Jenny gulps a laugh, wiping her eyes again. “Well, I guess there has to be at least one thing you’re not totally wrong about. Oh! Before I forget, I found something of yours.”
She opens the cabinet on top of the fridge, which is set too high to be any practical use as a storage space. “I found this in with some of the clothes you gave to Min to use as dress-ups. I stopped reading as soon as I realized what they were. Here.”
It’s a cigar box, the varnish worn from the warm-hued wood and the painted design on the lid long-ago faded to the barest ghosts of the dancing figures which had once adorned it. The hinges are stiff when Alexander opens the lid.
He’s only seen it once before, and had all but forgotten that it existed. It had been amongst Tim’s things, found in a drawer during Alexander’s purge of all the remnants of the life together that they’d lost. He’d opened it then, seen what was inside and, like Jenny, had closed the lid quickly on the discovery. The box had been banished to the attic, along with so many other little ghosts. And now it’s come back for another haunting.
“Thank you,” Alexander says to Jenny, as graciously as he can muster. “I’ll just go put it with the coats.”
~
“I like your shirt,” Timothy tells Sofie over the dinner table, sipping on his cup of raspberry tea. Alexander has a cup of the stuff too, but is reluctant to touch it. He thinks Jenny probably has it in the house for when Will and Lily visit, and anything that those two would willingly consume is bound to be unpalatable. He’ll get something to drink on the way home.
Sofie’s response to Timothy’s compliment is a glare. “There’s nothing wrong with how I’m dressed.”
The t-shirt is faded from its original black to a worn, watery grey, and there’s an imperfect darning job along the split seam of one shoulder. The logo on the front is for the band Pearl Jam, and depicts a child with two heads, one of a little boy and the other a little girl.
“Uh, yeah, I know there’s not, that’s why I complimented your shirt,” Timothy says, “because I like it. You’ve heard of the concept of liking things, I’m sure.”
“She has new tattoos,” Min contributes helpfully, speaking around a mouthful of mashed potato. “Do you like them, too?”
There’s a wide black band all around Sofie’s wrist now, covering the design of her old tattoo completely. Alexander can vaguely remember it from when he met her in Colorado. It had been crude and unattractive, and while these aren’t things Alexander objects to on principle, the new designs are a definite improvement.
The black looks like a bracer, the arm-part of a sleek gauntlet. Higher, entirely covering the space between the black and the crook of Sofie’s elbow, are strange creatures. There’s a naked mole rat, and an angler fish, and a host of other scuttling things that he can’t quite make out, a ribbon of frightening animals wound all around Sofie’s arm.
“They eat other predators.” Sofie says. “Angler fish, I mean. They lure them close and then devour them whole. And mole rats don’t feel pain. You know, I could dress like you if I wanted to.” The cadence of her voice changes from reflective back to irritated so fast that Alexander takes a moment to catch up. “Just because I don’t doesn’t mean I can’t.�
��
“Don’t worry, I get the hint. No more compliments,” promises Timothy, face so ludicrously earnest that even diplomatic Jenny can’t keep in a snort of amusement.
Sofie, scowling furiously, loads up her spoon with mashed potato and fires, catapulting the missile directly at Timothy’s waistcoat. “Not any better well-dressed than me now, are you?” she gloats with a thin smile.
Timothy spares the barest glance down at his splattered clothing before turning to where Jenny sits beside him. “May I?” he asks politely, gesturing at her plate.
“You’re the one who’ll pay the cleaning bill,” she answers cheerfully, handing him her spoon and moving her chair back to avoid the worst of the carnage as Timothy returns fire.
“What excellent role models the child has,” remarks Alexander. Sofie throws a fork at Timothy’s face. Min laughs delightedly, displaying the natural love of chaos that Alexander finds so endearing in young children.
The silliest part is that Sofie and Timothy aren’t really so different, as far as Alexander can tell. For one thing, they’re both currently covered in potato. They’re both older siblings who’ve been left without younger siblings to taunt and care for—Timothy’s sister is lost to the mists of history, and Sofie’s brother is separated from her by the more prosaic problem of family tensions and the everyday difficulties of love.
Both Sofie and Tim are, as Sofie had so aggressively stated, perfectly capable of dressing up in beautiful, impeccable clothes and acting with the nicest of manners. But both would, if given the choice, choose a half-decayed Pearl Jam tee over a silk shirt.
The Wolf House: The Complete Series Page 64