The Wolf House: The Complete Series

by Mary Borsellino

  “Shh. It’s all right.” Tim smooths the worst of Alexander’s tears away with the pads of his thumbs, stroking with aching tenderness against Alexander’s face.

  “I thought I’d lost you. I didn’t… I didn’t even think to hope, there didn’t seem any chance…” Alex says, knowing he’s babbling a little, that his viciously guarded composure is crumbled completely. But it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters, because Tim is still here.

  The door opens with a crash, Ash standing there with her hair in a ridiculous sleep-knotted tangle, her eyes still smeared with mascara from the night before, dressed in the short night-dress she sleeps in that leaves the scars on her legs and shoulders bare.

  She runs at Tim, barely giving him a second to sit up before she’s clinging to him like a child seeking a parent after a nightmare. Hot on her heels are Blake and Jay and Bette, who wear matching expressions of shocked relief. There’s a sickly cast to Blake’s features, but that’s to be expected – none of them are looking their best right now, and Alexander doesn’t care in the least.

  Cora’s purpose may have ostensibly been to make Alex too afraid and wounded to dare go against her again, but Alexander’s not an idiot. He knows it’s just as likely that she was making a deliberately obvious goad, to try to push him into some kind of extreme retaliation. No matter what he does, there’s a good chance that he’s playing directly into her hand.

  But, like it or not, there’s only one course of response he can even contemplate taking. She tried to hurt Tim, and Alexander cannot let that stand.

  “Cora’s games are absolutely at an end,” he says to Blake in an even voice.

  Blake’s only answer is a curt nod, his smile folding into a grim line for a moment as he offers the agreement.

  ~

  That night, they stay close to home. Tim is still too weakened to mount much of a protest against everyone’s fussing, and so he soon gives up and submits to a marathon round of first-person shooter games against Jay and Bette on his collection of vintage console systems.

  They sit on the bed, all in a line with Tim in the centre, their gazes intent on the television screen. Alexander can hardly bear to tear his eyes away.

  Unlike Blake, Alexander believes in the usefulness of delegation, so he calls his usual real estate broker and requests a list of properties. While he’s waiting for that to come through he checks his emails, which are the usual mix of personal and professional messages. Tim’s always at him to make separate accounts for the two types, but Alex doesn’t see the point. One can become the other so easily, and then the problem of how to divide them up becomes just one more thing to think about.

  “Anything interesting?” Tim asks, sitting on Alex’s desk next to the computer and prodding at Alex’s hands as he tries to type.

  “You’re as bad as the cat,” Alex says, swatting gently at him.

  “Where do you think I learned all my tricks from?” Tim replies.

  “Weren’t you playing your games? Invalids are meant to stay in bed and be doted on.”

  “Bette and Jay got a sudden death round,” Tim answers, then looks contrite as Alexander tries not to flinch. “Sorry.”

  Alex just holds Tim’s hand in his own, grasping tight. They look at one another, happy to just be together for a long moment.

  “Nicole says hello,” Alexander says, when he returns to the task of going through his inbox. “She’s sent some photos of the new horses they’ve brought in.”

  “You should invite her to come visit,” suggests Tim. “I’d like to see her again, and… well, let’s just say that right now I’m in a ‘seize the day’ kind of mood.”

  “She might have something more practical than optimism to offer on the Min situation, too,” Alex muses as he types the invitation. He knows that isn’t really fair to Jenny; she’s the best human carer a girl like Min could possibly hope for. But sometimes even the best human isn’t enough.

  The property list arrives in an email, but none of the houses are what Alex is looking for, and he’s not in a mood to make compromises. He calls the realtor.

  “There’s a house in Kenilworth that would be tied up in a deceased estate as of a few days ago. I don’t need anything refurbished, but get some quotes from security companies for new systems…Yes, that’s fine, take whatever you need from the usual accounts.”

  “I’m changing any plans we had in place,” Alexander explains to Timothy when he’s off the phone. “Just in case any of them have filtered back to Cora. So I’m getting a new place to use for meeting our recent university stalkers. I liked that house we hunted in the other night.”

  Tim nods. “Good idea. And the security upgrades are because if it’s one that you can crack—”

  “It’s one that Cora can crack,” Alexander finishes.

  Jay raps his knuckles against the doorframe and holds his phone out to Alexander. “Call for you,” he says, and Alexander can hear the subtle warning in the flat tone. He takes the cell from Jay.

  “Did you like your present?” Cora asks, her voice bright and bubbly.

  “You’re going to die,” Alexander answers calmly.

  “Well, yes. All systems tending toward entropy means that everyone does, sooner or later. But did you like your present?”

  “And what present is that?”

  “Timothy, of course. I bet you’ve never loved him more, or been more grateful for him, than you are right now. All the small everyday irritations are gone. I did a beautiful thing for you, and it was hard work too. I hope you appreciate it.” A dark, venom-bright edge has crept into her words. “It wasn’t easy at all. Do you have any idea how many times I had to shoot some of my test subjects before I found exactly the right angle to hit them, the angle that wouldn’t damage their memories? Still, if a gift’s worth doing, it’s worth doing properly.”

  “Why are you doing this?” It seems a trite question to ask, but Alexander is genuinely curious, and the words are said without a rhetorical note to them.

  “What I want or don’t want in the world has never mattered. It was always only the things that would make Blake happy that mattered, wasn’t it? So I thought I might as well do exactly what he made me for. Everything I’m doing, everything I’m going to do, is only whatever what will make all of you happy. Everything you ever wanted.” Cora gives a husky, secretive laugh. “Well, almost everything I’m doing. Taunting Will in his warehouse, when you caught me—that was just for fun. But we all need our little pleasures, don’t we? You with your watches, Timothy with his cat, Nicole with her horses.”

  Nicole. Several unconnected events suddenly click together into a pattern in Alex’s mind. It had been Cora who’d told a group of Alexander’s business associates to give him Min. Tim’s injuries—again, Cora’s handiwork—had given him the impetus to invite Nicole to make one of her infrequent visits to Chicago, and Min offered a good reason for them to ask Nicole to make the trip.

  “Not the cleverest of plans, whatever it is you’re doing,” he tells Cora. “Underestimating Nicole is, I hear, a very efficient method of ending up dead.”

  “She isn’t the only one that’s true of,” Cora answers blithely. “And what I said before remains in place: don’t cross me again. I gave you your present early. Stay out of the rest of the game.”

  The line goes dead.

  ~

  Dear Tim

  Thank you for the exquisite new watch, and its tender engraving. I maintain that I love you more than you could possibly hope to return back, but I accept that you feel otherwise.

  Bosie (Oscar’s latest true love; I have no especial liking for him myself and so will hold off from telling you about him for now, in case the true love proves short-lived and I’m saved the trouble) and Oscar and Blake are currently engaged in a discussion that they clearly think is very clever on the other side of the room while I write. It’s something about a Greek myth, a piece of writing Bosie is working on. A woman, Helen, is said to be like a lion cub: welcomed into
the house of a lord and, at first, returning all affection in kind, but later growing up and devouring the lord’s children.

  Blake has just remarked that he rather likes the idea of being compared to a cat.

  “Oh, no, my boy,” Oscar’s just replied. “You’re some other creature, a wolf perhaps, or the smiling hyena.”

  As you can see, you are better off being well away from this collection of so-called ‘wits’.

  Nell has been in one of her bleak moods of late. They come, I’ve realised, in conjunction with Blake’s bloodthirstier phases. A few nights ago, when the pair of us were out hunting together, I finally asked her if I could know why this was so.

  “I fall in love easily and deeply. That’s just always been my way,” she told me. “My heart is a fierce and hungry thing. But you know already that I don’t turn all those that I fall in love with. Some I love because of how in love with life they are, how vital and changing and connected to the world they seem.

  “The ones I turn, I love them too. I love them as surely as I love those Persephones whom I find too lovely to drag to Hades. These are no less beautiful, but their own lives are all but over. They stay alive to remember the dead.

  “I didn’t make Quinn into a vampire, but he’s an excellent example of the type I’m speaking of. It’s why he and I are so close. Quinn’s sister died while they were growing up. They lived in a village in France, she was a shepherdess, there were wolves. I’d come through much the same with my own brother, lost when I was young, and so I understood completely when Quinn told me of how hard it was for him after she was gone.

  “The pragmatism of the peasant way is too acquainted with death’s part in the everyday to give much time over to grief. There’s too much else to do. Quinn couldn’t shake his pall so simply, though. He missed her too much. He found that the only real reason he even bothered to go on was because he couldn’t bear the idea of her memory fading, becoming another old thread in the tapestry of the forgotten legions of the past. He stayed alive for the dead, not the living.

  “The restless spark that keeps us vital no matter how many centuries we endure keeps us travelling. Never trust a vampire who is content to stay shut up in the same castle as the centuries pass, Alex: he has forgotten what it is to be in the world. To be hungry for experience. And a vampire who is not hungry is an unnatural creature indeed.

  “Quinn travelled. Even before his death, he travelled. He secured passage on a ship to the new world, the same ship which luck saw fit to populate with a vampire among its motley passengers. Liam saw something in Quinn which yearned to be immortal, or maybe Quinn’s curiosity about the working of the ship intrigued him, or perhaps it was just the way the candle-light caught Quinn’s sandy lashes while he read. Whatever it was, it was reason enough for Liam to make Quinn into a vampire shortly before their ship reached what would later become America. He took to his new existence quickly and without difficulty, because there had been so little keeping him tethered to the daylight world.

  “But Blake... it had only been a few years since Paulette. Since she’d almost been the death of me. And only a few years since... since I did what I did, after. I felt like I had lost a part of myself along the way, and then Blake... it was inexcusable. But he made me laugh, Alex. He was so alive, and I thought: just this once.

  “I thought he’d be all right.”

  I tried to tell her that she’d been correct, because Blake is so adept at vampirism that he might as well have been born to it. But Nell just shook her head.

  “He wasn’t finished being alive. To deny him the life he had ahead was a terrible thing for me to do. What if he never changes enough from who he is now to be capable of falling in love? What if I’ve denied him that? How monstrous am I to have done that to him?”

  None of the consolations and assurances I offered her made any difference. I hope some day, Blake himself proves her worries wrong, and gives her troubled heart the justifications it seeks.

  MICHELLE

  Tommy gets one of his fucking awful asthma attacks just as first period ends. Michelle goes with him to the nurse’s office, because he can’t get a full sentence out without pausing to wheeze in a breath. So then it’s peak flow meters and inhalers and Michelle doing her best to be useful and helpful, because while she’s useful and helpful she doesn’t have to think about how many thousands of kids die of asthma every year or how cold Tommy’s hands get or how horrible it is when someone’s body doesn’t want them in it, like how Michelle’s brain doesn’t want her around either.

  The nurse decides Tommy needs to go home and get proper rest, and pages Rose over the school intercom system. She looks worried when she comes in, which isn’t surprising considering how wrung out and weak Tommy’s looking, even if the worst has passed.

  “You always gotta steal my thunder, don’t you?” Rose jokes gently. The art show’s opening is tonight and Michelle can see the disappointment and regret bloom on Tommy’s face as he remembers that.

  “Shit, Rosie, I’m sorry,” he says in his quiet rasp of a voice. Rose rolls her eyes.

  “Like you did this on purpose, dipshit. You just look after yourself, ok?” Turning to Michelle, Rose asks “You going home with him?”

  Michelle nods, holding her cellphone up to show that she’s just gotten a message. “Yeah, Jay says he’s coming too.”

  The four of them go back to Tommy and Rose’s house, and get Tommy set up and comfortable in the living room on the couch in front of the TV with a bunch of DVDs. Michelle thinks it’s funny that there’s all those people who spout off crap about how illnesses like asthma are happening more and more because people are living cleaner and cleaner—comfy houses and warm clothes mean that bodies get less tough, and so end up with allergies and problems they wouldn’t have otherwise. Michelle doesn’t have medical training, but she’s pretty sure it’s a load of bull, because Tommy is one of the messiest people ever, and his hair’s always kind of stringy and oily and gross. She’s pretty sure he’s as germ-resistant as they come.

  They decide to have a Hitchcock marathon to pass the time, starting out with Psycho as the obvious choice. They’re almost at the end when Rose emerges from her basement to head off to her art show opening. She’s dressed in black suit pants and a matching vest, with a crisp white shirt underneath and a black-and-white striped tie. She smiles self-consciously and spins on one foot so they get a look at her back.

  “Do I look okay?”

  Michelle gives the best, and most truthful, compliment she can think of. “You look like you like who you are.”

  Rose looks surprised at the answer, and offers a faintly sardonic smile. “I guess being in that musical taught us how to act after all, then.” She turns to Tommy. “Call me if you have another attack, obviously. Or get Michelle or Jay to call me, I guess, since you’ll be busy breathing. I’ll be home pretty late, but you’re more important than any art gig, so don’t hold off calling if anything happens or I swear, I will kick your sickly little ass so hard.”

  And with that, she’s out the door.

  “Whirlwind,” says Michelle.

  “Train wreck,” corrects Tommy.

  After Psycho they watch The Birds. Michelle thinks that these movies are some of the scariest she’s ever seen because of how the scary parts are all mixed in with real people doing real things, things that have nothing to do with the monster part of the movie. It’s like the people in the movies think they’re ordinary, that their lives are ordinary. They don’t know that they’re characters getting set up for awful things.

  When there’s a knock at the door a little while after nightfall, Michelle jumps in surprise, almost spilling her glass of Coke on herself. Jay laughs at her.

  “Watch out, Chelle, it’s a flock of killer blackbirds at the door,” he teases. She drops an ice cube from her drink down the back of his shirt and goes to open the door, laughing at his yelp of reaction to the cold.

  It’s a girl, about sixteen years old or so,
and a young man of about 25. The girl’s wearing an eye patch, which means that Michelle is absolutely unsurprised when she smiles and says “Hi, I’m a friend of Rose’s. I’m Gretchen.”

  “Hi. Rose isn’t here at the moment. She’s got her art show thing on tonight,” Michelle explains. “Have you got her phone number? She won’t be home for hours.”

  “I know about the art show,” Gretchen says with a too-sharp smile. “I funded it myself. Don’t tell her that, though. I wouldn’t want her feelings hurt. Let me in, now, please.”

  Terrified, Michelle steps aside from the door so Gretchen and the young man can step past her. Michelle doesn’t know what to do and she’s more frightened than she can ever remember being in her whole life before.

  At the sight of the newcomers, Jay’s posture has shifted, and Michelle knows that he’s trying to prepare himself if he needs to fight or run away. He knows so much better than Michelle what to do. She’s so useless. She’s never felt so useless. Tommy, still pale and utterly exhausted, looks warily at the pair.

  “It’s excellent luck that you’re unwell this evening,” Gretchen tells him, sitting herself down on one of the arms of the nearest chair. The young man stands behind her, like he’s her security guard. Maybe he is. “I wanted an opportunity to talk to you before I saw Rose, and now I can get that out of my way on my first night in town.”

  Michelle remembers Gretchen, vaguely, from when her band supported Remember the Stars one time. Mostly, the support acts begin to blur into one indistinct, interchangeable memory of disinterest and noise and boredom. Sometimes Michelle feels like she’s spent half her life feeling bored, at least. Waiting for something to happen, certain that nothing will.