The Wolf House: The Complete Series

by Mary Borsellino

  “I didn’t know how to tell you,” Gretchen says.

  Rose looks like it’s talking all the restraint she has not to slap Gretchen, and that she’s only bothering to hold herself back because she knows it would hurt her hand more than it would hurt Gretchen’s face.

  “A letter. Email. The phone. Carrier pigeon. Morse code. Any way but this would have been okay!” Rose yells. “I could care less that you’re—”

  “It’s ‘couldn’t care less’. A mistake a lot of young people make. ‘Could care less’ would mean—”

  “Shut up, Alexander!” Gretchen and Rose both say at the same moment. Alexander shuts up.

  “I wouldn’t have cared at all,” Rose begins again. “Atheist, religious, gay, straight, vampire, human—what would ever have made you think I’d’ve changed my opinion about you the slightest fucking bit? You couldn’t just fucking tell me? You had to scare the shit out of my fucking brother just so someone who wasn’t you would be the one to break the news?”

  “It wasn’t just that,” Gretchen mutters, not looking at Rose. Alexander has had his fair share of arguments with Gretchen, back in the 1930s when she was Anastasja and he thought her ways of interacting with humans she loved were ridiculous. She clearly hasn’t gotten any better at it, but he can’t remember ever seeing her so cowed before.

  Rose gives an unamused laugh. “You mean that bullshit about making me a vampire, offering it to Tom? Are you fucking high? I might not go out hunting vampires anymore but trust me, if you touch my brother, if you even think of touching my brother, I will destroy you.”

  Gretchen doesn’t look intimidated, which doesn’t surprise Alex—no matter how impassioned or determined, Rose wouldn’t stand a chance in a true fight with Gretchen. Only one hunter has ever come even close to killing her, and Paulette was a long, long time ago.

  “I used to think that turning people while they still had so much to live for was a terrible thing to do. That even losing them was better than doing that,” Gretchen says. “But it’s all come right. Blake’s found—”

  “Oh no.” This time it’s Jay’s flinty voice which interrupts, even as the boy stays well apart from the rest of the participants in the argument. “You aren’t using me as an excuse. And at least Blake knows better than to turn me against my will and then rely on the power of love to make me forgive him.”

  Gretchen just raises her eyebrows, clearly not believing Jay’s words at all. He stares right back.

  “I can’t even… you two should go now. I’ll talk to you in a few days, when I’m not so fucking angry at you,” Rose says, breaking the silence and walking back toward the door. Alexander follows her, along with Gretchen and Quinn.

  “You look lovely,” Gretchen tells her quietly as they leave the house. Rose doesn’t look mollified, but that doesn’t stop the spark of attraction Alexander can see in her eyes. He has to stop himself from sighing. Teenagers are so complicated.

  “You won’t be able to stop her, if she’s put her mind to having you,” he warns Rose as they watch Quinn and Gretchen walk away.

  “No,” Rose agrees wearily. “But Bette will.”

  MICHELLE

  Michelle and Jay decide to skip the next day of school. Tommy won’t be there, since he’s still recovering, and Jay’s been sufficiently spooked by Rose’s creepy friend that he wants to spent the day hanging around with his vampires.

  “Isn’t that boring, though? Like being the first one awake after a sleepover, trying to kill time while everyone else is asleep?” Michelle asks him, over video chat on their computers when they’re both back at their respective homes.

  “Not really. They don’t sleep much; they just don’t go in the sunlight if they can help it,” he explains. Which is yet another thing to add to the steadily lengthening list of reasons why Michelle has no idea why anyone would want to be a vampire. Sleep is one of the most excellent inventions in history, in Michelle’s opinion, and the more the better.

  She spends the morning thinking about all the homework she should be doing and isn’t, flicking through all the channels of nothing to watch on the TV. She thinks about calling Ash, seeing if Michelle can go hang out with her, but Michelle is kind of overdosed on vampires for the time being.

  Like an especially irritating psychic, Lily calls at the exact moment when Michelle decides she doesn’t want to interact with any undead creatures of the night today.

  “You gotta cut back on this whole stalking business. It’s creeping me out,” Michelle tells her.

  Lily’s laugh is obnoxiously smug. “How many fans get the chance to say that to a member of their favourite band? You should be grateful.”

  “Yeah, I’m grateful that you haven’t kidnapped me and made my skin into a suit, that’s exactly the emotion all bands dream of generating in their fan base,” Michelle retorts. “How come you’re calling now? Shouldn’t you be lying in a coffin somewhere?”

  “Shouldn’t you be at school?”

  “Okay, you have a point.”

  “I couldn’t sleep. I figured it was worth giving you a shot—it’s not like skipping school is a rare event for you.”

  “You need to get some friends your own age,” Michelle tells her. “Seriously, I cannot tell you how incredibly pathetic you are right now.”

  “That’s easy for you to say now, but what’m I supposed to do in a hundred years? The only people as old as me then will be vampires, and vampires are jerks.”

  “Actually, it’s good you called,” says Michelle, suddenly thoughtful. “Do you have Anna’s number, or an address I can reach her at?”

  Lily’s silent for a few seconds. When she speaks again, she sounds sad and a little hurt. “I don’t, no. But I know she works in that same bar where you talked to her. I think she’s there now.”

  Michelle feels bad about ruining Lily’s mood, but she can’t put consideration for something like that above what she needs from Anna. “Thanks, dude. Go get some sleep, okay?”

  “Bye,” Lily says, and hangs up. Michelle mutters a variety of curses under her breath, and goes to find Anna.

  ~

  As expected, the bar is basically a ghost town during the day—there’s maybe three other people in the entire place apart from Anna and Michelle, and the thin strains of early afternoon sunlight that make it through the grimy windows don’t do much to illuminate the place.

  “The tips are shitty during the day,” Anna says, getting her a glass of coke. “But it leaves my nights open. Why are you here?”

  “I might just be stalking you. I do have about a zillion pictures of you on my camera and hard drive at home, you know,” Michelle answers, sipping the drink. Anna doesn’t seem that surprised to see her, but it probably takes a hell of a lot to surprise Anna these days.

  Anna just folds her arms, waiting. Michelle shrugs one shoulder.

  “You were the best person I could think of for teaching me to fight vampires.”

  “You want to fight vampires?” Anna looks skeptical. “Really? Aren’t they the latest fan club you’ve joined up with?”

  “I’m not going to go charging out onto the streets with a stake in my pocket, no,” concedes Michelle. “But I want to be able to, if I had to. I want to know how to fight back.”

  The look Anna gives her is almost as uncomfortable for Michelle as Gretchen’s unblinking stare. She hates being scrutinised so intently, no matter who’s doing it.

  Finally, Anna sighs. “Okay, sure. I get off in another hour. Let me know if you need another Coke before then.”

  ~

  Anna has a beat-up car and an extremely nice, spacious loft apartment. Light fills it from corner to corner, the pale-colored walls unadorned and spotless. There’s hardly any furniture, just a futon mattress on the floor and a coffee table with a couple of cushions arranged as seats around it, an old take-out box with the chopsticks still sticking out of it resting on the top. In the kitchen area, a sleek and elaborate chemistry set has been assembled beside the s
ink, and there are a few bottles of lethal-looking herbs and chemicals arranged on the otherwise-empty spice rack. The space for a fridge is unoccupied.

  “This place is amazing,” Michelle says, looking out the wide panes of one of the huge, numerous windows.

  “Well, it’s not like I have to save my cash to fund my retirement,” Anna answers with a hard smirk. “Might as well live well for a couple of months and get some use out of it.” She puts her hands on her hips. “Okay, today we’ll just talk absolute basics. Vampires are stronger than us and faster than us, so the only way to beat them is by fighting dirty and by being smarter than them. They’re all arrogant assholes, so use that to your advantage—they’re going to underestimate you. Prove them wrong.”

  Anna beckons Michelle to come closer to her, over to where the futon mattress offers them something to land on when they’re tripped. “This is stuff you’d learn in any self-defence class, but it’s worth going over before we get to the other stuff. Lesson one: always go for their eyes.”

  ~

  They keep at it until nightfall. Michelle’s not afraid of pain, not like this, and she’s determined to match every level of skill that Anna sets for her. Whenever her legs start to ache or her arms cramp up, Michelle forces herself to remember that moment when Gretchen said that she could become a vampire too if she wanted, since Tommy and Jay would be.

  Her life is worth more than that, more than an idle why-not by a distracted vampire. She has to make it worth more than that. She has to learn to be ready.

  When it’s almost dark, Anna holds her hands up and steps away from Michelle.

  “Okay, that’s enough for now. You should get home.”

  Michelle glares. “No. More. C’mon, I can take it.”

  Anna shakes her head, scraping her sweaty hair back into a ponytail completely unlike her usual perfect coifs. “You can’t learn all of it in one day. If you want this, you have to trust me.”

  Michelle sits down on the futon mattress, letting the hot fire of exertion drain out of her. “I need to be good.”

  “Why?” Anna asks, sounding almost gentle as she sits down opposite Michelle. “What happened?”

  And to her own surprise, Michelle tells her. All of it, from Tommy’s asthma attack right through to when Rose ordered Gretchen and Quinn to leave.

  Michelle knows that the others wouldn’t want her to tell Anna all of that, to give Anna so much knowledge about the goings-on amongst the vampires. But the others weren’t the ones who got treated like an afterthought. The others weren’t the ones whose lives weren’t worth anything except a shrug.

  When Michelle’s done talking, Anna doesn’t respond right away. She looks at Michelle like she hasn’t properly seen her before, like she has to learn to recognise her all over again.

  “I always thought they were kind of, I don’t know, sexy,” Michelle admits. “Before now. Exotic. Alluring. They go off to forests and deserts and all kinds of places, out in the wild, while we stay in suburbia. It seemed like something better than human, you know? But then… it wasn’t. It wasn’t better. It wasn’t anything to do with ‘human’ at all.”

  “They didn’t name those places,” Anna replies. “The forests and the deserts. They can only go there if we’ve gone there first. They’re parasites, and we’re the host. They seemed like freedom, a break out of conformist life, but they aren’t. They’re death. They’re the absence of any choices. They take your choices away. They kill all the possibilities of what you could be.”

  Anna looks away from Michelle, up toward the windows that now offer a sprawling view of the night cityscape. “I never thought I had any possibilities at all until I met Lily. I was in juvenile detention when I met her. It wasn’t the first time I’d been there, either.

  “The other kids in there were hard. I could recognise that in them because it was in me, too. I was just another damaged kid who was a little too mean, a little too brittle. Nothing special. None of us were anything special. That was what made us so different from the ordinary kids: the world told them over and over how special they all were, how remarkable, how every one of them was going to grow up to be the top of the heap. But we’d learned the lie early, the lie that’s bigger than Santa Claus. The one that says that everything’s going to turn out okay. We all knew that. That’s what got us locked up, what broke us deep enough inside that we smashed windows or stole cars or painted our names on walls. Knowing how meaningless and worthless we were to everyone in the world. And if you don’t mean anything to anyone, you don’t really mean anything at all, do you?

  “That’s what Lily was in for. Painting her name, I mean. She’d been caught out by her mom with spray cans in her room for about the millionth time—she used to sneak out at night and mark her territory on every underpass and wall she could find. Her mom had run out of patience this time, and so here Lily was, stuck in kiddie jail with the rest of us.

  “She wasn’t hard. She was as mean as any of us, when she needed to be, but she wasn’t hard. She was golden. She was this crazy, charming, short little freak with a pretty face and a dorky grin who got into fights all the time and laughed at her own stupid jokes and she was just… golden. And when she looked at me, I felt golden too, you know? Like, to her, I was worth something.

  “I wish I could have told her that. I wish there was a way I could have let her know how much that meant to me. How those stupid jokes and her dorky grin, I guess they pretty much saved my life, because suddenly I wasn’t hopeless. I wasn’t useless. Just being her friend, treated like a human being by her… that was enough to change my whole fucking world.”

  Anna smiles at Michelle when she’s done speaking, a crooked, wry half-grin. “I guess I just made the mistake of thinking that the change was going to be for the better.”

  ALEXANDER

  “Alexander. Alex, wake up.”

  It’s the frantic note in Jay’s voice, more than the hand shaking his shoulder, which brings Alexander awake quickly. ‘Jay’s voice’ and ‘vocal emotions’ rarely have anything in common.

  “What’s wrong?” Alexander asks, sitting up. Timothy’s awake too by now, looking up at Jay with worry.

  “It’s Blake. He’s. It’s like. If he was human, I’d’ve said he had mono or chronic fatigue or something. I don’t know what to do.”

  Alexander gets out of bed and goes to Blake’s room. He’s just as Jay described him, pale and drawn against the pillows, his hair a dull tangle and his eyes fever-bright.

  “If I lacked compassion, I’d take this opportunity to remind you of the fable about the little shepherd boy, who cried wolf so often than when the wolf really came, nobody attended his cries,” Alexander says, lifting Blake’s chill wrist to check the pulse, which is as faint as he feared it would be. “If you didn’t treat every passing ill feeling as if you’d gone and caught the Black Death, somebody might have taken this seriously before you got this bad. You might have taken this seriously before you got this bad.”

  “’If’? There are sharks with more compassion than you,” Blake says in reply, with a weak attempt at a smirk.

  “Well, I am a vampire,” Alexander points out with a shrug. Then, in a more serious tone, he says “I think you already know what I’m going to say here. You really do have a talent for having the most difficult and complicated life possible. I’m almost in awe.”

  Blake sighs, closing his eyes for a long moment. The shadows below them are bruise-dark. “Agheazma.”

  “What’s that?” Jay asks, stepping forward to Alexander’s side. “What’s wrong with him?”

  The boy looks so afraid. Alex feels a wave of sympathy and empathy for his position; to be the one standing by is in some ways much worse than being the one suffering through illness and injury. Not in all ways, of course. But in some. And until this moment, Alexander doubts that Jay had any idea that vampires could even suffer illnesses like the one currently striking at Blake.

  Blake has fear in his expression too, which is an ev
en rarer sight than Jay’s display of emotion. The constant aplomb that Blake puts up as a front makes him seem invulnerable. Jay breached that soon enough, as far as Blake’s feelings went, but to be physically weak as well in front of his human lover is a new challenge. What if, after all, it turns out that Jay’s attraction to Blake stems largely from how invincible Blake seems to be, how unkillable he is compared to the world that has taken so much away from Jay in the past?

  Alexander shakes his head in disbelief. “Typical. You’re dying, and you’re still too busy creating absurd romantic dramas to pay it any attention,” he says to Blake.

  Jay stiffens, eyes going even wider with fear. “Dying?” he chokes.

  “Not quite yet,” Blake assures him. “Alexander just enjoys making me feel as guilty as he can. I can be cured.”

  “If you’re lucky,” Alexander reminds Blake, before turning to Jay. “I’m going to go fetch Will. I’ll be back soon. Try to get him to swallow a little of your blood, if you can.” He lays a hand on Jay’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. Blake is far too irritating to die this easily, I assure you.”

  “Your face is far too irritating,” Blake grumbles in retort. Alexander gives him an unimpressed look.

  “When you recover from this, we’re going to have a long discussion about not picking up incomprehensible slang,” he warns.

  Alex and Tim head down the stairs and out of the townhouse, careful not to make any mention of Blake’s condition when they’re in earshot of the vampires on the ground floor. There’s no reason to cause panic and gossip, not yet.

  Alexander calls Rose as soon as they’re outside. “Can I have Gretchen’s phone number, please? It’s a matter of some urgency.”

  “It is ever anything but?” Rose asks, clearly trying for world-weary in her tone but coming out closer to cranky and petulant. Still, she gives Alexander the number, so he resolves to be more charitable in his thoughts.