“What are all of you doing here?”
“What are you doing here? What’s wrong?” Ash asks, because Ash knows Alexander almost as well as he knows himself.
They’re hardly the allies he would have chosen, but they’re better than nothing. “Cora. She’s got Jenny, Min and Nicole at the house where Nicole’s staying.”
Sofie has the door open before Alexander’s finished. “Call one of your cars, then,” she says. “A fast one.”
~
They arrive at the house at the same time as Lily and Will. The evening is still bright enough that all of the vampires are feeling decidedly uncomfortable, and even Sofie and Rose look a little queasy.
They haven’t even had time to do more than acknowledge that Lily and Will are approaching when Anna shows up too. Whatever else he might feel about her, Alexander can’t fault Cora’s timing.
“We have to work together. This is too dangerous to do otherwise,” Will says to Anna in a businesslike tone. “Please, Anna. This once. Just this one time.”
Alexander doesn’t like the look in Anna’s eyes as she nods. But there isn’t time to stop, isn’t time for discussion. Alexander puts his shoulder to the door, and then they’re inside.
At the top of the stairs, on the wide landing which overlooks the foyer, Cora is standing like a hostess making her grand entrance. She’s wearing one of her sleek little business dresses, the slit on one thigh stretching high on her hip, and her earrings and throat glitter with emeralds.
There’s emeralds in the hilt of each of the two throwing daggers she holds in her hands, as well.
For a moment, everyone is still. The vampires among them search out and find the sound of heartbeats, three of them, in the room where Min so recently learned the childish joy of jumping on a bed.
Alexander sees Will relax, just a fraction, once it’s clear that Jenny’s still alive, that her heartbeat is still that of a human.
Sofie’s the one who breaks the stillness, who moves. She’s up the stairs two at a time, almost as fast as a vampire. One of Cora’s knives buries itself in her shoulder but Sofie doesn’t break stride.
Anna, Will and Lily all strike a second later. Anna leads them up the stairs, even as Sofie tackles Cora down over the landing’s railing and onto the parquet floor below.
That’s when Alexander sees the full shape of Cora’s plan, as she laughs in triumph upon impact with the floor. But it’s too late, he knows it’s too late, even as he runs up after the hunters and follows them into the bedroom where the hostages are held.
MICHELLE
Cora’s other knife goes into Sofie’s thigh and is then pulled free again, driving hilt-deep a second time. Sofie screams.
A third stab, another scream.
There’s no time to think, no time to hesitate. There isn’t time to be scared, which is a mercy, because if she had time to be scared then Michelle wouldn’t be able to move at all.
As it is, though, there’s no time for anything but what happens next. Michelle squeezes Tommy’s hand one last time, to give herself courage – and as a goodbye, because she may be dead in the next few seconds.
Then she runs, and Ash is running beside her, and the little knives that Alexander gave them are in their hands.
The knives are hardly the most impressive weapons. Far from it. If they were able to ask, it’s likely that Cora would tell them that knives like that aren’t even worth considering as a threat.
But really, that’s the only advantage they’ve got, isn’t it? Nobody ever considered them. Ash is just the sacrifice who refused to stay dead, and Michelle is nothing but the afterthought who demanded to be thought of.
Michelle’s knife drives itself into the back of Cora’s neck. That’s how cocky Cora was, how little thought she gave the rest of them: she turned her back to them.
Vampire flesh is tough, and Michelle’s not especially strong, but the blow is enough to throw Cora off-guard for a few seconds, and that’s enough time for Ash to get in front of her and push the second knife directly into Cora’s eye, as deep as it will go.
Bette and Tommy help Sofie to stand on her uninjured leg, shifting her away, putting pressure on the wounds.
And then soft, vulnerable Rose, her pale hands trembling, reaches into the pocket of her jacket and pulls out a plastic cigarette lighter, decorated with a skeletal angel. She crouches beside Cora’s still body, reaching for a handful of Cora’s glossy hair.
It gleams coppery in the small firelight of the lighter for a second and then catches, blazing. Rose steps back to avoid being burnt, her face smooth and cold as she tosses the lighter into the growing flames.
ALEXANDER
Anna has a stake in one hand, a knife in the other. The knife’s not so different from Cora’s, and Alexander can appreciate the symmetry of that.
He’s more like Cora than Nicole thinks, in some ways.
He hopes Jenny isn’t looking. He’s sure she is.
He can see all of it now. The way every cog and wheel fits into the mechanism.
Cora’s revenge was always going to be this. It was never about Blake. It was always about getting Will and Sofie back in every way that she could for Colorado, a childish game of you-hit-me-first. She’ll be killing Sofie right now, downstairs, as Anna kills Will, and Alexander can’t halt the motion of any of it enough to stop it.
Poisoning Blake led to Will and Lily working to save Blake’s life. Min’s existence tied Jenny’s world to that of the townhouse, muddying the moral clarity of Will’s black-and-white hunter world. The mindless vampires, like Ash was supposed to be, that Cora unleashed on the city, made Anna’s world clearer and sharper – the monsters were simple monsters, with no ambiguity to their evil.
Every step made them weaker. Every step put Will more at odds with Anna. Every step drove them here.
And then Anna strikes, like Alex knew she would, and the stake goes into Will’s heart and the knife into his temple, and he falls to the ground, his eyes open and staring and lifeless.
MICHELLE
The scream rips through the air, making everyone’s frayed nerves jump in redoubled surprise. Automatically, as if by instinct, Michelle and Rose move in the direction of the sound, running up the stairs and leaving the others to make sure Cora’s pyre doesn’t become an inferno.
Michelle doesn’t know if the movement towards someone’s fear and pain comes from her short lived training as a hunter, or from the borrowed predatory impulses still threading through her system from Jay’s bites. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t want to know.
Jenny, Min and Nicole are tied up together in one corner. Jenny’s bloodied but alive. Alexander is slicing the ropes away from them.
But none of that matters, because Will is on the floor, Lily curled over him, and Anna is standing with a gun in her hands, trembling, aiming at Lily’s bowed head.
“I know. I know about all of it. The people you’ve both… I know he wasn’t the same Will anymore. I know you aren’t Lily anymore. But I can’t kill you. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I can’t,” Anna sobs, her shaking more violent with each word.
Michelle’s only thought, as she looks at the scene before her, is that Anna has killed Lily, more profoundly than any of them can imagine.
ALEXANDER
“Anna, it’s done. Cora’s dead. Will’s dead. We have to go, now,” Michelle says, voice flat and steady in a way that reminds Alexander of Jay. The girl pulls on Anna’s arm, forcing her to follow, dragging her away before Lily has a chance to recover her wits and make this an even bloodier encounter.
Michelle turns her head back for a fleeting second and her dark, sad eyes lock with Alexander’s.
And the worst part is that hearts grow back, she is thinking in that moment, and then their contact breaks and she’s gone, nothing but fading footsteps down the stairs and growing distance out the door.
By the time Alexander turns back to the wreckage of the room, Lily has already pulled the rough stake out of Wil
l’s ruined chest and is clutching it, forgotten, in one hand. The inch-long splinters off the spike are cutting jagged scratches into her skin, but she gives no indication that she notices. Alexander isn’t surprised. He wouldn’t notice, either.
“Go downstairs,” he says to the others. None of them should have to deal with this. Jenny begins to protest, but Nicole sends a strong wave of mesmerism over the girl and leads her out of the door. Rose carries Min out after her. Alexander is very, very grateful for Nicole and Rose in that moment.
“What am I supposed to tell him?” Lily asks, staring down at Will’s slack, lifeless face, her tears dripping onto his forehead and cheeks as she kneels beside his body. “What am I supposed… he ran away last time. He ran away. He promised me he wouldn’t run away again. What if he runs away again? What am I supposed to tell him?”
Even the slight inflection of a question has left her voice by the end of her words, the tone of every syllable flat and hopeless.
Alexander checks to see if there’s anything in the room that they need to dispose of. There’s not. Even the most shattering of acts can be done without much surrounding damage.
Alexander thinks that might be a ‘worst part’ to rival even the one whispered by Michelle’s mind. How slight the ripples left by loss can be.
“What do I tell you about Anna,” Lily’s asking Will’s still features now, smoothing his hair with a robotic, awkward repeating motion of her free hand. The other still clutches the stake, her bone-white knuckles even whiter in their grip. “What do I tell you about… about, oh God, what do I say when you wake up and we’re here, how do I explain? You can’t leave me. You can’t leave me here alone. I need you. You make sense of… you make it all make sense. What am I going to do if you’re not here?”
“Help me lift him onto the bed,” Alexander instructs Lily, guiding her gently down away from Will’s head and down to his feet. As she’s distracted, he swiftly pulls the knife free, pressing his thumb over the tiny gash to stop it bleeding. The knife, Alex slips into his pocket to dispose of later.
“He’ll begin to heal soon,” he tells her when they’ve laid Will on the bed. She climbs up beside the body, curls protectively around the unmoving chest. “He’ll wake up in the evening. Is there anyone you want me to call, to be here with you?”
“No,” Lily says, her voice numb.
“Anything you need?”
“No,” she repeats in exactly the same tone. Then, blinking blearily up at him. “Blood.”
Alexander nods. “I’ll make sure there’s some here for you soon. Stay here as long as you want, Lily. I’ll post people downstairs; tell them if there’s anything you need. If you want any of us here tomorrow evening, when Will wakes, just tell the vampires and they’ll tell me, all right?”
Her eyes narrow, sparking with what little passion and hate she can still muster. “Why are you doing anything for me?”
Alexander shrugs one shoulder. “The house is here. It may as well be used.”
Alex thinks, briefly, of Cora. This too falls under her joke of giving Blake exactly what he wants. Just as Will and Lily’s resistance to Blake was beginning to crumble, Cora’s reset the game back to what it was when Will first died.
Only it isn’t, of course. Because Lily is still Lily, and Lily has always been the wild card that changed the rest. This isn’t a new game, this is just the start of another round.
~
Downstairs, Nicole has taken charge. Jenny is asleep, her head on Sofie’s skinny lap, at the bottom of the stairs. Min sits next to them, watching all the excitement around her with the same owlish quietness she always wears.
“I’ll take care of them. Jenny will be all right soon,” Nicole tells Alexander. “I thought it would be easier this way. The kid takes on more than her share of the world’s problems.”
“She says it’s her way of fighting the vampires of the world.” Alexander can’t help but smile. Nicole shakes head, smirk pulling the corner of her own mouth up.
“You do know how to pick them, Alex. Your whole ridiculous family does.”
“So you’ve called everyone who needs calling, then?”
“Cleaners for that mess over there,” Nicole says, ticking off on her fingers, nodding towards a spread fire blanket off to one side, which Alexander glances at and promptly ignores. Nicole’s right, he’s got better things to lose sleep over than Cora. “Security to stay down here while Lily and Will are upstairs. A car to take Rose and Tommy home, and one for you and Ash and Bette. As I said, I’ll look after Sofie and Jenny and Min for now.” She frowns. “I had to book a hotel suite, Alex. You know how I feel about hotels.”
He can’t help but laugh.
~
When the car for Rose and Tommy arrives, Bette comes over to where Alexander is sitting on the doorstep outside.
“I’m gonna go with them too. Go say hi to my mom and stuff,” she says. “I’ll come home in a couple of days, ‘kay?”
He smiles up at her, and nods. “I’ll let Gretchen know where you are when I speak to her.”
“Thanks, Alex.”
When she’s gone, Ash comes over and sits beside Alex, leaning against him.
“I guess stabbing your murderer in the face counts as closure, right?” she asks. He kisses her on her forehead.
“Probably.”
“Hm. Okay. So it’s just you and me heading back to the townhouse, then?”
“Just you and me.”
“Wanna walk it? We’ve still got most of the night. I don’t really feel like being in a car.”
He gets to his feet, and holds down a hand to help her up. “Sure thing. Let’s go.”
~
Mikhail and Quinn are leaving the townhouse as Ash and Alexander arrive, but offer no comment on the rumpled state of the pair. Everyone in the household has come home looking like that from time to time, often much worse. Occupational hazard of being a bloodthirsty creature of the night.
They climb the stairs. Tim and Jay are arguing about whose use of the grotesque is more interesting, Quentin Tarantino or Chuck Palahniuk (Alexander can’t really see the basis for comparison). Blake is listening to the battle, making notes in an appointment diary, and scratching at the purring cat on his lap.
He raises an eyebrow at Alexander and Ash’s disheveled clothes, but doesn’t ask.
Alexander answers anyway, with a shake of his head. “I’ll tell you in a minute,” he says, sitting down on the sofa beside Ash. He closes his eyes, and listens to his family.
MICHELLE
Back at her apartment, Anna doesn’t pack much. T-shirts, jeans, toothbrush, toothpaste, comb. The barest essentials.
“Where are you going to go?” Michelle asks.
“Wherever I end up,” Anna answers, folding another singlet and adding it to her duffle. “Somewhere South, maybe. Somewhere warm. I want to be like the soldiers in World War Two, you know? The ones who came back and had so many little fat kids that they called it a baby boom. Who built houses and got married and sat back and knew that they fucking deserved this, they deserved this happiness, because they’d given up so much. Had to do such terrible things.”
She pulls her red leather jacket off the bedpost. “You can have this if you like.”
“Don’t you want it? I hear other places in the world have weather too, you know.”
Anna shakes her head. “I want to start as fresh as I can. The more I take with me from here, the less I’m leaving behind.”
“I’m not sure if that’s profound or a tautology,” jokes Michelle gently, before her voice becomes serious, concerned. “Are you going to be okay on your own?”
“Yeah.” Anna sounds sure. Weary, but with the weariness is a wisdom that lends certainty to the simple reply. “I’ll be okay.”
~
In the early morning light, Rose is lying in the front garden, on top of a red tartan picnic blanket that’s faded to a washed-out pinky grey, threadbare enough that the waterproof backing
glints through black and slick in places. She’s smoking, staring up at the branches which arc leaflessly over her.
“Tom’s asleep,” she says when Michelle opens the front gate and steps onto the path. “But you can wake him if you like, I doubt he’d mind.”
“No hurry,” Michelle replies, walking to the blanket and sitting down on it, ignoring the bite of cold from the ground that comes up through the thin covering. Rose must be freezing, lying there like that.
Michelle lies down beside her. The cold’s not so bad, really. She’s gotten used to worse things before.
“Aren’t you uncomfortable? Being in sunlight?” Michelle asks.
“Nah. It’s okay.”
She’s never been close to Rose. Rose always seemed shy or timid or something, some other word that’s not quite the same as those and that Michelle doesn’t know, some word that means skittish and weird and out-of-the-way. Rose was always that, retreating off into her basement or out with Bette when Michelle and Jay came around to hang out with Tommy.
Michelle never really made the effort to get to know her, since Rose seemed happy to scuttle off out of the way all the time. Making the effort to get to know somebody gave them the power to reject you, and Michelle had built up her careful walls of uncaring a long time ago. Better to be thought a haughty bitch than to be a wounded, easily kicked creature like Rose always seemed to be.
But now they’ve got something in common, a membership to a dark secret world, with the scars to prove it.
And it’s not about the danger and the strangeness, exactly, this thing that makes them different from every else, makes them the same as each other. It’s not about that.
It’s about love, maybe. And the things you can’t choose about yourself. And the things you can, that most people pretend aren’t there to choose.
“So you guys and Jay, huh?” Rose asks, breathing a plume of smoke out of the corner of her mouth.
The Wolf House: The Complete Series Page 85