CHAPTER 31

 

 

Ariadne drew near the covered bridge on the campus of her daylight days, stepping silently across the well-tended green that had turned brown for the season. The chemically treated lawns still shone unnaturally bright and verdant into late autumn, but winter always won in the end. The trees were bare, the ponds iced over, and the students, wrapped in expensive down coats and alpaca scarves and mufflers, scurried from one warm den to another, leaving the campus a frozen ghost town patrolled at intervals by a sad-looking campus security van.

At this time of night, the campus was a necropolis. It was here, at night, that Ariadne had died. It was here, in the frozen, monochrome shadow of the world she had known and loved, she would finally bring Andrei underground to join her. She was an inverse Orpheus, come to drag her Eurydice into Hell.

Liliane would not own him. But what about Roarke? Was Roarke even still walking the nights, or had someone finally slain him? Would Ariadne have felt his destruction if it had happened?

Bundled in a giant coat that she didn’t need, but which obscured the blood and grime from the night’s battle, Ariadne walked ghostlike down the pathways out from the quad, her sword making an awkward bulge beneath the jacket. These paths ringed for her what had once been the most welcoming of homes, the source of so many firsts and the promise of so much more to come. Now all she saw was the bridge, hunkered over like the shell of a corpulent turtle, mottled and dilapidated, dissuading visitors from seeing what lay within. The tape in Ariadne’s mind had played the scene of this bridge and what happened beneath it so often over the past ten years that she was surprised to see all the details she had accidentally altered or forgotten. The rock that she thought was on the left had really been on the right, and she hadn’t remembered that cedar tree at all.

Had it always been that way or had landscapers changed things? Certainly the paved paths that circled campus hadn’t always been diverted away and the stream beneath the bridge had been active, not dried up and filled in with cement blocks. Time had moved on, relegated this place to the realms of the forgotten.

Still, Ariadne could find the spot as unerringly as she could find her own limbs. Then she waited, playing an odd sort of goalkeeping with her memories, allowing this or that one past her defenses so it could blossom in her mind, deflecting this or that one before she could even start to dwell on it. She watched a phalanx of hardy New England ants march doggedly across the cement path, undaunted by the low temperatures.

As the clock rounded 2:00 A.M., Ariadne began to worry. He said he would wait here all night for her, but perhaps the cold or late hour had forced him to give up his vigil.

Their plan to run away together seemed increasingly insane with every moment he delayed the rendezvous. Even with how little he knew, he had surely seen enough. She wouldn’t blame him for coming to his senses. Not that he knew it, but this was his last chance to do anything she didn’t want him to.

But no. When Andrei made an appointment, he always kept it.

Liliane, or even Bourne or Silas, might have intercepted him. There would be no profit in it for them, of course, but the sheer spite of revenge might suffice for motive. Then Andrei would become yet another innocent bystander caught in the crossfire of the war. Or perhaps his car just wouldn’t start.

She stiffened. What if he never came and the sun began to rise?

A crack of branches. Ariadne turned to see Andrei tromping through the dry, crackling leaves to the bridge. It took all her composure not to run up to him.

“Ariadne!” he called out.

“I’m here, Dre!”

She could not fit any of the anger, the impatience, the worry, or the relief into her voice. In this place, on this bridge, the strange power he held over her was at its strongest. He could ask her for anything, to stake herself through the heart with her own blade, and she could not refuse him.

This would all change after the Embrace.

As Ariadne awaited him, the wind brought her the scent of another warm life.

Cassie.

She was small, pudgy, compact, but her hair was as golden and full as Andrei’s, her eyes as deep and blue, albeit bleary-eyed and scrunched against the cold, half obscured by a pink windbreaker. Her nose was small and buttonlike. Her mother’s contribution?

“We had to find a bathroom,” Andrei apologized. “This is a little past her bedtime, and she’s not used to going out in nature. Right, Princess?”

“I wanna go home,” Cassie moaned, burying her face in Andrei’s thigh. “It’s cold!”

“I know.” He rubbed her head beneath her hood. “You’ve been a brave, brave girl tonight, out here on our adventure. And now it’s all paid off. We’re finally going to go someplace warm and nice, and stay there for a long, long time.”

Ariadne couldn’t help staring. She had seen Cassie’s pictures, but that was entirely different from the living, breathing proof of her. It was proof of her mother, of Andrei’s last ten years, of a world where people lived and loved and changed and moved on. Without Ariadne.

Ariadne could dimly perceive Andrei’s words—his apologies for being late, his comments to Cassie about this stranger being “the nice lady Daddy told you about”—but somehow they never quite penetrated. The bandage around his four-fingered left hand seemed to glow accusingly in the dim security lights.

Ariadne suddenly remembered the pounding, anxious, always-abortive forays she made to the train station during the last ten years, sometimes going so far as to actually buy a ticket to Andrei’s home town. Travel, of course, had become much more difficult since her unlife, but she still could have risked it. Something had always stopped her.

“It’s not any easier that you look just the same,” Andrei had told her during one of their trysts at the Fresh Pond Motel. “I mean, some part of me kept wanting to just walk back on campus and see you as you were, age twenty, still reading the same poetry books.”

He could have no more imagined Ariadne’s life in Eagle Hill than Ariadne could truly understand his life in a suburban wonderland with a wife and child. Yet it was fear of seeing that very life that had kept her off the train each time.

Andrei had seen her world, even if only in small, traumatic bits. Could she bear to see his, live in his?

Ariadne wondered suddenly how long she had until dawn. She shouldn’t waste any time. She had to Embrace him here, now, and get away to shelter before the sun rose and destroyed them both. Otherwise, she would have to explain too many things before he was ready.

“Here.” Andrei led Cassie forward, tentatively. “Come on, say hi. I bet you’ll be great friends.”

Cassie looked up at her father, then to Ariadne, as if looking for support in her conclusion that this whole meeting was insane.

Ariadne squatted down. “I’m Ariadne. Can you say that name?”

Cassie inched backward, bracing herself against Andrei’s legs. Her wide eyes shimmered.

“Come on. Ahr . . . ee . . . ahd . . . nee.”

“Go on.” Andrei placed his hands on Cassie’s shoulders.

“Let’s get a better look,” said Ariadne, and she scooped Cassie awkwardly up in her arms.

“Eew!” said Cassie, pulling back as she peeled away the lip of Ariadne’s coat. “You’re all smelly and sticky!”

“Cassie,” Andrei chastised, “that’s not a very nice thing to . . .” His voice trailed off.

“What?”

Cassie began struggling, finally wriggling free of Ariadne’s arms and dropping to the ground. Ariadne’s coat was thrown open momentarily in the process.

“Blood,” Andrei said softly. “My God, you’re covered in blood!”

Ariadne stared down at herself, then up at Andrei. There was fear in his eyes, and in Cassie’s as she ran behind her father.

“Ariadne, is that a sword?” he gasped.

“It’s all going to be okay.” Ariadne reached out a hand. “Just come close, and you’ll see.”

He batted her hand away. It was a gesture without much force or violence, but to Ariadne it felt like the golem’s punch.

“What happened?” he demanded.

“It’s a long story,” she said, “but everything’s fine.”

“Fine? You’re bleeding. Let me take a look—”

“No!” Ariadne took a step forward. Andrei and Cassie took a step back.

“Ari,” Andrei began, looking all around them, “is it safe? Those people, are they after you right now? We have to go. We’ve got Cassie to think about.”

“I didn’t tell you to bring her!” Ariadne yelled, far more forcefully than she had intended. “I told you to trust me, to follow what I said.”

“You didn’t say not to bring her. I’m not going to abandon my daughter, Ari. I thought we were clear that she was going to come with us.”

Cassie began to whimper.

“You thought . . . we . . .” Ariadne sputtered. She shook her head in disbelief. “Doesn’t this violate your custody agreement, or—”

“Ixnay!” Andrei hissed, cocking his head toward Cassie. “We’ll, ah, discuss those details later.”

Great. So now this had become a child kidnapping. What a perfect way to stay below the radar.

What now? Embrace both Andrei and Cassie? Embracing one mortal was ordeal enough. Ariadne had never heard of a Kindred who could do two at once. What else would she do with Cassie? Kill her right in front of Andrei’s eyes? Just abandon her out on campus after turning her father into a monster?

This wasn’t how it was all supposed to happen. The Embrace should have been a beautiful, hideous dance, where she would usher him under the cloak of night into a world of painful union. Instead, she was starting to succumb to fear once more, and it was here again, on this bridge, this damnable bridge, this link between the present and the past, between the living and the dead.

Ariadne held up her hands, as if she could will the world to stop for a moment while she reassessed. If she could only get Andrei alone.

Andrei was still looking around, trying to spot hidden menaces lurking in the trees. The shadows obliged his paranoia by shifting with every gust of wind.

“I want to go home,” Cassie whined.

“I have the train tickets for the 3:00 A.M. Red Eye,” said Andrei, fumbling for words as if he, too, were trying to salvage a plan from this debacle. “It’s 2:15, so we can still make it. But now we’ll need to get you cleaned up first. I’m pretty sure I can exchange the tickets for the 6:00 A.M. departure if—”

“No!” Ariadne cried.

“If it’s the, um, logistics of Cassie, don’t worry. I know a lawyer who says this can all get ironed out.”

“It’s not that,” said Ariadne. “I—we can’t be on a train at 6:00 A.M.”

“Well, we certainly can’t stay here. It’s freezing, and you’re bleeding. Come on already!”

It was that voice, the voice he had always used to reprimand her, to chastise, to treat her as if she were a child Cassie’s age. Something inside her quaked.

“Dre, please. You don’t understand—”

“Then tell me, Ari. God knows, I’ve been patient. I’ve been helping you for weeks. I came out here and waited all night, and I’ve been letting you take your time with your explanations. But if you’re backing out now, I think you at least owe us an explanation!”

“Daddy, don’t yell!”

“Dre—”

Andrei grabbed Ariadne by the shoulders, tried to pull her with him. “Come on, damn it! Tell me!”

Ariadne stumbled as she pulled away and fell to the ground, dragging him down with her weight. Cassie cried out as she watched her father and Ariadne tumble down the embankment, over and over, in a hideous parody of lovemaking, into the dry riverbed.

They came to a stop with him straddling her. Ariadne shuddered beneath him, tossed her hair back, and then opened her mouth wide and let her fangs extend to their fullest. A sharp hiss escaped her mouth.

Andrei’s face froze. He staggered to his feet, took a step back and then tripped. His mouth formed wordless questions of horror.

Ariadne smiled, a smile of infinite sadness, of infinite relief.

“That’s what’s going on, Andrei.”

For the second time in ten years, the bridge echoed with the sound of tears. Ariadne couldn’t even tell whether they were Andrei’s or her own.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 32

 

 

Later, Ariadne would remember the rumble of car engines, the men in dark suits clambering out of vans with guns and badges raised. They were all images from a dream; surely, if they had been real, Ariadne would have reacted. She would have reached for her sword and fought or fled, not just sat there staring at the expression of horror and fear on Andrei’s face.

Liliane had been right. Mortals could not tolerate a monster in their midst. There had been no love in Andrei’s expression, in his wide eyes, in the meaningless noises that came from his throat. When the men with the guns surrounded them, he turned to them not in fear, but for protection. They swept him and Cassie in one direction, dragged Ariadne’s limp form in the other. Yellow letters—F-B-I—glowed faintly in the security lights.

Ariadne’s eyes followed him until too many bodies blocked him from her sight and the doors of a van closed it all off. The campus receded in the small window, shrinking to a vanishing point where only the covered bridge remained.

Ariadne had already died there once. Tonight, she had died again. Maybe this time she would have some peace.

Time passed. Ariadne sat in a white, windowless room lit by pale halogens. Although the frame was metal and not stone, it might as well have been her cell beneath Eagle Hill. Bare, blank walls. A slab for a bed. A small basin for washing, which she didn’t need. Trays appeared and disappeared through a slot, containing a single saline bag filled with blood. So they knew what she was. She was surprised how little she cared.

Her hands and feet were bound in shackles. Perhaps she could break them. Likely she couldn’t. She didn’t make more than a few token attempts. Mostly, she just sat.

Ariadne had never had this much time to be still, to think. She found herself lost in images of the world in which she and Andrei would have lived, had they made it out to the suburbs:

Ariadne stands on a wobbly stool, hanging a crepe-paper lamp on a hook above the desk in their bedroom. Orange, bright, star-shaped, it spreads a soft light upon the five-by-eight space that she has tried to make seem slightly bigger by using scarves instead of curtains, by angling them in the corner instead of along the wall. She remembers someone once telling her that a mirror makes a room seem larger, but she cannot bring herself to place one here.

Ariadne, wearing a sundress that will never see the sun, has dinner waiting when Andrei returns home after another day of looking for a job. A decade has passed since she last tried to cook something. She never really made a successful meal even when living.

They adhere to the script of dinnertime pleasantries as Andrei eats the half-hard pasta unconsciously, talking the whole way through, as if he too were Kindred and only ate to keep up appearances.

Try as she might, these are the only scenes she can imagine. No romance, no scenes of solace. Only monotony, only the awkward jerking dance of marionettes on stage. Cynicism or, at long last, a look at the world through open eyes?

It was Cassie who kept her visions in monochrome. Cassie, who, in Ariadne’s imaginings, gave her fish-eye looks, who stopped playing and stared whenever she walked by. Even in the scene where she imagined herself cooking, Ariadne kept seeing Cassie’s tiny eyes peeking out from behind the half-stove in the kitchenette, watching, accusatory.

No. It was not just Cassie. She kept the film rolling, moved Andrei into place and gave him the voice she always remembered from college, the voice that, the more she thought about it, had never truly changed.

“Notice anything?” she asks Andrei, inclining her head toward the newly hung lamp.

“The hooks are uneven,” Andrei grumbles, placing his coat on one of them. “I know. I’ll fix it tomorrow.”

“No,” Ariadne says sweetly, or at least, in her best memory of what sweetness sounds like. “Look around.”

Andrei does, but she can tell his eyes are still seeing the bus ride back from the unemployment office, home to this tiny apartment on a side street in a New Hampshire town the name of which keeps escaping her.

Ariadne glides over to the star-lamp she has installed. “See?” she grins, clicking it on and off.

“Oh,” says Andrei. “That’s nice.” With only a few moments pause: “Did you fill out those forms to register Cassie for school yet?”

“No. “I’m sorry. I promise I will tonight. I just . . . I just thought the room needed more character.”

“I think Cassie’s education is a little higher priority than décor, don’t you think?” He is smiling, but his words are not.

Maybe it wouldn’t have been like that at all. Maybe Ariadne had just spent too much time around Bourne and his pessimism had rubbed off on her. Maybe it was the endless waiting that did this to her.

Even in her visions, she waited. Waited while Andrei and Cassie had their time together. Waited until Andrei came back from his day of work. Waited all night, awake, as he slept. Would she surf cable channels in the wee hours of the morning? Pace the quiet streets up and down, unnerving the neighbors and fanning the flames of their gossip? Would her whole world be some tree-lined street, a late-night grocery store?

She would never know.

 

*   *   *   *   *

 

It could have been day or night, but it must have been night, because she did not feel sleepy. During her last round of sluggishness, she remembered the movement of bodies. Someone had brought in a table, and now a mug of coffee rested on it, beside a plate of raspberry Danish. Ariadne watched an ant make a determined summit attempt at the crest of the frosted crust.

“Well,” the man across the table from her was saying, putting up his legs and crossing his arms behind his back, “shall we cut to the chase?”

Ariadne inclined her head just so.

The man was a welcome addition, if only because he was now the only other real thing to look at in this room. As such, Ariadne saw him very well. She could see his crew-cut brown hair, the starched and pressed white collar of his shirt bearing a polished American flag lapel pin, the black tie free of lint. He was dressed in much the same way Andrei used to look, smelled nearly the same way Andrei did. With one important exception.

“I didn’t realize the FBI had a habit of employing our kind,” Ariadne said coolly.

The man in front of her smiled, revealing the barest hint of fangs. “The Bureau has its uses. Besides, even if they don’t know we exist, our goals still intersect at times.”

He tossed a folder onto the table in a move meant to look nonchalant, but Ariadne was well versed in the language of body motion, particularly wrists. His were the reflexes of a swordsman.

The folder label announced something about narcotics enforcement.

“It’s entirely quid pro quo,” said the man. “The field director received a commendation for busting up a ‘drug ring’ in East Boston, ending the wave of arson and gang violence that had been gripping our fair city for the past two months. And us? We received the hardware and the permission to carry out a long-overdue operation.”

“You’re Council. The Invictus.”

The man nodded. “You can call me Saul.” He opened the folder, flipped through the pages that Ariadne, with her still-bound hands, could not turn. “Go on. Look.”

The notes told Ariadne what she already suspected. Two dozen “persons with criminal ties” involved in a feud with “drug lords” had all been killed or arrested at their base on Eagle Hill and shipped to an undisclosed facility for interrogation. Saul had not even bothered to change the names. She scanned the list, tried to find Bourne, Silas, Roarke, or Liliane among them.

“We’re just tying up a few loose ends.” He snatched the folder away from her, knowing she wasn’t reading. “Your pal Andrei—he’s the one who hacked our financial records a month or so ago.”

Saul clucked his tongue. “Ballsy. Or it would have been, if he knew what he was actually doing. If he knew just who owned those accounts. Which I sincerely hope he did not.”

“He didn’t know,” Ariadne said. She began straining at her cuffs. “I was using him for his access. It was entirely my idea. He never had an inkling that Kindred were involved.”

Saul’s blue eyes did not blink. His thin mouth remained taut. “Does he have an inkling now?”

“No,” said Ariadne, her heart clenching. “He has no idea what he saw. I’m convinced of it. Trust me.”

“Trust?” Saul raised an eyebrow, but not his voice. “An odd request, coming from the former Hand of a treasonous Prince. A Senechal who, from all accounts, helped murder our last agent on the scene, Mister Rose.”

She closed her eyes. “Please. Whatever I’ve done, punish me. Let him alone. I’ll do anything. Please.”

Even before she opened her eyes again, Ariadne was aware of Saul’s piercing gaze roving up and through her, eating her alive as thoroughly as Liliane’s ants.

“You mean it,” said Saul at length.

“Of course I do,” said Ariadne. “Andrei isn’t a danger to—”

“No,” said Saul, his soft voice somehow still sharp enough to cut her off. “You mean it when you say you’re willing to die. I’ve seen this before.”

He rose, palm dragging across the table between them as he made a slow circuit toward her. “I’ve seen that look in Kindred who can’t face what they are, who are ready to run from the Beast.”

His coat fell aside and now she could see the scabbard beneath it, from which protruded the hilt of a sword. Once again, she saw the familiar patterns. This time, it seemed to shimmer and bend in her vision, just like Mr. Rose’s had. Here, then, was the true mate to his sword, the second soul-stealer.

“You think you’re a monster. You think you deserve death.”

Ariadne stared up at him, felt an ache at the base of her eye sockets.

“I can see it in your aura. You’ve committed Amaranth. You’re a monster even among monsters.”

Ariadne tried to summon the feeling of Andrei’s body pressing against hers as it had night after night. She could remember every incident. She willed, with all her might, to feel a yearning for it.

A yearning indeed came. It was a yearning for the pulse in his jugular, drowning out his breathing, the pulse that called to her every night she was with him, as she stared out the window and pretended to count the stars.

“Yes,” she said, defeated. “Yes. I am.”

“Then we’ll be doing the world a service, won’t we?” Saul lifted the thick weight of Ariadne’s raven hair, exposing her neck. She could see the sword rise from the corner of her eye, feel its electric presence. “We should kill both of you right now.”

“Please, just me. Not him.”

“What do you care? You’re a monster. Monsters feel no love. Let him die.”

Ariadne winced. She felt the prick of something against her neck, but it wasn’t a sword. It was a photograph. Saul shoved it in front of her eyes.

“Who is this woman?”

It was Marie. Ariadne remained silent.

“You ran out of Liliane’s sanctuary carrying this woman. You delivered her into the hands of emergency workers. Frankly, if you hadn’t done that, we would have had a much harder time tracking you. Why did you save her?”

Ariadne kept her mouth closed.

“You’re a monster. Monsters don’t save people.”

“What do you want from me?”

The blade returned to her neck. Liliane’s Silent Knife would never have tolerated this situation. But she wasn’t Liliane’s Silent Knife any longer. Neither was she Andrei’s girlfriend.

“If you’re a monster, why do you care about this woman? Why do you care about Andrei? Why did you inform the local wizards there was some sort of threat to the city? What do you care about Boston?”

His words ran into a fog as a random memory intruded into Ariadne’s mind. In college, she was sitting on the Longfellow Bridge, seeing the lights in windows, the pale blue glow of televisions, imagining she could hear the hiss of steam radiators. She was thinking of the thousand glows and hisses of Boston, trying to transport herself into every single one of those points of light. That young woman had wanted to know what was going on out there, at each and every one of those homes. She’d wanted to drink in the experience, to make it real. The thought of all those lights being snuffed at once would have horrified her beyond imagining.

Ariadne sighed. “I guess even a monster can do some good on occasion.”

Ariadne wasn’t entirely sure she had said those words aloud. But her statement carved a gouge in the sand of her mind; the tide flood of intention began to fill it.

“Yes,” Saul said. “A monster can do some good, when directed by the right hands. Those hands are ours.”

“What do you want?”

“Everything you know.”

“Fine,” she said, voice suddenly full of the authority of a Seneschal. “Put away the damned sword and we’ll talk.”

Saul paused, then withdrew. He sat back calmly in his seat, attentive, hands folded.

“You didn’t finish the job, Saul,” said Ariadne. “You didn’t find the Almavore.”

Saul waited. He did not raise a skeptical eyebrow, did not mock her for trying a ridiculous ploy. He did not even ask what an Almavore was.

“Go on,” he said at last.

“Only if you promise you’ll spare Andrei.”

“You’re in no position to dictate terms.”

“It’s more than just information I can offer. It’s also my assistance. But I’ll stop cooperating the moment I hear anything’s happened to him.”

“Just speak.”

As Ariadne described it all, she could tell Saul was truly listening. He seemed to be one of those rare individuals she had met, in life or unlife, who had a bottomless well for listening.

At last, Ariadne ran dry of words. Saul was still listening, legs crossed, fingers interlaced. Finally, he spoke.

“Our negotiations with the local mages,” he said slowly, “touched upon this topic. Their condition for letting Invictus forces continue to occupy East Boston was that we return the Almavore to them. I told them I knew nothing about it. And that was the truth.”

Saul pulled out another folder, this one clearly not for the FBI’s eyes. He spread its contents on the table: maps and diagrams of the Eagle Hill house, catalogs of artifacts and other recovered booty.

“We searched for days. Exhaustively. No statue. The wizards wouldn’t coordinate with us, and all our own mystics were stymied. We had assumed the mages were either making this whole story up or that Liliane had somehow got the thing out of there.”

“So you never caught Liliane?”

“As I said, we’re still tying up loose ends.”

“Who else have you missed? Roarke, too?”

Saul was silent, but the slightest flicker of a grimace across his face told Ariadne all she needed to know.

“The Almavore’s still in the city,” said Ariadne. “I can feel it, all the way from here. Every time I open my senses to it, I can hear it calling. As for Roarke, he’s my sire. I’m still a little new to this sire game. Does our shared blood give me the ability to find him?”

“It can.” Saul leaned forward. “But you would do that—sell out your sire? Sell out your Prince?”

“If you took prisoners from Eagle Hill, ask any of them and I’m sure they let you know just how badly I’ve burned my bridges on both of those fronts.”

“If what you’re saying is true,” said Saul, “then it turns out I made a good decision in keeping you here. It’s a good thing to be useful, Ariadne. A very good thing. Useful enough, even, that, when this is all done, we can let Andrei go with only, shall we say, a stern reminder to keep his mouth shut about all he thinks he may have seen. As if anyone would believe him, anyway. Normally I’d drive it home with a little gesture, but someone apparently beat us to the idea of removing a finger.”

“When we find the statue,” Ariadne said, “we’ll find Liliane. She’s using its power to make her vision of New Jerusalem a reality.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. I think it might involve destroying Boston.”

Saul raised an eyebrow. “You honestly think Liliane has the power to do that?”

Ariadne shrugged. “Believe me or don’t believe me, but I think it’s going to happen.”

“I repeat: how?”

“I’m still working that out.”

Saul signaled. The door opened to admit two men in FBI jackets who unlocked the manacles from her wrists and ankles. Ariadne stretched for the first time in nights. As she stood, she imagined she could see her full reflection in the polished basin, see the return of confidence and poise in her posture instead of a blur.

“Come with me,” said Saul, standing by the open door, but Ariadne had already begun walking.

 

 




 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 

 

DAVID NURENBERG, PhD, is a teacher, freelance writer, and social activist who lives in the Boston area. His credits with White Wolf include writing for the Vampire: The Requiem, Scion, and Exalted lines. His nonfiction has appeared in the Boston Globe, Newsweek, USA Today, and Multicultural Review, as well as many lesser-known papers, ’zines, and blogs. Silent Knife is his first novel published by a major press. His favorite animal is the wombat.