Cherry Bomb: A Siobhan Quinn Novel (10 page)

I grabbed at one of the grasshoppers and missed. It hopped away, and all the others wisely followed its example. My hand closed around nothing but a few yellow-brown stalks. Screw you, Mr. Bug.

“I’m not dreaming,” I whispered to myself.

“No, you’re not, Quinn.”

“Isn’t that what I just said?”

I didn’t have to look to know the wolf was still watching me. I could feel its white eyes on me.

“Is she here to protect you? The wolf, I mean.”

“Who else would you have meant? But no, I don’t think so. I suspect it’s a coincidence, that we both just happen to be here at the same time. Which is better than being alone. I would hate to be here alone. I don’t like that field. Something about that field isn’t right.”

“It’s just a field,” I said, dropping the dead blades of grass.

“I know,” she said very quietly. “I know.”

And I wanted to tell her I didn’t think her being there
and
the wolf ’s being there too, their being there together, was a coincidence, any more than, it had turned out, my being found by the Bride of Quiet the same night—right damned
after
—I’d been bitten by Jack Grumet had been a coincidence.

You ask me, which you haven’t, coincidence is often a coward’s way out of facing facts.

And please feel free, right about here, to become exasperated at my complete cluelessness. No, I didn’t see what was right in front of my face. And I don’t mean all that grass. I don’t mean the forest for the trees. I didn’t add up two and two and get four. Often, I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

I said, “There’s a bloodthirsty
loup
—my
loup
—tear-assing through Chelsea or the West Village or some shit, and I’m sitting here playing pretend and talking to a hallucination.”

“Is that all that I am, Quinn? Pretend? A hallucination? Did you make me?”

“Didn’t I?”

She sighed and stopped scratching the wolf ’s chin. “I really don’t know. That’s why I asked.”

I shut my eyes. I shut my eyes very tight, and I saw—or at least thought that I saw—the
loup
working its way clumsily up a fire escape. The rusted metal groaned and creaked under its weight. Our weight. Or was she alone now?

All these fucking questions were becoming a stone around my neck.

“I have,” the girl said, “thought sometimes there might be a peaceful place on the other side of the field.”

The
loup
was about halfway up the fire escape when it gave way, when the bolts or whatever holding it into brick and mortar came loose, and the whole mess crashed to the alley below. I was wondering what would happen to me if the bitch got herself killed, and I was assuming that would be the end of both of us, when the monster pulled herself from the wreck. She looked like . . . well, a werewolf that had fallen thirty feet and had a ton of steel dropped on it. But she hardly even seemed fucking fazed. Just shook her head a few times, then resumed her killing spree. Scary monsters, right? I could hear police sirens and ambulances now, rescue vehicles, whatever.

So much for caution.

Scary monsters. And, thank you, Mr. Bowie, because, I thought, and there she goes, opening those strange damn doors, and ain’t no one ever gonna come along and get them closed again. And
she
might have been the porcelain demon who’d made me half of what I am. Or
she
might have been the girl with the wolf. Or my
loup.
Or, simply,
me.

The girl’s wolf whined, and I opened my eyes.

The girl’s black wolf. My black
loup.

Lightbulb. Duh and/or hello. Me, myself,
and
I.

“Sometimes,” the blonde girl said, me talking to me, “people lose themselves in their secret selves. Once upon a time it happened in France. Have you ever heard of the Beast of Gévaudan? That was someone who lost herself and never did make it back again.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard of the Beast of Gévaudan. But I didn’t know it was a
loup.
”

Between 1764 and 1770, a nasty attacked more than two hundred people in the Margeride Mountains of France. More than a hundred died. The nasty ate on most of those. Don’t say I never taught you people anything.

“Sure you did, Quinn.”

“If you say so,” I told her, getting to my feet, wiping grass and dirt and crap off the seat of my jeans. There was a shiny iridescent beetle crawling on my leg, and I flicked it away. “I don’t have time for this.”

“You don’t have to hate her, but you can’t lose yourself to her,” said the girl. “You always have to come back.” Then she kissed the top of the black wolf ’s head, and it thumped its tail happily—at least I assume it was happily—against the ground. Goddamn heartwarming stuff. A girl and her carnivore.

I rubbed at my eyes. The sirens were getting louder, nearer. The sound of them only seemed to encourage the Rhode Island werewolf in Manhattan. It gutted a waiter who’d just gotten off work.

“Yeah, well, people die either way, whether it’s the Beast or a vamp. What difference does it make?”

The girl narrowed her eyes, and for the first time she looked impatient with me.

“Quinn, if you lose yourself tonight, or any other night, you’ll both be killed. That’s the way it always goes when a
loup garou
surrenders to—”

“You’re assuming I give a rat’s ass.”

She nodded very slowly.

“You’re not a suicide, Quinn. Maybe that’s what keeps you going, knowing it’s an option, that you can always kill yourself if the world gets to be more than you
can endure. But, personally, I think if you were going to do it, you’d have done it by now, don’t you?”

Fuck it. Fast-forward. I’d figured out where that neon exit door was. First I broke the black wolf’s neck with a single quick twist. It didn’t put up much of a fight. The blonde girl didn’t try to run. I’d halfway hoped that she would. I drove my right hand through her rib cage and breast bone and tore out her heart. It wasn’t beating, and it wasn’t warm. It was nothing but a shriveled lump of discolored muscle. And it was exactly as easy as that.

The forest and the field dissolved.

And I was looking out across the city from some high place, out across rooftops and the asphalt grid of streets, everything lit up like a Christmas tree.

You always see people saying that time seems to slow way down during, say, car wrecks or pretty much any other sudden, violent event. Those times when their lives are in danger, or the lives of a loved one. Those sorts of situations. Encounters with the unexpected, chaotic incursions. Well, what came next, it was surely fucking chaos, and it certainly could have ended with my going down for the count, once and for all. But it happened so fast it seemed to be over almost before it began. Looking back, I can only recall a series of images, like photographs or flashcards.

I’ll use present tense here. Seems more appropriate somehow:

I see the city, from up there, and I realize
up there
is the High Line, that odd park on the Lower West Side that used to be a section of the New York Central Railroad. In the wolves’ greenish night vision, I see leaves, gravel, rusted tracks. Sirens are screaming.

Jump cut.

There’s a rent-a-cop motherfucker with a gun aimed at me, at the
loup.
He looks scared shitless. The streetlights glint off the barrel of the revolver. His hands are shaking. He’s pissed himself.

Jump cut.

A figure steps out of the bushes, someone dressed up like the Unabomber, big, baggy hoody, face hidden in shadows. They’re holding a crossbow in leather-gloved hands. My crossbow. It’s aimed at the security guard’s head. I’m thinking,
Don’t you fucking do it.
Maybe that’s meant for the
loup
. Maybe for the guard or the person holding the crossbow, or maybe it’s meant for all three at once.

Jump cut.

The Unabomber shifts just so, and I can see it’s Selwyn. She’s so goddamn calm, as if she’s done this a hundred times before. The rent-a-cop obviously doesn’t see her. He’s whispering “What the fuck?” over and over and over again as if it’s a litany against death by werewolf. Or whatever he believes he’s seeing looming up before him. The
loup
roars, and the gun goes off. I’d almost believe that bullet did a time-travel trick and hit me, us, the
loup
, before the man squeezed the trigger. There’s fire in our left shoulder. All this is happening so incredibly fast. Selwyn fires a carbon-composite bolt, puts it through the guard’s skull, temple to temple.

Jump cut.

I can’t remember seeing the man fall. But now he’s on his back, his body twitching, legs and arms doing a death-throe tarantella, right? I smell blood. The sirens are very close. My shoulder is burning alive.

Jump.

I’m staring up at Selwyn, her face still half obscured by the hoody. I know the
loup
is gone, and I’m alone now. And sweet Jesus on rubber crutches, I have never felt so alone as I do right now. Selwyn touches my face, and she whispers something I don’t understand. I’m wondering where the hell she got those clothes, wondering how long she was on the streets in her birthday suit before she scored them.

Jump cut.

We’re in a taxi, and I realize the blood I smell is my own. “Don’t move,” Selwyn says. “It’s not much farther.” I can’t hear the sirens anymore. The driver smells like sweat and patchouli. I smell fake evergreen from the pine-tree-shaped cardboard swinging from the rearview mirror. I’m wrapped in a blue wool blanket. My shoulder throbs. It’s not the first time I’ve been shot, and the pain’s familiar. I want to tell her I’ll be fine by dawn, but I don’t. I’m dizzy, but it’s not from the pain. I’m dizzy from the sheer weight of
color
werewolf us couldn’t see. My vamp eyes are flooded with color.

Okay, I’m gonna stop with the damn “jump cut” device and the present tense. You get the point.

The taxi ride seemed to go on forever. The longest taxi ride of my life, though it couldn’t have lasted more than twenty minutes. My face was propped against the window. On the other side of the glass, the world was a slow blur of nothing I recognized.

“Where’d you get the clothes?” I asked Selwyn.

“It doesn’t matter,” she replied.

“You really shouldn’t have done that,” I said.

“Well, I wasn’t about to come looking for you stark naked, Quinn.”

I laughed, and my shoulder ached worse.

“That’s not what I meant, you pinhead. You don’t throw down on a cop.”

“He wasn’t a real cop. And don’t call me names, okay? I just saved your ass from a metric fuck-ton of real cops with
much
bigger fucking guns.”

A few moments before, Selwyn had sounded concerned. Now she just sounded angry. I wasn’t sure if we were talking quietly enough the driver couldn’t hear. I also didn’t care. Actually, I was considering having her drive to some deserted spot and having a snack to help my shoulder heal.

“You don’t want me to call you a pinhead,” I told her, “don’t go around acting like one. Did you at least not leave the bolt back there?”

She didn’t answer, which meant, of course, that she had left the bolt sticking out of the man’s head.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“Almost there.”

“Almost where, Selwyn?”

I saw a homeless man pushing two shopping carts tied together like boxcars and piled almost to overflowing with bulging Hefty bags. I thought how good he’d taste, and my mouth watered.

“I’m hungry,” I said, and I wiped drool off my chin. There was a smear of it on the window.

“After everything you puked up back there?”

I never do manage to keep down what the
loup
eats. This body ain’t so keen on solid food.

I closed my eyes. I wanted to be in a very, very dark place, away from headlights and taillights and sodium-vapor light. A closet would suffice. A subbasement would be wonderful.

“You have my bag? You didn’t leave it on the High Line?”

“I have your bag, Quinn. Stop talking so much, why don’t you.”

Good advice, which is probably why I ignored it. The driver drove, and I rambled on. I asked if we were going all the way to fucking New Jersey, and Selwyn told the driver to ignore me, that I was drunk. That I was, in fact, an alcoholic who’d fallen off the wagon. She told the driver she was my AA sponsor.

“Liar,” I said.

“You oughta know.”

I oughta. Takes one to know one. The pot calling the kettle black.

That smudgy, alien blur of street rushed by outside the cab, and I asked her, “This isn’t the way back to your place, is it?”

“No. You sort of trashed my place. And the cops have it cordoned off. It’s like a crime scene or something now. I don’t know how I’m gonna get my shit out of there.”

“I’m sorry,” I told her, but I expect I didn’t come off especially sincere. Apologies are not my specialty.

“It’s my fault. I know it’s my fault. The
Aconitum.
I should have known better.”

I didn’t disagree.

“They’re gonna know it’s your place, Selwyn.”

“Yeah, they will. So, we go to ground. We keep our
heads down. I know some people who’ll help. But it’s a mess. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. I’m too tired to pretend otherwise.”

“B, he used to say I could cock-up a wet dream.”

Selwyn laughed, and she sounded as tired as she’d said she was. She didn’t argue with me, either. I didn’t ask about these people she knew; figured I’d learn all about them soon enough. The taxi ride couldn’t go on forever.

“There’s stuff in there you need?”

“There is. Maybe I can get in later, but I’m not gonna count on it. And even if I do, I doubt the safe will still be there. You know that’s going to be taken as evidence.”

I didn’t ask her as evidence of what. My head was too foggy. Everything was too foggy. I shut my eyes and listened to the wheels on the road until we finally got where we were going. The Village, MacDougal Street, an apartment three floors above a frozen yogurt joint. Selwyn paid the driver while I stood on the sidewalk wearing the blue wool blanket, wishing my old duster wasn’t back in Hell’s Kitchen or already tucked away in an NYPD evidence room somewhere. There was a woman waiting for us at the door.