Cherry Bomb: A Siobhan Quinn Novel (12 page)

“She won’t shoot me,” Selwyn replied confidently.

“And you know that how?”

Selwyn nodded at the bundle. “I might drop the Madonna. It might break. Worse, she might miss
me
and hit
it.
”

I looked at Selwyn, and then I looked at the woman on the fire escape. She still hadn’t lowered the gun, but she also hadn’t squeezed off another round.

“Sweet,” I said and stood up, shooting the assassin twice in the chest. My gun didn’t have a suppressor, and the Glock roared like thunder. The woman stumbled backwards, the SIG falling from her hands to the rusty metal at her feet. But she didn’t go down.

“She’s a vampire,” Selwyn said. I could only just make out the words over the ringing in my ears.

“Fuck her,” I whispered to myself. The next bullet was meant for her skull, but she dodged it and disappeared over the railing. I waited a full two minutes, counting off the seconds in my mind, before I lowered my gun. I waited another minute before I took my eyes off the window. My left arm hung limp at my side, and blood slicked my sweater and pooled on the floor at my feet. The silver shrapnel burned like white-hot embers buried in my flesh. I still have no idea how I’d managed to hurl that book.

“Selwyn, did informing me this son of a bitch uses fucking vamps for hired killers never cross your fucking mind?”

“I didn’t want to make you any jumpier than you already were,” she said, lowering the bundle.

“Oh, you did
not
just say that.”

She shrugged and set the bundle on the counter. Her hands were shaking.

“Quinn, if I’d told you, you might not have come. You might have stopped me from coming. Am I right?”

“You bet your skinny white tailless ass you’re right.”

“Well, then, there you go,” she said.

I was speechless. I do not deal well with being manipulated, though I’ve spent a great deal of my existence postmortem
being
manipulated. The undead make wicked good weapons, as Isaac Snow obviously understood. They also make good bodyguards, as Selwyn obviously understood. Being junkies, we’re easy marks. More often than not, we’ll do a lot of fucked-up humiliating shit and let people get away with using us to their ends if it means we don’t have to worry where the next fix is coming from.

I stared at Selwyn and very, very seriously considered smashing whatever was wrapped up inside that bundle of hers myself and all parties involved be damned. It’s a testament to my not inconsiderable shortcomings that I didn’t destroy it. If I’d known what was coming, I like to think I wouldn’t have pussied out, that I’d have acted on that impulse. Instead, I tucked the Glock back into the waistband of my pants, did my best to ignore the pain and blood, and went to the closet in the hallway. Selwyn had hung my duster there the afternoon before she’d poisoned me with wolfsbane. I was frankly a bit surprised it was still there. I yanked it off the hanger and draped it over my good arm.

“You don’t know what’s at stake,” she said.

“Then how about you enlightening me?”

Not that, right then, I especially gave two shits.

“It’s complicated,” she replied.

“Seems pretty simple to me. You have something there this cocksucker wants. Something he paid you to find. But after you found it, along with that other junk, you decided to double-cross him. I won’t speculate why
you did it. I’m sure you had your reasons. Now, tell me, am I wrong?”

She didn’t answer, one way or another.

“Darling,” I said, “you do know what tends to become of stupid little girls who fuck over monsters?”

“I will not be condescended to,” she said angrily, as if she had some say in the matter.

“I don’t recall asking for permission,” I replied.

I went to the window and peered down at the alley, then up towards the roof. There was no sign of the vamp anywhere. I hadn’t expected there to be. By now she was holed up somewhere safe, licking her wounds and busy trying to decide exactly how she was going to explain having bungled the job.

I climbed out onto the fire escape. I could hear sirens. Maybe they had our names on them; maybe they didn’t.

“Wait!” Selwyn shouted, the anger gone, replaced by . . . well, not quite panic. Let’s say an attack of desperation. She quickly picked her way through the clutter to the window.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

And I said, “I’ve taken two bullets now because of your dumb ass, Annie Smithfield. I’m not sticking around for the third.”

The sirens were getting louder, so I assumed they
were
headed our way.

“Come
on
, Quinn. Please. I’ll explain everything.”

And then I said, “I might have told you this already, but whatever’s happening here is your mess. You got yourself into it, and you can sort it out on your own. Or not.”

She reached through the open window and grabbed
my left elbow, the side with the shattered collarbone. I almost gave into reflex and punched her in the face. It probably would have broken her neck.

She’d tucked the bundle under one arm. I could see now that whatever she was carrying had been wrapped in a black Morrissey T-shirt.

Sirens.

“You hear that? The cops are on their way,” I said. “I’m leaving.”

“Quinn,
please.
”

I stared down at the alley, at the spot on the pavement where, regrettably, there wasn’t a dead vampire. Then I looked back at Selwyn. She was leaning out towards me, all twinkly, big, star-sapphire eyes. Sad puppy-dog eyes. I felt a flutter in my belly. And another flutter between my legs. Go me, sentimental monster, thinking with her cunt.

“Fine,” I muttered. “Come the fuck on, then.”

Because that’s what stupid, horny people would say.

We found Jodie and the rental car waiting exactly where she’d promised to wait for us. Only someone—presumably the assassin—had ripped out her throat, slashed the tires, and punched a hole in the radiator. Scratch one getaway vehicle. Scratch one helpful witch. We’d have to beat our hasty retreat on foot, which wouldn’t have been such a problem if I hadn’t had Selwyn. On my own, I could have moved a whole hell of a lot faster. But I
did
have Selwyn. We headed towards the subway station at Fiftieth and Eighth. It didn’t even occur to me until we were waiting on the platform just how fucking suspicious we’d look in our matching black outfits.

“Quinn, where are we going?” she asked.

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

“We can’t go back to Jodie’s.”

Near as I could figure, she wasn’t upset by Jodie Babineaux’s death. Well, not unless it had made her more worried about her own skin. I could tell Selwyn wouldn’t be mourning the woman anytime soon. Or ever.

The train pulled into the station, the doors slid open, mind the fucking gap, and we got on. Luckily, the car was empty. I sat down. Selwyn didn’t. She held on to one of the shiny poles with her free hand and stared at the floor while we swayed and bumped along beneath the grimy streets of Manhattan. I watched her, waiting for an explanation. No dice. She clearly wasn’t about to
volunteer
the lowdown she’d promised. Now that I’d decided not to leave here high and dry, probably she was hoping I’d just forget all about it, distracted by our daring escape, apparently dire predicament, and possible pursuers.

“So,” I said, “what the fuck’s going on?”

Warning. Next infodump ahead. If that sort of thing annoys you, might want to skip a few pages ahead. Of course, then you’ll have no idea what’s going on later. I know. Decisions, decisions. Whee.

Selwyn glanced at the bundle.

“You promised,” I said.

“Have you ever heard of the Byzantine Ghul?”

I shook my head and looked out the window at the blackness rushing by.

“I must have been playing hooky from the Monster Academy that day,” I said. “You got me. What’s the Byzantine Ghul? Short version.”

“I’m not sure there is a short version, Quinn.”

“But it’s got to do with Isaac Snow and why he’s trying to kill us.”

“Yeah,” she said. “It has everything to do with that. Do you know anything about the church during the Byzantine Empire?”

“Hooky,” I reminded her. “Monster hooky. Jesus hooky.”

Selwyn showed me what was hiding in the T-shirt. It was a plaque, a bas-relief carved into a slab of dark gray stone. It was one of those mother and child things, good old Catholic idolatry. Only, with a twist. The artist had managed to give what I assumed was meant to be the Virgin Mary a hungry, leering smirk. And the Baby Jesus, well, he looked as if he’d fallen out of an ugly tree and smacked into every branch on the way down. He was also smirking, like the two of them were gloating over some awful secret, a secret that amused them no end. There was a fossil ammonite, about as big around as a silver dollar, set into the plaque, clutched in the kid’s hands. It was some sort of glittering gold-colored mineral, the ammonite, and I guessed pyrite. Fool’s gold.

“What the fuck, Selwyn?”

“It has a lot of names,” she said. Just then the train lurched and she almost fell, almost dropped the carving. I wouldn’t have caught it. It would have been a relief to see the thing break into a hundred pieces at her feet.

“Such as?”

She held the thing closer to her chest.

“Basaltes Maria Virgo, La Virgen negra de la Muerte, Unser Mutter von der Nacht—”

“Anything in fucking English?”

She sighed and frowned. Oh, the burden of having an ignorant vampire girlfriend.

“Well, in
Cultes des Goules,
François-Honoré de Balfour translated
Basaltes Maria Virgo
as
La Madone de basalte.
The Basalt Madonna. And mostly that’s what it’s been called ever since he published his book in 1702. The ghoul call it
Qqi d’Evai Mubadieb.
”

I couldn’t take my eyes off that hideous plaque.

“Just how many languages do you speak?” I asked her.

“Only eight,” she said.

“Right.
Only
eight. Go on. I’m listening.”

Mostly, I was. I admit that chunk of gray rock was taking up a good deal of my attention. Especially the ammonite. There seemed to be something wrong about it, like the golden whorl of the shell went on and on and on, spiraling inward forever, never quite reaching the spot that should have been its center.
Neat trick,
I thought.

“I’ve heard of Balfour,” I told her.

“Yeah. Not too many copies of
Cult of Ghouls
left. Right off, it made the Church’s
Index Librorum Prohibitorum
and most of the copies were destroyed. Supposedly, Richard Upton Pickman, he had one, but it vanished with him.”

I’d heard of Pickman, too.

“I thought that book was a nasty urban legend,” I said. “Like the mad Arab and the
Necronomicon.
”

She was silent a moment.

I stared at the ammonite. It was beginning to make me woozy, the fucked-up optical illusion of it. At least, I hoped it was an illusion.

“Quinn, the
Necronomicon
isn’t a myth,” she finally said. “Lovecraft didn’t invent it. Dad saw a partial copy when he was in Iran, back in the sixties.”

“You’re shitting me.”

She shook her head. I definitely remember her shaking her head, though I
don’t
remember looking away from the ammonite, which makes me wonder about . . .

Never mind. Let’s not go there.

“It was under lock and key at the Jam’karaˉn mosque just outside Qom.”

“It was under lock and key, but your dad saw it?”

“An imam owed him a favor.”

The woozy feeling was turning into genuine nausea, and I bit my lip hard enough to draw blood. Which ain’t really very hard with teeth like mine. The pain was enough to break whatever hold the bas-relief was exerting over me. Thank holy fuck. You know how at the end of
Raiders of the Lost Ark
the bad guys’ heads all explode? I’m pretty sure that was next, after nausea. Also, the Ark of the Covenant thing seems a good comparison, since Selwyn’s father was starting to sound an awful lot like Indiana Jones.

“Wrap it up again,” I told her, turning back to the dark tunnel walls outside the subway car. She did as I told her, and I said, “So this is what Isaac Snow’s after.”

It wasn’t a question, because I already knew the answer.

“Yeah. This and the skull and the necklace. A couple of years ago, he thought he’d found the Basalt Madonna. A hack novelist woman named Aimee Downes made what
was apparently a pretty convincing counterfeit, and she sold it to him. Didn’t fool him for long, though. Right after that, she sort of went missing.”

“Sort of?”

“I heard parts of her body turned up here and there,” Selwyn said. “An eye. A hand. A breast. But no one knows if he actually had her killed.”

Ghoul justice. Happy fun time.

“Anyhow, when he hired me to find the stuff, I didn’t have any idea what it was, the Madonna, or, more to the point, why he wanted it.”

“And what has all this got to do with the Byzantine Empire?”

“It’s a long story,” Selwyn said. “It’s hard to make a short version out of it.”

“Try anyway.”

The train lurched and swayed, and she gripped the pole a little tighter. I could see her reflected in the glass. I was so regretting not having left her back in that apartment. In fact, I was regretting ever having met her. If I hadn’t, I’d still have been shacked up with my CEO, safe and snug and bored.

“Sometime during the fifth century,” Selwyn began, “though no one’s sure exactly when, I don’t think, a monk in Constantinople found a ghoul—only he didn’t know it was a ghoul. He thought it was a leper, you know. That sort of almost makes sense—”

“Not really,” I cut in. “Not if you’ve ever actually seen a ghoul, which—”

“—I have. I’m just telling you that’s how the story
goes. The monk thought the wretch he found huddled in the shadows was a leper, and he led it back to the abbot, who saw that whatever it was, it definitely wasn’t human.

“Father, look what followed me home,” I said. “Can I keep it? Please? Pretty please?”

Selwyn didn’t laugh like I’d hoped she would.