Cherry Bomb: A Siobhan Quinn Novel (17 page)

Charlee fished half a roll of spearmint Life Savers from a jeans pocket and passed one to B.

“Why am I here?” I asked.

“Come after a ball of fire, did we?” B mumbled around the spearmint Life Saver. He clicked it about in his mouth, then scratched at his stubbled face again. “Might be,” he said, “I want to
help
you, Quinn. Lend a hand, as it were. Mind you, not out of the goodness of my heart.”

“No offense, B, but . . . you don’t even look like you’re in any shape to help yourself, much less me. You want my advice, cut your losses and sit this one out.”

“Did he say he wants your advice?” Charlee asked, and the way he asked it left no doubt that he was getting angry. I began to wonder if maybe this kid was more than arm candy. Maybe. Or maybe he only had aspirations.

Either way, he was pissing me off.

I said to him, “Charlee with two
e
’s, you want to remind me how this shit’s any of your business?”

“Now, now,” said B. “Let’s all be friends.”

“I didn’t come here to make friends, and I think your twink needs a shorter leash.”

Charlee made half an admirable stab at shooting me a withering glare, and I showed him my middle finger. Nice try, boy, but no banana. B sighed, sucked on his Life Saver, and checked his wristwatch.

He said, “You and me, kitten, seems like we’ve perfected the fine fucking art of finding ourselves between a rock and a hard place, Scylla and Charybdis, demons and the deep blue sea. And this time, well, here you have those inbred albino lunatics up in Beantown, got it in their collective fucking loaf they’re gonna see some ancient prophecy come to fruition, yeah? Believe they’re the chosen ones, gonna lead all the wee little downtrodden ghouls to the pearly gates of Kingdom Come.”

He stopped talking just long enough to spit what was left of his Life Saver onto the floor.

“While on the other hand, you’ve got the venerable Mr. Pickman and his merry band of counterinsurgents, the agnostics in this right holy Barney the Snows are trying to incite, and that lot figure what they got now is better than reopening old wounds and picking a losing battle with the Djinn.
Id est,
the plonkers you appear to have aligned yourself with, my darling dear.”

“B, I haven’t fucking aligned myself with anyone. I’m just trying to get Selwyn back. And I’m gonna assume you know who she is.”

“Indeed, I do. Your aforementioned heart’s desire and lady love,” he replied. “And do let me pause to congratulate you on having found that special someone. I was tickled pink at the news, I was.”

Right then’s when I realized there were a couple of kids, a boy and a girl, watching us from just a few feet away. They looked to be seven, maybe eight. Eight at the most. Small wonder they were the only ones giving us the hairy eyeball.

“I haven’t taken a side,” I said again.

“Why didn’t Pickman hold on to the Madonna?” B asked, and now he was staring back at the two kids.

“Beats the ever-loving shit outta me. Why’d the twins cut off your hand? You get greedy and try to pull a double cross with them?”

“I had unexpected expenses,” he said, speaking very softly now, still watching the two children who were watching us. “It happens. I’d underestimated my out-of-pocket, tried to renegotiate the terms.”

“Yeah. That’s what I thought.”

Then B leaned forward a bit, towards the two kids, and he rolled his eyes back in their sockets until only the whites were showing. Actually, the whites were a little yellow, like possibly B’s liver was reaching the end of its rope and jaundice was setting in. Also, he smiled. For a human, B’s got a creepy fucking smile. I have, on occasion, speculated he might have a dash of infernal blood from a few generations back; it would explain a lot. Like that smile.

The two kids promptly stopped staring and melted into the crowd flowing by between the dinosaurs.

“Neat trick,” I said. “Though, I do wonder why you thought meeting here was a good idea.”

“Lately,” he replied, “I’ve sort of developed a fondness for crowds, if you get my drift.”

“Well, hey, then that makes one of us. What do you want, B? You’re charming as ever, but I’m getting tired of sitting here.”

He took a deep breath and rubbed at the bridge of his nose. And when he answered me, he almost sounded like his old self.

“What I
want
, precious, is my fucking hand back. But seeing as how that’s not in the sodding cards, I’m looking to settle for revenge. I want those two freaks dead.”

I glanced at the
Tyrannosaurus
looming over us, and though it was stripped of flesh and its bones turned to stone all those many tens of millions of years ago, it sure as shit still looked hungry. Ravenous, Mr. Dinosaur with those grinning jaws and petrified teeth long as my hand, like B, it wanted vengeance. And, I thought, like B, it’s shit out of luck.

“I’m not for hire,” I told B. “And if I were for hire, I still wouldn’t come back to work for you.”

He laughed, a quiet, sour laugh. A laugh that gave me goose bumps.

“I don’t want to hire you, Quinn. Tell me, have you even seen them yet?”

“Who?”

“‘Who,’ she wants to know,” he said to Charlee. Then B jabbed me hard in the ribs with his cast. “The mongrel berks, that’s who. Have you
seen
them?”

“No,” I said, rubbing my right side. “Talked to the brother on the phone. He called Selwyn’s place looking for her and got me instead. But I haven’t seen either of them. I’m beginning to think they don’t like being seen.”

“It’s a right bitch, ain’t it, treacle tart?” he asked, staring at me now as if he were challenging me to disagree. “Trying to face off against fucking gits when you ain’t even got a face to put with the toil and trouble they’ve brought down upon you? Like boxing with your own shadow, wouldn’t you say?”

And for just a second, Mean Mister B’s gray eyes had
a hint of their old fire back. Just a spark, sure, but still enough for me to see that—no matter the damage the Snows had done to him—he was still in there.

“I just want to get Selwyn back,” I said. And if we were playing chicken right then, well, I’m the one who blinked first. It was easier to watch all those anonymous faces filing past than the hate bubbling up from B’s soul.

“Fuck what the fuckers look like,” I said.

“Remember when I tried to get you to read
The Art of War
?” he asked.

I said no, because I had no recollection whatsoever of B ever trying to get me to read so much as a take-out menu.

“Right, well, you see, Sun Tzu, that wily sixth-century Celestial cocksucker, yeah, well, he wrote—and do forgive my paraphrasing, kitten—he wrote, if you know yourself and know your enemy, you can fight a hundred goddamn battles and always emerge the victor. But if you ride out into the jaws of death, into the mouth of Hell—like Lord Tennyson’s six goddamn hundred cavalrymen in eighteen hundred and what the fuck ever—and you
don’t
know your enemy, then, kitten, you are, make no mistake, righteously fucking
fucked
every goddamn time.”

“Which means?”

“It means you’re blind,” he said, raising his voice. “It means you’re in the dark, as the poets say. And the time’s come to have those scales fall from your blinkered eyes, just like Saint Paul on the road to Damascus. Time for you to see your enemy, them two mad as a bag of ferrets with teeth just as sharp. If you really want her back, that
is. You still got that much fight left in you, Siobhan Quinn? You still know how to dance the dance?”

They didn’t wait for me to answer.

I say they, because it was Charlee who placed a hand on my neck, two fingers at the base of my skull. I didn’t even have time to be surprised. There was a flash, as much pain as it was light, as much light as searing pain, and the sensation that I was falling. But that only lasted . . . well . . . it was pretty much over before it began.

Boom.

And I opened my eyes, though I didn’t remember having shut them.

And I didn’t need anyone to tell me who I was seeing.

I was seeing Isaac and Isobel Snow. It was night, and I was standing beneath a full moon in a grove of trees on a hill crowned with a weathered stone altar, the whole scene a cliché straight out of a tale of New England witchcraft, a Roger Corman film starring Vincent Price. The twins had their backs to me. Each was wearing an identical velvet robe the same shade as the night sky. I leaned against one of the trees, feeling queasy and weak, trying to ignore my discomfort and focus on nothing but those two. Their white hair had been twined together into a single ivory braid that hung between them, down past their hips. Something lay on the altar, but I couldn’t quite make it out. One of the twins raised a crude dagger, a blade chipped from flint and set into a wooden handle. A fucking caveman’s Neolithic knife. It rose up almost high as the moon, and both twins were calling out to “gods” even fouler than the things ghouls worship.

“Shub-Niggurath!” they cried in unison. “Iä! Mighty
Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, accept this oblation in thy name!”

And the flint knife came down.

Whatever was on the altar screamed, and I heard the crunch of bone, and the whole fucking night suddenly smelled of blood.

Then I got hit by both barrels of Charlee’s flashbulb again:
boom, boom.
I’d been right; there was way more to that kid than questionable fashion sense, a wicked pretty face, and a headful of idiotic slang.

“Where the hell did you find him?” I heard myself ask, without ever having moved my lips.

“Where the hell did I find
you
, precious?” B replied.

In the motherfucking gutter, B.

Down in the motherfucking gutter, a needle in my arm.

There was that pell-mell tumbling sensation again, but it went on longer than before. When it ended, I felt like I was being splashed with icy water, jolted awake from a nightmare. But the truth of it, I was being jolted awake
into
one.

I was underground, and I knew where, even if I didn’t know
how
I knew. A tunnel below Mount Auburn Cemetery in Boston, a secret path the ghouls had scratched out centuries before. There was orange torchlight flickering off the damp walls, off moldering heaps of bones and skulls, off rubbery fungi growing in fleshy clumps on the exposed granite. I took a step, and mud sucked at my boots.

Ghouls crouched on either side of me, dozens of them, squatting in filth and half-devoured corpses. Their bristling hides seethed with lice and fleas, with maggots,
and their eyes shimmered iridescent gold in the gloom. The air was cold, dank, and stank of mushrooms, rot, blood, shit, and wet dogs. I took a step backwards, just wanting to be anywhere except fucking right fucking there, but I tripped over my own clumsy feet and landed hard on my ass in the mud. I looked up, and the Snow twins had entered the passageway. They stood together, hand in hand—Isaac on the right, Isobel on the left—and the creatures crowded into the tunnels averted their gaze and murmured incoherent prayers.

I didn’t look away.

I’m sure there are those who’d have called them beautiful. There’s never a shortage of people in the world ready to look at the grotesque and the warped and call it lovely. I just don’t happen to be one of them. Isaac’s and Isobel’s skin seemed to have been dusted in flour, it was so pale. Their irises could have been cut from the reddest rubies ever mined. They were tall, lanky, long-boned, and thin,
frail
, and I couldn’t help but think that one good, hard shove and they’d have both shattered like antique porcelain dolls. They were completely naked, save for the mud and decay caking their pale bodies.

“Well,” said Isobel, looking directly at me, “from somewhere and somewhen, somehow she’s finally found her way to us.” She grinned ear to ear and flashed a crooked mouthful of stained teeth filed almost as sharp as a vamp’s or a
loup
’s . . . or, hey, a goddamn
Tyrannosaurus’
.

“Clever bitch,” her brother whispered. “So, she’s a sorceress after all.”

“No, brother. No, it’s not
her
magic. She
has
no magic
to call her own. Only curses. There is another guiding her.
Pushing
her.”

Some of the ghouls were watching me now.

Oh, and I had to piss.

Funny how I remember how badly I suddenly had to piss. But, see, vampires do not actually pee, so I suppose that part was, by definition, rather memorable.

“Where is she?” I heard myself ask, taking myself my surprise. “Where is Selwyn?”

Like cartoon villains, the twins exchanged curious, amused glances.

“She believes we have the traitor,” said Isobel to her brother. And, “So, that’s how we’ll get your attention, Twice-Damned,” Isaac said to me. “I believed as much, but one can never be certain what will work.”

“Never,” said Isobel. “Never certain.” And she leaned down and forward, reaching towards me with her long white fingers. Her nails reminded me of broken acorn shells.

“No,”
I heard myself say, and then, whatever Charlee was doing, he did it some more. The tunnel dissolved around me, swallowed up by the fall, the flash, the sonic fucking boom, and I felt my bladder let go.

I hit the floor like a sack of potatoes.

A sack of potatoes that had just pissed itself.

Warm urine trickled down my thighs as this Third Circle of Fuck All swam into focus. My mouth tasted like blood, and I realized I’d bitten my tongue. I was lying on my right side, staring out across a hardwood floor so dusty and gray it might well have been the surface of the
moon. The buckled floor of a room in a rotten old house, that floor and walls defaced with chalk pentagrams and seemingly random letters from the Enochian alphabet. Here and there were clusters of white candles burning on the floor. You know, I can ladle on description and adjectives all damn day, all damn night, but it really won’t say jack shit about how evil that place felt. How
evil
it smelled. Worse even than the tunnels, somehow worse than the summoning of good ol’ Shub-Niggurath. The pitched roof of a garret room rose high above me, impossibly high it seemed, and I wondered if maybe this wasn’t a real place at all. It struck me more as a carnival funhouse abstraction of a spooky old garret room than the real McCoy. Another page ripped from freaking Poe or Lovecraft or Stephen King and splashed across my frontal lobe. A wave of nausea swept over me, but I managed not to puke. Pissing myself was plenty bad enough.