Cherry Bomb: A Siobhan Quinn Novel (18 page)

I lay at one end of the garret, and far, far away at the other end, what seemed like fifty miles off, was a sagging canopy bed. The canopy itself had rotted long ago, and nothing was left but cobwebs and tattered strips of fabric hanging from the head and foot posts, from the vaulted crisscross of rusted metal rods suspended above the bed.

The twins were in the bed.

In a corner not far from the footboard, a woman sat in a chair, watching them. Her fingers were steepled, echoing the inverted V of the garret roof, and her chin rested on her fingertips. She wasn’t young or old, beautiful or hideous. She was somehow completely unremarkable and entirely loathsome. Her hair was salt-and-pepper,
and her eyes were golden. Amber. Eyes like honey. She wore a tailored pantsuit, black shirt, pants, vest, a stark white shirt with a ruffled collar. Her clothes were immaculate, despite the dustiness of the garret. She was barefoot.

On the bed, the twins were fucking.

“Who is she?” I whispered, and the woman in the chair looked my way, but only for a moment. The scene on the bed was far more important, more urgent, it seemed, than the vampire who’d just appeared on the attic floor
ex nihilo
.

“Hera Snow,” Charlee answered, from someplace deep inside my brain. “Their mother.”

“No way,” I whispered.

“Yes way,” said Charlee. “But they’re hers by a ghoul father. Once in each generation, a daughter is sent down to the—”

“Selwyn already told me that story,” I interrupted. “I absolutely do
not
need to hear it again.”

There on that filthy mattress, Isobel was down on her hands and knees, her ass raised in the air, and Isaac was mounting her from behind. They both had ugly vestigial tails sprouting from the base of their spines, bent and hardly as long as my pinky finger. He growled and leaned over her. In response, she spread her thighs farther apart, just before he sank his teeth deep into the meat of her left shoulder. The smell of dust and candle wax took a backseat to the reek of blood and sex. Just before he entered her, I got a glimpse of Isaac Snow’s cock. There were bands of backwards-pointing hooks, like those on a cat’s penis. The sort of shit you see and can’t ever
un
-see,
right? There was not even the faintest hint of love in that lovemaking. It was more like witnessing a consensual rape, which is exactly the sort of nonsensical phrase that comes of trying to apply human sensibilities to the mating of hopelessly inhuman beings. Isobel screamed when he pulled out, when those spines tore into her. Hera Snow practically beamed, proud as proud can be.

“My pretty, pretty, pretty boy,” she cooed. “My sweet, sweet baby girl.”

I expected the bitch to applaud.

Isobel, sweat soaked and panting, turned her face towards me, and she smirked and said, “Hello there, little voyeur. Want to come out and play? I’ll share.”

There was blood leaking from her nostrils.

“Play with us, Quinn.”

And my stomach rumbled.

Suddenly, all those candles flared in unison, and the room grew much, much brighter. Painfully bright to
my
eyes. I instinctively shut them, but not before I saw the
shadow
looming over the twins and Hera Snow, the shadow of something both voracious and infinitely impatient. Yeah, I shut my eyes, but not before I saw it, and not before
it
saw
me.

Bring me back,
I prayed to Charlee with two
e
’s.
Whatever the fuck it is you’re doing back there, you fucking make it stop and bring me back, right fucking now.

Not yet,
he replied.
I apologize, but we’re not finished yet.

There’s more.

What was. What is. What’s coming.

What
might
come.

The garret room broke apart around me, the world collapsing into splinters and shards, spilling me ass over tits back into the void. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am, and down the goddamn rabbit hole with you, Quinn Alice.

For a time, there was nothing at all.

Nothing.

That was nice. I’d have gladly spent several eternities drifting in that limbo, if it meant I’d be spared any more visions of the twins’ depravity.

But you know what they say about all good things.

I heard the mutterings of ghouls.

And I smelled incense—myrrh, vetiver, frankincense, turmeric—cloying smoke from smoldering braziers.

And once again I found myself in some subterranean place, but not the narrow tunnels hollowed out beneath Mount Auburn. This was somewhere cavernous, a veritable goddamn underground cathedral stretching away on all sides, its ceiling so far overhead not even my fancy undead eyes could find any trace of it.

I’m in the belly of the world.

No,
whispered Charlee.
But you’re in its maw.

I was crouched on my knees, my clothing in rags, the clothes I’d taken off the girl in City Hall Park only hours before. My hands and face were bleeding from dozens of fine cuts, paper cuts, razor cuts. My magical mystery tour was taking a toll on more than just my mind.

When I breathed, my breath fogged.

Before me was a wide dais carved from rough ebony stone shot through with veins of scarlet crystal. There must have been two or three hundred ghouls crowded
into the cavern, a grunting, restless mass of muscle and fur, all of them jostling for a spot nearer the edge of the dais. They snarled and spat curses in their guttural excuse for a language. Here and there, skirmishes broke out. I saw one big silverback motherfucker, three hundred pounds if he was an ounce, pop the skull of a scrawny ghoul who’d shoved him—inadvertently, I think. I mean, the brute just
literally
popped
the little guy’s head in his hands. Then he licked his gnarled fingers clean of brain and gore and went back to watching the dais. They were, all of them, waiting on something. And I supposed that Charlee and B had seen to it that I was waiting, too. There was another dustup, not ten feet from me, and it ended in a spray of blood and the victor dancing with a garland of intestines draped merrily about his shoulders.

In the three long years since my untimely death, I’d smelled a lot of rancid shit, but nothing that quite compared to that gathering. I didn’t care what B’s boy had said; judging from the funk, I was lodged firmly in the world’s goddamn descending colon.

Where is she, B? Where’s Selwyn in all this?

Patience, kitten.

The twins appeared on the dais—just
appeared
—and, as they say, sports fans, the crowd went wild. A howl rose up from the throat of every ghoul in the place, and you didn’t have to be wise in the ways of the hounds to know it was a
joyful
noise. The crowd surged forward, and I heard bones crack. Bodies were crushed to pulp against the sides of the black dais, and talons scratched desperately at the edges of the stone. But not one of the ghouls tried to climb up onto it. They wouldn’t dare.
There
were
rules here, and the price for breaking them would, I suspected, be worse than being squashed and trampled to death.

My eyes stung, and my vision blurred. When I wiped at them I realized there was blood trickling into them from a deep gash across my forehead.

What the fuck, Charlee?

The twins were dressed in the same midnight robes they’d worn when I watched as they summoned the Black Goat of the Woods, and, same as that night, their long white hair was plaited into a single braid. They stood there hand in hand, eyes downcast, their expressions just shy of solemn. It was Isobel who spoke first, and
when
she spoke, the rabble fell quiet as—if you’ll excuse the pun—the grave. She didn’t lift her head. She didn’t look at the congregation. But . . . she smiled. She smiled an awful smile.

“Long ages ago,” she said, not raising her voice, not needing to raise her voice, “we walked freely beneath the sun. In immemorial nights, we lived beneath the moon. We did not fear the day. Nor did we have cause to fear the sky and stars. We did not skulk in graveyards, subsisting off the withered corpses of apes. We were a great race, until we were betrayed and cast down into the Sunless Lands, exiled to the peaks and plateaus and necropolises of Thok, lost to the Lower Dream Lands where most of our race now dwell. Before the Djinn made their war upon us.”

At this, the ghouls once again began to howl and hoot and snarl, and the twins let them. The twins held their leashes, that much was plain as fucking day. I was
watching a puppet show, and the two mongrels on the stage were pulling all the strings.

I tried to stand, discovered that I was too dizzy, and sat down with my back against a stalagmite.

Minutes passed. I can’t say how many. It was all a blur of goddamn yodeling ghouls and snapping jaws. But eventually they fell silent of their own accord, and now it was the brother’s turn to speak. Isaac kept his head down, same as Isobel had done, and he wore the same smile she’d worn.

“My sister,” he said, “recites the sorrowful and cruel history of our fallen race. She speaks it true, yes. But remember that it is
but
history. It is
only
history. The crimes done to us in antiquity have gone unanswered for three
thousand
millennia while human men and woman—usurpers favored by the Djinn bastards—have risen and stolen all that
should
have been ours. But I stand here and tell you, there is a path back, long promised us, and this wrong will no longer be endured, these unspeakable indignities, this . . . captivity.”

Pretty lame as “Let my people go” speeches go. But, once again, the ghouls raised their cries for justice, and again, the twins let them howl and slam themselves against one another and the sides of the black dais. I watched as more of the faithful went down, casualties of the frenzy, ripped apart, stomped to jelly under the hooves of their fellows. Once or twice I even looked away.

No kidding.

“I get the point,” I muttered. “I’ve seen enough.”

I didn’t bother whispering. It’s not like the ghouls could possibly hear me over the ruckus they were raising.

Not just yet,
the boy with pomegranate hair replied.

“
Yes
yet. Fuck you. Stop this
now
, right
fucking
now, or B’s gonna be window-shopping for a new favorite pillow biter.”

Charlee didn’t respond.

I can’t exactly blame him.

The ghouls had all fallen silent once more, and I looked back at the dais, the stage for Isaac and Isobel Snow’s own private Altamont, this carefully ordered chaos good as their own DIY Nuremberg Rally. All eyes were on them, every fucker there waiting with fetid breath for the next proclamation.

For the plan.

For deliverance.

“What has
any
of this shit got to do with me?” I growled, and maybe I ought to have been keeping my voice down after all, because Isobel’s ruby eyes went right to me. Finally, she raised her head. She licked her lips and nodded once, a nod that seemed to be something more meaningful than a mere acknowledgment of my presence, though what that might be I had no goddamn way of knowing. But neither her brother nor the ghouls seemed to have noticed what
she’d
noticed. None of them turned towards me, and Isobel, after a few seconds, looked away.

Free of her gaze, I felt as if a concrete block had been lifted off my chest. I heard myself gasp.

On the dais, the twins turned to face each other, and behind them appeared—just
appeared
—a contraption that looked a bit like what might happen if an indecisive metalworker set out to create a torture rack, then changed
her mind and started work on a cross, only to change her mind a second time and attempt the sort of cage that could be hung from a gibbet. In places, the iron bands still glowed red hot.

The twins opened their hands.

“What rough beast—” said Isaac.

“—its hour come round at last,” finished Isobel.

They opened their hands again, or maybe I’d only thought they’d opened them the first time.

They held, between them, the Basalt Madonna, and where the pyritized ammonite had been was a spiraling emptiness. A hole in space and time and the consciousness of everything that has ever had a halfway coherent thought, a hole in the universe, spinning around and around and around.

They kissed.

And the ghouls wailed, and their hoofed feet hammered at the travertine floor of the cavern.

We’re almost done,
said Charlee.

For just an instant, like a few frames of film spliced into the wrong movie, I saw a squalid room where two hulking figures held B still while a third used a butcher’s cleaver to take off his hand a few inches above the wrist.

I saw Charlee watching.

I heard Mean Mister B scream.

Isobel reached into the hole where the ammonite had been, and now there were tears flowing down her cheeks as a sticky blackness poured out of the Madonna and up her arm. Isaac Snow watched, eyes wide—but not with fear and not with horror for what was happening to the woman who was both his twin sister and his lover. That
expression, it was glee. It was jubilation. The bastard was ready to cream himself. All his sick fucking dreams were coming true, right there before his eyes, and Isobel, I saw, was a price he was more than ready to pay.

Power.

Greed.

A thirst for violence that would never be quenched.

And, suddenly, right then, all I wanted was to see him dead. I struggled to my feet, shoving back against the dizziness and supporting myself against the stalagmite. I reached for the gun that should have been under my tattered peacoat, tucked into the waistband of the dead girl’s jeans. But it wasn’t there. Not that it much mattered, because an instant later I saw what was suspended from that device that was not exactly a rack or a cross or a gibbet’s cage.

What rough beast.

I’d never seen its face so clearly.

My face. My wolf ’s face.

I’d never imagined she could be in agony.