Cherry Bomb: A Siobhan Quinn Novel (2 page)

“Wouldn’t dream of it. I’d just hate to find out you’re all talk and no bite.”

Well, what happened next, I ordered Eve to get up off the floor and the three of us went back to her place. I had Selwyn strip her and fuck her while I watched. Then I cuffed my CPA meal ticket to her bed, stuffed one end of a silk scarf into her mouth, and made Selwyn watch while I did a messy job of draining Barbara O’Bryan. No, not quite true, even if, at the time, I wanted to think it was. I didn’t have to
make
her watch. She was as wide-eyed and attentive as a hungry cat waiting to pounce on an unwary mouse.

That night, I didn’t let her drink from me. But I offered her a mouthful of Eve. She smiled that smile of hers, all wicked pretend innocence, and accepted every goddamn drop. And right then, I didn’t feel lonely anymore. It was the first time in all those years
since
I’d been murdered by a fucked-up china-doll excuse of a vamp who liked to call herself the Bride of Quiet. The first time since I’d been bitten by a Swamp Yankee
loup
named Jack Grumet. I fell asleep with Selwyn in my arms, the two of us naked and gore spattered, and we slept the day away there by the cold body of a dead woman.

All my dreams were crimson.

That night in Brooklyn I broke my cardinal rule, or the nearest I’ve ever had to a cardinal rule since the night I died. I caved into the loneliness. I was weak and allowed another person to follow me down. Maybe not all the way. It’s not like I
turned
Selwyn, but I did everything but. Now, sure, she’d likely had a certain predilection all her life. Maybe she was the sort of person who eventually becomes a serial killer, that supposedly rare female variety. Maybe not. Or maybe some other vamp or
loup
or whatever would have shown up with open, welcoming arms, willing to take her along for the ride—or worse. She was out there cruising, fingers crossed, praying to dark gods that she’d get lucky. She was willing to die, willing to kill. Hell, if I’d put a knife in her hands and told her to cut Barbara O’Bryan’s throat ear to ear, give her that gaping Glasgow smile, I have no doubt Selwyn would have done it. I have no doubt whatsoever. It’s what she wanted more than love or money, and she was willing to do anything to show me that she wasn’t a tourist. That
she was, to her way of thinking, deserving of my companionship, even if she knew right from the start—and I’m pretty sure she did—that I’d never share the curse that I have no doubt
she
saw as a blessing.

Some nights, I wish I’d just given it to her. If I had, maybe everything would have gone differently, and she’d be here, and I wouldn’t even be writing this, because there’d be no tale to tell. Should’a, could’a, would’a. Regret is a wicked bitter fucking pill to swallow.

Yeah, I suppose I just dropped a spoiler on you. But it’s not like I give a shit. I ain’t doing this for your amusement and titillation.

Yeah. You.

I’d like to delude myself into believing that I’m doing it for Selwyn, just so there will be a record of her short life left behind—no matter how unflattering—so she will not have been x-ed out without so much as a trace remaining to show she ever was.

So.

The next morning when we awoke, wrapped in those sticky sheets and each other’s arms, she put her lips to my ear and whispered, “It’s beautiful.”

I slapped her.

“Like
fuck
it is,” I snarled. “You want to be a killer, be a killer. Just don’t ever let me hear you try and romanticize it.”

She rubbed her jaw and stared at the stiff, mutilated corpse beside her.

I continued. “It’s not a game. It’s not a fantasy. There’s no dark gift. There’s murder and horror, and one day we’ll both have hell to pay. Literally. I ever catch you thinking otherwise, I’ll break your fucking neck.”

There was a good-sized tear in Eve’s throat, just below her larynx, and Selwyn slid three fingers inside it, like some grotesque parody of doubting fucking Thomas and Jesus Christ, a story that’s plenty grotesque enough to start with. Yeah, I was raised to be a good Irish Catholic girl, force-fed all that nonsense right up until I ran away to live on the dirty streets of Providence.

“You’re telling me it isn’t a rush?” Selwyn asked. “You really expect me to believe you don’t enjoy this? If so, I’m not buying it, Quinn.”

I wanted to slap her again. Instead, I got up and went to the table where, the night before, I’d left my phone.

“I’m not telling you that at all,” I replied, trying to remember the number I needed. “It’s better than sex ever was. It’s even better than heroin, and I never thought I’d love anything better than smack.”

“You were an addict?” She took her hand out of the wound and sniffed at her fingers.

“Still am. Only now it’s blood, not H. But, Selwyn, what you did last night, that’s no different from Jeffrey Dahmer wrapping his cock in some poor fuck’s intestines and jacking off. If that’s your idea of beautiful, keep it to yourself.”

She changed the subject. Smart girl.

“How do we get rid of the body?” she asked.

“I’m about to take care of that right now,” I told her, and I dialed the number of a janitor over in Red Hook. Back in Rhode Island, I’d had to clean up my own messes. Here in Manhattan, I’d learned there were people who’d pay for the privilege of wiping my ass for me. They were quick, thorough, and they never asked
questions. What they did with the refuse, hey, that was their own business, the sick fucks. I called and was told someone would be around in half an hour or less, traffic permitting. There was already a truck in the neighborhood.

“I need a shower,” Selwyn said. “Wanna join me?”

I shook my head. There was a chance the cleaners would arrive early, and if I got in the shower with her, well, I knew where that would lead.

“You go on. I’m gonna tidy up.”

I didn’t bother getting dressed. Eve’s eyes were still open, and I sat on the edge of the bed, staring into them. The shower sounded like heaven. I looked into the blind, blank gaze of the woman who’d sheltered me, but all I could think of was the hot water pounding Selwyn’s tits and cunt. After five minutes or so, I wrapped the body tightly in the bloody sheets. Usually, I let the cleaners take care of that, but suddenly I needed to be busy. The night before, dumb bitch that I am, I’d gone and changed the whole goddamn tried-and-true ball game of my existence, and it was a lot easier to try and figure out what came next if I kept busy.

“You trust these guys?” Selwyn asked. I looked up, and she was standing in the doorway, wet and naked, drying her black, black hair with a white bath towel.

“Yeah,” I replied. “I trust these guys. Put some clothes on.”

“What about you?”

“What
about
me?”

She shrugged and disappeared back into the steamy bathroom.

The resurrection men—they never called
themselves
cleaners or janitors, always resurrection men, when they called themselves anything—came and went. They didn’t so much as bat an eyelash at the nude, gore-smeared vampire. I was a familiar enough sight, me and however many other nasties they knew on a first-name basis. These guys, they were hip to what sorta appalling shit goes bump in the night. After all, they might be mortal, but they did a fair share of bumping themselves. They took away the corpse and the mattress and the box springs. They cut away ruined chunks of carpet and sheetrock. They paid me fifteen hundred dollars for their trouble, for their windfall. Selwyn watched on quietly, and I could tell she was amazed, impressed, enthralled. Yeah, I had a budding psychopath on my hands. I was beginning to wonder if the CPA’s was the first murder she’d taken part in.

“What next?” she asked eagerly as soon as they’d left.

“What next is I take a shower.”

“I mean after that, Quinn.”

“I assume you have a place to live. I can’t stay here anymore.”

She nodded and reached for one of my cigarettes. She lit it and blew smoke rings. “Yeah, I have a place. So we’re roomies now?”

“Sure seems that way.”

She smiled.

There you go.

How Quinn met Selwyn.

When I left Providence, I did
try
to give up the whole undead avenger shtick. My heart was never in it, anyway. Like I said already, I traveled south, then west, then I came to the Big Apple, and I decided to live and let live.
Or whatever it is the reanimated dead do when they’re minding their own affairs and not being goddamn self-righteous hypocrites. In fact, during my time in NYC I’d only taken out a single nasty, a gutter vamp down in the Village who’d made the mistake of getting in my face about my arrangement with Barbara O’Bryan. Maybe I should have let it go, water off a duck’s ass and all that, but I hadn’t.

Of course, a lot of folks knew who I was. I’d gotten a reputation over the years. Which happens. Frankly, I was surprised no one came gunning for me. I’d been good at slaying my fellow monsters, and that shit’s like it used to be for gunslingers in the Old West. You get a rep, and there’s always another asshole with a six-shooter looking to put you down and win your infamy for themselves. But no one messed with me. Maybe, like Selwyn that night at the club, I just got lucky.

I bother mentioning all this because Selwyn asked a lot of questions during our taxi ride to her tiny, rent-controlled apartment in Hell’s Kitchen; she’d inherited it from her dad. She grilled me, and I wanted to tell her to shut up. The driver kept glancing in her rearview mirror, shooting us the sort of glances you reserve for people who talk that sort of crazy shit in the backseat of your hack. I didn’t much care whether or not she took any of it seriously, and besides, odds were she thought we were a couple of loons or larpers or something like that. Whenever I caught her watching us, I’d just smile the most innocent smile I could manage, flashing the fake teeth that hid the truth of my predator’s mouth.

“So, this guy in Providence, he was mortal?”

She meant B.

“Yeah, but it didn’t stop him from being the king of all cocksuckers,” I replied. “At least demons have an excuse.”

“Still,” she said, “guess you gotta give him
some
credit. Not many people would have the nerve—”

“Fuck that,” I interrupted. “He’s a low-life grifter who’s found a big con, and he’s stubborn enough and foolish enough to hang on as long as he can squeeze out a few more pennies.”

“Still,” she persisted, “he showed up and saved your ass, didn’t he? I mean . . . sorta?”

“Is that how you see it? Shit . . .”

She was quiet a moment, then said, “After that ghoul, and the first vampire—”

“
Both
accidents.”

“Still . . .”

“Look, B’s the reason a big-time beastie ever had cause to come looking for me. If I hadn’t been such a goddamn junkie that I was willing to accept a job as a contract killer of killers, I’d have stayed mortal and the worst that ever would have happened is I’d have died.”

“But you did die.”

“And
stayed
dead.”

I still hadn’t put her wise to the fact that I was double cursed, double damned, double fucking dipped, that I was a vamp who’d been infected by a werewolf before Mercy had kissed me with those china-doll lips and left me lying in a weedy ditch near the Seekonk River. So, Selwyn, she only knew half the joke.

“Did it hurt?” she wanted to know.

“Fuck you.”

She sighed and looked out the passenger-side window, frowning at pedestrians and storefronts.

“I just don’t get why you’re so bitter, Quinn. I mean, what’s done is done. Shouldn’t you at least try to make the best of it?”

“Listen, just for starters, how about you get yourself raped to death. Then come to and remember it all in perfect detail.
Then
we’ll talk. And stop pouting.”

“I don’t want to die,” she said. “It’s hard for me to imagine anything that’s worse than death.”

“Then you’re not trying hard enough. We’ll have to work on that.”

It went on like that until we finally, mercifully, pulled up to the curb in front of the apartment building on Ninth Avenue. Selwyn paid the driver, who popped the trunk so I could retrieve the gym bag and cardboard box that was all I’d left Brooklyn with. Some clothes, a few books, two pistols, and the mini-crossbow not unlike the one B had given me what seemed like a hundred years before, a bottle of saline and my contact lens case. A makeup bag. The charger and cords for my iPod and phone. My banged-up laptop. Selwyn had said it was a shame leaving all the sex toys behind, and I’d told her to take whatever she wanted, so she had a plastic shopping bag full of dildos and vibrators and lube.

The taxi pulled away, and I wondered briefly if the driver would tell anyone about us. Selwyn pointed up at the redbrick building.

“This is it,” she said. “Welcome home.”

“I’ve done worse,” I told her, which sure as hell wasn’t a lie.

It was a ten-story walk-up, though the stairs didn’t seem to bother Selwyn, and they certainly weren’t an issue for me. You can’t get out of breath when you only bother breathing if you don’t want to draw attention to the fact that you’re a cadaver. Anyway, the place was still chock-full of the sort of clutter I suppose archaeologists accumulate. Stacks of yellowing books, ceremonial masks from New Guinea and Japan and Thailand, a mummified cat in a miniature cat-shaped sarcophagus. Et cetera. Plus the spoils and tools of Selwyn’s own enterprises, sort of Lara Croft meets Madame Blavatsky. Selwyn set the bag of sex toys by the door, then apologized for the mess and excavated half a couch and a love seat. Both had seen better days and had probably been new when Kennedy was president. The place smelled like dust, old paper, and Top Ramen. Well, those are the smells that would have greeted the living. Me, I also caught the stink of rats and roaches, dirty dishes, mildew, a toilet that badly needed scrubbing, unwashed laundry, an expired carton of milk in the fridge, and . . . you get the picture.

“Sorry it’s such a wreck,” she said.

“Hey, at least it’s an interesting wreck.”

I picked up a book on Mesoamerican astronomy and flipped through the pages.