Cherry Bomb: A Siobhan Quinn Novel (4 page)

No one calls me Siobhan. Even Mean Mr. B knew better than to call me Siobhan.

She took a step towards
me.

“OK,” she said. “If you’re too weak to control yourself, come on.”

I yanked back so hard on that figurative leash it’s a wonder the damned thing didn’t snap and take whatever was left of my sanity with it. But hell if I was about to give either one of them the satisfaction, my Beast or Selwyn. Maybe she was bluffing, and maybe she wasn’t, but on the off chance she was serious, on the off chance she actually was taunting me into killing her . . . fuck that. I took two steps backwards and bumped against the windowsill. Defeated, the wolf withdrew. It knew from experience there’d be lots of other opportunities.

“Liar,” I growled. Yeah,
growled
is the most honest and accurate way to describe the way the word came out. “You might be a grifter, but no way you’re in this for the
short con. You wouldn’t have waited this long if that was your angle.”

“Yeah,” she said. “You’re probably right.”

How had she even learned my first name? I sure hadn’t told her. I never would learn the answer to that one.

“And don’t you
ever
fucking again call me Siobhan.”

“Okay, Quinn. I’ll try to remember that.”

Jesus, she looked smug. Right then, I hated her as much as I’d ever hated anyone, which is saying a lot. It passed quickly, but for a moment that hatred was almost enough to call the Beast back again.

“Now,” she said. “Are we done playing chicken? Can we put our dicks away and—”

“You gonna tell me what’s going on with this Snow guy?”

“You know, you look a little woozy, Quinn. Maybe you ought to sit down.” She nodded at the love seat, which was nearer the window than the sofa was. I sat down.

“Who is he?” I asked again.

“Just a disgruntled asshole client. This isn’t the first time I’ve had to deal with his goons. He gets pushy when I’m late with a delivery.”

I covered my eyes a moment. The contacts were stinging, and the room seemed a lot brighter than it had only five minutes earlier.

“And you’re worried maybe this time he’s gonna do more than send the goons around, even though having a goon of your own on your six isn’t
entirely
the reason I’m here. Have I got that right, Ms. Smithfield? More or less?”

“More or less,” she said.

I squinted at her from between my fingers. Her pale skin almost seemed to glow. She sat down on the sofa and reached for the pack of cigarettes and my Zippo lying on the cushion where I’d left them.

“So what makes this time different?” I asked her.

She exhaled smoke and tossed the lighter at me.

“How about we discuss Isaac Snow later? I’m starving. You might only need to eat every couple of days, but right now I’d kill for pizza or a bowl of noodles. I’m not used to missing breakfast.”

So we went to Famous Original Ray’s on Ninth, and I watched while Selwyn scarfed down three slices of meatball and sausage. At least she wasn’t a vegetarian. Other than my blood, the CPA
had
been, and I never missed an opportunity to point out the irony.

I asked again about the troublesome client, and once again she dodged the questions.

“Later,” she said.

She sat there in her fraying gray cardigan and the same Hellboy shirt from the night before. I sat there in my duster and a black tank top. I had gone to the trouble to hide my true face, my true teeth, because, duh, vamps are a lot more noticeable by the light of day. There was a strange familiarity about that morning. Like, you know, we’d known each other for years. There never was a “getting to know you” period for me and Selwyn Throckmorton. Is that what people mean by soul mates? You meet someone, and the way it goes feels like you’ve known them all your life?

Once upon a time, as they say, I’d thought that was a girl named Lily.

Selwyn stopped gnawing the crunchy rind that was the only thing left of her third slice and dropped the piece of crust onto her grease-stained paper plate.

“Ever think it might not have been an accident?” she asked me.

“Ever think
what
might not have been an accident?”

“The first ghoul, that night in the warehouse.” She wiped her hands with a paper napkin.

I wasn’t in the mood for stupid questions—but, then, who the hell ever is, right? I sighed and watched the plate-glass windows, all the people walking past. They looked like a buffet.

“I was there,” I told her. “I didn’t do shit but scream and try to get out of its way. If the stupid, clumsy fucker had looked where it put its feet, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

The first nasty I ever saw, and the first that ever died because of me. Note that I did not say “first I ever killed,” because I didn’t do jack shit but scream like the teenage girl I was and try to crawl away—
after
it had murdered Lily. Fuck. I never even learned her last name. She was just Lily, and me, I was just Quinn. We met out back of a They Might Be Giants show at Lupo’s, and after that night we were lovers, best friends, inseparable partners in heroin. Yeah, I do know just how sappy that sounds, and no, I don’t care. You swear to someone you’d die before you let any harm come to them, you swear you’d die to protect them, and then, well, the shit hits the fan and you pussy out. I hadn’t told Selwyn about Lily on our cab ride to her place. I’d kept to the bare bones. That first kill, the ghoul with two left feet,
it was an accident. Period. That’s all she knew, and it’s all she ever found out.

“That’s not what I mean,” Selwyn said, and I nearly told her to drop it right then. I wish I had. Hindsight and all that, you know. “What I mean is, Quinn, what if it was a setup?”

I didn’t answer. But I stopped watching the people and watched her, instead.

“Oh, c’mon. Surely you’ve thought about this before. Surely it’s crossed your mind.”

“Surely what’s crossed my mind?”

She glared at me like I was the kid sitting in the corner, the one wearing the pointy cap.

“This B dude, he needed a slayer, yeah? So . . . what if he arranged the whole thing? What if he
led
the ghoul to the warehouse that night? What if, after that, he made sure that second one, the vamp bitch,
knew
where you’d be, and—”

I interrupted her.

“Did you somehow miss the part where I was just some homeless kid, strung out and willing to do anything for my next fix? Not exactly chosen one material.”

“Sure, I know it looks that way. Maybe it’s supposed to look that way. But all those demons and things he was associated with, who also stood to benefit, could be one of them figured it out, your potential, and pointed him towards you.”

“Are you done? Because I need a cigarette.”

“Does it scare you to even entertain the possibility?”

Wanna know the truth? Yeah, it scared me. Scared me shitless. Because all at once I was having what
theologians and philosophers and such call an epiphany. A eureka moment. Pieces started falling into place—that ghoul, the first vamp, Alice Cregan that day Bobby Ng screwed up at Swan Point Cemetery, Jack Grumet, the Bride of Quiet—everything, right on down the line. Might be it made
too
much sense, which is how conspiracy theories tend to work. There’s this one crazy idea, but suffering Jesus on his cross, why has no one bothered to think of it before? Because they’ve all been suckered, of course, just like you’ve been suckered, but then the scales fall from your eyes and WHAM! Why didn’t anyone else ever put two and two together? Why?

Well, could be because the ideas are actually
dumb
ideas. And your eureka moment is the product of desperation and/or gullibility and/or plan ol’ ignorance.

But there in Famous Original Ray’s, drowning in the stink of pepperoni and garlic and burned dough, ain’t gonna lie—I was scared by what she was saying to me.

“Wow, you really
haven’t
ever thought of it.”

“I’m asking you nicely to shut up, Selwyn.”

She leaned back and scowled at me. Disappointment was written all over her face.

“Dad taught me the worst fear in the whole wide world is when people are afraid to look at the evidence before them and—”

What I said next, I didn’t try not to sound pissed.

“So, you’ve known me less than twenty-four hours, but here you’ve sussed out this imaginary grand and secret shadow show of my fate.”

“You believe in fate, Quinn?”

“I was speaking fucking euphemistically.” I was also
quickly losing my temper, which is never good in a public place. For the second time that day, I felt the Beast lurking far too close to the surface. “Now, I’m gonna go outside and have a smoke. Or two. You can either come with me, or you can sit here and contemplate the possibility that the Illuminati had JFK assassinated in order to hide the truth about Roswell. Frankly, I don’t care.”

Have I brought up that thing about how all junkies are inveterate liars? No? Well, there. I just did.

I was scared. She’d hit a nerve.

She’d instilled doubt.

She’d shaken my little ring-tailed lemur world.

Selwyn didn’t say anything. But she followed me, and we headed back towards her apartment. The day had turned cloudy and windy, and somehow that sudden change in the weather, it felt
ominous.

THE WHORES HUSTLE AND THE HUSTLERS WHORE

T
he next day passed uneventfully. If Selwyn was still thinking how maybe B or Drusneth or even, I don’t know, the fucking Bride of Quiet herself had gone out looking for a stooge and found me, and I’d been too dumb to ever catch on—if Selwyn still had that going through her head, she wisely kept it to herself. Me, I tried my best not to let it gnaw at me, but gnaw at me it did. Anyway, yeah, more or less uneventful. She was busy with a couple of customers, and I knew one was this Isaac Snow fucker. I read from her dad’s books and slept too much.

On that second uneventful night, the third day I
spent in the company of Selwyn—which I remember was a Wednesday—that night was the first time she let me drink from her. We’d been watching television. She had this huge stack of VHS tapes that had also been her father’s, and we’d watched a movie. All I can remember is that it was something black-and-white. Might have had Humphrey Bogart in it, but I’m not sure on that point. When the movie was over, I finished my beer, then got up and pulled on my duster.

“Where are you going?” she asked. She was sitting cross-legged on the sofa, sipping at a Rolling Rock.

“I’m hungry,” I said.

She tapped at the end of her nose. It was a habit she had, tapping her nose, and I never did ask her why the hell she did it, or even if she realized she did it, or if anyone had ever told her it was sort of annoying.

“I thought we had a deal. Like you and the CPA.”

Thing was, I liked Selwyn. Since that night at the club, I’d come to realize just how much I’d loathed Barbara O’Bryan. I was having trouble thinking of Selwyn as my new sippy cup.

“Maybe later on,” I said. “I feel like getting some air, anyway.”

She looked hurt and tugged at a strand of that very black hair of hers. “Fine,” she said, sounding not even the least bit fine. In fact, she was pouting. I don’t do well with pouting, especially when I suspect it’s a put-on and I’m being played. “If that’s what you want.”

“You don’t have any idea—”

“So, you’re having second thoughts.”

I stood there, drumming my fingers hard against the
doorframe. “Stop fucking pouting. I can’t fucking stand pouting.”

“I don’t pout,” she said, still pouting. “I’m good enough to fuck, and good enough to let you hide out here, but I’m not good enough to drink from.”

I was hungry, and I was in no mood for my first lover’s quarrel in—shit, maybe forever, since I don’t think Lily and I ever
had
quarreled.

“No,” I said. “We are
not
going to have this argument. Not tonight and not ever.”

“Fine,” she said again.

I sighed and sat down on the floor between the cigar box with the pistol and steel bar brace.

“Selwyn, I could fucking hurt you, right. It could happen. Have you thought of that?”

“You never hurt her.”

There was a difference—a big damn difference, but I didn’t feel like trying to explain it.

“I won’t break,” she said.

“Everybody breaks,” I replied. “Even I break.”

She shrugged, took a swallow of beer, and then very deliberately shattered the empty bottle against the edge a table. Before I could stop her, before I could even protest, she sliced her left palm open. She held it up, smiling.

“Oh, you bitch,” I said. There was so much saliva in my mouth, all at once, I probably drooled when I said it. The smell of her blood was so strong and my senses had kicked so far into overdrive I was getting dizzy. And no point denying the fact that I was horny as hell.

“Take it or leave it,” she said, all self-satisfied and shit. “No one’s holding a gun to your head.”

Probably, there are vamps out there with the sort of discipline I’d have needed to get to my feet, unlock the door, and leave her bleeding on the sofa. I’m not one of them. I’m not especially ashamed to admit that.

So, like I said, that was the first night I drank from her, the first night I tasted her. I carried her to the bedroom, ordered her to take her clothes off. She did, quick like a bunny, and I started with that gash in her palm, then punched a couple of holes of my own in her throat, near the carotid. It actually
could
have gone bad, that night. The heady mix of anger and sexual tension, there’s a recipe for getting lost in the moment and going too far. I thought, another two or three weeks, the ugly beige comforter would be so bloodstained we’d have to get a new one, but that Wednesday night it was still immaculate when I started. I clearly remember, when I was done with her hand and had not yet moved on to her neck, watching crimson drops soaking into the fabric. I was high as a kite on her, tripping balls, and it was like watching stars being born.

Just before I bit her, she had the cojones to whisper, “I’m scared, Quinn.” I saw there were tears streaking her cheeks, but she was also smiling. Her sapphire eyes were two balls of blue fire. Way to go, mixed signals. We have already established how I’m not a nice person, so when I say I wanted to hit her, right there, in that moment, you don’t have a whole lot of excuse to be shocked.

“I am,” she said. “Really. But . . . damn I wish I had teeth like those.”

What the fuck was I supposed to say to that? I had no idea. I lay her bleeding left hand between her thighs,
slipping the index finger inside her, and suggested an activity that might take her mind off the pain. She was immediately responsive to the suggestion. As I learned that night, Selwyn was as much a pain whore as she was sadistic. And it was a balance I found very attractive, something that had been missing in the CPA. Selwyn never, ever felt like a victim, regardless of her ability to play the role when the mood struck her.

Fade to black.

Next day, she had a package to deliver to a guy down in the Meatpacking District. Not a part of town I was terribly familiar with. She asked me to go along, said I might get a kick outta him—some dude she called Skunk Ape. I asked right off what the fuck kind of nasty winds up with a moniker like that, and she replied no sort she was aware of, that Skunk Ape was just a guy, mortal as anyone.

Oh, and it turns out she had a house safe, which was parked between one edge of the bed and another overflowing bookshelf. I hadn’t even noticed it, as it was also buried beneath a stack of books. The morning we went to see Skunk Ape, Thursday morning, she opened it and took out a wooden box. It was obviously old, made of some dark varnished wood with the finish all scuffed up, a latch on the front, hinges on the back. There was a keyhole in the latch. The thing was about big enough to hold a cantaloupe. I inquired what was inside, but she just said, “You’ll see.”

Fine. I’d see. Be that way.

Later, I learned that Skunk Ape’s real, legal name was Rudyard, and I had to admit that Skunk Ape was an
improvement. He ran a weird little shop near the corner of Ninth and Washington, place called the Walrus and the Carpenter that specialized in animal skulls and mounted skeletons, “rogue” taxidermy, and fossils. But, truth was, the W&C was actually nothing but a front for an operation that was his actual bread and butter. Guy was a dealer in the remains of cryptozoological and mythical creatures—which, of course, encompassed a range of nasties, vampires and
loups
included—as well as endangered species and specimens stolen from museums. Pretty much whatever the more discerning and unscrupulous collector was after, I was told, Mr. Skunk Ape could lay his mitts on.

Oh, and I learned that day that Skunk Ape is what they call Bigfoot in Florida.

How he’d earned that particular nickname wasn’t very hard to figure out. Hair down past his shoulders, beard that hid a good portion of his face. Total neck beard. He was big. Not huge, but big enough to be intimidating. I doubt he worried much about walking the streets alone at night. Finally, it was obvious he bathed less than often. Dude stank, plain and simple, a problem compounded by the closeness of his shop below the W&C. He was wearing a paisley waistcoat with a sweat-stained gingham shirt underneath. Weird, how I remember crap like what Skunk Ape was wearing that afternoon, but can’t remember stuff that actually mattered.

As they say, anyway.

Back to the delivery. There was a very cute girl behind the counter, sort I always think of as Betties, because they’re working that Bettie Page look, only with enough tattoos and piercings to find work in any halfway decent
sideshow. She told us Skunk Ape would be right with us, and then we waited upstairs for maybe ten minutes. Never did learn the chick’s name, but she gave me the hairy eyeball while I perused the wares. Dinosaur and mastodon bones, a ruby-throated hummingbird mounted inside a bell jar, jackalopes and Jenny Hanivers and two-headed cobras in jars of formalin. Et cetera and et cetera. Pretty cool shit, really. Anyway, finally Skunk Ape appeared, introduced himself, stared at me a moment, then ushered us behind the counter and down an exceedingly narrow flight of stairs. He parked himself behind a desk littered with an assortment of taxidermy tools, several magnifying glasses of various shapes and sizes, slips of paper impaled on receipt spikes, bits of hide and bone, and a dinged-up beige PC.

He stared at me.

The
way
he’d stared at me, I knew
he
knew exactly what he was seeing. That he’d seen it before, up close and personal. There was a mix of fascination, revulsion, and lust in his murky eyes. Made me want to snap his neck. Might be, if I had, everything would have gone another way. Might be Selwyn would still be alive and here with me. But, you know, probably not.

“What are you looking at?” I asked him.

He sucked at his teeth. He didn’t look away.

“She’s with me,” said Selwyn, taking my hand, the wooden box cradled in her left arm.

“Always playing with fire, ain’t you, Annie?” he smirked. “You’ve outdone yourself this time.”

I didn’t bother asking why he’d called her Annie.

“Can we get this over with?” I asked her, instead.

Skunk Ape frowned and sighed. He pointed at me. “Is that really the best disguise you could manage, Lady Nosferatu? Annie, is she at least housebroken?”

There was a stuffed black bear to my left, wearing a red fez and frozen forever rearing up on its hind legs. I reached out with my free right hand and knocked it over. When the fez bear hit the floor, its head came off in an impressive puff of sawdust.

What do you say when someone breaks your bear? You’d think the occasion would call for something imaginative and extra-pissy special, right? Well, the best Skunk Ape managed was a couple of vamp specific slurs and flipping me the Massachusetts state bird.

I kicked the fallen bear, raising another cloud of sawdust. “Think I
won’t
kill you, Sumo Boy?”

“Play nice, you two,” Selwyn said, then coughed and let go of my hand. She swatted the sawdust away from her face while Skunk Ape muttered and rearranged the junk on his desk until there was room for her to set the box down. He finally stopped staring at me and was watching her expectantly, one bushy eyebrow arched like a dying caterpillar.

“At least tell me that’s what I think it is,” he said to Selwyn.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said and coughed again. “There was some last-minute bullshit. That greedy bastard in Cambridge decided to jack the price on me, right at the last minute. You know how it is.”

“Don’t think that means I’m paying extra,” he replied. “Open the box. Let me see it.”

Fairly sure he was salivating.

Selwyn produced a rusty barrel key from a front pocket of her jeans and unlocked the box, lifted the lid, then stepped back from the desk. From Skunk Ape’s expression, you’d think he’d just found the world’s best girl-on-girl, faux lesbo porn. His mouth was a perfect O, framed by the wild tangle of his beard and mustache.

“You’ll pay me extra if you still want it,” Selwyn said firmly. “I have a buyer in Thailand who’ll gladly fucking take it off my hands.”

I’m not sure he even heard her.

“Skunk,” she said, “we’re friends and all. But I’m sick of greedy assholes trying to rip me off.”

The box was lined with dark blue velvet, and he reached inside and lifted out a very, very old skull, its lower jaw wired in place. It looked almost as old as some of the petrified bones I’d seen for sale upstairs. Right off, I knew what it was. Like the love child of a human being, a baboon, and a hyena. The bone had an orange-brown patina, and the teeth were the color of nicotine stains. There was a pentagram etched into the top of the skull, a different alchemical symbol placed at each of the five points.

“Oh, baby,” Skunk Ape cooed. “Look at you.”

“The fifteen we agreed on, plus my expenses, plus—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said, interrupting Selwyn and waving a hand dismissively towards her as he gingerly set the Ghul skull down beside the wooden box.

I wasn’t shocked or surprised by any of this. I’d met collectors before. Whatever gets your rocks off, so long as it’s not
my
head in a box.

“Oh, Annie, you surely have outdone yourself this time. You, my friend, are the ghostess with the mostest.”

She smiled, obviously proud of whatever mad skills and machinations had been required to get Skunk Ape his prize and land her payday.

“Before Rupert Talbye got his hands on it,” she said, “it was one of Dick Pickman’s. You can see his mark burned into the zygomatic arch, just behind the sutura lacrimomaxillaris.”

Skunk Ape glanced skeptically at Selwyn; up went that caterpillar eyebrow again.

“You’ve got the documentation.”

“I do,” she said, and produced an envelope from the biker jacket. She handed it over to him. “Before Pickman, it was the property of a necromancer in Marblehead, woman named Cherish Doliber. And she’s almost certainly the one who got it from the ghouls. I’m not even gonna guess how that transaction came about, the way the hounds are about their dead.”

“Might’a stolen it,” said Skunk Ape.

“Or had a ghoul in her debt. Rumor has it she was a fairly formidable witch. So, there you go. The skull and proof of its pedigree, just like I promised.”