Cherry Bomb: A Siobhan Quinn Novel (7 page)

“I have some serious doubts on that score.”

She sighed and sipped her drink and stared at the picture of Karl Marx hanging behind the bar, above all the bottles of liquor. Oh, yeah. The place was decorated in all sorts of Soviet memorabilia—flags, photographs of the late, great politburo and other assorted heroes of the USSR, propaganda posters, et cetera. Turns out, it actually had once been a secret gathering spot for socialists trying to stay under the radar of the McCarthyism and Cold War hysteria. Back then, it was called the Ukrainian Labor Home, and there were dances and potluck dinners. Sitting there, you can almost smell the
kapusniak
and hear the accordions. Sorry. Infodump. But that bar—named after the former Soviet security agency—is one of the few places in Manhattan I ever genuinely fell in love with.

Selwyn stirred at her old-fashioned with a swizzle stick, and I drank my Pabst.

“How’d you get the Host on you, anyway?”

She shook her head and went back to stirring her drink.

“I’d rather not get into that.”

“Okay, then, how about we return to the subject of Isaac Snow, or, better yet, why you seem to specialize in ghoul artifacts.”

She chewed at her lower lip a moment, then said, “One skull and one necklace hardly constitute specializing.”

“So, that was just a coincidence?”

“Is this really your business?”

I finished my beer and ordered a second and another shot of Jack. If the bartender had overheard us, he was either used to hearing that sort of talk because the place was a secret watering hole for nasties and their fellow travelers or he had the good sense to mind his own business.

“Hey, Selwyn, you go and spring shit like Aster and her chamber of horrors on me, then it starts being my business real fast. Never mind getting me involved in your flea market of the damned. Do you even begin to understand what happens when the bad folks from the Nine Hells discover someone’s playing Walmart with stuff they consider rightfully theirs? Because I do.”

“I take precautions,” she said.

I was only almost speechless.

“Congratulations, baby girl. I think you just graduated from ‘reckless’ to ‘too dumb to fuck.’”

She stopped stirring her drink. She tapped at the end of her nose instead.

“He’s my cousin,” she said, and she took a tarnished silver pocket watch from her jacket and opened it. She checked the time against the clock behind the bar, then closed the watch and put it away again. “Isaac Snow. He’s my cousin.”

I tossed back my Jack Daniel’s and ordered a third shot. I figured, whatever was coming next, whatever she was about to say, I’d need it. See, it tends to work like this with monsters. Not always, but usually. We aren’t so big on the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” adage. More like “the enemy of my friend is always my enemy.” You
hang with troublemakers, or even just someone unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, tends to rub off. There are exceptions, sure. For example, when Evangelista Penderghast helped me put an end to Mercy Brown—see the first thrilling installment of the misadventures and dumb luck of me. But, truth be told, the Bride of Quiet and Penderghast, they were actually playing a very long game of chess, and I’d just been the pawn in the match. Okay, bad metaphor. But you get the gist. I knew sitting there at the bar that afternoon that the longer I stuck around Selwyn Throckmorton, the more of her messes were gonna become messes I could call my own. Hell, the spooky grapevine was probably already humming with the news that she’d found a vamp guardian angel.

“So,” I said, watching the bartender as he poured the shot of bourbon, “when you were telling me about Boston’s answer to the Addams Family, you just conveniently neglected to mention it also includes the Throckmortons. You know, if I murder you, this very minute, I’ll totally get away with it.”

She glanced at me, and then she tapped her nose a few more times.

“It’s
not
the Throckmortons,” she said. “The Throckmortons are all working-class, God-fearing Baptists. Dad’s from Pittsburgh. But my mother was an Endicott. Suzanne Endicott. He didn’t know about any of it until after they were married. She’d come to New York to try to get away from that bunch.”

My shot arrived. I found myself wishing it were something redder and richer than whiskey. I let her talk. I
didn’t have to. I could have gotten up and walked out, bought a bus or train ticket, put Manhattan behind me, and hoped none of the grief Selwyn had earned would follow me.

I sat on my stool and listened.

“Mom had some money she’d inherited from a dead aunt or uncle, and she enrolled at NYU. She wanted to study art history. Anyway, that’s where she met my father. He was doing his postdoc work. They got married, she dropped out, got a job at the Strand, and Dad didn’t find out anything about her family until after I was born. She’d told him she was from Alaska.”

“Alaska,” I said.

“Yeah. Anchorage. He believed her, which is sort of crazy because she had such a strong Boston accent and all. Maybe he just didn’t care what the truth was, decided it didn’t really matter, whatever. It was three years before he found out, not until after I was born. He wouldn’t have found out then if I hadn’t been born with a tail.”

In one of those old screwball comedies Selwyn liked so much, here’s where I’d have done a spit take. But dead girls, we don’t do spit takes when we hear our new fuck buddy was born with a tail. Par for the course, water off a duck’s back, cliché, cliché, cliché. We’re a jaded lot.

“I didn’t notice a tail last night,” I told her.

“That’s because my mother told them to amputate it. When she saw it, she got hysterical. She wouldn’t even hold me until the doctors cut it off. Dad used to apologize, like it was all
his
fault I didn’t still have a tail.”

I imagined that dusty old portrait of Karl Marx was staring sympathetically down at me as if he understood
precisely how impatient I was getting, exactly how much I was wishing Selwyn would hurry up and get to the goddamn point already. I lit a cigarette. I didn’t offer her one.

“That was very sweet of him,” I said. “But how the fuck did your tail lead to his finding out about the skeletons in your mom’s closet?”

“She told him. She got it in her head somehow that he’d connect the dots—which was perfectly ludicrous, because it’s not like he’d ever even heard of the Endicotts or the Snows or—”

“Promise me this starts making sense eventually,” I interrupted, and she took a swallow of her old-fashioned. Most of the ice had melted.

“She freaked out. Got paranoid. I honestly have no idea. But a few days after they came home from the hospital, she started talking and didn’t
stop
talking until Daddy knew why I’d been born with a tail and a whole shitload more about her family and their past than, you know, than they wanted anyone who wasn’t one of them knowing. I was also born with a caul,” she added, like an afterthought.

“Which means . . . what?” I asked. “Come
on.
I’m a blood-sucking freak and a werewolf. It’s not like you’re gonna
shock
me.”

That was the thud of the other shoe dropping.

Her sapphire-blue eyes got very, very wide, and I half expected they were gonna pop out of her skull and go rolling away across the floor.

“Fuck,” she whispered. “You’re a werewolf? And you were gonna tell me this when?”

“Jesus.” I sighed, a great big exasperated sigh and rubbed at my eyes. My stomach grumbled, and I
wondered how long it would be before anyone noticed if I ate the bartender. “How about right after you got around to explaining how you got your hands on that necklace, or ever got involved with goddamn Faeries, or—”

“Yeah, but . . . Jesus. I didn’t even know werewolves were real. Not for sure. How did—”

“Shut up,” I said. “Just shut up. Later. I’ll tell you all about it later.
If
I feel like it. Meanwhile, you were saying, your mom blew a fuse over your tail and your caul and ratted out her creepy relatives. Your creepy
relatives
.”

“Yeah,” Selwyn said, still watching me like I was about to get all hairy right then and there. “I was.”

My stomach grumbled again. The bartender seemed like a nice enough guy, but I’d eaten a lot of nice guys over the years, and what was one more?

“You were going to tell me what babies with tails have to do with the Snows and the Endicotts.”

“And the Cabots.”

“Them, too.”

She finally took her eyes off me.

Warning: infodump inbound.

“The families came mostly from north of England, Yorkshire mostly. And they didn’t leave England by choice. Frankly, I don’t know a lot of the details, but it seems their reputation finally got the best of them. Witchcraft, human sacrifice, cannibalism. The list goes on and on. All across Europe, lots of people accused of being witches were being burned at the stake in the early sixteen hundreds, and the families must have decided they were all living on borrowed time. The Snows apparently led the diaspora. Nicholas and Constance Snow arrived in
Plymouth in 1620, then John and Anne Endicott in 1623. The Cabots were latecomers, probably because
their
reputations weren’t quite as bad. They didn’t make it to Massachusetts until 1700. And Antoine Cabot, he didn’t come to New England, but took his family to New Orleans in 1753, because he—”

She was already boring the shit out of me, and I interrupted. “‘And unto Enoch was born Irad: and Irad begat Mehujael: and Mehujael begat Methusael: and Methusael begat Lamech.’ Can we skip the genealogy falderal?”

Selwyn seemed surprised I could quote Scripture. But, like they say, it pays to know them what want to put wooden stakes through your chest, decapitate you, and cut off your head, tiddley-pom.

“I thought you wanted to hear this.”

I called for another beer; this time I skipped to the chase and asked the bartender to leave the bottle of Jack.

“Yeah, okay,” I said and rubbed my temples; I was getting a headache. You’d think being dead, at least I’d be spared headaches. You’d be wrong. “I’m assuming this wasn’t just paranoia, that these actually were dipping their collective big toes in the black arts.”

She shook her head.

“No, it wasn’t just paranoia. Sometime back in the fifteenth century, during the reign of Henry VI, during the Wars of the Roses, that’s when it started. What with all that feuding from the nobility, you know, the power of the Crown was starting to erode. Rumor has it that the families were somehow involved in the deposing of the king by his cousin Edward in 1461. Edward was the first Yorkist King of England, you know.”

I’ll be the first to admit I know less than fuck all about English history, and give much less than two shits, and the Girl Who’d Lost Her Tail had also just lost me.

“The families, the men and women whose descendants would become the three families, they made a pact with the Ghul. So long as one daughter was offered to them each generation to bear half-ghoul children, the families would prosper. The ghouls had been squirreling away treasures in the vaults of Thok and Pnath since they were cast down into the Underworld by the Djinn—”

I’m not making this stuff up. Neither was she. Lovecraft might not have known about the war—or he chose not to write everything he knew—but he got a lot of other stuff about the ghouls right.

“—and as long as the families kept their pledge, some of that plunder would be given to the patriarchs and matriarchs and so forth. Both sides were good to their word. And the families grew bolder. They started summoning demons and making deals with dark gods—at least this is what my mother had told Daddy. Even got in with one or two of the Great Old Ones. I’m not sure I believe that part. But maybe. Dad saw the Snow library once—long story—and he swore there were copies of both
Cultes des Goules
and the
Necronomicon
, possibly the Greek translation that had belonged to Richard Pickman.

“Also,” she added, “except for the ghouls and maybe an occasional ritual tryst with worse things, the families don’t breed outside the families. Which was one of Mom’s terrible transgressions against them. In their eyes, of course, it makes me an abomination.”

I sipped at my whiskey and smoked my cigarette.
“What a naughty bunch of shitbirds,” I said. “Guess it’s no wonder your mother tried to disown them. And these twins?”

“Isaac and Isobel,” she said and pushed her watery old-fashioned away. The napkin had soaked through, and she smeared water across the varnished wood. “They were sired by a ghoul. See, that’s how it is with the kids. The Ghul send them back up into this world. Well, all of the ones who can pass for human.”

She stopped talking, so I prodded her.

“And they send them back because?”

She looked at me again. But at least her eyes weren’t bugging out over me being a werewolf.

“They’re trying to come back. The Ghul. They’ve been looking for a way since they lost the war. And the half-breeds give them a foothold. And they’re looking for something . . .” She trailed off. Sitting there among the relics of a fallen Communist empire, trying to digest Selwyn’s tale and wishing I was still capable of getting utterly cockeyed, I remembered my first impression of her from the night before. That she could have been a monster herself, hiding inside a glamour or some other sort of spell. That skin so damn pale I swear it almost glowed, but wasn’t the waxy sort of pale mine is. Her black hair. The sapphire eyes I keep bringing up. And, voilà, turns out I wasn’t too far off the mark, was I?

“So, this makes you?”

“Makes me what?”

I liked her, and I didn’t want to come right out and say it. Fortunately, I didn’t have to. It only took her a couple of seconds to realize what I was asking.

“My mother’s mother was a half-breed,” she said.

“Which makes you—”

I don’t know why I couldn’t seem to shut up and just let her talk.

“One-quarter,” she whispered. “That makes me one-quarter.” Which explained the tail, and if you buy into that shit about kids born with cauls being marked by demons, well, if the three families truly had made deals with demons and Yog-Sogthoth and what the hell ever, it explained that part, too.