Cherry Bomb: A Siobhan Quinn Novel (8 page)

End of infodump. Later, she’d tell me what happened to her parents, but that can wait.

“Is this why you specialize in ghoul artifacts and bones and stuff?”

“Quinn, I don’t specialize in ghoul artifacts. I already told you that.”

“Right,” I said. “Coincidence. I forgot.”

She checked her pocket watch again.

“You got some place to be?” I asked.

“I had some place to be twenty minutes ago.” And she put away the watch and took out her phone. “Now I have to explain why I’m late.”

“It happens,” I said. “Another customer?”

“Yeah. Up in the Bronx. Maybe you’d better sit this one out.” She took out her wallet.

“Who, me? Are you kidding? And miss you hawking the toenail clippings of the Earl of Weir or some shit? No way, baby girl.”

I’m not gonna lie. All I wanted was to sit there with Marx and Engels and Stalin and finish off the bottle. But, hey, she’d just paid for it, and it was portable. And I might
as well admit that I was beginning to feel protective, no matter how furious I still was over Aster the Faerie. It crossed my mind Selwyn might be a witch herself, and that maybe she’d cast some sort of hoodoo to make sure I’d become that special someone to watch over her. Besides, I’d conceded to myself while she’d confessed her sordid lineage, I was tired of being bored. Tired of playing it safe.

“And you’ll behave yourself?” she asked me.

“As long as there are no fucking Faeries, sure, I’ll be good.” And I crossed my heart with my right hand and made the three-fingered Girl Scout sign with my left.

“It’s not a Faerie,” she assured me.

And that third stop of Selwyn’s day, it was actually sort of anticlimactic. The customer was a crazy cat lady who paid five hundred dollars for dried-out trichobezoar she thought might cure her arthritis. And then Selwyn was hungry again, and I sat on the curb and smoked while she sat on the curb and ate two hot dogs and an order of fries.

She didn’t say anything else about Isaac and Isobel Snow or ghouls or diabolical get-rich-quick schemes of yore. And I didn’t
ask.

QUARREL WITH THE MOON

H
ow about let’s call this bit comes next “Quinn’s getting sidetracked or digressing or what the hell ever with some crazy and inconvenient werewolf hijinks.” Works for me. Straight lines, all neat and tidy—from
here
to
there
—are for Aesop and los Hermanos Grimm. You’ll keep reading or you’ll stop. Also, it
is
what happened next, and while it’s gonna leave you hanging for a bit as regards the Snow twins and ghoul conspiracies, it
is
what happened next. And it’s relevant to what came later on. Patience, young Jedi.

Have I said all this was going down early in
November? I’m pretty sure I mentioned that, but if I haven’t, it was. October had been unseasonably warm, but the weather turned cold just after Halloween. The night I met Selwyn was the evening of the third, a Sunday night. New moon. The cleaners disposed of the CPA’s corpse on the morning of the fourth, and that night I fed from Selwyn for the first time. Then came the three deliveries, KGB, and Selwyn’s revelations on the fifth. Tuesday. The next two days were more or less unremarkable. Lots of sex. I fed from her again Thursday evening. Those two days, we didn’t talk about her business, she didn’t have any transactions to attend to, just some phone calls, and none of Mr. Snow’s goons showed up. We watched movies, and she told me stories about her father’s work in places like Egypt and Iran. I read. There you have it. That cliché calm before the storm.

Never let your guard down.

By Thursday night, mine was slipping. All that time in Brooklyn with Barbara O’Bryan I’d been pretty sloppy, I will admit. Spent less time looking over my shoulder than I should have. Selwyn knowing what I was, that should have been more of a wake-up call than it was. But that Thursday—well, after midnight, so it was more like the dark hours of Friday morning—I wasn’t thinking about much of anything but the taste of her.

I’d noticed the first time that her blood had a faintly musky edge. I didn’t think too much of it. Different people taste different. But some people taste more different than others. Now that I’d gotten the lowdown on her family line, I was pretty damn sure I was tasting just a dash of ghoul. I’d never sampled one before, and, frankly,
I’d planned to go the rest of my life without doing so. I mean, ew. Anyone who’s ever seen one of the bastards, they can tell you last thing you’ll have on your mind thereafter is wrapping your lips around any part of a ghoul’s anatomy.

The strange edge to Selwyn’s blood, it tasted a
little
like fried chicken livers. I’ve never come up with a better analogy.

That morning, I took less than I’d taken from her the first time, just enough I wasn’t hungry anymore. I had just enough more self-control to manage that trick. And I managed not to make too much of a mess. Afterward we fucked. She had a pretty spectacular strap-on, one of those double-ended, silicone jobs salvaged from the effects of the CPA. That night, Selwyn was on top.

A few seconds after I came, which was a few seconds after she came, Selwyn slapped me. Hard. I wouldn’t have guessed she could hit that hard. I’ve mentioned her being a sadist. Well, that was a turn-on. But the slap took me by surprise. I suppose it was meant to, right? She raised her hand for another strike, but I grabbed hold of her wrist and just stared at her. Whatever she saw in my eyes, it wasn’t meant to make her smile, but it did. She smiled, and she said, “Goddamn, I wish I had teeth like those.”

The sudden wave of anger that had washed over me was fading almost as quickly as it had arrived. But it left me jangling and on edge. That part of me that wasn’t human, it didn’t quite understand when being struck only meant your girl got off seeing her girlfriend in pain.

“Don’t do that again,” I whispered as she withdrew and lay down beside me. She didn’t immediately take off
the dildo, and the phallus, wet with me, drooped slightly towards the bed, cause gravity sucks and all.

“Oh, Quinn, c’mon. I hardly—”

“Just don’t,” I said.

She shrugged and slipped her right hand around the shaft of that pretend cock, lazily stroking it. Not sure if that was supposed to be for my benefit or not. I didn’t ask. She had a mischievous expression.

“So, what? Now you’re pissed at me?” she asked.

“No. I’m not pissed at you. But maybe we need some ground rules.”

“That lady of yours in Brooklyn, she never hit you?”

“No, she didn’t. But hurting people wasn’t her thing.”

“I’ve never understood that one-sided mentality,” Selwyn sighed. “Making it all give and no take, or all take and no give. You’re missing half the fun either way. Anyway, from a political standpoint, it seems more egalitarian, less like—”

“Come off it, Selwyn. You do not give a shit about being a politically correct pervert.”

She shrugged again, tugged roughly on the dildo before letting it go. It flopped over sideways.

“Can you take that ridiculous thing off?”

“Sure,” she said and began loosening the straps on the leather harness. “You didn’t seem to think it was so ridiculous a few minutes ago.”

I shut my eyes.

“I dated this girl for a while,” she said, “and she was a pretty hard-core masochist. She’d let me do shit like sewing her labia together, run needles through her nipples, and so forth. But I could never get her to lay a hand
on
me
, like I was some sort of china doll and was going to shatter into a million pieces. I’m pretty sure that’s why we finally broke up. It got boring.”

There’s no denying that Selwyn would have made a goddamn wicked vamp. That one-quarter of her that came courtesy of ghouls getting their rocks off with human women (and, undoubtedly, vice versa), it had laid the foundations good and proper. If you’re reading this, hoping for a likable, sympathetic character—and I just
know
you’ve already given up on me—well, you’re not likely to do any better with Selwyn. I mean, not unless you’re willing and able to rise to the occasion and overlook the ugly fucking truth of her inherited appetites. We can talk nature versus nurture until we’re blue in the face, but I don’t care how she was raised; in these matters, blood will out, and you can bet your bottom dollar on that.

But no, I didn’t turn her. I’ve never turned anyone. That’s one of the very few gold stars you’ll find stuck up next to my name.

“She once had me sew her lips shut for two days,” says Selwyn, my mean girl disguised as a mild-mannered geek. “I’m good with stitches, if I do say so myself. Oh, what happened to her, you ask?”

“I didn’t ask,” I said, my eyes still shut.

“Yeah, but you wondered.”

“I didn’t wonder, either.”

“Well, too bad. She killed herself about six months ago. Drank a bottle of . . . Shit, I don’t recall what it was, but it killed her dead.”

“Usually, that’s the way people
get
killed.”

“Don’t be an ass,” she said and punched me in the
left shoulder, and I opened my eyes. The room was spinning, the way it does when you make the mistake of getting spectacularly shit faced, then lying on your back. Only, I wasn’t shit faced.

Selwyn gently bit my left biceps; her teeth were as dull as pencil erasers. She was quiet a moment, then whispered, “Quinn, you okay? You look sorta ill.”

I blinked my eyes, then rubbed them. The dizziness refused to pass. I gripped the edge of the mattress, with my right hand, you know. I felt, all at once, the need to hold on to something solid, anything at all. A wave of nausea swept over me. My arms and legs had begun to tingle.

“That’s sorta the way I feel,” I told her.

The vertigo, the nausea, it was joined then by tunnel vision. First thought, had Selwyn poisoned me somehow? Had she actually poisoned that ex-girlfriend whose lips and pussy she’d sewn shut? She hadn’t. Poisoned me. I don’t know about the ex-girlfriend. Still that was the first thing popped into my head.

My head had begun to pound. My chest hurt.

Vampires do not have heart attacks.

I sat up and went to get out of bed. When I tried to stand, my legs folded under me and I hit the floor. I was dimly surprised. I was beginning to have trouble thinking clearly.

“Jesus, Quinn,” Selwyn said, alarmed. I heard the box springs creak.

I tried to stand again. No dice. So I crawled to the bathroom. By the time I got the toilet seat up, I was completely blind, and the headache was a jackhammer. I puked
a stomachful of Selwyn into the dirty porcelain bowl. The smell of blood made me puke again. And again.

“Fuck, Quinn. What’s happening?” She sounded scared. Her voice seemed to be coming from somewhere very far away. Like Hoboken.

I managed to croak, “Drugs?”

“Drugs?”

“Jesus fucking Christ.
Drugs.
Have you
taken
anything tonight?” I managed. Not that it should have mattered.

Fire bloomed in my rib cage, and that, right there, is when I knew, without a doubt, what was happening.

“I . . .” she started, and I realized she was kneeling and had her arms around me.

I shat myself. The smell made me vomit again, though there wasn’t anything left to puke up. Note: Vampires also don’t shit. Hell, after a few decades, our assholes and lower intestines just shrivel up and disappear (same with our genitals). I heard Selwyn scrambling away from me across the tiled floor.

“I just . . .”

“You just
what
, bitch?” I growled. No, I snarled.

“Wolfsbane,” she whispered, horrified.

Okay, so my newfound blood doll wished she was a vamp, but she wasn’t so keen on the
loup
thing. Not that I could
blame
her.

I laughed; then I had a bout of dry heaves. Then I laughed again.

“You’re fucking kidding me.”

“I thought maybe . . .” She trailed off again, and then she added, “Just a tiny, tiny bit, Quinn. Hardly any at all.
And it’s the detoxified, medicinal stuff I get from . . . I mean . . . not even enough to—”

“—hurt
you
,” I finished.

Garlic and holy water might not work on vampires, but werewolves have a vicious goddamn problem with
Aconitum
. Even hardly any at all. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about wolfsbane:
Marked symptoms may appear almost immediately, usually not later than one hour, and with large doses death is almost instantaneous. Death usually occurs within two to six hours in fatal poisoning. The initial signs are gastrointestinal, including nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea.
Oh, there’s more. But I expect you get the idea. Of course, I wasn’t gonna die. I wasn’t that lucky.

Whee.

Except something else was happening. Selwyn had done more than poison me. She’d given the Beast a swift kick in the balls, and my puppy was waking up with the mother of all hangovers.

“Run,” I croaked. “Run as far as you can. Get somewhere I can’t find you.”

“Quinn, I didn’t know. How could I—”

“Shut the fuck up and fucking
run
!” I roared.

Roared. Snarled. Growled. I don’t mean these words in the usual euphemistic sense.

Selwyn ran. Later, I’d learn she grabbed the bag with my weapons on her way out. I heard the door slam behind her. I heard her feet on the stairs on her way down to the lobby. I heard the lobby door open and slam. She hadn’t even bothered to get dressed. I never did find out how she got away with that. What the hell. New York City, right? Enough said.

The pain was closing around me like a steel fist, taking hold and squeezing. My chest and belly, my skull, felt like they were trying to turn themselves wrong-side out. An apt enough analogy, as
loups
everywhere can attest.

I waited for the merciful and inevitable blackout. because that’s what had always happened.

Always.

But not this time. Oh, no. I didn’t fade out. Before, the change had always been accompanied by oblivion, a dreamless unconsciousness that lasted until I was only a vamp again. I still can’t say for sure what made the difference, and what made the difference forever thereafter every time the Beast came to dance. I believe it was that one dose of wolfsbane, but I can’t swear to it.

The pain was everything in the world. The pain was God. What do you do when the hand of God reaches down and touches you? Me, I screamed. At least what came out of my throat was
meant
to be a scream. I tried to stand, lost my footing, and careened into the wall beside the toilet. No. The Beast
slammed
itself against that wall. I heard the brittle crack of ceramic tiles, the crunch of old plaster, the tiny bathroom window shattering, the tinkling of glass scattering across the floor. The creature toppled backwards into the tub, pulling the shower curtain down on top of itself, on top of me, of us. While we flailed about in the small cast-iron tub, the blindness passed as quickly as it came. But what returned to me wasn’t my vision. It’s not exactly that I was color blind, but telling one color from another was just about impossible, and the bathroom was sort of a muddy emerald blur. I watched as the skin of my arms and hands split and sloughed bloodlessly away.
There was the fucking Beast underneath, like it had been waiting there all along, stuck inside a Quinn-shaped suit.

There wasn’t much of the pain left. Mostly just a smothering, all-consuming frustration. Wherever the Beast wanted to be, Selwyn’s tub was not that place.

The plastic shower curtain came apart as easily as my flesh, and for just a moment the Beast and I lingered at the medicine cabinet, its golden eyes staring furiously back at me, twin pits in its face packed with molten gold. Strips of me were still tangled in its black fur, hanging off its muzzle. Jesus, I’d killed my share of
loups
, and I’d never seen one I’d call anything less than ugly. Anybody’s ever set eyes on one knows whatever joker coined the term
werewolf
was full of shit. But I suppose that’s the sort of shit that happens when words fail, right? Anyway, there in the mirror was a special sort of gruesome, which I chalk up to the unholy marriage of the Bride of Quiet and Jack Grumet. Two nasties for the price of one. I’d never seen its face before.