Blood Oranges
Page 22
Where are you going, my pretty fair maid? Where are you going, my honey?
The dagger vanished from my hand.
A shower of flame, engulfing the basement.
I’d walked into the fire, and then I walked back out again. As soon as I was clear, the tunnel of cool air was gone, and the sagging house was permitted, at last, to collapse in upon itself.
I stepped past the shell of the loups’ bus, and there was Mean Mr. B, standing by the shell of my Honda. He smiled his oily smile. He bowed a gentlemanly bow.
“What is it tonight?” I asked, raising my voice to be heard over the inferno behind me. “Your name, I mean.”
“Why, Quinn, let me think on that,” he said and tapped at his left temple. “Tell you what. Tonight, call me Balthazar, like the last king of Babylon.”
“Balthazar,” I said.
“Yes, as I have seen the writing on the wall, love, and damn if I can make heads or tails of it. She dead?”
The best I could do was nod. All at once, every inch of my body was swept with a degree of weariness I’d never even imagined. The locket and brass chain around my neck abruptly changed to quicksilver and trickled down my exposed chest and belly.
Balthazar frowned and asked, “Whatever happened to your clothes?”
I opened my mouth, but realized I didn’t have the energy to explain.
“Well, I think I heard sirens,” he said. “The enchantment’s gone. Let’s not stick around for the after party.”
I think I laughed. I know I said, “The party’s over.”
“Oh, the party’s never over, love. There’s always a party somewhere.” And he led me down the road to an emerald Porsche. One of his boys was behind the wheel. B helped me into the backseat, and I lay down, even though the cool leather started me shivering again. The last thing I remember before sleep overtook me is B telling the boy to head back to Providence. And as dreams of snow and ice flowed over me, I wondered how differently it might all have gone if taking out monsters did come with a how-to manual.
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AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY
Kathleen Rory Tierney, despite her very Irish name, has never once left her home state of Idaho. She is a three-time recipient of the Dewda Yorger Prize in Poetry, and her verse has been collected in two volumes—Hark! The Yaks Are at the Door Again and Reflections on Inevitability and Entropy. She currently lives in a raccoon-infested house trailer in Deerfield, Illinois, where she spends her spare time collecting bottle caps and antique license plates. Blood Oranges is her first novel, and if there is another, no one will be more surprised than she.
BOOKS BY CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN
Novels
Silk
Threshold
Low Red Moon
Murder of Angels
Daughter of Hounds
The Red Tree
The Drowning Girl: A Memoir
Writing as Kathleen Tierney
Blood Oranges