Cherry Bomb: A Siobhan Quinn Novel

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  I hate Fae. Maybe even worse than I still hate Mean Mr. B. Which is saying a lot. Only Faerie I’ve ever been able to stand was a troll named Aloysius lived under a highway overpass back in Providence. I knew right off the pretty creature in front of me, stretched out on the cranberry recamier, was worse than any troll who ever squatted below any bridge. The recamier was upholstered, by the way, in some threadbare fabric about the same color as the red door and the front of the building.

  “Quinn, meet Aster. Aster, meet Quinn.”

  The only thing I hate more than Faeries are Faeries named after flowers. It’s just so . . . twee.

  “Quinn’s sort of along for the ride today,” said Selwyn.

  The Faerie made an expression that wasn’t quite a grin.

  “Why, Annie,” she said in that annoying, lilting Unseelie accent. “You have a new lover. I’m so glad. Quinn, it is my pleasure, certainly, I am sure.”

  The Faerie lifted one long, slender arm. I wasn’t sure whether I was meant to kiss her hand or shake it. I didn’t do either.

  “Charmed,” I said, trying to keep a bee from crawling up my left nostril. Selwyn frowned.

  The Faerie waved the hand I had neither kissed nor shaken, and all the bees on me flew away. I probably literally sighed a sigh of relief.

  I haven’t described her. Aster, I mean. I suppose I should. Well, I can’t say what she really looked like, because I’ve never been any good at seeing through glamours and shit like that. To my eyes, she could have been some runway model bitch, bulimic and thin as a rail. But still hot, right. Aster’s ash-blond hair was cut in a bob, and she had eyes almost the same shade of gray as B’s. The dress she was wearing was so sheer I’m not sure why she bothered wearing anything at all. By the way, I’m not sure the Faerie was actually female; these are pronouns of convenience. Beneath that glamour, Aster could have been anything at all. Besides, with Faeries, gender and sex and whatnot tends to be a pretty slippery affair.

  The Faerie named Aster studied me, and then she said to Selwyn, “I would caution you against taking one such as this into your bed, child, but you know your own affairs better than I.”

  “We have an arrangement. I trust her,” Selwyn said, and she winked at me. “Mostly.”

  “We must always be careful with whom we bargain and where we’ve placed our trust,” the Faerie said, “and especially when matters of the heart are concerned.”

  I ran my fingers through my hair, making sure all the bees were gone, still imagining I could feel them on me.

  “Lady, I don’t currently plan on eating her,” I told the Faerie, not much bothering to hide the indignation at having been dragged across town to be attacked by a swarm of bees and have my character called into question by this Tinkerbelle slut. “Which is not to say that might not change, of course. Being one such as this and all.”

  Selwyn pulled the shiny, shiny necklace from her jacket right about the same time I noticed the hives.

  “Oh,” crooned the Faerie. “Oh, it’s even more beautiful than the ballads would have us believe, isn’t it?”

  Hive is the only word I can think of that even comes close to describing the misshapen things lining the walls of the room. Clearly, they’d once been human beings, and probably, in some sense, they still were. Some of them were still alive. I know this because a couple of them were breathing, and one even turned its head. I’d say it was watching me, only it didn’t have any eyes. Try to imagine if someone had attempted to mold statues from honeycombs and done a fucking sloppy job. Bingo. It was hard to tell where one began and another ended, and their waxy yellow flesh was pockmarked with thousands of hexagonal pits. And the bees were all over them. The hives had holes where mouths had been, and holes in other places, and the bees crawled in and out, out and in. The honey I was smelling dripped from those horrid fucking things and pooled on the floor around them. Takes a whole damn lot to make me want to puke. Those things did the trick.

  “I knew you wouldn’t be disappointed,” said Selwyn, pleased with herself and seemingly oblivious to the hives. I figured she’d likely seen them at least once before. Maybe shit like that didn’t bother her anymore. Maybe it never had.

  The Faerie said, “My dear Ms. Smithfield, a treasure is lost—so lost to have been all but forgotten even to the memory of Daoine Sídhe—it is foolish to believe it will ever again be seen. A treasure lost as long as was the Tear of Dis, then I do not hesitate to name its reappearance miraculous.”

  Me, I was trying to concentrate on anything at all but the hive people. So I stared at the string of diamonds and that huge ruby cupped in Selwyn’s right hand. In the taxi, I hadn’t realized the way the ruby seemed to shine . . . no, wrong word. How the ruby seemed to ooze a soft reddish glow. The stone wasn’t reflecting light; it was making it. Wasn’t the first time I’d seen that sort of magic, and I still don’t know why it took me that long to catch on. Maybe the ruby waited until it was there with the Faerie to show its true colors—ha-ha.

  “That’s infernal,” I said, and Selwyn nodded.

  “Taken from the mines beneath the City of Iron,” she replied. “Supposedly it belonged to some archduke or another for, I don’t know, thousands of years. Took me—”

  “Correction, love,” the Faerie interrupted. “Your kind would count it in millions of years.”

  Now that I knew what it was, the ruby seemed a fuck-ton worse than the hive people.

  “So, wait. You traffic in hellgoods?” I asked Selwyn.

  I felt her eyes on me, but I didn’t look away from the necklace.

  “Only when they come my way,” she answered, “which isn’t very often”

  Right then’s when it occurred to me the ruby was staring into me, same as I was staring into it. You know, Nietzsche and gazing into the abyss and all. Well, the ruby wasn’t some philosophical, metaphysical abyss. It was the real fucking deal. Might sound trite, but it felt as if I actually had to pry my eyes away from the ruby. My head had begun to throb, and I could taste iron.

  “A damned shame, too,” Selwyn said. “It’s a profitable market. Demand always exceeds supply.”

  “You have such a keen head for business,” the Faerie told her. “Quite the acumen, for only a mortal girl.”

  I think the appropriate phrase is, I was aghast.

  “Selwyn, do you even know how fucking stupid that is?”

  The Faerie raised an eyebrow and leaned towards us. The honey smell was coming from her, too.

  “Selwyn? Annie Smithfield, why did that dead one name you Selwyn?”

  Selwyn turned sort of green. She looked like she wanted to punch me in the head.

  “It’s my middle name,” she replied, doing her best not to sound as pissed off as she was at having her nom de guerre blown like that. “Annie Selwyn Smithfield. Annabelle, to be precise.”

  I thought it was a decent enough save, though it was unclear whether the Faerie was buying it. Aster’s left eyebrow was still cocked in a very skeptical fashion.

  “I shouldn’t like to ever learn that you’ve been less than truthful with me, Ms. Smithfield,” Aster said, her voice just as skeptical as her eyebrow.

  “I’m not lying.” Selwyn turned away from me, back towards the Faerie camped there on her tattered red recamier. “You want to see my driver’s license? My passport? My—”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Aster said, leaning back again. “You’ve brought me such a precious thing, so I shall take your word.”

  “Thank you,” said Selwyn, all obsequious and shit. I wondered if the Faerie could hear as much relief in her voice as I did.

  “It is understandable, dear, that such a formality as trusting me with your middle name might slip your merely human mind.”

  Jesus God, have I said how much I fucking hate fucking Faeries. Yeah, well. I haven’t said it enough.

  I hate Faeries
.

  Except for Aloysius.

  He’s my one and only exception.

  “May I please hold it now, my sweet dear?” asked Aster the fucking pompous, condescending Fae bitch.

  Selwyn started to hand over the necklace, but I grabbed her arm.

  “Payment up front,” I said.

  Selwyn? Mortified.

  The Faerie? If, as they say, looks could kill. A bee appeared from her right nostril, buzzed loudly, then flew away towards a clump of the hive people.

  Selwyn forced half a strained smile, and she said, “She loves to joke. You know vampires.”

  The Faerie shut her gray eyes a moment. When she opened them, the irises were an oily black. I guessed that meant she was seriously bent out of shape, that I’d just gone and dumped sand in her vagina.

  “I have made a habit of not making the acquaintance of corpses,” Aster sneered.

  “Your loss,” I said. Often, thoughtlessly shooting off my piehole is how I deal with my fight-or-flight response when doing either isn’t an option.

  Selwyn quickly intervened by placing the necklace in bee lady’s hand and then closing the hand around it. Which instantly seemed to placate the Faerie. Her eyes faded to gray again. Just give us monsters our play pretties, yeah, and all is forgiven. No, that’s obviously not exactly true, not across the board, I mean, but it certainly seemed the case with Aster the fucking Faerie.

  “At first I was afraid it was still in the vaults at Thok,” Selwyn said, talking a little too fast, “and no one was ever gonna see it again, like you said. But—”

  The Faerie whispered, “The Ghul have always been careless with the fruits of their thievery. And the Tear of Dis burns. The flame held within its facets betrays its origins, if only one has the sight to know hellfire.”

  Blah, blah, fuckity blah.

  I was beginning to think maybe Selwyn wasn’t getting paid for this transaction, that she might be somehow in debt to Aster—happens all the time with humans—and this was a way of buying her freedom. Also, surely Selwyn had to know about Faerie gold. They pass you a bag full of Spanish doubloons, only later you discover that bag’s full of acorns or pebbles or rabbit droppings. Selling shit to Faeries is, in short, almost as stupid as selling hellgoods. And here was Selwyn Throckmorton doing both at the same time.

  “It is beautiful,” she said, “though I know I can’t appreciate it as you do.”

  The Faerie nodded, and the necklace vanished from her hand, only to reappear around her throat.

  “You’re honorable, Annie Smithfield. You will find that the Host never again troubles you.”

  So, okay, this wasn’t about money, but some sort of exchange of services. Not that the Fae are known for keeping promises. I almost asked what Selwyn had done to get the Unseelie Host on her—that vicious assortment of bogles, goblins, hobs, and flying fucking monkeys.

  Selwyn thanked Aster again, bowed, and the Faerie dismissed us with a wave of the hand. Well, dismissed Selwyn. I suspect the Faerie considered reanimated corpses and cadavers and whatnot so disgraceful that we’re not worth the trouble.

  I hate Faeries.

  Once we were out of there and down on the sidewalk again, I tried to conceal how glad I was to not be in the presence of Aster and her hive people. I’ll take a hundred Skunk Apes and their BO any day of the week.

  The taxi hadn’t waited. This came as no surprise, though it did piss off Selwyn. Well, pissed her off even more. She was already so angry at me, she was seething.

  “Two hundred damn dollars,” she said and kicked a trash can lying in the gutter. It ripped wide-open, spilling soda cans, Chinese leftovers, and a couple of used prophylactics.

  “Whatever,” I said. “I need a drink anyway.”

  She pushed me hard enough that I almost lost my balance and ended up in the gutter with all that liberated garbage.

  “Are you a total fucking idiot? Do you even know what could have happened back there?” She was shouting loud enough that several people were staring.

  “You’re making a scene,” I said.

  She shoved me again, but this time I was ready for it.

  Seemed like a good time for an understatement. I said, “I didn’t like her.” I said it as matter-of-factly as I could, given I was still seriously creeped out over the hive people. “Besides, no one who deals hellgoods to the Unseelie has any business calling anyone an idiot.”

  “Quinn, if she’d wanted, she could have—”

  “Also, you push me again and I push back. Three strikes you’re out. Now, I’m going to get a beer. You’re welcome to join me, unless, I don’t know, you’re late for a meeting with a succubus or something.”

  “You ass,” she hissed.

  “I have my moments,” I said, and then I crossed the street. No way I was going into that Irish place below the Faerie’s human apiary. Fortunately, there was another bar hardly a stone’s throw away.

  “You think I’m just gonna put up with this sort of crap?” she shouted.

  “Your call,” I shouted back. “You’re a big girl.”

  “Oh my god,” I heard her mutter just before I walked through the door to the bar. By the way, that door was also painted red, and if I hadn’t still been so shaky I might have taken that for an ill enough omen I’d have gone in search of another watering hole. But fuck it.

  I went inside and ordered a Pabst and a shot of Jack.

  Sure, it sounds arrogant as shit, but I was not the least itty-bit surprised, ten or fifteen minutes later, when Selwyn showed up. I had something she wanted as bad as I’d wanted heroin, back when I was still a breather, as much as I need blood now. And she knew the odds were against her finding another willing donor anytime soon. Or ever.

  Could say I held all the cards.

  She sat down on the stool next to me and ordered an old-fashioned. I watched while the bartender mixed whiskey and bitters and added a lump of sugar and a maraschino cherry. To each her own poison, but that shit’s way too sweet for my liking. I drink bourbon, I want to taste bourbon.

  “You told her my real name,” she said.

  I glanced at her, then back to my beer. “Doesn’t work that way. You ought to know that. Faeries and demons, they’re the ones have to worry about their names. You really ought to know that, Selwyn.”

  “There wasn’t any point to you getting her so torqued.”

  “Her? You really think—”

  “Don’t change the subject. You didn’t have to do that, Quinn.” She sounded tired.

  “I hate Faeries,” I told her, though she’d possibly already deduced that much.

  Her drink came. She pulled out the toothpick with the cherry on it and lay it on the paper napkin.

  “I don’t have to be told how risky this line of work is,” she said very softly.

  “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.”<
br />
  “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.