Cherry Bomb: A Siobhan Quinn Novel

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “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 matr
iarchs 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.

  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.

  CHAPTER THREE

  QUARREL WITH THE MOON

  How 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—”