Cherry Bomb: A Siobhan Quinn Novel

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “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 th
e 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.

  There was confusion in those eyes, and fear, and more hate than I’d ever thought could be crammed into a glare. The hate, that was mostly the Beast’s. I was the bitch who held her chain, who kept her locked away to rot in the prison of me. Ever been to the zoo and looked into the eyes of a wolf or a coyote or a mountain lion stuck there behind iron bars or Plexiglas? Ever seen that venom, that spite? Well, there you go.

  One or the other of us, me or the Beast broke the mirror. I like to believe it was me who did it. But that’s probably wishful thinking.

  I say one or the other of us because that’s the best I can describe what it was like. Like I said, my mind hadn’t had the decency to take a powder, so there we were together at last. And speaking of the limitations of language, I’m not sure I have the language needed to describe the hours that followed. I doubt anyone does, anyone dead or alive or whatever. But I’m gonna try.

  I don’t remember leaving Selwyn’s apartment or the stairs. Next thing I knew I was out on the sidewalk, and a woman was screaming bloody goddamn murder. You remember the end of An American Werewolf in London, after David Kessler’s final transformation in the porno theater, when he’s rampaging around Piccadilly Circus fucking shit up? Well . . . it wasn’t like that. Just that one unfortunate woman. We, it, I reared up on two legs and towered over her, seven and a half, eight feet. She opened her mouth to scream again, and the loup picked her up and smacked her head once against a lamppost before dragging her away into an alley, leaving nothing behind but a gooey smear of brains. A great deal of what was to come would involve skulking through alleys and shit, because, turned out I was more than a reluctant passenger. Turned out I still had a modicum of control over the Beast. Which, you know, only pissed it off that much more. But that night I managed to teach it the value of caution.

  Go me.

  The screaming woman was the first person we ate that night. Whatever revulsion I might have harbored, I harbored it very briefly. It had been a long time since I’d known the simple pleasure of chewing and swallowing solid food. I found myself savoring every raw, greedy mouthful. Those razor teeth pulled her apart easy as you please, and between those jaws her bones might as well have been pocky. Whoa. Weird analogy. How about her bones might as well have been pretzel sticks, instead? No, that’s really not much better. Never mind. Probably, you know what I mean.

  And shit I felt strong. I felt motherfucking alive, which I’d never, ever dared imagine I would feel ever again. Here was how the other half lived. The Beast was seducing me, whether it knew it was or not. And I thought, I could lose myself in here. I could just let it run on and on and on, and I’d never have to go back to being Quinn.

  Who was she, anyway? Some pathetic dead girl, good at being bitter and surviving, but nothing much more than that. She was a parasitic phantom who wanted with all her sour heart to be truly dead, but she didn’t have the balls to make that happen. To grab that brass ring and get off the merry-go-round. But the Beast, it knew joy.

  Nasties tend to look down on loups as the white trash of our psychofuck supernatural menagerie. Nothing lower than a loup but maybe a ghoul. Sure. That’s the party line. Demons and Faeries on their lofty pedestals, vamps out on the street, and werewolves in the gutters. Except, at least if we’re talking about the way bloodsuckers look down on loups, maybe that ain’t nothing but envy. Maybe, somewhere down deep, it’s obvious how living, how lycanthropy isn’t a curse at all.

  How maybe it’s a blessing.

  Not bad enough my very existence is a blasphemy in the eyes of Big Bads the world over. Not bad enough I’d become a traitor who hunted and put them down. I’d just become a heretic to boot.

  When we were done with the screaming woman, there wasn’t much left of her but a puddle of gore, and a stingy puddle at that. And I was still starving. My taste for blood has always been easy enough to temporarily satisfy. But this, this was a hunger that was utterly absolute and insatiable. I instinctively knew how the Beast could eat for days and never get its fill. And, honestly, crouching there in the alley behind Selwyn’s apartment building, that would’ve been fine by me.

  We, I, it glanced up at the sky, as if seeking a premature full moon. Not that the loup’s appearances have ever much synced up with lunar phases. I’d long ago written that off to superstition, and, hey and by the way, learning that the world is full of monsters and magic’s real and all that crap doesn’t mean that isn’t still superstition. Everything isn’t true, just because an awful lot of weird shit turns out to be. Yes, there are demons and vamps and unicorns and Faeries, but it ain’t bad luck to walk under a ladder and black cats are nothing but cats that are black. And werewolves don’t seem to care about the moon.

  Where was I?

  We howled, and I’d have sworn, for an instant or two, the night around us held its breath.

  And then the loup ran, and I’d say that I was dragged along for the ride. Only it wasn’t like that at all. I was riding. Oh, I could have fought, and maybe the struggle would even have made a difference, but I didn’t. We went south, keeping always to alleys and side streets. I can’t say which side streets and alleys, because it hardly mattered. Not like I was reading the signs. Lurching along on two legs, racing on four, our claws dug furrows in asphalt and scraped across concrete and cobblestones. Everything unfolded around me in a ghostly haze of night vision. Somewhere, the Beast’s left shoulder clipped a dumpster, and the dumpster skidded away, doing almost a full one eighty before smacking into a brick wall. We were briefly stunned. Or it was stunned, and I was aware of that fact. Which the fuck ever. It was knocked off its feet, but got right back up again. Jesus, I’ve never felt so invulnerable. Like . . . like what? Like that bullshit self-confidence comes along with the rush after a couple of lines of cocaine, but multiplied a hundred times.

  Yeah, like that.

  Car horns, car alarms, the squeal of tires and brake pads. Screams and curses. Dogs locked up inside going monkey shit at the smell of us and barking their heads off. The stink of garbage and rats and pigeon shit and . . . every smell of Manhattan amped up and off the scales. And we killed. Almost anything, anyone unlucky or dumb enough to get in our way went down and stayed down. Most barely had a chance to scream. Barely knew what hit them, or didn’t know at all.

  Probably the latter.

  You’re out for a stroll, or your walking your Pomeranian, and this huge fucking brute lunges out of the shadows, in those final seconds, how likely is it you’re gonna think, Oh shit on me, a werewolf, right? You’re too busy being totally stupefied or w
ith fleeting thoughts of just how screwed you are. I mean, I’m talking about regular people here, those not in on the great cosmic joke that monsters walk among them.

  We barreled headlong, full-tilt boogie into the passenger side of a Volkswagen Beetle, and the car was tossed several feet into the air and landed upside down on a punk kid on a skateboard. Splat. I was dimly amazed. Dude, that was, I gotta say, one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. Hey, I bet that guy on the skateboard would have agreed.

  Unlike the dumpster, the Volkswagen didn’t even slow us down. The Incredible Hulk? That snot-green son of a bitch has nothing on my loup.

  Yeah, that night, that November morning, was when I began thinking of the Beast as mine. Or, no. Wait. That’s not quite right, ’cause the Beast is without a doubt her own Beast. More like, I realized she’s an integral part of me, an intimate part of me—of the new me that Mercy and Grumet had created—wedded inextricably to whatever miserable crumb was left of my soul. Suddenly, she was more than a bothersome fucking furball who popped up from time to time for the express purpose of messing with precious goddamn me. Might come off schmaltzy, but dashing helter-skelter about Gotham, decapitating and disemboweling and dismembering, I also found myself thinking of her as a friend. Yeah, right? Hell, I hadn’t had too many of those when I was alive, and no more than a couple postmortem, Selwyn Throckmorton and Aloysius the troll. Oh, and a violet-skinned succubus went by the fine old Puritan name of Clemency Hate-evil before being my friend got her killed. Or got her worse. I was never sure which.

  But it wasn’t as simple as that. This epiphany, I mean. There was more to it. We hit the Volkswagen, and shortly afterwards I had . . . let’s call it a vision, because I don’t know what the hell else I’d call it. You got something better, be my guest. One minute I was all but drowning in the sound of the Beast’s paws hammering at the pavement, tripping balls on the carnage, on a million noises, odors, sights, et cetera and fucking et cetera.

  Jump cut.

  And I was walking slowly through a forest. Dry leaves crunched under my bare feet, and the moon—a full moon, mind you—was shining down through branches that were mostly bare. Because wherever I was that was no longer Lower Manhattan, it was autumn there, too. Maybe it was even November. I knew right off those woods weren’t real. They could have been a storybook forest, the sort of place dreamed up so wicked witches can build their gaudy gingerbread houses while Snow White lies in a coma surrounded by her seven dwarves. A forest built out of imagination. Yeah, that was the way it struck me, like it hadn’t grown there, like it had been thought into being.