Cherry Bomb: A Siobhan Quinn Novel

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  Regardless, I didn’t want to be there. I wanted to be with the loup. I was supposed to be with the loup, wasn’t I? By being hauled away to that soundstage forest, I was being cheated out of my half of our wild hunt. I stopped and looked over my shoulder, like maybe there was gonna be a flashing neon exit sign waiting behind me. But there was only more trees. Paper birch and oak trees and shaggy hemlocks. I cursed them and started walking again, because walking seemed to make slightly more sense than standing still. I don’t know how long I walked. Everything about that place was so much the same it could have been a short loop of film, playing over and over. I could have been walking in tiny circles that I’d only mistaken for a straight line, some sort of Möbius strip . . .

  I walked through the trees until there weren’t any more of the trees to walk through. They came to an end at the edge of a field of tall yellow-brown grass. The woods had been still as my dead heart, but a cold breeze rustled the field, blowing the grass this way, that way. The forest had smelled like cinnamon and cloves, but out in the open, the air smelled like apple cider. And I was no longer alone. There was a blonde child and a huge black wolf staring out over the tall grass. The wolf was sitting on its haunches. She was standing, but, even so, she was hardly as tall as that wolf. It wasn’t a loup. Except for its size, it was, you know, just a wolf. The child was stroking the top of its head. When I stepped out of the forest, they both turned and looked at me. The girl smiled. But it was a sad sort of smile. A pitying kind of smile that ought to have made me even more angry, because I cannot bear being pitied. But, for some reason, her smile was a relief. Could be anything would have been a relief after those trees.

  “Hi,” she said and waved.

  “Hi,” I replied. There were a lot of questions I wanted to ask. I picked one more or less at random.

  “What’s going on?”

  The girl raised an eyebrow.

  “What do you mean, Quinn?”

  “I mean . . .” And I paused, uncertain for just a second what I did mean. “I mean,” I continued, “where am I?”

  Her smile returned.

  “Oh. Well, you’re standing between the forest and the meadow. Do you know what’s on the other side of the meadow, Quinn?”

  “More fucking trees?”

  She shrugged, and the wolf whimpered, so she scratched it under the chin.

  “Could be. I don’t know. We’ve never tried to cross the meadow. I think we’re afraid to try.”

  I gazed out across the grass. Whatever was on the other side, it was too far away to see.

  “Today,” she said, “my name is Quinn.”

  “I should tell you, I’m not in the mood to be fucked with.”

  She just shrugged and kept scratching at the big black wolf ’s chin. It occurred to me that the wolf ’s fur was the same color as Selwyn’s. It also occurred to me that the girl’s hair was the same dirty blonde as my own.

  “So, okay, what was your name yesterday?”

  “I can’t remember. Does it really matter? You weren’t here yesterday.”

  “I’m going to sit down,” I told her. “My feet hurt.”

  “If you sit, you won’t be able to see anything,” she said. “The grass is too tall, if you sit, to see over.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, there’s not a hell of a lot going on out there.”

  “Not yet,” she said, and stopped scratching the wolf.

  “You’re a strange one,” I said, and she shrugged again.

  “Said the vampire who’s also a lycanthrope.”

  I let that go. She had a point.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked her. I sat down cross-legged with the trees at my back. I discovered that several fat gray grasshoppers were watching me. If grasshoppers can watch something cautiously, then that’s what they were doing.

  “I’m not sure. But I guess it must have been a very long time. Long enough I can’t remember. Unless, of course, I only got here yesterday and just can’t remember I got here yesterday.”

  “Do you always fucking talk like a character from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?”

  She laughed. It was a totally creepy laugh.

  The wolf turned its head and stared at me. Its eyes—the irises of its eyes—were so pale I’d call them white.

  “Does he have a name?” I asked and nodded at the wolf.

  “She,” the girl said. “He’s a she. And I’ve never thought to ask her, Quinn.”

  I grabbed at one of the grasshoppers and missed. It hopped away, and all the others wisely followed its example. My hand closed around nothing but a few yellow-brown stalks. Screw you, Mr. Bug.

  “I’m not dreaming,” I whispered to myself.

  “No, you’re not, Quinn.”

  “Isn’t that what I just said?”

  I didn’t have to look to know the wolf was still watching me. I could feel its white eyes on me.

  “Is she here to protect you? The wolf, I mean.”

  “Who else would you have meant? But no, I don’t think so. I suspect it’s a coincidence, that we both just happen to be here at the same time. Which is better than being alone. I would hate to be here alone. I don’t like that field. Something about that field isn’t right.”

  “It’s just a field,” I said, dropping the dead blades of grass.

  “I know,” she said very quietly. “I know.”

  And I wanted to tell her I didn’t think her being there and the wolf ’s being there too, their being there together, was a coincidence, any more than, it had turned out, my being found by the Bride of Quiet the same night—right damned after—I’d been bitten by Jack Grumet had been a coincidence.

  You ask me, which you haven’t, coincidence is often a coward’s way out of facing facts.

  And please feel free, right about here, to become exasperated at my complete cluelessness. No, I didn’t see what was right in front of my face. And I don’t mean all that grass. I don’t mean the forest for the trees. I didn’t add up two and two and get four. Often, I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

  I said, “There’s a bloodthirsty loup—my loup—tear-assing through Chelsea or the West Village or some shit, and I’m sitting here playing pretend and talking to a hallucination.”

  “Is that all that I am, Quinn? Pretend? A hallucination? Did you make me?”

  “Didn’t I?”

  She sighed and stopped scratching the wolf ’s chin. “I really don’t know. That’s why I asked.”

  I shut my eyes. I shut my eyes very tight, and I saw—or at least thought that I saw—the loup working its way clumsily up a fire escape. The rusted metal groaned and creaked under its weight. Our weight. Or was she alone now?

  All these fucking questions were becoming a stone around my neck.

  “I have,” the girl said, “thought sometimes there might be a peaceful place on the other side of the field.”

  The loup was about halfway up the fire escape when it gave way, when the bolts or whatever holding it into brick and mortar came loose, and the whole mess crashed to the alley below. I was wondering what would happen to me if the bitch got herself killed, and I was assuming that would be the end of both of us, when the monster pulled herself from the wreck. She looked like . . . well, a werewolf that had fallen thirty feet and had a ton of steel dropped on it. But she hardly even seemed fucking fazed. Just shook her head a few times, then resumed her killing spree. Scary monsters, right? I could hear police sirens and ambulances now, rescue vehicles, whatever.

  So much for caution.

  Scary monsters. And, thank you, Mr. Bowie, because, I thought, and there she goes, opening those strange damn doors, and ain’t no one ever gonna come along and get them closed again. And she might have been the porcelain demon who’d made me half of what I am. Or she might have been the girl with the wolf.
Or my loup. Or, simply, me.

  The girl’s wolf whined, and I opened my eyes.

  The girl’s black wolf. My black loup.

  Lightbulb. Duh and/or hello. Me, myself, and I.

  “Sometimes,” the blonde girl said, me talking to me, “people lose themselves in their secret selves. Once upon a time it happened in France. Have you ever heard of the Beast of Gévaudan? That was someone who lost herself and never did make it back again.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard of the Beast of Gévaudan. But I didn’t know it was a loup.”

  Between 1764 and 1770, a nasty attacked more than two hundred people in the Margeride Mountains of France. More than a hundred died. The nasty ate on most of those. Don’t say I never taught you people anything.

  “Sure you did, Quinn.”

  “If you say so,” I told her, getting to my feet, wiping grass and dirt and crap off the seat of my jeans. There was a shiny iridescent beetle crawling on my leg, and I flicked it away. “I don’t have time for this.”

  “You don’t have to hate her, but you can’t lose yourself to her,” said the girl. “You always have to come back.” Then she kissed the top of the black wolf ’s head, and it thumped its tail happily—at least I assume it was happily—against the ground. Goddamn heartwarming stuff. A girl and her carnivore.

  I rubbed at my eyes. The sirens were getting louder, nearer. The sound of them only seemed to encourage the Rhode Island werewolf in Manhattan. It gutted a waiter who’d just gotten off work.

  “Yeah, well, people die either way, whether it’s the Beast or a vamp. What difference does it make?”

  The girl narrowed her eyes, and for the first time she looked impatient with me.

  “Quinn, if you lose yourself tonight, or any other night, you’ll both be killed. That’s the way it always goes when a loup garou surrenders to—”

  “You’re assuming I give a rat’s ass.”

  She nodded very slowly.

  “You’re not a suicide, Quinn. Maybe that’s what keeps you going, knowing it’s an option, that you can always kill yourself if the world gets to be more than you can endure. But, personally, I think if you were going to do it, you’d have done it by now, don’t you?”

  Fuck it. Fast-forward. I’d figured out where that neon exit door was. First I broke the black wolf’s neck with a single quick twist. It didn’t put up much of a fight. The blonde girl didn’t try to run. I’d halfway hoped that she would. I drove my right hand through her rib cage and breast bone and tore out her heart. It wasn’t beating, and it wasn’t warm. It was nothing but a shriveled lump of discolored muscle. And it was exactly as easy as that.

  The forest and the field dissolved.

  And I was looking out across the city from some high place, out across rooftops and the asphalt grid of streets, everything lit up like a Christmas tree.

  You always see people saying that time seems to slow way down during, say, car wrecks or pretty much any other sudden, violent event. Those times when their lives are in danger, or the lives of a loved one. Those sorts of situations. Encounters with the unexpected, chaotic incursions. Well, what came next, it was surely fucking chaos, and it certainly could have ended with my going down for the count, once and for all. But it happened so fast it seemed to be over almost before it began. Looking back, I can only recall a series of images, like photographs or flashcards.

  I’ll use present tense here. Seems more appropriate somehow:

  I see the city, from up there, and I realize up there is the High Line, that odd park on the Lower West Side that used to be a section of the New York Central Railroad. In the wolves’ greenish night vision, I see leaves, gravel, rusted tracks. Sirens are screaming.

  Jump cut.

  There’s a rent-a-cop motherfucker with a gun aimed at me, at the loup. He looks scared shitless. The streetlights glint off the barrel of the revolver. His hands are shaking. He’s pissed himself.

  Jump cut.

  A figure steps out of the bushes, someone dressed up like the Unabomber, big, baggy hoody, face hidden in shadows. They’re holding a crossbow in leather-gloved hands. My crossbow. It’s aimed at the security guard’s head. I’m thinking, Don’t you fucking do it. Maybe that’s meant for the loup. Maybe for the guard or the person holding the crossbow, or maybe it’s meant for all three at once.

  Jump cut.

  The Unabomber shifts just so, and I can see it’s Selwyn. She’s so goddamn calm, as if she’s done this a hundred times before. The rent-a-cop obviously doesn’t see her. He’s whispering “What the fuck?” over and over and over again as if it’s a litany against death by werewolf. Or whatever he believes he’s seeing looming up before him. The loup roars, and the gun goes off. I’d almost believe that bullet did a time-travel trick and hit me, us, the loup, before the man squeezed the trigger. There’s fire in our left shoulder. All this is happening so incredibly fast. Selwyn fires a carbon-composite bolt, puts it through the guard’s skull, temple to temple.

  Jump cut.

  I can’t remember seeing the man fall. But now he’s on his back, his body twitching, legs and arms doing a death-throe tarantella, right? I smell blood. The sirens are very close. My shoulder is burning alive.

  Jump.

  I’m staring up at Selwyn, her face still half obscured by the hoody. I know the loup is gone, and I’m alone now. And sweet Jesus on rubber crutches, I have never felt so alone as I do right now. Selwyn touches my face, and she whispers something I don’t understand. I’m wondering where the hell she got those clothes, wondering how long she was on the streets in her birthday suit before she scored them.

  Jump cut.

  We’re in a taxi, and I realize the blood I smell is my own. “Don’t move,” Selwyn says. “It’s not much farther.” I can’t hear the sirens anymore. The driver smells like sweat and patchouli. I smell fake evergreen from the pine-tree-shaped cardboard swinging from the rearview mirror. I’m wrapped in a blue wool blanket. My shoulder throbs. It’s not the first time I’ve been shot, and the pain’s familiar. I want to tell her I’ll be fine by dawn, but I don’t. I’m dizzy, but it’s not from the pain. I’m dizzy from the sheer weight of color werewolf us couldn’t see. My vamp eyes are flooded with color.

  Okay, I’m gonna stop with the damn “jump cut” device and the present tense. You get the point.

  The taxi ride seemed to go on forever. The longest taxi ride of my life, though it couldn’t have lasted more than twenty minutes. My face was propped against the window. On the other side of the glass, the world was a slow blur of nothing I recognized.

  “Where’d you get the clothes?” I asked Selwyn.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she replied.

  “You really shouldn’t have done that,” I said.

  “Well, I wasn’t about to come looking for you stark naked, Quinn.”

  I laughed, and my shoulder ached worse.

  “That’s not what I meant, you pinhead. You don’t throw down on a cop.”

  “He wasn’t a real cop. And don’t call me names, okay? I just saved your ass from a metric fuck-ton of real cops with much bigger fucking guns.”

  A few moments before, Selwyn had sounded concerned. Now she just sounded angry. I wasn’t sure if we were talking quietly enough the driver couldn’t hear. I also didn’t care. Actually, I was considering having her drive to some deserted spot and having a snack to help my shoulder heal.

  “You don’t want me to call you a pinhead,” I told her, “don’t go around acting like one. Did you at least not leave the bolt back there?”

  She didn’t answer, which meant, of course, that she had left the bolt sticking out of the man’s head.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “Almost there.”

  “Almost where, Selwyn?”

  I saw a homeless man pushing two shopping carts tied together like box
cars and piled almost to overflowing with bulging Hefty bags. I thought how good he’d taste, and my mouth watered.

  “I’m hungry,” I said, and I wiped drool off my chin. There was a smear of it on the window.

  “After everything you puked up back there?”

  I never do manage to keep down what the loup eats. This body ain’t so keen on solid food.

  I closed my eyes. I wanted to be in a very, very dark place, away from headlights and taillights and sodium-vapor light. A closet would suffice. A subbasement would be wonderful.

  “You have my bag? You didn’t leave it on the High Line?”

  “I have your bag, Quinn. Stop talking so much, why don’t you.”

  Good advice, which is probably why I ignored it. The driver drove, and I rambled on. I asked if we were going all the way to fucking New Jersey, and Selwyn told the driver to ignore me, that I was drunk. That I was, in fact, an alcoholic who’d fallen off the wagon. She told the driver she was my AA sponsor.

  “Liar,” I said.

  “You oughta know.”

  I oughta. Takes one to know one. The pot calling the kettle black.

  That smudgy, alien blur of street rushed by outside the cab, and I asked her, “This isn’t the way back to your place, is it?”

  “No. You sort of trashed my place. And the cops have it cordoned off. It’s like a crime scene or something now. I don’t know how I’m gonna get my shit out of there.”

  “I’m sorry,” I told her, but I expect I didn’t come off especially sincere. Apologies are not my specialty.

  “It’s my fault. I know it’s my fault. The Aconitum. I should have known better.”