Cherry Bomb: A Siobhan Quinn Novel

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  I didn’t disagree.

  “They’re gonna know it’s your place, Selwyn.”

  “Yeah, they will. So, we go to ground. We keep our heads down. I know some people who’ll help. But it’s a mess. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. I’m too tired to pretend otherwise.”

  “B, he used to say I could cock-up a wet dream.”

  Selwyn laughed, and she sounded as tired as she’d said she was. She didn’t argue with me, either. I didn’t ask about these people she knew; figured I’d learn all about them soon enough. The taxi ride couldn’t go on forever.

  “There’s stuff in there you need?”

  “There is. Maybe I can get in later, but I’m not gonna count on it. And even if I do, I doubt the safe will still be there. You know that’s going to be taken as evidence.”

  I didn’t ask her as evidence of what. My head was too foggy. Everything was too foggy. I shut my eyes and listened to the wheels on the road until we finally got where we were going. The Village, MacDougal Street, an apartment three floors above a frozen yogurt joint. Selwyn paid the driver while I stood on the sidewalk wearing the blue wool blanket, wishing my old duster wasn’t back in Hell’s Kitchen or already tucked away in an NYPD evidence room somewhere. There was a woman waiting for us at the door.

  “This is Jodie,” Selwyn said, nodding to the woman. “Jodie, this is Quinn.”

  Jodie said it was good to meet me and offered me her hand. I shook it, and her skin felt very, very hot. Everyone alive feels hot when I’m hungry. Her skin was almost as dark as Selwyn’s was pale, but her eyes were a startling, unexpected shade of green.

  “You’ve made the news,” she said, just before leading us upstairs. “But no one has any idea what happened.”

  “No shit,” Selwyn muttered.

  “The police aren’t saying anything yet, but the most popular rumor is that a drug dealer’s pet grizzly bear got loose and went on a rampage.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh.

  Jodie’s apartment was bigger than Selwyn’s, and it wasn’t cluttered. It was furnished with pricy-looking antiques, and there were real paintings—not prints or posters—hanging on the walls. Real fucking art. Oh, and a stereo system I once would have done murder for. I wondered what she did for a living. I mean, Selwyn was making a small fortune peddling her junk, but you’d never have known it from the way she lived.

  I caught Jodie staring at me. It was more a curious stare than a worried or frightened kind of stare.

  “I’m your first?” I asked her.

  “Yes,” she said softly. Jodie said everything softly. “You’re my first.”

  Right then, I caught a peek at myself in a mirror hanging in the hall. It was a miracle a taxi had stopped for us. Between the bruises and scrapes, the dried blood on my chin and cheeks and forehead, and the wet, dark splotch on the blanket from the seeping bullet hole that hadn’t yet begun to heal.

  “I need a shower,” I said.

  And Selwyn said, “You need three or four.”

  “The bathroom’s just past the kitchen,” Jodie told me, and she pointed down the surprisingly long hallway. “You’ll find everything you need. Soap, clean towels, shampoo. If you need it, there’s disinfectant and a needle and silk thread in linen closet. And gauze bandages.”

  I thanked her and said I could use the gauze, yeah, but there was no need for the rest of it.

  Undead girls don’t tend to get infections. It’s one of the perks. No matter how much it hurt—and hurt it did—if I could get some sleep, by sunrise my body would spit out the slug, and there wouldn’t even be a scar.

  I stood under the hot spray of this Jodie woman’s showerhead, letting the water hammer my chest, shoulders, my buttocks and face. I didn’t want to be remembering anything at all. But I couldn’t stop remembering the forest and the field, the blonde girl and her black wolf. I knew full well who they were. The loup was me, and they were also me. Me knock, knocking, knocking on my so often slow-on-the-uptake conscious mind. Do you get the gist now, Quinn? Yeah, I got it. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do with the knowledge, but I got it.

  While I dried, I took stock of my reflection in the mirror above the sink. My shark-black eyes, my waxy skin, my piranha mouth, me more naked than any absence of clothes could make me. Me without the makeup, contacts, the grille that hid my teeth. All that shit was something else trapped back at Selwyn’s cordoned-off apartment, unless they’d also been confiscated as evidence. I’d have to find replacements, but I could worry about that later. After sleep. I could also worry about who the fuck Jodie was and whether there was any chance the cops could get any leads on Selwyn. I knew I was likely safe from any investigation, but she had a paper trail—her lease, just for starters. Shit knows how much else—identifying documents and shit. Truth be told, I’d been inconvenienced; she’d been screwed over good and proper.

  There was a time I wouldn’t have given her situation a second thought. There was a time my attitude would have boiled down to, What’s any of that got to do with me? But she’d changed me. In less than a week, she’d changed me.

  Which scared me bad, more than I was willing to admit.

  I’d figured out long ago how dangerous it was allowing anyone to get close to you, forming emotional ties to the living. Or much of anyone else. Vamps aren’t pack animals. Doesn’t matter how lonely the isolation might be, it was a lot safer than the alternative. For me and for whoever found themselves the object of my affections. Maybe you’ve read shit about vamps and werewolves as guardian fucking angels. That’s wishful thinking, ignorant fantasies. You may as well snuggle up to a leaky nuke.

  We slept in the guest room, me and Selwyn. I don’t know if I’d ever in all my life slept in a bed that comfortable. The room smelled like lavender and citrus, aging fabric woven before my grandmother had been born, old wood and Murphy’s Oil Soap. My clean body and Selwyn’s clean body, and the blood in her veins. Before I nodded off, she offered herself, and I almost refused. It was dangerous, drinking from her in the state I was in.

  “You need it,” she said. “I can see how much you need it, Quinn.”

  What else can this pale child see?

  She didn’t have to twist my arm. But I managed to take only a couple of mouthfuls. And then we slept. I had no dreams, not of the girl by the field, not of the loup. Nothing, just the bliss of oblivion.

  Jodie didn’t wake us until after three in the afternoon. She knocked lightly on the door. I lay blinking at the ceiling, but Selwyn told her the door was unlocked, to come in. Then she kissed me on the forehead. She smiled sleepily, looking way more refreshed than I felt. She looked . . . what? Relieved? Certainly not much like someone who’d lost all her worldly possessions the night before and had to put a bolt through a man’s head to save the nasty she was shacked up with.

  I sat up. Our host was standing in the doorway with a breakfast tray. If she cared that we were both naked, it didn’t show in her face.

  “I thought you should have a bite to eat,” she said to Selwyn.

  “I’m not going to turn it down,” Selwyn replied.

  There were also several newspapers tucked under Jodie’s left arm. She brought the tray over and carefully set it on the bed in front of Selwyn. There were eggs, toast, some bacon, OJ, and a big-ass glass of Guinness. Them pretty blood dolls need their vitamin C and iron, right? Selwyn thanked her and wasted no time getting to work on the food. The sight and smell made me a bit queasy.

  “I’m sorry, Quinn,” Jodie said in that soft, silky voice of hers. She had an accent I hadn’t noticed the night before. Haitian maybe. Or Jamaican. “I don’t have anything on hand for you. I’ll have something by this evening, though. I put out feelers.”

  She dropped the papers in front of me. The Post was on top, its cover-page headlines every bit as lurid as you’d expect: MYSTERY CREATURE’S ORGY OF BLOOD.
Selwyn was reading over my shoulder.

  “An orgy?” she mumbled around a mouthful of egg. She washed it down with Guinness. “Jesus, lady. You get to have all the fun.”

  SEVEN DEAD

  BEAST STILL AT LARGE

  “One of those is mine,” said Selwyn, pointing at the page. “They better not give you credit for all seven.”

  “Actually,” said Jodie, “the body count’s now at nine. They found two more after the papers went to press. They’re still trying to figure out what to make of the security guard.” She looked at Selwyn. “Is that the one you did?”

  “Damn straight.”

  “Where did you even get a crossbow?”

  I cleared my throat. “She can lay her hands on ghoul skulls and Hell merch, and you wonder where she got a crossbow?”

  I was assuming Jodie knew all about the source of Selwyn’s income.

  Selwyn tapped me on top of the head. “It’s Quinn’s,” she said. I swear, she was getting her rocks off on the mayhem and pandemonium. What was it I said earlier about how she’d have probably become a serial killer if she hadn’t found me?

  “It’s in that gym bag I brought in with us last night, with all her guns and stuff.”

  “Fuck me running backwards.” I sighed. Or something to that effect. There was a garish color photograph of a body beneath a bloodstained sheet.

  Selwyn ate, and I read. The Times had a photo of the flipped-over Volkswagen, cops and paramedics crowded around it. ESCAPED COUGAR SLAYS SEVEN. There were quotes from eyewitnesses and exactly the sort of vague, noncommittal statement from the chief of police. On page two there was another photo, this time of Selwyn’s building. The doors hung crooked on their hinges, what was left of the doors. Yellow crime-scene tape and plastic sawhorses were up to keep the looky-loos at a distance.

  I tossed the papers to the floor.

  “Hey,” Selwyn protested, “I wanted to read those.”

  I glared at her. “Why don’t you shut up and eat?”

  Jodie sat down on the foot of the bed, where, by the way, she’d laid out some clothes I could wear, jeans and a Yankees sweatshirt.

  “It seems to me no one has any clear idea what really went down last night,” she said. “And no one’s going to swallow the monster angle. But whatever was in your apartment, Selwyn, you’d best consider all that a complete write-off. No way you’re getting back inside, and even if you did, well . . .” And she trailed off.

  Selwyn stopped nibbling at a crispy strip of bacon.

  “Fortunately, it wasn’t much,” she told Jodie. “Tuesday was a payday. I got lucky.”

  “And none of the safe-deposit boxes are in your name?”

  Selwyn laughed and took a sip of Guinness. “Hell, no. No way they can trace those back to me.”

  “You hope,” I said and lay down again. I wanted to go back to sleep. No, I wanted to feed again, then fuck, and then go back to sleep.

  “Nothing comes with an ironclad guarantee,” Jodie added. “You should not be so confident.”

  “Listen, the both of you. Don’t sweat the damn safe-deposit boxes, okay? Jesus. I’m going to clean them out before anyone’s the wiser, just in case.”

  Jodie clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. Not just once, but several times. For a moment I considered the possibility that she and Selwyn had worked out some sort of secret tongue-clicking Morse code.

  “Regardless,” said Jodie, “you may have bigger problems than the police.”

  Selwyn kissed me on the forehead. I gently swatted her away.

  “How’s that?” she asked.

  Jodie looked at me, and then she looked back at Selwyn. She pointed at me.

  “Does she know?”

  “Shit, lady.” I laughed. “I know she used to have a tail and that her mama wasn’t exactly altogether totally human.”

  Selwyn nodded. “If you’re about to say what I think you’re about to say, yeah, she knows. How did he find out so fast?”

  Jodie scowled.

  “Dear, he’s in Boston,” she said. “Not on the moon. They do have newspapers, television, radio, and the internet in Boston.”

  Selwyn did that tapping at the end of her nose thing. Maybe their secret code involved tongue clicking and nose tapping.

  “Yeah, okay. Shit,” she said and tapped her nose again. I waited for Jodie to click her tongue and was disappointed when she didn’t.

  “Said the girl who didn’t know poisoning a loup with wolfsbane was a terrible idea.”

  Selwyn punched me in the arm.

  “I wasn’t trying to poison you, you ass. Wolfsbane is supposed to guard against werewolves, not trigger their transformations.”

  I think I glared at Selwyn skeptically.

  “Wait,” Jodie said, and her scowl had turned into an expression of disbelief. “That’s how this happened?”

  “Pretty swift, right?”

  Jodie shook her head and stood up.

  “Quinn, our Miss Throckmorton there, she’s resourceful. A pity she suffers these lapses in judgment.”

  Selwyn flipped her off. “I need to piss,” she said.

  Okay, I’m getting sick of the she said, she said blow-by-blow. I’m sure you are, too. Anyway, we lay low for a couple of days. Turned out this Jodie woman—Jodie Babineaux, and she was from Sierra Leone—was a halfway decent witch. You don’t find many of those. The wards and shit she had erected around her apartment kept us off the radar just long enough for me to get my bearings. Selwyn got her hands on a cloned phone and made a bunch of calls, sussing out her predicament and trying to keep tabs on what Isaac Snow did and didn’t know. We hardly left the building.

  The Post’s headlines got weirder and weirder. They talked to a cryptozoologist at some university in New Hampshire who claimed the cougar attacks had actually been the work of a chupacabra.

  Because, you know.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  PICKMAN’S MADONNA & GHOULS ON A TRAIN

  We did go back to Selwyn’s apartment. Despite what she’d said about there being nothing important there, nothing worth the trouble and the risk to retrieve, after three days of hiding out in the witch’s safe house, Selwyn began to grow antsy, and she started to let on that there might, after all, be something worth going back for. Surely, she reasoned, the cops weren’t keeping the place under surveillance. Now, if I was an NYPD detective, and I thought I knew the starting point of the “cougar” rampage, and if that place was full of bizarre and valuable books and gewgaws, you bet your fanny I’d keep my eyeballs on it. As I have often said, people are stupid. This includes people who keep dangerous wild animals locked up in Manhattan. Stupid people do stupid, sloppy, ill-advised things, like go back to apartments the PoPo have staked out because they probably have fuck all in the way of leads.

  Selwyn was in a stupid mood.

  And she badgered me until I agreed to go along.

  We’d slip in and slip back out before anyone had any idea we were there. In and out, quick as a flash. No, we wouldn’t use the front door. Obviously, we were smarter than that. Obviously. We’d take the fire escape.

  That’s what smart people do.

  Looking back, never mind how it turned out, the way that night started off is pretty damn funny. Jodie brought us black pants and black turtleneck sweaters and versatile black ski masks, just like Tom Cruise in a Mission Impossible movie. Or Sterling Archer. Because that’s what smart people would do.

  When I asked Selwyn what, exactly, was so important that I was agreeing to allow her to put my ass on the line, she wouldn’t tell me.

  “You’ll see,” she said.

  When I demanded that she tell me or I’d let her undertake this idiotic expedition alone, she said, “You’ll see” again. So I went. Why? If Selwyn was in prison, I’d have to find someone else to fuck, and I’d
also lose a willing donor of red sauce.

  I am a smart cookie.

  I took along the Glock 17 9mm I usually pack.

  Jodie had a car she kept in a garage somewhere nearby, and she drove us. Not like we could take a taxi or the subway in our styling secret-agent, ninja, cat-burglar getups. She pulled the car into an alley a couple of blocks from the building, and we walked the rest of the way. No sense in her getting hauled off to the pokey if we got ourselves caught.

  Pause a moment to consider the fate of a vamp, who’s also a loup—or vice versa—who finds herself in lockup. Standing next to a box where a homeless dude was sleeping off a couple of bottles of Thunderbird, staring up at the fire escape, I asked Selwyn to ponder that very scenario.

  “No one’s going to jail,” she said, pulling the ladder down with a loud clank. The homeless dude didn’t wake up.

  “You bet your ass they’re not, because I’m not gonna let it come to that.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “The problem, Grasshopper, is the mess I’d have to make so that it didn’t come to that.”

  “We’re not going to get caught,” she sighed and started climbing. I hesitated a second or two, thought about leaving her to the pissy gods of fate and heading to Port Authority and buying a ticket on the first bus anywhere far from New York City. And then I followed her.

  Because that’s what stupid people do. Even vamps.

  Being dead has yet to boost anyone’s IQ.

  I did my best not to make noise, but the rusty fire escape had other ideas. We creaked and squeaked our way to the fifth floor and the apartment’s single window. Which had, as noted earlier, been painted shut. But, super vampire strength, right? I tugged it open, which made, probably, only slightly less noise than breaking it would have made.

  “Five minutes,” I told her. “That’s all. You ain’t done in five minutes, I’ll leave you here.”

  She rolled her eyes and muttered and wandered away through the dark towards the bedroom. I sat on the windowsill, where I could keep my eyes on the door. The cops had tossed the place. At least, I assumed it was the cops. Someone had. The carefully ordered chaos had been reduced to simple, run-of-the-mill chaos.