It was only the second time I’d ever killed out of kindness. It hasn’t happened since.
I turned back to Isobel and Isaac, and I raised the pistol again, taking aim at the sister.
As the saying goes, you could have heard a pin drop.
I squeezed the trigger, and the 9mm roared again. The bullet went in through Isobel’s left eye and took off most of the back of her head. She didn’t go down immediately. There was this long, weird pause while she just stood there, swaying side to side, her remaining eye filled with hemorrhage and surprise. And then she bared her teeth, hissed, and I clearly heard the death rattle before she crumpled—very, very slowly, as though she were moving underwater. The ghoul skull tumbled from her hands and rolled away across the flagstones. And, what with the way their white hair was braided together, she dragged Isaac off his feet, as well, and he wound up on all fours beside her corpse. I took aim again.
Yeah, it did—right then—occur to me that there was no way in hell it could be that easy, avenging Selwyn, putting an end to what the twins had done and what they meant to do. What they’d set in motion. Putting an end to the twins themselves. Unless, of course, what was happening right that moment, Selwyn’s and their undoing, me reprising my too-familiar role as executioner, was all they’d ever really set in motion, the inevitable and unintended consequences or their actions.
“Twice-Damned,” said Charlee in a voice that boomed louder than the Browning. I didn’t lower the pistol, but I did look his way.
Well, I looked towards the place where he’d been.
What stood there now, it wasn’t human, and it wasn’t a vampire. My first thought, Where the fucking fuck did the fucking angel come from?
Three fucks, when one just isn’t fucking enough.
I knew what it was, even though I’d never laid eyes on a Djinn. To my knowledge, it had been an imp’s age since anyone of earth had. B told me once that Djinn are like germs in a cheap whorehouse. You never see the bastards, but they’re always there.
. . . in the midst of the four beasts, I heard a terrible, terrible voice saying to me, ‘Come, child, and see.’ And behold, in the midst of the whirlwind I looked . . .
“Fuck me,” I whispered. There wasn’t so much as a peep from the ghouls, but I could hear Isaac sobbing inconsolably over his dead sister.
Go head, I thought. Go ahead and bawl your eyes out.
The Djinn unfurled wings of fire, fire and smoke and incandescent gases, wings made of lightning and roiling, sulfurous clouds. The Basalt Madonna was clutched in the talons of its right hand. It took a step towards the Snows, a step towards me. I took a step backwards and bumped into Selwyn’s cage.
“Which is what I get for underestimating boys who wear dresses,” I said. “So, tell me, Smoky. What happens next?”
The Djinn flared its wide nostrils, exhaling steam, then stared down at the Madonna. The T-shirt had burned completely away, revealing the grotesque mother and child reunion and the pyrite whorl of the ammonite.
“All the time you held it,” said the Djinn, and its voice was a hurricane. “All that time, you might have changed your fate, rewoven the skein of time, and yet you did not. Why is that, Siobhan Quinn, Twice-Damned?”
Its voice bruised the air, and I wanted to cover my aching ears.
“Did doing so not even occur to you?”
Oh, it had. Of course it fucking had. As soon as B told me what it was that hunk of rock did and why the Snows wanted it so badly, I began to wonder what would have to be undone, what single event in the shitty hit parade of my existence would have to be unbirthed, in order to set things right. Right for me, I mean. What would get me back to that moment before Selwyn and I climbed onto the subway? What would buy back the lost life of a homeless girl named Lily? How about the night I was attacked by Grumet and the Bride? Better yet, what would take me all the way back to the day before I ran away from home?
Don’t think I didn’t give it a long hard think.
But there was no guarantee anything would turn out any differently, was there? Or that it wouldn’t be infinitely worse, because that’s always an option. Better the hell you know. What I said to the Djinn was:
“I just couldn’t stand the thought that I’d probably have to do all this same shit over again. Figured, best-case scenario, I’d still manage to fuck it up. Figured I probably wouldn’t remember what I had unhappened, which meant I wouldn’t know what to do differently.
“Once was enough.”
The Djinn smiled, which is a sight I hope never to see again. Napalm dripped from its jaws and spattered across the floor at its feet.
“I admit,” said the Djinn, “we had not considered that a fool could be so wise.”
I glanced back to Isaac, who was still blubbering over the corpse of his sister. So much for the eldritch terror of the Snows. The dumbstruck ghouls were beginning to mutter among themselves as the shock wore off.
“You can destroy it?” I asked the Djinn.
“No,” it said. “But we can consign it to the Greater Shadow, forever beyond the reach of Raˉs al-Ghul and man and any other who would seek after the Qqi d’Evai Mubadieb. Past Sarkomand and Leng, there are bottomless vaults in the roots of mountains known only to the Suˉrat al-Jinnıˉ.”
My head was spinning, and I tightened my grip on the trigger.
“Okay, well, that’s wonderful. Fucking wonderful. So, asshole, why didn’t you take it from me back in Manhattan and save us all this horror show? Why didn’t you just find Selwyn before I even showed up and take it from her? Fuck, why didn’t you just get proactive back in nineteen hundred and ninety whatever and stop Thing One and Thing Two here from having been born.”
The Djinn laughed to itself, and the hollow place below Mount Auburn shuddered. Dirt and small stones rained down around me. I heard the retinue of ghouls yelp and curse.
“Because, Twice-Damned,” said the Djinn, “it did not please me to do so. Now, do you mean to kill the half-breed King of Dogs, or shall I?”
I glared up at the sulfurous inferno of not-Charlee with two e’s.
“It did not fucking please you to fucking do so? You asshole. You son of a bitch.”
“Twice-Damned,” the Djinn said, “mind your place and know your limits. Events have unfurled as suited our design, and it is not remaining to you to question.”
I’ll never get used to the whole inscrutable plots of godlike beings thing. It’s none of your business, little baby monster, and you wouldn’t understand, even if I deigned to tell you. Which I won’t. And I’m sure it makes for unsatisfying reading. But it is what it fucking is.
Anyway . . .
Isaac had dragged Isobel into his arms, and then he lifted his head and sneered at me, showing me his teeth, as she had done. Tears and snot and dirt streaked his face, and it was clear that all the fight and bluster had gone out of him. When his sister had died, she’d taken at least half of him with her.
“Why did you give me the Aconitum?” I asked the Djinn.
“Because,” it replied, “you’re going to have to find your own way out of this tomb. I cannot help.”
“Because it wouldn’t please you to do so,” I whispered, and the Djinn didn’t disagree.
With my free hand, I took the bottle from my pocket.
Isaac growled something in Ghul. He was busy now trying to gather up all those globs of ruined gray matter and stuff them back into the hole in Isobel’s head.
And I felt sick.
Not the sort of sick puking will ever make better.
“It’s wrong,” I said, “you two getting off this easy.”
Then I pulled the trigger again.
And again.
I put ten rounds into him, emptying the clip, and then I let the gun slip from my fingers and clatter to the flagstones. I glanced back to where the Djinn who was not a
vampire who was not a boy named Charlee with two e’s had stood, and there was only a sooty, scorched pattern on the floor of the chamber where it had been standing. The Djinn had taken its leave; enough fun and games for now, thank you one and all, and it had taken the Madonna with it.
Through the ringing in my ears, I could hear the frenzied yelping and yapping of the ghouls, and then I heard more gunshots. I sat down beside Selwyn’s cage, her coffin, and I tried to make sense of the chaos unfolding around me. There were more ghouls pouring into the chamber. A lot more. But they were not those who’d sworn allegiance to Isaac and Isobel. These were ghouls who’d opposed the twins, Pickman’s foot soldiers, his necropolis infantry. And not only ghouls, but dozens of night gaunts, their leathery wings battering the air, and gugs, too, and ghasts. They were all well armed, and they’d come to mop up. I considered doing nothing at all, sitting right where I was and letting the battle wash over me, crush me, rip me to fucking shreds, and then maybe the world would be done with me once and for all.
I seriously considered it.
Then I uncorked the bottle and took a long drink. My belly rolled, and the cramps began.
At the edge of a dream field, a girl with my name pushed her way through a wall of yellow-brown grass, and a great black wolf the black of Selwyn Throckmorton’s hair followed her.
And I followed it.
Fade to black.
Roll credits.
The End.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
With this novel I conclude a trip that has been long and strange, indeed, and which has had a few highs and some truly astounding lows. It has been an experiment, and, admittedly, not one I can declare a success, but, as Mr. Vonnegut said, “And so it goes.” My thanks to my agent, Merrilee Heifetz, who urged me to do this after reading Chapter One of Blood Oranges, which I’d actually written on a lark, as a joke, a protest against what “paranormal romance” has done to the once respectable genre of urban fantasy. I honestly never intended to write a whole Quinn book, much less three. Well, technically four, but I scrapped Fay Grimmer and wrote Red Delicious to replace it. My thanks to Amber Benson, who, one summer night in New Orleans, agreed to be the voice of Quinn. And my thanks to the many readers who stuck with this. At the very least, I hope you had fun. I will miss you, Aloysius, and I’ll miss you too, Mean Mr. B. I’ll even miss the damn seagulls.
On the 124th anniversary of Lovecraft’s birth,
Caitlín R. Kiernan (Kathleen Tierney)
20 August 2014
Providence, Rhode Island
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