Cherry Bomb: A Siobhan Quinn Novel

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Kid,” I said, “you have absolutely no idea what you’re fucking around with.”

  Her heart beat five times before she replied.

  “For all you know,” she said, “I’ve had vampire lovers before. For all you know, I’m a regular chew toy.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Fine,” she sighed. “If you like the cage, if you’re content behind bars, it’s none of my business.” But she didn’t get up. She didn’t leave.

  “Quinn?” That was Eve. I blinked, and there she was, tricked out in her expensive, custom-made corset, hobble skirt, stiletto heels, leather collar, and her lipstick the color of a nosebleed. She held a sweaty bottle of Bass in each hand. “Who’s your friend?”

  Now, in the land of the whip and the ball gag, there is an age-old etiquette, which I generally tended to ignore. But here was an opportunity to turn it to my advantage.

  “Did I say you could speak to me, slave?” I asked her. “Did I give you permission to fucking ask me a question? I sure don’t remember doing it.”

  Eve’s face managed somehow to simultaneously express embarrassment and delight. After all, wasn’t this precisely what she’d been after all along, degradation and humiliation, but I’d been too indifferent to give her?

  “Shut up and sit down,” I said. She handed me my beer, and when she started to take a place on the sofa next to me, I told her to sit on the floor at my feet. I took her beer and gave it to Selwyn.

  “I don’t like Bass,” she said, clearly amused. “I don’t much like beer.”

  “Then don’t drink it. Makes no difference to me, as long as she doesn’t get it,” and I nodded to Eve, obediently sitting on the filthy floor. It made me grin, and I found myself savoring the thought of how uncomfortable she must be, all trussed up in that bondage couture and forced to try and find a not entirely excruciating position down there with the spilled drinks, cum stains, and fuck only knows what else. Her head was down; she wouldn’t dare look at me until I told her she could.

  “So, occult antiquities,” I said. “Acquisition and appraisal. How’s that work anyway?” I took a drink of my Bass, a long drag off my cigarette, then turned my head, much more interested in the pushy, reckless girl in her Hellboy T-shirt than Barbara O’Bryan’s kinky alter ego. Selwyn sat up and shrugged.

  “Depends,” she said. “But, usually, a client comes to me with a request. Maybe they’ve learned the whereabouts of a particular artifact or talisman or grimoire, but they don’t have the skills necessary to procure it. Or just don’t want to get their hands dirty. Better to have a third party to blame if, somewhere down the road, the shit hits the fan.”

  “And how often does the shit hit the fan?”

  She made a zero with her right thumb and forefinger. “I’ve been fortunate,” she said. “But I’m not so stupid that I don’t know it’s the sort of luck doesn’t last forever. You tell me how I’m living on borrowed time, I’m not going to disagree.”

  Was this the other shoe dropping? Was she more interested in a bodyguard than a vampire fuck buddy? Insurance against that inevitable rainy day? I thought of Mean Mr. B, my long months spent as his muscle, convinced I’d never survive on my own, and the thought alone was enough to leave a bitter taste on my tongue. I’d gotten used to freedom.

  Eve, probably in the early stages of asphyxiation, made a small grunting noise, and I nudged her roughly with the toe of my boot. In the immortal words of Johnny Rotten, this is what you wanted, this is what you get.

  “Dad was an archaeologist,” Selwyn went on. “Specialized in Near Eastern mysticism and religious stuff. When he died a few years back, he left a shitload of unrealized profit just lying around the house. I needed a quick source of income. All I had to do was find the right buyers, match any given piece of ancient junk to an interested customer.”

  “Pretty resourceful of you.”

  “Better than waiting around for his savings account to dry up and finding myself on the street.”

  I took another swallow of beer.

  “I’m gonna ask you again,” I said, lowering my voice and leaning closer, “what do you want from me?”

  “If that’s what you’re thinking, I can take care of myself,” she said, sounding slightly offended.

  “Kid, you go and piss off the wrong beast, the Pope and Baby Jesus won’t be able to protect you.”

  I only barely resisted adding, Take it from me. Been there. Done that.

  “You really want me to fuck off, Quinn, fine. Just say so. You can go back to playing footsie with Little Miss Poser. It’ll be no skin off my nose.”

  I leaned still closer and sniffed at the soft, vulnerable spot beneath her chin. The blood pumping through her carotid artery was, to my ears, loud as a jackhammer.

  “See,” I said, “that’s what I wanted about ten minutes ago. Now you’ve gone and gotten my attention.”

  To Selwyn Throckmorton’s credit, she didn’t even wince. So, either she was genuinely too stupid to be scared or she had balls.

  “About damn time,” she whispered.

  I touched the tip of my tongue to her throat and held it there a moment, savoring the calm thump, thump, thump of her pulse. Then I told her, “Just so we’re completely crystal fucking clear, it turns out you’re stupid enough you believe this is some sort of parlor game, it won’t make no difference whatsoever. It won’t save your ass if I should lose control, as I have been known to do.”

  “Quinn, are you always this worried about the welfare of your food? You’re awfully conscientious for a—”

  “Don’t you dare taunt me,” I growled. Eve whimpered and I kicked her. “Don’t you dare.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it. I’d just hate to find out you’re all talk and no bite.”

  Well, what happened next, I ordered Eve to get up off the floor and the three of us went back to her place. I had Selwyn strip her and fuck her while I watched. Then I cuffed my CPA meal ticket to her bed, stuffed one end of a silk scarf into her mouth, and made Selwyn watch while I did a messy job of draining Barbara O’Bryan. No, not quite true, even if, at the time, I wanted to think it was. I didn’t have to make her watch. She was as wide-eyed and attentive as a hungry cat waiting to pounce on an unwary mouse.

  That night, I didn’t let her drink from me. But I offered her a mouthful of Eve. She smiled that smile of hers, all wicked pretend innocence, and accepted every goddamn drop. And right then, I didn’t feel lonely anymore. It was the first time in all those years since I’d been murdered by a fucked-up china-doll excuse of a vamp who liked to call herself the Bride of Quiet. The first time since I’d been bitten by a Swamp Yankee loup named Jack Grumet. I fell asleep with Selwyn in my arms, the two of us naked and gore spattered, and we slept the day away there by the cold body of a dead woman.

  All my dreams were crimson.

  That night in Brooklyn I broke my cardinal rule, or the nearest I’ve ever had to a cardinal rule since the night I died. I caved into the loneliness. I was weak and allowed another person to follow me down. Maybe not all the way. It’s not like I turned Selwyn, but I did everything but. Now, sure, she’d likely had a certain predilection all her life. Maybe she was the sort of person who eventually becomes a serial killer, that supposedly rare female variety. Maybe not. Or maybe some other vamp or loup or whatever would have shown up with open, welcoming arms, willing to take her along for the ride—or worse. She was out there cruising, fingers crossed, praying to dark gods that she’d get lucky. She was willing to die, willing to kill. Hell, if I’d put a knife in her hands and told her to cut Barbara O’Bryan’s throat ear to ear, give her that gaping Glasgow smile, I have no doubt Selwyn would have done it. I have no doubt whatsoever. It’s what she wanted more than love or money, and she was willing to do anything to show me that she wasn’t a tourist. That she was, to her way of thinking, deserving of my companionship, even if she
knew right from the start—and I’m pretty sure she did—that I’d never share the curse that I have no doubt she saw as a blessing.

  Some nights, I wish I’d just given it to her. If I had, maybe everything would have gone differently, and she’d be here, and I wouldn’t even be writing this, because there’d be no tale to tell. Should’a, could’a, would’a. Regret is a wicked bitter fucking pill to swallow.

  Yeah, I suppose I just dropped a spoiler on you. But it’s not like I give a shit. I ain’t doing this for your amusement and titillation.

  Yeah. You.

  I’d like to delude myself into believing that I’m doing it for Selwyn, just so there will be a record of her short life left behind—no matter how unflattering—so she will not have been x-ed out without so much as a trace remaining to show she ever was.

  So.

  The next morning when we awoke, wrapped in those sticky sheets and each other’s arms, she put her lips to my ear and whispered, “It’s beautiful.”

  I slapped her.

  “Like fuck it is,” I snarled. “You want to be a killer, be a killer. Just don’t ever let me hear you try and romanticize it.”

  She rubbed her jaw and stared at the stiff, mutilated corpse beside her.

  I continued. “It’s not a game. It’s not a fantasy. There’s no dark gift. There’s murder and horror, and one day we’ll both have hell to pay. Literally. I ever catch you thinking otherwise, I’ll break your fucking neck.”

  There was a good-sized tear in Eve’s throat, just below her larynx, and Selwyn slid three fingers inside it, like some grotesque parody of doubting fucking Thomas and Jesus Christ, a story that’s plenty grotesque enough to start with. Yeah, I was raised to be a good Irish Catholic girl, force-fed all that nonsense right up until I ran away to live on the dirty streets of Providence.

  “You’re telling me it isn’t a rush?” Selwyn asked. “You really expect me to believe you don’t enjoy this? If so, I’m not buying it, Quinn.”

  I wanted to slap her again. Instead, I got up and went to the table where, the night before, I’d left my phone.

  “I’m not telling you that at all,” I replied, trying to remember the number I needed. “It’s better than sex ever was. It’s even better than heroin, and I never thought I’d love anything better than smack.”

  “You were an addict?” She took her hand out of the wound and sniffed at her fingers.

  “Still am. Only now it’s blood, not H. But, Selwyn, what you did last night, that’s no different from Jeffrey Dahmer wrapping his cock in some poor fuck’s intestines and jacking off. If that’s your idea of beautiful, keep it to yourself.”

  She changed the subject. Smart girl.

  “How do we get rid of the body?” she asked.

  “I’m about to take care of that right now,” I told her, and I dialed the number of a janitor over in Red Hook. Back in Rhode Island, I’d had to clean up my own messes. Here in Manhattan, I’d learned there were people who’d pay for the privilege of wiping my ass for me. They were quick, thorough, and they never asked questions. What they did with the refuse, hey, that was their own business, the sick fucks. I called and was told someone would be around in half an hour or less, traffic permitting. There was already a truck in the neighborhood.

  “I need a shower,” Selwyn said. “Wanna join me?”

  I shook my head. There was a chance the cleaners would arrive early, and if I got in the shower with her, well, I knew where that would lead.

  “You go on. I’m gonna tidy up.”

  I didn’t bother getting dressed. Eve’s eyes were still open, and I sat on the edge of the bed, staring into them. The shower sounded like heaven. I looked into the blind, blank gaze of the woman who’d sheltered me, but all I could think of was the hot water pounding Selwyn’s tits and cunt. After five minutes or so, I wrapped the body tightly in the bloody sheets. Usually, I let the cleaners take care of that, but suddenly I needed to be busy. The night before, dumb bitch that I am, I’d gone and changed the whole goddamn tried-and-true ball game of my existence, and it was a lot easier to try and figure out what came next if I kept busy.

  “You trust these guys?” Selwyn asked. I looked up, and she was standing in the doorway, wet and naked, drying her black, black hair with a white bath towel.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “I trust these guys. Put some clothes on.”

  “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  She shrugged and disappeared back into the steamy bathroom.

  The resurrection men—they never called themselves cleaners or janitors, always resurrection men, when they called themselves anything—came and went. They didn’t so much as bat an eyelash at the nude, gore-smeared vampire. I was a familiar enough sight, me and however many other nasties they knew on a first-name basis. These guys, they were hip to what sorta appalling shit goes bump in the night. After all, they might be mortal, but they did a fair share of bumping themselves. They took away the corpse and the mattress and the box springs. They cut away ruined chunks of carpet and sheetrock. They paid me fifteen hundred dollars for their trouble, for their windfall. Selwyn watched on quietly, and I could tell she was amazed, impressed, enthralled. Yeah, I had a budding psychopath on my hands. I was beginning to wonder if the CPA’s was the first murder she’d taken part in.

  “What next?” she asked eagerly as soon as they’d left.

  “What next is I take a shower.”

  “I mean after that, Quinn.”

  “I assume you have a place to live. I can’t stay here anymore.”

  She nodded and reached for one of my cigarettes. She lit it and blew smoke rings. “Yeah, I have a place. So we’re roomies now?”

  “Sure seems that way.”

  She smiled.

  There you go.

  How Quinn met Selwyn.

  When I left Providence, I did try to give up the whole undead avenger shtick. My heart was never in it, anyway. Like I said already, I traveled south, then west, then I came to the Big Apple, and I decided to live and let live. Or whatever it is the reanimated dead do when they’re minding their own affairs and not being goddamn self-righteous hypocrites. In fact, during my time in NYC I’d only taken out a single nasty, a gutter vamp down in the Village who’d made the mistake of getting in my face about my arrangement with Barbara O’Bryan. Maybe I should have let it go, water off a duck’s ass and all that, but I hadn’t.

  Of course, a lot of folks knew who I was. I’d gotten a reputation over the years. Which happens. Frankly, I was surprised no one came gunning for me. I’d been good at slaying my fellow monsters, and that shit’s like it used to be for gunslingers in the Old West. You get a rep, and there’s always another asshole with a six-shooter looking to put you down and win your infamy for themselves. But no one messed with me. Maybe, like Selwyn that night at the club, I just got lucky.

  I bother mentioning all this because Selwyn asked a lot of questions during our taxi ride to her tiny, rent-controlled apartment in Hell’s Kitchen; she’d inherited it from her dad. She grilled me, and I wanted to tell her to shut up. The driver kept glancing in her rearview mirror, shooting us the sort of glances you reserve for people who talk that sort of crazy shit in the backseat of your hack. I didn’t much care whether or not she took any of it seriously, and besides, odds were she thought we were a couple of loons or larpers or something like that. Whenever I caught her watching us, I’d just smile the most innocent smile I could manage, flashing the fake teeth that hid the truth of my predator’s mouth.

  “So, this guy in Providence, he was mortal?”

  She meant B.

  “Yeah, but it didn’t stop him from being the king of all cocksuckers,” I replied. “At least demons have an excuse.”

  “Still,” she said, “guess you gotta give him some credit. Not many people would have the nerve—”

>   “Fuck that,” I interrupted. “He’s a low-life grifter who’s found a big con, and he’s stubborn enough and foolish enough to hang on as long as he can squeeze out a few more pennies.”

  “Still,” she persisted, “he showed up and saved your ass, didn’t he? I mean . . . sorta?”

  “Is that how you see it? Shit . . .”

  She was quiet a moment, then said, “After that ghoul, and the first vampire—”

  “Both accidents.”

  “Still . . .”

  “Look, B’s the reason a big-time beastie ever had cause to come looking for me. If I hadn’t been such a goddamn junkie that I was willing to accept a job as a contract killer of killers, I’d have stayed mortal and the worst that ever would have happened is I’d have died.”

  “But you did die.”

  “And stayed dead.”

  I still hadn’t put her wise to the fact that I was double cursed, double damned, double fucking dipped, that I was a vamp who’d been infected by a werewolf before Mercy had kissed me with those china-doll lips and left me lying in a weedy ditch near the Seekonk River. So, Selwyn, she only knew half the joke.

  “Did it hurt?” she wanted to know.

  “Fuck you.”

  She sighed and looked out the passenger-side window, frowning at pedestrians and storefronts.

  “I just don’t get why you’re so bitter, Quinn. I mean, what’s done is done. Shouldn’t you at least try to make the best of it?”

  “Listen, just for starters, how about you get yourself raped to death. Then come to and remember it all in perfect detail. Then we’ll talk. And stop pouting.”

  “I don’t want to die,” she said. “It’s hard for me to imagine anything that’s worse than death.”

  “Then you’re not trying hard enough. We’ll have to work on that.”

  It went on like that until we finally, mercifully, pulled up to the curb in front of the apartment building on Ninth Avenue. Selwyn paid the driver, who popped the trunk so I could retrieve the gym bag and cardboard box that was all I’d left Brooklyn with. Some clothes, a few books, two pistols, and the mini-crossbow not unlike the one B had given me what seemed like a hundred years before, a bottle of saline and my contact lens case. A makeup bag. The charger and cords for my iPod and phone. My banged-up laptop. Selwyn had said it was a shame leaving all the sex toys behind, and I’d told her to take whatever she wanted, so she had a plastic shopping bag full of dildos and vibrators and lube.