Cherry Bomb: A Siobhan Quinn Novel

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  I told her to run.

  And deep down inside me, the Beast opened her eyes.

  Yeah, I said to her. Sure thing, puppy. Let’s party. Let’s rock out with our cocks out.

  But it wasn’t like it had been on wolfsbane. There was the old fade-to-black routine. And, frankly, I was then and still am grateful for that. Sure, I’d have loved to feel what it was like, ripping apart the hounds who flooded into that subway car. I wish I could claim I have no idea what magical, mystical cosmic agency decides if I’ll retain consciousness whenever the Beast arrives to paint the town red. If it’s all up to me, that child and her wolf at the edge of the field, the forest at their backs, or if it falls to some secret sliver of my brain making nanosecond decisions. Or both. I don’t really care.

  I awoke on cold stone, and at least half the pain I’d felt in the instant before I’d blacked out was still right with me. Hell, the transformation into Beast would have seen to a sackful of ouch, without having first been shot in the shoulder and then pummeled by fuck knows how many of the Ghul who’d jumped us.

  I’d been dreaming of long-lost Lily—murdered by a ghoul, the first nasty I killed, even if it was an accident, beginner’s fucking luck. Pretty, pretty Lily, my compatriot in Needle Park, Lily and the streets.

  Not kind dreams.

  I opened my eyes and lay still on my back a long time. Fifteen, twenty minutes. Half an hour. I don’t know. I was disoriented, and I was trying to get reoriented. There was a growing urgency as the attack on the train came back to me, and as I realized Selwyn wasn’t there with me. I called out her name a couple of times, but got nothing except my own voice echoing back to me. I was naked, and if I’d been alive, I’d likely have been freezing to death. Wherever I was, it was cold and dank and stank of mildew and ages of accumulated dust. Wherever I was, was dark. Not that it much mattered to my built-in vamp night-vision goggles. It was just a matter of convincing the three of everything to get together and be the one of everything.

  There was a tremendous whoosh of warm air and then the cacophony of a train rattling past. So, I knew I was still in the subway. But I was alone. Alone and naked. I rolled over onto my left side and there was my duster, neatly folded, and there were my pants, also neatly folded. A great what-the-fuck moment. No shoes, though. No shirt. And, I’d see soon enough, no gun. What kinda half-assed mercy was that?

  My surroundings were beginning to wriggle into focus. It was a deserted station. There are a lot of those, though most people have no idea they even exist. Abandoned, shut-away platforms, trolleys, entire stations. I’d seen a few of them in my time in NYC, when restlessness had gotten the better of me, and I’d roamed the city without Barbara O’Bryan the CEO blood doll hanging on. This particular abandoned subway station, it was one I’d visited twice before. I’d found it a great place to be alone. It was the old City Hall Station, decommissioned back in 1945, shut away more than seventy years. There’s nothing else like it down in the tunnels. Nothing else like it in the rat’s maze below Manhattan, all decked out with stained glass, tiled vaults, Romanesque brick arches, and brass chandeliers. You know humans. They toss out the old and beautiful for the new and soullessly functional. Once upon a time, this station was the southern terminus of the Interborough Rapid Transit, which stretched from City Hall to Grand Central Station, across 42nd Street to Times Square, and all the way north to 145th Street along Broadway. Sometimes the station is lit, and passengers who linger on the 6 after the Brooklyn Bridge can get a peek of that ghostly reminder of a more graceful age.

  Listen to me, waxing all damn sentimental over a fucking subway station. Jesus.

  I rolled over onto my back again, not even bothering to wonder how the Seventh Avenue line had dumped me a stone’s throw from the Brooklyn Bridge station. I’d encountered pocket universes before, and sorceries used to wrap time and space to the needs of an elite few who wielded that brand of mojo. Certainly it hadn’t been the doing of the ghouls. Isaac Snow maybe, which made him a much more formidable dude than I’d suspected from what Selwyn had told me. If he could pull shit like this, or if he had those who could on his payroll, he was way more than some power-hungry half-breed. He was the thaumaturgic equivalent of a goddamn thermonuclear bomb.

  I groaned and sat up. I wanted to lie right back down again, but fuck that. For all I knew, I’d been out for hours, maybe an entire day. Selwyn could be anywhere. She could be fucking dead, for all I knew. And yeah, I cared, whether I wanted to care or not. Was I pissed at her dragging me into this cloak-and-dagger hullabaloo with the Snow twins? Damn straight, but that didn’t change how I’d discovered I felt for her. I was past walking away, and more’s the pity. Probably, I’d been past walking away since the first time we screwed, no matter what I might have told her to the contrary.

  I sat there and stared at the mosaic of yellow and green and black, brown and cobalt-blue glazed bricks that make up the stations walls, archways, and the vaulted ceiling, building blocks laid a century before. Those blue stained-glass skylights, and even through the haze in my head, I couldn’t help but be amazed there was an age when people bothered to make a subway station so beautiful. Probably, I was recovering from a concussion, which would explain this gawking at Victorian architecture when I should have been dragging my sorry ass off to find Selwyn.

  It was a fair bet the ghouls had taken her.

  And if they had, they’d taken her to Isaac Snow, which would mean he had the Madonna, and . . . well, I still had no idea what he wanted with that rock.

  My stomach suddenly rolled, and I cramped, then crawled on hands and knees to the edge of the platform and puked into the darkness where the disused track lay. This is what usually happens after the Beast comes out to play. My liquid-diet vamp stomach can’t deal with all that shit the wolf wolfs down, and as soon as I’m this me again, I hork up all that meat and . . . well, too often, worse stuff than meat. The Beast is not a discerning gourmand.

  So, there I am, huddled on the filthy platform of a forgotten subway station, naked as the day I was born, puking up my innards and cursing the indiscriminate appetites of loups. Hardly digested ghoul McNuggets spattering all over the place. Not a pretty picture. Not one I’d want preserved for posterity. What I would like very much to consider a private goddamn moment. Too bad. Not meant to be. I wiped my mouth on the back of one hand and sat up, hoping there was nothing left in me wasn’t supposed to be there.

  I realized someone was watching me.

  Vamps are extraplusgood at that. Probably I’d have figured it out sooner, if not for all the hurt and regurgitation.

  And then the watcher spoke. He—it was a he—had a voice like a two-hundred-year-old chain smoker. But I could also hear the remnants of the same sort of old-money Boston accent I’d heard through the phone when Isaac Snow had called Selwyn’s apartment. I have an ear for shit like that, accents.

  “Poor girl,” he said. “I trust you feel better now?” he asked. I turned around and gave the whoever it was a good look at my middle finger. Right hand.

  The speaker was leaning against a tiled wall, puffing a cigarette. He wasn’t a ghoul, not really. But he also wasn’t human, not really. He was what you’d get if a mad scientist set out to make one, then decided, halfway through, to make the other. He was also naked, so at least I wasn’t the only one. He had the scabby gray-purple skin of a ghoul, but his face was still more of a face than a muzzle, and his feet were not quite hooves. I could sorta make out a couple of toes. The son of a bitch had a schlong that dude porn stars would kill for, right? I mean, never before had I beheld a baloney pony of such prodigious dimensions. How do you not stare at something like that?

  “Who—and what—the fuck are you?”

  He didn’t answer me, just took a long drag off his cigarette. The tip flared in the gloom.

  “You’re not Isaac Snow,” I said. “I’ve heard his voice, and you’re not him.”
r />   I spat, trying to get the throw-up taste out of my mouth. Didn’t work.

  “No, I’m definitely not Isaac Snow,” said the nasty with the enormous dick. “But he’s the reason I’m here.”

  I’d already sorta guessed that part, but I didn’t tell him that.

  “Is that so? Well, do you happen to have any idea where the rest of my clothes are?” I pointed at the duster and my pants. “And my fucking gun?”

  He grinned, and his eyes glimmered. He for sure had the eyes and the toothsome smile of a ghoul—only different. I spat again.

  “And what about Miss Throckmorton?” he asked. “Surely you’ve noticed she’s missing, as well.”

  “Yeah, well, fuck her,” I said. “I’m tired of getting my ass kicked on her account. She can go hang, for all I care.”

  And right then, I probably meant it.

  “Fair enough,” he said. “But the hour is late, Quinn, and how you feel about her has ceased to be an issue.”

  I crawled the few feet to my clothes, my legs still too wobbly to stand. He kept talking.

  “She’s made you a part of this, and it’s unlikely you could, at this point, extricate yourself from the muck and mire of unfolding events.”

  I pulled on the duster. It was ripped and torn and the leather was still tacky from all the blood.

  “Goddamn cocksuckers went and killed my fucking coat,” I muttered.

  The nasty laughed, a sound that made his speaking voice positively melodious by comparison. I glared up at him, and he smiled back at me.

  “Dude, who the fuck are you?”

  “Pickman,” he said. “Richard Upton Pickman.”

  My turn to laugh. I dropped the ruined duster in my lap and shook my head, the way you shake your head when you can’t decide between That just fucking figures and No fucking way.

  “Well,” I said, flipping a mental coin, “that just fucking figures.”

  “Then you’ve heard of me?” He sounded pleased at the prospect.

  “Maybe I read a couple of stories once,” I replied.

  “Ah, yes. Those. I once had a bowl of strawberry ice cream with the Old Gent of Providence. He was never good about keeping secrets.”

  Smelling his cigarette, I started jonesing for one of my own. I needed the nicotine, and maybe it would help get the barf taste out of my mouth. However, I was not about to bum a smoke off the half ghoul.

  “Fine, Richard Upton Pickman. Am I also supposed to ask what you’re doing here?”

  “It does seem a more or less logical next step in the natural course of events.”

  “Ain’t nothing natural about the course of these events,” I said, setting the late lamented duster aside and reaching for my pants, only to discover they were as much a mess as my coat. But I pulled them on, anyway. What else was I supposed to do? I was tired of giving Pickman a free coochie show. Though, from what I’d heard, the guy (and his astounding wonder cock) didn’t swing that way.

  “I’ll not argue with that,” he said and laughed again. “But to answer your question, I’m here because I needed you not to die back there. Or, I should say, we needed you not to die.”

  I zipped my pants and stared at him.

  He asked, “We who, you’d like to know, yes?”

  “If you say so. Frankly, I’d rather know where the rest of my clothes are. And my gun. My gun’s been coming in especially handy lately.”

  Pickman produced a pistol, seemingly out of thin air, and tossed it to me. I caught the gun. It was a Browning Hi Power 9mm. Not my first choice, but beggars can’t be choosers. I checked to see if the clip was full; it was.

  “It isn’t yours,” he said, “but perhaps this will do for the time being.”

  “Thanks,” I said, popping the clip back in. “Fine, so what are you doing here?”

  “We have a common enemy, Miss Quinn. You do prefer to be called Quinn, or have I been misinformed?”

  “By ‘a common enemy,’ you mean Isaac Snow and his sister?”

  “I do.”

  “Then you’re gravely mistaken, my ugly friend. I said I don’t want anything else to do with Selwyn, and by extension, that includes the Snows. That most especially includes the Snows.”

  Pickman narrowed his eyes skeptically. He dropped the butt of his cigarette and ground it out under the thick sole of a deformed left foot.

  “Miss Quinn, not to be presumptuous—”

  “He said immediately before being just that.”

  “—but Isaac Snow has tried to kill you twice now. Even if you truly are washing your hands of Miss Throckmorton, you have a reputation for not letting people get away with such grave insults to your person.”

  “Don’t believe everything you hear,” I told him. “People exaggerate.” And I aimed the Browning at one of the stained-glass skylights, sighting down the barrel. The heft of the pistol felt good in my hand. “Or maybe you caught me in a forgiving kinda mood. Shit, maybe I’m turning over a new leaf.”

  Pickman frowned and scratched his chin whiskers.

  “Make no mistake, Miss Quinn. He may not kill her straightaway, because he needs her as a bargaining chip. But he will do her great mischief, he and Isobel. And if you do not bring him the Madonna, if that strategy proves futile, he will simply murder her. Well, not simply, as torture will surely be involved. Afterwards, he’ll come for you again. And he’ll continue hunting you until you’re dead and he has what he wants.”

  I lowered the Browning.

  “What do you mean, Until I bring him the Madonna? I don’t have the thing.”

  Pickman cocked a mangy eyebrow.

  “Oh, but you’re very much in the wrong on that account, Miss Quinn.” And then he nodded to a bundle at his feet. Selwyn’s bundle, the black Morrissey T-shirt wrapped about the basalt atrocity. Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, I swear it hadn’t been there a second before. My stomach rolled, and I gagged.

  But let’s say I didn’t.

  This is my story, right? And if I don’t want to throw up again, I don’t have to.

  Let’s say this happened, instead:

  I aimed the 9mm at the bundle.

  “Awesome,” I said. “Then I can do what someone should have done a long damn time ago. And when I’m finished, I’ll mail the gruesome twosome all the itty-bitty broken pieces. You might wanna step aside. And cover your ears.”

  “You go ahead and do that, Miss Quinn, and—assuming the Madonna can be undone with mere bullets, which I doubt—they’ll send her back to you in itty-bitty broken pieces. Then everyone can play Humpty Dumpty and All the King’s Men. Is that what you wish?”

  “I told you I am done with Selwyn.”

  “Yes, Miss Quinn, you did, and you lied. That was obvious. I would think that someone who lies as frequently as you would be better at it by now.”

  “Fuck you, you fucking elephant-dicked freak.”

  I tightened my grip on the trigger, as if I actually believed, even for a second, that I wasn’t lying. Holy goddamn dancing Moses in drag, I wanted to do it. I wanted to squeeze the trigger and empty that clip, reduce Mother and Child and that hellish pyrite whorl to a couple of handfuls of gravel and dust. I wanted not to give a shit what would happen to Selwyn. I wanted, as much as I’ve ever wanted anything, never to have met the quadroon psycho bitch.

  Problem is, I wanted her back even more.

  For the second time, I lowered the Browning.

  “Fuck you,” I said again, though this time I was addressing myself, not Pickman. I looked at him, and the bastard was grinning ear to ear.

  “Good girl,” he grinned. “Now, if we play our cards right, I honestly think there is some slim hope that we can get her back. But . . .” And he paused.

  “But what?”

  He scratched his chin again.

  “But, Quinn, there
’s rather more at stake here than yours and your lover’s lives. Very much more. The Snows mean to start a war. Right here, in this world. Your world.”

  I sighed and lay down on my back, staring up at the candy-colored kaleidoscope skylights. We must have been quite a sight, a fine fucking tableau, the topless werepire—blood and puke spattered—and Pickman standing over me, the man who’d ditched his human skin for life everlasting in a ghoul suit.

  “They mean to see the prophecy fulfilled,” he said, “at any cost.”

  “The prophecy.”

  “Have you ever heard of the B’heil Djinna? The war between the ghouls and the Djinn?”

  I didn’t answer him. Instead, I closed one eye, then opened it and closed the other. It was a sort of a game I used to play when I was a kid, alive and kicking, lying in the grass staring up at clouds or stars or whatever happened to be overhead.

  “The Ghul were not always as you know them,” he said. “Once, they had a vast kingdom on this plane, in this realm, until they made the unfortunate and ill-considered decision to go to war against the Djinn. Almost four million years ago, during what human geologists refer to as the Pliocene Epoch, when mastodons and mighty chalicotheres still—”

  “Bored now.” I sighed. “Can we please fucking skip ahead to the point? As in, what prophecy?”

  Pickman pulled a face like a goat eating a tin can. He was clearly a fiend who disliked being interrupted.

  “I assume the clock is ticking,” I said.

  “The prophecy promises that there will be a savior,” Pickman said. “The Ghul call him the Qqi d’Tashiva, a messianic warlord, who will lead us back to our former glory. And Isaac Snow believes he is the Qqi d’Tashiva, and that his sister is the Qqi Ashz’sara, and together—”

  “Yeah, but hold up,” I interrupted again. “Way back in the Roaring Twenties, you went and cozied up to the ghouls. So, isn’t this savior something you’d want? Let my people go? Psalm 136. By the waters of Babylon, and—”