Cherry Bomb: A Siobhan Quinn Novel (9 page)

There was confusion in those eyes, and fear, and more hate than I’d ever thought could be crammed into a glare. The hate, that was mostly the Beast’s. I was the bitch who held her chain, who kept her locked away to rot in the prison of me. Ever been to the zoo and looked into the eyes of a wolf or a coyote or a mountain lion stuck there behind iron bars or Plexiglas? Ever seen that venom, that spite? Well, there you go.

One or the other of us, me or the Beast broke the mirror. I like to believe it was me who did it. But that’s probably wishful thinking.

I say
one or the other of us
because that’s the best I can
describe what it was like. Like I said, my mind hadn’t had the decency to take a powder, so there we were together at last. And speaking of the limitations of language, I’m not sure I have the language needed to describe the hours that followed. I doubt anyone does, anyone dead or alive or whatever. But I’m gonna try.

I don’t remember leaving Selwyn’s apartment or the stairs. Next thing I knew I was out on the sidewalk, and a woman was screaming bloody goddamn murder. You remember the end of
An American Werewolf in London
, after David Kessler’s final transformation in the porno theater, when he’s rampaging around Piccadilly Circus fucking shit up? Well . . . it wasn’t like that. Just that one unfortunate woman. We, it, I reared up on two legs and towered over her, seven and a half, eight feet. She opened her mouth to scream again, and the
loup
picked her up and smacked her head once against a lamppost before dragging her away into an alley, leaving nothing behind but a gooey smear of brains. A great deal of what was to come would involve skulking through alleys and shit, because, turned out I was more than a reluctant passenger. Turned out I still had a modicum of control over the Beast. Which, you know, only pissed it off that much more. But that night I managed to teach it the value of caution.

Go me.

The screaming woman was the first person we ate that night. Whatever revulsion I might have harbored, I harbored it very briefly. It had been a long time since I’d known the simple pleasure of chewing and swallowing solid food. I found myself savoring every raw, greedy mouthful. Those razor teeth pulled her apart easy as you
please, and between those jaws her bones might as well have been pocky. Whoa. Weird analogy. How about
her bones might as well have been pretzel sticks
, instead? No, that’s really not much better. Never mind. Probably, you know what I mean.

And shit I felt strong. I felt motherfucking
alive
, which I’d never, ever dared imagine I would feel ever again. Here was how the other half lived. The Beast was seducing me, whether it knew it was or not. And I thought,
I could lose myself in here. I could just let it run on and on and on, and I’d never have to go back to being Quinn.

Who was she, anyway? Some pathetic dead girl, good at being bitter and surviving, but nothing much more than that. She was a parasitic phantom who wanted with all her sour heart to be
truly
dead, but she didn’t have the balls to make that happen. To grab that brass ring and get off the merry-go-round. But the Beast, it knew joy.

Nasties tend to look down on
loups
as the white trash of our psychofuck supernatural menagerie. Nothing lower than a
loup
but maybe a ghoul. Sure. That’s the party line. Demons and Faeries on their lofty pedestals, vamps out on the street, and werewolves in the gutters. Except, at least if we’re talking about the way bloodsuckers look down on
loups
, maybe that ain’t nothing but envy. Maybe, somewhere down deep, it’s obvious how living, how lycanthropy isn’t a curse at all.

How maybe it’s a blessing.

Not bad enough my very existence is a blasphemy in the eyes of Big Bads the world over. Not bad enough I’d become a traitor who hunted and put them down. I’d just become a heretic to boot.

When we were done with the screaming woman, there wasn’t much left of her but a puddle of gore, and a stingy puddle at that. And I was still starving. My taste for blood has always been easy enough to temporarily satisfy. But this, this was a hunger that was utterly absolute and insatiable. I instinctively knew how the Beast could eat for days and never get its fill. And, honestly, crouching there in the alley behind Selwyn’s apartment building, that would’ve been fine by me.

We, I, it glanced up at the sky, as if seeking a premature full moon. Not that the
loup
’s appearances have ever much synced up with lunar phases. I’d long ago written that off to superstition, and, hey and by the way, learning that the world is full of monsters and magic’s real and all that crap doesn’t mean that isn’t still superstition. Everything isn’t true, just because an awful lot of weird shit turns out to be. Yes, there are demons and vamps and unicorns and Faeries, but it ain’t bad luck to walk under a ladder and black cats are nothing but cats that are black. And werewolves don’t seem to care about the moon.

Where was I?

We howled, and I’d have sworn, for an instant or two, the night around us held its breath.

And then the
loup
ran, and I’d say that I was dragged along for the ride. Only it wasn’t like that at all. I was
riding
. Oh, I could have fought, and maybe the struggle would even have made a difference, but I didn’t. We went south, keeping always to alleys and side streets. I can’t say which side streets and alleys, because it hardly mattered. Not like I was reading the signs. Lurching along on two legs, racing on four, our claws dug furrows in asphalt and
scraped across concrete and cobblestones. Everything unfolded around me in a ghostly haze of night vision. Somewhere, the Beast’s left shoulder clipped a dumpster, and the dumpster skidded away, doing almost a full one eighty before smacking into a brick wall. We were briefly stunned. Or it was stunned, and I was aware of that fact. Which the fuck ever. It was knocked off its feet, but got right back up again. Jesus, I’ve never felt so invulnerable. Like . . . like what? Like that bullshit self-confidence comes along with the rush after a couple of lines of cocaine, but multiplied a hundred times.

Yeah, like that.

Car horns, car alarms, the squeal of tires and brake pads. Screams and curses. Dogs locked up inside going monkey shit at the smell of us and barking their heads off. The stink of garbage and rats and pigeon shit and . . . every smell of Manhattan amped up and off the scales. And we killed. Almost anything, anyone unlucky or dumb enough to get in our way went down and stayed down. Most barely had a chance to scream. Barely knew what hit them, or didn’t know at all.

Probably the latter.

You’re out for a stroll, or your walking your Pomeranian, and this huge fucking brute lunges out of the shadows, in those final seconds, how likely is it you’re gonna think,
Oh shit on me, a werewolf,
right? You’re too busy being totally stupefied or with fleeting thoughts of just how screwed you are. I mean, I’m talking about regular people here, those not in on the great cosmic joke that monsters walk among them.

We barreled headlong, full-tilt boogie into the
passenger side of a Volkswagen Beetle, and the car was tossed several feet into the air and landed upside down on a punk kid on a skateboard. Splat. I was dimly amazed. Dude, that was, I gotta say, one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. Hey, I bet that guy on the skateboard would have agreed.

Unlike the dumpster, the Volkswagen didn’t even slow us down. The Incredible Hulk? That snot-green son of a bitch has nothing on my
loup.

Yeah, that night, that November morning, was when I began thinking of the Beast as mine. Or, no. Wait. That’s not quite right, ’cause the Beast is without a doubt her
own
Beast. More like, I realized she’s an integral part of me, an intimate part of me—of the
new
me that Mercy and Grumet had created—wedded inextricably to whatever miserable crumb was left of my soul. Suddenly, she was more than a bothersome fucking furball who popped up from time to time for the express purpose of messing with precious goddamn me. Might come off schmaltzy, but dashing helter-skelter about Gotham, decapitating and disemboweling and dismembering, I also found myself thinking of her as a
friend
. Yeah, right? Hell, I hadn’t had too many of those when I was alive, and no more than a couple postmortem, Selwyn Throckmorton and Aloysius the troll. Oh, and a violet-skinned succubus went by the fine old Puritan name of Clemency Hate-evil before being my friend got her killed. Or got her worse. I was never sure which.

But it wasn’t as simple as that. This epiphany, I mean. There was more to it. We hit the Volkswagen, and shortly afterwards I had . . . let’s call it a vision, because I don’t
know what the hell else I’d call it. You got something better, be my guest. One minute I was all but drowning in the sound of the Beast’s paws hammering at the pavement, tripping balls on the carnage, on a million noises, odors, sights, et cetera and fucking et cetera.

Jump cut.

And I was walking slowly through a forest. Dry leaves crunched under my bare feet, and the moon—a
full
moon, mind you—was shining down through branches that were mostly bare. Because wherever I was that was no longer Lower Manhattan, it was autumn there, too. Maybe it was even November. I knew right off those woods weren’t real. They could have been a storybook forest, the sort of place dreamed up so wicked witches can build their gaudy gingerbread houses while Snow White lies in a coma surrounded by her seven dwarves. A forest built out of imagination. Yeah, that was the way it struck me, like it hadn’t grown there, like it had been thought into being.

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.”