Cherry Bomb_ A Siobhan Quinn Novel - Caitlin R. Kiernan Page 0,11
the mood for stupid questions—but, then, who the hell ever is, right? I sighed and watched the plate-glass windows, all the people walking past. They looked like a buffet.
“I was there,” I told her. “I didn’t do shit but scream and try to get out of its way. If the stupid, clumsy fucker had looked where it put its feet, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
The first nasty I ever saw, and the first that ever died because of me. Note that I did not say “first I ever killed,” because I didn’t do jack shit but scream like the teenage girl I was and try to crawl away—after it had murdered Lily. Fuck. I never even learned her last name. She was just Lily, and me, I was just Quinn. We met out back of a They Might Be Giants show at Lupo’s, and after that night we were lovers, best friends, inseparable partners in heroin. Yeah, I do know just how sappy that sounds, and no, I don’t care. You swear to someone you’d die before you let any harm come to them, you swear you’d die to protect them, and then, well, the shit hits the fan and you pussy out. I hadn’t told Selwyn about Lily on our cab ride to her place. I’d kept to the bare bones. That first kill, the ghoul with two left feet, it was an accident. Period. That’s all she knew, and it’s all she ever found out.
“That’s not what I mean,” Selwyn said, and I nearly told her to drop it right then. I wish I had. Hindsight and all that, you know. “What I mean is, Quinn, what if it was a setup?”
I didn’t answer. But I stopped watching the people and watched her, instead.
“Oh, c’mon. Surely you’ve thought about this before. Surely it’s crossed your mind.”
“Surely what’s crossed my mind?”
She glared at me like I was the kid sitting in the corner, the one wearing the pointy cap.
“This B dude, he needed a slayer, yeah? So . . . what if he arranged the whole thing? What if he led the ghoul to the warehouse that night? What if, after that, he made sure that second one, the vamp bitch, knew where you’d be, and—”
I interrupted her.
“Did you somehow miss the part where I was just some homeless kid, strung out and willing to do anything for my next fix? Not exactly chosen one material.”
“Sure, I know it looks that way. Maybe it’s supposed to look that way. But all those demons and things he was associated with, who also stood to benefit, could be one of them figured it out, your potential, and pointed him towards you.”
“Are you done? Because I need a cigarette.”
“Does it scare you to even entertain the possibility?”
Wanna know the truth? Yeah, it scared me. Scared me shitless. Because all at once I was having what theologians and philosophers and such call an epiphany. A eureka moment. Pieces started falling into place—that ghoul, the first vamp, Alice Cregan that day Bobby Ng screwed up at Swan Point Cemetery, Jack Grumet, the Bride of Quiet—everything, right on down the line. Might be it made too much sense, which is how conspiracy theories tend to work. There’s this one crazy idea, but suffering Jesus on his cross, why has no one bothered to think of it before? Because they’ve all been suckered, of course, just like you’ve been suckered, but then the scales fall from your eyes and WHAM! Why didn’t anyone else ever put two and two together? Why?
Well, could be because the ideas are actually dumb ideas. And your eureka moment is the product of desperation and/or gullibility and/or plan ol’ ignorance.
But there in Famous Original Ray’s, drowning in the stink of pepperoni and garlic and burned dough, ain’t gonna lie—I was scared by what she was saying to me.
“Wow, you really haven’t ever thought of it.”
“I’m asking you nicely to shut up, Selwyn.”
She leaned back and scowled at me. Disappointment was written all over her face.
“Dad taught me the worst fear in the whole wide world is when people are afraid to look at the evidence before them and—”
What I said next, I didn’t try not to sound pissed.
“So, you’ve known me less than twenty-four hours, but here you’ve sussed out this imaginary grand and secret shadow show of my fate.”
“You believe in fate, Quinn?”
“I was speaking fucking euphemistically.” I was also quickly losing my temper, which is never good in