Cherry Bomb_ A Siobhan Quinn Novel - Caitlin R. Kiernan Page 0,19
eyes, she could have been some runway model bitch, bulimic and thin as a rail. But still hot, right. Aster’s ash-blond hair was cut in a bob, and she had eyes almost the same shade of gray as B’s. The dress she was wearing was so sheer I’m not sure why she bothered wearing anything at all. By the way, I’m not sure the Faerie was actually female; these are pronouns of convenience. Beneath that glamour, Aster could have been anything at all. Besides, with Faeries, gender and sex and whatnot tends to be a pretty slippery affair.
The Faerie named Aster studied me, and then she said to Selwyn, “I would caution you against taking one such as this into your bed, child, but you know your own affairs better than I.”
“We have an arrangement. I trust her,” Selwyn said, and she winked at me. “Mostly.”
“We must always be careful with whom we bargain and where we’ve placed our trust,” the Faerie said, “and especially when matters of the heart are concerned.”
I ran my fingers through my hair, making sure all the bees were gone, still imagining I could feel them on me.
“Lady, I don’t currently plan on eating her,” I told the Faerie, not much bothering to hide the indignation at having been dragged across town to be attacked by a swarm of bees and have my character called into question by this Tinkerbelle slut. “Which is not to say that might not change, of course. Being one such as this and all.”
Selwyn pulled the shiny, shiny necklace from her jacket right about the same time I noticed the hives.
“Oh,” crooned the Faerie. “Oh, it’s even more beautiful than the ballads would have us believe, isn’t it?”
Hive is the only word I can think of that even comes close to describing the misshapen things lining the walls of the room. Clearly, they’d once been human beings, and probably, in some sense, they still were. Some of them were still alive. I know this because a couple of them were breathing, and one even turned its head. I’d say it was watching me, only it didn’t have any eyes. Try to imagine if someone had attempted to mold statues from honeycombs and done a fucking sloppy job. Bingo. It was hard to tell where one began and another ended, and their waxy yellow flesh was pockmarked with thousands of hexagonal pits. And the bees were all over them. The hives had holes where mouths had been, and holes in other places, and the bees crawled in and out, out and in. The honey I was smelling dripped from those horrid fucking things and pooled on the floor around them. Takes a whole damn lot to make me want to puke. Those things did the trick.
“I knew you wouldn’t be disappointed,” said Selwyn, pleased with herself and seemingly oblivious to the hives. I figured she’d likely seen them at least once before. Maybe shit like that didn’t bother her anymore. Maybe it never had.
The Faerie said, “My dear Ms. Smithfield, a treasure is lost—so lost to have been all but forgotten even to the memory of Daoine Sídhe—it is foolish to believe it will ever again be seen. A treasure lost as long as was the Tear of Dis, then I do not hesitate to name its reappearance miraculous.”
Me, I was trying to concentrate on anything at all but the hive people. So I stared at the string of diamonds and that huge ruby cupped in Selwyn’s right hand. In the taxi, I hadn’t realized the way the ruby seemed to shine . . . no, wrong word. How the ruby seemed to ooze a soft reddish glow. The stone wasn’t reflecting light; it was making it. Wasn’t the first time I’d seen that sort of magic, and I still don’t know why it took me that long to catch on. Maybe the ruby waited until it was there with the Faerie to show its true colors—ha-ha.
“That’s infernal,” I said, and Selwyn nodded.
“Taken from the mines beneath the City of Iron,” she replied. “Supposedly it belonged to some archduke or another for, I don’t know, thousands of years. Took me—”
“Correction, love,” the Faerie interrupted. “Your kind would count it in millions of years.”
Now that I knew what it was, the ruby seemed a fuck-ton worse than the hive people.
“So, wait. You traffic in hellgoods?” I asked Selwyn.
I felt her eyes on me, but I didn’t look away from the necklace.