Cherry Bomb_ A Siobhan Quinn Novel - Caitlin R. Kiernan Page 0,23

her talk. I didn’t have to. I could have gotten up and walked out, bought a bus or train ticket, put Manhattan behind me, and hoped none of the grief Selwyn had earned would follow me.

I sat on my stool and listened.

“Mom had some money she’d inherited from a dead aunt or uncle, and she enrolled at NYU. She wanted to study art history. Anyway, that’s where she met my father. He was doing his postdoc work. They got married, she dropped out, got a job at the Strand, and Dad didn’t find out anything about her family until after I was born. She’d told him she was from Alaska.”

“Alaska,” I said.

“Yeah. Anchorage. He believed her, which is sort of crazy because she had such a strong Boston accent and all. Maybe he just didn’t care what the truth was, decided it didn’t really matter, whatever. It was three years before he found out, not until after I was born. He wouldn’t have found out then if I hadn’t been born with a tail.”

In one of those old screwball comedies Selwyn liked so much, here’s where I’d have done a spit take. But dead girls, we don’t do spit takes when we hear our new fuck buddy was born with a tail. Par for the course, water off a duck’s back, cliché, cliché, cliché. We’re a jaded lot.

“I didn’t notice a tail last night,” I told her.

“That’s because my mother told them to amputate it. When she saw it, she got hysterical. She wouldn’t even hold me until the doctors cut it off. Dad used to apologize, like it was all his fault I didn’t still have a tail.”

I imagined that dusty old portrait of Karl Marx was staring sympathetically down at me as if he understood precisely how impatient I was getting, exactly how much I was wishing Selwyn would hurry up and get to the goddamn point already. I lit a cigarette. I didn’t offer her one.

“That was very sweet of him,” I said. “But how the fuck did your tail lead to his finding out about the skeletons in your mom’s closet?”

“She told him. She got it in her head somehow that he’d connect the dots—which was perfectly ludicrous, because it’s not like he’d ever even heard of the Endicotts or the Snows or—”

“Promise me this starts making sense eventually,” I interrupted, and she took a swallow of her old-fashioned. Most of the ice had melted.

“She freaked out. Got paranoid. I honestly have no idea. But a few days after they came home from the hospital, she started talking and didn’t stop talking until Daddy knew why I’d been born with a tail and a whole shitload more about her family and their past than, you know, than they wanted anyone who wasn’t one of them knowing. I was also born with a caul,” she added, like an afterthought.

“Which means . . . what?” I asked. “Come on. I’m a blood-sucking freak and a werewolf. It’s not like you’re gonna shock me.”

That was the thud of the other shoe dropping.

Her sapphire-blue eyes got very, very wide, and I half expected they were gonna pop out of her skull and go rolling away across the floor.

“Fuck,” she whispered. “You’re a werewolf? And you were gonna tell me this when?”

“Jesus.” I sighed, a great big exasperated sigh and rubbed at my eyes. My stomach grumbled, and I wondered how long it would be before anyone noticed if I ate the bartender. “How about right after you got around to explaining how you got your hands on that necklace, or ever got involved with goddamn Faeries, or—”

“Yeah, but . . . Jesus. I didn’t even know werewolves were real. Not for sure. How did—”

“Shut up,” I said. “Just shut up. Later. I’ll tell you all about it later. If I feel like it. Meanwhile, you were saying, your mom blew a fuse over your tail and your caul and ratted out her creepy relatives. Your creepy relatives.”

“Yeah,” Selwyn said, still watching me like I was about to get all hairy right then and there. “I was.”

My stomach grumbled again. The bartender seemed like a nice enough guy, but I’d eaten a lot of nice guys over the years, and what was one more?

“You were going to tell me what babies with tails have to do with the Snows and the Endicotts.”

“And the Cabots.”

“Them, too.”

She finally took her eyes off me.

Warning: infodump inbound.

“The families came mostly from north of England, Yorkshire