Cherry Bomb_ A Siobhan Quinn Novel - Caitlin R. Kiernan Page 0,24

mostly. And they didn’t leave England by choice. Frankly, I don’t know a lot of the details, but it seems their reputation finally got the best of them. Witchcraft, human sacrifice, cannibalism. The list goes on and on. All across Europe, lots of people accused of being witches were being burned at the stake in the early sixteen hundreds, and the families must have decided they were all living on borrowed time. The Snows apparently led the diaspora. Nicholas and Constance Snow arrived in Plymouth in 1620, then John and Anne Endicott in 1623. The Cabots were latecomers, probably because their reputations weren’t quite as bad. They didn’t make it to Massachusetts until 1700. And Antoine Cabot, he didn’t come to New England, but took his family to New Orleans in 1753, because he—”

She was already boring the shit out of me, and I interrupted. “‘And unto Enoch was born Irad: and Irad begat Mehujael: and Mehujael begat Methusael: and Methusael begat Lamech.’ Can we skip the genealogy falderal?”

Selwyn seemed surprised I could quote Scripture. But, like they say, it pays to know them what want to put wooden stakes through your chest, decapitate you, and cut off your head, tiddley-pom.

“I thought you wanted to hear this.”

I called for another beer; this time I skipped to the chase and asked the bartender to leave the bottle of Jack.

“Yeah, okay,” I said and rubbed my temples; I was getting a headache. You’d think being dead, at least I’d be spared headaches. You’d be wrong. “I’m assuming this wasn’t just paranoia, that these actually were dipping their collective big toes in the black arts.”

She shook her head.

“No, it wasn’t just paranoia. Sometime back in the fifteenth century, during the reign of Henry VI, during the Wars of the Roses, that’s when it started. What with all that feuding from the nobility, you know, the power of the Crown was starting to erode. Rumor has it that the families were somehow involved in the deposing of the king by his cousin Edward in 1461. Edward was the first Yorkist King of England, you know.”

I’ll be the first to admit I know less than fuck all about English history, and give much less than two shits, and the Girl Who’d Lost Her Tail had also just lost me.

“The families, the men and women whose descendants would become the three families, they made a pact with the Ghul. So long as one daughter was offered to them each generation to bear half-ghoul children, the families would prosper. The ghouls had been squirreling away treasures in the vaults of Thok and Pnath since they were cast down into the Underworld by the Djinn—”

I’m not making this stuff up. Neither was she. Lovecraft might not have known about the war—or he chose not to write everything he knew—but he got a lot of other stuff about the ghouls right.

“—and as long as the families kept their pledge, some of that plunder would be given to the patriarchs and matriarchs and so forth. Both sides were good to their word. And the families grew bolder. They started summoning demons and making deals with dark gods—at least this is what my mother had told Daddy. Even got in with one or two of the Great Old Ones. I’m not sure I believe that part. But maybe. Dad saw the Snow library once—long story—and he swore there were copies of both Cultes des Goules and the Necronomicon, possibly the Greek translation that had belonged to Richard Pickman.

“Also,” she added, “except for the ghouls and maybe an occasional ritual tryst with worse things, the families don’t breed outside the families. Which was one of Mom’s terrible transgressions against them. In their eyes, of course, it makes me an abomination.”

I sipped at my whiskey and smoked my cigarette. “What a naughty bunch of shitbirds,” I said. “Guess it’s no wonder your mother tried to disown them. And these twins?”

“Isaac and Isobel,” she said and pushed her watery old-fashioned away. The napkin had soaked through, and she smeared water across the varnished wood. “They were sired by a ghoul. See, that’s how it is with the kids. The Ghul send them back up into this world. Well, all of the ones who can pass for human.”

She stopped talking, so I prodded her.

“And they send them back because?”

She looked at me again. But at least her eyes weren’t bugging out over me being a werewolf.

“They’re trying to come back. The Ghul. They’ve been looking