for a way since they lost the war. And the half-breeds give them a foothold. And they’re looking for something . . .” She trailed off. Sitting there among the relics of a fallen Communist empire, trying to digest Selwyn’s tale and wishing I was still capable of getting utterly cockeyed, I remembered my first impression of her from the night before. That she could have been a monster herself, hiding inside a glamour or some other sort of spell. That skin so damn pale I swear it almost glowed, but wasn’t the waxy sort of pale mine is. Her black hair. The sapphire eyes I keep bringing up. And, voilà, turns out I wasn’t too far off the mark, was I?
“So, this makes you?”
“Makes me what?”
I liked her, and I didn’t want to come right out and say it. Fortunately, I didn’t have to. It only took her a couple of seconds to realize what I was asking.
“My mother’s mother was a half-breed,” she said.
“Which makes you—”
I don’t know why I couldn’t seem to shut up and just let her talk.
“One-quarter,” she whispered. “That makes me one-quarter.” Which explained the tail, and if you buy into that shit about kids born with cauls being marked by demons, well, if the three families truly had made deals with demons and Yog-Sogthoth and what the hell ever, it explained that part, too.
End of infodump. Later, she’d tell me what happened to her parents, but that can wait.
“Is this why you specialize in ghoul artifacts and bones and stuff?”
“Quinn, I don’t specialize in ghoul artifacts. I already told you that.”
“Right,” I said. “Coincidence. I forgot.”
She checked her pocket watch again.
“You got some place to be?” I asked.
“I had some place to be twenty minutes ago.” And she put away the watch and took out her phone. “Now I have to explain why I’m late.”
“It happens,” I said. “Another customer?”
“Yeah. Up in the Bronx. Maybe you’d better sit this one out.” She took out her wallet.
“Who, me? Are you kidding? And miss you hawking the toenail clippings of the Earl of Weir or some shit? No way, baby girl.”
I’m not gonna lie. All I wanted was to sit there with Marx and Engels and Stalin and finish off the bottle. But, hey, she’d just paid for it, and it was portable. And I might as well admit that I was beginning to feel protective, no matter how furious I still was over Aster the Faerie. It crossed my mind Selwyn might be a witch herself, and that maybe she’d cast some sort of hoodoo to make sure I’d become that special someone to watch over her. Besides, I’d conceded to myself while she’d confessed her sordid lineage, I was tired of being bored. Tired of playing it safe.
“And you’ll behave yourself?” she asked me.
“As long as there are no fucking Faeries, sure, I’ll be good.” And I crossed my heart with my right hand and made the three-fingered Girl Scout sign with my left.
“It’s not a Faerie,” she assured me.
And that third stop of Selwyn’s day, it was actually sort of anticlimactic. The customer was a crazy cat lady who paid five hundred dollars for dried-out trichobezoar she thought might cure her arthritis. And then Selwyn was hungry again, and I sat on the curb and smoked while she sat on the curb and ate two hot dogs and an order of fries.
She didn’t say anything else about Isaac and Isobel Snow or ghouls or diabolical get-rich-quick schemes of yore. And I didn’t ask.
CHAPTER THREE
QUARREL WITH THE MOON
How about let’s call this bit comes next “Quinn’s getting sidetracked or digressing or what the hell ever with some crazy and inconvenient werewolf hijinks.” Works for me. Straight lines, all neat and tidy—from here to there—are for Aesop and los Hermanos Grimm. You’ll keep reading or you’ll stop. Also, it is what happened next, and while it’s gonna leave you hanging for a bit as regards the Snow twins and ghoul conspiracies, it is what happened next. And it’s relevant to what came later on. Patience, young Jedi.
Have I said all this was going down early in November? I’m pretty sure I mentioned that, but if I haven’t, it was. October had been unseasonably warm, but the weather turned cold just after Halloween. The night I met Selwyn was the evening of the third, a Sunday night. New moon. The cleaners disposed of the CPA’s corpse on the morning of the fourth, and that night