Cherry Bomb_ A Siobhan Quinn Novel - Caitlin R. Kiernan Page 0,28

so keen on the loup thing. Not that I could blame her.

I laughed; then I had a bout of dry heaves. Then I laughed again.

“You’re fucking kidding me.”

“I thought maybe . . .” She trailed off again, and then she added, “Just a tiny, tiny bit, Quinn. Hardly any at all. And it’s the detoxified, medicinal stuff I get from . . . I mean . . . not even enough to—”

“—hurt you,” I finished.

Garlic and holy water might not work on vampires, but werewolves have a vicious goddamn problem with Aconitum. Even hardly any at all. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about wolfsbane: Marked symptoms may appear almost immediately, usually not later than one hour, and with large doses death is almost instantaneous. Death usually occurs within two to six hours in fatal poisoning. The initial signs are gastrointestinal, including nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. Oh, there’s more. But I expect you get the idea. Of course, I wasn’t gonna die. I wasn’t that lucky.

Whee.

Except something else was happening. Selwyn had done more than poison me. She’d given the Beast a swift kick in the balls, and my puppy was waking up with the mother of all hangovers.

“Run,” I croaked. “Run as far as you can. Get somewhere I can’t find you.”

“Quinn, I didn’t know. How could I—”

“Shut the fuck up and fucking run!” I roared.

Roared. Snarled. Growled. I don’t mean these words in the usual euphemistic sense.

Selwyn ran. Later, I’d learn she grabbed the bag with my weapons on her way out. I heard the door slam behind her. I heard her feet on the stairs on her way down to the lobby. I heard the lobby door open and slam. She hadn’t even bothered to get dressed. I never did find out how she got away with that. What the hell. New York City, right? Enough said.

The pain was closing around me like a steel fist, taking hold and squeezing. My chest and belly, my skull, felt like they were trying to turn themselves wrong-side out. An apt enough analogy, as loups everywhere can attest.

I waited for the merciful and inevitable blackout. because that’s what had always happened.

Always.

But not this time. Oh, no. I didn’t fade out. Before, the change had always been accompanied by oblivion, a dreamless unconsciousness that lasted until I was only a vamp again. I still can’t say for sure what made the difference, and what made the difference forever thereafter every time the Beast came to dance. I believe it was that one dose of wolfsbane, but I can’t swear to it.

The pain was everything in the world. The pain was God. What do you do when the hand of God reaches down and touches you? Me, I screamed. At least what came out of my throat was meant to be a scream. I tried to stand, lost my footing, and careened into the wall beside the toilet. No. The Beast slammed itself against that wall. I heard the brittle crack of ceramic tiles, the crunch of old plaster, the tiny bathroom window shattering, the tinkling of glass scattering across the floor. The creature toppled backwards into the tub, pulling the shower curtain down on top of itself, on top of me, of us. While we flailed about in the small cast-iron tub, the blindness passed as quickly as it came. But what returned to me wasn’t my vision. It’s not exactly that I was color blind, but telling one color from another was just about impossible, and the bathroom was sort of a muddy emerald blur. I watched as the skin of my arms and hands split and sloughed bloodlessly away. There was the fucking Beast underneath, like it had been waiting there all along, stuck inside a Quinn-shaped suit.

There wasn’t much of the pain left. Mostly just a smothering, all-consuming frustration. Wherever the Beast wanted to be, Selwyn’s tub was not that place.

The plastic shower curtain came apart as easily as my flesh, and for just a moment the Beast and I lingered at the medicine cabinet, its golden eyes staring furiously back at me, twin pits in its face packed with molten gold. Strips of me were still tangled in its black fur, hanging off its muzzle. Jesus, I’d killed my share of loups, and I’d never seen one I’d call anything less than ugly. Anybody’s ever set eyes on one knows whatever joker coined the term werewolf was full of shit. But I suppose that’s the sort of