Cherry Bomb_ A Siobhan Quinn Novel - Caitlin R. Kiernan Page 0,29

shit that happens when words fail, right? Anyway, there in the mirror was a special sort of gruesome, which I chalk up to the unholy marriage of the Bride of Quiet and Jack Grumet. Two nasties for the price of one. I’d never seen its face before.

There was confusion in those eyes, and fear, and more hate than I’d ever thought could be crammed into a glare. The hate, that was mostly the Beast’s. I was the bitch who held her chain, who kept her locked away to rot in the prison of me. Ever been to the zoo and looked into the eyes of a wolf or a coyote or a mountain lion stuck there behind iron bars or Plexiglas? Ever seen that venom, that spite? Well, there you go.

One or the other of us, me or the Beast broke the mirror. I like to believe it was me who did it. But that’s probably wishful thinking.

I say one or the other of us because that’s the best I can describe what it was like. Like I said, my mind hadn’t had the decency to take a powder, so there we were together at last. And speaking of the limitations of language, I’m not sure I have the language needed to describe the hours that followed. I doubt anyone does, anyone dead or alive or whatever. But I’m gonna try.

I don’t remember leaving Selwyn’s apartment or the stairs. Next thing I knew I was out on the sidewalk, and a woman was screaming bloody goddamn murder. You remember the end of An American Werewolf in London, after David Kessler’s final transformation in the porno theater, when he’s rampaging around Piccadilly Circus fucking shit up? Well . . . it wasn’t like that. Just that one unfortunate woman. We, it, I reared up on two legs and towered over her, seven and a half, eight feet. She opened her mouth to scream again, and the loup picked her up and smacked her head once against a lamppost before dragging her away into an alley, leaving nothing behind but a gooey smear of brains. A great deal of what was to come would involve skulking through alleys and shit, because, turned out I was more than a reluctant passenger. Turned out I still had a modicum of control over the Beast. Which, you know, only pissed it off that much more. But that night I managed to teach it the value of caution.

Go me.

The screaming woman was the first person we ate that night. Whatever revulsion I might have harbored, I harbored it very briefly. It had been a long time since I’d known the simple pleasure of chewing and swallowing solid food. I found myself savoring every raw, greedy mouthful. Those razor teeth pulled her apart easy as you please, and between those jaws her bones might as well have been pocky. Whoa. Weird analogy. How about her bones might as well have been pretzel sticks, instead? No, that’s really not much better. Never mind. Probably, you know what I mean.

And shit I felt strong. I felt motherfucking alive, which I’d never, ever dared imagine I would feel ever again. Here was how the other half lived. The Beast was seducing me, whether it knew it was or not. And I thought, I could lose myself in here. I could just let it run on and on and on, and I’d never have to go back to being Quinn.

Who was she, anyway? Some pathetic dead girl, good at being bitter and surviving, but nothing much more than that. She was a parasitic phantom who wanted with all her sour heart to be truly dead, but she didn’t have the balls to make that happen. To grab that brass ring and get off the merry-go-round. But the Beast, it knew joy.

Nasties tend to look down on loups as the white trash of our psychofuck supernatural menagerie. Nothing lower than a loup but maybe a ghoul. Sure. That’s the party line. Demons and Faeries on their lofty pedestals, vamps out on the street, and werewolves in the gutters. Except, at least if we’re talking about the way bloodsuckers look down on loups, maybe that ain’t nothing but envy. Maybe, somewhere down deep, it’s obvious how living, how lycanthropy isn’t a curse at all.

How maybe it’s a blessing.

Not bad enough my very existence is a blasphemy in the eyes of Big Bads the world over. Not bad enough I’d become a traitor who