Cherry Bomb_ A Siobhan Quinn Novel - Caitlin R. Kiernan Page 0,30

hunted and put them down. I’d just become a heretic to boot.

When we were done with the screaming woman, there wasn’t much left of her but a puddle of gore, and a stingy puddle at that. And I was still starving. My taste for blood has always been easy enough to temporarily satisfy. But this, this was a hunger that was utterly absolute and insatiable. I instinctively knew how the Beast could eat for days and never get its fill. And, honestly, crouching there in the alley behind Selwyn’s apartment building, that would’ve been fine by me.

We, I, it glanced up at the sky, as if seeking a premature full moon. Not that the loup’s appearances have ever much synced up with lunar phases. I’d long ago written that off to superstition, and, hey and by the way, learning that the world is full of monsters and magic’s real and all that crap doesn’t mean that isn’t still superstition. Everything isn’t true, just because an awful lot of weird shit turns out to be. Yes, there are demons and vamps and unicorns and Faeries, but it ain’t bad luck to walk under a ladder and black cats are nothing but cats that are black. And werewolves don’t seem to care about the moon.

Where was I?

We howled, and I’d have sworn, for an instant or two, the night around us held its breath.

And then the loup ran, and I’d say that I was dragged along for the ride. Only it wasn’t like that at all. I was riding. Oh, I could have fought, and maybe the struggle would even have made a difference, but I didn’t. We went south, keeping always to alleys and side streets. I can’t say which side streets and alleys, because it hardly mattered. Not like I was reading the signs. Lurching along on two legs, racing on four, our claws dug furrows in asphalt and scraped across concrete and cobblestones. Everything unfolded around me in a ghostly haze of night vision. Somewhere, the Beast’s left shoulder clipped a dumpster, and the dumpster skidded away, doing almost a full one eighty before smacking into a brick wall. We were briefly stunned. Or it was stunned, and I was aware of that fact. Which the fuck ever. It was knocked off its feet, but got right back up again. Jesus, I’ve never felt so invulnerable. Like . . . like what? Like that bullshit self-confidence comes along with the rush after a couple of lines of cocaine, but multiplied a hundred times.

Yeah, like that.

Car horns, car alarms, the squeal of tires and brake pads. Screams and curses. Dogs locked up inside going monkey shit at the smell of us and barking their heads off. The stink of garbage and rats and pigeon shit and . . . every smell of Manhattan amped up and off the scales. And we killed. Almost anything, anyone unlucky or dumb enough to get in our way went down and stayed down. Most barely had a chance to scream. Barely knew what hit them, or didn’t know at all.

Probably the latter.

You’re out for a stroll, or your walking your Pomeranian, and this huge fucking brute lunges out of the shadows, in those final seconds, how likely is it you’re gonna think, Oh shit on me, a werewolf, right? You’re too busy being totally stupefied or with fleeting thoughts of just how screwed you are. I mean, I’m talking about regular people here, those not in on the great cosmic joke that monsters walk among them.

We barreled headlong, full-tilt boogie into the passenger side of a Volkswagen Beetle, and the car was tossed several feet into the air and landed upside down on a punk kid on a skateboard. Splat. I was dimly amazed. Dude, that was, I gotta say, one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. Hey, I bet that guy on the skateboard would have agreed.

Unlike the dumpster, the Volkswagen didn’t even slow us down. The Incredible Hulk? That snot-green son of a bitch has nothing on my loup.

Yeah, that night, that November morning, was when I began thinking of the Beast as mine. Or, no. Wait. That’s not quite right, ’cause the Beast is without a doubt her own Beast. More like, I realized she’s an integral part of me, an intimate part of me—of the new me that Mercy and Grumet had created—wedded inextricably to whatever miserable crumb was left of my soul. Suddenly, she was more than a