Cherry Bomb_ A Siobhan Quinn Novel - Caitlin R. Kiernan Page 0,31

bothersome fucking furball who popped up from time to time for the express purpose of messing with precious goddamn me. Might come off schmaltzy, but dashing helter-skelter about Gotham, decapitating and disemboweling and dismembering, I also found myself thinking of her as a friend. Yeah, right? Hell, I hadn’t had too many of those when I was alive, and no more than a couple postmortem, Selwyn Throckmorton and Aloysius the troll. Oh, and a violet-skinned succubus went by the fine old Puritan name of Clemency Hate-evil before being my friend got her killed. Or got her worse. I was never sure which.

But it wasn’t as simple as that. This epiphany, I mean. There was more to it. We hit the Volkswagen, and shortly afterwards I had . . . let’s call it a vision, because I don’t know what the hell else I’d call it. You got something better, be my guest. One minute I was all but drowning in the sound of the Beast’s paws hammering at the pavement, tripping balls on the carnage, on a million noises, odors, sights, et cetera and fucking et cetera.

Jump cut.

And I was walking slowly through a forest. Dry leaves crunched under my bare feet, and the moon—a full moon, mind you—was shining down through branches that were mostly bare. Because wherever I was that was no longer Lower Manhattan, it was autumn there, too. Maybe it was even November. I knew right off those woods weren’t real. They could have been a storybook forest, the sort of place dreamed up so wicked witches can build their gaudy gingerbread houses while Snow White lies in a coma surrounded by her seven dwarves. A forest built out of imagination. Yeah, that was the way it struck me, like it hadn’t grown there, like it had been thought into being.

Regardless, I didn’t want to be there. I wanted to be with the loup. I was supposed to be with the loup, wasn’t I? By being hauled away to that soundstage forest, I was being cheated out of my half of our wild hunt. I stopped and looked over my shoulder, like maybe there was gonna be a flashing neon exit sign waiting behind me. But there was only more trees. Paper birch and oak trees and shaggy hemlocks. I cursed them and started walking again, because walking seemed to make slightly more sense than standing still. I don’t know how long I walked. Everything about that place was so much the same it could have been a short loop of film, playing over and over. I could have been walking in tiny circles that I’d only mistaken for a straight line, some sort of Möbius strip . . .

I walked through the trees until there weren’t any more of the trees to walk through. They came to an end at the edge of a field of tall yellow-brown grass. The woods had been still as my dead heart, but a cold breeze rustled the field, blowing the grass this way, that way. The forest had smelled like cinnamon and cloves, but out in the open, the air smelled like apple cider. And I was no longer alone. There was a blonde child and a huge black wolf staring out over the tall grass. The wolf was sitting on its haunches. She was standing, but, even so, she was hardly as tall as that wolf. It wasn’t a loup. Except for its size, it was, you know, just a wolf. The child was stroking the top of its head. When I stepped out of the forest, they both turned and looked at me. The girl smiled. But it was a sad sort of smile. A pitying kind of smile that ought to have made me even more angry, because I cannot bear being pitied. But, for some reason, her smile was a relief. Could be anything would have been a relief after those trees.

“Hi,” she said and waved.

“Hi,” I replied. There were a lot of questions I wanted to ask. I picked one more or less at random.

“What’s going on?”

The girl raised an eyebrow.

“What do you mean, Quinn?”

“I mean . . .” And I paused, uncertain for just a second what I did mean. “I mean,” I continued, “where am I?”

Her smile returned.

“Oh. Well, you’re standing between the forest and the meadow. Do you know what’s on the other side of the meadow, Quinn?”

“More fucking trees?”

She shrugged, and the wolf whimpered, so she scratched it under