Cherry Bomb_ A Siobhan Quinn Novel - Caitlin R. Kiernan Page 0,32

the chin.

“Could be. I don’t know. We’ve never tried to cross the meadow. I think we’re afraid to try.”

I gazed out across the grass. Whatever was on the other side, it was too far away to see.

“Today,” she said, “my name is Quinn.”

“I should tell you, I’m not in the mood to be fucked with.”

She just shrugged and kept scratching at the big black wolf ’s chin. It occurred to me that the wolf ’s fur was the same color as Selwyn’s. It also occurred to me that the girl’s hair was the same dirty blonde as my own.

“So, okay, what was your name yesterday?”

“I can’t remember. Does it really matter? You weren’t here yesterday.”

“I’m going to sit down,” I told her. “My feet hurt.”

“If you sit, you won’t be able to see anything,” she said. “The grass is too tall, if you sit, to see over.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, there’s not a hell of a lot going on out there.”

“Not yet,” she said, and stopped scratching the wolf.

“You’re a strange one,” I said, and she shrugged again.

“Said the vampire who’s also a lycanthrope.”

I let that go. She had a point.

“How long have you been here?” I asked her. I sat down cross-legged with the trees at my back. I discovered that several fat gray grasshoppers were watching me. If grasshoppers can watch something cautiously, then that’s what they were doing.

“I’m not sure. But I guess it must have been a very long time. Long enough I can’t remember. Unless, of course, I only got here yesterday and just can’t remember I got here yesterday.”

“Do you always fucking talk like a character from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?”

She laughed. It was a totally creepy laugh.

The wolf turned its head and stared at me. Its eyes—the irises of its eyes—were so pale I’d call them white.

“Does he have a name?” I asked and nodded at the wolf.

“She,” the girl said. “He’s a she. And I’ve never thought to ask her, Quinn.”

I grabbed at one of the grasshoppers and missed. It hopped away, and all the others wisely followed its example. My hand closed around nothing but a few yellow-brown stalks. Screw you, Mr. Bug.

“I’m not dreaming,” I whispered to myself.

“No, you’re not, Quinn.”

“Isn’t that what I just said?”

I didn’t have to look to know the wolf was still watching me. I could feel its white eyes on me.

“Is she here to protect you? The wolf, I mean.”

“Who else would you have meant? But no, I don’t think so. I suspect it’s a coincidence, that we both just happen to be here at the same time. Which is better than being alone. I would hate to be here alone. I don’t like that field. Something about that field isn’t right.”

“It’s just a field,” I said, dropping the dead blades of grass.

“I know,” she said very quietly. “I know.”

And I wanted to tell her I didn’t think her being there and the wolf ’s being there too, their being there together, was a coincidence, any more than, it had turned out, my being found by the Bride of Quiet the same night—right damned after—I’d been bitten by Jack Grumet had been a coincidence.

You ask me, which you haven’t, coincidence is often a coward’s way out of facing facts.

And please feel free, right about here, to become exasperated at my complete cluelessness. No, I didn’t see what was right in front of my face. And I don’t mean all that grass. I don’t mean the forest for the trees. I didn’t add up two and two and get four. Often, I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

I said, “There’s a bloodthirsty loup—my loup—tear-assing through Chelsea or the West Village or some shit, and I’m sitting here playing pretend and talking to a hallucination.”

“Is that all that I am, Quinn? Pretend? A hallucination? Did you make me?”

“Didn’t I?”

She sighed and stopped scratching the wolf ’s chin. “I really don’t know. That’s why I asked.”

I shut my eyes. I shut my eyes very tight, and I saw—or at least thought that I saw—the loup working its way clumsily up a fire escape. The rusted metal groaned and creaked under its weight. Our weight. Or was she alone now?

All these fucking questions were becoming a stone around my neck.

“I have,” the girl said, “thought sometimes there might be a peaceful place on the other side of the field.”

The loup was about halfway up the fire escape when it gave way, when the bolts or whatever holding