Cherry Bomb_ A Siobhan Quinn Novel - Caitlin R. Kiernan Page 0,47

killed.

“Quinn,” whispered Selwyn.

“What?”

“The train’s slowing down,” she said.

Which is when both the surviving ghouls dropped down onto all fours and charged me. I had time to get off one more shot, but it went wild and punched a hole in the ceiling of the train. To her credit, Selwyn didn’t scream. She was fast and got clear before four hundred or so pounds of stinking flesh and bone slammed into me. My gun went skittering away, and I heard bones snapping, all of them mine, natch, and the ache in my shoulder was drowned in a shimmering wall of fresh hell.

Their breath was almost as bad as the pain.

“Kill you,” growled one of my attackers, just before I drove a knee into its crotch and pushed my thumbs into its eyes. The left eye popped, and the ghoul howled and stumbled to its feet. But the other ghoul pinned me, good and proper, and wrapped a hand tight around my throat, those talons digging into my skin. I knew it could yank my head off easy as brushing away a fly. And there we were, nose to nose. It grinned, as ugly a grin as any nasty ever grinned. A grin to impress a true demon. It’s face lit up, and I knew the ghoul knew it had won.

“Finish you now, vampire,” it said. “But finish you slow and hard. Make you beg and scream for the delight of the King of Bones.”

I heard Selwyn racking back the Glock’s slide. The ghoul, it was too busy savoring the thought of picking me apart limb by limb, flaying and disemboweling me, to notice shit. She blew the top of its head off, spraying me with brains and gore and specks of skull in the process. Small price to pay, right?

“More are coming,” she said, not sounding half as scared as she had a right to be, and then I caught the tattoo of many pairs of hooves pounding steel. Yeah, ghouls also have hooves where their feet should be. The floor beneath me vibrated with the weight and force of them.

“They’re close, Quinn.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” I mumbled.

I blinked and wiped at my face, trying to get dead ghoul out of my eyes. In a second or two, I could see well enough to see Selwyn was squatting next to me, still holding on to the Basalt Madonna. In the chaos, part of the T-shirt had slipped enough that one corner of the stone plaque was visible.

I told her to run.

And deep down inside me, the Beast opened her eyes.

Yeah, I said to her. Sure thing, puppy. Let’s party. Let’s rock out with our cocks out.

But it wasn’t like it had been on wolfsbane. There was the old fade-to-black routine. And, frankly, I was then and still am grateful for that. Sure, I’d have loved to feel what it was like, ripping apart the hounds who flooded into that subway car. I wish I could claim I have no idea what magical, mystical cosmic agency decides if I’ll retain consciousness whenever the Beast arrives to paint the town red. If it’s all up to me, that child and her wolf at the edge of the field, the forest at their backs, or if it falls to some secret sliver of my brain making nanosecond decisions. Or both. I don’t really care.

I awoke on cold stone, and at least half the pain I’d felt in the instant before I’d blacked out was still right with me. Hell, the transformation into Beast would have seen to a sackful of ouch, without having first been shot in the shoulder and then pummeled by fuck knows how many of the Ghul who’d jumped us.

I’d been dreaming of long-lost Lily—murdered by a ghoul, the first nasty I killed, even if it was an accident, beginner’s fucking luck. Pretty, pretty Lily, my compatriot in Needle Park, Lily and the streets.

Not kind dreams.

I opened my eyes and lay still on my back a long time. Fifteen, twenty minutes. Half an hour. I don’t know. I was disoriented, and I was trying to get reoriented. There was a growing urgency as the attack on the train came back to me, and as I realized Selwyn wasn’t there with me. I called out her name a couple of times, but got nothing except my own voice echoing back to me. I was naked, and if I’d been alive, I’d likely have been freezing to death. Wherever I was,