Cherry Bomb_ A Siobhan Quinn Novel - Caitlin R. Kiernan Page 0,48
it was cold and dank and stank of mildew and ages of accumulated dust. Wherever I was, was dark. Not that it much mattered to my built-in vamp night-vision goggles. It was just a matter of convincing the three of everything to get together and be the one of everything.
There was a tremendous whoosh of warm air and then the cacophony of a train rattling past. So, I knew I was still in the subway. But I was alone. Alone and naked. I rolled over onto my left side and there was my duster, neatly folded, and there were my pants, also neatly folded. A great what-the-fuck moment. No shoes, though. No shirt. And, I’d see soon enough, no gun. What kinda half-assed mercy was that?
My surroundings were beginning to wriggle into focus. It was a deserted station. There are a lot of those, though most people have no idea they even exist. Abandoned, shut-away platforms, trolleys, entire stations. I’d seen a few of them in my time in NYC, when restlessness had gotten the better of me, and I’d roamed the city without Barbara O’Bryan the CEO blood doll hanging on. This particular abandoned subway station, it was one I’d visited twice before. I’d found it a great place to be alone. It was the old City Hall Station, decommissioned back in 1945, shut away more than seventy years. There’s nothing else like it down in the tunnels. Nothing else like it in the rat’s maze below Manhattan, all decked out with stained glass, tiled vaults, Romanesque brick arches, and brass chandeliers. You know humans. They toss out the old and beautiful for the new and soullessly functional. Once upon a time, this station was the southern terminus of the Interborough Rapid Transit, which stretched from City Hall to Grand Central Station, across 42nd Street to Times Square, and all the way north to 145th Street along Broadway. Sometimes the station is lit, and passengers who linger on the 6 after the Brooklyn Bridge can get a peek of that ghostly reminder of a more graceful age.
Listen to me, waxing all damn sentimental over a fucking subway station. Jesus.
I rolled over onto my back again, not even bothering to wonder how the Seventh Avenue line had dumped me a stone’s throw from the Brooklyn Bridge station. I’d encountered pocket universes before, and sorceries used to wrap time and space to the needs of an elite few who wielded that brand of mojo. Certainly it hadn’t been the doing of the ghouls. Isaac Snow maybe, which made him a much more formidable dude than I’d suspected from what Selwyn had told me. If he could pull shit like this, or if he had those who could on his payroll, he was way more than some power-hungry half-breed. He was the thaumaturgic equivalent of a goddamn thermonuclear bomb.
I groaned and sat up. I wanted to lie right back down again, but fuck that. For all I knew, I’d been out for hours, maybe an entire day. Selwyn could be anywhere. She could be fucking dead, for all I knew. And yeah, I cared, whether I wanted to care or not. Was I pissed at her dragging me into this cloak-and-dagger hullabaloo with the Snow twins? Damn straight, but that didn’t change how I’d discovered I felt for her. I was past walking away, and more’s the pity. Probably, I’d been past walking away since the first time we screwed, no matter what I might have told her to the contrary.
I sat there and stared at the mosaic of yellow and green and black, brown and cobalt-blue glazed bricks that make up the stations walls, archways, and the vaulted ceiling, building blocks laid a century before. Those blue stained-glass skylights, and even through the haze in my head, I couldn’t help but be amazed there was an age when people bothered to make a subway station so beautiful. Probably, I was recovering from a concussion, which would explain this gawking at Victorian architecture when I should have been dragging my sorry ass off to find Selwyn.
It was a fair bet the ghouls had taken her.
And if they had, they’d taken her to Isaac Snow, which would mean he had the Madonna, and . . . well, I still had no idea what he wanted with that rock.
My stomach suddenly rolled, and I cramped, then crawled on hands and knees to the edge of the platform and puked into the darkness where the