were hip to what sorta appalling shit goes bump in the night. After all, they might be mortal, but they did a fair share of bumping themselves. They took away the corpse and the mattress and the box springs. They cut away ruined chunks of carpet and sheetrock. They paid me fifteen hundred dollars for their trouble, for their windfall. Selwyn watched on quietly, and I could tell she was amazed, impressed, enthralled. Yeah, I had a budding psychopath on my hands. I was beginning to wonder if the CPA’s was the first murder she’d taken part in.
“What next?” she asked eagerly as soon as they’d left.
“What next is I take a shower.”
“I mean after that, Quinn.”
“I assume you have a place to live. I can’t stay here anymore.”
She nodded and reached for one of my cigarettes. She lit it and blew smoke rings. “Yeah, I have a place. So we’re roomies now?”
“Sure seems that way.”
She smiled.
There you go.
How Quinn met Selwyn.
When I left Providence, I did try to give up the whole undead avenger shtick. My heart was never in it, anyway. Like I said already, I traveled south, then west, then I came to the Big Apple, and I decided to live and let live. Or whatever it is the reanimated dead do when they’re minding their own affairs and not being goddamn self-righteous hypocrites. In fact, during my time in NYC I’d only taken out a single nasty, a gutter vamp down in the Village who’d made the mistake of getting in my face about my arrangement with Barbara O’Bryan. Maybe I should have let it go, water off a duck’s ass and all that, but I hadn’t.
Of course, a lot of folks knew who I was. I’d gotten a reputation over the years. Which happens. Frankly, I was surprised no one came gunning for me. I’d been good at slaying my fellow monsters, and that shit’s like it used to be for gunslingers in the Old West. You get a rep, and there’s always another asshole with a six-shooter looking to put you down and win your infamy for themselves. But no one messed with me. Maybe, like Selwyn that night at the club, I just got lucky.
I bother mentioning all this because Selwyn asked a lot of questions during our taxi ride to her tiny, rent-controlled apartment in Hell’s Kitchen; she’d inherited it from her dad. She grilled me, and I wanted to tell her to shut up. The driver kept glancing in her rearview mirror, shooting us the sort of glances you reserve for people who talk that sort of crazy shit in the backseat of your hack. I didn’t much care whether or not she took any of it seriously, and besides, odds were she thought we were a couple of loons or larpers or something like that. Whenever I caught her watching us, I’d just smile the most innocent smile I could manage, flashing the fake teeth that hid the truth of my predator’s mouth.
“So, this guy in Providence, he was mortal?”
She meant B.
“Yeah, but it didn’t stop him from being the king of all cocksuckers,” I replied. “At least demons have an excuse.”
“Still,” she said, “guess you gotta give him some credit. Not many people would have the nerve—”
“Fuck that,” I interrupted. “He’s a low-life grifter who’s found a big con, and he’s stubborn enough and foolish enough to hang on as long as he can squeeze out a few more pennies.”
“Still,” she persisted, “he showed up and saved your ass, didn’t he? I mean . . . sorta?”
“Is that how you see it? Shit . . .”
She was quiet a moment, then said, “After that ghoul, and the first vampire—”
“Both accidents.”
“Still . . .”
“Look, B’s the reason a big-time beastie ever had cause to come looking for me. If I hadn’t been such a goddamn junkie that I was willing to accept a job as a contract killer of killers, I’d have stayed mortal and the worst that ever would have happened is I’d have died.”
“But you did die.”
“And stayed dead.”
I still hadn’t put her wise to the fact that I was double cursed, double damned, double fucking dipped, that I was a vamp who’d been infected by a werewolf before Mercy had kissed me with those china-doll lips and left me lying in a weedy ditch near the Seekonk River. So, Selwyn, she only knew half the joke.
“Did it hurt?” she wanted to know.
“Fuck you.”
She sighed and looked out