Cherry Bomb_ A Siobhan Quinn Novel - Caitlin R. Kiernan Page 0,51

and All the King’s Men. Is that what you wish?”

“I told you I am done with Selwyn.”

“Yes, Miss Quinn, you did, and you lied. That was obvious. I would think that someone who lies as frequently as you would be better at it by now.”

“Fuck you, you fucking elephant-dicked freak.”

I tightened my grip on the trigger, as if I actually believed, even for a second, that I wasn’t lying. Holy goddamn dancing Moses in drag, I wanted to do it. I wanted to squeeze the trigger and empty that clip, reduce Mother and Child and that hellish pyrite whorl to a couple of handfuls of gravel and dust. I wanted not to give a shit what would happen to Selwyn. I wanted, as much as I’ve ever wanted anything, never to have met the quadroon psycho bitch.

Problem is, I wanted her back even more.

For the second time, I lowered the Browning.

“Fuck you,” I said again, though this time I was addressing myself, not Pickman. I looked at him, and the bastard was grinning ear to ear.

“Good girl,” he grinned. “Now, if we play our cards right, I honestly think there is some slim hope that we can get her back. But . . .” And he paused.

“But what?”

He scratched his chin again.

“But, Quinn, there’s rather more at stake here than yours and your lover’s lives. Very much more. The Snows mean to start a war. Right here, in this world. Your world.”

I sighed and lay down on my back, staring up at the candy-colored kaleidoscope skylights. We must have been quite a sight, a fine fucking tableau, the topless werepire—blood and puke spattered—and Pickman standing over me, the man who’d ditched his human skin for life everlasting in a ghoul suit.

“They mean to see the prophecy fulfilled,” he said, “at any cost.”

“The prophecy.”

“Have you ever heard of the B’heil Djinna? The war between the ghouls and the Djinn?”

I didn’t answer him. Instead, I closed one eye, then opened it and closed the other. It was a sort of a game I used to play when I was a kid, alive and kicking, lying in the grass staring up at clouds or stars or whatever happened to be overhead.

“The Ghul were not always as you know them,” he said. “Once, they had a vast kingdom on this plane, in this realm, until they made the unfortunate and ill-considered decision to go to war against the Djinn. Almost four million years ago, during what human geologists refer to as the Pliocene Epoch, when mastodons and mighty chalicotheres still—”

“Bored now.” I sighed. “Can we please fucking skip ahead to the point? As in, what prophecy?”

Pickman pulled a face like a goat eating a tin can. He was clearly a fiend who disliked being interrupted.

“I assume the clock is ticking,” I said.

“The prophecy promises that there will be a savior,” Pickman said. “The Ghul call him the Qqi d’Tashiva, a messianic warlord, who will lead us back to our former glory. And Isaac Snow believes he is the Qqi d’Tashiva, and that his sister is the Qqi Ashz’sara, and together—”

“Yeah, but hold up,” I interrupted again. “Way back in the Roaring Twenties, you went and cozied up to the ghouls. So, isn’t this savior something you’d want? Let my people go? Psalm 136. By the waters of Babylon, and—”

“Quinn, we are not all dissatisfied with our humble lot,” he said. “Many, indeed most, are content in the Lower Dream Lands and in those dim, funereal corners of this world we still inhabit. We’ve no desire to enter into the folly of a second war with the Djinn, or, for that matter, to see your civilization reduced to ash and—”

“Pickman, it isn’t my civilization. It stopped being mine when I died. I’m just a blood-sucking parasite latched on to the armpit of this civilization. A leech. A tick. A goddamn bedbug.”

“Truly, you’ve that low an opinion of yourself?”

“On good days? Yeah.”

He made an annoying tsk, tsk, tsk noise through his bucked front teeth.

“Anyway,” I said, “so Snow thinks he’s the Second Coming, but you beg to differ. That’s what you’re telling me?”

“No, not exactly. The prophecy may well be genuine. The Snows might be precisely who and what they believe they are. Yet that doesn’t change our desire to avoid this war and all its unpleasant, inconvenient consequences.”

“It’s a ripping good yarn, Pickman. You should write a novel, sell the film rights, retire to a nice little cemetery in Bermuda. But I still have no