Cherry Bomb_ A Siobhan Quinn Novel - Caitlin R. Kiernan Page 0,6

the passenger-side window, frowning at pedestrians and storefronts.

“I just don’t get why you’re so bitter, Quinn. I mean, what’s done is done. Shouldn’t you at least try to make the best of it?”

“Listen, just for starters, how about you get yourself raped to death. Then come to and remember it all in perfect detail. Then we’ll talk. And stop pouting.”

“I don’t want to die,” she said. “It’s hard for me to imagine anything that’s worse than death.”

“Then you’re not trying hard enough. We’ll have to work on that.”

It went on like that until we finally, mercifully, pulled up to the curb in front of the apartment building on Ninth Avenue. Selwyn paid the driver, who popped the trunk so I could retrieve the gym bag and cardboard box that was all I’d left Brooklyn with. Some clothes, a few books, two pistols, and the mini-crossbow not unlike the one B had given me what seemed like a hundred years before, a bottle of saline and my contact lens case. A makeup bag. The charger and cords for my iPod and phone. My banged-up laptop. Selwyn had said it was a shame leaving all the sex toys behind, and I’d told her to take whatever she wanted, so she had a plastic shopping bag full of dildos and vibrators and lube.

The taxi pulled away, and I wondered briefly if the driver would tell anyone about us. Selwyn pointed up at the redbrick building.

“This is it,” she said. “Welcome home.”

“I’ve done worse,” I told her, which sure as hell wasn’t a lie.

It was a ten-story walk-up, though the stairs didn’t seem to bother Selwyn, and they certainly weren’t an issue for me. You can’t get out of breath when you only bother breathing if you don’t want to draw attention to the fact that you’re a cadaver. Anyway, the place was still chock-full of the sort of clutter I suppose archaeologists accumulate. Stacks of yellowing books, ceremonial masks from New Guinea and Japan and Thailand, a mummified cat in a miniature cat-shaped sarcophagus. Et cetera. Plus the spoils and tools of Selwyn’s own enterprises, sort of Lara Croft meets Madame Blavatsky. Selwyn set the bag of sex toys by the door, then apologized for the mess and excavated half a couch and a love seat. Both had seen better days and had probably been new when Kennedy was president. The place smelled like dust, old paper, and Top Ramen. Well, those are the smells that would have greeted the living. Me, I also caught the stink of rats and roaches, dirty dishes, mildew, a toilet that badly needed scrubbing, unwashed laundry, an expired carton of milk in the fridge, and . . . you get the picture.

“Sorry it’s such a wreck,” she said.

“Hey, at least it’s an interesting wreck.”

I picked up a book on Mesoamerican astronomy and flipped through the pages.

“After Pop died, I just—”

“You don’t have to explain anything to me. It’s your house. I’m just a guest.”

“I didn’t want to throw out any of his stuff, you know? Plus, I’m sort of a pack rat myself.”

I closed the book and returned it to the teetering stack beside the love seat. “Didn’t I just fucking say you don’t have to explain anything?”

I picked up another book, this one on Hindu eschatology. Selwyn chewed at her lower lip and worried at a loose thread in the sweater she was wearing.

“How often do you have to eat?” she asked.

I didn’t look up from the book. “Thought you were some sort of an expert on us undead folks,” I said. “What with your line of work and all. A regular Abraham Van Helsing.”

She rolled her eyes.

“Christ, all I said was I can tell one when I see one. I never said I was an expert.”

“Every two or three nights,” I told her, relinquishing the answer to her question. “Four, if I’m willing to deal with hunger pains.”

“That’s an awful lot of corpses,” she said, and then there was the blare of police sirens down on the street, and neither of us said anything while we waited for them to pass.

I said, “Fifteen a month, give or take.”

“About a hundred and twenty a year,” she said, still messing with her sweater. She wore that sweater a lot. It was a cardigan, and the yarn was a shade of gray that reminded me of a kitten I’d had when I was a kid. Anyway, I nodded. Grisly arithmetic, especially when you pause to consider that a