Cherry Bomb_ A Siobhan Quinn Novel - Caitlin R. Kiernan Page 0,65
them appeared—just appeared—a contraption that looked a bit like what might happen if an indecisive metalworker set out to create a torture rack, then changed her mind and started work on a cross, only to change her mind a second time and attempt the sort of cage that could be hung from a gibbet. In places, the iron bands still glowed red hot.
The twins opened their hands.
“What rough beast—” said Isaac.
“—its hour come round at last,” finished Isobel.
They opened their hands again, or maybe I’d only thought they’d opened them the first time.
They held, between them, the Basalt Madonna, and where the pyritized ammonite had been was a spiraling emptiness. A hole in space and time and the consciousness of everything that has ever had a halfway coherent thought, a hole in the universe, spinning around and around and around.
They kissed.
And the ghouls wailed, and their hoofed feet hammered at the travertine floor of the cavern.
We’re almost done, said Charlee.
For just an instant, like a few frames of film spliced into the wrong movie, I saw a squalid room where two hulking figures held B still while a third used a butcher’s cleaver to take off his hand a few inches above the wrist.
I saw Charlee watching.
I heard Mean Mister B scream.
Isobel reached into the hole where the ammonite had been, and now there were tears flowing down her cheeks as a sticky blackness poured out of the Madonna and up her arm. Isaac Snow watched, eyes wide—but not with fear and not with horror for what was happening to the woman who was both his twin sister and his lover. That expression, it was glee. It was jubilation. The bastard was ready to cream himself. All his sick fucking dreams were coming true, right there before his eyes, and Isobel, I saw, was a price he was more than ready to pay.
Power.
Greed.
A thirst for violence that would never be quenched.
And, suddenly, right then, all I wanted was to see him dead. I struggled to my feet, shoving back against the dizziness and supporting myself against the stalagmite. I reached for the gun that should have been under my tattered peacoat, tucked into the waistband of the dead girl’s jeans. But it wasn’t there. Not that it much mattered, because an instant later I saw what was suspended from that device that was not exactly a rack or a cross or a gibbet’s cage.
What rough beast.
I’d never seen its face so clearly.
My face. My wolf ’s face.
I’d never imagined she could be in agony.
On the dais, Isaac was letting the Basalt Madonna devour Isobel, while the loup in me watched on, while I tried to remember how to shut my eyes.
“Okay, Quinn,” said Charlee. “Hang on. Time to come home.”
I cursed him, and the scene in the cavern began disintegrating around me, and I let go.
CHAPTER SIX
NOT A ROAD MOVIE
I didn’t come to in the Hall of Saurischian Dinosaurs, surrounded by petrified bones, tourists, and noisy children. In fact, I didn’t come to anywhere in the museum. I opened my eyes, after all that falling and the whirling black stars and the void, fucking Carcosa, and I was sitting on a bench in the park. I couldn’t even remember crossing the street. Not that it mattered. I opened my eyes, and B was sitting on my right and Pretty Boy Charlee was sitting on my left. Charlee was holding on to my arm, just above the elbow. And the Basalt Madonna, still wrapped in Selwyn’s Morrissey T-shirt, it was right there in his lap.
I gasped, sucking in air like I’d never tasted the stuff before. Like I was a breather. It smelled good, clean. Well, as clean as November in New York City gets. It was, in fact, the best goddamn air I’d ever tasted. But there was a chill, too, in the afternoon breeze rustling the leaves, and I pulled the stolen peacoat tighter.
“You’re okay,” said Charlee, and he gave my arm an encouraging little squeeze. “You’re just fine. The disorientation, that’ll pass really soon.”
But it wasn’t the Tilt-A-Whirl wooziness—apparently a side effect of Charlee’s magical mystery tour—that I wanted gone. It was the twins, their grotto, the altar and the garret, Mama Snow, the frenzied ghouls, the Madonna, all that shit, Isobel Snow looking me in the eyes—that was what I needed to pass really fucking soon. But I knew better.
Some stains don’t come out, no matter how hard you scrub.