Cherry Bomb_ A Siobhan Quinn Novel - Caitlin R. Kiernan Page 0,7
city the size of Manhattan likely has a dozen or so vamps in residence at any given time. All the resurrection men in the Empire State can’t make fifteen hundred bodies a year disappear. And not all of us are careful about covering our tracks. There’d surely be a lot more hunters than there are if it weren’t for the bloodsuckers who hunt the hunters.
“All these books were your dad’s?” I asked, using the one I was holding to motion to the rest.
“Yeah, mostly. I suspect he never even read half of them.”
“I don’t suppose you have any beer?” I asked, and she shook her head and said she’d run down to the corner store and pick some up. At least there were ashtrays, so I didn’t have to ask if it was okay to smoke. I put the book down and lit a Camel.
“Selwyn, it’s not too late for you to walk away from this shit.” Looking back, I have no idea why I said that. No idea what the hell I was thinking. How the fuck was I supposed to let her off the hook? It was not like I had the thing in Brooklyn to go back to.
“You’d let me do that? Walk away?”
I took a drag on my cigarette and watched smoke curl towards the ceiling.
“Even if you would,” she said. “And I don’t believe you’d take that risk, no way I could go back to the way my life was before.”
“Fine. But here’s the rub. Don’t you ever get it in your head you’re indispensable or safe from me. I don’t care how good a lay you are, and I don’t care how much you get your freak on playing sidekick. That’s not the way it works.”
“How long has it been?” she asked.
“Since what?”
“Since you died.”
I stared at one of the masks hanging on the wall, something hideous carved from wood and bone that was clearly meant to be a bird. I had the unnerving impression that it was gazing back at me, that it was waiting on my answer same as Selwyn Throckmorton.
“Five years, almost,” I told her, then added, “I was sixteen.”
“I’m almost twenty,” she said. “You seem a whole lot older than me.”
Here I am pretending that I remember a conversation verbatim that I hardly even recall the gist of, right? I just stopped and read back over the last few pages. If I sounded a lot older than twenty-one that day, there in her cluttered apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, I can only guess how much older I must sound now. How much older than my actual age, I mean. I know I hardly come across as the same person who—while I was traveling—got so bored that I decided it would be a good idea to write out what happened to me with Mercy Brown and the Woonsocket loups, then that whole cock-up with the Maidstone sisters, the dread madams Harpootlian and Szabó and their “Maltese unicorn.” I’d say, “Hell, I was just a kid,” but I’d have to tack on so many qualifiers it’s not worth the effort. Reading this, I don’t hear the snarky brat who wrote, “First off, taking out monsters absolutely doesn’t come with a how-to manual.” It’s not the days, the months, the years that wear you down. It’s the slaughter, the nightmares that I’ve seen strolling about in broad daylight and every time I look in a mirror, the close calls and deceit and pain I’ve inflicted and that have been visited upon me. For that matter, it’s the years I spent on the street and the toll that took before I had any idea monsters were anything but the stuff of fairy tales and spooky stories.
See, this right here is why immortal is anything but, why so few vampires stick around more than three or four centuries. Time and the high cost of survival, it fucks you up. No, I don’t want sympathy. I’ve always had a choice. Just like the living, I can put an end to my existence whenever I please. This might have begun with me being a victim, but it never followed I had a right to embark upon my own reign of terror.
I ain’t no more than any serial killer ever was. Most times, I figure I’m a good bit worse.
But I digress, as they say.
That autumn day I was twenty-one going on fifty, and here I am twenty-two going on seventy. That day, I didn’t tell Selwyn she seemed