Cherry Bomb_ A Siobhan Quinn Novel - Caitlin R. Kiernan Page 0,76
I’d slept. But . . . hadn’t I missed a day in there somewhere, after the attack and before Pickman, and . . . ?
“A couple of days,” I guessed.
“Well, then, you should get some shut-eye, girlbaby,” said Charlee. “We’re both gonna need you bright eyed and bushy tailed much sooner than later.”
And then it hit me, and I opened my eyes.
Someone will be in touch, Pickman had said.
I opened my eyes and stared at Charlee, there behind the wheel, Charlee with his fake green eyes and Moscow-hooker fake fur coat and the red of his hair that was as unnatural as a werewolf who is also a vamp.
“Does B know?” I asked.
“He’s beginning to suspect,” answered Charlee.
“You’re working with Richard Pickman,” I said, feeling just a tiny bit pleased with myself, a teensy bit less clueless than usual.
“Not exactly,” Charlee replied. He smiled for me, and I was treated to my second revelation in as many minutes. His teeth, like his eyes, were simply too perfect, a mask worn to disguise the truth. “But you might say we work for the same people.”
“You don’t need to take a piss in Waterbury.”
His smile widened, and he winked at me. Then he reached into his mouth and slipped out the dental prosthetics, uppers and lowers. I tried to remember where I’d lost my own, but couldn’t.
“And does B know about that?” I wanted to know.
“That I’m a vampire? Yeah, he knows.”
I laughed and shut my eyes again. “Jesus fucking shitting Christ on a Greyhound bus,” I muttered. “How the fuck did I fucking miss that?”
“It’s a kind of magick,” he said and winked again. “With a k, naturally.”
“Naturally.”
“Charlee, you were planning on telling me this when?”
He looked back at the road, at the twin beams of halogen light picking out the path ahead of us.
“I’d have told you before we got to Mount Auburn. I just wanted to see—”
“If I could figure it out.”
“No. I wanted to see how mad my skills are up against the infamous Twice-Damned. I think I didn’t do so bad. Now, get some rest.”
I had a million questions. Anyone would. But suddenly I was almost too sleepy to keep my eyelids open. I suspected that was probably yet another stunt from his bag of tricks. But I didn’t protest. Either this was some sort of double cross, or it wasn’t. Either Charlee was here to help me put down the twins and get Selwyn back, or he wasn’t. I’d find out soon enough, and if he was more foe than friend, there was only so much, at this late date, I could do about it.
The headlights and the oncoming night, the purr of the Porsche’s engine and my exhaustion, it all melted together, and I let go.
I slept.
And somewhere in my sleep I found myself once again stepping out of a fairy-tale forest and coming back around to the edge of that vast field of yellow-brown grass. And same as before, there was the blonde-headed child and her wolf companion. Never mind that I’d brutally murdered them both the last time I’d come this way. The girl and the wolf watched me for a while, neither of us speaking. They didn’t seem anywhere near as wary as I would have expected.
Finally, the girl said, “We didn’t expect to see you again.”
“Which makes it mutual,” I said, peering out across those amber waves of grain towards the whatever that lay, unknown and unglimpsed, on the Other Side.
“It wasn’t kind of you,” said the girl, “and it wasn’t necessary, doing what you did. It certainly wasn’t very productive.”
The wolf ’s eyes were, if anything, even paler than they’d been before, and the fat gray grasshoppers were everywhere. The sky above the swaying grass was uncomfortably low, as if at any second it would scrape its belly against the field. The wolf blinked, then glanced up at the girl. Its tongue lolled half out of its mouth.
“What do they want with us?” I asked.
“Who, Quinn? What does who want with us?”
I took a step backwards and sat down, my back against the trunk of one of the trees at the edge of the forest, the edge of the field. The bark crunched loudly and gave beneath my weight, which is when I discovered it was only papier-mâché and chicken wire.
“It’s not real,” I said, and the girl shrugged.
“Real enough,” she said. “What does who want with us, Quinn? Do you mean the twins?”