Cherry Bomb_ A Siobhan Quinn Novel - Caitlin R. Kiernan Page 0,82

me in the ribs.

“No,” growled a voice I recognized as Isaac’s. “Be still, corpse.”

I heard whimpering and whining then, like whipped dogs. I opened my other eye and sat up, hugging my throbbing side, wondering if anything in there was broken and, if so, what the chances were that I’d be around long enough for it to heal. The Basalt Madonna lay a foot or so away from me, still wrapped up snug in Selwyn’s T-shirt. I reached out, winced, and picked it up. Then I raised my head, and the twins stood nearby, hand in hand. As in my vision, their long white hair was plaited together into a single braid that dragged behind them in the dirt, and they wore the same long blue-black velvet robes I’d seen in the museum. Their feet were bare and filthy, their toenails dirty and cracked, and their eyes burned like molten rubies.

“Welcome, Twice-Damned, Twice-Dead,” said Isaac Snow. “As it was written, yes, as it was foretold, you’ve come to us in these last, desperate hours of our captivity, bearing the Qqi d’Evai Mubadieb, hallowed instrument of our deliverance.”

So much for my being Pickman’s ace in the hole, an unknown variable the twins knew nothing about. I wondered what discount bin he’d scryed his information from.

“We are more grateful,” said Isobel, “than mere words ever can express.”

My head was still spinning, and I rubbed at my eyes and tried to blink back the disorientation and queasiness. I glanced down at the bundle in my hands, then up at the twins. My surroundings were beginning to swim hazily, slowly, into focus. Wherever the fuck I was, it wasn’t that great fancy cave from Charlee’s vision, though it was clearly some sort of underground chamber. There was no ebony dais laced with red crystalline veins. But there were ghouls, a goddamn sea of doglike faces and gangly, hunched backs. And they’d been whipped into a mad frenzy, presumably by my arrival. Or, more likely, the Madonna’s arrival. After all, I was nothing but the reluctant delivery girl. But the ghouls were hanging back, keeping a healthy, respectful distance between themselves and the twins. They yapped and gibbered and laughed the grating, barking way that ghouls laugh. They flailed and clawed viciously at one another, pushing, shoving, slamming their bodies together. It was impossible not to be reminded of a mosh pit.

And then I saw what was behind the twins.

A cage.

Again, Charlee’s vision had embellished and missed the mark. It was nothing elaborate, not the amalgamation of gibbet and rack he’d shown me; its iron bars didn’t glow red hot, either. And what was inside, it wasn’t the Beast in me. It was Selwyn.

It was what had become of Selwyn.

Behind me, someone cleared his throat, and I turned away from the cage.

It was Charlee, standing there in his lime-green patent-leather go-go boots and Russian-hooker fur, looking as silly as it’s possible to look in a pit of fiends, and I made the mistake of being glad to see him. He smiled and held up the pink Sanrio backpack he’d taken from the backseat of the Porsche.

“My Lord and Lady,” he said, “Qqi d’Tashiva and Qqi Ashz’sara, ruthless and indomitable hands of the Fifty.” And he bowed to them.

“Why, you lousy son of a bitch,” I snarled. “You cunt.”

Charlee smirked, but he didn’t look at me.

“You’ve brought them?” asked Isobel, cocking her head to one side. “What the traitor Throckmorton stole from us, you’ve returned those treasures?”

Charlee nodded his pretty pomegranate head. “Precisely as you asked, my Lady.”

One of the ghouls, a skinny little shit so thin it looked like it hadn’t eaten since Pong was the next big thing, scuttled out of the shadows on all fours and snatched the backpack from Charlee’s hands. Charlee, he kept his cool and kept his eyes on the twins. The skinny ghoul carried the pack to Isaac, groveled and slobbered pitifully at his feet, then quickly melted back into the throng.

“It would have been an awful tragedy,” Isobel said, turning to her brother, “if such precious things as these were lost in the coming holocaust, if they’d been caught in the unmaking.”

I watched as Isaac removed an antique wooden box from the pink backpack, the very same antique wooden box that Selwyn had taken to the Meatpacking District and sold to a fat oddities dealer who’d called himself Skunk Ape. Isaac passed the box to his sister, and he took a second object from the pack, a small