Cherry Bomb_ A Siobhan Quinn Novel - Caitlin R. Kiernan Page 0,85
caught at it. He’d only lost a hand, his dignity, a few teeth. Lucky motherfucker, but then he always was. I think it’s more likely than not that Selwyn had cast her lot with Richard Upton Pickman and his rebels, but, as it happens, I would never know for sure. Where the twins had sent her, she was never coming back from that place.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and maybe I even meant it. I drew the Browning and put three bullets in her head. They did the trick.
And the ghouls, they finally shut up.
Isobel Snow was laughing, a quiet, uneasy titter.
Those scraps of my humanity the Bride of Quiet had somehow missed, those died in the space of three gunshots. Bam, bam, bam. That’s all she wrote. Selwyn was gone, and with luck she wasn’t hurting anymore. I like to tell myself she was dead already, before I pulled the trigger.
It was only the second time I’d ever killed out of kindness. It hasn’t happened since.
I turned back to Isobel and Isaac, and I raised the pistol again, taking aim at the sister.
As the saying goes, you could have heard a pin drop.
I squeezed the trigger, and the 9mm roared again. The bullet went in through Isobel’s left eye and took off most of the back of her head. She didn’t go down immediately. There was this long, weird pause while she just stood there, swaying side to side, her remaining eye filled with hemorrhage and surprise. And then she bared her teeth, hissed, and I clearly heard the death rattle before she crumpled—very, very slowly, as though she were moving underwater. The ghoul skull tumbled from her hands and rolled away across the flagstones. And, what with the way their white hair was braided together, she dragged Isaac off his feet, as well, and he wound up on all fours beside her corpse. I took aim again.
Yeah, it did—right then—occur to me that there was no way in hell it could be that easy, avenging Selwyn, putting an end to what the twins had done and what they meant to do. What they’d set in motion. Putting an end to the twins themselves. Unless, of course, what was happening right that moment, Selwyn’s and their undoing, me reprising my too-familiar role as executioner, was all they’d ever really set in motion, the inevitable and unintended consequences or their actions.
“Twice-Damned,” said Charlee in a voice that boomed louder than the Browning. I didn’t lower the pistol, but I did look his way.
Well, I looked towards the place where he’d been.
What stood there now, it wasn’t human, and it wasn’t a vampire. My first thought, Where the fucking fuck did the fucking angel come from?
Three fucks, when one just isn’t fucking enough.
I knew what it was, even though I’d never laid eyes on a Djinn. To my knowledge, it had been an imp’s age since anyone of earth had. B told me once that Djinn are like germs in a cheap whorehouse. You never see the bastards, but they’re always there.
. . . in the midst of the four beasts, I heard a terrible, terrible voice saying to me, ‘Come, child, and see.’ And behold, in the midst of the whirlwind I looked . . .
“Fuck me,” I whispered. There wasn’t so much as a peep from the ghouls, but I could hear Isaac sobbing inconsolably over his dead sister.
Go head, I thought. Go ahead and bawl your eyes out.
The Djinn unfurled wings of fire, fire and smoke and incandescent gases, wings made of lightning and roiling, sulfurous clouds. The Basalt Madonna was clutched in the talons of its right hand. It took a step towards the Snows, a step towards me. I took a step backwards and bumped into Selwyn’s cage.
“Which is what I get for underestimating boys who wear dresses,” I said. “So, tell me, Smoky. What happens next?”
The Djinn flared its wide nostrils, exhaling steam, then stared down at the Madonna. The T-shirt had burned completely away, revealing the grotesque mother and child reunion and the pyrite whorl of the ammonite.
“All the time you held it,” said the Djinn, and its voice was a hurricane. “All that time, you might have changed your fate, rewoven the skein of time, and yet you did not. Why is that, Siobhan Quinn, Twice-Damned?”
Its voice bruised the air, and I wanted to cover my aching ears.