Cherry Bomb_ A Siobhan Quinn Novel - Caitlin R. Kiernan Page 0,1

work?”

“Occult antiquities,” she replied. “Acquisition and appraisal.” And wet or not, I’d have wrung her pretty neck right then and there if she’d said one word about dildos and/or unicorns.

Her eyes were the deep blue of a star sapphire, and her hair was the black of a lump of coal. Skin like a glass of ice-cold milk. Hey, I can ladle on the purple prose with the best of them if the mood strikes me. And remembering that night, the mood strikes me. She could just about have been something awful herself, a demon or one of the Unseelie gazing out at me from beneath her glamour. Unlike most of the people crammed into the place, she wasn’t dressed in some tacky fetish garb. Just a black Hellboy T-shirt, faded jeans, a leather biker jacket a size or two too small, and a ratty pair of checkered Vans. She was both hot and goddamn adorable. Which is to say she stuck out in that crowd like the proverbial sore thumb. Shit, even I caved in and wore the silly dom getups Eve the CPA bought for me from a couple of shops down on St. Mark’s, just to keep her happy. I also wore the cosmetics, contact lenses, and dental prosthetics that were supposed to help keep people from going all looky-loo on me.

“Acquisition and appraisal,” I said. It sounded a hell of a lot more interesting than accounting.

“Plus,” she said, “I’m a bit of an armchair occultist, and a halfway decent thief. But that last part just sort of comes with the territory.”

“Occupational hazard.”

“It can be. Hazardous. But I’m careful. Cautious.”

“Right now, Selwyn, careful and cautious are probably the last two things I’d call you.”

She laughed, winked, then fluttered those sapphire eyes. “Oh, come off it,” she said. “You’re not gonna hurt me.”

“And why is that, Selwyn?”

“Because,” she began, then paused to point an index finger at Eve, who was still waiting at the crowded bar. “To begin with, your date there bores you to tears. I’m still trying to figure out what you see in her. I know the sort. Something excruciatingly extra dull by the light of day, a wedding photographer or an accountant or an economics professor. Am I right?”

It’s not like I could say she wasn’t.

“We have an arrangement,” I said.

“Oh, I bet you do.”

I stared at her, smelling her; she smelled like blood and clean laundry and vanilla. Suddenly, my mouth was as wet as my pussy. Anyone—living or dead—gets bored eating the same meal week in and week out, no matter how convenient that might be.

“Pollyanna Wannabe over there,” Selwyn continued, “she comes home from a hard, tedious, unrewarding day at the office, right, and there you are waiting for her, wilder and weirder and more dangerous a creature than she’d ever hoped to meet, much less swap blood with. And every day, every evening, she knows that might be the day or night you finally get bored, decide you’ve had enough, and finish her off. The cherry on top, so to speak. Living dangerously.”

“But I suppose you’re different.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“It was heavily fucking implied.”

She laughed again, stretched her legs out in front of her, and rested her head on the back of the sofa. I glanced from her to the bar. Wouldn’t be long now until Eve was on her way back with our beers.

“Just what is it you want, anyway?”

“Didn’t say I want anything. What’s your name?”

“Quinn,” I told her. “You should know up front I’m a piss-poor conversationalist.”

“Lady, if I did want something from you, it wouldn’t be conversation.”

“But you don’t want anything from me.”

“Didn’t say that, either. Are you always this prone to putting words in people’s mouths?”

I looked up at the low concrete ceiling, hoping that if I ignored her, maybe she’d fuck off, and I could get back to my dull but convenient arrangement with the CPA who never asked more from me than her weekly ration of red sauce, nothing more than a monster willing to play arm candy and give her a halfhearted flogging now and then. A sea of chatter pressed in all around me, the casual rise and fall of talk in a place no one came to talk. I could hear Selwyn Throckmorton’s beating heart, along with the dozens of others. I could hear her breath, and gazing at the ugly ceiling did nothing whatsoever to calm my appetite or my libido.

“Kid,” I said, “you have absolutely no idea what you’re