Cherry Bomb: A Siobhan Quinn Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 andthe 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 older than she was; but, obviously, her own life had also been the sort that increases the gulf between actual and apparent age.
    “Well, for what it’s worth,” I said, “I feel a lot older than you, kiddo.”
    She laughed, and then there was another silence, and this one we couldn’t blame on street noise. I smoked, and she picked at her raveling cardigan. After maybe five minutes, the quiet became uncomfortable, and I volunteered to go for the beer myself.
    “Okay, but I’ll go with you. I don’t feel much like being here alone.”
    There was a knock at the door.
    “You expecting company?” I asked her, stubbing out my cigarette.
    “Not really,” she said.
    I didn’t much care for the way she was looking at the door.
    “Selwyn, I take it you’re thinking this isn’t a social call,” I said. She was buttoning her sweater and combing her hair with her fingers.
    “I don’t get those,” she said. “Leastwise, not very frequently. And never this early.”
    “So, what, then? A customer?”
    “That’s not the way it works. I don’t tell clients where I live.” She stood watching the door, wary as a cat that’s just heard a barking dog. Whoa, three cat similes so far. Anyway, whoever our visitor was, they knocked again, harder and more insistently than the first time.
    “I hope you aren’t so naive you think that means they can’t find out. You’re not that naive, are you, Ms. Throckmorton?”
    “Shit,” she said.
    “Want me to get it?”
    “I told you I can take care of myself,” she replied, but it came out even less convincingly than it had the night before.
    “Fine. Then how about you answer the door before they huff and puff and blow the damned thing down.”
    She rubbed at her forehead and glared at me.
    “Hey, I was only joking.”
    “Who
is
it, and what do you
want
?” she shouted at the door, her blue eyes still fixed on me.
    “Ms. Smithfield?” a gravelly male voice shouted back.
    “Ms.
Smithfield
?” I asked.
    “I’ll