Cherry Bomb: A Siobhan Quinn Novel by Caitlin R. Kiernan, Kathleen Tierney Page A

always to alleys and side streets. I can’t say which side streets and alleys, because it hardly mattered. Not like I was reading the signs. Lurching along on two legs, racing on four, our claws dug furrows in asphalt andscraped across concrete and cobblestones. Everything unfolded around me in a ghostly haze of night vision. Somewhere, the Beast’s left shoulder clipped a dumpster, and the dumpster skidded away, doing almost a full one eighty before smacking into a brick wall. We were briefly stunned. Or it was stunned, and I was aware of that fact. Which the fuck ever. It was knocked off its feet, but got right back up again. Jesus, I’ve never felt so invulnerable. Like . . . like what? Like that bullshit self-confidence comes along with the rush after a couple of lines of cocaine, but multiplied a hundred times.
    Yeah, like that.
    Car horns, car alarms, the squeal of tires and brake pads. Screams and curses. Dogs locked up inside going monkey shit at the smell of us and barking their heads off. The stink of garbage and rats and pigeon shit and . . . every smell of Manhattan amped up and off the scales. And we killed. Almost anything, anyone unlucky or dumb enough to get in our way went down and stayed down. Most barely had a chance to scream. Barely knew what hit them, or didn’t know at all.
    Probably the latter.
    You’re out for a stroll, or your walking your Pomeranian, and this huge fucking brute lunges out of the shadows, in those final seconds, how likely is it you’re gonna think,
Oh shit on me, a werewolf,
right? You’re too busy being totally stupefied or with fleeting thoughts of just how screwed you are. I mean, I’m talking about regular people here, those not in on the great cosmic joke that monsters walk among them.
    We barreled headlong, full-tilt boogie into thepassenger side of a Volkswagen Beetle, and the car was tossed several feet into the air and landed upside down on a punk kid on a skateboard. Splat. I was dimly amazed. Dude, that was, I gotta say, one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. Hey, I bet that guy on the skateboard would have agreed.
    Unlike the dumpster, the Volkswagen didn’t even slow us down. The Incredible Hulk? That snot-green son of a bitch has nothing on my
loup.
    Yeah, that night, that November morning, was when I began thinking of the Beast as mine. Or, no. Wait. That’s not quite right, ’cause the Beast is without a doubt her
own
Beast. More like, I realized she’s an integral part of me, an intimate part of me—of the
new
me that Mercy and Grumet had created—wedded inextricably to whatever miserable crumb was left of my soul. Suddenly, she was more than a bothersome fucking furball who popped up from time to time for the express purpose of messing with precious goddamn me. Might come off schmaltzy, but dashing helter-skelter about Gotham, decapitating and disemboweling and dismembering, I also found myself thinking of her as a
friend
. Yeah, right? Hell, I hadn’t had too many of those when I was alive, and no more than a couple postmortem, Selwyn Throckmorton and Aloysius the troll. Oh, and a violet-skinned succubus went by the fine old Puritan name of Clemency Hate-evil before being my friend got her killed. Or got her worse. I was never sure which.
    But it wasn’t as simple as that. This epiphany, I mean. There was more to it. We hit the Volkswagen, and shortly afterwards I had . . . let’s call it a vision, because I don’tknow what the hell else I’d call it. You got something better, be my guest. One minute I was all but drowning in the sound of the Beast’s paws hammering at the pavement, tripping balls on the carnage, on a million noises, odors, sights, et cetera and fucking et cetera.
    Jump cut.
    And I was walking slowly through a forest. Dry leaves crunched under my bare feet, and the moon—a
full
moon, mind you—was shining down through branches that were mostly bare. Because wherever I was that was no longer Lower Manhattan, it