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

was autumn there, too. Maybe it was even November. I knew right off those woods weren’t real. They could have been a storybook forest, the sort of place dreamed up so wicked witches can build their gaudy gingerbread houses while Snow White lies in a coma surrounded by her seven dwarves. A forest built out of imagination. Yeah, that was the way it struck me, like it hadn’t grown there, like it had been thought into being.
    Regardless, I didn’t want to be there. I wanted to be with the
loup.
I was
supposed
to be with the
loup
, wasn’t I? By being hauled away to that soundstage forest, I was being cheated out of my half of our wild hunt. I stopped and looked over my shoulder, like maybe there was gonna be a flashing neon exit sign waiting behind me. But there was only more trees. Paper birch and oak trees and shaggy hemlocks. I cursed them and started walking again, because walking seemed to make slightly more sense than standing still. I don’t know how long I walked. Everything about that place was so much the same it could have been a short loop of film, playing over and over. I couldhave been walking in tiny circles that I’d only mistaken for a straight line, some sort of Möbius strip . . .
    I walked through the trees until there weren’t any more of the trees to walk through. They came to an end at the edge of a field of tall yellow-brown grass. The woods had been still as my dead heart, but a cold breeze rustled the field, blowing the grass this way, that way. The forest had smelled like cinnamon and cloves, but out in the open, the air smelled like apple cider. And I was no longer alone. There was a blonde child and a huge black wolf staring out over the tall grass. The wolf was sitting on its haunches. She was standing, but, even so, she was hardly as tall as that wolf. It wasn’t a
loup.
Except for its size, it was, you know, just a wolf. The child was stroking the top of its head. When I stepped out of the forest, they both turned and looked at me. The girl smiled. But it was a sad sort of smile. A pitying kind of smile that ought to have made me even more angry, because I cannot bear being pitied. But, for some reason, her smile was a relief. Could be anything would have been a relief after those trees.
    “Hi,” she said and waved.
    “Hi,” I replied. There were a lot of questions I wanted to ask. I picked one more or less at random.
    “What’s going on?”
    The girl raised an eyebrow.
    “What do you mean, Quinn?”
    “I mean . . .” And I paused, uncertain for just a second what I
did
mean. “I mean,” I continued, “where am I?”
    Her smile returned.
    “Oh. Well, you’re standing between the forest andthe meadow. Do you know what’s on the other side of the meadow, Quinn?”
    “More fucking trees?”
    She shrugged, and the wolf whimpered, so she scratched it under the chin.
    “Could be. I don’t know. We’ve never tried to cross the meadow. I think we’re afraid to try.”
    I gazed out across the grass. Whatever was on the other side, it was too far away to see.
    “Today,” she said, “my name is Quinn.”
    “I should tell you, I’m not in the mood to be fucked with.”
    She just shrugged and kept scratching at the big black wolf ’s chin. It occurred to me that the wolf ’s fur was the same color as Selwyn’s. It also occurred to me that the girl’s hair was the same dirty blonde as my own.
    “So, okay, what was your name yesterday?”
    “I can’t remember. Does it really matter? You weren’t here yesterday.”
    “I’m going to sit down,” I told her. “My feet hurt.”
    “If you sit, you won’t be able to see anything,” she said. “The grass is too tall, if you sit, to see over.”
    “In case you haven’t noticed, there’s not a hell of a lot going on out there.”
    “Not yet,” she said, and stopped scratching the wolf.
    “You’re a strange one,” I said, and she shrugged again.
    “Said the vampire who’s also a lycanthrope.”
    I let that