Read Online Cherry Bomb: A Siobhan Quinn Novel by Caitlin R. Kiernan, Kathleen Tierney - Free Book Online Page A

in some sense, they still were. Some of them were still alive. I know this because a couple of them were breathing, and one even turned its head. I’d say it was watching me, only it didn’t have any eyes. Try to imagine if someone had attempted to mold statues from honeycombs and done a fucking sloppy job. Bingo. It was hard to tell where one began and another ended, and their waxy yellow flesh was pockmarked with thousands of hexagonal pits. And the bees were all over them. The hives had holes where mouths had been, and holes in other places, and the bees crawled in and out, out and in. The honey I was smelling dripped from those horridfucking things and pooled on the floor around them. Takes a whole damn lot to make me want to puke. Those things did the trick.
    “I knew you wouldn’t be disappointed,” said Selwyn, pleased with herself and seemingly oblivious to the hives. I figured she’d likely seen them at least once before. Maybe shit like that didn’t bother her anymore. Maybe it never had.
    The Faerie said, “My dear Ms. Smithfield, a treasure is lost—so lost to have been all but forgotten even to the memory of Daoine Sídhe—it is foolish to believe it will ever again be seen. A treasure lost as long as was the Tear of Dis, then I do not hesitate to name its reappearance miraculous.”
    Me, I was trying to concentrate on anything at all but the hive people. So I stared at the string of diamonds and that huge ruby cupped in Selwyn’s right hand. In the taxi, I hadn’t realized the way the ruby seemed to shine . . . no, wrong word. How the ruby seemed to
ooze
a soft reddish glow. The stone wasn’t reflecting light; it was making it. Wasn’t the first time I’d seen that sort of magic, and I still don’t know why it took me that long to catch on. Maybe the ruby waited until it was there with the Faerie to show its true colors—ha-ha.
    “That’s infernal,” I said, and Selwyn nodded.
    “Taken from the mines beneath the City of Iron,” she replied. “Supposedly it belonged to some archduke or another for, I don’t know, thousands of years. Took me—”
    “Correction, love,” the Faerie interrupted. “Your kind would count it in millions of years.”
    Now that I knew what it was, the ruby seemed a fuck-ton worse than the hive people.
    “So, wait. You traffic in hellgoods?” I asked Selwyn.
    I felt her eyes on me, but I didn’t look away from the necklace.
    “Only when they come my way,” she answered, “which isn’t very often”
    Right then’s when it occurred to me the ruby was staring into me, same as I was staring into it. You know, Nietzsche and gazing into the abyss and all. Well, the ruby wasn’t some philosophical, metaphysical abyss. It was the real fucking deal. Might sound trite, but it felt as if I actually had to pry my eyes away from the ruby. My head had begun to throb, and I could taste iron.
    “A damned shame, too,” Selwyn said. “It’s a profitable market. Demand always exceeds supply.”
    “You have such a keen head for business,” the Faerie told her. “Quite the acumen, for only a mortal girl.”
    I think the appropriate phrase is,
I was aghast.
    “Selwyn, do you even
know
how fucking stupid that is?”
    The Faerie raised an eyebrow and leaned towards us. The honey smell was coming from her, too.
    “Selwyn? Annie Smithfield, why did that dead one name you
Selwyn
?”
    Selwyn turned sort of green. She looked like she wanted to punch me in the head.
    “It’s my
middle
name,” she replied, doing her best not to sound as pissed off as she was at having her
nom de guerre
blown like that. “Annie Selwyn Smithfield. Annabelle, to be precise.”
    I thought it was a decent enough save, though it was unclear whether the Faerie was buying it. Aster’s left eyebrow was still cocked in a very skeptical fashion.
    “I shouldn’t like to ever learn that you’ve been less than truthful with me, Ms. Smithfield,” Aster said, her voice just as skeptical as her