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

take a hundred Skunk Apes and their BO any day of the week.
    The taxi hadn’t waited. This came as no surprise, though it did piss off Selwyn. Well, pissed her off even more. She was already so angry at me, she was seething.
    “Two hundred damn dollars,” she said and kicked atrash can lying in the gutter. It ripped wide-open, spilling soda cans, Chinese leftovers, and a couple of used prophylactics.
    “Whatever,” I said. “I need a drink anyway.”
    She pushed me hard enough that I almost lost my balance and ended up in the gutter with all that liberated garbage.
    “Are you a total fucking
idiot
? Do you even
know
what could have happened back there?” She was shouting loud enough that several people were staring.
    “You’re making a scene,” I said.
    She shoved me again, but this time I was ready for it.
    Seemed like a good time for an understatement. I said, “I didn’t like her.” I said it as matter-of-factly as I could, given I was still seriously creeped out over the hive people. “Besides, no one who deals hellgoods to the Unseelie has any business calling
anyone
an idiot.”
    “Quinn, if she’d wanted, she could have—”
    “Also, you push me again and I push back. Three strikes you’re out. Now, I’m going to get a beer. You’re welcome to join me, unless, I don’t know, you’re late for a meeting with a succubus or something.”
    “You ass,” she hissed.
    “I have my moments,” I said, and then I crossed the street. No way I was going into that Irish place below the Faerie’s human apiary. Fortunately, there was another bar hardly a stone’s throw away.
    “You think I’m just gonna put up with this sort of crap?” she shouted.
    “Your call,” I shouted back. “You’re a big girl.”
    “Oh my god,” I heard her mutter just before I walkedthrough the door to the bar. By the way, that door was also painted red, and if I hadn’t still been so shaky I might have taken that for an ill enough omen I’d have gone in search of another watering hole. But fuck it.
    I went inside and ordered a Pabst and a shot of Jack.
    Sure, it sounds arrogant as shit, but I was not the least itty-bit surprised, ten or fifteen minutes later, when Selwyn showed up. I had something she wanted as bad as I’d wanted heroin, back when I was still a breather, as much as I need blood now. And she knew the odds were against her finding another willing donor anytime soon. Or ever.
    Could say I held all the cards.
    She sat down on the stool next to me and ordered an old-fashioned. I watched while the bartender mixed whiskey and bitters and added a lump of sugar and a maraschino cherry. To each her own poison, but that shit’s way too sweet for my liking. I drink bourbon, I want to taste bourbon.
    “You told her my real name,” she said.
    I glanced at her, then back to my beer. “Doesn’t work that way. You ought to know that. Faeries and demons,
they’re
the ones have to worry about their names. You really ought to know that, Selwyn.”
    “There wasn’t any point to you getting her so torqued.”
    “Her? You really think—”
    “Don’t change the subject. You didn’t have to do that, Quinn.” She sounded tired.
    “I hate Faeries,” I told her, though she’d possibly already deduced that much.
    Her drink came. She pulled out the toothpick with the cherry on it and lay it on the paper napkin.
    “I don’t have to be told how risky this line of work is,” she said very softly.
    “I have some serious doubts on that score.”
    She sighed and sipped her drink and stared at the picture of Karl Marx hanging behind the bar, above all the bottles of liquor. Oh, yeah. The place was decorated in all sorts of Soviet memorabilia—flags, photographs of the late, great politburo and other assorted heroes of the USSR, propaganda posters, et cetera. Turns out, it actually had once been a secret gathering spot for socialists trying to stay under the radar of the McCarthyism and Cold War hysteria. Back then,