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

it was called the Ukrainian Labor Home, and there were dances and potluck dinners. Sitting there, you can almost smell the
kapusniak
and hear the accordions. Sorry. Infodump. But that bar—named after the former Soviet security agency—is one of the few places in Manhattan I ever genuinely fell in love with.
    Selwyn stirred at her old-fashioned with a swizzle stick, and I drank my Pabst.
    “How’d you get the Host on you, anyway?”
    She shook her head and went back to stirring her drink.
    “I’d rather not get into that.”
    “Okay, then, how about we return to the subject of Isaac Snow, or, better yet, why you seem to specialize in ghoul artifacts.”
    She chewed at her lower lip a moment, then said, “One skull and one necklace hardly constitute specializing.”
    “So, that was just a coincidence?”
    “Is this really your business?”
    I finished my beer and ordered a second and another shot of Jack. If the bartender had overheard us, he was either used to hearing that sort of talk because the place was a secret watering hole for nasties and their fellow travelers or he had the good sense to mind his own business.
    “Hey, Selwyn, you go and spring shit like Aster and her chamber of horrors on me, then it starts being my business real fast. Never mind getting me involved in your flea market of the damned. Do you even begin to understand what happens when the bad folks from the Nine Hells discover someone’s playing Walmart with stuff they consider rightfully theirs? Because I do.”
    “I take precautions,” she said.
    I was only almost speechless.
    “Congratulations, baby girl. I think you just graduated from ‘reckless’ to ‘too dumb to fuck.’”
    She stopped stirring her drink. She tapped at the end of her nose instead.
    “He’s my cousin,” she said, and she took a tarnished silver pocket watch from her jacket and opened it. She checked the time against the clock behind the bar, then closed the watch and put it away again. “Isaac Snow. He’s my cousin.”
    I tossed back my Jack Daniel’s and ordered a third shot. I figured, whatever was coming next, whatever she was about to say, I’d need it. See, it tends to work like this with monsters. Not always, but usually. We aren’t so big on the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” adage. More like “the enemy of my friend is always my enemy.” Youhang with troublemakers, or even just someone unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, tends to rub off. There are exceptions, sure. For example, when Evangelista Penderghast helped me put an end to Mercy Brown—see the first thrilling installment of the misadventures and dumb luck of me. But, truth be told, the Bride of Quiet and Penderghast, they were actually playing a very long game of chess, and I’d just been the pawn in the match. Okay, bad metaphor. But you get the gist. I knew sitting there at the bar that afternoon that the longer I stuck around Selwyn Throckmorton, the more of her messes were gonna become messes I could call my own. Hell, the spooky grapevine was probably already humming with the news that she’d found a vamp guardian angel.
    “So,” I said, watching the bartender as he poured the shot of bourbon, “when you were telling me about Boston’s answer to the Addams Family, you just conveniently neglected to mention it also includes the Throckmortons. You know, if I murder you, this very minute, I’ll totally get away with it.”
    She glanced at me, and then she tapped her nose a few more times.
    “It’s
not
the Throckmortons,” she said. “The Throckmortons are all working-class, God-fearing Baptists. Dad’s from Pittsburgh. But my mother was an Endicott. Suzanne Endicott. He didn’t know about any of it until after they were married. She’d come to New York to try to get away from that bunch.”
    My shot arrived. I found myself wishing it were something redder and richer than whiskey. I let her talk. Ididn’t have to. I could have gotten up and