Siobhan Quinn, Tome 2: Red Delicious

CHAPTER ONE

A GHOST OF MYSELF

Hello. My name is Siobhan Quinn, and I’m a murderer. It’s been three days since my last homicide.

See? You like me already.

Not that everyone and her mother considers vampires and werewolves—or some poor shit like me who lucks out and gets the best of both worlds—a murderer. Most everyone is too busy either painting us nasties as this or that stripe of demon or monster, or (and this truly does get my goat) they’ve managed to romanticize the fiends we are into tortured Byronic figures who sparkle in sunlight or pretentiously haunt the streets of, say, New Orleans. The heroes and heroines of lurid “shifter” romances and self-proclaimed “otherkin” and “therianthropes” who’d shit themselves silly if they ever got so much as a peep at a genuine loup. Or we get to solve paranormal crimes in an attempt to redeem our damned souls. Or we seek to regain our lost mortality. Or, so say various Academic sorts, serve as metaphors for mankind’s fear of the Other. Or . . .

You get the picture.

And John Wayne Gacy was just some misunderstood candy-colored clown. Jeffrey Dahmer, guy just had an eating disorder. Sure thing. Anyway, we’ll no doubt come back to all this falderal later on, repeatedly, because it never ceases to amuse me.

I hate recaps. With a passion do I hate recaps. But I suppose—for all you folks just tuning in—I should at least make a half-assed, token effort at something of the sort. Here goes:

Once upon a time there was a girl ran away from home to live on the hard streets of Providence, Rhode Island. Before long, she discovered the joys of heroin, or they discovered her, and she took to junk like a fly to horse poop. Then, lo and behold, a series of highly unlikely events transpired during which she accidentally killed a ghoul and then a vampire—in the process discovering, hey, guess what, monsters are real. Whee. Now, homeless junkies who kill two nasties without even trying, they tend to attract attention. Mostly, not the good sort of attention. Which is how it went for me. This dude calling himself B, he shows up. B’s sort of a middleman for all sorts of dealings between things what go bump in the night, which makes him as many enemies as friends. More, actually. So, he shows up and gives me one of those offers you can’t refuse: I go to work as a sort of bodyguard, and he protects me from the baddies want me dead, and he gives me a place to live. Plus, generous soul that he is, he’ll supply me with all the free smack I can shoot into my veins. Well, as long as I can balance being high and getting the job done. I accept, and he pins a rep on me, tall tales of his own invention, how I’m absolute and certain doom to anyone dares fuck with him, and . . . Jesus, I’m boring myself already.

Shorter version: I screw up. And I mean I screw up bad. The same night I get sloppy and get bitten by a werewolf, I’m also bitten by a very, very formidable vampire child called herself the Bride of Quiet. Or Mercy Brown, depending on her mood. B, who sees no shame in cowardice, he takes a powder, leaving me to fend for myself, because, turns out, I’d become some sort of pawn in a decades-old labyrinthine intrigue of revenge and bitch-slapping between the Bride and this even scarier she vamp down in Brooklyn, a firebug of thermonuclear proportions known as Evangelista Penderghast. Events unfold. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. Folks die, most of whom have it coming. Most of whom I ate. Finally, I make a deal with Penderghast, and she loans me a magical doodad—real eldritch voodoo stuff—that allows me to bump off the Bride (and a church bus full of werewolves in the bargain).

B comes back, and all is forgiven.

Cue exit music. Close curtain.

Fast-forward six months or so.