Blood Oranges (9781101594858) by Caitlin R. Kathleen; Kiernan Tierney Page A

had something Catholic tattooed on his left bicep, Mother Mary and a heart wrapped in thorns. Something generic, something cliché.
    â€œYou could say that,” I replied.
    â€œHope you gave good as you got.”
    â€œBetter,” I replied, turning the key, hearing the tumblers roll loud as thunder. Since I’d awakened by the tracks, the whole damn world was loud—sound, sight, smell, touch—all of it LOUD.
    â€œYour blood or theirs,” he asked, and the others laughed. I almost told him to mind his own business.
    â€œ
Mostly
theirs,” I lied, seeing how it was
all
theirs. Hugo (or Hector, whatever) nodded and gave me the thumbs up.
    â€œMuy peleonera,”
he grinned. I had to ask him what that meant, which made the guys playing dominoes chuckle again. They laughed a lot, the guys who played dominoes on the sidewalk outside my apartment.
    â€œDon’t you worry,” he said. “Means you did good.”
    Insert ironic laughter here.
    Cut to me stepping into the apartment. It was stifling, the air stale and warm as any other summer night because Mr. B didn’t spring for a window unit. Only, it had never seemed quite
as
stale and stifling as it did that night. Thank you, werevamp super-senses. And there was the smell. Sure, my housekeeping skills were nonexistent. Still are. But the mess in the kitchen sink, and the mold running rampant in the bathroom, and the fast-food bags strewn around the place had never stunk even half as bad as they did that night. I may have actually gagged. Look at me, all creature of the night and shit, ready to spew at the smell of a filthy apartment. But like I said, the stink was LOUD. I mean, you’d think some kind soul had left a dead elephant to rot in that dump. I took a few steps across the mustard-yellow shag and could hear the bodies of roaches—some dead, some not—crunching LOUD in the home they’d made between the carpet and the floorboards. I could still hear every word the guys on the sidewalk were saying, and the Mexpop was starting to make my head ring. I went straight to the bathroom—and I’ll spare you further details of that
parfum
, except to say the gagging got worse before it got better. Last thing I wanted to do was vomit the belly full of blood, because, for all I knew, that meant I’d have to hit the streets again before sunup. Anyway, I found enough cotton (scavenged from an aspirin bottle and Q-tips) to stuff into my nose and ears, and that helped just a little. Okay, hardly at all, but give the girl an
E
for
Effort
, right?
    I stalked around the place with a Hefty garbage bag (I found a box of them beneath the kitchen sink, though I have no memory of ever having bought such things), tossing everything into it that I could stand to touch and cursing my slovenly ways. Fuck you, Siobhan. Fuck you, too, Mr. Month-Old Mystery Thing from Taco Bell. Fuck you, Miss Ashtray I’d Not Emptied All Summer. Let my vengeance rain down upon thee. By the time the sky was growing light, I’d made a few craters in the clutter, but I’d also come to appreciate the futility of my efforts. Might as well have been trying to tidy up a landfill.
    I couldn’t take the reek any longer, so I went outside and sat on the steps and smoked as the streetlights winked out. The domino boys were gone and had taken the card table with them. I sat and stared at the used car lot across the street. A sign promised me the best deals in town. I wondered what had happened to my own car after the encounter with the werewolf and the china doll who wasn’t Mercy Brown. Maybe it was still parked out by the reservoir. Maybe she’d pushed it into the water. You know, to cover her tracks, hide the evidence, whatever. Any bitch strong enough to take out a bull loup that size, she’d have no trouble rolling my beat-to-hell-and-back ’99 Honda Accord into the Scituate Reservoir. Sure, my Honda wasn’t as