What Screams May Come

by H. P. Mallory

  So, Meg wanted her power back, and all the House-related government entities that went with it. That meant exterminating the illustrious Association of Netherworld Creatures. And making sure the ANC would stay gone forever. And how did Meg eventually solve her problem, you ask? By blowing up damn near every ANC office in the country. And then she framed us, the ANC, for the crime, trying her damnedest to make it look like an inside job. She wanted us to appear like we were sick of government oversight and trying to overturn it from the inside out. Which was sheer bullshit! Half the time, we didn’t even know the federal representatives watching us were even there… That’s probably why everything went to shit in the first place. Not enough people were watching.

  Well, it worked out swimmingly for Meg. Lots of things went boom across the United States, culminating in a synchronized domino effect in Chicago, Austin, Kansas City, Miami, and the District of Columbia—which, in case you reside under an extremely sound-proof rock, is where the President of the United States lives.

  So they all went boom, and Meg used a portal-ripper that she stole from Bram (way to give the nightmare hellbeast the key to the Universe, dumbass!) and liberated herself, myself, and lots of bad guys from the Netherworld, all of which she later released on Earth.

  Oh, and during all of this I got kinda of, um, glamoured. Yep, I was glamoured into thinking that Meg was my mother.

  But that’s another story. And one I really don’t want to get into right now.

  All the cities that went boom were suddenly crawling with beasties. The worst, most horrid creatures of the imagination started appearing everywhere, and the higher-ups in D.C. as well as the general public, shat their collective pants.

  Everything within a hundred miles of any ANC was ablaze. Meg and I, along with a bunch of other people were in the White House lobby, staring at each other. President Odyssey was three tenths of a second away from expiring when pow! Federal Agent Rowena Gem snapped her fingers and in swooped a giant, green skeleton thing that just burned the ever-loving shit out of Meg. Meg went nuts and started screaming, like she was terrified, and then poof! She was gone. And so was the skeleton.

  So Odyssey got up and called Canada, saying, “Help pls,” and thus began two long weeks of waiting and waiting and waiting. Whatever was left of our government had to decide what to do with the surviving parts that still remained from the questionably-dead ANC… which didn’t amount to much. Three offices still stood, two of them consumed by fire and smoke and swimming with all manner of Netherworldian parasites and mold-like spores. The rest were just big, black craters, still steaming in the ground.

  There weren’t many survivors. Not anywhere.

  The ANC was effectively dead, and Odyssey’s administration had more pressing issues to deal with—like the humanitarian crises in more than twenty newly demolished cities. So reestablishing our bureaucracy got shelved and they eventually decided to merge the surviving personnel with human law enforcement. Every aspect from the sheriff’s office to the FBI was integrated until a more permanent solution could be found.

  And now here I am. Sitting at a tiny desk in a giant room, surrounded by angry pedestrians and the ghosts of my unpaid parking tickets.

  Ta-da.

  The office was crowded with uniformed officers as well as undercover cops who were busy hustling the small-time bad guys into cells at the far end of the building. Nobody noticed me—half of them didn’t care I was here, and the other half preferred not to be caught ogling the hyper-dangerous fairy lest I snap and set them and theirs on fire with my laser-focused eyes!

  I heard a rumbling and the building trembled around us when an earthquake rattled, making everybody drop what they were doing and look around. Desks shook and computers clattered; the lights swung from the ceiling like kite tails, and the small number of transfers from states where this didn’t happen every Thursday were cautiously huddled under doorframes, visibly resisting the urge to crawl under their steel tables.

  For a fraction of a second while it was happening, the air around me went ice-cold. My spine froze and I gasped, inhaling slowly and feeling like I was deep underwater. The air was getting thinner and something was coming. But what?

  The earthquake stopped. The odd feeling went away.

  Everybody looked at me. Like they thought I was the cause of it.

  I glanced at a few of them. “Don’t look at me! I had nothing to do with that!” I snapped.

  Nobody replied. They all looked down, coughing and shuffling papers until the hum of conversation reclaimed the uncomfortable quiet.

  I turned back to my desk, bending down to pick up some papers that slid off in the quake. “It’s not like we live in fucking California or anything.”

  Behind me I heard footsteps and a disgruntled sniffing. I sat up and lifted my coffee cup, remarkably still contained in its mug, and took a long drink while I watched the offensive sniffer round the corner.

  Gary. Old, heavy, and set in his ways. Emotionally unbalanced. Unbearably human.

  He caught me looking at him and glared back before disappearing into an interrogation room. I knew damn well there was nobody else in it. I scoffed. He was trying to intimidate me, make me think he was working a case so big and scary that it warranted interviewing somebody in a room with a two-way mirror and an angry, white guy. I don’t know what he intended to accomplish. If I were as tight with Satan as everybody thought I was, Gary’s pompously pedantic behavior wouldn’t benearly enough to slow me down.

  Oh, yeah, did I mention that basically everybody hates me?

  I sighed, taking a very long drink of coffee and setting the mug down beside a short pile of papers. Blank forms for taking statements. I was waiting patiently for somebody out in the big, bad world to do something so stomach-turning that I could write a short story about it. Worse than a car accident, but better than terrorism. And it couldn’t cross state lines—the Feds would be only too happy to take a case off my hands. Anybody in the building would have been happy to take a case off my hands. Never mind that it meant more work for them and a wasted opportunity to watch the temperamental fairy take a flying leap into a career-devouring volcano.

  I’d only been in the building for about two hours, waiting for my unidentified partner to make his appearance. It was weird having a desk again… It felt like years, maybe decades since I’d been at work. It couldn’t have been more than a month, but every memory I had from before I got sucked through a fucking wormhole was frighteningly blurry.

  My doctors attributed my continuing recovery to a long-term glamour. They all agreed that it should go away within the year. Eventually I would be able to think clearly again, and remember my tenth birthday and the first time I shot an Op 7, and the time Knight ingested shapechanger blood and morphed into the living embodiment of an erection.

  Now that was an ordeal.

  It was a weird memory. All cloudy and red even before this happened, so now all I could really remember was hiding in a bush beside an increasingly horny Knight who insisted that I pinch him repeatedly.

  I wondered for the better half of a second what Knight would say or do if I brought the memory up now. He hadn’t been able to remember what had happened when I’d told him about it in his office right after it happened. One of the hazards in drinking magic sex blood is convenient memory loss—so he probably wouldn’t remember it now. However, it might cause him to do that adorable, angry, blushing thing…

  I smiled but then nearly smacked it right off my own face. Hades, stop that.

  Oh. Right.

  One thing I forgot to mention, mostly because I’m not quite sure how to say it: Knight and I are… something. We’re not quite together, and not quite apart. Dancing on static. Breathing in a sandstorm. Somewhere cold and uncomfortable, balancing on the razor’s edge of violation. Empty. Vulnerable in all the worst ways. Bared to the bone, our souls molded into effigies of ourselves, quivering, unsure what to do about each other, now that the worst of all possible things
had happened.

  Knight had sex with Meg. Right in front of me. He was under a glamour, but… still. It was a hell of a thing to see.

  And I have no fucking idea how to process it.

  To be totally honest—and this doesn’t make it any better—I had my fair share of glamoured-sex too. It was with a vampire in Meg’s household named Sebastian. It makes me sick to think of it now…

  “Detective O’Neil?”

  I looked up and standing in front of my desk was a gangly, twenty-something in a blue uniform with ash-blond hair and the biggest, goofiest grin I’d ever seen. With both hands in his pockets, he faced me. His wide, bogglingly blue eyes suggested at once that he had no concept of how easy it is to die.

  I blinked squarely at him. He blinked back.

  “Who’s asking?” I said slowly.

  “Henry Cotton,” he replied. He seemed at ease in the strangest, most irritating way possible, like a middle schooler from fifties television. The kid could have addressed me with “Golly gee, mister” and I would not have been the least surprised.

  “I’m your new partner.”

  Greeeaaat, I thought, suppressing a powerful urge to sigh. “Yeah, that’s me.”

  His eyes got bigger, if that were even possible. Almost like being my new partner excited him. I squinted at him, instantly suspicious.

  Okay, on paper, it wasn’t too weird that they were saddling me with the new guy—technically, and I do mean strictly technically, I had almost seven years of professional ass-kicking experience under my belt. On paper, I was the ideal person to place the new grads with. And I say “on paper” because as far as everyone in this building and damn near every other building on this fucking planet were concerned, I was as fresh-outta-the-Academy-green as he was, and red, red, red to boot. I was totally inexperienced and guilty of so many things. Nothing I’d done in the now-defunct ANC now held any water. As far as everyone else was concerned, I was newborn and bloody, about as trustworthy as the kid they picked up off the street for peddling potions or whatever street drugs humans chronically use. I was trailing a long, angry list of really bad things that were totally not my fault, but which put me at the top of everybody’s “nope, not today” list.

  Nobody here would have been stupid enough to place one of their own under the wing of the scary-fairy; and none of them trusted me enough to train somebody from the ground up. So, either this particular kid was in really hot water with somebody higher up the ladder, or the powers that be were playing a deliberate, and weirdly sophisticated hand—sticking me with the new kid so that if something went wrong, they’d conveniently have me to blame.

  “It is such an honor,” he said, offering me his hand.

  “Um what?” I asked as I took his hand slowly. He gave it a vigorous shake. “Honor,” I repeated blandly. “You’re looking for Dulcie O’Neil, right?”

  “Yes, yes, the one from the Association of Netherworld Creatures! I am a huge fan!” he said, now shaking my hand hard enough to rattle my bones.

  “Um,” I said. Okay, this is new. “Fan of… what, exactly?”

  He stopped shaking my hand abruptly, looking very confused. “What do you mean, of what? You saved the world!”

  I drew my hand back, still staring at him. “Well, yeah,” I agreed. I mean, I almost helped end it to start with—but yeah, sure, what the hell, I saved the world.

  “Is it true what I’ve heard?” he asked, rounding the desk and plunking himself down in an empty, free-floating chair next to mine. “That you’re a fairy and a vampire?”

  Along with a number of other things, I thought. “Um… yeah. It is.”

  “Cool,” said Henry, practically squealing—then he caught himself and cleared his throat. “Sorry, Detective. I’m just excited they granted my request.”

  “Request?” I repeated. “Wait, wait, wait! Hold up! You asked to work with me?”

  Henry nodded enthusiastically. “I sure did, ma’am.”

  I looked up. Behind him, a group of officers were casually loitering near the captain’s office, muttering to each other and casting spectacularly obvious glances at Henry and me. Their eyes widened and narrowed in turns, as if they were trying to decide if the kid were crazy or just good, old-fashioned stupid. Their hands were poised over their guns, like they fully expected me to set myself on fire, unhinge my jaw and swallow poor Henry like a foul-tasting pill.

  My heart skipped a beat for a second, because their guns weren’t just guns anymore. Part of the merger included the introduction of bullets that were filled with dragon saliva—a supernatural paralytic that sometimes did its job too well. It made your lungs forget how to breathe. The saliva wouldn’t do anything to humans, as most every other supernatural poison, but the change in artillery went over without much of a fuss—a bullet filled with dragon spit is still a bullet.

  The bullets weren’t filled with dragon blood only because the president worried about what dragon blood bullets would mean for those not of the human persuasion. Like if I coughed and someone spooked and shot me where I stood, I’d be dead on the spot. The president couldn’t allow any infighting to destabilize or castrate the entire police force. It was a tentative, and I do mean tentative grasp that the world currently had on peaceful coexistence with magic.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Henry, louder than he should have. He followed my eyes to the officers who were still glaring at us. “What’s the matter with them?”

  “They don’t like me,” I said pointedly. “Ignore them. You said your name was Henry?”

  “It is.”

  “Henry Cotton.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you asked to work with me.”

  “I did.”

  “You realize that being my partner is going to be a bitch-and-a-half, right?”

  “I do. At least, I’ve been told that, ma’am.”

  Ma’am, I thought. Fuck, I’m not that old, am I? “And also everyone in here will probably hate you at least a little just for talking to me.”

  He laughed. “Yes. I’m aware of that.” He glanced over at the others. “Looks like they’re in the process of hating me now.”

  “And did you also know I’m being actively accused of treason by the people you work with?”

  He nodded. “An accusation isn’t a conviction.”

  I sighed, blowing the air out my cheeks as I shook my head. I couldn’t help but wonder what the hell kind of crazy made Henry Cotton not want to throw me into an active volcano for crimes against the State.

  Never look a gift horse in the mouth, I thought. Even if the horse is tapdancing and breathing fire. Even if you really should look inside its mouth, just to make sure it doesn’t have sharp teeth and an ancient vendetta.

  Whatever. Henry seemed nice enough. I opened my mouth to say something trite and inclusive—Welcome to the force, wear your badge with pride, eat your vegetables, etc.—but the front doors banged open.

  Everyone looked up at once.

  A man, tall, dark and drenched in sweat, stood between four officers, two on either side of him. His hands were cuffed behind his back, and he was twitching, almost in spasms. He was thin and lanky with alabaster eyes and a mouth that looked like it never learned how to smile. He turned to me as they pulled him past, grinning maniacally. His eyes were wide and wild with the forced-adrenaline of a mandrake high.

  I’d never seen him before.

  “We should go,” I said, standing up. The last thing I needed was Gary making digs about my magical connection to every petty thief in the Universe: That a friend of yours? Want me to give you two a minute alone?

  They wouldn’t be particularly intelligent digs, but I wasn’t in any mood to deflect them.

  “Go where?” Henry asked.

  The officers manning the front desk were looking at me. Apparently, they thought I couldn’t see them because they made a big show of examining their papers and computers when I looked back. Their auras glowed pink, grey and Indian yellow—indicating
they were uncomfortable. Were they worried that the arrest of one of my “fellow creatures” might make me self-conscious, or worse yet, irritable?

  “To the car,” I said to Henry. “We’ll start our patrol. I’ll, uh… show you the ropes. Or something.”

  “Okay,” he said, shuffling excitedly as I made my way around the desk. I shoved my arms into my jacket and tried not to make eye contact with literally anyone in the office, but everyone was staring at me intently. A good third of their hearts were pounding furiously, their auras flaring in pale blue and white and grey—the colors of dread. There was an aching hollowness like an execution, or maybe they thought I was gearing up for a jailbreak.

  “Evening, O’Neil,” said one of them as we walked past. He was polite, and his expression placid but his soul was squirming under his skin.

  Hades! I wanted to turn to scream in his face. Not to say anything in particular. Just the wild, wordless cry of a girl who was sick and tired of having people think she was crazy enough to devise slow, creatively painful deaths to anyone who wasn’t a deviant like herself.

  I didn’t scream, of course. I just smiled and said, “Evening, Tate,” hoping to high hell that my eyes weren’t red.

  He didn’t flinch so I could only assume they weren’t.

  Score one for me.

  TWO

  Knight

  “There’s a regulation portal,” I said. “The one in LA is still mostly functional; it can get us to the Netherworld just fine.”

  Hades didn’t reply. He was standing in the center of my living room, running his thumb up and down his staff, deep in thoughts that didn’t include me.

  We’d been having this conversation for the better part of the last hour. In the immediate aftermath of D.C., I reluctantly agreed to help Hades save the world from whatever dark power Meg had drawn on when she ripped a hole in the White House lobby. At that moment, Hades promptly vanished, only to reappear three months later in my living room. Standing in front of the TV, he kept fiddling with his staff and offering zero helpful words of advice.