What Screams May Come

by H. P. Mallory

  “We’ve had a few casualties,” Sam said as she giggled. “But he really does try. He came into the bedroom one morning, absolutely covered in flour, holding a tray of brownies. Sure, they came out of a box, but they were perfect and oh, my gosh! He was so proud. You should have seen the look on his face. He was grinning like a little kid on Christmas, with flour on his glasses, his shirt and his face, and we got it all over the comforter…” She shook her head, smiling at the memory. “And he loves cookie-cutters. I still have those cheap snowman ones I got when I was a kid and he’s obsessed with them. When it comes to the frosting, he’s totally useless. He never waits for them to cool enough, so we end up with all these white cookies that have weird stripes.”

  “So what, if you’re just going to eat them anyway?”

  “Yeah,” Sam said. “I bought a little dragon cookie cutter the other day for him. When I gave it to him, he spent three days doing nothing but making dragon cookies! Occasionally, he burned the batches, so he started shouting ‘the dragon strikes again!’ and ‘the kingdom is doomed!’ while running around with smoking, black cookies.”

  “I’m really glad you’re so happy,” I said. “You—”

  “I love you, Dulcie,” Sam said, suddenly very somber. “You know that, right?”

  “Of course I do,” I said.

  Sam reached across the table and took my hand, giving it a gentle squeeze. “And I’ll always be here for you.”

  I smiled but couldn’t think of anything to say, so I just squeezed her hand back.

  We sat there for a while, just looking at each other. Sam’s eyes were brimming with sisterly concern, and her mouth was somewhere between a grimace and a smile, in that place where fear and love meet while exchanging worst-case scenarios. Someday, she was going to make a really spectacular mother.

  I almost killed you.

  The thought chilled me. Sam, my beautiful Sam, so sweet and smart and fierce, who would have been rendered to a smoldering corpse if not for Special Agent Casey Strickland. I was so grateful for his absurd courage that drove him to tackle a burning fairy-demon-thing to save a witch he didn’t even know. A witch he now loved and protected from monsters like me.

  I wanted to say I was sorry. My mouth opened, but I couldn’t. I saw her face the way it was that night, wreathed in fire, my own fingers searing long, silver scars into her skin. That’s what happens when you forcibly inject your magic into the skin of someone as powerful as Sam—her body rejects it and then melts beneath it, like using oil to turn water to ash. How do you just say “sorry” after something so awful as that? How do you say anything?

  Yeah, Knight slept with Meg, I thought. I almost melted your head off your body. How is that any better?

  “You’re going to be okay,” Sam said. Not a question or even a strong reassurance. Just a statement.

  Okay. Never mind the darkness and dead men and voices in radios, shadows with sharp smiles around every corner, treason and attempted murder and seven different candy-coated flavors of betrayal… I was going to be okay.

  I smiled in spite of myself. Sam has a way of making you believe the impossible.

  “Say it with me,” she commanded.

  I chuckled. “I’m going to be okay.”

  “Good,” she said.

  “You should bring me some of those dragon cookies. Maybe not the burnt ones.”

  “I will.”

  The lights suddenly went out.

  The diners muttered and guffawed their irritation. A manager cursed loudly somewhere in the back behind the swinging steel doors. My eyes tingled before my vampire vision took over, tinging everything slightly red, outlining the silhouettes and gleaming human eyes. Most everyone remained where they were, their arms crossed, and looking extremely put out. The rest were fumbling for their bags and purses and cards, some of them even planning to stiff the waiters in the dark. Everybody’s heart was beating just a little bit faster than before.

  “Well, then,” said Sam. “I have plenty of cash. We can just leave it on the table and go.”

  “Okay,” I said, and we stood up.

  The ground started to shake. Violently.

  Sam and I dropped down, crouching by the booths, our feet apart, our hands landing on the ground just in time to catch ourselves. The floor pitched and heaved beneath us, throwing people from their booths into the opposite walls and windows. Tiles cracked, florescent bulbs burst and fizzled, and a thunderous sound roared all around us.

  Beneath us came a rumbling. Not from motion exactly, more like bubbles rising from deep, black water, or the gurgling of a river monster.

  Eight seconds was all it took; then it was over.

  The building settled, and everyone inside let out a collective sigh of relief. Silhouettes pulled phones from their pockets and turned on flashlight apps, asking if everyone was okay. Someone coughed, and somebody else groaned, but I didn’t smell any blood, and everyone’s heart rate was about where it should have been. Some poor bastard in the corner tried to get up and screamed when broken fragments of his tibia ground together, but his leg was already broken. Apparently, his cast landed the wrong way when he dodged the toppling table. He’d be fine. Probably.

  “Hades!” said Sam, pulling herself to her feet. A luminescent bulb hovered over her palm, casting blue light across the room. If anybody cared about the witch in the room, they didn’t respond. Nobody even spared us a glance. Good. Last thing we needed was for them to start accusing Sam of causing the quake. Or recognize me and start screaming.

  “Yeah,” I said, looking around. “No kidding.” The floor had wide cracks damn near everywhere, dozens of ceiling tiles littered the ground, and every booth and table had been violently torn off the floor and shifted at least a foot or more from its former position. There was much more damage than the jitterbug-like shaking should have caused.

  “Dulcie?” Sam asked.

  A thick, choking miasma hung over everything, hovering between the motes of dust in the air that smothered the inside of my lungs like tar.

  Fuuuuuuuck.

  “Oh, hell,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s it feel like to you?” I asked, if only to make sure.

  “Thick,” she said. “Very claustrophobic. And cold. Like if darkness became a physical being.” She swallowed audibly. “Like Meg.”

  “Shit,” I said.

  Sam bit her lip, thinking. “Do you think we should—”

  All of a sudden, the encroaching darkness disappeared. The air was clear again, and the world became visibly lighter. A physical weight was suddenly released from my chest.

  “It’s gone,” I said.

  Sam nodded. “Yeah,” she agreed. “It’s gone.”

  We looked at each other, waiting for whatever it was to spring back with renewed strength.

  Although we stood there for a long time, nothing happened.

  “Do you think whatever Meg did at the precinct could be causing the earthquakes?” asked Sam. It wasn’t the craziest theory.

  “Maybe,” I answered, feeling sick to my stomach as I remembered the earthquake that occurred before the attack. That awful, nightmarish, ice-cold sensation at the bottom of my lungs. I wondered if it meant another attack was coming.

  Dammit, Meg has been here the whole time. Hades only knew where here was, but… fuck, I should’ve known.

  “Or maybe it was just another earthquake,” Sam said.

  “Yeah, with a coincidental veil of nightmare magic just hanging over it by chance?” I asked, shaking my head. “In what universe could we ever get that lucky?”

  Sam shrugged, looking around at the dust, the dirt and the general disrepair. “We can always dream.”

  SEVEN

  Dulcie

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” Sam asked me for the nth time. We stood in the parking lot by her car, staring at the road, or what was left of it. The concrete was splintered, frozen in uneven ripples like waves in a storm, but thankfully, stil
l drivable.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I want to walk around a bit. See if that odd feeling comes back.”

  “Okay,” Sam said, clearly dubious. Worried. Where I was concerned, she was always worried. “I’m going to see Casey. Tell him what just happened. And you will call me if you need me?”

  I nodded even though I wasn’t planning on calling her. “I will. I promise.”

  “Okay,” she said as she hugged me. “I love you, Dulcie.”

  “I love you too,” I said. She smelled so nice, like strawberries and old textbooks. “I’ll see you later.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Let me know when you’re ready and we’ll go to the FBI together, okay? No more than a few hours? We’re pushing it by waiting at all.”

  “I know. I just…” I shrugged. “I just need a minute.”

  Which was true. But I didn’t need the minute to think. I needed it to walk around and see if something big and angry was about to jump out of the cracks in the sidewalk and kill everybody. I’d go to the FBI office afterwards. I’d call Sam and Casey and we’d debrief somebody important together and see what to do about it as a team.

  But, for now, I needed a breather.

  Downtown Splendor had suffered the brunt of the tremors. Much of the neighborhood was still in recovery, and the mountains of dug-out concrete were taped off. Now-empty dirt lots, wooden planks over busted windows, and lots of missing doors revealed a scene of utter annihilation. These buildings were older, made of brick, stone and cheap mortar, ridiculously underprepared for earthquakes of any magnitude, let alone, the nightmare tremors I’d caused when I’d been under Meg’s influence. Splendor was one of those places in California that had never been retrofitted or brought up to code.

  The majority of shops were still standing, a number of them even open, despite the fact that nobody in their right mind would drive down there. At least, not until the roads were repaved and all the shrapnel carted away. Many businesses were targets of looting in the initial chaos, but most of these businesses didn’t sell things, but services, like hairdressers and handymen. Some small boutiques and carpentry stores lost all of their merchandise, which was either destroyed or spirited away by the kinds of people who lived for such disasters.

  The looting contributed to the street’s bad rep of late, but now it wasn’t totally desolate, despite the wee hour. Pockets of night people—most of them kids—were out, hunting for a decent club to party in or a generous creature to bum potions off. Seemed to be lots of those types around Splendor recently. It was getting hard to keep track of them all; especially when the police force and others responsible for potion regulation were, you know, no longer a viable entity anymore.

  Look for monsters, look for monsters. But the sensation I felt in the diner was totally gone. The only Meg-esque magic I detected was the much thicker stuff I felt in the precinct, and whatever remained in my lungs and clung to my skin. It was uncomfortably pervasive, crawling in places and refusing to leave, like wet sand.

  A faint, nagging voice in my head kept whispering that I wasn’t really out here looking for monsters but I ignored it. Mostly.

  I sighed hard enough to hurt my lungs, and dragged my hands over my face as I walked. Most of the street lamps here were shot out—a lot of them fallen across the roads like gigantic shoelaces—but I could see everything just fine. Rimmed a little in red, I knew the werewolf part of me was vying to dominate the vampire part of me. Both creatures have night vision, but werewolves rely more heavily on scent in the dark. If the conflict continued, I’d have a hell of a headache later, but unless I wanted to crawl back to Sam immediately, there was nothing else I could do.

  I’ll see her tomorrow, I thought. I’m just making sure everything’s okay here before I get some sleep so I can be calm and useful while explaining what happened to the officers and why I took so long to report to them.

  Yes, I’d go to the FBI tomorrow. I had to, even if Sam didn’t come over and make me. I just needed a second. In the morning, I planned to hunt down Casey (or whoever his superior was now—they kept getting replaced as the investigation grew more complicated) and spend the better part of forever explaining why I thought Meg was A. still alive; and B. behind the bloodfest at work. I knew I’d be in there for hours, answering the human interrogators, letting those weird, empathic, slug-like organisms crawl all over me to absorb what remained of the sensation, and all of it while drinking that piss-poor coffee they served in the break room.

  I needed to take a minute before facing that kind of day. I’d had a long day as it was and I’d certainly earned a decent night’s sleep, hadn’t I? Six hours of fitful slumber while trying to come to terms with it all? Half a hundred people were dead and everyone would blame me. I don’t know, I just needed a second to prepare for that. Brace myself for something that would head the Top Ten Worst Days of My Life.

  So there I was, walking alone and looking for monsters that weren’t there, without thinking any feasible thoughts. Screaming wordlessly into the void, I hoped for some relief.

  I don’t know why, but Knight’s face flashed across my mind. Smiling, laughing, and shaking his head. I couldn’t pin it to any particular moment, but Hades, for two seconds it was the most real thing in the world. And it was the most beautiful thing in the world. From a time when we could laugh, when we could love each other, when we were still… innocent. And now? All that memory made me want to do was scream.

  Scream into the void, I thought. I kind of wanted to. It was about as productive as anything else I could do right now.

  You know what? Fuck it. It was worth a shot.

  I stopped walking, threw my head back, and just fucking screamed. I was a lot louder than I thought I’d be. My voice echoed like thunder in the valley, bouncing back to me in ways it really shouldn’t have. The buildings rattled, and mounds of brick and concrete started shaking and breaking apart—not too much, just enough for me to feel. Any number of things could have been responsible—werewolves, drakes, vampires, and half a dozen other creatures. All of them could be stupidly loud if they chose to. Functionally speaking, I had a built-in bullhorn now.

  The sound faded ten seconds later, dissolving into the atmosphere like wisps of smoke. There was a long moment of silence.

  A block away, I heard somebody say, “Fuck, dude, what the hell was that?”

  “Demons, probably,” the friend responded. The people they were with laughed and cringed by turns. Hell, maybe it was a demon. They all kept walking.

  I smiled, feeling slightly better. Crossing my arms, I leaned back against the wall of an ancient brick something-or-other. It had no windows and lots of scrap metal on the ground inside. Iron comprised most of it, enough to sting my lungs when I breathed—possibly the only hazard of being a fairy. It was a nice night, almost cold, and cloudless, like the dying breath of a cool breeze, without any massacre-monsters, at least, none that I could see or smell. I was hovering on the edge of something, a feeling that might have been relaxing.

  Ugh, maybe I should just go to the FBI now and get it over with. I was just procrastinating, I knew I was, and honestly? I knew why. But that conversation was not one I wanted to have with myself, especially alone in the dark, in a Splendor back street. Or anywhere else really.

  But you gotta.

  I forced myself to actually think the thought. I didn’t want to go to the FBI to tell them I thought Meg was alive because—and this was pathetic—of the chance I’d run into Knight in the building. I just didn’t know what I’d say to him. What he’d say to me. Would we just stand there awkwardly and shuffle our feet?

  I wasn’t stupid and I knew Knight was the reason I was avoiding going—but if the earthquake before the precinct attack were a sign of the arrival of whatever was responsible, I was rapidly running out of excuses.

  Avoidance isn’t something you eventually grow out of. If anything, it gets worse, because the older you get, the higher your expectations become of yourself. You expect to have matur
e, healthy conversations about the most immature and unhealthy things. We’re supposed to keep calm and smile and forgive one another, or at least hate one another openly enough that everybody knows not to put certain people together in the same room for any length of time. During your whole childhood, your anger comes easy, and you’re either disappointed or mad at someone claiming you never want to see them again.

  Then you wake up one morning, all grown up, and realize that after years of evolution, you still have no idea how to properly hate the people you love.

  I hated him. More than anything, but I didn’t, I couldn’t. It wasn’t his fault, but it was, and it wasn’t, but—and on and on it went like that forever. There’s no one to blame, the blame belongs to both parties. You can’t even begin to try to find a solution when you don’t know how to classify the problem.

  I didn’t want to see him. I didn’t want to talk to him. I didn’t want to debrief him. I didn’t want to chance having awkward eye contact with him in the hallway. I wanted to crawl under a rock and just stay there until the world magically made sense to me again.

  Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt—it’s a fairy named Dulcie, who’s just doing her best.

  “Okay,” I said aloud, “okay, okay, okay.” Hyping myself up like a football coach on a Disney Channel afternoon special, I felt like I was hopelessly coaching the losing team. “Come on, you’re a goddamn adult, just go. Just fucking go, and if he’s in the room, don’t look at him. You don’t have to give him eye contact. Pretend he’s somebody else. Pretend he’s Sam. Pretend he’s Casey. Pretend he’s Gilbert Godfrey with a head cold.”

  I was trying, okay?

  Yeah, I needed to go. Continuing to avoid my not-a-boyfriend was an astoundingly stupid thing to do. The longer I waited, the longer Meg was left to her own devices, wherever she was and totally unattended, which as a rule, was probably a very Bad thing.

  Sam said it was fine, I thought, and immediately afterwards, No, she’s humoring you because your life sucks ass, like, all the time now. And she shouldn’t do that. She’s a good friend, but she should really tell you to shut up and do your goddamn job. Saving the world is more important than feeling awkward around your pseudo boyfriend.