What Screams May Come

by H. P. Mallory

  WHAT SCREAMS MAY COME

  Book 10 of the

  Dulcie O’Neil series

  by

  H.P. Mallory

  (Want to be the first to hear about my latest releases? Then join my mailing list here)

  Copyright ©2019 by HP Mallory

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. Please do not participate in or encourage the piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Follow me on Facebook

  Follow me on Amazon

  Acknowledgements:

  For my son, Finn, who makes me so grateful every day.

  To my editor, Teri, at www.editingfairy.com: Thank you for a job well done, as always.

  To Jenny Hart: Thank you for coming up with the amazing title!

  ALSO BY H.P. MALLORY

  Virtual Reality Series:

  NuLife Trilogy:

  Book One: Valhalla KINDLE

  Epic Fantasy Series:

  The Lily Harper Series:

  Better Off Dead KINDLE

  The Underground City KINDLE

  To Hell And Back KINDLE

  Persephone KINDLE

  Rebirth KINDLE

  The Dulcie O'Neil Series:

  To Kill A Warlock KINDLE

  A Tale of Two Goblins KINDLE

  Great Hexpectations KINDLE

  Wuthering Frights KINDLE

  Malice In Wonderland KINDLE

  For Whom The Spell Tolls KINDLE

  A Midsummer Night's Scream KINDLE

  Grave New World KINDLE

  Pride And Poltergeists KINDLE

  What Screams May Come

  Paranormal Series:

  The Jolie Wilkins Series:

  Fire Burn and Cauldron Bubble KINDLE

  Toil and Trouble KINDLE

  Witchful Thinking KINDLE

  The Witch Is Back KINDLE

  Something Witchy This Way Comes KINDLE

  Be Witched (Novella) KINDLE

  The Sinjin Sinclair Series (Spinoff to the Jolie WIlkins Series):

  Sinjin KINDLE

  The Scent KINDLE

  The Gentleman KINDLE

  The Flame KINDLE

  The Peyton Clark Series:

  Ghouls Rush In KINDLE

  Once Haunted Twice Shy KINDLE

  Brown Eyed Ghoul KINDLE

  Book 4 Coming Soon!

  The Ice Wolf Series (Co-Authored with JR Rain):

  Ice Wolf KINDLE

  She Wolf Coming Soon!

  Standalone Contemporary Romances:

  Bronco KINDLE

  The Handbook KINDLE

  Mountain Man KINDLE

  About What Screams May Come

  Fairy and law enforcement agent, Dulcie O'Neil, finds herself working for the human government since the ANC has been disbanded, after Meg destroyed it from the inside out.

  When Dulcie is appointed a new, human partner and the two are out on patrol, things get interesting when everyone at Dulcie’s precinct is suddenly murdered and Dulcie detects Meg’s influence. Could it be possible that Meg isn’t really dead?

  As creatures called Abominations turn up left and right, searching for Dulcie and trying to kill her friends, Dulcie must discover the truth about who their master is.

  And Dulcie’s personal life isn’t much better: things are still super awkward with her former boyfriend, Knight and Bram is doing everything in his power to be close to her…

  What Screams May Come

  PROLOGUE

  Hana,

  Former Secretary of State

  On a crisp, autumn morning, a very particular someone was sitting on a beach in a place that, as far as everyone in the Netherworld was concerned, didn’t exist anymore.

  The scene was cold and bright. Stars twinkled through a thick veil of clouds, smothered by rain that refused to fall. Thunder broke a long silence along the horizon, chased by thin tails of lightning. The only sound for a thousand miles in any direction came from the birds and the eternal tossing of a restless sea.

  This particular someone was drinking excessive amounts of tea and watching the waves, waiting. Endlessly patient, she was smelling the air and listening to the gulls; their calls sounding ever-so-slightly less musical than their counterparts on Earth. They flew lower, landing frequently, still accustomed to dodging the horrid, flying nightmares of Melchior O’Neil, as rare as the flying abominations had been even back then in this place.

  It was a futile precaution; when the monsters were here, they were invariably faster. That was the point. Melchior had a fondness for daring someone to run from him, just so he could make a brilliant, visceral display of his revolting strength.

  And look where that got you, she thought as she sipped her tea.

  The air fizzled and popped beside her as someone appeared.

  She smiled, drank, and peered out at the ever-shifting sea, tasting the salt in the air. The wind carried wispy clouds of glittering sand up from the beach, plastering it to her bare legs. This was her home, her hiding place, full of the cold and everything that was allowed to exist here at the edge. This was her first and last refuge from Meg and the darkness Meg insisted on playing with. Though really, the darkness was playing with Meg now.

  Meg and her obsession with Dulcie no longer concerned Hana; Meg and Melchior’s shambling empire was all she wanted now.

  The newcomer cleared his throat and shifted his weight on the sand, visibly uncomfortable. She had that effect on people when she wanted to. She let him steep in his own silence for a while before she spoke. Instead, she took in the beauty around her.

  A shallow wave swept the shore, splashing droplets of water with all the fervor of a morning mist onto the beach. In its wake lay shells, pebbles and the broken remnants of coral. The water hardly made a sound as it retreated. The rocking motion it exhibited was cool and calculated. It was too soft, gentler than the sea should have been in a place like this, where all the worst creatures in the world issued interminable threats. According to legend, these beaches were swallowed up by an earthquake followed by a typhoon hundreds and hundreds of years ago. Any surviving creatures of Hana’s ilk were assumed to be the offspring of those who managed to escape—but they all knew better than to believe that.

  The heartland of the Valkyrie, so cold and pristine, where Hana had been born so long ago, remained a closely guarded secret. Any divulgence of its existence, let alone, its location, bordered on blasphemy.

  Hana, of course, did not care.

  “I hear Meg finally went crazy,” she said to the visitor eventually.

  The man snorted. “And what gave that away?”

  Hana ignored his tone, not in the mood to find herself out of sorts. “Did you see what Meg did to them? The ones who stayed after the White House fiasco?”

  The sarcasm sloughed off him like water in the desert. He swallowed audibly. Sweating bullets of dread in buckets, he could have filled an ocean with his animal terror.

  “Yes.” The word was a ghost of itself, so thin and brittle. He said it again. “Yes. I did.”

  He uttered a few extra sounds, perhaps to say that what happened at the White House was a horrible, haunting, devastation of morality; or maybe only that it made his stomach turn. His own reaction would undoubtedly be his greatest concern; she doubted if he mourned for any of the innocent victims.

  “It was awful,” he said. Admittedly, that was better than she expected from him. It was awful, horrible, detestable. Vulgar.

  At last, she looked at him. He was tall and well-built with eyes full of ice and venom. Dar
k eyebrows, a squarish jaw, and one shoulder that rose higher than the other, due to the result of a bad brawl and a bone that never knitted together properly. The folds of his faded coat, just a tad too small, outlined the bones poking through his skin like a fishnet on a shark. Scars crisscrossed his face and arms, most of them fairly recent, and ostensibly inflicted by Knightly Vander.

  “How are you, Jax?” Hana asked.

  It had been quite a while since they last spoke; before Melchior blackmailed Dulcie into working for him. Hana had warned Melchior and Meg that the way they were going about handling Dulcie was a terrible idea, totally unsustainable. She’d suggested Dulcie would need a subtler incentive to persuade her to come to their side. But Melchior, of course, could not be swayed. Instead, he was set on threatening his daughter’s very dangerous boyfriend.

  How did that pan out, Mel? Hana thought now. If you’d just left Dulcie and Knight alone, none of this would have happened. Meg’s darkness would not have been necessary. You wouldn’t be dead and this probably wouldn’t have blown up in all of our faces.

  God, the look on Meg’s face when she found out Melchior nearly killed Dulcie in his library. The ensuing rage was just as hot and ferocious as a California wildfire. If Melchior had not already been dead, Meg would have torn him into tiny pieces and very slowly.

  But Hana was getting distracted. She returned her eyes and thoughts to Jax.

  “I’ve been better,” he said. “Glad I’m not one of Meg’s fucking zombies. You?”

  She looked him up and down. “I’m better now.”

  A smile curled the edges of his mouth. She felt his emotions as they spilled out of him, eagerness wrapped in a smothering blanket of caution—and arousal. He wanted her, and badly.

  Good. It was easier to manipulate feelings that were already established.

  “You know I don’t work for Meg anymore,” Jax started. “She’s… like you said, she’s fucking crazy. If you want to talk to her again, you’ll need to find somebody else. And anyway, everything’s gone to shit, so I doubt she could help you even if she wanted to.”

  As though Hana didn’t already know that. “I could have contacted her myself.” Hana shook her head. “But I don’t want to talk to her.”

  “You quit too?”

  She bristled. “I never worked for Meg, or Melchior either. We were partners for a while. But only as long as they were useful.” Until they started making the kinds of stupid decisions that cause empires to crumble. Things such as blackmailing your daughter while consorting with an ancient evil like the Darkness to pick up your dead partner’s slack.

  “Right,” Jax said. “Which is why I hardly ever saw you around.”

  “Are you accusing me of something?”

  “Prolonged absence, maybe.”

  “I tried to keep them smart,” Hana answered. “They didn’t listen. They never listened.” She looked at him over her shoulder. “The most dangerous animal is not the lion or the bear, but the snake! You can’t see it until it’s already bitten you. Meg is a lion and Melchior might have been a snake, but he was the kind of snake that slithers in the grass and gives itself away. Their incompetence was hardly my fault.”

  He nodded. “Uh-huh. So are you taking over now?”

  “Something like that.” She reached out with invisible hands to twist and pull at his desire. His subdued physical appreciation morphed and swelled, blooming into a wire-bound need, a labyrinth of steel thorns that embedded themselves in his skin. His aura flared red around him, throbbing like an inflamed muscle. A moment later, he was hers. All it took was one “come hither” look for him to drop to his knees and begin salivating like Pavlov’s dog.

  Sometimes, things were just too easy.

  He swallowed hard. “What can we do?” We meant Jax, himself, and the paltry remains of his once formidable potion organization.

  It had been a long time since they were anything close to “being together;” but luckily for Hana Jax had never moved on.

  She grinned, almost leering. “A great deal, actually. You and a sizable number of your more loyal employees escaped in one piece. Meg’s disciples were not so lucky and suffered a more… colorful fate, as you witnessed. Meg is somewhere around still, but all the people willing to die for her are dead… and she doesn’t care about anything now but retrieving Dulcie.”

  He stared at her blankly.

  “Which means, Meg is distracted,” Hana said slowly. “And without friends or resources.”

  He nodded, his eyes suddenly vacant.

  She sighed, sitting back, and allowed his attraction to diminish to a prickling simmer. That gave him back some of his senses. He blinked with confusion—then smiled and tried his best to look seductive.

  She repressed a grimace. He hadn’t gotten any better at it.

  “Which means we are without opposition,” Hana continued. “Meg is gone, Melchior is dead, and there is a whole plane of existence out there just waiting for us to seize it. While the rest of the world continues to search for Meg and tries to prevent what I’m sure will be a spectacular and loud attempt to get Dulcie back from wherever she is now, we can move with grace and delicacy.”

  “Delicacy?” asked Jax, crossing his arms.

  “We can be sneaky, Jax.”

  He chewed his lip, obviously unsure how to ask his question without sounding like an idiot. “And what do you want from me?”

  “Your people. Your connections. You,” she said. She put her drink down and stood up, walking slowly towards him. “A partnership. I want to give you what we were promised.” She ran her hand slowly down his arm. “Better than what we were promised.”

  He raised his brow. “Really? And what was that?”

  Her expression turned to stone, her vision swimming with all the human faces that never paid her any mind because she was a Valkyrie—a magical creature and therefore, hard to control. She saw Odyssey’s red hair and burning eyes, the ever-present scorn of ignorant men like Richmond in their expensive suits, the idiots behind the Siphon Project, the human agents with synthetic magic scorched into their skin, a paper wall between humanity and the unbridled rage of the supernatural collective, the photographer taking the picture of Odyssey’s administration inside the Oval Office, the highest office in the world, and Odyssey sitting in the chair behind it, the one seat that belonged to her.

  She took a breath. Behind her, the ocean swelled and the clouds darkened. Lightning split the sky somewhere far away. “Power, mostly. And revenge. The ashes of the empire Meg and Melchior left behind. The tools to put the whole human world right in the palms of our hands.” She smiled and put her hand on his cheek. “A better world.”

  Not the most inspired answer, but it got her what she wanted. Jax’s face split into a wide skeleton smile.

  “I’m in,” he said.

  Not that he had any choice.

  ONE

  Dulcie

  So I’ve got good news and bad news.

  The good news: the supernatural community isn’t being expelled from the planet. Huzzah.

  The bad news: the ANC has devolved into absolute shit. In other words, it no longer exists. Like. At. All. Most of the buildings were blown to hell and the rubble that was left got absolutely pulverized during the official disbanding of the Association of Netherworld Creatures. This decision was based on the grounds of the ANC “being unable to keep an ego-maniacal, magical, crazy person from trying to take over the world.”

  Which might have been fair, but it still sucked.

  We didn’t get fired, though. We just got transferred. I’m still a cop, which is great, but it means I now have a human partner. Yep, I’m now working for the human government in a precinct full of humans, armed with guns and thousand-yard stares, as well as oversized chips on their shoulders. Yes, there are lots of really good reasons not to trust supernatural creatures. Especially me. A good number of them think I’m the herald of the Apocalypse. Not that I blame them. I was almost-kinda-sorta slightly r
esponsible for the attempted assassination of the leader of the free world.

  And at least a little responsible for a lot of fires.

  Like a lot of fires.

  Okay, debriefing time. I’ll make this quick.

  So, there’s this person named Meg. She calls herself “The Darkness,” because she apparently has something really dark and unfriendly on her speed dial. And all she wants for Christmas is to take over the world.

  Not our world, though, just the Netherworld. She hates humans with a burning passion, along with the ANC, as well as the human government. She wants the humans out of the Netherworld, and she wanted it yesterday.

  But if the ANC goes away, the Netherworld lacks infrastructure and has no security to rely on. Closest thing they had before was a mockery of a monarchy with all the big, scary Houses of the old Netherworld answering to the biggest, scariest House in the Universe. Apparently, that House had belonged to Meg and all of her vampire friends a long time ago..

  Once upon a time, Meg had been in charge. Then she wasn’t. There was a really nasty war when the humans showed up in the Netherworld for the first time—not long after the supernatural creatures that were already on Earth went public. The United States (and other countries) naturally wanted to establish their own consulates in the Netherworld, especially if the Netherworldians insisted on building clubs, bridges, casinos and drug empires right on their front lawns.

  Not all the creatures back home agreed with the decision to inform the human government of things that go bump in the night in the first place. Fewer still wanted to allow human influence into the physical bases on their plane. Most of them didn’t want any contact period, let alone, active human operations. Humans were not revered and generally considered stupid, lesser beings, lacking magic, and putting them in charge of anything on the wrong side of spacetime was a big no-no.