“What the fuck was that?” I shouted, my lungs rattling.
He ignored me.
Come, he said.
I pushed myself onto my knees, my hands still in the sand, just trying to breathe. “You could have fucking warned me.”
Come. You are wasting my time.
“Fuck you,” I said, pushing the wet hair out of my face. I gave a loud, racking cough, and the last of the water I ingested spurted out of my lungs, tasting more like blood than salt water. I probably bit off my tongue or something.
Looking up, I found the world wasn’t the world anymore.
The sun was too close and big and round and watery. It seemed like I was looking at it from the bottom of a swimming pool. The sky was tinged red. The air had the alabaster bite of a dead Arctic winter. The horizon was comprised of a wall of mountains, towering masses of black stone, their peaks shrouded in a burning, red haze. Firework flashes of white light sprang out from their centers, lightning that was never followed by thunder. Behind me, the ocean stretched out long, dark and silent.
“This?” I said. It wasn’t California, but it sure as hell wasn’t the Netherworld either. Toto, what the fuck did you do with Kansas? “Where the hell are we?”
Close, he said, still prickling.
“Not what I meant, jackass.”
This is the land where gods are conceived.
Okay, closer. It seemed as likely a divine homeworld as any. “Which is… where, exactly?”
Hades clacked his teeth. We are in the lands beneath, he said.
“Beneath what?” I asked, standing up and brushing the sand from my knees and arms.
Everything. He looked at me with palpable pride.
I gazed at the mountains, their broad faces glinting like steel as the fog above them shifted and stirred. There was no way around them, and there was no path up that I could see, no stairs, and no rope-and-chain jerry-rigged to an invisible outcropping beyond my sight. Whichever peak was the notorious Mountain of Shadows, it had to be a bitch to climb.
Your army awaits you.
“Great,” I said. “So where are we going?”
Hades appeared briefly beside me, just long enough to point.
The big one.
THREE
Dulcie
Here’s the general rule about what happens when things go boom.
Say you were standing on a sidewalk in a city. And let’s assume you were a reasonably well-read person with no particular opinion regarding the domestic supernatural community and its ability to restrain its infrequent homicidal impulses. You also don’t care that fairies, vampires and werewolves aren’t just stories anymore.
Then something very close to you goes boom.
Of course, you’re startled. Scared shitless, probably. And witless, feeling totally incompetent in less than two-thirds of a second, your ears are ringing, and everything around you begins catching fire. The first thing you see while you still have all five of your senses would probably be something big and scaly with rows of unnecessary sharp teeth. Something undoubtedly supernatural.
The brightest souls among us would make the same assumption you probably did when faced with the threat of a razorblade tongue and brimstone eyes: Dragon bad. Dragon magic. Magic bad.
At this point, you might start running, along with anyone else who was unfortunate enough to be in close proximity when the thing went boom. By the time someone discovered you, you’d just babble senselessly about dragons, demons and large, carnivorous armadillos with trolls on their backs that bucked like mechanical bulls. Naturally, you’d expect the worst to happen.
Which is exactly what most of the population did.
The politics surrounding supernatural existence went from being tenuous but neutral to firehouse red and hostile, and from idle Thanksgiving chatter to maybe-we-shouldn’t-talk-about-this-with-grandpa in ten seconds flat. Never mind the evidence we had to the contrary; it didn’t do us any good. Meg was a vampire, a supernatural creature, just as evil and profane as the rest of us or more so. A feeble, plaintive public outcry that Meg didn’t represent the entire magical collective went unheard. You can’t extinguish the fire by lighting the match.
Even if it is one thousand percent the match’s fault.
“Okay,” I said. “So. Let me be honest with you.”
Henry frowned at me from the passenger’s seat. Streetlight stripes colored his face as we drove. “Have you been lying up until now?”
“What? No!” Then I thought better of what I’d just said. “Well… sort of,” I said, “but not about anything important. There’re just some things you don’t know yet, because, like, I’ve only known you for all of ten minutes.”
“Oh. That’s good, I guess,” he said so innocently that I knew it would start grating on my nerves any minute now. “What don’t I know yet? Do you have a bad back or something?”
“Just, listen for a second, will you?” I retorted as I sighed. A bad back?! “So you’re new. Like, really new. Fresh out of the Academy, and never-issued-a-parking-ticket new.”
I expected him to go on the defensive, but he just nodded, looking almost eager to hear more. When I hesitated another second, he added, “Yep!”
“Um,” I said. “Okay, so you know all the stuff that went down in D.C.?”
“Yeah.”
“With the vampire and the skeleton and the explosion?”
“And the dragon.”
I grimaced. “And the fucking dragon.”
“I do.”
“And you also know that everybody thinks it was my fault.”
“Not everybody,” Henry said.
“Okay, everybody but you,” I corrected. “Plenty of people blame me specifically for what happened. I even have friends who think it’s at least partially my fault—they just don’t admit it. Half the people I’ve made eye contact with today still hold me personally accountable.”
“For what?”
“For the cities that were torched, and the explosions, and for what almost happened to President Odyssey. They act like I’m a walking supernova or something.”
“They think you’re dangerous,” Henry said as he nodded, like I was dangerous and it was good to be dangerous.
“Yeah.”
“Are you not?” He sounded almost disappointed.
I sighed heavily, leaning with the wheel as I turned a corner. “I am,” I said. “Not to everybody—just the bad guys. I’m a cop before anything else, and I’m a good cop, so unless you’re breaking the law, we’re fine.” Not that anybody cares. “The point is: everybody is scared of me and would really love it if I were out of their precinct. Every other precinct feels the same way. I make them ultra nervous.” As volatile as storing gasoline and fireworks in the same tiny closet. Nothing bad could happen unless somebody lights a match, but still. Not a fun plan in the long-term.
“They don’t like you,” Henry said.
I snorted. “No, they don’t. Not at all.”
“Then why did they hire you?”
“They didn’t,” I said. “I’m part of a merger. All the cops from the ANC were moved to human precincts around the country. The captain’s my boss, yeah, but he doesn’t have anything to do with me being here.”
“What does this have to do with me, Detective?”
Hades, that title still felt weird. I’m not a detective, I’m a Regulator—calling myself anything else was sacrilegious. “I think they stuck us together in case something goes horribly wrong, because then they’ll blame me since I’m the superior officer.”
“Like a scapegoat?”
“Yeah. I think they’re just looking for an excuse before they formally request my discharge. They can’t ask for it out of the blue or say, ‘We’re scared’. Unless they have probable cause, it’ll read as hella racist, and Odyssey won’t have any of that.”
There was a long moment of silence. Henry put his elbow on the door, resting his chin in his hand. He stared at the glaring street lamps and
the stone-black sky behind them. He must be trying to parse out what this means for his personal career.
“Do you think they’re going to try to make something bad happen on purpose?” he asked.
“That’s exactly what I believe,” I answered. Like planting drugs in my car or breaking my shoulder cam and claiming I roughed up a suspect in the dark. “I mean, I hope not, but… you saw the guys at the precinct, everybody thinks I’m hell-bent on taking over the world.”
“But you’re not, right?” he asked.
“No, I’m not!” I almost screamed at him and his eyes went wide.
“Oh. Sorry,” he said, suddenly appearing sheepish and shrinking into himself. Hades, this kid was young.
I sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m just beyond stressed out. And I might be wrong about all of this. Maybe we’re together because they find it amusing to saddle the fairy with an irritating newbie.”
“Am I really irritating?” asked Henry.
“Yeah, a little,” I answered. “But you can’t help it. You’re new and young, and you probably don’t even know what a VHS tape is.”
“I know what a VHS tape is,” he said, sounding a little offended.
I took a deep breath. “Anyway, I’m pretty sure they’re trying to mess with me. And maybe you too, but I’m gonna bet it’s aimed at me.”
“Maybe they’re hazing me.”
“Hazing you?” I asked incredulously. “By placing you with the super dangerous fairy-vampire monster that they think murdered everybody?”
He shrugged. “People can be mean.”
I looked at him. Suddenly, I felt really sad because it was such an innocent remark. But oh so true. “Yeah,” I said, turning back to the road. “Yeah, they sure can be.”
He was quiet again. In was dark, the streetlights drew thick orange lines across the windshield. A good portion of the businesses stayed open for most of the night, coughing out neon and bad music into the small hours of the morning. The roads were very smooth here—the first ones in Splendor to be repaired after the ANC explosion ruptured the better half of the city like a busted vein. Parts remained in hellish disrepair, nothing more than blood stains and smoke and towers of climbing water where the fire hydrants used to be. People slowly gathered up all the bits of rock and bone, trying to figure out which pieces went where—as if they were assembling a giant jigsaw puzzle. Except that all the edges of the pieces were incinerated.
“So what are we going to do?” Henry asked.
I blinked, somewhat startled. “What do you mean, what are we going to do?”
“What are we going to do?” he repeated with a shrug. “About the other officers, I mean.”
“Nothing,” I said. “This is pure speculation. All they’ve actually done is give me dirty looks.”
“That’s still harassment, isn’t it?”
“Bringing them up on a charge so petty will only make them hate me more. And it sure as hell won’t get any of them transferred.”
“Do we want to get them transferred?”
I sighed. “I only want them to be decent human beings that are smart enough to realize that one stupid, fucking vampire doesn’t speak for literally, an entire population.” I sucked in a breath, feeling the cold air on my teeth and trying to control myself. “I want them to be nice. That’s all. But apparently, that’s not going to happen. They’re jackasses and they think that’s how you make it in the jungle.”
“But we’re not in the jungle,” said Henry.
“Yeah,” I said. We’re in a city on the brink of destruction. Creatures and humans had been living within blocks of each other in the aftermath of the most devastating domestic attack since 9/11. Tensions weren’t just high, they were soaring, and we might as well have been leaning casually out the window with nothing but a plastic bag for a parachute. We were a country in recovery, a wounded animal desperate to sever the bleeding head of the thing that hurt it so badly.
“So what’s the answer? What’s our next move?” Henry asked, with obvious enthusiasm.
“I appreciate your, uh… commitment,” I said. “But there’s nothing we can do. Not really anything we should do either, it’s just… I wanted you to know why you got saddled with me.”
“I openly asked to get saddled with you,” he said.
“Okay, then the reason why they let you saddle yourself with me,” I corrected myself. “And why you should expect to get a lot of nasty looks in the office. Just brace yourself, okay? Talking to me will get you into trouble with somebody, never mind, actively working with me. And if it gets too uncomfortable or anything, don’t hesitate to put in for a transfer or request another partner.” I turned to face him. “It wouldn’t offend me at all. I mean that.”
“I’m not gonna do that!” he vowed adamantly.
I scoffed. “Hey, it’s your funeral.”
Silence. Oodles of it. Stretching the length of an airstrip. It felt taut and trembled like a plucked guitar string.
“Is that a vampire thing?” he asked after a while.
“Is what a vampire thing?”
“Your eyes.”
“What about my eyes?”
“They’re red.”
I was so exhausted, I didn’t even care. I sighed. “Yeah. It’s a vampire thing.”
“Does it mean you’re thirsty?” he asked, gulping slightly.
I couldn’t help smiling as I shook my head. “No. Actually, it means I’m angry.”
“Oh. I’m sorry,” he said. “Did I make you angry?”
I took a deep breath. “No. No, you didn’t. Our coworkers did.” I sighed heavily.
“By being racist?”
“Among other things. It’s fine. Worse things could have happened.”
“Worse things,” he said quietly. “Worse things like…?”
I almost laughed.
Like being glamoured into thinking your worst enemy is your mother. Like watching your boyfriend sleeping with her right in front of you. Like burning your entire city to the ground because you thought you were doing the world a favor. Like nearly turning your best friend’s esophagus to slag. Like being a part of the nightmare-monster country club that almost ended the whole fucking world…
“I don’t know,” I said. “Jury duty.”
He nodded as he looked out the window.
###
“So,” said Henry. “What are we going to do tonight?”
I shrugged. “Technically, we’re supposed to be in the office, but now that feels like a bad idea. You’re new, I’m… me… and it’s a slow night for nightmares. Nobody’s busy, everybody’s bored. We’d just be asking for trouble by sitting in there, let alone, trying to do any actual work.”
“Okay,” said Henry. “So… no office.”
“No office,” I agreed. “We’ve only got a couple hours left before we can clock out for the night, so I guess we’ll just drive around for a while. Give everyone a chance to get used to the idea of me being in the building with them all the time.”
“So we’ll go on patrol?”
“Yeah, sure.” I had one hand on the wheel as I glanced up and down each side of the street, unsure of what I was looking for but also not finding it. “Not like we’ve got anything better to do.”
Henry nodded. We drove for several minutes in silence, but I could practically hear the gears spinning in his head. He was fidgety, casting me sidelong glances, and biting his lip. The kid had questions, maybe some of which he deemed disrespectful to ask. I sighed.
“Ask away,” I said as I frowned at him.
“Okay.” He swallowed audibly. “Um… so. What kind of stuff can you do?”
I scoffed. “A lotta things, you’ll have to be more specific.”
“Okay, okay, um… can you smell blood?”
“Yes.”
He was quiet for a beat. “Can you smell mine?”
“Kind of,” I said.
“What’s it smell like?”
“Salt and rust,” I said.
“Same as it smells to you, only stronger.”
“Does everybody’s blood smell like that?”
“No,” I answered. “I mean, not really. Humans pretty much smell alike. Magical creatures vary more often. Fairy blood smells like pomegranates, werewolves smell like wet steel, vampires smell like rotten flowers, depending on how old they are…” I looked over and found him listening intently, his eyes wide. He was totally enthralled. Not that I could blame him. This stuff was pretty interesting. Well that is, if you weren’t a vampire yourself and you could study it from a long, long distance.
When I didn’t say anything else, he asked, “Do you have to drink blood to survive?”
I scoffed again. “No,” I said. “I mean, I can. I suppose I could technically survive on a diet of pure blood, but it’s gross and I like eating food. So, you know. Not worth it.”
He seemed to sense my discomfort and leaned forward tentatively. “Are you also other things?”
I hesitated. “Yes.”
“Like what?”
“Um… like a werewolf,” I said. “Sometimes I wake up and my teeth are sharper than they should be and I feel super irritable. That’s the Draconian part of me. I’ve got some dryad stuff going on too, a super green thumb and infrequent, but powerful urges to become a vegetarian and burn coal plants to the ground. The vampire stuff was just what I got the most of,” I said carefully, “and the rest just gave me, like… I don’t know, chemical deficiencies or something.”
“How’d you get… how’d you become like… that?”
“Um,” I started. “I was injected with the blood of a whole array of creatures, and because I’m a fairy, they just assimilated instead of killing me like they normally would.”
For a second, I was terrified he would ask me why that happened, and I’d have to find some way to say “You know that vampire that almost killed the president? Yeah, she was the one responsible for doing that to me,” without sounding complicit.
“So you can see in the dark?” he asked.
Thank Hades. “Yeah. I can.”
What Screams May Come Page 4