“Consistently?”
“Yes.” The vampirism was the most consistent of all the abilities I had packed into my blood. Probably because it had been there the longest.
“Are you fast?”
“Faster than I was.”
“Are you immortal?”
“Fuck, I hope not.”
“Are you allergic to sunlight?”
I laughed. “Allergic? No, but I’m probably way more susceptible to sunburns now.” Not that my pasty face wasn’t sunburn-prone before.
Henry nodded thoughtfully. “Can you see your reflection in a mirror?”
I glanced at him and frowned. “Of course I can. Any vampire can. The mirrors don’t have silver backing anymore.”
“Huh. Cool.”
“Cool?’
“Cool,” he said. “Can you fly?’
“Until I hit the ground.”
Henry chuckled. “Can you teleport?”
“Nobody I know can teleport without a portal generator,” I said, “and those things use ridiculous amounts of power; so there’s nobody in the world that can supply enough without collapsing in on itself, whether they’re immortal or not.” I thought for a second. “I can dematerialize. It’s hard, and really uncomfortable, but I can do it if I need to.”
“Dematerialize?” Henry asked.
I tried to remember Sam’s explanation when I asked how Bram managed to move so fast.
Oh, right, Bram. A vampire friend of mine. Wickedly fast, questionably moral. Obsessed with me in an irritatingly sexual way. He helped stop Meg from making everything go boom, so he isn’t quite a bad guy—but he had some personal incentive to keep her from taking over the world, so his assistance wasn’t outright altruism. But nothing Bram ever does is purely altruistic.
“It’s like breaking yourself down to your basic components, your physical and ephemeral parts, and then reconstructing them briefly into a form that is thin enough to move slightly slower than light. Or something like that.”
“Or something like that?”
“Hey, I’m a Regulator, not a scientist,” I said.
“Right, is that what they called you before? A Regulator?”
The word almost stung my ears. Burning buildings flashed across my mind’s eye and I banished them away angrily. “Yeah. That was my job.”
“As a detective, or something else?”
“Basically as a detective,” I answered, “but also everything else. Domestic disturbances and potion smuggling and traffic violations. Depended on what station you occupied, but we didn’t really have names for those. There were no meter maids in the ANC. Just people with no better criminals to catch.”
“So you gave out parking tickets?”
“Sometimes,” I said. “Usually, that was somebody else’s job, though.”
“Huh. So what’s the lowest level in the ANC? The most basic entry level job?”
“Uh… Junior Regulator, but I had to train with somebody for a while before I earned that title.”
“Does that make you a Senior Regulator?”
“Yes, it did,” I said, my heart splintering at my use of the past tense. “All the big scary cases were sent directly to me.”
“Like what?”
“Like…” Shit, where do I even start? “A shapeshifter from a few years ago who was killing people that owned alchemy supply stores. Or the dreamstalker who put people I knew into comas and killed them in their sleep.”
Henry blinked like a little kid being told his first scary story—he was awed, stunned, and scared. Excited beyond description. “Whoa.”
“Yeah,” I said. And those cases seemed so tame now. So easy to solve.
“How many people have you arrested?” he asked.
“More than I care to count.”
“Supernatural prisoners are deported to the Netherworld, right?”
“They are.” To one of five prisons—which, with all the power-changing happening Netherside, I suddenly realized was a really bad idea. Hades, we need better infrastructure.
“Do they still?”
I hesitated. Good question. “I think so,” I said. “I mean, they’re doing all of this integration stuff with our departments because…” because we almost got the president killed, but whatever. “…well, you know, but I doubt they’re putting magical baddies away around here. They’re entirely too dangerous, and the prisons in the Netherworld are magically reinforced from the foundation up. Any wards we can place on existing buildings here would be no more than window dressing unless we’re willing to tear it all down and start again.”
“Are we?”
“Henry, we can’t get our government to fill potholes in the streets.”
“This is more important than potholes, isn’t it?”
“It is, but it’s not where the money’s going. Not while we have facilities that look perfectly fine, especially since we have enchanted prisons already. It’s just more practical.”
“Isn’t it dangerous to keep them all housed together?”
I sighed. “Yeah. Yeah, it is.”
Before he could say anything else, the radio sputtered and we looked down.
“What frequency is that?” I asked. The numbers were blurred over so I couldn’t read them—twitching with the vibrations of the car, maybe.
Could it be…
You don’t believe that, I thought, but surely I was just being paranoid. Relax, it’s just a broken fucking radio.
Henry squinted at the numbers and shook his head. “No idea,” he said. “I don’t know what’s—”
The dial spun one way, then shot back and settled on the police frequency. The numbers sputtered and flashed. Through thunderclap static, a voice, strained and deep, said something in an urgent tone, but I couldn’t make it out.
Henry and I looked at each other.
“What the,” Henry started, but I cut him off with a sharp wave of my hand.
“Wait,” I said.
“S… back… go… hel…” the radio said.
“Captain Chase,” Henry whispered. I nodded as I reached for the console to respond.
The static died. Someone screamed. Something on the other end inhaled. Laughter and high-pitched squealing followed like gears in a broken clock.
“Dul… cie…”
A little voice in the back of my head said, See?
The static came back, only louder now. I palmed the response key on the console. The radio didn’t respond.
Henry looked over at me slowly. “What was that?’
“I don’t know,” I said. “Something very bad. We’re going back to the precinct. Call for backup.”
Henry nodded and pulled out his phone. For a moment, his hands were shaking and hovering over the keys like his fingers didn’t know where to go, what to press, or whom to call.
Ghostbusters, I thought inanely.
Henry put the phone to his ear.
FOUR
Dulcie
We pulled into the station parking lot ten minutes later. There were the same number of cars as when we left, and the lights were still on inside. The windows were all broken. Glass was ground into glitter and scattered all over the sidewalk, like something inside must have exploded.
I stopped and listened for a fraction of a second as I sucked in a deep breath, throwing my door open and barreling out of the car.
“Something’s wrong,” I said. We already knew that, but now it also felt wrong on top of sounding wrong. I took my gun from my holster and held in it low ready, plastering myself against one side of the front door. Henry mirrored me, staring at me with wide eyes—frightened,.
“What’s in there?” he whispered. “What do you hear?”
“Nothing. Nobody’s breathing,” I whispered back. “Nobody.” There should have been a number of night officers, a secretary, the poor, bored bastard who kept the records, and at least one detective working late. Gary was usually around, trying to prove he was exceptional at his job, but there was no sound. Nothing audib
le but the hiss and hum of a broken vent, the blades clicking against an outcrop of metal or plastic. No breathing, no beating hearts.
Henry swallowed. “Do you smell blood?”
“Yes.” I adjusted my grip on the gun, my thumb hovering over the safety latch. The front doors were shut tight, but I could taste something in their metal, in the bars that bound the door hinges to the walls and floor—something like blood and salt and sulphur. Something arcane, bleeding heavily—a monster brushing against metals that melted its skin, a werewolf against silver, a fairy against iron. Something must have touched it, gotten burned, and left a little of itself behind.
We opened the door and gagged.
The smell of blood beyond the door was toxic, a liquid-gold miasma hanging in the air. Even Henry could taste it. To his credit, he didn’t stagger. He just closed his mouth and swallowed hard.
“What the hell?” he said, taking a tentative step forward, both hands still clasping his gun.
I barely heard him. I was staring blank-faced at the scene, which was black and bloody. Everything was shiny and slick. The whole room seemed to be liquified, and smeared in red. The tiled ceiling was splattered in heavy bursts like fireworks. Scarlet lines ran down walls, handprints reaching for phones or guns. The computers were tossed on their sides, thrown wildly across the room. Bits of shattered monitors and motherboards were scattered across the floor. Half the lights were blown out, shattered bulbs hanging from the ceiling, swinging slowly, sputtering.
And the bodies. So many bodies.
“Oh, my God,” said Henry. “That’s the captain.”
He was looking at a man lying face-up not three feet from the door. His mouth was open, and half his teeth were missing. His eyes were by his feet. His fingers were all broken, some severed completely. He was bathed in his own fluids that flowed from the craters that now comprised his stomach.
None of the other corpses looked any better.
“Yeah,” I said. “It is.”
Henry eyed me expectantly. Right. Superior officer.
I pulled out my cellphone and tossed it to him. “Call…” Fuck, who do you call when everyone in your office is dead? The next precinct over? “Chief of Police,” I said at last. Might as well go to the top of the ladder.
“We already called for backup,” he said.
“And now we’re calling again to tell them what the hell we just found,” I snapped sharply. “Do you know the number?”
Henry nodded briskly and dialed, trying his hardest to avoid looking at any one body for very long. I wondered if he’d never seen a corpse before. Well, nothing like getting thrown in the deep end on your first day.
I took a long breath through my mouth, drawing the polluted air across my tongue. The salty tang of blood, rotting flesh, sweat, and the violet reeking of abject animal fear nearly made me vomit. I listened and still heard nothing. No heartbeats but mine and Henry’s, breaking the silence like thunder inside a morgue. I barely heard the conversation—sixty seconds of secretaries connecting him to the higher office, then something about sending backup and telling us to stay where we were.
He hung up. “Should we clear the building?” he asked.
Right, I thought. Protocol. “Yeah,” I said. “But whoever, or whatever did this is long gone.” There was no one left with functioning lungs at least—which didn’t exactly mean that we were actually alone. Vampires were, as a rule, more elegant when they went on rampages, but there’s always the exception.
“Come on,” I said.
We started to walk. Slowly, while trying not to stare at the ground, we tramped through blood, and stepped over the stiffening bodies. They hadn’t been lying here long. The smell was still fresh, sickening sweet and warm. My mouth watered and I gagged. My stomach growled—feeling hungry and repelled all at once.
“You okay?” Henry asked, barely two steps behind me. His shoes kept sticking to the floor, leaving thin red prints wherever he walked. I worried about us contaminating the crime scene, but at this point, it didn’t really matter. Anything that was so reckless would have left pieces of itself in everything—a few disturbed puddles of blood wouldn’t make any difference.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m fine.”
We checked the building. Every office, interrogation room, and broom closet. Only two of them were untouched. Broken tables, overturned trashcans, spilled coffee. Anything with the potential to break was scattered in pieces.
Blood was everywhere. Obviously so.
“Clear,” Henry said, backing out of the last room. I sighed heavily and holstered my gun, running my hands through my hair.
“Fuck,” I muttered. Two hours at work and already we’ve got a massacre to deal with. Maybe it was a callous thought, but this would play hell with supernatural sensibilities. Nothing human could have done so much carnage—the human population would be wielding torches-and-pitchforks once this got out. Especially when people learned that I was not only there to witness the aftermath, but also seemed to be the only survivor. Well, that is, my new partner and me. They already had their reasons to hate me. When the other cops discovered I was the first one to stumble over this latest disaster, they’d riot. The optics couldn’t be worse. “Fucking fuck.”
“Yeah,” said Henry. “Yeah.”
Props to him for not saying anything more. Another person might have tried to voice something profound.
We stood there in total silence for a long time, just observing the emptiness. Staring at lifeless faces, and quickly looking between them so we never thought about one person for too long. I was chilled from the inside out. My body was numb. It was cold and dark, filled with a chronic emptiness, heavy enough to become a presence of its own…
“Hang on,” I said as I started toward the front of the building. Henry followed without a word, his gun still in his hand.
We walked back through the swath of bodies, tracing our footprints so we didn’t disrupt anything else, all the way back to the captain and the doors—where the metal was gouged by claws as long as knives.
“Okay,” I said, looking around. Feeling for the salt and sulphur behind the air, the gangrenous smell that was worse than death. The aura remained of something that didn’t belong here or anywhere else. Something hauntingly familiar.
“What is it?” Henry asked softly.
“Something…” It was really, really bad, but I couldn’t tell what. A heaviness in the atmosphere, a smothering presence with no weight. A dark aura with no glow… “I don’t know. It’s magic, but I can’t tell what kind…” What kind wasn’t even the right word. It wasn’t a different genre, but an entirely different medium. Whatever it was, it was as dissimilar as trying to compare a newspaper to a possessed person who was speaking in tongues. Red and white versus the intangible cobalt blue of a worried soul—the color swiftly leeched out of Henry in thick smoky clouds.
Aura reading was new—one of a hundred thousand innovative race-traits that were injected into me by Mother Dearest, although Hades knew where this came from. Drakes can’t do it, or vampires, or werewolves, or fairies, or dryads, as far as I knew, but something allowed me to see the colorful manifestations of a person’s life force intermittently. Fairy magic was sunlight yellow, vampire magic gave off twisting bands of shadow and scarlet, werewolves were an ironic mix of ocean blue and silver, of all things. Most of them were rather obvious, but this? This wasn’t any color I’d ever seen. It was dark, sure, but what kind of dark was the real question.
“Is it evil?” Henry asked and I almost laughed.
“Um,” I replied while looking around us and then at him as I shrugged. “This doesn’t look much like a social call.”
“So, it is evil?”
I instantly thought of Sam casually brandishing a book explaining the inherent complexity of souls and how absolute evil wasn’t even a thing… Sure. This was weird enough to be evil.
“About as evil as it gets,” I said.
The precinct doors opened, and t
he officers started pouring in, their yellow caution tape, cameras and latex gloves at the ready. We turned to them, our faces blank.
“Detective O’Neil?” someone said.
They saw us. The walls, the crimson stripes, the shattered glass, the bodies, the faces growing paler by the second. Pools of blood inching ever outwards, devouring the palette of colors around them like black holes. Singularities in red, consuming whatever they touched.
Everyone came to a screeching halt. Their sentences ended midway and evaporated. Nobody blinked for ten seconds. Nobody breathed. Every heart was beating like a jackhammer, threatening to burst through their chests.
“By God,” someone said. Everyone was slowly swimming back to reality. After twenty seconds of wire-tight silence, the horde of professionals drank it all in.
“Yeah,” I said, looking down at the captain. “I know.”
###
I made it home three hours later, everybody’s questions were still ringing in my ears.
No, I don’t know what happened. No, there was no one in the building when we got there. No, I didn’t see anyone leaving. Yes, there was bad magic there. No, I didn’t know what type of bad magic it was. Yes, they called for backup. Yes, we called for backup the second we heard the transmission. Yes, we were away from the precinct the whole time. And no, we didn’t have any reason for being away.
I opened my door, closed it, inhaled and sighed long enough to make my lungs hurt.
The apartment wasn’t mine—not my old one, anyway. That entire complex had been razed to the ground in the earthquakes I caused when I leveled my old office. Now I was in a posh, little something-or-other and closer to Sam. It was a small four-room unit on the fifth floor filled with plush new furniture and overly modern kitchenware beneath wide windows.
It was fine. It didn’t exactly feel homey, but too nice was better than the impoverished sinkhole I expected to come home to.
Blue came bounding out of the kitchen, whining softly before he sat at my feet, looking up at me expectantly.
I couldn’t help but smile at him. Blue is a golden retriever, not yet past puppy-stage. He was a gift from my old boss, Quillan, whom I hadn’t seen since, hell, since the stupid dance we had after we killed Melchior. We talked really briefly in the hospital after D.C. when he came to get Christina—and they’re an item now—but it wasn’t longer than ten seconds. Mostly, we just wanted to make sure neither of us were dead and then we moved on—we had statements to give and other people to locate.
What Screams May Come Page 5