Shutter

by Courtney Alameda

  Ryder waved us into a loose huddle.

  I exposed my abdomen, framing the cold lump of light with my fingers, unable to meet anyone’s gaze. Showing off a scrap of skin made me jumpy enough, but anticipating the boys’ reactions was worse. Oliver crouched down, wincing and adjusting the chromoglasses’ focus. I stared at the top of his head, the pencil-straightness of the part in his hair, the bandage under his shirt, anything to keep from looking into Ryder’s eyes and seeing the unspoken why don’t you ever listen to me? lurking there. Haunting him, haunting me.

  “I’ll be damned, Daddy’s little girl actually has some curves.” Jude grinned when I flipped him off. The boy didn’t take anything seriously, not life or death or whatever beat like a diseased heart under my skin.

  “Curves aren’t her problem.” Oliver took a measuring tape off his key ring and pressed it against my skin. He blew out a breath. “That’s definitely ghostlight. Violet. Two inches by three and a quarter. How is this possible, Micheline?” he asked, rising.

  “I don’t know.” I crossed my arms under my breasts and hugged myself. “But it’s got something to do with the smoke the entity forced down my throat. Down our throats, I guess.”

  Ryder jerked his shirt out of his waistband. Ghostlight spread through his abs in strands that wafted and wove together, forming a small, tight loop that stood out against his tan skin like a neon sign in a dark window.

  The sight hit my heart. I swallowed hard. Nodded.

  Ryder cursed, once for himself and twice when we found similar marks on Oliver and Jude. The boys passed the chromoglasses around, sobered by the strange light inside them, looking to me for an explanation I didn’t have. Knowledge I didn’t possess. Deliverance I couldn’t provide.

  I thrust my uninjured arm at Jude. “Take my wrist, see if this thing’s deadly.”

  Jude recoiled. He never let us have skin-to-skin contact with him, and wore gloves anytime he left his bedroom. Whenever he touched someone—or anytime someone touched him—he saw their next potential death. He’d seen fourteen deaths for me already. Three for Oliver. Twenty-two for Ryder. “You know I don’t do that,” he said.

  “I need to know if these things are going to kill us,” I said.

  “Not. Like. That.” Jude fisted his hands so tight his gloves creaked.

  “But—”

  Ryder took my arm and pressed it down, gently. Drop it, he meant both figuratively and literally. I sighed through clenched teeth.

  In the hall, the nurse tapped Dr. Harding on the shoulder. She pointed at us, and Harding covered the mouthpiece of his phone as he asked, They all have it? It was easy to read his lips from a distance.

  She nodded.

  Black guilt gummed up the valves of my heart. Or maybe it was dread, too—I wouldn’t survive the loss of my boys, not even one. They were my family now, all I had and all I wanted.

  “These things must be dangerous if they set off the scanners,” Oliver said, gazing at the light on his stomach, prodding it gently. He removed his chromoglasses and slipped them into one of the cargo pockets on his thigh.

  “Think it’s bad enough to get us out of class tonight?” Jude asked.

  Oliver rolled his eyes. “You didn’t finish your paper for Paranecrotic Anatomy? Come on, I gave you my notes.”

  “You mean the paper he botched the dissection for?” I added. Jude stuck his tongue out at me. It had been his job to pith and scramble the zombie’s brain before we dissected it in class, but he thought the step was “optional.” Oliver and I were cataloging the necro’s stomach contents when it sat up with this groan straight out of a horror movie, spilling its guts all over the dissection table and floor. It almost bit Katie Moultrie before Ryder jabbed a Bic pen in its brain stem, taking it down for good.

  Ryder got an automatic A in the class for the specificity of the kill and the angle of the jab. The pen still worked, too. Ryder always said his old man beat a “sixth sense for hurting things” into him, and that the day my own father offered Ryder a one-way plane ticket to California was the best he’d ever had. He’d been eleven.

  My parents didn’t adopt him, but he became my shadow—whenever I spent time training with Dad, Ryder came, too; Mom asked me to tutor him until he caught up at the academy; they included him in all holidays and family vacations, and treated him like another son. Ryder adored my parents, soaking up all their love and attention until it expanded him from the scrawny, flinching boy he’d been to the rough-and-ready reaper he was today.

  No doubt that was why Ryder toed Dad’s line with such ferocious loyalty.

  “I’ve got a paper to turn in,” Jude said, grinning.

  “I didn’t see you write one,” Ryder said.

  “That’s ’cause I didn’t write it.”

  Ryder swept a hand under his nose, wiping a stitch of a grin off his face. “You bastard.” In his articulation, the word bastard was usually an endearment, like mate or love, though he reserved its use for his two half brothers back in Melbourne, and for Jude, who was a brother-in-arms instead of one of blood.

  Jude grinned, fierce and wolfish. We were predators, but Jude played that role on multiple fields, blowing through girls like automatic rounds and tossing the empty casings away. Before I could ask which poor girl Jude conned into doing his work this time, the doctor returned.

  Harding administered the antinecrotic shots to the boys, examined the ghostlight marks on their abdomens, then scanned our eyes again. The scans blinked red in a wash. A doorknob-size knot of worry turned in my throat, making it hard to breathe. I didn’t let the emotion show on my face, I couldn’t.

  “Get your things,” Harding said, pulling his phone from his pocket and tapping its screen. “I’m sending you to Seward Memorial, stat, per Dr. Stoker’s orders. I’ll inform him you’re on your way.” He looked at me, saluted with a fist over his heart, and withdrew.

  If Dr. Stoker knew, it was only a matter of time before Dad found out, too. And that’s when the proverbial shit would really hit the fan.

  FRIDAY, 12:50 A.M.

  I SAT BESIDE RYDER on the helicopter ride to Angel Island, hardly listening to the conversations around me. Without my comm, the boys’ voices got chopped up and digested by the helicopter’s percussive thrum. I caught a beat here, the shape of a word there, but little else.

  The dregs of my adrenaline wore off, leaving me stiff in places, bruises solidifying into dark masses over my shins and knuckles. Failure tasted like aluminum foil, metallic and sharp, forcing me to focus on how badly I’d screwed up. Even the way Ryder’s thigh pressed against mine—Thank you, packed chopper—failed to comfort me. I wanted to lean against his shoulder and close my eyes but didn’t, not in front of the other boys and our escort.

  Instead, I watched the black bay water slide by, reviewing the fight in my head—every move, each frame of memory—and wondered how I could have exorcised the entity. How many shots would it take to capture so much ghostlight on film? Could I contain all that light in a single frame, or would I have to split it between multiples? I’d never needed more than a few shots to suck an entity’s ghostlight into my lens. Would the entity be able to move on in a fragmented state?

  Would we even survive another bout against that monster?

  I didn’t realize I’d chewed the side of my fingernail bloody until Ryder took my hand away from my mouth. A smile touched his eyes, if not his lips. I’d picked up the habit after Mom died and never quit; the tic a “coping mechanism for my anxiety,” as my psychologist would say.

  We hovered above the hospital’s helipad in a few minutes’ time. The Gregory M. Seward Memorial Hospital was a state-of-the-art facility located on Angel Island’s north shore. The hospital functioned as a treatment and research facility—the six stories aboveground were for human patients, for broken bones and concussions, for surgeries and ER visits. Normal stuff.

  The three underground stories, however, were for the undead. For researching them, for penning them up, observ
ing, and testing them. Reapers called the place the Ninth Circle, and I’d been down there once and swore to Dad if he ever made me go back, I’d torch the place.

  I spotted Oliver’s father, Dr. Paul Stoker, waiting on the helipad, his white lab coat and dark tie whipping in the wind.

  Oliver groaned. “He must’ve heard about the demerits, he looks pissed.”

  “I thought you were going to say ghostlight,” I said.

  “Or the H-threes,” Ryder said.

  “Or the frickin’ disaster zone we just walked away from,” Jude said.

  “Do we know the same Paul Stoker?” Oliver cracked a smile, but it flinched off as the helicopter jolted against the roof. “Do me a favor and don’t mention the fact that the GPS failed at the hospital, too—he’s got enough to worry about.”

  I waited for Oliver to say with the divorce. The unspoken words detonated in my ears. Jude grimaced, waiting for the fallout, but Oliver just turned his head and sighed. No griping about his mom’s last e-mail—a meager two lines shot off at ten thousand feet. No muttering about everything she’d left untied when she cleared out a month ago. So God bless painkiller cocktails; I loved Oliver but his emo side rubbed me raw. At least his father was still proud of him, and at least his mother was still alive. At least he was used to being an only child.

  A ground crew opened the chopper’s hatch, releasing us onto the helipad. Dr. Stoker crossed to us, narrowing his eyes against the wind and dust. Placing one hand on Oliver’s back, he ushered his son off the helipad, gesturing to the rest of us to follow.

  Seward Memorial’s sixth floor was private, accessible only to high-ranking officers and their families. We walked over the Helsing cross inlaid into the lobby’s mirror-finish marble floor, the motto Semper Vigilans inscribed below. A sleek, circular reception desk sat in the room’s center, and the lacquer-black furnishings and pristine white walls felt more chic than comforting. Floor-to-ceiling windows displayed the northern edge of the bay at night, with Sausalito’s lights winking like cats’ eyes among the inky hills.

  The grandest thing in the room, however, was the mural of the famous Abraham Van Helsing and his original reaping crew: his protégé, Dr. John Seward; the lone American, Quincey Morris; Helsing’s first investor, Arthur Holmwood; the “other Abraham,” Bram Stoker; and Van Helsing’s dearest friends, Jonathan and Mina Harker.

  Van Helsing stood in their midst with a book, not a gun, in his hand—their leader, protector, and guide. Mina Harker sat on his right side, with Jonathan’s hand on her shoulder. Her vibrant eyes always caught my attention, because we shared the same shimmering, peacock-blue irises. I felt a kinship with her, not only for the color of our eyes but for the scars we’d won in our fight against the dead.

  A silver plaque beside the painting held a quote of Van Helsing’s I knew by heart, one I repeated to myself when in tight straits and dark places: “I have a duty to do, a duty to others, a duty to you, a duty to the dead, and by God, I shall do it.” Those words usually brought me courage; but tonight, they echoed in the void between who I was and the Helsing I was supposed to be.

  Dr. Stoker checked us into the hospital. Nurses secured ID bracelets around our wrists, issued us cotton scrubs and disposable slippers, then ushered us into an examination room. They separated me from the boys with a snap of a curtain.

  “I’ll take your clothes,” one of the nurses said as I peeled off my jacket. “We need to send them to the labs for analysis.”

  “I’m keeping my camera.”

  “Of course, miss.”

  I removed my shirt next, dismayed to see how the ghostlight had already spread. The light formed a closed loop that sketched and skewed under my skin, about the same length as my index finger.

  It wasn’t fading away. It was growing.

  Resisting the urge to hurl, I tugged the scrubs over my head. The pants came next, and I had to roll the hems several times to make them fit. My body heat leaked out of the thin fabric. Shivers plucked my skin. My teeth chattered a few times before I clenched my jaw.

  “Chills are an early symptom of paranecrosis,” the nurse said, placing the back of her hand against my forehead. “You received H-three treatment at the pier clinic, didn’t you?”

  I nodded. She pressed her lips together in a frown. “Well, you don’t have a fever and your color looks okay. I’ll get you a robe.”

  When I rejoined the others, Jude lounged on a gurney, gloved hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling. Ryder paced the cordoned length of the room, anxious as a caged big cat. Oliver and his father spoke in low voices by the door. Dr. Stoker placed a hand on Oliver’s shoulder and gave him a little shake, his fingers the same length and shape as his son’s.

  Of all the first families—of the forefathers shown in the painting—only the Helsing and Stoker bloodlines were still around. We’d lost the others, one by one, over the decades since Dracula’s defeat. My grandfather called it a curse, my father called it a superstition. As for me, I figured Dracula was dead dead dead and didn’t give a pint of blood about what the descendants of his killers did.

  Still, my father and I were the last surviving members of the American branch of the family. Dad himself was an only child. His twin brother had died within hours of birth. My brothers had been dead for eighteen months, and my paternal grandfather didn’t live to see seventy. The UK branch wasn’t faring better—they’d lost their commander in chief in a bad raid last year, and the whole organization was now run by an “illegitimate sixteen-year-old upstart with more balls than brains.” (My father’s words, not mine.)

  Oliver and I were only children. If we were terminal with this—this thing, this ghostlight under our skins—then our bloodlines would die with us. Dad was a widower who’d sworn to never remarry. Dr. Stoker was a divorcé of late and had silver wingtips in his dark hair. He was Dad’s age—fifty, maybe fifty-one—young enough to have another child, perhaps, but maybe not young enough to train that child to lead one of the corps’s major branches.

  Dr. Stoker gave Oliver’s shoulder a squeeze as I walked in. The nurses rolled the curtains back, exposing the rest of the room.

  “Pull some chairs around,” Dr. Stoker said, gesturing to the armchairs pushed into the room’s corners. “I want to know what happened at St. Mary’s.” He moved a chair into the middle of the room and sat, crossing his leg at the knee, his tablet in hand.

  “Is this going to be an official statement?” I asked, accepting the armchair Ryder dragged over for me.

  Dr. Stoker tapped his tablet’s screen. “What you say will be added to your personnel file and admissible to the academy’s disciplinary board. With that said, I would advise you not to amend your story for your statement. I can’t help you if I don’t know everything that happened.”

  Hmph, he might’ve just said checkmate.

  Oliver and Jude pulled chairs up, too. Jude hunched over, forearms on his thighs, head down, while Oliver sat as straight as his father did, despite his injuries. Ryder perched on the arm of my chair—doubtless he’d be pacing in a few minutes, anyway. The guy didn’t know how to hold still.

  “Where should we start?” I asked, blowing out a breath.

  “At the beginning, when you first learned of the entity,” Dr. Stoker said. His tablet beeped at him, and he recited his name, the date, and the time for the recording.

  Ryder nudged me. I took a deep breath and launched into a detailed description of the hunt, starting with Marlowe’s phone call. Quietly, I told Dr. Stoker about the pattern killings, the possessed corpse, and the ghost who wreathed itself in shadows. Dr. Stoker watched me closely as I spoke—my hands, my eyes, and my body language—no doubt looking for lies. He was a reaper’s equivalent of a Renaissance man, and even if I hadn’t planned on telling the truth, I’d be hard-pressed to hide my tells from him.

  Dr. Stoker made me repeat the entity’s nursery rhyme twice.

  “‘Eye for an eye,’” Oliver murmured.

  “It’s the
lex talionis,” Dr. Stoker said, glancing at his son. “Do you know what that is?”

  “It’s an ancient Roman law, wherein an offended party could claim restitution equal to the offense. Literally equal, that is,” Oliver said.

  Dr. Stoker smiled. “Very good. In this case, I should add that the Romans took the law from the Abrahamic tradition of the Jews,” he said. “Perhaps the line ‘chain up the souls of Abraham’s youth’ refers to such ancient practices?”

  Abraham? “Or maybe it refers to a famous ancestor of mine,” I said, thinking of the painting in the hall. “Of yours, too.”

  Dr. Stoker’s brows rose, two storm clouds on the placid expanse of his forehead. “If that were the case, Micheline, I would assume, ipso facto, that someone meant to lure the four of you to St. Mary’s tonight, and that the attack was not a chance occurrence but a deliberately malicious one.”

  I lifted my shoulders in a shrug, mostly to hide the many-legged shudder that crept up my spine. The feeling banished my confidence. I suddenly couldn’t find the words to tell Dr. Stoker how the entity called me by name, a detail that expanded my guilt and my fear. “Anything’s possible.”

  “That’s quite the machination for someone dead,” Dr. Stoker said, but he was looking through me as though I were the glass lens through which he viewed a far-off and obscure subject. “One that would require forethought, even prior knowledge of your relationship with Father Marlowe and the Catholic church. Why else choose a Catholic hospital, one not two blocks away from Marlowe’s residence?”

  “Who says the ghost came up with it?” Jude said. “Maybe some dumbass released the ghost in the hospital and bam! Instant deathtrap. And it wouldn’t take a lot of brains to figure out how to get Princess here running headlong into it.”