Shutter

by Courtney Alameda

  I stuck my tongue out at him.

  “You’re such a lemming, Micheline,” Jude said.

  “Who came running into the hospital after me?” I shot back.

  “Enough.” Dr. Stoker rubbed his temple. “It is entirely possible someone released the ghost in the hospital. Investigations has procured the security tapes and will review them upon their return.”

  “What about Marlowe?” Ryder asked. “Can we trust him?”

  “Yes,” I said, so automatically that all eyes turned in my direction. “He was my mother’s best friend and confidant; he wouldn’t do anything to hurt me.”

  “He put you in the path of a bloody killer,” Ryder said. “And after what happened to your mum, you’d think the bloke would know better.”

  I pinned Ryder with a look, but he wasn’t game for a contest. He slid off the chair and started pacing again, scrubbing the shadow on his chin with his hand. I turned away, said nothing, not only out of loyalty to the memory of my mother’s friendship with Marlowe but because I had no rebuttal. Marlowe had asked me to go after a killer, after all.

  “I’ll bring Marlowe in for questioning,” Dr. Stoker said, standing. “I’ve also been in contact with Dr. Stella Montgomery of Stanford, who will be arriving shortly to help me diagnose your infections. Infestations.” He waved both words away with a hand, as if neither fit his meaning exactly. “In the meantime, you’ll be subjected to a battery of tests, in hopes we find a physiological cause and remedy for your … predicament.”

  Oh, joy.

  “Dr. Montgomery is coming?” Oliver asked, perking. “Will Gemma be with her?”

  Dr. Stoker nodded. Jude moaned and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms. Oliver might have loved Gemma, but the rest of us didn’t. Gemma Stone was Oliver’s haughty girlfriend with an IQ he touted like a double-letter cup size, the girl who’d been accepted to Stanford’s Paranecrotic Medicine program at the age of I’m-still-immature-enough-to-throw-it-in-your-face. Even Ryder rubbed the back of his neck as if the idea crimped him. It took a hell of a lot to make Ryder McCoy dislike a person—like maybe spreading rumors at the academy that Helsing Corps psychologists had me on antipsychotics, suicide watch, and house arrest after Mom’s death. That I’d wake up during the day, screaming, and Dad had to hold me down while my live-in nurse gave me a sedative.

  Okay, maybe I wasn’t over what Gemma had said, either. Or over how Oliver told her the gory details of my three rounds in the ring with post-traumatic stress disorder.

  I was better now. Mostly.

  Dr. Stoker left us with the nurses. They turned me into a human pincushion—one nurse stuttered apologies as she missed the large vein in my arm once, twice, three times for a blood test. They swabbed my throat, scraped soot off my hands, shoved a thermometer in my mouth, and made me choke down barium for the MRI. They poked, prodded, and pierced me until “battery” by tests was right. I felt like I’d gone head-to-head with a meat tenderizer.

  By the time I got out of the MRI, backup had arrived. Oliver lay flat on one of the gurneys in the exam room, abdomen exposed up to the bandages on his chest, while a female doctor examined his ghostlight marks. I assumed she was Dr. Montgomery, only surprised by the cut-glass green color of her eyes. She’s a tetro? Guess that made sense—Gemma was a tetro, too, so she needed to train with one. Gemma wiped at her cheeks with her knuckles, smearing watercolor trails of mascara over her cheekbones. Dr. Stoker stood beside her, wearing a pair of chromoglasses and a frown, watching Dr. Montgomery work.

  The flat-screen television mounted on the wall played CNN on mute. Flashes of St. Mary’s appeared, as well as segments of a correspondent speaking to my father. The words MALEVOLENT ENTITY TERRORIZES SAN FRANCISCO HOSPITAL scrolled across the bottom of the screen, subtitled with HELSING AUTHORITIES ORDER A DUSK-TO-DAWN LOCKDOWN FOR THE BAY AREA. So the media jackals got to Dad—that’d put him in a mood. Worse, I’d only seen Helsing issue a night curfew twice in my life: once when paranecrosis ravaged the homeless population in the Tenderloin, and for the five months the Embarcadero Scissorclaw stalked the wharfs.

  Ryder and Jude stood a few paces back, watching. I eased between them, so close our shoulders touched.

  “Does she recognize the ghostlight?” I whispered.

  “Never seen it before,” Ryder said softly, crossing his arms over his chest.

  “Or heard of it, either,” Jude said.

  Guess it wasn’t going to be an easy diagnosis.

  Gemma looked up at me and blinked, her face crumpling like a crushed paper sack. “You,” she said, the word gushing out of her. “This is all because of you.”

  Oliver turned his head and frowned when he saw me. “Gem, don’t—”

  “You dragged him into this,” she said, rounding the gurney, pointing a finger at me like a pistol. “Taking off like that, leaving them defenseless. What is wrong with you?”

  Dr. Montgomery looked up, recognized me, and straightened. “Gemma.” Her tone flickered with a warning.

  Jude muttered, “Here we go” under his breath. Ryder leaned forward, almost imperceptibly, shifting his weight from his heels to the balls of his feet. Not to protect me from Gemma—he knew I didn’t need his protection—but maybe to protect Gemma from me.

  “I didn’t ask anyone to come with me,” I said, squaring my shoulders. It was hard to look imposing when everyone in the room stood several inches taller than I did.

  “You knew,” she spat. “You knew they would come after you, because everyone’s so worried about you and your precious family—”

  “That’s enough,” Dr. Stoker said, cutting off the conversation at the roots. “You will desist, Miss Stone, or you will receive a demerit for insubordination.”

  Gemma turned on her heel. “Insubordination? Oliver’s suffering for her mistakes and you’re calling it—”

  “Gem, I’m fine.” Oliver pushed off the gurney and put his arms around her. She buried her face in his neck. “Fighting gets us nowhere. We have to work together, okay?” His gaze rested on me, weighty. Play nice, it said. Easy for Oliver to say, she’d never slandered him.

  She sniffled and nodded. Jude made a gagging gesture with his finger in his mouth. I elbowed him. He bumped me with his hip. I slapped his hand, and he almost smacked back before Ryder hit him over the back of the head.

  “Now that you’re here, Miss Helsing”—Dr. Montgomery pressed her right fist into her heart in a salute—“I think we can begin.”

  “Begin what?” Then I noticed the antimirror.

  Once a silver reaping pane was used to trap a ghost, it became an antimirror—a sort of portal to the space between life and death, a place we called the Obscura. Tetrachromats sealed antimirrors by dipping them in molten glass. Once the panes cooled, their silver surfaces no longer reflected the living world, but allowed us to peer into places stained with twilight and shadow, beaten down by ruin and rot, and full of psychopathic ghosts chained by whatever fears or regrets kept them from moving on into death.

  Tetrachromats sometimes used the mirrors to communicate with the dead, to ask questions when faced with a spiritual anomaly or entity that couldn’t be explained by conventional means. Dr. Montgomery’s antimirror stood five feet tall—the height of a standard reaping mirror—propped up on a wire easel. The hospital room I saw through the mirror had chunks of flesh torn out of its walls. The light fixture dangled from the ceiling by its optical nerve, and a gurney lay in one corner, its frame twisted and bent. It was our hospital room … yet it wasn’t.

  I’d learned to exorcise ghosts with silver mirrors as a kid. A power inverter hooked on to the reaping mirror with clamps that looked like jumper cables, which positively electrified the silver surface and turned it into a magnet for a ghost’s negative ions and opened a portal to the Obscura. Silver conducted electricity better than any other metal, too, which made it pure Kryptonite to ghosts. Of course, this process involved somehow forcing the ghost into contact with the electrified pan
e, which was neither simple nor safe.

  Once they moved a ghost into the Obscura, tetros wrapped the antimirror in a static-free bag, and either dipped the pane to seal the portal, or sent it to Helsing silversmiths to melt it down. If a tetro left an antimirror unsealed or unmelted, ghosts could sometimes slip through during thunderstorms or power surges. On rare occasions, a ghost was powerful enough to electrify a silver pane on its own.

  Dr. Montgomery crossed the room, carrying a Maglite flashlight in hand. “You have experience with antimirrors, don’t you, Miss Helsing? I’ve yet to train Gemma in their use.”

  Mom had kept a basement full of them back at the Presidio house. Unbidden, her voice rushed through my memory: Mark my words, Micheline—nothing good comes out of an antimirror. Still, she’d taught me to summon ghosts to the edge of the pane, taught me how to question them, and taught me to never reveal my name to them. “Yes,” I said.

  “Good.” Dr. Montgomery turned on the flashlight and pointed it into the mirror. The beam shot straight through the glass, illuminating the carnage in the hospital room beyond. She flicked it off, then on again, as the others gathered behind us.

  “What’s that for?” Jude asked.

  “Consider this a dial tone,” Dr. Montgomery said, continuing the flashlight’s off/on pattern. “Light draws them, as they can absorb its energy.” Well, most light energy—ghosts couldn’t absorb my flash’s specially ionized light.

  After a few minutes, a rustling noise eked from the glass. The flashlight’s beam stuttered, its batteries weakening. A dirty arm flickered through the beam, and the faintest throb of violet ghostlight pressed itself against the glass.

  Dr. Montgomery turned off the light, and something said, “Shh, shh,” from inside the mirror. The voice sounded like the wind whickering in the wooden shingles of my old house.

  Meager light fell into the Obscura via our side of the antimirror. The refuse on the floor shifted, as though pressed by a footstep. A plaster pebble tumbled free from the mess and broke into a powdery cloud on the linoleum. There came a kind of hiss—more like the susurration that dragging one’s slippers across carpet makes—low and crackling. The hem of a tattered ball gown appeared in the arc of light cast by our side, the outline of a woman’s bony shoulders and long neck visible in the anorexic light behind her.

  “Light, shh,” the ghost whispered. “On.”

  “You may have the rest of the energy if you assist us,” Dr. Montgomery said to the mirror. “I have four living children who have been infected with ghostlight, and I need to know what’s happened to them. Will you help us?”

  The ghost twitched.

  “I’ll take that as a yes.” Dr. Montgomery blew out a breath. “Show her the infection, Micheline.”

  I curled my fingers around the hem of my shirt and tugged up, exposing the ghostlight marks on my skin. The first loop had split into two identical, attached helixes and thickened.

  The ghost drew back so fast, an avalanche of trash sputtered in her wake.

  “Please, do you know what it is?” I asked.

  “Shh, shh,” she said, her voice limped and lisped.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “Shh-s-s-soulchain.”

  The word made my insides seize up. Soulchain. The loops on my stomach were starting to look like chain links, a conduit connecting me to a demon. A vise-like pressure clamped down on my lungs, making my breaths shallow, dizzying.

  Dr. Montgomery recovered first. “A soulchain? Do you know how to get rid of it?”

  The ghost shifted her weight. She reached her hands into the light, her fingernails cracked and layered with dirt. She made two fists and twisted them in a way that looked vaguely like wringing a chicken’s neck.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “Break,” she said.

  “But how do I break the chain?” I asked, stepping closer to the mirror. “Do I need to exorcise the ghost?”

  She made the twitchy wringing motion again. “Seven days. Break ties.”

  “Seven days till what?” I asked.

  “Till you … are as I.”

  There was a crash—a loud, wrenching sound. The ghost tripped backward, knocking into the light fixture, whimpering as I cried out, “How do I break the chains?”

  An impermeable darkness bubbled into the room on the Obscura side. A scream cut the air, drawing an answering cry from Gemma. Dr. Montgomery stripped the sheets off a gurney in one motion and threw them over the antimirror, silencing it. The leftover stillness in the room sopped up the dregs of my composure. Dr. Montgomery and I stared at each other, our chests heaving as if we’d just run a mile.

  For several seconds, no one spoke.

  “That black mist,” Oliver murmured. “It looked rather like what we saw at St. Mary’s, didn’t it?”

  “You mean the shadows in the mirror?” Dr. Montgomery said, looking at Dr. Stoker. “That’s what this ‘miasma’ you’ve described looked like? And you were all able to see it, plain as day?”

  The boys nodded.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  Dr. Montgomery drew a breath. “Those misty creatures have been described to me as starvelings, denizens of the Obscura that consume other spirits to accumulate power. From what I understand, they have the ability to deconstruct the fabric of the soul and weave it into the black matter you saw, which acts as both a shield and an agent for the host.”

  “And what would happen if someone were to ingest some of a starveling’s miasma?” I asked. “Someone living, I mean.”

  “Is this what happened to you, Miss Helsing?” she asked.

  “The entity practically choked me with its smoke,” I replied.

  Dr. Stoker checked his notes, flipping through several pages before he said, “It’s comprised of a carbon substrate, mixed with some element unrelated to any on our periodic table.”

  “Well, I would have to say soulchains are the result of ingesting a starveling’s miasma,” Dr. Montgomery said quietly.

  Dad raised me to have iron emotions, to stay calm and stoic in spite of fear; but the despair pooling in Dr. Montgomery’s eyes shot down my resolve.

  I had seven days to break our chains. Seven days to stop a monster.

  Seven days to save us.

  It wasn’t enough.

  FRIDAY, 3:42 A.M.

  I NEEDED A FEW minutes alone to think. To deal. I pushed past the exam room doors and headed down the hall. The soulchains would likely break if I exorcised the ghost who held them, but a track and exorcism could take weeks—it required the establishment of a profile, an index of an entity’s preferred haunting locations, victims, and method of killing. It required figures. Projections. Data. Hunting. How much of that could I accomplish in seven days?

  The hall clock’s second hand clicked like a revolver’s hammer—tick, tock, bam. Even time wanted me dead.

  “Hold up, Micheline,” Ryder said, following me out of the exam room. I paused by the Helsing mural. To my surprise, he stopped inside the three-foot buffer zone we kept between us, the space that reminded us both of how off-limits I was, the one we didn’t discuss. The one my father put between us with all his talk of arranging my marriage, of keeping the Helsing bloodline strong, and how neither of those things included a castaway Aussie boy with no ties to the founding families.

  Dad made that clear to both of us.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, but I wasn’t sure if I apologized for the soulchains or for the lines drawn between us.

  Ryder answered with a look—I expected it to ache, but the worry in his eyes drowned me instead. He touched the corner of my mouth with his thumb. His lips parted, and I hoped for words that could put the breath back in me. It’s going to be okay. I needed to hear it, if only from him.

  He flinched when a door slammed. A nurse bustled into the hall, pushing a rattling cart in the opposite direction. Ryder set his hands on his hips and looked at me, his soft smile tugging my heartstrings out of shape. His em
otions ran deep—he didn’t often use words to express his thoughts or feelings. A girl had to get used to translating his body language and using it to interpret the words he did say.

  “What now?” he asked.

  I blew out a breath and shoved the ache away. We had two options, but only one real choice: “We do what we do best—we find the monster and destroy it, or we die trying.”

  “Just like any other hunt,” he said.

  “Like any other night,” I said. Except it wasn’t.

  I looked up at the painting and met Mina Harker’s bright gaze. Even in her final moments, as Dracula’s blood ripened in her body, poised to kill and necrotize, Van Helsing hadn’t given up on her. He’d fought for her life as I would fight for the boys’ lives, for my own. Whatever this thing was, it would be twice dead before our seven days were up.

  Footsteps—sharp and timed, like a metronome—bounced toward us. “Micheline?”

  We turned. Damian Drake strode through the lobby, alone. He looked like a darker version of Jude, his nephew, like all the years of working counterterrorism beat the sun out of his visage. His gaze drilled into my bones. “Your father asked me to escort you home and wait with you until he arrives.”

  Wait with me? More like imprison me. “Why didn’t he come himself?” I asked.

  “He’s holding another press conference in a half hour,” Damian said. My heart clattered into the pit of my stomach. Dad had been angry at St. Mary’s, yes, but I had a feeling what was coming would be worse. Much, much worse.

  “What about Ryder and the others?” I asked, fighting the quiver in my voice.

  “Stoker’s keeping the boys for observation,” he said, inclining his head at Ryder. “Report to him immediately.” The gravity in Damian’s tone told me there were no buts to the order, as it wasn’t a manner he often used with us. Like Jude, Damian normally took a devil-may-care approach to reaping and life—he didn’t allow anyone to call him sir or even Drake, and dispensed with pleasantries for everyone else, even my father.