Shutter

by Courtney Alameda

  Damian’s stone-cold streak came from his work with Helsing’s Special Ops and our necrotic counterterrorism units. Work he’d chosen Jude to inherit, as I would inherit my father’s work and Oliver his father’s. Only Ryder had a choice in his future, and he’d apply to the Harker Elite in the spring. The Harker’s solo entrance exam consisted of one handgun, one clip, one reaper, and one big necro. Those capable of passing the exam made up the Helsing’s own reaping crews—a sort of personal guard for the family, like a Secret Service with an undead edge. I’d get my own detail at eighteen, when my current reaping crew graduated to their respective departments and I started college and hunting more dangerous things.

  The thought of Ryder applying for my detail comforted me, and Dad supported our platonic friendship wholeheartedly. Dad was all about loyalty—the blinder, the better.

  “I’ll get my camera,” I said. When Damian turned away, Ryder brushed the back of his hand against mine, intertwining our index fingers for a moment. Even that was a risk, putting hairline cracks in the one rule I couldn’t break. If the crack spread, Dad would set the Pacific Ocean between us.

  “Be careful,” he murmured.

  All I could manage was a nod.

  * * *

  I FOLLOWED DAMIAN OUT into an anemic, waning night. Spindly trees lined the wide avenue, shedding the gangrenous leaves of fall. The world smelled terminal, waiting for winter and rot. October in San Francisco was usually warm, but this year, fog frothed over the peninsula, carried by a chilly wind. I crossed my arms over my chest, hugging my camera and belt.

  One of the lieutenants had a Humvee waiting for us in the street. As soon as I dropped into my seat, exhaustion bricked in my eyes and filled my bones with mortar. I leaned my head back and closed my eyes.

  “Been a long night,” Damian said. The Humvee growled and jostled beneath us.

  “Not as long as some,” I said, thinking of the night I spent curled in Ryder’s arms on a safe house couch, sleepless, shivering, sick. Surrounded by people. Doctors. Dad hovering. Mom’s blood under my fingernails. We caught it in enough time, the doctors said. She shouldn’t turn, she’s already made it past the five-hour mark …

  But if she does …

  If she does …

  Well, that’s why Dad put a handgun on the coffee table, bullet chambered, safety off.

  Damian and I drove without speaking to each other. The Humvee’s scanner chattered, absorbing the cab’s silence. Compound hangars and artillery bunkers blurred by, then the training and practicum arenas, even the academy campus. Mundane things, too, like the Safeway supermarket and the night-track elementary and junior high schools. Most reaper families woke at sundown and lived at night—not a lifestyle for everyone, but it was all I knew.

  Up ahead, the compound’s residential high-rises melted from the fog, their sides checkerboarded with light. The dead retreated at dawn, so reaping crews were just getting home, eating dinner with their families or knocking back a beer with friends. Turning on the news, seeing St. Mary’s, shaking their heads or exchanging knowing glances.

  Once upon a time, they said my father had raised me well; and after I took out the Embarcadero Scissorclaw, they said I’d be the first woman to successfully lead the corps. But nobody had confidence in me now—nobody, except the three boys who had my back, no matter what. And I’d gone and led them into a nightmare.

  Damian pulled into the garage under the officers’ tower, acknowledged the guards’ salutes, and parked by the private elevator that would take me to the penthouse. As I popped my door open, Damian pressed his cell phone to his ear and stepped from the vehicle. I followed him to the elevator and typed the penthouse’s sixteen-digit security code into the glossy stainless-steel panel.

  “Yeah, she’s home,” Damian said. The doors dinged, the bright sound covering up whatever my father said on the other line. We stepped into the elevator. “Relax, Len—the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree.” Damian chuckled, but the sound was taut as trip wire. He listened and frowned, glancing over at me. “Then hurry, Barbara Walters, I have two crews to debrief at nine.… See you then.” He hung up.

  “Dad’s still mad, isn’t he?” I asked.

  “‘Mad’?” Damian asked. “Mad doesn’t even begin to describe where Len’s head is at right now, sweetheart.”

  “And you?”

  He shrugged. “You get Jude out of this mess and we’re square. I don’t have time to train someone else, and he’s got the best skills of any of the kids in the family. His sisters weren’t born with his blood-reading ability. We can’t afford to lose him, understand?”

  “You won’t lose him, I promise.”

  He took my good wrist and squeezed. “Just remember, whatever Len says or does … you’ve got to know it’s because he loves you.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that,” I said.

  He released me. “Someone should.”

  A few more floors ticked by. I decided on two things:

  First, no ghost would get the better of me;

  Second, I wouldn’t cry, no matter what Dad said. I promised myself, balling my fists so tight I stamped prints of my nails in my palms.

  The elevator doors dinged and slid open. The foyer lay dark, lights off. In the great room beyond, floor-to-ceiling windows spanned one wall, overlooking the whole city. After my mother and brothers died, I went from a home full of peanut butter smiles and Tonka truck traffic to this twentieth-story penthouse the decorator called Spartan chic, with a thermostat set on permachill and so much space Dad and I never needed to see each other. It felt like an endless hotel stay, never a home. Even the air smelled empty, eau d’arctic waste.

  Damian disappeared into the kitchen, more comfortable here than I was. The refrigerator door popped open and a glass bottle clinked. Not up to facing any more pity, I carried my camera into my darkroom—more like a renovated closet—and set it on the desk. I considered developing my film, but analog film required a lot of attention and several timed steps, and if Damian or Dad interrupted or let a sliver of natural light into the darkroom, I’d lose the best evidence I had. Worse, I knew my focus would be scattered until Dad and I hashed out everything.

  So I changed out of my scrubs, made coffee, and paced. Looked up soulchains on Google and in Mom’s ancient exorcism books, the ones that smelled like moth wings and had pages like flakes of dead skin. Nothing.

  An hour later, the elevator sounded as Damian left, resonating through the halls like a knell. Then the hard rap of footsteps resounded in the entryway, followed by the jangle of keys as they struck the foyer table. The force of the sounds alone—the violence of them—told me the shape and size of my father’s wrath.

  Be careful. Ryder’s words came back to me as I pushed out of my desk chair and stepped into the hall.

  Dad stalked toward me, his sights set, his body blocking out the light. “In my office. Now.”

  I flinched. Dad never said please—words like that were for lesser mortals, like daughters. I never heard him say sorry or thank you or even I love you. He lined Mom’s coffin with those words and buried them six feet deep.

  I was so dead.

  FRIDAY, 4:55 A.M.

  I HATED DAD’S OFFICE. The utilitarian modern furniture, black surfaces, and rack-mounted rifles riled my nerves. His degrees and awards decorated an entire wall, from his PhD in Necrotic Warfare to his Presidential Medal of Freedom. He had duplicates of everything in his office at headquarters, too—maybe because the work was the only thing that mattered to him now. He didn’t have any family pictures here, nothing to remind him of what we’d been before.

  Floor-to-ceiling windows made up one wall, overlooking the city. The Golden Gate Bridge rose from the fog, a bunch of bloody bones in the waning dark. Everything else was black: onyx water; starless sky; dark city with its pinhead lights. The temperature in his office trembled somewhere around fifty-five degrees, too cold for me. Too cold for anything human, I thought.

  He s
lammed the door so hard the room rattled.

  “Dad, I—”

  “Sit.” He left the lights off, most comfortable in the semidarkness. I perched on a chair across from his desk, watching him remove his Colt 1911s from their holsters. He switched their safeties on and set them down, the barrels staring at me. He pulled my cell phone and comm from his pocket and placed them beside the guns.

  He steepled his fingers against the desk. “You have thirty seconds to explain why you accepted an unauthorized hunt with a body count.”

  I lifted my chin. “I wouldn’t be much of a Helsing if I ignored a call for help.”

  “True as that may be, it doesn’t exempt you from following code,” Dad said. “Marlowe should have called six-one-one—”

  “He did call six-one-one. Dispatch told him help wouldn’t be available for an hour.”

  “That doesn’t give you authorization to take a team into a dangerous situation, Micheline. The rules exist to keep our employees and cadets alive.”

  “But civilians were dying—”

  “Last I heard, you are dying.”

  The words he didn’t say echoed in the silence that followed: And it’s all your fault. I did my best to maintain a poker face, but my father knew my tells the way I knew his. He’d catch the way I bit down on the inside of my cheek, or how I shifted my weight and pressed my legs together. I’d never been good at hiding guilt from him.

  “What am I supposed to do with you?” Dad’s fingertips, pressed hard into his desktop, were bleached of blood. Anger rasped in the squared breaths he took, the ones for shooting and fighting and not losing your head; it deepened the shadows under his eyes and throbbed in his jugular. “What the hell am I supposed to do for you?”

  “I don’t need you to do anything,” I said. “Let me hunt it.”

  He actually laughed. “No, I’m assigning every tetro crew in the city to hunt this abomination down and destroy it. Until then, you are on house arrest, effective immediately. I want to see all your weapons and equipment on my desk in five minutes.”

  “What?” I leapt up from my chair so fast it hit the ground with a bang. “A regular tetro can’t capture this monster with a mirror—”

  “You’d better hope they can and do.”

  “If I stop reaping, more people will die.” The words tumbled from my mouth, tripping over one another in their rush to get past my lips. He couldn’t do this to me, couldn’t lock me away and expect someone else to save my life. “You’ll be responsible for all those lives lost, reaper and civilian alike, when your tetro crews fail to stop that demon—”

  “You yourself failed to stop the entity,” Dad said.

  “Once! But I can fight the ghost at a distance with a lens,” I said, my voice rising. “The other tetros have to initiate contact between their mirrors and the entity; they’ll die. I can stop this ghost—”

  “Absolutely not.” Dad punctuated the statement with a finger thrust at me. “My reapers expect to put their lives on the line, but I’m not risking yours. Your safety and the continuation of the Helsing line is of the utmost importance—”

  “Is that it? You’ll lock me up because you need me to be a stupid breeding cow for the ‘line’?” I snapped, making air quotes around the word line.

  Dad’s face and neck flushed. “I have never been unclear about your responsibilities to the family.”

  “You raised me to be a hunter, not pregnant and barefoot in the freaking kitchen—”

  “Enough!” His voice rang in my ears. He rounded his desk, advancing toward me. “I will take care of this—”

  “I don’t need you to save me,” I shouted, backing away, almost tripping on the upset chair. “I can save myself.”

  “You can’t save anyone, Micheline.”

  The words smacked the breath out of me. I’d read them in his face before, seen them in his actions, his coldness, in this half life we shared; but hearing them spoken gave them bones and sinews, it made them real.

  You can’t save anyone. Not my brothers. Not my crew. Not myself. Something inside me snapped like a cable. A smart girl would’ve shut her mouth, but I’d left off being Daddy’s perfect little girl the day we buried my mother and brothers.

  So I said, “You never forgave me for what happened. Or maybe you never forgave yourself because you never found the people who infected her. How’s that for not being able to save anyone?”

  Darkness coiled in his eyes. He stalked toward me.

  My nerves sparked. I held my ground. “I wish I’d died, too, rather than be stuck here with you—”

  He lifted his hand and slammed it into my cheekbone, cobra-quick. Something cracked in my neck, sending a shock down my spine. The blow hammered me to the floor. I didn’t have time to process the pain. Flashbulbs popped through my vision and my equilibrium sloshed between my ears.

  “Never say that again,” Dad said, shuddering, his face gargoyled and ten years too old. He held out a hand to help me up—the same hand he’d used to strike me.

  I scrambled backward, putting several feet between us, using the wall for support as I got to my feet. My legs trembled, threatening to spill me back to the floor. Every breath hurt, inflaming the hole he’d torn in my heart.

  I thought about calling him monster,

  About screaming screw you,

  I wish it had been you, not Mom, because I did.

  But I wiped the blood off my mouth and said, “I’m not your punching bag, jackass.”

  Dad’s grimace turned into something so feral, it sent a sharp spike of adrenaline through my veins. He grabbed me by the arm and dragged me from his office. I twisted my arm and fought him, dug in my heels, but Dad outweighed me by at least a hundred pounds. He took me into my room, pushed me into my bathroom, and shut me inside. On the other side, I heard metal shriek. The doorknob jerked hard and hit the carpet on the other side with a thump.

  “What did you do?” I grabbed the knob, turning it right, left, but it stuck to my hand and refused to turn. “Dad!”

  A crash shouted back at me, the clamor of glass cracking and metal denting. It sounded like one of the shelves in my room had collapsed and—

  My cameras.

  “Stop!” I threw my shoulder into the door, but it trembled and held fast. Another shattering wave reached past the door and peeled a layer off my composure. I hit the door again, pounded it with my fists, while Dad conducted a cacophony outside. I kicked the door by the knob, it held; he threw a camera or a lens against the wall, and the thud ebbed through the door and floor. I shouted, “Don’t!” A crescendo of broken glass erupted, my voice a high, shrieking coloratura over it all.

  When it was done, my bedroom door creaked and the lock clicked, imprisoning me twice.

  Putting my back to the wall, I sank to the floor. A sob bubbled up in my chest, but I looked at the smiles cut into my palms and remembered what I’d promised myself. No crying. Square breathing, four seconds in. Hold four. Four seconds out. Hold four. Repeat. Ten cycles—that’s all the time I had for self-pity.

  I pushed off the ground, rinsed out my mouth with a handful of water, and looked up into the mirror. Thunderclouds massed and darkened under my right cheek, purplish-red and shocking. The mark spread from the crest of my cheekbone to the corner of my mouth, already stiff to the touch. My gorge rose—my father hit me. Sure, it happened in training before, but I hadn’t been prepared for the hit or had time to think about the fall. Cheap shot, Dad. Next time, aim for the knockout if you want to keep me down.

  Taking a pair of nail clippers from a drawer, I stuck the file between the door and the knob plate and began to pry. Times like these, I wished I’d listened to Jude’s lessons on lock picking and could use a bobby pin to mess with the tumblers; but I hadn’t, so brute force would have to do.

  I twisted and turned the knob, cursing, gaining leverage with the nail file. After several minutes, it broke loose in my hand, plate popping off. I pushed past the door, dropping the knob when I saw t
he devastation beyond. The designer ball bounced over the carpet and clunked against an antique camera Mom gave me for my fifteenth birthday.

  A smashed antique camera.

  This … This is …

  Even dawn’s milky light seemed too frightened to venture into the room. The fifty-eight cameras I owned sprawled across the floor, busted and broken. Stomped-on canisters spewed guts of cloudy, wasted film. Lenses littered the ground, their eyes put out, glass shards scattering chips of sunlight. He’d thrown things against the walls and windows, chipping paint and cracking cobwebs into plaster and glass. There were tens of thousands of dollars in damage, and some of the antiques were irreplaceable. He’d even taken my laptop—the wires dangled uselessly over the edge of my desk.

  Biting my lip—it helped to dam up tears—I tiptoed through the chaos, fishing a Playskool digital camera off the floor, one that belonged to my brother Ethan. Its broken flash winked at me. I wiped the dusting of plaster and paint off its side, shocked Dad hadn’t spared this one, even in his rage. Dad pulled out my claws but I wouldn’t let him win. I’d find a way out of this place, and when I did, I’d reap the entity before his tetros could.

  My father could wreck all the cameras he wanted, lock me up, and swallow the key; he could chase me, hit me, and hunt me, but just about the only thing he couldn’t do was stop me. My best weapon was the old Helsing stubbornness, which he could neither break nor take away.

  I cocked my ear toward the door. Dad stormed through the apartment, stomping his feet and slamming cupboards. For a moment, my breath caught and I thought he might be ravaging my darkroom, too … but, no, the reverb came from farther down the hall. The kitchen, hopefully. Please let him forget about the darkroom. If he went there, he’d destroy my best reaping camera for sure, along with the rest of my equipment. I could try to buy another analog camera in the city, but my quartz lenses were special-order items from our Research and Development department. Losing the camera and lenses in the darkroom might be a death sentence.