Shutter

by Courtney Alameda

  “Hey,” he said, catching me. “Everything okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said, scanning the basement’s antimirrors, wondering if Luca would appear in their blackened faces. There. A blue spark in the shadows, a little to my left and behind. The weight of Luca’s gaze settled on me, heavy as a lead drape. Ryder followed my gaze, and Luca’s light melted away into the mirrors’ obsidian faces.

  Ryder rubbed a palm up and down my arm. “You’re freezing cold,” he said.

  “It’s just the soulchains,” I said. Ryder would freak out if he knew I’d been talking to a ghost, especially one who touched me like I was something to be owned, possessed, used. Maybe the anxiety of such a discovery flickered across my face, because Ryder pressed a kiss into my forehead. Before he pulled back, a ghostly finger trailed down my spine and traced little circles on the small of my back.

  I shuddered—sandwiched between life and death—unable to call out Luca on his behavior. Ryder could not know about Luca … and I worried about Luca being so keenly aware of Ryder and his affection for me. The thought drove a stake into my chest. How much did I betray Ryder, not telling him about the danger lurking beyond the antimirrors?

  The problem with a cross is …

  “What was that?” Ryder asked, turning and looking at the mirrors. He couldn’t know danger stood right behind me, that the fingers crawling up my spine belonged to a creature burned and blackened by holiness.

  “It’s just the mirrors,” I whispered, turning his face back to mine with a finger. “Something weird happened at the PacBell tonight—reflective surfaces can strengthen my shots, and maybe help me capture more ghostlight with each photograph. I think if you guys carry some sort of reaping panes, we can work out a system to trap the ghost between my lens and your mirrors.”

  The warmth in Ryder’s eyes took on a different texture, one that poured liquid sunlight into an old, disused well in my soul. Dad used to look at me like that, back when I was his bulletproof golden girl. Back before he could be proud of me without taking a hit to his ego.

  “Brilliant, yeah, we can do that,” Ryder said, slipping his hand in mine. “I can rig us a couple of modifications for the standard carrying cases, make them safer for us to use, hey?”

  “How long will that take?”

  He shrugged. “Couple hours, if we can find everything we need. Do you have any new reaping mirrors?”

  “They didn’t remove all the stock from the warehouses,” I said. “We can try there.”

  “Sounds good,” he said, tugging on my hand. “C’mon, it’s bloody freezing down here, and Ollie’s got something on Investigations.”

  Ryder led me up the basement stairs, the warmth of his hand carbonating my blood. I turned out the light when we reached the top, bathing us both in pure blackness. Weak threads of ghostlight ringed three-quarters of his neck like a limp noose, grating against his Adam’s apple and draping down his back. The sight knocked my blood flat. Did he sense the chains as keenly as I did, like grinders against his guts and bones? Did he feel his breath hitch when the chains shifted?

  “Where’s the rosary Father Marlowe gave you?” I asked him, unable to look away from those chains.

  “Upstairs with my stuff,” Ryder replied. “Why?”

  I sucked in a breath. “I want you to wear it. Don’t take it off, not even for a second.” Luca’s voice threaded into my mind: If you’re lucky … it will keep your captor from possessing your body like a puppeteer taking up his pawn. “The other boys, too. Never, ever take them off. Not till we beat this monster.”

  Ryder nodded, sober and confident in me as always. As he stepped from the basement, I caught the glint of a snicker, then a whisper, calling me back to the darkness:

  “The problem with a cross is…”

  I didn’t turn around.

  I was done taking Luca’s bait.

  SATURDAY, 6:22 P.M.

  “FORENSICS BOTCHED THE INVESTIGATION.” Oliver paced in the family room, his laptop open on the coffee table and connected to his Wi-Fi-enabled phone. “St. Mary’s still records their security footage on VHS tapes, and one of our techs erased the three hours of footage leading up to the attack. Idiots.” He jammed both his hands into his hair in frustration.

  “VHS predates the dinosaurs,” Jude said, propping his boots up on the table and leaning back into the couch. He had two sweatshirts on, their blue and black hoods pulled up over his head. I wondered if the soulchains’ chill affected him, too. Even Ryder had a long-sleeved shirt on—uncharacteristic of him.

  Jude yawned. “What’d you expect, Einstein?”

  “Results,” Oliver shot back. “Answers.”

  “I’m surprised we even had the equipment to play a VHS tape,” I said, sinking down on the couch. Oliver’s laptop showed a background picture of Thomas Morley, head of Investigations, surrounded by a gaggle of kids and his haggard-looking wife. Files pimpled the screen, folders marked with different, recent case names, including one named ST. MARY’S GHOST. Oliver’s ability to hack computers this precisely was either insanely cool or incredibly creepy—he must’ve set up some kind of remote desktop connection to Morley’s computer.

  “We have everything,” Oliver said, running his hand over his face. “I’m sure Archives could find you a phonograph, if you—”

  “You lost me at Archives,” Jude said, tapping keys on his phone.

  “Point being”—Oliver rolled his eyes—“that thanks to Investigations, we don’t know who’s responsible for smashing the antimirror at St. Mary’s. How are we supposed to prosecute without video evidence?”

  “If you can find a guy to prosecute,” Ryder said, sitting on the couch beside me.

  “If,” Oliver echoed.

  I tapped into the St. Mary’s case file and scanned its contents, drawn to a folder labeled PHOTOS. Inside, I found hundreds of photos of the victims photographed from different angles. Washed out and overexposed in Investigations’s cheap flashes, the violence looked B-movie-set ready: the blood made from corn syrup, the shredded flesh no more than torn latex, and the victims just actors on “corpse duty” for the day.

  Oliver continued to pace: “Investigations makes too many mistakes. My father has been trying to discharge Morley for years; the department’s a disgrace.”

  “He sure didn’t find whoever killed my mom,” I said, clicking past photo after photo. Thanks to the six-month-long examination of the incident surrounding my mother’s and brothers’ deaths, I’d gotten to know the reapers working Helsing’s Investigations and Forensics teams. One picture I blew by had Lieutenant Martha Scully in it; she’d been the one to profile and capture a “necro copycat” serial killer in Phoenix a few years back. Her kid gave me a teddy bear at Mom’s funeral. Paul Skinner—one of our medical examiners—showed up in another shot, crouched over a dead girl’s body. He pointed a gloved finger at the Lichtenberg burns branching up her severed wrist.

  “Exactly,” Oliver said. “They mishandled several items of trace evidence in the Alexa Helsing case…”

  Oliver kept talking, but I shut off his rant in my head. I couldn’t bear to think the person who infected my mother with paranecrosis hadn’t been caught. To think my mother and brothers hadn’t received justice tinged my whole world red. Somehow, someway, I’d find their killer.

  When I did, God have mercy. I sure as hell wouldn’t.

  None of Morley’s photos showed anything I hadn’t seen at the hospital. When I downsized the window, I glanced at the trash bin in the upper-left-hand corner of Morley’s screen, then clicked it on a whim.

  More photos. I narrowed my eyes and started to click through the thumbnails. Most were bad shots with improper lighting, a few were blurred. But one photo snagged my attention—a candid image of crosses hanging in a hospital room window. That’s the room where I found exorcism glass in the bathroom. It also caught a forensics tech carrying a spiny garbage sack. He must’ve been a new hire—I didn’t recognize him.

  “Hey, Oli
ver,” I said, cutting him off mid-rant and turning the laptop so he could see the screen. “Who’s this?”

  He blinked, the only beat he needed for his brain to switch tracks. “That’s Reynold Fielding, one of two morons responsible for accidentally erasing the security tapes. He’s a newer tech, hired in the last six months or so. Why?”

  “Reynold Fielding cleaned out the hospital bathroom we found the antimirror glass in,” I said. Oliver’s face took on a solid cast, cool and impassive as granite.

  Ryder leaned forward to turn the laptop around. “Never seen the bloke before.”

  “I think I have,” Jude said, staring at the screen. He tossed his cell phone on the table and grabbed the laptop, tilting the screen toward him. “Yeah, yeah. He was in the vision I had at the hospital, before everything went to hell. Wasn’t in his blacks then, so I didn’t recognize him for one of ours.”

  “Do you think Morley’s trying to cover for him?” I asked, and the boys’ silence made my stomach twist. I rose from the couch. “I want to know everything there is to know about both Morley and Fielding—their backgrounds, work histories, and how many generations their families have been employed by Helsing. If Fielding so much as sneezed in St. Mary’s prior to the attack, I want to know about it.”

  “I’ll need a hardwired terminal with access to HR’s intranet files to retrieve that information,” Oliver said. “We don’t store personnel dossiers in our cloud.”

  “Are any of the computers here at the Presidio still hooked up to the intranet?” I asked.

  “No, but Dr. Stone’s home computers can access the corps’s intranet, as he oversees medical staffing. Gemma will sneak me in.” Oliver looked to Jude. “Can I borrow your keys?”

  “Hell no,” Jude said, still absorbed in Fielding’s picture. “Nobody drives my truck but my numero uno.”

  I ignored Jude. “Oliver, the Stones will report you to the corps.”

  “Not if they don’t know I’m there,” Oliver said, taking out his phone and starting a text message. “Will you at least drop me off, numero uno?”

  Jude sighed, swiping his cell phone off the table. “You’ll have to hitch a ride back with your little ice queen. I’m not making two trips.”

  Oliver rolled his eyes and gathered his things. Ryder and I followed them to the door. In the foyer’s darkness, I checked Oliver’s soulchain—it winched tight around his chest but no higher. Jude still had two hoodies on, hiding the light from his chains. I wondered if he sensed them more keenly than the others, thanks to his abilities.

  “Before you go,” I said. “I want you guys to wear the rosaries Father Marlowe gave you.”

  “Sorry, Princess, but religious iconography’s not my style,” Jude said.

  “I don’t care about your style,” I replied. “I care about keeping you from getting possessed by the entity and used as a weapon against us.”

  Jude and Ryder exchanged a look; Oliver’s brows rose. “You know I respect your faith, Micheline,” he said. “But there’s no way a necklace made of wood could ward off a possession.”

  “Just do it,” I said.

  “Seriously—”

  “Don’t make me turn it into an order, Oliver.”

  Oliver’s brows peaked higher, and he held my gaze as our wills duked it out. After several tight moments, he broke it off, chuckling to himself. “Very well.”

  I waited by the door until the boys returned, rosaries circling around their necks. Ryder’s collar of chains retreated, too. A bit of the tension slipped out of my shoulders.

  “Happy?” Jude asked me, tucking his cross into his hoodie.

  “And you haven’t even been hit by lightning,” I said, grinning.

  He snorted. “Give me two hours, a girl in a little white tank top, and a six-pack. That’ll change the good Lord’s mind.”

  Oliver passed me by without a word. I hated pulling the Helsing card on him—it was a dirty move and we both knew it—his family had almost as much claim to the corps as the Helsings did. Still, I knew I wouldn’t have won the battle any other way, not with Oliver.

  “You lot better be careful,” Ryder said, sticking his hands in his pockets.

  “And don’t get caught,” I added.

  “Yes, Mother,” Oliver said, not kindly.

  Jude made a wonk-wonk sound, smirking at me. Whatever. So long as they kept their rosaries on, I’d take their trash talk.

  Ryder and I followed them outside, lingering on the porch. Nighttime cold soaked into my shirt and skin. The fog bubbled over the lawns, turning the clearing into a cauldron. I watched for brilliant, little-boy-shaped ghosts, but the night only gave me a jagged, black crust of trees set against a murky sky. Silent, save for the crash of surf, the faraway honk of horns on the Golden Gate Bridge, and Jude’s truck rumbling awake.

  We waited until the truck’s taillights disappeared down the road and into the trees.

  “What now?” Ryder said.

  “You up for that D-I-Y modification project you promised me?” I asked.

  Ryder grinned. Nobody could repurpose old junk like he could—he looked at raw materials and saw parts of a larger whole, knowing where and how to cut, or how to reassemble things to make them perform. He was the kind of guy you wanted around if a paranecrotic holocaust ever hit: good with his hands, good with a gun, and cool under siege.

  “Let’s get to work,” he said, rubbing his palms together.

  * * *

  RYDER AND I FOUND some of the things on his list at the house—the standard reaping pane cases in the basement, an arthritic sewing machine and findings (zippers, pins, and thread) in the attic, and wooden boards to add rigidity to the existing cases in Dad’s shed. All we needed was enough antistatic fabric to add front panels on the cases, and unused, virgin reaping panes.

  “We probably have bolts of Gore-Tex out in warehouse two,” I said as we walked back to the house from the shed, wooden boards and a crowbar in tow. The antistatic envelopes and cases used to store antimirrors were made from specially treated Gore-Tex, which was difficult to rip and wouldn’t conduct electricity.

  “That’s a bit of a walk,” he said, then cleared the night’s cold out of his throat. “Bloody freezing out here.”

  “You, cold?” I lifted a brow, then remembered Jude in his double-hoodies. We all suffered from the soulchains’ grave-deep chill, and it infected our flesh, bones, and blood and gave us no respite or quarter. “I know it’s against your macho code, but I still have your jacket in my room.”

  “I’m not too macho to wear a jacket,” he said, setting the boards on the back porch. “Not while I’ve got a ghost riding my arse.”

  I fetched his jacket from my room—supple, doe-soft black leather lined with shearling. He wore it so infrequently it looked new. We grabbed his motorcycle and headed for the southern part of the compound.

  When the corps cleared out of the Presidio, we left the bulk of our storage warehouses intact. The massive concrete buildings were used for storing everything from weapons to the iceboxes—units for necros with their frontal lobes or spinal cords removed, kept for scientific study.

  Ryder and I approached the main entrance to warehouse two, tetro storage and archives. With no compunction, he thrust a crowbar between the double doors and yanked on the bar like an Olympic rower would an oar, cracking them open.

  “She’s easy,” he said, winking at me.

  “For you, maybe,” I said, thinking I’d never bust open a door with so little effort.

  The warehouse contained miles of shelving. Foggy light limned everything, from the massive shelving units to the cellophane-wrapped mounds of supplies. We didn’t bother with the lights—Oliver warned us a spike in the Presidio compound’s energy consumption might alert someone back at HQ to our location.

  Directional signs pointed down aisles, their signs announcing JUMPER KITS or RUBBERIZED GEAR or EASEL STANDS, anything a tetro might need to hunt the dead. Rather than expend manpower to move everything
to Angel Island, Dad opted to replace most items in storage. Our vendors shipped for free, and Dad figured the costs of packing and freighting everything to the new compound would be roughly equivalent to replacing everything. Honestly, I think he just wanted out of the Presidio, no matter the cost.

  Ryder tapped a knuckle on my arm, using his flashlight to point out a sign marked ANTISTATIC MATERIALS. “We’ll find the extra fabric we need over there, hey? Not sure about your reaping panes, though.”

  “They’ll be locked up in a vault.” I turned the corner of the antistatic aisle. “Let’s find the stuff you need first.”

  I searched for the fabric among the shelf talkers, digging past boxes full of rubber gloves and crates of supplies, hunting for the rubber-coated Gore-Tex used to insulate reaping panes. After ten minutes of hunting, Ryder called for me. He’d climbed up on one of the seven-foot shelves, and had his flashlight aimed at a rack of bolts of black material.

  “This it?” he asked, handing one of the bolts down. The thick fabric felt sticky to the touch on one side and woolen on the other, kind of like a rain slicker might.

  “You got it.” I blew a layer of dust off the fabric.

  He plucked another bolt off the rack and jumped down from the shelf. We headed toward the end of the aisle. “So where’s this vault going to be?” Ryder asked, pointing his flashlight down the main walkway.

  “I’d guess in a basement,” I said, looking both ways at the intersection of lanes. “The whole vault would be grounded against electric surges, just to be sure.” Helsing stored reaping panes in vaults for several reasons: firstly, the silver used to manufacture the panes was valuable. Panes not sealed in glass were melted down, the gateway to the Obscura destroyed in the flame of a silversmith’s crucible, the metal recycled.

  Secondly, if panes weren’t stored properly, ghosts capable of creating their own electrical fields crept through, entities like Luca, or ones like the starveling we now hunted. Strange to think a fragile shield of glass protected the world from so many terrors.