Shutter

by Courtney Alameda

  Every little thing about him distracted me, now that his kisses had thrown my resolve off-kilter. We swung like a pendulum, back and forth, sometimes battering down the barriers between us, sometimes hurtling away again. We couldn’t escape the physics of the situation: Each time we swung away, we picked up momentum, came back, and hit the barrier harder. His every action seemed amplified, everything noticeable, everything meaningful.

  I wasn’t sure how our world would change if—no, when—that barrier finally fell. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  Between the two of us, we stitched up the mirror cases quick, adding front panels to zip over the reaping panes for safe transport, rigging kickstands, and stitching in better, tougher handles.

  “Just add mirrors and reapers.” Ryder crouched beside the finished products, straight pins stuck between his teeth.

  “They’re perfect,” I said.

  “They’ll do.”

  I nudged him with my knee. “They’re amazing.”

  He leaned against my thigh, sighing. I placed a hand on the crown of his head, surprised by the softness of his hair. It gleamed like wet ink, highlighted with burnt umber and cherry tones. So pretty, and like most boys, he probably didn’t even realize what he had. The color made me wish I had something richer than pale European blood running through my veins, too. Ryder’s mother had Australian Aboriginal blood and gave him his five-shot latte coloring.

  Getting braver, I ran my fingers through his hair.

  He looked up and the warmth in his gaze nuked any resistance in me. I let him tug me down into his lap. Despite the soulchains, his body still burned several degrees hotter than mine, practically scalding the insides of my thighs. I placed a hand on his cheek, touching the sandpaper shadow on his face. He cupped my rear in his hands and pulled me closer, leaving inches between our lips. Dueling emotions set my cheeks ablaze—my heart wanted him, but fear grabbed me and held me back. This was the hammer clicking, the bullet chambering … and all I could think about was how itchy my trigger finger felt.

  “You’re shivering,” he said, wrapping his arms around my waist.

  “It’s just the chains.” I watched the strands of his soulchain twine together, building a new link right under the rosary beads around his neck. I traced the edge of one with my fingertip.

  “Can you feel them?” I whispered.

  “Just the cold—they feel like someone shoved a bunch of coolant tubes under my skin.” He swallowed hard, his muscles contracting under my fingertips. “Warm me up?”

  Somehow, I got the feeling he wasn’t talking about the kind of warmth that came from hot, strong coffee or fuzzy bunny slippers. He pulled me closer, so close our noses touched. I nuzzled him, encouraging, not committing.

  “You never answered my question, you know,” I whispered.

  “Which one?”

  “The one I asked you back in the alley.”

  He cupped my chin in his index finger and rubbed his thumb over my lower lip, wiping my words and worries away. “You think you have someone to lose, you beauty, but you know I would break every one of his rules for you. Say the word, and I would fight for you, kill for you, follow you anywhere, even leave the bloody corps for you—”

  I kissed him. Ryder hummed and slipped a hand up my back, skin on skin, cradling me. He nibbled my lower lip, twisting a bundle of nerves in my navel, then opened me with a kiss. My toes curled in my boots. I hadn’t realized I’d pull the trigger so easy. Now I was falling and tumbling without a parachute—he was twice the adrenaline rush of jumping off the PacBell Building and almost as frightening.

  “I used to think I’d always be loyal to your old man,” Ryder said, so softly I almost couldn’t make out the words. “But now I know it’s you I’ll be always be loyal to, not him.”

  I dug my hands into his hair. His lips found a sweet spot between my collarbone and neck, and I arched my back. He gripped me tighter and let his lips wander up the column of my throat, knocking heat loose in my body. Warmth, real warmth—the first I’d felt in days. Whatever coursed between us made my chains fall still and forced their cold to retreat. It made me never want to stop, never want to let him go.

  But when his lips brushed mine again, someone else’s breath buffeted my ear. I startled, sitting up and glancing behind me. We were alone, or appeared to be. I gripped Ryder’s shirt, thoughts of Luca ruining my mood. Could Luca manifest his energy so far away from the antimirrors? The antimirror gallery did lie directly beneath the family room, and the thought made me tremble.

  “Everything okay?” Ryder asked, turning my face back to his with a thumb.

  “Yeah, I just … thought I heard something,” I said, running a hand through his hair to reassure him. He closed his eyes. Cute, he likes that. He pulled me close again and kissed me deep, until I thought our bodies would melt together so our hearts could fuse, or that I’d forget my own name. In kissing him, maybe I already had.

  He made me shut out our problems, forget myself … until a ghostly hand alighted on my stomach and moved higher, brushing the curve of one of my breasts—

  I jumped like I’d been electrocuted. Pushing to my feet, I backed away from Ryder, hands in front of me. The last thing I wanted was for Luca to latch on to Ryder, to single him out, to hurt him or use him as a bargaining chip with me.

  “What’s wrong?” Ryder rose from the floor slowly, as if he might spook me if he moved too fast. “Are you okay?”

  “It-it’s almost midnight,” I said, grabbing the cases off the floor and pretending my hands weren’t shaking. “We should head to the practicum grounds.”

  “Micheline?”

  “Let’s just get out of here, okay?” The words came out more forcefully than I intended. A breathy snicker twisted into my ear. Luca wanted to unhinge me, to knock me off my game, to toy with me. I couldn’t give him the satisfaction of success, no matter how much his actions wore down my composure.

  Ryder took the cases from me. “Look, if it was too much, too fast—”

  I rose up on my tiptoes and kissed him once, kissed him chaste.

  Because I wouldn’t lie to him,

  Even to protect him.

  SUNDAY, 12:02 A.M.

  RYDER AND I WALKED to the Presidio’s practicum arena in silence, armed and carrying my training equipment: an old laptop, monitor, DSLR digital camera, and the new mirror cases. Jude’s truck idled in the parking lot, its blue-white headlights punching me in the face.

  Jude jumped out of his truck, but didn’t turn the engine off. My gaze zeroed in on the girl sitting in the passenger seat, her dark hair shimmering in the dashboard’s light.

  Bianca Hsieh, the girl who’d stitched up Oliver three nights ago.

  “What’s she doing here, mate?” Ryder said, pointing at the truck.

  “She wants to help,” Jude said. “I told her about the soulchains—”

  “What?” I asked. “You told her?”

  He stood his ground, completely unapologetic and so Jude, I could’ve punched him right in his all-American nose. “She had chromoglasses on for a project and noticed—”

  I turned on my heel and headed for the arena. If I listened to any more, I’d get angry. Dad angry. Jude shouldn’t have told Bianca anything, he shouldn’t have agreed to see her until we exorcised our ghost. We couldn’t send her home now—if our location got back to Helsing, we’d spend the last days of our lives locked up. And didn’t Jude realize how dangerous it was to bring someone else in on this hunt? What if Bianca ended up soulchained, too? I didn’t want any more lives depending on my lens. Dammit, dammit, dammit.

  Jude sighed and called my name. I didn’t turn.

  “Come on, Micheline,” he said, gravel crunching as he jogged after me.

  I whirled on him, pointing my index finger into his chest. “You’ve compromised our position. What if she’s a mole for one of the trackers? What if someone followed you here?” His truck wasn’t exactly subtle. “I need you to think with the brain in y
our head, not the one in your pants.”

  “Relax,” he said. “Her parents are in New York till Sunday, and she’s not the kind of girl who’d rat us out.”

  “How do you know?”

  Jude blew out a breath and looked back at the truck. Bianca looked down, her lower lip caught between her teeth. “Call it a sixth sense.”

  “That’s not funny,” I said.

  Ryder walked up to us, my monitor cocked against his side. “I should beat the shit out of you.”

  “But you won’t,” Jude said.

  “I might.”

  “Why bring her into this?” I asked. “Besides your raging libido, I mean.”

  “God, Micheline, this isn’t about sex,” Jude snapped, fists clenched, nostrils flaring.

  “When isn’t it about sex with you?”

  He turned his face away, jaw clenched. He might read others easily, but he hid his own heart behind smokescreens and sarcasm. I’d known him even longer than I’d known Ryder, but I couldn’t name one thing Jude wanted out of life—outside of the pursuit of leisure and pleasure.

  “So?” Ryder asked.

  “She’s…” Jude winced, his gaze stretching out and suddenly far away, focused on something I couldn’t see. “Man, I don’t want to talk about this.”

  “Well, you’re going to,” I said.

  He glared at me, held my gaze as he said, “Every time I touch her, I see her die the same way—young. Something rips her apart, I can’t quite see what, starting with her entrails. It eats them while she’s still alive.”

  The nerves in my body jolted. Jude’s death visions were only supposed to be possibilities and warnings—from what I understood, he never saw the same death twice. Until now.

  Bianca looked up at us. I hoped she hadn’t been trained to read lips and that the truck’s engine growled loud enough to cover our voices.

  “You want to stop it from happening,” I said, the thought creeping up on me. “You think if you let her help, you’ll save her life.”

  Jude’s gaze touched on mine. For a single, flickering instant, I saw grit in him. Resolution. I’d never seen Jude resolved to do anything in his life, at least not anything noble. Part of me wanted to ask why her, why now? but I didn’t dare count on another straight answer.

  “Bring her in,” I said, turning away from him. “We’ll need someone to run the training software until Oliver gets here. Just make sure she doesn’t communicate with anyone from Helsing.” If the brass ever figured out she’d helped us, they’d expel her from the academy, no questions asked.

  “Hey, Princess?”

  I paused and turned my head.

  “Thanks,” Jude said, slipping back behind a liquid smile. Oh, that boy worked me over, appealing to my better nature and all that crap. I knew it, he knew it.

  “You sure about this?” Ryder asked, catching up to me and following me up the arena steps.

  “I don’t think we have a choice,” I said, rifling through my camera bag to find my keys. “After all, our position’s safer so long as she’s here.”

  “We’re safer, she’s not,” Ryder said.

  “Can’t argue with that.” I unlocked the arena doors and slipped into the charred blackness beyond. Ryder held the door, allowing a small bit of light to struggle in with me. I ran one hand along the wall, waiting for my fingers to stumble over the switch panel. My footsteps echoed in the corridor under the grandstands, stirring the crypt-like air.

  My palm scraped across the panel. I flipped on the lights, which came up in a series of metallic clanks. The gloom turned from midnight to twilight over the stands—the field, however, lay dusky. Luminescent chalk glowed soft under the black lights, demarcating the edges of the practicum grounds. Tracks crisscrossed the ceiling, supporting the automated projection units. With any luck, they’d still work despite eighteen months of neglect, but wouldn’t consume enough power to alert Helsing to our whereabouts. Here, we could prepare to capture our ghost once and for all, thus ending our chains.

  I waited for the others, watching Bianca take shape in the darkness. Our paths hadn’t crossed much—she was a med student, and the only class we’d ever had together was Paranecrotic Anatomy. I knew she came from old reaper blood, that her parents emigrated from Hong Kong after the paranecrotic holocaust in China, that her GPA was Stanford-bound, and that her heels clacked so loud they sounded like gunshots. I wouldn’t be caught dead in such girly, noisy shoes, and I was doubly annoyed they made her stand two inches taller than I did.

  Still, she wasn’t Jude’s usual order of tall, blond, and dull—safe girls with peaceful deaths. Could Jude really save her from the fate he’d read in her skin, or would associating with reapers like us condemn her?

  Bianca pressed a fist against her heart, but I waved her down. “Friends don’t have to salute,” I said. The word friend visibly relaxed Jude—some tension ran out of his shoulders and into his hands, which he clenched and unclenched a few times.

  “Okay,” she said, attempting a smile. Nodding, I turned and started into the darkness. Dry grass crackled under my boots. So many memories rose on the scent of this old, dead field. I used to train here with Mom and Oliver, working to refine both my exorcism techniques and my camera’s technology.

  Mom’s old card table still waited in the arena’s midfield, limed with dust and rusty memories. She used to sit in that half-turned chair, watching my digital photographs appear on her laptop, critiquing my performance, offering advice, and troubleshooting equipment issues with Oliver. Since her death, I’d stopped training on DSLRs, mostly because facing Mom’s life’s work without her ached. This realistic, virtual training environment for tetros had been her brainchild, her passion.

  I set my old laptop on the table, my knuckles leaving tracks in the dust. Ryder rested the reaping cases against the table’s legs.

  “Lots of memories here,” he said, setting the monitor down beside my laptop.

  “Too many,” I said, opening my training bag and pulling out a digital camera. Ryder hooked up the monitor to the laptop, then dropped to a knee to plug everything into a generator cube. The screen flickered, opening a white eye and casting everyone in an alien light.

  After explaining the situation to Bianca, I described how Ryder and I planned to boost my camera’s sensitivity by capturing the ghost between my lens and a reflective surface.

  “Our job here is to figure out our tactics and maneuvers,” I said, tapping a few keys on my laptop and launching the training app Oliver built for me. The program relayed my digital photographs via Bluetooth to my laptop in real time, allowing my work to be critiqued and coached. Tracks clicked and whirred overhead. Score, the stadium’s mechanics worked. “I want to practice shooting ghosts against the training panes until we’ve got a rhythm down. Sound good?”

  Ryder and Jude nodded.

  “You can practice photographing ghosts?” Bianca asked.

  “Have you seen the tetro training programs?” I asked, smiling when she shook her head. I tapped the Start Program key. The tracks clacked. Seconds later, a glowing violet “proxy ghost” seemed to crawl straight out of the ground. She turned her head to peer at us, lizard-like, her head jerking.

  Bianca’s laugh sounded like a chaser, the cathartic kind of laughter people made after being startled in a jokey haunted house. I reminded myself she was pre-med, not hunting squad-hardened. Dissecting monsters in labs and theory required a different skill set and comfort zone than dealing with them in the field.

  “Is that how ghosts move?” Bianca asked, her gaze fastened on the proxy ghost. To her credit, her voice didn’t quiver.

  I froze the proxy in mid-crawl. “The projections are virtual simulations of real-world entities. My mother’s team spent years developing these programs, which allow tetro cadets to safely practice trapping ghosts in reaping panes. The projection units in the ceiling have heat and motion sensors to track the tetro and keep the ghost engaged in the bout, and the projection beam senses
when it comes into contact with a tetro’s practice pane.” When I trained with the program, a Bluetooth attachment relayed information back to my computer, which dimmed the proxy’s ghostlight depending on how much of the proxy I managed to capture on film.

  “Amazing,” Bianca said. “I’ve never watched the tetro girls train before—the program’s kind of creepy, isn’t it?”

  “You’re lucky you don’t see them for real.” Lifting my camera, I took a test shot of the proxy with a telephoto lens. It appeared on-screen in seconds, a thumbprint of indigo and violet against a black backdrop. “We’re good to go. Anybody heard from Oliver yet?”

  The boys both checked their phones. “Pfft, no,” Jude said.

  “He hasn’t answered my texts, either,” Ryder said.

  “How long has he been gone?” Bianca asked, looking back and forth between the boys and me. “Should we be worried?”

  I pressed my lips together, but the warning in my gut didn’t quite reach my head. We only had a few hours to nail our maneuvers, and Oliver wouldn’t be hunting with us anyway.

  “We’ll give him another hour before we worry. Bianca, you’ll need to run the training software since he’s not here. Is that okay?” I asked.

  “Sure, I can do that.” She picked up the training app with ease, asked intelligent questions, and made me wonder how she’d been suckered into Jude’s tractor beam. Only a few girls had ever escaped him—Elena Morales, Travis Knight’s hunting partner and the only girl with a top-ten killboard spot; Anna Kostova, the pretty sniper with an attitude; and Lara Mulder, the girl who famously smashed her rifle butt into Jude’s stomach when he came on to her. I’d think a girl like Bianca would be among them, smart enough to rebuff him with the grace of her middle finger.

  “Thanks for letting me stay,” she said as the boys headed out onto the field with training panes loaded into their cases. “Jude’s not a bad guy, just … kind of unsure of himself, I think.”