Shutter

by Courtney Alameda

  Jude Drake, unsure of himself? I looked up at her, surprised. “What do you mean?”

  She turned her head, watching the boys goof off on the field. “He cares more about others than he lets on, but he thinks the caring makes him weak. He’s got thick walls around his heart.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “Or maybe it’s just the visions, I don’t know.”

  “The visions are a big part of it,” I said, looking her up and down. She seemed genuine enough, and I liked to think I’d inherited Dad’s bullshit radar, even if mine wasn’t quite as calibrated as his was yet.

  I joined the boys on the practice field, giving them instructions to keep their mirrors aimed at me and maintain a fifty-foot circular perimeter. The program would trace our movements via a complex AI system, and tonight, I’d asked it not to dim a proxy’s faux ghostlight unless I managed to capture it against a training pane.

  Trapping the entity’s light against a pane would be easier said than done—the boys’ faux-silver panes were about three feet wide. We’d be making up tactics on the fly, melding maneuvers out of the ways we reaped the corporeal dead. I wouldn’t put the boys in our entity’s warpath until we could manage to connect lens to pane at least 75 percent of the time.

  “You guys act like my satellites, okay?” I asked. “I want to run a modified shoot-and-scoot with a circular perimeter, which means you guys need to be constantly moving, keeping the entity between you, capisce?”

  Nods. With the proxy paused, I took a few test shots against Ryder’s mirror, then Jude’s.

  “They look good,” Bianca called out—for a second, she almost sounded like Mom. I shook my head to loosen the thought. It’s just the echo.

  “Reset the program, let’s go,” I said. The proxy’s form glimmered out, the tracks helicoptering overhead. Both Ryder and Jude looked up, not minding the ground. The proxy ghost surfaced a few feet away from Jude with a deep, cracking moan. He jolted, swearing loud.

  Bianca laughed. “Don’t worry, baby, I’ll still respect you in the morning.”

  “Like I need your respect,” Jude shouted back.

  “Ooh, so icy.”

  “You shameless—”

  “Move, Jude,” I snapped, my camera pointed at the ghost. He scowled, turning his mirror parallel to my lens, the proxy sandwiched between us.

  She rose up on her knees, head convulsing, body twitching, flickering. Tetros called the convulsion light decay—the more an entity spasmed and flickered, the closer they were to fading back into the Obscura. An entity like this one would take a little nudge with my camera, and wouldn’t put up a fight for a tetro with a mirror.

  The proxy considered Jude, her head foundering on a broken neck.

  I leveled my lens at Jude’s mirror and fired. The first shot made the entity stumble and dim—if this were a real exorcism, it’d be a two-shot job. Before I hit the shutter again, Jude hopped aside and the proxy slid outside our perimeter. Her heat-seekers latched her attention back on him.

  “Good instincts, move if the proxy gets too close,” I yelled. “Ryder, six o’clock to the proxy. Jude, fall back.” Reaper crews hunted like a pack—a cohesive group of individuals working toward the same goal. Tonight, I needed to get the three of us thinking less like a pack and responding, moving, and reaping as one. The boys needed to respond to my movements instinctively—it could be the difference between life and death.

  The proxy’s attention followed Jude as he backed toward twelve o’clock. A bubbling growl rolled through the projector’s speakers. She stalked toward him. I lined up my lens with Jude’s mirror, waited for her light to loom, and shot.

  She faded under the assault, the tracks whirring to a stop.

  “The app says the ghost was captured,” Bianca said. “Should I reset the program?”

  I fell back to perimeter. “No, go to the next level and increase the speed.”

  The second proxy appeared near Ryder—a male this time, too far away to shoot from my current position. Breaking into a run, I arced in from behind, camera ready. I fired into Ryder’s mirror. The proxy stumbled, its light halving.

  “Perfect shot,” Bianca called.

  The projector clicked and the proxy ghost turned on me. I got a glimpse of his skeletal face through my lens, which looked real enough to make blood pound in my ears. Dodging his attack, I pivoted and took a shot that should’ve ended him. The photograph registered with the program but didn’t dull his light—I had to capture him against the practice pane.

  I swung right. Jude turned his mirror at a perfect angle, and I captured the proxy in two quick shots.

  The boys and I worked our way through the first few levels without difficulty. But once we started the faster programs with cleverer AI, it got harder to see the practice panes in the dark. We altered formation fast, the boys’ movements guided by my gravitational pull. Sometimes I missed. Sometimes the boys couldn’t back up my shots. Sometimes the proxy light washed over one of us, shutting the program down instantly.

  We couldn’t allow our entity to get so close to us in real life.

  “Keep your head in the game, McCoy,” Jude shouted as a proxy zigzagged past Ryder’s mirror. Ryder had tripped—wasn’t like him, but the practice panes weren’t easy to run with.

  I ran toward the proxy, shouting, “Ry at five, Jude at seven.” The proxy moved like hummingbird wings, a smear of acid light to the retina. Jude didn’t react fast enough—the proxy slammed into him, coating him in purple for an instant before the program cut out.

  “Let’s take a break.” I wiped my forehead with the back of my wrist, then rolled my shoulders a few times to loosen the pain in my injured arm. We were good, but we weren’t gods. What we’d been through in the last few days would whip anyone, Dad included.

  We jogged off the field and gathered around the monitor, examining the shots. We had a 35 percent success rate as a team, which meant one in three of my shots connected with one of the boys’ practice panes. I captured the ghost on film 90 percent of the time; however, swinging a camera around was easier than aligning a lens with a mirror.

  “Thirty-five percent’s not good enough,” I said, clicking past my shots. “Granted, our capture rate’s almost sixty-five percent with the slower proxies, not bad. How are you guys feeling? Do we need to try a different maneuver?”

  “The ghost’s going to catch wise after a few shots,” Ryder said, passing me a water bottle. I took a light swig. “We need to be prepared for the target to adapt to our tactics.”

  “Maybe we should train to hit it with the old bait and switch,” Jude said. “All war is deception.”

  “Sun Tzu,” Bianca said, her voice all color-me-impressed. “You’ve read him?”

  Jude shrugged. “Parts.”

  Ryder took a swig of water to hide his smile, tipping his head back. I wrestled a snort down. No, Jude hadn’t read Sun Tzu—Damian said “All war is deception” so often, it was almost his catch phrase.

  “A bait and switch could work,” I said. We normally deployed a tactic like that with hypernecrotics, introducing a “crippled” but armed reaper into their environment, drawing the necros out of their dens, then opening fire. “Our ghost is only as fast as the mid-speed proxies. Let’s work on those and see if we can get our capture rate to seventy-five percent. Deal?”

  “It’s lunchtime,” Jude said, dropping his empty water bottle to the grass.

  “Later,” I said.

  “Hit seventy-five percent and I’ll make everyone dinner,” Bianca said. Jude groaned, but eventually followed Ryder and me back on the field. It took a proxy or two to settle back into a rhythm, but the promise of a home-cooked meal made both boys hyperattentive.

  By our fifth proxy, the boys started anticipating my movements. I could turn and shoot a ghost against Ryder’s mirror while Jude fell back. By our seventh, we hit a capture rate of 55 percent. I started to think—to hope—that this plan would work. We’d used up forty-eight hours, and I didn’t want to risk
another day chained, not if I could help it.

  As our eleventh proxy dissipated into the shadows, Bianca cheered. “Seventy-nine percent capture rate. You guys rock.”

  We packed my equipment, killed the lights, and locked up. I checked my phone as the boys loaded my gear into Jude’s truck. Oliver hadn’t texted me back. I dialed his number and pressed my phone to my ear, cursing under my breath when he didn’t pick up.

  Ryder and I climbed in the back of Jude’s truck bed with my stuff, sitting across from each other on opposite sides of the truck. He stretched out his legs so that we sat calf-to-calf, the closest we could be in front of anyone affiliated with the corps, even our friends.

  “You worried about Ollie?” Ryder asked, nudging me with his knee.

  I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “It’s not like him to ignore calls.”

  “The bloke leaves his phone everywhere—I found it in the fridge once. He’s fine, love, don’t worry.”

  Rationally, I knew Ryder was right. Oliver was probably busy and hadn’t checked his phone. He’d call me back and laugh, and I’d chew him out for making me worry. But “probably busy” wasn’t enough, not with a murderous curse flowering under our skins. And we’d burned up half our night already; if we wanted to get in a hunt, we’d need to track the ghost and get moving within the next hour.

  Oliver hadn’t returned by the time we got back to the house.

  “I’m sure Einstein’s fine,” Jude said, grabbing my training duffel for me. “He’s probably geeking out with his little nerd girlfriend.”

  “Don’t worry,” Ryder said, lifting my computer monitor out of the truck’s bed. “It’s like he’s walkabout when he’s working, he totally zones out.”

  I knew they were right—they must be right—but I couldn’t shake the feeling something had gone very, very wrong.

  SUNDAY, 2:17 A.M.

  BIANCA BARRED US FROM the kitchen, telling us to relax awhile. Fatigue built up in my body; between the disaster at the warehouses, building the cases for the reaping panes and training, dealing with Luca, and worrying about Oliver, I’d almost hit my limit for one night.

  While the boys turned on the television in the family room, I retreated to the hall to call Oliver again. No good—I hung up on his voice mail. I paced and paced, passing Dad’s old study where the map of San Francisco waited on his desk. My shoulder ached at the thought of tracking the ghost via Ouija again.

  Something’s off, he should’ve called by now.

  My phone buzzed. My heart leapt, then crashed when I saw Dad’s name on-screen. Since I’d left home, he’d called almost a hundred times and sent more texts and e-mails than I dared open. Part of me wanted to answer and reassure him, the other part wanted to tell him to go screw himself. I couldn’t wait to see the look on his face when I came home, scrubbed clean of soulchains and carrying photographs of an exorcised killer. The need to prove myself—no, the need to prove him wrong—burned bright in my blood, almost as powerful as the need to survive and protect my friends.

  I clutched my phone, wishing things were easy again, back when Dad gave me piggyback rides and shooting lessons. A little part of me would always believe my father was invincible; and while he’d always be a hero to the rest of the world, I knew his hands and heart were human.

  Human meant fallible.

  Human meant forgivable, didn’t it?

  My phone stopped ringing. Dad didn’t try calling a second time.

  I turned into his study. The Ouija planchette waited on the map, smack dab in the middle of downtown, and I couldn’t decide whether it looked more like a challenge or a threat. My doubts about Oliver snuck back in, and Luca’s words rattled around in my head, taunting me: The problem with a cross is …

  “What?” I whispered to the empty room. Setting aside my phone, I shook out my right arm, crossed myself, and reached for the planchette. As my fingers skimmed the planchette’s sides, a static shock jumped from my skin to the instrument. My soulchains shifted in response, spreading downward and spilling into the bend of my arm. I gripped the planchette and whispered, “Show me where your master is hiding.”

  The planchette didn’t waver, or tremble, or shake. This time, it glided over the map, skirting the city, heading south. When I closed my eyes, I saw flashes of the empty city streets, nothing more.

  You’re on the move, aren’t you? I squeezed my eyes tight as soulchains circled my upper arm. Where are you headed now, you bastard?

  The planchette moved south until it slid off the map paper, skidded five inches over the desktop, and halted. I saw a house—no, more like a mansion—before the vision cut and I stared at the blank backs of my eyelids.

  At first I thought the entity caught wise to this tracking methodology and threw up some sort of psychic barrier; but, no, the planchette sat on what would’ve been the South Bay if the map had been large enough to include the other cities, right around what might be … Oh God, no.

  Palo Alto.

  Oliver.

  “Ryder!” I ran into the hall. Both boys appeared at the outlet, their faces cast in confusion and sharp shadows. “The entity’s headed for Palo Alto—”

  “You’re sure?” Ryder asked. Jude’s gaze snapped toward Dad’s office door. When I nodded, they swore.

  “We’ve got to get to Oliver before it does,” I said. “Gear up.”

  Ryder squeezed my arm and stepped past me, heading for the stairs. “Two minutes,” he said to Jude, jerking his head. “Let’s move.”

  Bianca stepped out of the kitchen in their wake. I didn’t want to leave her here alone, but I didn’t want her anywhere in the entity’s vicinity, either.

  “What’s wrong with Oliver?” she asked, her brows pinched tight.

  The boys’ heavy treads upstairs counted out the beats of my hesitation. “I think our entity’s going after him.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Palo Alto.”

  Her eyes widened, and she tugged at her apron strings. “He’s with Gemma, isn’t he? I’m coming with you.”

  “No, it’s way too dangerous—”

  She wrenched the apron over her head and balled it in a fist. “Gemma’s my friend. I’m going.”

  “I appreciate the sentiment but, no,” I said. “You’re not a reaper, you haven’t trained for this kind of thing.”

  “Trained for what kind of thing?” Jude asked, coming back into the hall, armed. Ryder’s steps pounded the stairs behind him.

  “She wants to come with,” I said.

  Jude took one look at Bianca’s determined expression. “Okay.”

  “Okay?” I whirled on him. “We are not taking a civilian-class cadet into a dead zone.”

  He cocked his head and gave me a narrow look, as if to say, Are you stupid? I know she’s not dying tonight. Behind me, Bianca’s heels clacked on the hallway floor. Half a second later, my gun holster lightened. When I spun back around, I stared down my own barrel’s cyclops gaze.

  “Hey!” Ryder and Jude snapped in unison. I held up a hand.

  “Stand down,” I said, feeling ice crack in my tone, looking beyond the gun and at the girl beyond. Bianca dropped her arms, but in a few quick movements of her hands, discharged the clip, unhinged the slide, and thrust the pieces of my weapon at me.

  “I’m no reaper,” she said. “But my parents survived the Hong Kong holocaust, and there’s no way they’d raise a girl who didn’t know her way around a gun.”

  Jude wolf-whistled; Bianca smiled around the steel in her eyes. Had to admit, part of me was impressed.

  The other part was pissed.

  “Put it back together,” I said. “Without looking at it.”

  Bianca put the gun back together, holding my gaze the whole time, then extended it to me butt first.

  “Fine,” I said, taking the Colt, slipping it back into my holster, and hoping I wasn’t making another huge mistake. “Jude, she’s your partner. You’re responsible for her safety. I say run, you both run like hell
. Am I clear?”

  Bianca saluted. I glanced back at Jude—he grinned like he’d won something, and I wanted to smack the look off his face. Ryder didn’t meet my gaze, regarding Bianca with a cool dispassion. She’d surprised him. Damn, she surprised me.

  “Give her a gun, grab the med kit and the reaping panes,” I said, turning toward the door. “And for God’s sake, find her some shoes that won’t wake the dead. We’ve got to go.”

  SUNDAY, 3:35 A.M.

  PALO ALTO LAY TWENTY-ONE miles south of San Francisco, and Jude sped the whole way down. After forty-two minutes of panic, worry, and cab silence, we pulled up to a wrought-iron gate in a posh neighborhood. Trees, large shrubberies, and shadows obscured the property beyond.

  “Why is the gate open?” Bianca whispered. “Her parents are crazy about keeping the gate shut.”

  “Would a power failure affect the gate?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” she said. Jude glanced at me in the mirror before he pulled forward, taking us up the dark avenue. The streetlamps had imploded, their delicate glass skulls cracked open, wires and fuses dangling out. Our tires crunched over the broken glass, and no lights glittered in the house’s windows ahead.

  “It’s already here,” I said. Bianca tensed up, hands clenching in her lap. The boys already had their game faces on—they knew what a blackout meant. “We stick together in there, find Oliver, and extract him and any survivors. We’ll call dispatch for cleanup.”

  Bianca trembled.

  “Aim for the limbs, not for the kill,” I said. “The entity can reanimate corpses with its miasma, but bullets in the head and chest will be worthless. Limit a target’s mobility through the hip, thigh, and knee if possible.”

  “And Ollie?” Ryder asked.

  “If the entity’s taken control of him, knock him out,” I said. “Live possession is limited by the victim’s state of consciousness.” Ryder didn’t ask what to do if we found Oliver dead—no need to unearth words like those.

  Jude parked in the midst of a cobblestone courtyard. The house beyond was a magnificent Tudor mansion, like Shakespeare’s house dropped in the midst of the Palo Alto hills. With an Oreo-cookie-cute exterior, gabled eaves, multiple chimneys, and arched, diamond-paned windows, the place looked too fairy tale-sweet to house horrors.