Words tumbled helter-skelter over the pillar, finger-painted in an oily substance, encircled by the Draconists’ insignia I’d found on the wall at St. Mary’s:
WELCOME TO THE OBSCURA, NYMPHET. HERE ARE THE RULES FOR OUR LITTLE ENDGAME:
ONE: YOU’RE CHAINED TO MOMMY DEAREST, AND SHE’S CHAINED TO ME. WHEN YOU WAKE, I WILL FLIP A KILL SWITCH ON YOUR SOULCHAINS. YOU HAVE NINETY MINUTES LEFT TO LIVE.
TWO: YOUR BLOND FRIEND IS TIED UP ON THE BRIDGE’S NORTHERN TOWER, AND IN A FEW MINUTES, HE WILL BE BESET BY MY HANDMAIDENS. I SENT YOUR MOTHER HOME TO TORTURE YOUR LOVER. YOU WILL NOT HAVE TIME ENOUGH TO SAVE EVERYONE.
THREE: YOU HAVE YOUR CAMERA. YOUR FRIEND HAS A KNIFE. I HAVE YOUR GUNS AND OTHER WEAPONS. MY HANDMAIDENS HAVE THEIR CLAWS AND THEIR HUNGER.
FOUR: IF YOU DIE HERE, I PROMISE YOU WILL NEVER LEAVE.
NOW RUN.
As I read Luca’s words, my soulchains grew tighter, colder. I shrieked and kicked the tower’s base, wanting to tear him limb from limb. Yet I didn’t have time to riot and rage or even think—I had to get up to the bridge’s deck. I wouldn’t abandon Jude to whatever fate Luca had planned; the Presidio wasn’t far from the bridge. We could cover the territory in less than an hour. I glanced at my watch—the hands spun around the dial as if trying to hypnotize me. Useless.
I shucked off my thick-soled boots, tied them to my belt by the laces, and rubbed my hands on the chalky concrete to dry my palms. The bridge’s west face had the most damage, marbled with cracks and pits. I jounced my shoulders. Cracked my neck. Pictured Ryder back at home, happy and healthy. Breathing.
Do it.
I slid my hands into cracks and squeezed my toes into small ledges, my training surfacing from muscle memory. Unable to use my right arm for anything but balance, I limped up the tower’s face. Adrenaline sparked in my fingers and toes, keeping them sharp and sensitive. The corroded metal felt like the rock walls back at the academy, rough yet sturdy. The whole structure groaned and swayed. I’d climbed way more than two hundred feet before—Dad took us up Half Dome in Yosemite when I was thirteen. The bridge tower was kid stuff compared to that climb, but I’d had ropes on the mountain. Anchors. Sunlight.
All I had now was the old Helsing stubbornness and a heady fury coiling in my muscles. I’d known I couldn’t trust Luca, but hadn’t thought him capable of orchestrating a plot this insidious.
You don’t know, do you? What I am?
Only human ghosts can travel through mirrors, nymphet.
Which left me to wonder, What are you, you dead bastard? His words chased me up half the tower, spurring me faster. I’d never heard of a nonhuman entity—Father Marlowe talked about demons, but I’d figured they were human spirits twisted beyond recognition. If Luca’s spirit wasn’t human and couldn’t travel through an antimirror, why would he want Helsing destroyed? Why should we have any relevance to him in the first place, or why should he feel the need to obtain revenge against us?
And if he wasn’t human, how could he die?
I reached up and wedged my left hand into another crack. Rust coated my skin with a powdery, dry film. As I committed my weight to the grip, the metal weakened, moaning out loud.
The sound spilled barbs into my blood—
My grip crumbled and gave way.
I shrieked. My body dropped like a dead weight. Instinctively, my right hand clamped down on its little ledge. For one swinging, free-falling moment, my whole existence hinged on the four fingers of my right hand. Everything sharpened as I slammed into the tower, as pain sparked through my injured shoulder and yanked another cry out of me, as I scrambled for a second handhold. I didn’t breathe until my left hand slipped back into a solid crevice.
When I had a grip, I leaned my forehead against the anchorage and forced myself to breathe. I’d been four fingers away from a broken neck or a lungful of black water. My muscles trembled—it wasn’t good to stop in the midst of a climb. Keep moving, Dad said. It hurts less if you keep moving, in climbing and in life.
No way would I die in this place, this nightmare made flesh, the stuff of straitjacketed delusions and padded walls. One hundred more feet, go. I climbed higher. I ached, and it took every ounce of my willpower to lift my right arm above shoulder height again. And again. No time to stop.
The gloom at the top of the bridge stirred. I covered another twenty feet, bringing the bridge’s deck and massive undercarriage into focus. Suspension cables dangled off the edges like limp vines, scabbed with throbbing, leathery, aphid-like protrusions. As I climbed parallel to the end of the nearest cable, a pod twitched and opened its bat-like wings, allowing violet ghostlight to spill out into the night space.
What is that thing? Hundreds of them covered the bridge cables, swaying in a breeze I couldn’t feel, stretching out into the dimness on either side of me. I kept moving, no more than a scuffle and a shadow, praying they didn’t notice me.
I’d almost made it to the bridge’s rib cage when three high-pitched shrieks ripped the night limb from limb—two long calls, one short, like a Morse signal or something. I glanced left—ripples of ghostlight moved across the cables as ghosts shuffled their wings.
Fifty feet to go.
Every time I pitched my body higher, my right grip weakened; my shoulder couldn’t take much more. I clenched my teeth against the grind in my shoulder socket.
Thirty feet from the top, the anchorage began to tremble—small seismic vibrations eked from the metal into my fingertips and toes. High, shrill hunting calls bounced down to me, Luca’s words reverberating in their aftershocks:
My handmaidens have their claws and their hunger.
And all around me, the bats—silent, scabby, leather-backed ghosts—stirred. Opening their wings. A violet pall crept into the air.
Fifteen feet.
Stampeding feet shook the anchorage. I jammed my hands and feet in crevices to keep from being bucked off. The shrieks got louder, closer. Several winged ghosts dropped silently from their perches, plummeting toward the bay and gliding over the water. Ghosts above, ghosts below. Death on all sides.
Ten feet to go.
Ghostlight slicked the cables overhead, emanating from whatever shook the bridge deck. I’d skip the deck and travel over the bridge’s undercarriage and crisscrossing beams, thus staying out of sight.
Hopefully.
Five feet.
I curled my fingers around the lip of the bridge’s undercarriage. With a grunt, I dragged myself onto the steel strut and leaned against the bridge tower. The muscles in my body twitched from exertion. Pain hit me like lens flares, brilliant flashes of light exploding across my vision. I closed my eyes and exhaled, as if I could expel the pain on a breath.
The skin-tick sensation of being watched lifted gooseflesh along my arms. Looking up, I spotted a figure half obscured in the shadows, standing on a catwalk suspended parallel to the steel strut I sat on. The thin fabric of a woman’s nightgown bulged around her distended stomach, the torn neckline showing off her rib bones. She had no mouth, a knife-slice nose, and eyes like pits pressing from rotten fruit. Strangest of all, a shallow dimple split her face from crown to chin, bisecting her forehead and nose into two halves.
Is that … is she … a ghost? Her frame had heft, as if the Obscura granted ghosts more than sinews made of electricity and flesh made of light. My hand instinctively went to my empty gun holster; I cursed in my head. She cocked her head at me, her pale, patchy hair spilling over her shoulder.
Careful not to move too quick, I tugged my socks and boots back on, never taking my eyes off her. She growled in her throat as I rose, the muscles in her stilt-like legs bunching, skin glimmering with violet ghostlight.
I froze. If she’s a ghost … can I capture her ghostlight on film? How will she react to my flash? Slowly, slowly, I reached for my camera. When I snapped off my lens cap, the little popping noise echoed off the metal beams.
She made a trio of hunting cries—two long, one short—then leapt over the catwa
lk’s guardrail. I hit my shutter mid-jump, the flash booming in the darkness. The force of it knocked her off her trajectory, throwing her back so hard, she smacked into a support beam and tumbled toward the bay.
Electricity tingled against my fingers. Whoa.
“Micheline!” The voice drew my gaze north, and I spotted Jude running down the catwalk toward me. I’d never been so happy to see him—or anyone, for that matter—in my life. I crossed the struts like balance beams and hopped the catwalk’s guardrail, feeling better once my feet touched down on the walkway. Holstering my camera, I started toward Jude at a jog.
When I reached him, he grabbed me by the shoulders, then cupped my face between his gloved palms, fear palpable in his touch. He looked okay, except for a few abrasions along his cheekbone and a spattering of black blood in his hair. His favorite hunting knife was holstered on his chest, the hilt covered in dark gore. The soulchains pressed up his throat toward his head. Not even our crosses could help us now.
“You’re okay.” I covered his hands with mine.
“Barely. That crazy bastard tied me up and sent his freaky girlfriends after me—”
Hunting shrieks set my nerves on fire. Glancing over his shoulder, I spotted silhouettes of those … girls spilling through a fracture in the bridge’s decks, hitting the catwalk and making it quake and groan. Luca’s warning about his handmaidens reverberated through the aftershocks of their voices.
A big one emerged from the pack and screeched at us, her face split open on a vertical slit, like a Venus flytrap turned on point. Her snarl revealed rows and rows of serrated, wedge-shaped teeth.
“Speaking of girls,” I said, pushing Jude forward. “Run!”
Whirling, we sprinted for the southern shore. The winged ghosts cartwheeled on the edge of my sight; one hurtled over the catwalk, contrails of wind tearing at my clothes and hair. A second bat-ghost rocketed past and smashed into the walkway, rending a hole in our path.
Jude leapt first, the catwalk dipping under his weight. He scrambled forward until the walkway stabilized over a truss.
Behind me, the girls’ screams stabbed into my back.
Oh God, here goes—
I ran straight at the break and leapt, landed, and scrambled for a grip as the walkway screeched and sank under me. The big girl caught up and jumped—she crashed into the catwalk, and her weight made it slope toward the bay. I screamed, barely keeping a grip on the railing. The girl’s flailing body plummeted past me, her claws squealing on the metal as she scrabbled for purchase, then fell.
The catwalk sprang back up, wobbling. I scrambled to my feet as the other girls bounded across the gap. Several of them hit the walkway behind me. The corroded metal groaned and gave way, bending. Breaking.
The world fell out from beneath my feet and my stomach lost track of gravity; the catwalk dumped the screaming and shrieking girls into the ocean. I caught hold of the cross-hatched guardrail, my grip sweat-slicked and slippery. When I looked down, all I saw was a two-hundred-foot plunge to the dead water below, my feet dangling, and several winged ghosts fighting over a girl’s dismembered leg.
No wonder Mom went mad in this place.
The catwalk trembled and swayed, its metal skin and tendons groaning, arthritic. I doubted it’d be able to support my weight much longer. Muscles shaking from exertion and exhaustion, I climbed the guardrails like monkey bars, relieved when Jude appeared at the catwalk’s gnarled ledge.
He whistled, pulling me to safety by my good hand. “Guess today’s not your day to go.”
When my knees hit the walkway, I threw my arms around his neck. He stiffened, and slowly—so slowly—put his arms around my shoulders. My adrenaline eased off the gas pedal, my heart pounding in ten different pressure points in my body.
“Idiot,” I said. “You shouldn’t have come with me.”
“Still haven’t figured out how to use the words thank you, Princess?” he asked.
“This is a suicide mission.”
He shrugged out of my embrace, chucking me on the chin with a gloved finger. “Damned if I came, damned if I didn’t. You could die a hundred ways before you reach them; someone’s got to watch your back.”
I wondered if he’d seen anything when my forearms had brushed his neck, but didn’t dare ask. “I’m not much to put your faith in,” I said.
“I don’t have a lot of faith to work with in the first place.” He stood and offered me a hand up. “Dust yourself off, Helsing. We’re going hunting.”
OBSCURA, −0:43 HOURS
THE BRIDGE’S CATWALK ENDED over Fort Point—a small, historic installation on San Francisco’s northern tip. We picked our way over the beams, headed for land. The girls’ voices grew louder—closer—as we neared the shore. My stomach curled.
When I told Jude about the message Luca left for me, he laughed blackly and rubbed his raw wrists. “When I woke, I was tied up with a knife hilt between my palms,” he said, ducking under a bridge beam. “He had two of his little girlfriends tied up close to me—if I cut myself out, I’d cut them out, too. I had to Houdini my way out of there, then fight those things mano a mano.”
“Glad you’re okay,” I said.
He snorted, sweeping the back of his hand under his nose. “You want to tell me how you know this Luca guy? Real charmer.”
I kept my face impassive. “I talked to him a few times via an antimirror.”
“Let me guess—he gave you the Ouija idea?”
When I didn’t answer, Jude chuckled and shook his head. “Next time you decide to take candy from a psycho, Micheline, leave me the hell out of it.”
I dignified Jude’s statement with a punch in the shoulder. He bumped me with his elbow. As I was about to elbow him back, a shriek from the girls on the mainland sobered us up.
The tussle made Ryder’s absence ache like a lost limb. I kept expecting to hear his voice, to look back and see him bringing up the rear, to feel him close with every breath, with every step. My trigger finger won’t stick, not this time. I swore the words to myself like a mantra. I’ll get us all out of this nightmare.
Luca had twisted my mother’s soul into something monstrous, something unrecognizable, and I had to redeem her. I had to free her from this place, and once I did, I’d find Luca and destroy him. No matter what manner of being he was, he was too dangerous to exist. He used people as playthings—he set my mother and me against each other—then laughed as he watched our worlds burn.
“So what’s the plan?” Jude asked.
“Let’s shadow Highway 101 to the Presidio,” I said. “There’s a private gate into the compound off Lincoln Boulevard—it leads straight to the officers’ horseshoe and the big house.”
“Can we make it in time?”
“Only if we keep moving.” I figured I’d burned up over forty of Luca’s ninety-minute limit climbing the bridge tower, which meant we had less than fifty minutes to cover the mile between our position and my family’s old house, find Ryder, and exorcise my mother. It might be the longest mile of our lives—no way Luca would let us make the trek unmolested.
Upon reaching the final strut, Jude and I dropped a few feet to the ground. We took cover under the bridge deck; I scanned the area, found it clear, and waved Jude forward. We sneaked right, keeping low, taking cover in a copse of trees. I knelt behind the trunks of dead pines and scrub brush, able to see the 101 all the way to the toll stations despite the patchwork of dead cars, fog, and debris. Only half the toll stations stood. The city rose in the distance, the Coit Tower and Transamerica Pyramid missing from its skyline. The other buildings cut jack-o’-lantern teeth against the sky. I wouldn’t forget this ravaged skyline so long as I lived, nor the pit it opened in my gut.
It was my city, ended.
“The gate’s about half a mile away,” I said, pointing toward a forested ridge beyond the bridge services station. “We need to keep west.”
“There’s three hundred yards of open ground out there,” Jude said. “Cov
er’s spotty, at best.”
“I’ll take point,” I said, unholstering my camera and screwing on my telephoto lens. “They don’t like my flash.”
“Deal,” Jude said.
We moved forward, watching the negative spaces between trees, buildings, and rusted-out vehicles. I placed my finger on my camera’s trigger, moving quickly, soundlessly. My eyes played tricks, creating flashes of violet light I swore weren’t there. I couldn’t psych myself out now—Jude and Ryder relied on me to get them home safely; Oliver’s possession wouldn’t end until the soulchains broke; and I couldn’t let my mother suffer any longer, not in this hellish place. I squared my breathing and moved on.
We closed the gap on the bridge services station. The mist shifted on our right—I snapped to attention, turning my lens on empty space and swirling fog. Leather creaked as Jude yanked his knife from its sheath.
“I saw it, too,” he whispered. I jerked my head toward the cars on the road. As we took cover behind a Honda’s rusted flank, a scream pulsed through the night. I peered through one of the car’s dingy, web-crack windows. A girl bounded atop a nearby vehicle and shrieked, her face splitting open. Long-long-short answering calls echoed from farther down the road. The girl on the car looked right, then swung her pitted gaze toward me.
Gasping, I pressed my back into the vehicle door. “Get under the car,” I whispered to Jude, who nodded and slid beneath the undercarriage. I holstered my camera and low-crawled under, the asphalt biting into my forearms and abdomen. The car’s guts crumbled against my shoulders, grit tumbling into my shirt collar and hair. I inched abreast of Jude, and together, we faced a tumbledown maze of deflated tires, broken glass, and decaying auto parts.
“We can crawl from car to car,” I whispered.
“That’ll take too long—”
The next car over rocked on its rims, silencing us. The metal groaned like century-old pop-top lids as the girl walked down the hood and dropped to the ground. Her legs were visible from the calf down: She walked on the balls of her feet, predator-style, her tendons knotted at her ankles. Thick worm-like veins throbbed under her skin. Despite the condition of her legs, her steps were light. Fast. Jude made a gagging face.
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