Our car groaned, its axle pressing into our backs. I clenched my teeth to keep from making any sound, to keep the fear of being crushed under half a ton of metal away. The pressure of a second girl’s footsteps on the car’s roof pushed the air from my lungs. Jude suffered worse: His face reddened, tendons popping at the jaw and temple. I reached out and took his gloved hand, holding tight.
A hunting shriek rent the night—this one farther up the road, a little to the east. Another scream coupled with the first—this one pitched to curdle blood—the sound of breaking bones and bloodletting. Our girls took off running in the direction of the screams.
“Sound like a distraction to you?” I asked.
Jude expelled a breath. “Hell yeah.”
I slid out from under the car, twisting and grabbing the front bumper to get out quick. Ducking low, I spotted a pod of girls some fifty feet away, scrabbling at an old Suburban. One girl bashed in a window with her elbow and reached inside. Shadows flickered inside the car. A male ghost fought as the girl dragged him through the window, and then—
Don’t watch, I told myself, bracing myself with one hand on the car, the other on my camera. Move. Prey freezes, predators don’t.
Jude and I moved south, keeping ourselves lower than the hoods and trunks of the cars. The sounds of suffering clung to my conscience—tortured screams, shrieks, and sobs. I’d come to save the living and redeem the dead, but I couldn’t save every creature under this murky sky in ninety minutes.
We came abreast of the bridge services station, beyond which lay Lincoln Boulevard and the compound’s back gate. Nudging Jude, I pointed to the trailers across Merchant Road. “If we get separated, Lincoln Boulevard lies beyond those buildings. Run down the hill, hit the road, and hang right. From there, it’s a quarter mile to the compound’s gate.”
He looked back at the girls, wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, and nodded.
A bullet ricocheted off the car behind us—the sharp thwap! of an M16. The girls’ gazes swung in our direction, almost in synchronization. Several rose up off their haunches, their faces and arms and hands soaked in gore, bits of flesh slipping from their inverted maws.
Jude swore. I had no problem picking flight over fight. “Make for the gate!” I cried, shoving off the car. A long tunnel split the station in two—Jude and I dove into its darkness, heading for the small, fuzzy block of light on the other side. The girls’ hunting calls followed us in, rioting off the 101, the tunnel compressing the sound until I thought it’d make my head explode.
We burst out of the tunnel’s other end, and I pushed Jude left and up a small rise. Shadows covered potholes, cracks in the asphalt, and debris, ready to trip us or break ankles. We scrambled across Merchant Road. As I leapt over the sidewalk and into the brush, a tree branch struck my shin, nearly taking me down.
Everything in this place wanted us dead.
I half ran, half crashed down the embankment, which dumped me onto Lincoln Boulevard. Jude stumbled into me, pushing me forward as the girls’ cries cut through the trees.
We ran. My heart felt like it would explode. My muscles burned like they’d been injected with acid. The compound gate melted out of the fog and darkness ahead, its wrought-iron silhouette standing firm despite the pits and cracks in the stone wall. Close enough to sprint to, but my heart already sputtered and choked. My shoulder still hurt from climbing the bridge tower, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to scale the fence, too.
Jude hit the gate first—he jumped up, grabbed the bars, and scrambled to the top. I copied him, letting kinetic energy propel me straight into the gate. My shoulder burned as I climbed, a spear of pain stabbing down my arm to my wrist.
My right hand weakened, grip failing—
I fell and hit the ground, stunned for a second, breath gone.
“Get up,” Jude cried. He dropped down to the ground on the other side. The monsters’ footsteps made the road tremble, the girls’ pale limbs flickering on the edge of my sight as they raced toward us.
I shoved to my feet. My arm hurt so bad, I didn’t think I’d be able to move it for a while, much less climb a twelve-foot-tall gate … but I might be small enough to squeeze through the gaps in the bars.
“Use the flash to push them back,” I said, shoving my camera into Jude’s hands. Unclipping my gear belt, I slung it through and then stepped one leg between the bars.
“What the hell are you doing?” Jude shouted. “Climb!”
“Shut up and shoot.” I wiggled the left part of my hips through, my abdomen, my chest. Ten seconds. Less. The girls screamed at me with their open maws. I closed my eyes as the flash whined and exploded in the night. The ensuing calls sounded like shrieking violins. Still, they pressed forward.
I pulled my right leg in, then my other shoulder. My neck.
Five seconds.
My head got stuck on my ears. I put both hands on the gate and pushed.
A girl swept her claws at my face—
The flash went off again, knocking her back—
I slipped through, stumbling backward into the compound, my ears on fire and bloody. The girls hit the gate, which groaned but held. I scrambled to my feet and grabbed my gear as they reached for us, skin hanging off their arms in fleshy drapes. Several tried to jump the fence and failed, falling back to crowd-surf on their sisters’ shoulders before sinking into the writhing mass.
Jude grabbed my hand and we ran down the road. We didn’t look back when the girls screamed at us, and we didn’t stop until the trees swallowed up the road and hid us from sight. Once we reached the relative safety of the trees, I let go of Jude’s hand and hunched over, hands on my knees, trying to catch my breath.
“We can’t slow down,” Jude said. “We’ve only got a few minutes left, Micheline.”
“I know,” I said, my breath wheezing. I squeezed my eyes shut against the pain radiating from the second heart pounding away in my injured shoulder. “Give me a second.”
Jude gave me two minutes’ rest before handing me my camera and pressing on. The road disappeared into the dark fog ahead, silent and lonely, ready to take me to Mom. To Ryder. When we found them, I wouldn’t let my memories overwhelm my instincts again. This time, I wouldn’t forget that my mother’s ghost was nothing more than a tortured shade.
We passed the officers’ horseshoe, the houses battered, their framework skeletons exposed. The compound’s wall must have kept out the ghosts—no one moved in the darkness, nothing cried. Maybe the dead condemned this place, just as we the living had.
Or perhaps the dead feared my mother’s ghost, too.
“Look,” Jude whispered, pointing ahead.
A figure stood on the road, barely visible in the darkness under the trees. I’d know that silhouette anywhere, from the straightness of his shoulders to the way he stood with his feet apart, fists balled at his sides, head held high and straight.
“Ryder,” I whispered. He didn’t move, waiting. Watching us. I couldn’t peel my gaze off him, still moving, still living, still breathing. Half of me wanted to run to him, to throw myself into his arms and kiss him, to awaken him from this nightmare. But I’d stopped believing in fairy tales and happy endings at five, when I killed my first reanimate with Dad’s big hands wrapped around my tiny ones. Nothing monstrous was conquered with a kiss, nor by love. Evil went down by the trigger, overcome with bullets, shutters, blood, and courage.
The whites of Ryder’s eyes were gone, replaced by the beetle blackness of possession. Soulchains crisscrossed his face and disappeared into his hair. His rosary was gone, and his shirt tattered and slick with blood. My mother had taken him from me and made him a weapon of mass destruction.
“Run to the house,” Jude said, his gaze never leaving Ryder. “Head through the trees, don’t try to get past him.”
“He’s possessed, you can’t fight him alone,” I said.
“The faster you end this, the sooner he’s free.” Jude cracked his knuckles. I’d seen the
m spar a hundred times, times when punches were blunted and blocks were 100 percent effective. When they fought in the academy gym, the rules of engagement applied; but here in the Obscura, the only rule was the most primal one, kill or be killed. The fight would be dirty—Ryder was an indomitable fighter and would be doubly so while in the grip of possession, his muscle and bone driven by a demon. He would watch himself kill the friend he loved like a brother, just as Oliver watched himself gouge his girlfriend’s eyes from her head.
Ryder started toward us, panther-like, no light in his eyes. Memories exploded with every puppeted step he took—grenades made of pinkie promises … kisses stolen from the rules.
I had to stop Mom.
“Tick-tock, Princess,” Jude said, pushing me toward the tree line. “Go.”
So I ran.
OBSCURA, −0:18 HOURS
VAN HELSING’S WORDS CAME to me as I ran toward the trees: I have a duty to do.
Branches ripped at my clothing. I jammed my toes on a rock and almost fell, scraping my palms against a scarred tree trunk. Even if I ran forever, I’d never get far enough away from this place. I’d never escape the memory of a spider-eyed Ryder, or that of my mother cloaked in violet ghostlight and black fog. They drove me over fallen tree trunks and through shrubs that burst into ash as I fought past.
A duty to others.
I’d never get over the sight of the people I loved made monstrous, but I’d fight till the last breath to save them.
The trees thinned out and shoved me onto the house’s lawn—or what should have been lawn, not dust with patches of moldering crabgrass. With a jolt, I realized I’d seen the big house in my nightmares, with its swaybacked roof and beams jutting like cracked ribs from the walls. Shadows bled out the smashed windows. A bat flew down and landed on the rusted weathervane, then stood still as a coffin.
In the months following Mom’s death, I’d seen this place every time I slept, the dream a preview to the horrors locked away in my memory. Day after day, I never got to the end credits. I’d wake up screaming as soon as Mom bit into Fletcher’s throat and I wouldn’t stop until Dad came in with the drugs.
The soulchains on my legs shifted, settling into shackles around my ankles, weighting my soul. By now I had a handful of minutes left, maybe, time bleeding out from a wound I couldn’t stanch. I glanced up and saw my mother in a second-story window, looking exactly as she had in life.
A duty to you.
Mom’s visage snuffed out and left the window black-eyed. I didn’t want to go in that house or face the demons within and without.
A duty to the dead.
Once, long ago, Dad and I sat on the front steps while we watched Fletcher and Ethan chase each other stupid on the front lawn. We are not defined by our lack of fear—Dad had said, smiling as Ethan let our four-year-old brother tackle him—but rather by what we choose to do when facing the nightmare.
Until now, I’d had an intellectual understanding of what Dad meant, not an internal one. But my whole soul quailed as I walked up the house’s front steps. I unholstered my camera. My hand shook as I reached for the door, which cracked and opened of its own volition. Here, now, Dad’s words seeped into my bones and took root, the only part of myself that would last my whole life long, the part that would remain after I rotted away.
I have a duty to do—
And by God, I shall do it.
I stepped past the threshold. The door closed not with a bang, but a whisper. A shadow passed from the family room to the kitchen, a flicker of a white gown and pale hair. Uncapping my lens, I moved down the hall, passing family photographs with the faces hashed out, strange rhymes written on the walls, and pictograms of eyes etched into the hardwood floor. The place smelled of dry rot, and it creaked and moaned with every step I took. Tendrils of miasma melted in and out of the walls, whispering nursery rhymes to me.
Keeping my camera pointed at the floor, I eased into the room sideways. My senses balanced on a knife’s edge.
I found her in the kitchen, standing on the spot where she’d died, her back to me. Dressed in white, save for the black shackles around her wrists, her chains extending down into a rippling pool of miasma.
“I was terrified on the night you were born,” she said softly. “I was barely out of grad school, too young to understand what motherhood meant, married to a man I could barely tolerate, my every step monitored by a reaping corps a hundred thousand strong.” She shifted until I could see her in profile. “I wanted to hate you, the child who would shackle me to the Helsings forever. But you came, and you were female when the doctors told us to expect a male, and I loved you from the moment you opened your peacock-blue eyes.”
For the moment, the monster in front of me sounded like my mother, and it tricked the words right off my tongue: “I’ll bet Dad was disappointed.”
Her white gown whispered against the floor as she turned to face me, knocking her miasma into a whorl. The lopsided smile she always used to pacify my father’s temper curled on her lips. “Surprised perhaps, but never disappointed.” She chuckled, her face softening, gaze focused on something miles away from this place. “Len. Watching a killer figure out how to hold his newborn daughter is a sight I’ll never forget. We had to teach him how to love, you and me.”
She was blurring all the lines, mixing up a situation that should’ve been so black and white, making me remember all the reasons I loved her. This creature wasn’t my mother, not exactly. She had my mother’s face and my mother’s memories, but this place warped her.
No—Luca. Warped. Her.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
Her gaze sharpened. Focused on me. “No, you’re not. You let me die. You let him shoot me.”
“Never,” I said, taking a step forward. “Your death destroyed me. And Dad? We’ve never … never quite…”
That day, part of me died, too. I’ll never be the girl I was back then.
Never innocent, never carefree. Never again.
“I wish it had been anyone but you,” I whispered, unable to blink the tears back fast enough.
Her fingers flinched. For one whole second, the violent haze around her softened. Her miasma slowed to a float, the shackles around her wrists loosening their grip. The thick, black veins in her arms drew back an inch or two.
“You didn’t come to this place to save me, you came to save him,” she whispered.
“I can’t save Ryder without freeing you first.”
Her hand curled into a fist, dark veins resurgent.
“I don’t know what Luca told you”—I continued, easing forward—“but we’re toys to him, Mom. He’s a manipulative creep and a pathological liar. You can’t trust him.”
She drew back, her miasma twisting around her skirts, whirling faster. “Luca was here when I awoke in this place, here to warn me away from the monstrosities beyond the gates. Here to explain the betrayal I suffered at the hands of my daughter and the boy I loved like a son.”
“Betrayal?” The word scraped my throat raw. I couldn’t process the information fast enough—but somewhere deep down, deep-screaming-down, something locked into place: Luca had my mother murdered. He waited for her wretched, vulnerable spirit to step into this hellhole. He shackled her to the Obscura with fear, anger, and cruelty; twisted and tortured her with his lies, turning her into a weapon to damage my father and me on both a physical and emotional plane.
There was nothing left to say; I couldn’t break our chains with love alone, and the effects of Luca’s manipulations couldn’t be undone in the handful of minutes I had left. I powered up my flash.
“You still think you can survive this?” She flickered like an old television tube, her miasma curling into tentacles. “Stubborn, stubborn girl. You haven’t realized you’ve already lost.”
She burnt out. The hairs on the back of my neck rose.
“Don’t you see?” she whispered in my ear. “There are no glass windows and no mirrors in this house.”
Before I even processed what she’d said, Mom fisted her hand in my hair and yanked so hard, bright lights exploded through my vision. Breathless, I jabbed my elbow into her abdomen and slammed my heel into her foot. She released me with a shriek, but as I pivoted, she spun and slapped me across the left cheek. Hard, almost as hard as Dad hit. Blood burst in my mouth, sharp and coppery. The blow knocked me into the wall and made the floor heave.
Bracing my back against the wall, I slipped behind my camera and lined up the lens. She was too close—I ducked as she grabbed for me, dropped to the floor, and drove my heel into her left shin. She howled. I rolled and pushed up to my knees, put my camera to my eye and snapped.
Mom didn’t shriek—
I did.
Pain stabbed into my eye, like someone had taken a screwdriver and jabbed it into my pupil. When I looked up, the vision in my right eye was hazy.
What the hell just happened? I touched my temple, finding a chain of tight little knobs under my skin. My soulchain floated over my cornea. I’m almost out of time.
I hesitated a second too long. Mom dove for me, grabbing my throat and slamming me into the hardwood floor. Once. Twice. My camera skittered away. For a moment, the world blacked. When I got a grip, Mom’s fingers pressed into my eyelids.
“No,” I screamed. I flailed and managed to kick her off me. Scrambling, I grabbed my camera and ran—no plan—up to the second floor. Up ahead, the panic room door hung open. Hungry. Two children peered around its doorframe, tow-headed as California sunlight, with Dad’s big gray-sky eyes. They were dirty, and tear stains cut through the grime on their cheeks.
I stopped in my tracks. My mouth went slack. Everything I’d ever thought about death and the afterlife ruptured in a heartbeat. The boys should’ve moved on; they should’ve been at rest.
Ethan.
Fletcher.
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