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“Oliver,” I cried.

Jude got to him first. “No time,” he said, throwing his weight under Oliver’s arm and urging him forward. Oliver couldn’t run and stumbled—his breath came in wet, gasping spurts, and he leaned heavily on Jude.

Ryder thrust his flashlight into my hands. He ran back to the others, squatted low, grabbed Oliver’s thigh, and performed the fastest fireman’s carry I’d ever seen, lifting Oliver like a sack of flour.

“Go,” Ryder shouted at me, starting off at a slow jog. Oliver groaned. I turned and ran, lighting the way with Ryder’s flashlight. The men advanced; I couldn’t see them, but their footsteps rumbled through the floor and into the soles of my feet. We’d never outrun them, not with two of our crew mates encumbered—and I couldn’t know how much farther till we reached the tunnel’s end.

The men’s lights grew brighter, rapping on the walls and the ceilings. Closer. I needed to stop them, but the tunnel had no obstacles or cover, and I couldn’t fire on Helsing’s own men. One of their lights lit up a razor-sharp sprinkler, so bright it burned an afterimage into my retinas.

The sprinklers—

I pivoted, pulled the Colt from my waistband, and shouted, “Keep moving,” at the boys.

Jude slowed down for a few paces. “Micheline? What’re you—”

“Just go!”

The men were only forty feet behind us now.

Thirty.

Almost too close.

I waited for Ryder and the others to get several yards ahead, flicked the Colt’s barrel-mounted flashlight on, and lifted the gun one-handed. Cries of
Miss Helsing?
echoed through the tunnel when their flashlights hit me in the face.

“Stay back.” I aimed at a sprinkler closest to the men and pulled the trigger. The gun bucked against my palm, the shot so loud it deafened. The men ducked or pressed themselves against the walls. Gas hissed from the pipes, pumping out in thick pus-yellow clouds.

The men scrambled back, covering their mouths and noses with their hands. The gas cascaded down in a curtain, backlit by the men’s flashlights. No way would they get through a cloud so dense without a gas mask, and it was a long trip back to the island to get them.

I spun and chased after the boys, who’d already limped their way into a wide loading dock with several large, inoperable-looking steel doors. Large ducts and tubes dove into the concrete walls, marked with unfamiliar numbers and the Helsing insignia. A number of semitruck-size, unmarked storage pods turned the space into a sparse labyrinth.

“What was that?” Jude asked as we ducked behind one of the large pods. Ryder set Oliver on his feet, both boys panting. “You’re either the ballsiest girl I know, or the stupidest one.”

“I’ll take ballsy,” I said, shoving the Colt back in my belt.

“Sm-smart thinking, Micheline,” Oliver said, leaning up against the storage pod. Sweat plastered his hair to his forehead, and a wet smear dashed across the front of his shirt.
His wound’s reopened, dammit
.

“Well, brainiacs, let’s think a way out of this place,” Jude said.

“There … should be … exits,” Oliver gasped, pointing to one of the dock’s corners. “To parking.”

I turned Ryder’s flashlight in the direction Oliver indicated. Sure enough, I spotted a sliver of a regular-size door ahead. Slipping through, I found myself in a maintenance closet of sorts, the door behind me completely nondescript and lacking an exterior handle.

The maintenance room opened into a dim, naturally lit stairwell. I ascended the stairs first, getting my bearings, exhaling the darkness and breathing in the light and sea salt, the openness. We’d ended up in one of the parking garages off Pier 50, large
PARKING WEST
signs mounted by the doors. We couldn’t have planned it better—most of the officers’ vehicles were parked in this garage, including our designated Humvees, Jude’s obscene monster truck, and Ryder’s motorcycle.

I leaned over the banister to get the boys’ attention. “We’re in West Parking, who’s got their keys?”

“We can’t take the Humvees,” Ryder said, helping Oliver up the stairs.

“Nah, but my truck’s on three,” Jude said, heading up the stairs behind me. “Outback’s parked next to me.”

With a nod, I leapt up another flight of stairs to the third floor. I pushed the door to the garage open, peering out. Afternoon sunlight slanted into the garage, slicking the backs of standard-issue Humvees and reapers’ personal vehicles. This time of day, the garage was empty. The crew below must not have been able to call for backup—hopefully their comms didn’t work in the tunnels.

We made for Jude’s jacked-up fire-hydrant-red Silverado truck—a sixteenth-birthday gift from Damian. Oliver had a gunmetal-gray Mercedes with a letter and class I couldn’t bother to remember, and Ryder had a worn-in Harley he’d purchased with some of the prize money he’d won in the academy tournaments. Dad offered to buy him a car when he turned eighteen, but Ryder declined. I may be Helsing stubborn, but Ryder was Aussie proud.

As for me, Dad said no car until my eighteenth birthday. And since I’d dumped his Humvee in the academy fountains, I had a feeling I’d be getting no car at all.

Assuming I lived to see my eighteenth birthday.

Ryder and Jude helped Oliver into the passenger seat of Jude’s truck, put a balled-up shirt between his chest and the seat belt, and told him to press hard on it. Oliver’s face had the milky-gray color of an oyster’s flesh and looked just as sweaty.

“Hang in there,” I said, giving his hand a squeeze. He nodded, leaned back against the seat, and closed his eyes. I shut the door before I said, “He’s going to need better medical attention than we can give him.”

“No hospitals,” Ryder said. “Soon as the brass puts two and two together, they’re going to be after us.”

Jude wiped his face with his hand. “Think he just needs new stitches?”

“Probably,” I said.

“I know someone who’ll do it—”

“Discreetly?” I asked.

He made his zombie duck-face at me. “She’s not exactly going to call up old man Helsing and have a heart-to-heart, okay?”

“
She?
” Ryder asked, crossing his arms over his chest.

“You’re welcome,” Jude said. I nudged Ryder with my elbow, hoping I didn’t need to jab
back off
in Morse code into his side. Luckily, he dropped the issue and tossed our bags in the Silverado’s cab. They’d parked our Humvees a few stalls down, so we emptied the arsenal lockers and stowed everything—weapons and ammo—in a big toolbox Jude kept in his truck’s bed.

“We need to head back to St. Mary’s,” I said. “Think you can be there around sundown?”

Jude shut his tailgate. “What are we going back there for?”

“If we’re going to track our ghost and break the soulchains, we need evidence. Motive,” I said.

“Fine, we’ll see you there. But we’re going to eat afterward, understand?” Jude said, pointing a finger at me.

“Deal.”

The boys bumped fists. With one last look at Oliver, I turned to follow Ryder.

Ryder’s Harley was beaten and crotchety as hell. I don’t know where he found it, but the satin paint had been worn in like a favorite pair of jeans. Everything was black, from the bike’s guts to its handlebars to the seat. When Ryder cranked the throttle, the bike growled and spat. He didn’t have a helmet (for either of us, Dad would freak), but I liked how the bike gave me an excuse to wrap my arms around his waist, an excuse to soak in his warmth, an excuse to be close.

“Hold on tight,” Ryder said.

Like I needed to be told to hang on to him.

Jude pulled out of his parking space, flashing us a rock fist. We followed him down the ramp to the ground level, the guards’ stations manned with reapers drinking coffee and reading newspapers or watching television, the last gatekeepers. If Dad managed to wake up and alert the corps, they’d stop us.

I sucked in a breath as Jude pulled up to the gate, but the guard waved him through. His companion didn’t even look up from his newspaper. I exhaled as we rolled out of the garage and turned onto Embarcadero Street—Jude turning right, Ryder left. Some of the tension hanging between my shoulder blades dissolved in the fresh air, in freedom.

The sun was setting. Up ahead, the Bay Bridge’s lights looked like they’d been photographed on soft focus, diffused by fog. Ryder revved the bike, ducking downtown. Black-eyed skyscrapers rose around us, their doorsteps dead, save for some homeless men talking outside a twenty-four-hour pharmacy. A few cars dotted the roads, but the Friday night bustle retreated behind locked doors and steel grates. I spotted another empty coffee shop, the third one in the last block, its doors barred with trash cans. Ridiculous barricade, but fear screwed weird ideas into people’s brains.

We passed a Catholic church with its doors thrown open and its bells ringing down the day, priests standing guard at the doors. Parishioners streamed inside. At least people heeded the lockdown, even if I wasn’t sure if a curfew would protect anyone from a murderous ghost.

Heading uphill, we bounced over trolley tracks and passed Victorian residences with grates barring their doors. Exhaustion tugged at my eyelids, but I knew the only recharge I’d be getting came in a twenty-four-ounce cup with an effing mermaid on it. I rested my good cheek on Ryder’s back. At the next stoplight, he turned his head and said, “Hey, there’s a first-aid kit in the saddlebag. You should ice your cheek.”

“It doesn’t hurt so bad.” But I lied. Dad hit like a jackhammer and broke more than blood vessels.

“Maybe not on the outside,” he said.

The light turned before I could answer him, and he’d never hear a word over the motorcycle’s throaty growl and the wind’s whip. I watched the city blur past, counting the hours we’d already used up, wondering if we’d find enough evidence at the hospital to track our ghost. If not, we could press Father Marlowe for every scrap of information he possessed, or even obtain an antimirror and ask another ghost for help. Worst case, we’d break into the forensics lab on the island and have Jude read a victim’s blood. I shuddered at the thought, but chalked it up to the cold wind digging its fingers into my skin and pulling on my ponytail. I would do what it took to survive.

More than anything, I needed a clue to the entity’s motive. Unlike the corporeal undead, ghosts weren’t often killers. They preferred to possess their victims, to slip in and steal lives rather than end them. So why the hospital, why the rampage? And maybe most importantly, why the soulchains? If I knew
why
the ghost wanted to kill, I could better predict its movements in the future, track it, and perhaps even use its motivations to make it slip up in a fight.

We rode for fifteen minutes before Golden Gate Park emerged from the fog, a tangle of shadows and foliage. Passing Stanyan Street—and St. Mary’s—we turned into the park. Ryder hung left, pulling off the road and riding over the grass until the vegetation swallowed us whole. He killed the engine when the hospital’s edge came into view.

I slid off the bike, taking in a breath of the eucalyptus trees’ spicy, earthen scent. We could stay here and monitor the hospital until Jude and Oliver arrived. Luckily, I didn’t see any Helsing vehicles in the vicinity, just hazmat vans and fire trucks, sprinkled with a couple of police vehicles. Both parking lots looked empty, though I couldn’t see the garage. Hopefully they’d evacuated the patients and were getting ready to abandon cleanup for the night. With the night lockdown, I doubted anyone would stay past full dark.

Stars clawed their way out of the reddened sky, and dusk already swirled and eddied around our feet. Ryder rummaged around in the bike’s bags and removed an ice pack, kneading it until it broke out in a sweat. He handed it to me, and I took it without complaint or comment. The cold dulled the ache in my cheek.

“Think they’ve figured out we’re missing yet?” I asked.

Ryder pulled out his phone and showed me the screen. My father’s name sat atop his Missed Calls list, right beside a
x21
. “What’s your damage?” Ryder asked.

I’d turned off my phone in the tunnel and hadn’t thought about it since. When I took it out and flipped it on, it buzzed for almost a full minute, downloading missed call after missed call.

“So?” he asked.

“Fifty-three missed calls, twelve messages.”
Dad’s probably getting angrier on each message
. A second later, my phone burred in my hand.

Dad.

I let it ring.

He hung up. Called again.

I turned off my phone.

Ryder shifted his weight. “We should tell the old man we’re okay—”

“We’re not okay,” I said, turning back to face the hospital.
We’re not even close to okay.
As I watched the hazmat team and the city coroners trickle out of the building with the last few body bags, Ryder came and stood so close I sensed the heat radiating off his skin—not strictly touching me, but stepping beyond our barrier again, getting braver.

“Hey now,” he said, putting an arm around my shoulders. “So long as we’re still fighting, everything’s just right.”

Tentatively, I reached out and put my arm around his waist, even laid my head on his shoulder. I wanted to believe him, but I knew I couldn’t until I’d beaten the soulchains under our skins.

“Am I right?” he asked me.

I nodded. “For now.”