Shutter (15 page)

Those were the painful, sucker-punching things. We found disgusting things, too. The fridge, for instance, hadn’t been emptied. Eighteen months with no power hadn’t been kind to Mom’s famous egg salad—I thought my insides would grow mold just from breathing in the stuff. We scrubbed the fridge clean and threw away everything in the pantry.

While Ryder stoked the furnace in the attic, I headed to the darkroom to develop my shots from St. Mary’s. Film might be an old-school medium, but it was the only one capable of containing spiritual energy. Digital cameras were honest-to-God useless against ghosts—not only did entities have a nasty habit of sucking lithium ion batteries dry, but their ghostlight had to be pressed into something more substantial than a memory card. Be it analog film or a silver mirror, a ghost’s energy needed a physical container of some sort, and digital cameras provided none. But fine-grain film, with its light-sensitive silver-halide salts, had a perfect retention rate, making a camera an optimal exorcism tool. Oliver even developed a film that was hypersensitive to violet light for me.

Beyond the basement door, a spiral staircase plunged down into darkness. Reaching up, I tugged on the pull chain for the lone, naked bulb. Dust chalked my palm as I gripped the handrail and took the stairs one by one. The whole place smelled like unwashed hair and dank earth, not like home.

Antimirrors crowded the basement walls—thirty or so regulation-size panes, edges gilded with light from the bulb upstairs. They reflected nothing else, darker even than the basement walls, dark as dead space. A pair of worktables held the other oddments of exorcism: antistatic mirror cases, power inverters and clamps to charge the panes, rubber gloves, and cans of rubber mirror sealant. Mom hadn’t stored her “virgin,” unused panes here—those were in a vault in one of the compound’s warehouses.

I stepped past the curtain separating the basement from my makeshift darkroom, tugging the chain for the safety bulb. Amber light oozed down the walls, coating the photographs of the hundred-odd exorcisms I’d completed before Mom’s death. They wallpapered every vertical surface—cinder block and cabinet alike—and hung like uneven teeth from drying lines. Some ghosts looked like many-limbed Hindu gods, shot several times on one piece of film. Others were violet slashes on a canvas of black. All beautiful, in a creepy kind of way, all of them mine.

Unlike antimirrors—which served as portals to the Obscura if left unsealed—photographs were a one-way trip, freezing and sealing away a ghost’s energy, no glass or rubber dip necessary. The process of capturing a ghost on film destroyed a ghost’s ties to the physical world, whittling down its energy bit by bit. In most cases, the more ghostlight I sealed away on film, the dimmer an entity became. I rarely needed more than three or four shots to exorcise a ghost. The better the shot, the more energy I captured, the faster my target deteriorated.

Catching the ghost on film wasn’t easy as point and click, though. Some entities moved like hummingbirds, more blur than body. Before Mom died, she’d been considering giving me a group of first-year academy tetros to train on cameras instead of mirrors. Most tetros used their mirrors like shields, so it took guts to exorcise with lens.

Working quickly, I prepped the developer chemical in the sink, praying it hadn’t expired, and turned off the safety light to spool the St. Mary’s film onto a reel. Strange, the film barely glowed with ghostlight. Pins needled the bottoms of my feet.

I slid the reel into the light-tight developer tank, turned on the safety light, and checked the chemical temperature. One hundred degrees, good, film was picky about temperature. I timed each move, dumping the chemical into the tank and agitating the film. Despite the routine, the pinprick sensation worked its way up my spine and nestled at the base of my skull, spurring me to move faster.

The final rinse took ten minutes. I paced, annoyed by the egg timer’s gradual tick. When it finally dinged, I removed the negative roll, stood on tiptoe, and clipped the film to a drying line. It uncurled like a serpent’s tongue, reaching down to taste the floor. Not bothering to set the weight clip, I grabbed a small flashlight from a desk drawer.

Maybe the entity’s shadowy miasma prevented its ghostlight from glowing on film?
I flicked on the flashlight to backlight the negatives. The inverted frames never made sense at first, and several images crowded one piece of film. A bit of the corpse with her slashed leg emerged, transposed under my point-blank, blurred Hail Mary shot of the entity’s cheek and jaw. A rind of violet glowed off the curve of the entity’s chin. A third image was taken in the hallway—the ghost’s form overlaying the darkness beyond, the boys’ flashlight beams shooting off at odd angles.

I’d barely caught any ghostlight at all.

My grip on my flashlight loosened, and it clattered to the floor and went out. The photographs didn’t make sense. My hands shook. I must have made a mistake, developed the film wrong, or perhaps my chemicals were expired? I checked the labels on the bottles, scattering supplies as I yanked jugs off the shelves and fumbled for dates. All good.

What if I couldn’t exorcise this thing? Oliver warned me, long ago, that if a ghost ever gained enough power to make the jump from violet to ultraviolet light, that my camera and film might not be sensitive enough to contain the energy. Could the white-violet light I’d seen be ultraviolet ghostlight? What if I failed to capture this monster and got more people killed?

The tremors from my hands spread until my body shook so hard, I sank back against the cabinets and to the floor. The pins in my spine pushed up and pricked my eyes. It’d been a long time since I felt so low, not since we buried Mom and the boys.

That night, I’d wandered the safe house in my black dress, lost. Dad stared at pictures of Mom for hours, chasing memories with whiskey. Cigarette butts slouched like tombstones in his ashtray. He never looked at me, never spoke to me. So I cracked open a couple of big Sharpies, bled the wells dry, and used the ink like hair dye. Everyone said I took after my mother, so I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror without seeing her, dead and alive.

I buried my face in my arms and rocked myself. Long minutes spiraled past, drawing me into a barren emotional space. I had nothing to cling to, except the vow that I wouldn’t fail my boys, not this time. Somehow, I’d find a way to trap our entity.

A light whistling pricked my ears. I lifted my head. Had I imagined it, or had Ryder passed by the basement door? He wasn’t much of a whistler.

There it was again—eerie notes rising through a minor key, almost like a low howl—coming from the antimirrors outside.
Did the basement light attract a spirit?

With a deep breath, I wiped my eyeliner-smudged tears away and pushed off the floor. Drawing the lightproof lead curtain back, I found the antimirrors lit from within, but dimly. The basement air sank into the darkroom, colder than before, and it smelled as ionized as an electrical storm.

Something’s loose.
I grasped my camera until I realized the mirrors’ surfaces gleamed, unbroken. Safe, or safe enough. With nerves like bowstrings taut and ready to fire, I stepped into the basement.

Nothing moved in the antimirrors. I couldn’t see much of the basement reflected in them, white-blue light crackling over the Obscura side of the mirrors.
That’s weird.
I crept closer. My skin bucked as a predatory gaze settled on me.

“You are shorter than I imagined, nymphet,” a male voice said.

I spun, but the antimirrors showed only shadows laced with fingers of lightning.

His laugh breathed up my back.
Behind.
I pivoted, but those mirrors were empty, too. My blood pounded in my extremities.

“Show yourself,” I said, turning, keeping my focus wide to catch movement in any of the mirrors.

“My, my. Are you frightened?” The voice curled around me, as though someone—no,
something
—circled me, raking me from head to toe with its eyes.

“I’m not afraid of you.” I fought to keep steady, straightening my shoulders and lifting my chin. A chuckle wound into my ears.

“How now, little Helsing?” he said. A figure appeared in the room’s center mirror, tall, straight-backed, and square-shouldered. Twenty-something, with bone structure that deserved to be carved in marble and hair the color of hardened lava.

“Hello, Micheline,” he said. My name sounded odd, wrapped in an accent I couldn’t name.
Russian, perhaps?
As I stepped into the halo of light cast by his mirror, I noticed he had a long scar dashed down one temple. He wore a long black coat adorned with a wolf fur ruff, black trousers, and boots. He held my gaze, unblinking.

“How do you know my name?” I asked.

One corner of his mouth turned up in a grin or snarl, I couldn’t decide, exposing the gums but not the teeth. “I’d recognize a Helsing anywhere.” He reached toward me. Ghostly fingers traced down my cheek, sucking the heat from my body. I drew back; his grin deepened.

How is he manifesting his energy on both sides of the antimirror?
I wondered, but cleared my throat. Badass reaper girls didn’t back down in front of the dead. “Pretty rude of you not to introduce yourself, then.”

He laughed, throwing his head back, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Call me Luca. At your service,”—he bowed, catching my eye as he rose—“and you will need my service.”

I narrowed my eyes. “What’s that mean?”

He cocked his head to the side, his gaze falling to my navel. My veins iced. I put a hand on my abdomen, covering the soulchains glowing through my shirt. Luca tutted, though he looked anything but sorry for me.

“What do you know about them?” I asked.

“Everything, if you are willing to pay the price,” he said, stepping forward and drawing little circles on the mirror with his index finger. Electricity danced off his fingertips. “Nothing if you are not.”

The electricity … he can charge an antimirror on his own?
If so, only a thin layer of glass separated me from a predator, from a ghost whose voice possessed a shape and weight in the physical world. One little shock to an unsealed antimirror, and a ghost like Luca could step through the pane like a doorway.

I backed away.

“Skeptical, are you?” Luca said, cocking his head. “If I were the one responsible for your chains, why would I offer my assistance in breaking them? Don’t you think I’d want to”—he eyed me up and down—“
keep
you?”

“It could be a way to throw me off track,” I said. “My mother told me that nothing good comes out of an antimirror, so I don’t see why I should trust a ghost who knows my name.”

“Then to prove my good intentions, I will answer a question about your soulchains, gratis.” He beckoned me close. When I hesitated, he lifted a brow. Turning, he stepped out of one mirror and into the next. Watching me. Circling. “All predators must know how to hunt their prey.”

Don’t trust him
, I told myself. Something about his smile seemed off, too tight and without any teeth, familiar and foreign all at once. Yet I had no leads, no way to track my entity. Even if Oliver hacked Investigations’s servers and located the St. Mary’s case, I had no assurance he’d find anything useful. With no psychological profile on the ghost, no motive beyond seeing the boys and me dead, and only one known haunting, I had no way of triangulating the entity’s location; however, negotiating with a ghost as powerful as Luca brought me to the edge of my ethical code.

Helsing doesn’t bargain with the dead.

Did I have a better option?

How many rules will you break to win?
I asked myself.

Six days. My soulchain already had enough links to wrap around my waist once.

If he’s right …

I caught myself chewing on the side of my fingernail again, made a face, and dropped my hand.

“What will it be?” Luca asked.

So be it.
Nobody else would die on my watch. “Why help me?” I asked, stepping toward him.

“It entertains me. Ask your question.”

He’d baited me, and we both knew it. “Can I break the soulchain by exorcising my entity?”

“Yes.” But Luca’s voice lilted on the edge of the word, toying, teasing, as if such a simple phrase contained a multiplicity of meanings. He leaned down, almost as if he could slip through the mirror and kiss my cheek. The air stirred by my ear. I gritted my teeth so as not to flinch. “Would you also like to know how to find him?”

My breath caught; I couldn’t bottle it back. Luca smiled wider.

“Ask for my help, nymphet,” he crooned.

“Tell me how to track my ghost.”

“Say
please
.”

My lip lifted in a snarl. “Tell me how to track my ghost … please.”

A smile slicked his face. “You will be able to track your captor using a Ouija planchette and a map of the city.”

“I don’t believe in Ouija.”

He chuckled, and ghostly fingers danced up my arm. I rubbed off the sensation. “Try it, little huntress, then return to me.”

With a wicked grin, he vanished, taking the light in the room with him.

“That’s your answer?” I yelled at the dark mirrors. “A Ouija board?”

Another chuckle wound between my legs, cat-like, languorous. I kicked at the sensation and took the basement stairs two by two, not even bothering to turn off the light. Once closed, I put my back to the basement door and shut my eyes, crossing myself and counting backward from ten.

The front steps creaked, followed by a set of heavy footfalls in the foyer. “You feeling okay, Princess?” Jude asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Funny,” I said, in no mood to spar with him. No way could I tell the boys about Luca—if
I
didn’t trust him, Ryder definitely wouldn’t. No doubt the boys would question the Ouija board, too, but what the hell? We didn’t have any other leads.

In the kitchen, I found Oliver unpacking shopping bags. Fluffy plastic clouds held more food than we’d eat in three weeks, even with boy-size appetites. I counted at least seven boxes of cold cereal in the bags, a stack of salsa containers, corn chips, energy bars, and two liters of soda with multicolored labels. They bought the things on my list, too—pita bread, goat cheese, avocados, Greek yogurt. Lots of good coffee. I’d probably end up feeding them all by default, or else they’d nosh on processed crap for a week. Particularly Ryder, who loved junk food the way he loved rules, his motorcycle, and reaping.