Shutter (2 page)

“Good hell,” Ryder muttered.

I glanced through the back window, spotting Jude Drake at the wheel, mid-yawn. For growing up so posh, the guy had no manners and even less chivalry, but his laissez-faire approach to everything from reaping to girls played in my favor tonight. We’d been eating lunch at a deli in North Beach when I’d gotten Marlowe’s panicked call, and Jude said
let’s go
before I hung up.

If I wanted to do something that wasn’t quite legit, Jude was game. Break into Dad’s office to clean up our personnel dossiers?
Done
. Switch out the orchestra’s music at the Christmas ball and pay off the conductor so they’d play “Stairway to Heaven”?
Of course
. Help me escape the penthouse to shoot cans under the Golden Gate Bridge at dawn?
Hells yeah
.

Oliver Stoker rode shotgun, his fine, aristocratic features lit by the glow of his tablet computer. Born three months and ten days apart, Oliver and I would be together from cradle to coffin, just like our fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers had been. The Helsings and Stokers had more than a hundred years of history together, two of the great reaper families who allied in the year of 1893 against Dracula’s threat. Van Helsing led the charge against the vampire, and Bram Stoker collected and edited the crew’s letters, memorandums, and diary entries. Their camaraderie echoed through the generations and bound Oliver and me together the way our fathers were bound together—in bonds of unshakable friendship.

The Helsings remained the hunters, the Stokers the historians. Nowadays, my family’s role extended to the executive leadership, the day-to-day administration, and training of the corps. The Stokers kept our reapers alive via research and development in weaponry, equipment, and medicine—a burden once shared by the Seward family, may they rest in peace.

Oliver and I designed my camera’s technology together, after he’d taken apart an old Nikon and realized it had a tiny mirror inside. We nearly wound up dead the first time we tried to exorcise a ghost—the average glass lens worked as an insulator against their electrical energy. Every once in a while, I’d catch Oliver looking at one of my quartz lenses and chuckling, remembering.

“It’s a hospital, Ollie,” Ryder said. “They’ve got to have emergency generators.”

Oliver placed a finger on his comm. “Their servers are down, so I can’t access their network to check on the building’s status. The breakers are likely blown.”

If the entity consumed enough power to surge the breakers, no wonder Marlowe’s men hadn’t survived. Ghosts were charged, electrical beings that absorbed energy from the space around them. Weak ones were shivery spots and a prickle against the skin; strong ones were surging storms. It took an incredible amount of energy for a ghost to open a portal into the living world—or in some cases, luck. Once a ghost existed on this plane, it had to consume enough energy to maintain its presence here. With the breakers blown in a six-story building, the ghost upstairs could probably bench-press our Humvee by now. Or maybe rip it in half.

“Can we connect their security systems to the generators mounted on the Humvees?” Ryder asked.

Oliver’s brows rose. After a moment, he came back on: “Logistically, no. I need to restore power to their servers on the sixth floor—”

Thank God for logistics
. I wanted the boys blind to my movements.

“—But I’m running the GPS and radar diagnostic on the hospital now,” Oliver continued. “The satellite scan is being blocked by an electrical disturbance inside the building.”

So the boys wouldn’t be able to track me via the security cameras or GPS.
Perfect
. I didn’t need Oliver’s technology and toys to track a ghost. My eyes worked better than any GPS unit.

A shadow shifted in one windowpane. A coal-colored figure disappeared from sight. I narrowed my eyes, wondering if I’d been mistaken. Nobody could have survived up there, unless …

Unless the person standing in the window wasn’t alive.

My heart kicked. Ryder was looking out his driver’s side window, giving instructions to Oliver.
Now.

I grabbed my camera’s monopod off the backseat, kicked my door open, and leapt out as Ryder shouted at my back. I slid into the crowd.

Alone.

THURSDAY, 10:58 P.M.

R
YDER’S VOICE BURST THROUGH
my comm: “Micheline!”

I sliced between a nurse and her patient, nearly tripping into the doctor behind them. People shouted at me. I spun left, not breaking my pace. The people packed so close it was like trying to run through a mosh pit.

“What’s wrong?” Oliver asked.

“She jumped out of the damn truck,” Ryder said. “Get back here, Micheline.” His voice thundered through my body, and I knew he meant
don’t you go in without me
. The short note of desperation in his tone hooked my heart and nearly pulled me back—it wasn’t an emotion I’d ever heard from him. I ignored it, as the boys would need to search three empty floors before they found me on the fourth. They would be safe, or as safe as reapers could be.

“Just do us a favor—don’t die,” Jude said. “Our asses are on the line if something happens to you, Princess.” He knew I hated the nickname on both pride and principle.

I settled into a jog and wove between people. “Ten bucks says I have the ghost exorcised before you can find me.”

“Not funny,” Ryder said. Well, humor was a superfluous talent in a family bred for killer instincts and courage.

“Make it fifty and you’ve got a deal,” Jude said.

“Fifty it is.” I glanced right, left, and realized I’d come to the hospital’s eastern edge. Shrader Street and its blocky, vomit-colored Victorians stood dead ahead. To my right, patients and orderlies pushed out of the fire escape. Fighting my way past the evacuees, I pressed into the building, dodging people’s shoulders and elbows. I hated being short. There were nights I wouldn’t mind standing six foot three and broad shouldered, like Ryder. Tonight made the list.

The stairwell’s windows shed enough light to see by. People moved aside as I headed up, warning me with quiet calls of “Miss?” I rounded the first landing without answering them. The Helsing emblem stitched on my left breast should’ve quieted their concerns.

“Track her comm position, Ollie,” Ryder said. Watery voices echoed in the background, which meant Ryder hunted me in the crowd.

“I need a minute,” Oliver said. “The GPS isn’t cooperating.”

“Get it cooperating.”

Sorry, boys, you’ll have to find me the old-fashioned way.
I clicked my comm off, sidling past an orderly carrying a young patient downstairs. The girl couldn’t have been much older than eight and wore a knit cap on her head. If I didn’t want her to spend a night in the cold, I had to stop the entity. These people deserved their safety.

Focus
. The boys would canvass the first couple floors in minutes—three if they broke the rules and split up, nine if they didn’t, and Ryder wouldn’t ignore code twice. With luck, the rescue workers and survivors wouldn’t be certain which floor the entity haunted. So I ran, skidding around the third landing and leaping up the stairs two by two. Nine minutes. With luck.

The crowd thinned out. The stairwell to the fifth and sixth stories was silent; bloody fingerprints wrapped around the door to the fourth floor. Adrenaline sawed off the edge of my fear, and the cocktail of the two turned my senses wolfish.
Think like a predator,
Dad’s voice whispered to me
, never the prey.

I unholstered my camera and coupled it to my monopod. Most tetros trapped a ghost’s energy using charged silver panes, which were later dipped in insulating glass to keep the ghost from escaping back into the living world. I preferred to play offense, and my methodology of using cameras and analog film was maverick. I imprisoned ghostlight using a technique known as shutter drag, which required me to shoot a ghost several times on one frame of film. High-powered quartz lenses allowed me to capture light effectively, as quartz conducted a ghost’s electricity and had a high sensitivity to fast-moving violet light. Most ghosts succumbed in a few photographs, their energy whittled down shot by shot and sealed into film’s silver halide trap.

Helsing Research and Development optimized my flashes to slam ghosts with flares of ionized light, which broke down the electrons in the air and turned my camera into a lightning rod for ghostly energy. Lastly, my monopod steadied my hand and became a melee weapon in a pinch—Ryder had rigged a push-button knife inside the monopod’s base.

My camera empowered me. Unlike our mirror-wielding tetros, I never screwed up a hunt.

Here goes.
I leaned on the door lever, spilling limp light into the hallway beyond. Snatches of a lullaby wafted out, pebbling my skin with gooseflesh. I trembled, pushing away memories of Mom singing to my little brothers. I didn’t want to remember them, not now.

I started forward, holding my camera like a gun. A bloody taint corroded the air and burned in my lungs. Inside the rooms, wreckage. Equipment made venomous shapes in the darkness. Divider curtains hung in shreds from broken tracks. When I looked harder, I saw a woman slumped on her bed, shrouded and splattered in shadows. A girl about my age lay outside her door, unmoving. Blood gelled on the floor under her. As I got closer, I almost lost courage—the girl’s hands were dismembered at the wrist, her eyes gouged, teeth torn out and scattered.

I’d seen dead people before. Lots of them, in fact. But I’d never seen such careful murder from a ghost.

Across the hall, a man’s severed hand lay on the floor, clutching a rosary. The sight sucker-punched me and turned my world sideways. The hallway’s walls seemed to press closer.
Breathe
.
In through the nose
. I sucked down air as though the pressure outside my body would collapse my empty lungs.
Out through the mouth.

The lullaby grew louder as I headed deeper, a woman’s voice ringing down the hall. The tune sounded like “Rock-a-bye, Baby” but the lyrics were off:

“Hand for a hand, and tooth for a tooth—”

The knot in my stomach drew tight and I glanced back, sensing a trap.

“Chain down the souls of Abraham’s youth.”

Up ahead, a pair of double doors hung open, the letters
NURS
stamped on the one closest to me. I could handle dead adults, but dead infants?

“Eye for an eye, and life for a life—”

Inside the nursery, rust-stained blankets twisted over busted equipment. Shadows sliced the room into sections, light bleeding from the gallery windows. A woman in teddy-bear-print scrubs sat on the floor, her back to me, hugging her knees and rocking herself back and forth. The whole room crackled with ozone, smelling of electricity and ghastly energy.

“Down stabs vengeance, swift as a knife,” she warbled.

If I could see her eyes, I’d know if she was dead or alive, possessed or otherwise. Ghosts could hide in human flesh, but their presence made the body’s irises glow. I couldn’t damage the body if the woman still lived; but if she was dead, all bets were off.

I stepped inside. Her song trailed away, strangled into a silence that howled in my ears. So much for surprise. The woman turned her head, fixing a glowing eye on my face. Violet sinews twitched inside the hole gouged in her cheek.

Dead.

“Hello, Micheline.” The corpse’s lips sputtered the syllables of my name. My muscles locked up—
how could she, she shouldn’t—

A smile cut her corpse-face open. She spun and lunged for me, grabbing my leg. Her nails bit into my calf, triggering bursts of adrenaline in my fingers and toes. I twisted my leg and wrenched out of her grip, then drove my heel into her cheekbone. Her head snapped sideways. She didn’t cry out like a living person would’ve; dead nerves didn’t sense pain. I kicked her again, rotating my hips, sending her sprawling.

Recovering, she pressed up to her palms and scuttled sideways. Her cross-eyed gaze latched on me, eyes glowing like black lightbulbs behind a hunk of hair.

“I don’t have time for games,” I said, releasing the knife in my monopod’s base. My voice sounded braver than I felt—that was my training talking, because I’d started to think I’d been stupid to come alone. “Come out or I cut you out.”

She rose up on the balls of her feet, jerking like a marionette controlled by a drunken puppeteer. Disjointed. I could cut the tendons in her knees and destroy her mobility, or disable her arms. Force the entity to abandon ship, so to speak.

She staggered a step, found her balance, and charged.

Instinct fired pistons in my brain. Sidestepping her, I swept my knife down and stabbed her in the knee. The blade glanced off bone, slicing through a tendon. Her leg crumpled. She stumbled and smashed into the fallen equipment, getting tangled in a mess of IV lines. I slammed my monopod’s base into the floor, sheathed the knife, and aimed my camera at the visible ghostlight in the knee.

I hit the shutter, the lens blinking, world blackening. The shot’s electricity transfer hummed against my fingers, about as strong a shock as a toy buzzer’s. I’d captured almost nothing, but the entity still hissed through the woman’s lips.

When the shutter opened, the corpse sagged. Her skin split, unzipping the crown of her head and rupturing the base of her neck. Black veins laced her flesh. An oil-dark mist gushed from the wounds, staining her clothing, drawing a dark line where her spine pressed against her shirt.

What the—

I took a step back, arms quivering as I kept the monster in my crosshairs. The corpse writhed, flesh rending, bones cracking. A ghostlit hand punched out the woman’s side. Heavy droplets struck my skin. My stomach barrel-rolled, and I suppressed the instinct to drop my lens and shuck the gore off me.

The shadows spiraled up, concealing both the entity and its host from view. I’d never seen a ghost rip itself from a corpse nor swathe itself in shadow.

The empty corpse hit the floor, the mists roiling. The ghost extended a flickering fist toward me, opened its fingers, and dropped a handful of teeth to the ground. They tracked blood on the floor and rebounded off my boot, making
ping
s on the linoleum that rattled in the roots of my molars.