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The timer finally chimed. I yanked the cord on my safety light, holding in a sigh of relief. I didn’t want Luca to see me scared, especially not of him.

I clipped the developed film to the drying line and unrolled it, careful not to touch the important parts. It’d be hours before it dried, so I attached a weight clip to the bottom. I’d spread the shots out over several frames tonight, so a few of the frames glowed with ghostlight. Rifling through cupboards, I found a flashlight and dimmed it with a piece of cheesecloth, intending to soften the beam and illuminate the negatives.

The first few shots showed the empty auditorium, inverted in ghostly white on black.

But then,
then—

My breath caught. A figure appeared in the next shot, transposed against the window, a haze of violet in the negative whiteness of the frame. The ghost’s features blurred, which wasn’t unusual in combat. With high apertures, low light values, and fast film speeds, I aimed for ghostlight containment, not focus. Yet the most remarkable thing about the shot was the explosion of ghostlit sparks over window glass, as though the window wanted to absorb the ghost like a reaping pane.

“Wow,” I whispered, peering at the film. I’d never seen anything like it before, sparks flying over glass, captured on film. Far as I could figure, the reflective windows must have acted like reaping mirrors and amplified the sensitivity of my shot, allowing me to capture a greater concentration of the entity’s ghostlight.

A little laugh escaped my lips. By combining two methods of exorcism—the reaping pane with the camera’s lens—I could contain the ghostlight of a hyper-resistant entity.
See, Luca? I can bring this monster down by myself
. I didn’t dare say the words aloud, not wanting to taunt him more.

But how can I duplicate the fight conditions at the PacBell Building?

Footsteps echoed on the stairs. “Micheline?” Ryder called. “Are you down here?”

The room’s pressure shifted, the air whooshing past my cheek.
Luca
. Throwing the light-tight curtain back, I stepped out and almost right into Ryder.

“Hey,” he said, catching me. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” I said, scanning the basement’s antimirrors, wondering if Luca would appear in their blackened faces.
There.
A blue spark in the shadows, a little to my left and behind. The weight of Luca’s gaze settled on me, heavy as a lead drape. Ryder followed my gaze, and Luca’s light melted away into the mirrors’ obsidian faces.

Ryder rubbed a palm up and down my arm. “You’re freezing cold,” he said.

“It’s just the soulchains,” I said. Ryder would freak out if he knew I’d been talking to a ghost, especially one who touched me like I was something to be owned, possessed, used. Maybe the anxiety of such a discovery flickered across my face, because Ryder pressed a kiss into my forehead. Before he pulled back, a ghostly finger trailed down my spine and traced little circles on the small of my back.

I shuddered—sandwiched between life and death—unable to call out Luca on his behavior. Ryder could
not
know about Luca … and I worried about Luca being so keenly aware of Ryder and his affection for me. The thought drove a stake into my chest. How much did I betray Ryder, not telling him about the danger lurking beyond the antimirrors?

The problem with a cross is …

“What was that?” Ryder asked, turning and looking at the mirrors. He couldn’t know danger stood right behind me, that the fingers crawling up my spine belonged to a creature burned and blackened by holiness.

“It’s just the mirrors,” I whispered, turning his face back to mine with a finger. “Something weird happened at the PacBell tonight—reflective surfaces can strengthen my shots, and maybe help me capture more ghostlight with each photograph. I think if you guys carry some sort of reaping panes, we can work out a system to trap the ghost between my lens and your mirrors.”

The warmth in Ryder’s eyes took on a different texture, one that poured liquid sunlight into an old, disused well in my soul. Dad used to look at me like that, back when I was his bulletproof golden girl. Back before he could be proud of me without taking a hit to his ego.

“Brilliant, yeah, we can do that,” Ryder said, slipping his hand in mine. “I can rig us a couple of modifications for the standard carrying cases, make them safer for us to use, hey?”

“How long will that take?”

He shrugged. “Couple hours, if we can find everything we need. Do you have any new reaping mirrors?”

“They didn’t remove all the stock from the warehouses,” I said. “We can try there.”

“Sounds good,” he said, tugging on my hand. “C’mon, it’s bloody freezing down here, and Ollie’s got something on Investigations.”

Ryder led me up the basement stairs, the warmth of his hand carbonating my blood. I turned out the light when we reached the top, bathing us both in pure blackness. Weak threads of ghostlight ringed three-quarters of his neck like a limp noose, grating against his Adam’s apple and draping down his back. The sight knocked my blood flat. Did he sense the chains as keenly as I did, like grinders against his guts and bones? Did he feel his breath hitch when the chains shifted?

“Where’s the rosary Father Marlowe gave you?” I asked him, unable to look away from those chains.

“Upstairs with my stuff,” Ryder replied. “Why?”

I sucked in a breath. “I want you to wear it. Don’t take it off, not even for a second.” Luca’s voice threaded into my mind:
If you’re lucky … it will keep your captor from possessing your body like a puppeteer taking up his pawn.
“The other boys, too. Never, ever take them off. Not till we beat this monster.”

Ryder nodded, sober and confident in me as always. As he stepped from the basement, I caught the glint of a snicker, then a whisper, calling me back to the darkness:

“The problem with a cross is…”

I didn’t turn around.

I was done taking Luca’s bait.

SATURDAY, 6:22 P.M.

“F
ORENSICS BOTCHED THE INVESTIGATION.”
Oliver paced in the family room, his laptop open on the coffee table and connected to his Wi-Fi-enabled phone. “St. Mary’s still records their security footage on VHS tapes, and one of our techs erased the three hours of footage leading up to the attack. Idiots.” He jammed both his hands into his hair in frustration.

“VHS predates the dinosaurs,” Jude said, propping his boots up on the table and leaning back into the couch. He had two sweatshirts on, their blue and black hoods pulled up over his head. I wondered if the soulchains’ chill affected him, too. Even Ryder had a long-sleeved shirt on—uncharacteristic of him.

Jude yawned. “What’d you expect, Einstein?”

“Results,” Oliver shot back. “Answers.”

“I’m surprised we even had the equipment to play a VHS tape,” I said, sinking down on the couch. Oliver’s laptop showed a background picture of Thomas Morley, head of Investigations, surrounded by a gaggle of kids and his haggard-looking wife. Files pimpled the screen, folders marked with different, recent case names, including one named
ST. MARY’S GHOST
. Oliver’s ability to hack computers this precisely was either insanely cool or incredibly creepy—he must’ve set up some kind of remote desktop connection to Morley’s computer.

“We have everything,” Oliver said, running his hand over his face. “I’m sure Archives could find you a phonograph, if you—”

“You lost me at Archives,” Jude said, tapping keys on his phone.

“Point being”—Oliver rolled his eyes—“that thanks to Investigations, we don’t know who’s responsible for smashing the antimirror at St. Mary’s. How are we supposed to prosecute without video evidence?”

“If you can find a guy to prosecute,” Ryder said, sitting on the couch beside me.

“
If
,” Oliver echoed.

I tapped into the St. Mary’s case file and scanned its contents, drawn to a folder labeled
PHOTOS
. Inside, I found hundreds of photos of the victims photographed from different angles. Washed out and overexposed in Investigations’s cheap flashes, the violence looked B-movie-set ready: the blood made from corn syrup, the shredded flesh no more than torn latex, and the victims just actors on “corpse duty” for the day.

Oliver continued to pace: “Investigations makes too many mistakes. My father has been trying to discharge Morley for years; the department’s a disgrace.”

“He sure didn’t find whoever killed my mom,” I said, clicking past photo after photo. Thanks to the six-month-long examination of the incident surrounding my mother’s and brothers’ deaths, I’d gotten to know the reapers working Helsing’s Investigations and Forensics teams. One picture I blew by had Lieutenant Martha Scully in it; she’d been the one to profile and capture a “necro copycat” serial killer in Phoenix a few years back. Her kid gave me a teddy bear at Mom’s funeral. Paul Skinner—one of our medical examiners—showed up in another shot, crouched over a dead girl’s body. He pointed a gloved finger at the Lichtenberg burns branching up her severed wrist.

“Exactly,” Oliver said. “They mishandled several items of trace evidence in the Alexa Helsing case…”

Oliver kept talking, but I shut off his rant in my head. I couldn’t bear to think the person who infected my mother with paranecrosis hadn’t been caught. To think my mother and brothers hadn’t received justice tinged my whole world red. Somehow, someway, I’d find their killer.

When I did, God have mercy. I sure as hell wouldn’t.

None of Morley’s photos showed anything I hadn’t seen at the hospital. When I downsized the window, I glanced at the trash bin in the upper-left-hand corner of Morley’s screen, then clicked it on a whim.

More photos. I narrowed my eyes and started to click through the thumbnails. Most were bad shots with improper lighting, a few were blurred. But one photo snagged my attention—a candid image of crosses hanging in a hospital room window.
That’s the room where I found exorcism glass in the bathroom.
It also caught a forensics tech carrying a spiny garbage sack. He must’ve been a new hire—I didn’t recognize him.

“Hey, Oliver,” I said, cutting him off mid-rant and turning the laptop so he could see the screen. “Who’s this?”

He blinked, the only beat he needed for his brain to switch tracks. “That’s Reynold Fielding, one of two morons responsible for accidentally erasing the security tapes. He’s a newer tech, hired in the last six months or so. Why?”

“
Reynold Fielding
cleaned out the hospital bathroom we found the antimirror glass in,” I said. Oliver’s face took on a solid cast, cool and impassive as granite.

Ryder leaned forward to turn the laptop around. “Never seen the bloke before.”

“I think I have,” Jude said, staring at the screen. He tossed his cell phone on the table and grabbed the laptop, tilting the screen toward him. “Yeah, yeah. He was in the vision I had at the hospital, before everything went to hell. Wasn’t in his blacks then, so I didn’t recognize him for one of ours.”

“Do you think Morley’s trying to cover for him?” I asked, and the boys’ silence made my stomach twist. I rose from the couch. “I want to know everything there is to know about both Morley and Fielding—their backgrounds, work histories, and how many generations their families have been employed by Helsing. If Fielding so much as sneezed in St. Mary’s prior to the attack, I want to know about it.”

“I’ll need a hardwired terminal with access to HR’s intranet files to retrieve that information,” Oliver said. “We don’t store personnel dossiers in our cloud.”

“Are any of the computers here at the Presidio still hooked up to the intranet?” I asked.

“No, but Dr. Stone’s home computers can access the corps’s intranet, as he oversees medical staffing. Gemma will sneak me in.” Oliver looked to Jude. “Can I borrow your keys?”

“Hell no,” Jude said, still absorbed in Fielding’s picture. “Nobody drives my truck but my
numero uno
.”

I ignored Jude. “Oliver, the Stones will report you to the corps.”

“Not if they don’t know I’m there,” Oliver said, taking out his phone and starting a text message. “Will you at least drop me off,
numero uno
?”

Jude sighed, swiping his cell phone off the table. “You’ll have to hitch a ride back with your little ice queen. I’m not making two trips.”

Oliver rolled his eyes and gathered his things. Ryder and I followed them to the door. In the foyer’s darkness, I checked Oliver’s soulchain—it winched tight around his chest but no higher. Jude still had two hoodies on, hiding the light from his chains. I wondered if he sensed them more keenly than the others, thanks to his abilities.

“Before you go,” I said. “I want you guys to wear the rosaries Father Marlowe gave you.”

“Sorry, Princess, but religious iconography’s not my style,” Jude said.

“I don’t care about your style,” I replied. “I care about keeping you from getting possessed by the entity and used as a weapon against us.”

Jude and Ryder exchanged a look; Oliver’s brows rose. “You know I respect your faith, Micheline,” he said. “But there’s no way a necklace made of wood could ward off a possession.”

“Just do it,” I said.

“Seriously—”

“Don’t make me turn it into an order, Oliver.”

Oliver’s brows peaked higher, and he held my gaze as our wills duked it out. After several tight moments, he broke it off, chuckling to himself. “Very well.”

I waited by the door until the boys returned, rosaries circling around their necks. Ryder’s collar of chains retreated, too. A bit of the tension slipped out of my shoulders.

“Happy?” Jude asked me, tucking his cross into his hoodie.

“And you haven’t even been hit by lightning,” I said, grinning.

He snorted. “Give me two hours, a girl in a little white tank top, and a six-pack. That’ll change the good Lord’s mind.”

Oliver passed me by without a word. I hated pulling the Helsing card on him—it was a dirty move and we both knew it—his family had almost as much claim to the corps as the Helsings did. Still, I knew I wouldn’t have won the battle any other way, not with Oliver.