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“You lot better be careful,” Ryder said, sticking his hands in his pockets.

“And don’t get caught,” I added.

“Yes, Mother,” Oliver said, not kindly.

Jude made a
wonk-wonk
sound, smirking at me.
Whatever
. So long as they kept their rosaries on, I’d take their trash talk.

Ryder and I followed them outside, lingering on the porch. Nighttime cold soaked into my shirt and skin. The fog bubbled over the lawns, turning the clearing into a cauldron. I watched for brilliant, little-boy-shaped ghosts, but the night only gave me a jagged, black crust of trees set against a murky sky. Silent, save for the crash of surf, the faraway honk of horns on the Golden Gate Bridge, and Jude’s truck rumbling awake.

We waited until the truck’s taillights disappeared down the road and into the trees.

“What now?” Ryder said.

“You up for that D-I-Y modification project you promised me?” I asked.

Ryder grinned. Nobody could repurpose old junk like he could—he looked at raw materials and saw parts of a larger whole, knowing where and how to cut, or how to reassemble things to make them perform. He was the kind of guy you wanted around if a paranecrotic holocaust ever hit: good with his hands, good with a gun, and cool under siege.

“Let’s get to work,” he said, rubbing his palms together.

*   *   *

R
YDER AND
I
FOUND
some of the things on his list at the house—the standard reaping pane cases in the basement, an arthritic sewing machine and findings (zippers, pins, and thread) in the attic, and wooden boards to add rigidity to the existing cases in Dad’s shed. All we needed was enough antistatic fabric to add front panels on the cases, and unused, virgin reaping panes.

“We probably have bolts of Gore-Tex out in warehouse two,” I said as we walked back to the house from the shed, wooden boards and a crowbar in tow. The antistatic envelopes and cases used to store antimirrors were made from specially treated Gore-Tex, which was difficult to rip and wouldn’t conduct electricity.

“That’s a bit of a walk,” he said, then cleared the night’s cold out of his throat. “Bloody freezing out here.”

“You, cold?” I lifted a brow, then remembered Jude in his double-hoodies. We all suffered from the soulchains’ grave-deep chill, and it infected our flesh, bones, and blood and gave us no respite or quarter. “I know it’s against your macho code, but I still have your jacket in my room.”

“I’m not too macho to wear a jacket,” he said, setting the boards on the back porch. “Not while I’ve got a ghost riding my arse.”

I fetched his jacket from my room—supple, doe-soft black leather lined with shearling. He wore it so infrequently it looked new. We grabbed his motorcycle and headed for the southern part of the compound.

When the corps cleared out of the Presidio, we left the bulk of our storage warehouses intact. The massive concrete buildings were used for storing everything from weapons to the
iceboxes
—units for necros with their frontal lobes or spinal cords removed, kept for scientific study.

Ryder and I approached the main entrance to warehouse two, tetro storage and archives. With no compunction, he thrust a crowbar between the double doors and yanked on the bar like an Olympic rower would an oar, cracking them open.

“She’s easy,” he said, winking at me.

“For you, maybe,” I said, thinking I’d never bust open a door with so little effort.

The warehouse contained miles of shelving. Foggy light limned everything, from the massive shelving units to the cellophane-wrapped mounds of supplies. We didn’t bother with the lights—Oliver warned us a spike in the Presidio compound’s energy consumption might alert someone back at HQ to our location.

Directional signs pointed down aisles, their signs announcing
JUMPER KITS
or
RUBBERIZED GEAR
or
EASEL STANDS
, anything a tetro might need to hunt the dead. Rather than expend manpower to move everything to Angel Island, Dad opted to replace most items in storage. Our vendors shipped for free, and Dad figured the costs of packing and freighting everything to the new compound would be roughly equivalent to replacing everything. Honestly, I think he just wanted out of the Presidio, no matter the cost.

Ryder tapped a knuckle on my arm, using his flashlight to point out a sign marked
ANTISTATIC MATERIALS
. “We’ll find the extra fabric we need over there, hey? Not sure about your reaping panes, though.”

“They’ll be locked up in a vault.” I turned the corner of the antistatic aisle. “Let’s find the stuff you need first.”

I searched for the fabric among the shelf talkers, digging past boxes full of rubber gloves and crates of supplies, hunting for the rubber-coated Gore-Tex used to insulate reaping panes. After ten minutes of hunting, Ryder called for me. He’d climbed up on one of the seven-foot shelves, and had his flashlight aimed at a rack of bolts of black material.

“This it?” he asked, handing one of the bolts down. The thick fabric felt sticky to the touch on one side and woolen on the other, kind of like a rain slicker might.

“You got it.” I blew a layer of dust off the fabric.

He plucked another bolt off the rack and jumped down from the shelf. We headed toward the end of the aisle. “So where’s this vault going to be?” Ryder asked, pointing his flashlight down the main walkway.

“I’d guess in a basement,” I said, looking both ways at the intersection of lanes. “The whole vault would be grounded against electric surges, just to be sure.” Helsing stored reaping panes in vaults for several reasons: firstly, the silver used to manufacture the panes was valuable. Panes not sealed in glass were melted down, the gateway to the Obscura destroyed in the flame of a silversmith’s crucible, the metal recycled.

Secondly, if panes weren’t stored properly, ghosts capable of creating their own electrical fields crept through, entities like Luca, or ones like the starveling we now hunted. Strange to think a fragile shield of glass protected the world from so many terrors.

Thirdly, silver mirrors were outlawed in the United States—all household mirrors were backed with aluminum or mercury—so storing the mirrors in vaults allowed Helsing to control access to them.

We wandered the warehouse, sweeping the floors and walls with our flashlights. There were no directional signs to the vault—I wished I’d taken Mom up on her offer to tour the place. I’d been stupid to take her for granted, to take my family for granted, to take happiness for granted. Back then, I don’t think I could’ve defined
happy
if I’d tried, because I’d never been anything but. Looking back through the lens of this new life, I knew happiness was made up of three things: physical security, social and academic acceptance, and the love of one’s family and friends.

Right now, I had zero-point-five of those things, lucky at least to have my friends. If I couldn’t beat this monster, I wouldn’t have them for much longer.

After searching for almost ten minutes, Ryder and I found doors marked
ANTISTATIC STORAGE
in blocky letters. A large compliance sign glowered,
ELECTRICALLY CLASSIFIED AREA, CLASS I, DIVISION I—NO ELECTRONIC DEVICES PERMITTED BEYOND THIS POINT.

“That include our flashlights?” Ryder asked.

“And phones, too.” I turned off my flashlight and set it beside the door, along with my cell phone. “We’ll just grab and go. We can turn on the safety lights downstairs for a few minutes without attracting Helsing’s attention.”

“And your camera?”

“I don’t know about you”—I opened the door to the basement—“but I’m not walking into a room full of silver mirrors unarmed. Besides, its power output’s minimal without the flash.”

“Fair enough.” Ryder held the door as I slipped inside and flicked on the lights. Two sets of sliding glass doors lay before us, both etched with the Helsing insignia. The first set of doors opened as I approached, allowing me into some sort of anteroom with a sleek desk, thin computer, and a two-year-old blotter calendar with notes written in a feminine hand. Mom’s name was logged among the visitors on the night she died, which made my next heartbeat feel like a spike to the chest. I ripped the page off the calendar, folded it, and stuck it in my back pocket.

When I turned around, Ryder snapped an antistatic bootie at me, hitting me in the chest. “Think fast, Helsing,” he said with a grin.

I snatched it before it fell to the floor. The booties stuck out from wall dispensers like blue Kleenexes behind him.

I smirked at him and threw it back at his head, but the light, airy fabric opened like a parachute and wafted to the floor. “Don’t think you have to make up for Jude’s absence.”

“That bastard wouldn’t have fired just one.” He grinned and tugged me into his arms, our noses bumping. But before his lips touched mine, the lights buckled and went out. Ryder’s arms tensed. My other senses kicked up a notch, my hearing especially. No sound eked toward us and the room’s temperature held fast. The blackness sealed us in, airtight for two seconds.

When the lights fluttered on again, they were weak as a dying man’s pulse.

“Let’s hurry,” I whispered, stepping out of Ryder’s embrace. We tugged antistatic booties around the soles of our shoes. “We grab two panes and get out.”

He nodded. I uncapped my camera’s lens as we stepped through the second threshold, coming face-to-face with a vault door coated in black rubber.

“Do you know the combo?” Ryder asked.

“No, but I can guess it,” I said, looking at the ten-digit keypad beside the door. “Mom only used a few different codes, and she liked using Mina Harker’s birthday for anything related to the tetro corps.” I entered a flash of numbers in and the door thunked unlocked, its massive handle listing to one side.

“Good on ya.” He opened the vault door, which protested after many months of silence and immobility. The vault’s air crackled in my lungs, dry from dehumidifiers. Hundreds of panes marched like wafer-thin dominoes into the murk, wrapped in antistatic envelopes and hung from wooden racks. The racks themselves looked like those double-barred clothing racks on movie sets; however, half of them stood empty, their occupants moved to the island compound in a process involving antistatic transport and too many steps for Dad’s limited patience.

Something creaked in the darkness. I fumbled for the safety light switch, my palm raking the knob and knocking dim light loose in the room. One mirror rocked on its hanger, two, three times, then held still.

“Thought these things are secure,” Ryder said.

“Those bags are just safeties,” I murmured, daring the panes to move again. “Just because they’re on doesn’t mean the guns aren’t loaded. Wait here and keep an eye out, I’ll get the panes.”

He took a few steps into the vault.

“Seriously,” I said. “They aren’t heavy.”

He frowned but didn’t argue again, unconsciously toying with the rosary around his neck.
Ryder? Nervous?
Not that I blamed him; even I didn’t like being in this place under the circumstances. My shoulder ached when I thought of the Ouija planchette and the map, and a multitude of small, suckered hands pulling my arm into its silver frame.…

No, not now—focus.

I ducked through the skeletal, empty racks, stepping over their keels, headed for the vault’s far side. Whispers and giggles snuck from the panes. As I got closer, I noticed odd, inky stains blotting the envelopes and fading away again, as if the ghost’s miasma searched the envelopes for some tear or break, some way into this world. The sight sent a tremor through my jaw, and I bit it back.
The entity’s trying to break through.

“Hey, Micheline,” Ryder said. I glanced back at him, and he gestured left with his head. The panes hanging at the end of one rack swung back and forth, wild as a kid on a swing set.

I plucked one pane from a hanger, the envelope crackling. Bluish light and black ink bruised the fabric. I clutched it tight, unwilling to drop the pane and so much as nick the antistatic envelope. Unclipping another pane, I stowed them under my arm. They might’ve been light, but they were also wide, and my fingers barely curled around their edges.

When I turned back, one pane swung so wide it struck a wall. An orange spark danced across the concrete and the wet, fleshy
rip
of tearing fabric resounded in the room. Miasma tumbled from the torn seam, spreading across the ceiling like some unholy thunderhead. In seconds, the last light in the room was the stuff falling through the open vault door.

Clutching the panes in both hands, I ran for safety, ducking past racks and half hurdling their keels.

A tentacle of miasma snaked down from the ceiling, grabbing hold of the rack closest to the door. With a whipcrack of shadow, it smashed the rack into the others, firing a wave of half-broken poles at me. I feinted left, diving out of range.

A second tendril shot down to block my path. I jammed my heels into the ground, sliding a bit in the booties, barely stopping before I ran into the stuff.

“Duck!” Ryder shouted. I dropped into a crouch, just as a third tentacle swiped at the place my head had been. When it stabbed at me again, I held up the mirrors like a shield. The murk spilled over them, unharmed, but it bit like frost wherever it touched my skin. With a shriek, I scrambled back, dropping the panes to put distance between the miasma and me. I grabbed my camera off my belt and hit the flash. The entire cloud of miasma recoiled, then rushed back in the wake of the light. I blew the flash again, getting to my feet.

“C’mon,” Ryder said, grabbing the panes off the ground. We dove past the ruined racks, even as the miasma fell down upon us like a curtain. I cut a swath through it, creating a tunnel of blinding white light.

We broke free of the wreckage and ran for the door.

Bursting into the anteroom, Ryder dropped the panes flat on the floor. Together, we slammed the vault door closed, severing short tails of miasma. They dissipated, weak as cigarette smoke. Ryder spun the handle around, engaging the lock.