Shutter (29 page)

Gemma straddled my chest and pressed my shoulders into the floor. The flare of pain in my injured arm woke me, sped my thoughts back up. When I opened my eyes, I looked straight into her empty sockets, her thumbs positioned by my tear ducts. Her hollow gaze had weight, pressure. Malice.

“Eye for an eye,” she whispered, cocking her head at an inhuman angle. But as she pressed her thumbs against my eyes, Ryder and Oliver stumbled out of the bathroom. Distracting her. Ryder had Oliver by the shirtfront and whipped his handgun across Oliver’s cheek. The blow rocked my bones.

Gemma growled and shifted her weight to try to grab Ryder’s leg—big mistake. I rolled my hips, getting enough leverage to dump her on the ground. With a savage kick, I slammed her into the wall. She hit so hard, something cracked inside her. Instead of collapsing, she pushed up to her hands and knees and began to heave, the ghost’s smoky miasma frothing from her gouged sockets and gagging mouth.

Ryder smashed Oliver’s hand into the bathroom door, shattering his makeshift weapon. Oliver groaned. Pivoting, Ryder grabbed him by the face and slammed the back of his head into the wall. Oliver dropped into a heap on the floor, his blood pumping out onto the white marble. He didn’t move, save for the occasional twitch of his injured hand.

Gemma convulsed as a ghostlit hand shot from her mouth, its fingers curling around her chin. The miasma gushed from the holes in her head, billowing over the floor like the smoke off dry ice. I grabbed my camera, but she pushed to her feet and fled into the hallway.

I darted after her and chased her down the stairs. She ran with inhuman speed, straight for a large gallery window, and—

“No!” I shouted, but Gemma jumped right through the pane. Light fractured. A great glassy
crash
stabbed into my ears, along with the sound of bullets in the courtyard. I leapt through the broken window, spotting Gemma streaking into the darkness of the grounds. Gunfire drew my attention left, where Jude and Bianca lost ground against a group of staggering, miasma-laced corpses.

No time to decide. Cursing, I turned my back on Gemma, holstered my camera, and pulled the Colt. Dad’s favorite rule of reaping came back to me as I took aim at a corpse’s leg:

Save the living first;

Then kill the dead.

*   *   *

B
Y THE TIME WE
subdued the entity’s puppet-corpses—the bodies belonging to the housekeeping staff, and a woman Bianca identified as Mrs. Stone, Gemma’s mother—we couldn’t find any sign of Gemma or the entity on the property. Jude and I searched the mansion’s grounds for Gemma while Bianca attended to Oliver’s hand and Ryder’s lacerations.

I was relieved not to be needed by Oliver’s side—the sight of him broken on the floor had scoured the adrenaline out of my system. The glass shards embedded in his skin reminded me of the ones sticking out of Fletcher’s cheek on the night he died, and the connection made something snap inside me. Only the crispness of the night air kept me from doubling over and dry heaving on the grass.

Did Oliver watch his own hands rip the eyes from Gemma’s head? Is he conscious of this bodily hijacking?
Guilt sliced me deep and almost bled out my eyes. I blinked fast to keep the tears from spilling down my cheeks.

“Hey, you listening?” Jude said, nudging me. “How’d you know? About the rosaries keeping us from getting possessed, I mean?”

“Call it a hunch,” I said, wiping my upper lip with the back of my hand.

Jude was silent a moment before he said, “Liar.”

I didn’t have the mental energy to spar with him or to lie to someone so canny, so I let the accusation stand. We searched the rest of the property in silence, finding nothing but a creaky gate with gore-smeared bars to tell of Gemma’s—and therefore the entity’s—flight.
This is my fault.
I should never have sent Oliver out alone, and never into a house full of innocents.

All my fault.

We returned to Bianca and Ryder empty-handed. They’d bandaged Oliver’s wounds and put a tourniquet on his arm, then secured him to the bed.

“We called Marlowe,” Ryder said. “He’s on his way with a couple of reaper ambulances.”

“They’ll only need one,” Jude said, and the words echoed in the room and clattered in my heart. Bianca sank into one of Gemma’s overstuffed chairs, tremors starting in her lower lip and moving into her shoulders. She put her face in her hands, and I turned away to let her grieve.

By the time Marlowe arrived, I’d gone numb from the pain. While Bianca and Jude helped the EMTs get Oliver secured on a gurney and downstairs, Ryder and I spoke with Father Marlowe.

“I’ll need your father’s help to find the girl.” Marlowe put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “You mustn’t linger long, but before you go, I managed to learn something new from my associate in Rome.”

My heart skipped. “What’s that?”

He looked down at Oliver’s broken rosary, which he’d wrapped around his hand. “Just this: Banishing your ghost to Purgatory alone is not enough—you must subdue its spirit and force it to cross over. Permanently.”

“But that requires a rite, doesn’t it? I-I can’t perform—”

“I’ll call you at dawn. And I’m sorry this didn’t protect your friend.” He closed the broken rosary in my hand. “The wearer must have some faith for these to be effective, Micheline. Do you understand?”

I nodded, biting my lip to stop up the tears.

“Use it for fuel,” he said, and kissed my forehead. “Now go. I’ll call six-one-one in five minutes.”

Ryder took my hand and gripped it hard, like he needed to hang on to me to keep his own sanity intact. I followed him down the hall, down the stairs, and out the front door, Luca’s words taunting me the whole way.

The problem with a cross is …

The problem with a cross is—

It fails the unbeliever.

SUNDAY, 6:10 A.M.

A
T DAWN, EVERYONE RETREATED
to the anesthesia of sleep: sick of talking about what happened, sick of trying to make sense of everything, sick of it
all
. We’d faced desperate odds before—but nothing ever dropped Jude on the floor with a bottle of something clear and hard that he’d lifted from Dad’s old liquor cabinet. Nothing bruised Ryder under the eyes before and left him mute, not like this.
They don’t teach a bloke to fight monsters that look like his best mates
was all he’d said all morning.

Whenever I closed my eyes, nightmares shadowboxed in my mind. Gemma’s torn eyelids hanging over empty sockets. Hands pressing against Oliver’s skin from the inside. Saffron blood spilling over milk-white marble. Oliver’s hand twitching, palm sliced, bones exposed. Glass shattering. Girls vomiting ghosts. So long as I kept my eyes open, I stayed sane. But even if I left my headphones in with the volume high, I still heard Luca whispering:

The problem with a cross is …

Or Dad shouting through my memory:

You can’t save anyone.

Those words had edges sharp as Ginsu knives and cut me up. How had I managed to live up to Dad’s declaration again, despite all my efforts? Lately, this whole world just wrapped my stomach around my spine—or maybe it wasn’t the world, maybe it was just me and my own failures.

You can’t save anyone.

Not even yourself.

My phone jangled in my pocket. When I tugged it out, Father Marlowe’s name popped up on the screen. Cursing, I tried to compose myself before I answered, “Hello, Father.”

I didn’t expect the voice on the other line: “Micheline, don’t hang up,” Dad said.

Wrong father
. “I want to speak to Father Marlowe,” I said.

“You’ll speak to me first.”

I clenched my empty fist. “You have thirty seconds to explain what you want.” I’d give him the same “courtesy” he’d given me back at home.

“Listen to reason, Micheline, the situation has spiraled out of your control—”

“I’d be more inclined to listen to your ‘reason’ if it didn’t include contempt with a side of backfist to the face,” I said, talking straight over him.

Silence stretched between us, wide as an ocean.

No
I’m sorry.

No
I shouldn’t have hit you.

No
I love you.

Just, “You are in more danger than you realize. Paul—Dr. Stoker—analyzed the contents of Oliver’s bag and his notes, and we found the Draconists’ insignia in his notebooks—”

“Draconists?”

“An organization of assassins responsible for murdering a number of Helsings and corps members on both sides of the Atlantic,” Dad said. “We haven’t seen evidence of their organization in decades, not since Damian’s people destroyed their American cells. They are descended from a medieval military organization known as the Order of the Dragon, which was a chivalric order of the Holy Roman Empire. You may recognize the name of their most infamous member, Vlad Tepes the Third.”

“Dracula,” I said, a shiver snickering down my spine.

“Correct. Their modern goal has been to dismantle the Helsing Corps in the United States and devastate Britain’s Knights of the Cross. They are madmen who want to watch the world burn,” Dad said. “Damian suspects they are responsible for the entity’s release and your soulchaining. We took both Thomas Morley and Reynold Fielding into custody—the former committed suicide with a cyanide capsule secreted in his molar, and the latter’s utterly incoherent. He’s under surveillance in a psychiatric ward. All he will say is
eye for an eye
, over and over again.”

Gemma’s face flashed through my mind, and I shuddered. “And Oliver? Gemma? How are they?”

“Both stable, sedated, and strapped down to their beds,” Dad said. “Dr. Stone is distraught, his wife murdered, his daughter disfigured. He and Dr. Stoker deserve to know what happened to their families, Micheline.”

Here goes
. When I finished the telling, Dad didn’t speak for several moments.

“Good God, you are under siege from all sides,” Dad said. In the background, Father Marlowe insisted my father return his phone. I caught something about
passing on
and a
litany
, but not the gist.

“I want to speak to Marlowe,” I said.

“You can speak to him when you return home,” Dad said. “You are to report to Pier Fifty immediately and, yes, that’s an order.”

“Oh, sure, I’ll come home because I love being on house arrest, and I love wearing an ankle bracelet,” I said, pacing back and forth. “I’ll bet your crews haven’t figured out how to track the entity yet, have they?”

A pause. I swear I could hear my father’s pride squirming on the other end of the line.

“And you have?” he finally asked.

“I need one more night,” I said. “One more hunt.”

“No, the danger is too great. You are to come home
now
, we can fight this thing to—”

I killed the call, my thoughts in loops and tangles, my emotions in a snarl. These days, I missed Mom more than ever; I wished we could sit down at the kitchen table and talk. Unlike Dad, she’d always known just the right things to say, and her words felt like bandages or spurs or even ledges, instead of Dad’s bullets and knives and nooses.

Still, I couldn’t imagine what she’d say about the body count my entity left in its wake.

I stalked into the family room, shoving my headphones back in my ears and letting Kurt Cobain’s gritty voice meld itself to my frustration. I lifted my gaze to the family portrait hanging over the mantel. Somehow, Dad managed to look stoic even when smiling, and everything in him—his bearing; his thrown-back, broad shoulders; even the thunderous gray color of his irises—reminded me of the painting of Van Helsing at Seward Memorial.

The pale-haired girl on his right hand wore my face, but she and I were different as twilight and dawn. Different hopes. Different dreams. Different fears. She believed her father could protect her from anything. Nowadays, I knew a girl couldn’t wait for salvation; she had to make her own.

Something moved outside. The foliage at the tree line rippled, and a man-shaped shadow disappeared back into its depths. I tensed. The family room windows overlooked the thick eucalyptus trees separating the house from the compound wall, and beyond that, the Pacific Ocean. I watched the trees, willing whoever—or
whatever
—I’d seen to reappear. The forest around the house grew so dense, a tracker or assassin could easily hide himself among the trees.

Grabbing my Colt off the coffee table, I headed out the front door, tiptoeing across the porch and avoiding the creaky boards. Morning fog came with the sun, rolling off the Pacific and seeping through the trees. It would swallow the city in minutes, so thick it formed droplets of dew on the house windows. It killed visibility, but I knew the terrain around the house better than any intruder, tracker or no.

At least dawn meant my target wasn’t dead.

With the Colt pointed at the ground, I rounded the house and slipped into the trees. I’d seen the figure along the property’s western edge, so I took a half-moon-shaped path toward the far end of the clearing. Sneaking from tree to tree, I scanned the negative spaces between their trunks, ducking, dodging, and twisting through the underbrush.

Nothing moved, save for a few crows rustling in the treetops. The fog filled the lawns, making it nearly impossible to see the trees on the other side of the clearing.

I found tracks at the most western point of the lawn’s edge. A man’s boot prints pressed into the earth, their tread familiar and possibly Helsing issue. From the tracks, he was alone. He might’ve traveled over the west wall, paused to watch the house on the cusp of the trees, then moved north. I couldn’t let him get word back to Helsing that we were hiding here at the Presidio. I had to find him.

Taking off the Colt’s safety, finger on the trigger, I followed the tracks through the trees. As I neared the house again, I saw a flicker of movement up ahead—a black-clad form stepped behind a tree.