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Or even
I love you.

A disembodied snicker wound into my ears. “I can take you to them.”

Sniffling, I lifted my head. The antimirror rattled on the ground for a moment, static sparking across its surface. As the mirror rose on its own—reflecting Luca in its depths, setting the mirror upright—Jude and I scrambled away, ending in a tangle on the floor, our hearts jackhammering in perverse syncopation.

My fear died fast. “You.” I shifted out of Jude’s arms and pushed to my feet. “Everything—this is all your fault, you
warped
my mother.”

“Manipulation is easy when one’s target is desperate and alone,” Luca said. “She accepted my help, thinking I would help her discover the identity of her murderer. Little did she know she would be exacting
my
revenge, not her own.”

“Monster,” I spat.

“Are you surprised, truly? Death’s been so dull. The chaos dear Alexa has wrought in the last few days has been the most exciting thing I’ve experienced in years, and the most damage I’ve dealt to Helsing in almost a century. What do you people call that nowadays? A
win
?”

“Why not just come through the mirror yourself?”

He laughed. “You don’t know, do you? What I am? Only human ghosts can travel through mirrors, nymphet. Now choose.” Luca pressed his hand to the antimirror. Showers of blue sparks danced down the pane. “Life or death, though I can’t say which fate you’ll find in the Obscura.” He smiled as if it were some private joke.

Crocodiles must smile like that at little birds
, I thought.

“Don’t,” Jude said, but I put a finger to his lips. The Harker guys shifted on the perimeter, looking to Dad, to Damian.

“What’s your price?” I asked Luca. I wouldn’t lose someone again, not Ryder, not when I could stop it.

“Micheline, step away from the mirror.” The words sent Dad into a coughing fit. I ignored his warning.

“You become a pawn in my little game,” Luca said. “We’ll see if you can make it to where Mommy Dearest is hiding before I can capture you.”

“And if you catch me?”

He licked a corner of his lips and shrugged one shoulder.

“Deal,” I said, starting for the mirror.

“Micheline, don’t,” Jude shouted.

“Stop her,” Dad shouted to the men. The order came too late—I pressed my bare palm against the mirror. Cries erupted. Luca’s blue sparks melted into my skin, lighting up my veins. My hand broke through the surface, the metal bowing around my arm, cool as mercury. Luca’s solid hand closed over my wrist, his skin smooth. Dry. As he started to pull me through the mirror, Jude tackled me, locking his arms around my waist. His momentum broke my grip on Luca’s hand and knocked us both through the antimirror. We fell into a silence so perfect, I thought I’d gone deaf.

Darkness consumed us. I tucked my head into Jude’s shoulder, feeling my stomach and lungs press against my ribs in the free fall; the air tore at our skin, hair, and clothing.

I felt like we’d fall forever.

OBSCURA, −1:30 HOURS

I
WOKE SLOWLY.
Rocks
bit into my hip, my injured shoulder, the back of my head. Exposed skin on my arms and face stung in the cold.

When I opened my eyes, I stared up at the ribs of the Golden Gate Bridge. Large, toothy holes were busted into the deck, and chunks of concrete dangled from rebar sinews. Graffiti covered the bridge tower. Dripping water pealed like death knells and the whole structure creaked, its bones fracturing. The sky overhead had the livid darkness of dead flesh, of twilight dying.

“Ryder?” I whispered, sitting up. No answer, save for the groan of atrophying steel. I sat atop a twenty-foot-thick fender that protected the bridge’s southern tower from wrecks and weather, a concrete island surrounded by a mirror-smooth, oil-slick sea. A moat filled the space between tower and fender. To the south, San Francisco cut a dark profile against the bruised sky; to the north, I saw the bridge’s second tower, pinned into the edge of Sausalito. The bay water smelled like used motor oil, its surface pimpled with air bubbles.

Dread clung to my ribs, my chest aching inside and out. “Jude?” I expected my voice to echo over the water, but the darkness absorbed the sound. The only thing moved by my voice was a bat-like creature—it launched itself off the tower’s side and disappeared into the darkness. Rising to my feet, I looked back and forth, turned 360 degrees, disoriented and confused. Jude fell through the antimirror with me.
Jude, where are you?
I jogged around the fender’s perimeter, panic rising with every step.
How did I get under the bridge? Luca, what have you done with us?

“Jude!” I screamed into the night, and when he didn’t answer, I sat down on the fender and buried my face in my knees. Little earthquakes seized my muscles. I was stranded in the midst of a dead sea, alone, and beyond help. Jude was missing, Ryder in mortal danger; Oliver, possessed.

Worst of all, my mother was my enemy, my monster, my quarry, my captor—a withered shade of her former self. I didn’t want to believe it, but my eyes hadn’t lied and my heart wasn’t blind: Mom murdered innocent people to lure me close. She soulchained me and my friends, possessed Oliver, and stole Gemma’s eyes. She loosed necrotic monsters on Angel Island and turned the compound into a nightmarish menagerie, killing countless reapers and wounding my father.

No, not my mother—

Luca.

Somehow, Luca managed to warp her mind and her memories—why else would she believe she died by my hand? By Ryder’s hand? Why else would she seek vengeance against an organization she’d served so faithfully and loved so well? I had to get off the bridge and find her; she needed my help just as much as Ryder did.

My soulchains had grown down my legs, far enough to grate my shinbones. They wriggled in my nail beds and roiled at my throat like a collar, pressing past the cross around my neck. I clenched my fists until my fingernails bit into my palms. So many lives and souls—mine included—hung by a noose and almost all my loved ones were heartbeats away from death and worse. I couldn’t fail them, not Ryder, not Jude or Oliver; not my father, and certainly not my mother.

Mom had to move on, by my hand. Everything now depended on my lens.

I have a duty to do—

I got to my feet. Dusted my pants off. Rubbed the Helsing cross tattooed on my hand, for luck.

A duty to others—

My Colt was missing, the holster torn. My camera looked fine, though. My lenses, whole.

A duty to you—

It still worked, and the flash pushed back the shadows for a moment. When the light faded, the murk raced back in like a wave and sloshed around my feet, unconquerable.

A duty to the dead—

I had to get off the bridge tower, find Jude, exorcise my mother, and save Ryder.

By God, I shall do it.

Then I’d go after Luca. Destroy him and send him to whatever layer of hell he deserved.

My thoughts coalesced as I started to pace back and forth along the fender: swimming to shore was out, as the water would ruin my camera.
Option two?
I craned my neck to look up at the bridge’s tower. Pitted with age and lots of handholds, it looked like two hundred feet of red, rusted hell. Pain wracked my shoulder at the thought climbing the tower like I would a rock wall.

No way off but up.

Part of the fender had crumbled inward against the tower, forming a kind of footbridge. I crossed over and found a service door welded shut with rust, and stepped back to scout the tower’s western face.

Words tumbled helter-skelter over the pillar, finger-painted in an oily substance, encircled by the Draconists’ insignia I’d found on the wall at St. Mary’s:

WELCOME TO THE OBSCURA, NYMPHET. HERE ARE THE RULES FOR OUR LITTLE ENDGAME:

ONE:
YOU’RE CHAINED TO MOMMY DEAREST, AND SHE’S CHAINED TO ME. WHEN YOU WAKE, I WILL FLIP A KILL SWITCH ON YOUR SOULCHAINS. YOU HAVE NINETY MINUTES LEFT TO LIVE.

TWO:
YOUR BLOND FRIEND IS TIED UP ON THE BRIDGE’S NORTHERN TOWER, AND IN A FEW MINUTES, HE WILL BE BESET BY MY HANDMAIDENS. I SENT YOUR MOTHER HOME TO TORTURE YOUR LOVER. YOU WILL NOT HAVE TIME ENOUGH TO SAVE EVERYONE.

THREE:
YOU HAVE YOUR CAMERA. YOUR FRIEND HAS A KNIFE. I HAVE YOUR GUNS AND OTHER WEAPONS. MY HANDMAIDENS HAVE THEIR CLAWS AND THEIR HUNGER.

FOUR:
IF YOU DIE HERE, I PROMISE YOU WILL NEVER LEAVE.

NOW RUN.

As I read Luca’s words, my soulchains grew tighter, colder. I shrieked and kicked the tower’s base, wanting to tear him limb from limb. Yet I didn’t have time to riot and rage or even think—I
had
to get up to the bridge’s deck. I wouldn’t abandon Jude to whatever fate Luca had planned; the Presidio wasn’t far from the bridge. We could cover the territory in less than an hour. I glanced at my watch—the hands spun around the dial as if trying to hypnotize me. Useless.

I shucked off my thick-soled boots, tied them to my belt by the laces, and rubbed my hands on the chalky concrete to dry my palms. The bridge’s west face had the most damage, marbled with cracks and pits. I jounced my shoulders. Cracked my neck. Pictured Ryder back at home, happy and healthy. Breathing.

Do it.

I slid my hands into cracks and squeezed my toes into small ledges, my training surfacing from muscle memory. Unable to use my right arm for anything but balance, I limped up the tower’s face. Adrenaline sparked in my fingers and toes, keeping them sharp and sensitive. The corroded metal felt like the rock walls back at the academy, rough yet sturdy. The whole structure groaned and swayed. I’d climbed way more than two hundred feet before—Dad took us up Half Dome in Yosemite when I was thirteen. The bridge tower was kid stuff compared to that climb, but I’d had ropes on the mountain. Anchors. Sunlight.

All I had now was the old Helsing stubbornness and a heady fury coiling in my muscles. I’d known I couldn’t trust Luca, but hadn’t thought him capable of orchestrating a plot this insidious.

You don’t know, do you? What I am?

Only human ghosts can travel through mirrors, nymphet.

Which left me to wonder,
What are you, you dead bastard?
His words chased me up half the tower, spurring me faster. I’d never heard of a nonhuman entity—Father Marlowe talked about demons, but I’d figured they were human spirits twisted beyond recognition. If Luca’s spirit wasn’t human and couldn’t travel through an antimirror, why would he want Helsing destroyed? Why should we have any relevance to him in the first place, or why should he feel the need to obtain revenge against us?

And if he wasn’t human, how could he die?

I reached up and wedged my left hand into another crack. Rust coated my skin with a powdery, dry film. As I committed my weight to the grip, the metal weakened, moaning out loud.

The sound spilled barbs into my blood—

My grip crumbled and gave way.

I shrieked. My body dropped like a dead weight. Instinctively, my right hand clamped down on its little ledge. For one swinging, free-falling moment, my whole existence hinged on the four fingers of my right hand. Everything sharpened as I slammed into the tower, as pain sparked through my injured shoulder and yanked another cry out of me, as I scrambled for a second handhold. I didn’t breathe until my left hand slipped back into a solid crevice.

When I had a grip, I leaned my forehead against the anchorage and forced myself to breathe. I’d been four fingers away from a broken neck or a lungful of black water. My muscles trembled—it wasn’t good to stop in the midst of a climb.
Keep moving
, Dad said.
It hurts less if you keep moving, in climbing and in life.

No way would I die in this place, this nightmare made flesh, the stuff of straitjacketed delusions and padded walls. One hundred more feet,
go
. I climbed higher. I ached, and it took every ounce of my willpower to lift my right arm above shoulder height again. And again. No time to stop.

The gloom at the top of the bridge stirred. I covered another twenty feet, bringing the bridge’s deck and massive undercarriage into focus. Suspension cables dangled off the edges like limp vines, scabbed with throbbing, leathery, aphid-like protrusions. As I climbed parallel to the end of the nearest cable, a pod twitched and opened its bat-like wings, allowing violet ghostlight to spill out into the night space.

What is that thing?
Hundreds of them covered the bridge cables, swaying in a breeze I couldn’t feel, stretching out into the dimness on either side of me. I kept moving, no more than a scuffle and a shadow, praying they didn’t notice me.

I’d almost made it to the bridge’s rib cage when three high-pitched shrieks ripped the night limb from limb—two long calls, one short, like a Morse signal or something. I glanced left—ripples of ghostlight moved across the cables as ghosts shuffled their wings.

Fifty feet to go.

Every time I pitched my body higher, my right grip weakened; my shoulder couldn’t take much more. I clenched my teeth against the grind in my shoulder socket.

Thirty feet from the top, the anchorage began to tremble—small seismic vibrations eked from the metal into my fingertips and toes. High, shrill hunting calls bounced down to me, Luca’s words reverberating in their aftershocks:

My handmaidens have their claws and their hunger.

And all around me, the bats—silent, scabby, leather-backed ghosts—stirred. Opening their wings. A violet pall crept into the air.

Fifteen feet.

Stampeding feet shook the anchorage. I jammed my hands and feet in crevices to keep from being bucked off. The shrieks got louder, closer. Several winged ghosts dropped silently from their perches, plummeting toward the bay and gliding over the water. Ghosts above, ghosts below. Death on all sides.

Ten feet to go.