Shutter (34 page)

Ghostlight slicked the cables overhead, emanating from whatever shook the bridge deck. I’d skip the deck and travel over the bridge’s undercarriage and crisscrossing beams, thus staying out of sight.

Hopefully
.

Five feet.

I curled my fingers around the lip of the bridge’s undercarriage. With a grunt, I dragged myself onto the steel strut and leaned against the bridge tower. The muscles in my body twitched from exertion. Pain hit me like lens flares, brilliant flashes of light exploding across my vision. I closed my eyes and exhaled, as if I could expel the pain on a breath.

The skin-tick sensation of being watched lifted gooseflesh along my arms. Looking up, I spotted a figure half obscured in the shadows, standing on a catwalk suspended parallel to the steel strut I sat on. The thin fabric of a woman’s nightgown bulged around her distended stomach, the torn neckline showing off her rib bones. She had no mouth, a knife-slice nose, and eyes like pits pressing from rotten fruit. Strangest of all, a shallow dimple split her face from crown to chin, bisecting her forehead and nose into two halves.

Is that … is she … a ghost?
Her frame had heft, as if the Obscura granted ghosts more than sinews made of electricity and flesh made of light. My hand instinctively went to my empty gun holster; I cursed in my head. She cocked her head at me, her pale, patchy hair spilling over her shoulder.

Careful not to move too quick, I tugged my socks and boots back on, never taking my eyes off her. She growled in her throat as I rose, the muscles in her stilt-like legs bunching, skin glimmering with violet ghostlight.

I froze.
If she’s a ghost … can I capture her ghostlight on film? How will she react to my flash?
Slowly, slowly, I reached for my camera. When I snapped off my lens cap, the little popping noise echoed off the metal beams.

She made a trio of hunting cries—two long, one short—then leapt over the catwalk’s guardrail. I hit my shutter mid-jump, the flash booming in the darkness. The force of it knocked her off her trajectory, throwing her back so hard, she smacked into a support beam and tumbled toward the bay.

Electricity tingled against my fingers.
Whoa.

“Micheline!” The voice drew my gaze north, and I spotted Jude running down the catwalk toward me. I’d never been so happy to see him—or anyone, for that matter—in my life. I crossed the struts like balance beams and hopped the catwalk’s guardrail, feeling better once my feet touched down on the walkway. Holstering my camera, I started toward Jude at a jog.

When I reached him, he grabbed me by the shoulders, then cupped my face between his gloved palms, fear palpable in his touch. He looked okay, except for a few abrasions along his cheekbone and a spattering of black blood in his hair. His favorite hunting knife was holstered on his chest, the hilt covered in dark gore. The soulchains pressed up his throat toward his head. Not even our crosses could help us now.

“You’re okay.” I covered his hands with mine.

“Barely. That crazy bastard tied me up and sent his freaky girlfriends after me—”

Hunting shrieks set my nerves on fire. Glancing over his shoulder, I spotted silhouettes of those …
girls
spilling through a fracture in the bridge’s decks, hitting the catwalk and making it quake and groan. Luca’s warning about his handmaidens reverberated through the aftershocks of their voices.

A big one emerged from the pack and screeched at us, her face split open on a vertical slit, like a Venus flytrap turned on point. Her snarl revealed rows and rows of serrated, wedge-shaped teeth.

“Speaking of girls,” I said, pushing Jude forward. “Run!”

Whirling, we sprinted for the southern shore. The winged ghosts cartwheeled on the edge of my sight; one hurtled over the catwalk, contrails of wind tearing at my clothes and hair. A second bat-ghost rocketed past and smashed into the walkway, rending a hole in our path.

Jude leapt first, the catwalk dipping under his weight. He scrambled forward until the walkway stabilized over a truss.

Behind me, the girls’ screams stabbed into my back.

Oh God, here goes—

I ran straight at the break and leapt, landed, and scrambled for a grip as the walkway screeched and sank under me. The big girl caught up and jumped—she crashed into the catwalk, and her weight made it slope toward the bay. I screamed, barely keeping a grip on the railing. The girl’s flailing body plummeted past me, her claws squealing on the metal as she scrabbled for purchase, then fell.

The catwalk sprang back up, wobbling. I scrambled to my feet as the other girls bounded across the gap. Several of them hit the walkway behind me. The corroded metal groaned and gave way, bending. Breaking.

The world fell out from beneath my feet and my stomach lost track of gravity; the catwalk dumped the screaming and shrieking girls into the ocean. I caught hold of the cross-hatched guardrail, my grip sweat-slicked and slippery. When I looked down, all I saw was a two-hundred-foot plunge to the dead water below, my feet dangling, and several winged ghosts fighting over a girl’s dismembered leg.

No wonder Mom went mad in this place.

The catwalk trembled and swayed, its metal skin and tendons groaning, arthritic. I doubted it’d be able to support my weight much longer. Muscles shaking from exertion and exhaustion, I climbed the guardrails like monkey bars, relieved when Jude appeared at the catwalk’s gnarled ledge.

He whistled, pulling me to safety by my good hand. “Guess today’s not your day to go.”

When my knees hit the walkway, I threw my arms around his neck. He stiffened, and slowly—so slowly—put his arms around my shoulders. My adrenaline eased off the gas pedal, my heart pounding in ten different pressure points in my body.

“Idiot,” I said. “You shouldn’t have come with me.”

“Still haven’t figured out how to use the words
thank you
, Princess?” he asked.

“This is a suicide mission.”

He shrugged out of my embrace, chucking me on the chin with a gloved finger. “Damned if I came, damned if I didn’t. You could die a hundred ways before you reach them; someone’s got to watch your back.”

I wondered if he’d seen anything when my forearms had brushed his neck, but didn’t dare ask. “I’m not much to put your faith in,” I said.

“I don’t have a lot of faith to work with in the first place.” He stood and offered me a hand up. “Dust yourself off, Helsing. We’re going hunting.”

OBSCURA, −0:43 HOURS

T
HE BRIDGE’S CATWALK ENDED
over Fort Point—a small, historic installation on San Francisco’s northern tip. We picked our way over the beams, headed for land. The girls’ voices grew louder—closer—as we neared the shore. My stomach curled.

When I told Jude about the message Luca left for me, he laughed blackly and rubbed his raw wrists. “When I woke, I was tied up with a knife hilt between my palms,” he said, ducking under a bridge beam. “He had two of his little girlfriends tied up close to me—if I cut myself out, I’d cut them out, too. I had to Houdini my way out of there, then fight those things
mano a mano
.”

“Glad you’re okay,” I said.

He snorted, sweeping the back of his hand under his nose. “You want to tell me how you know this Luca guy? Real charmer.”

I kept my face impassive. “I talked to him a few times via an antimirror.”

“Let me guess—he gave you the Ouija idea?”

When I didn’t answer, Jude chuckled and shook his head. “Next time you decide to take candy from a psycho, Micheline, leave me the hell out of it.”

I dignified Jude’s statement with a punch in the shoulder. He bumped me with his elbow. As I was about to elbow him back, a shriek from the girls on the mainland sobered us up.

The tussle made Ryder’s absence ache like a lost limb. I kept expecting to hear his voice, to look back and see him bringing up the rear, to feel him close with every breath, with every step.
My trigger finger won’t stick, not this time.
I swore the words to myself like a mantra.
I’ll get us all out of this nightmare.

Luca had twisted my mother’s soul into something monstrous, something unrecognizable, and I had to redeem her. I had to free her from this place, and once I did, I’d find Luca and destroy him. No matter what manner of being he was, he was too dangerous to exist. He used people as playthings—he set my mother and me against each other—then laughed as he watched our worlds burn.

“So what’s the plan?” Jude asked.

“Let’s shadow Highway 101 to the Presidio,” I said. “There’s a private gate into the compound off Lincoln Boulevard—it leads straight to the officers’ horseshoe and the big house.”

“Can we make it in time?”

“Only if we keep moving.” I figured I’d burned up over forty of Luca’s ninety-minute limit climbing the bridge tower, which meant we had less than fifty minutes to cover the mile between our position and my family’s old house, find Ryder, and exorcise my mother. It might be the longest mile of our lives—no way Luca would let us make the trek unmolested.

Upon reaching the final strut, Jude and I dropped a few feet to the ground. We took cover under the bridge deck; I scanned the area, found it clear, and waved Jude forward. We sneaked right, keeping low, taking cover in a copse of trees. I knelt behind the trunks of dead pines and scrub brush, able to see the 101 all the way to the toll stations despite the patchwork of dead cars, fog, and debris. Only half the toll stations stood. The city rose in the distance, the Coit Tower and Transamerica Pyramid missing from its skyline. The other buildings cut jack-o’-lantern teeth against the sky. I wouldn’t forget this ravaged skyline so long as I lived, nor the pit it opened in my gut.

It was my city, ended.

“The gate’s about half a mile away,” I said, pointing toward a forested ridge beyond the bridge services station. “We need to keep west.”

“There’s three hundred yards of open ground out there,” Jude said. “Cover’s spotty, at best.”

“I’ll take point,” I said, unholstering my camera and screwing on my telephoto lens. “They don’t like my flash.”

“Deal,” Jude said.

We moved forward, watching the negative spaces between trees, buildings, and rusted-out vehicles. I placed my finger on my camera’s trigger, moving quickly, soundlessly. My eyes played tricks, creating flashes of violet light I swore weren’t there. I couldn’t psych myself out now—Jude and Ryder relied on me to get them home safely; Oliver’s possession wouldn’t end until the soulchains broke; and I couldn’t let my mother suffer any longer, not in this hellish place. I squared my breathing and moved on.

We closed the gap on the bridge services station. The mist shifted on our right—I snapped to attention, turning my lens on empty space and swirling fog. Leather creaked as Jude yanked his knife from its sheath.

“I saw it, too,” he whispered. I jerked my head toward the cars on the road. As we took cover behind a Honda’s rusted flank, a scream pulsed through the night. I peered through one of the car’s dingy, web-crack windows. A girl bounded atop a nearby vehicle and shrieked, her face splitting open. Long-long-short answering calls echoed from farther down the road. The girl on the car looked right, then swung her pitted gaze toward me.

Gasping, I pressed my back into the vehicle door. “Get under the car,” I whispered to Jude, who nodded and slid beneath the undercarriage. I holstered my camera and low-crawled under, the asphalt biting into my forearms and abdomen. The car’s guts crumbled against my shoulders, grit tumbling into my shirt collar and hair. I inched abreast of Jude, and together, we faced a tumbledown maze of deflated tires, broken glass, and decaying auto parts.

“We can crawl from car to car,” I whispered.

“That’ll take too long—”

The next car over rocked on its rims, silencing us. The metal groaned like century-old pop-top lids as the girl walked down the hood and dropped to the ground. Her legs were visible from the calf down: She walked on the balls of her feet, predator-style, her tendons knotted at her ankles. Thick worm-like veins throbbed under her skin. Despite the condition of her legs, her steps were light. Fast. Jude made a gagging face.

Our car groaned, its axle pressing into our backs. I clenched my teeth to keep from making any sound, to keep the fear of being crushed under half a ton of metal away. The pressure of a second girl’s footsteps on the car’s roof pushed the air from my lungs. Jude suffered worse: His face reddened, tendons popping at the jaw and temple. I reached out and took his gloved hand, holding tight.

A hunting shriek rent the night—this one farther up the road, a little to the east. Another scream coupled with the first—this one pitched to curdle blood—the sound of breaking bones and bloodletting. Our girls took off running in the direction of the screams.

“Sound like a distraction to you?” I asked.

Jude expelled a breath. “Hell yeah.”

I slid out from under the car, twisting and grabbing the front bumper to get out quick. Ducking low, I spotted a pod of girls some fifty feet away, scrabbling at an old Suburban. One girl bashed in a window with her elbow and reached inside. Shadows flickered inside the car. A male ghost fought as the girl dragged him through the window, and then—

Don’t watch
, I told myself, bracing myself with one hand on the car, the other on my camera.
Move. Prey freezes, predators don’t.

Jude and I moved south, keeping ourselves lower than the hoods and trunks of the cars. The sounds of suffering clung to my conscience—tortured screams, shrieks, and sobs. I’d come to save the living and redeem the dead, but I couldn’t save every creature under this murky sky in ninety minutes.

We came abreast of the bridge services station, beyond which lay Lincoln Boulevard and the compound’s back gate. Nudging Jude, I pointed to the trailers across Merchant Road. “If we get separated, Lincoln Boulevard lies beyond those buildings. Run down the hill, hit the road, and hang right. From there, it’s a quarter mile to the compound’s gate.”