Trigger (3 page)

The media dubbed the necro the “Embarcadero Scissorclaw,” after the street that bordered the city's many wharves. The necro snatched its earliest victims from the area, before Helsing caught wise and shut the waterfront down. Fisherman's Wharf and Pier 39 became ghost towns, visited only by police officers and Helsing reapers in riot gear.

By night, Dad and I patrolled the city's drains, sewers, and tunnels, aided by hundreds of heavily armed reapers. Dad summoned our best trackers from all over the country—still, our scissorclaw had endless places to hide. We found a lot of monsters in the tunnels; ran into traps that dismembered, traps that killed; and stumbled over claw-gored corpses, with no sighting of the monster we tracked.

Weeks passed. Then months. After the new year, Dad offered a six-figure reward to the reaper who brought him the Embarcadero's head. But with every dawn, we came home empty-handed and hollow-hearted. The body count piled higher, night after night. My father's frustration turned to fury, then mania, then a kind of grim, stoic silence that signaled his desperation.

He devoted his every waking moment to taking that monster down … and every one of mine, too.

One frosty evening, as I geared up to head back into the tunnels with Dad, my parents' raised voices thudded against my bedroom floor. I frowned. Mom and Dad never fought—my father might be as stubborn as they come, tenacity running thick in Helsing veins—but he denied my mother nothing.

Well, almost nothing.

Slipping from my bedroom, I headed down the hall, careful to keep my footsteps from echoing through the floor. The hall stairs tried to creak underfoot, but I skipped the loudest steps and eased over the others, slinking onto the first floor. On the other side of the darkened hall, my brothers cut small silhouettes in the family room, their eyes cartoonish and large. I waved them away.

Dad's study sat just off the front room. Stepping through the hall, I hung on the room's edge, listening:

“Your hunts are always more important, aren't they, Len?” Mom's voice punched past the study door.

Dad cleared his throat. “This isn't a permanent arrangement—”

“It's been a
three-month-long
arrangement,” Mom snapped. “Do you realize it's been so long since she's worked on her exorcism technique, she's falling behind her tetro classmates?”

I narrowed my eyes. Like the other tetros could even keep up with me in the first place, cowering behind their mirrors like they did. Since the end of October, I'd gone out hunting with my father every night of the week, leaving little time for anything else, especially exorcisms. But if Dad could hunt seven days a week,
I
had to prove I could do it, too.

“The other tetro girls aren't being groomed to lead the corps.” The coldness in my father's voice chilled the room. “Nor does the responsibility to protect this city rest on their shoulders.”

“It's
your
responsibility, not Micheline's,” Mom snapped. “She's fifteen years old, for heaven's sake!”

Something screeched inside the office, maybe a chair against the floor. “I don't care how old she is,” Dad said. “She's a Helsing. And since she failed to kill the scissorclaw in the tunnels, she'll hunt with me every night until we destroy the monster.”

A flush rose through my chest and burned in my cheeks.
Is that what he really thinks … that I failed?
He'd never given me any reason to believe he was disappointed in me, not one word, not one look. At least I'd
survived
the encounter. Not everyone could claim so much, including Dad's best captain.

Delgado.
I closed my eyes, and memories of the aftermath of his death slid past like film frames:

Gabriela crying in the girls' bathroom, mascara-black tears sliding between her fingers.

Luis sitting in Dad's office with a bloody nose and black eye, the badges from a locker-room fight.

Gabriela's mouth set in a hard line, hunting with the squads in the storm drains.

Luis's shoulders heaving during the funeral.

Remorse resonated through my chest, echoing in my fingertips and toes. Losing a parent had to be the worst hard thing.

“You expect too much of her,” Mom said, almost too quietly to hear.

“No more than my father expected of me,” Dad said.

The study's doorknob turned with a click. I stepped into the front room and dropped behind one of the couches, tucking myself into a pocket of shadows.

“I don't think that's true, Len.” The door creaked. A wedge of light fell into the room, hitting the wall above my head. “Mark my words, if Micheline doesn't train to exorcise ghosts the way she trains to reap, someday she'll meet a ghost she can't stop.”

“You'll have her back soon, Alexa,” Dad said. “As soon as this business with the Embarcadero is done.”

The door closed, latch catching. “It's too late; she's already chosen her side,” Mom said, too quietly to be heard by anyone but me. Only one set of footsteps padded over the carpet. I held my breath until she turned into the hall and opened the basement door, stepping into the darkness beyond. Mom didn't bother to turn the lights on.

She's already chosen her side.
Her words echoed in my head. All I wanted to do was reassure her: of
course
I wanted to hunt with her, exorcise with her, learn from her. Hunting the dead in
any
form—corporeal or spiritual—was what they'd raised me to do, all I knew and all I wanted. Mom
had
to realize I was the only cadet in the corps learning to reap necros and exorcise ghosts simultaneously, and that I hadn't chosen my father over her, not even close.

Or had I?
I glanced down at the Helsing cross tattooed on the back of my hand, rubbing it with my thumb. What
wouldn't
I do to inherit that thin red line? What
wouldn't
I sacrifice for the corps?

One thing for sure: my relationship with my mother.

Waiting a few seconds to make sure my father didn't emerge, I tiptoed across the hall. My brothers had disappeared into the family room, so no one saw me sidle past the basement door. Ambient light trickled into the room and coated the top of the spiral staircase. She'd left the lights off—many reapers felt more comfortable in the darkness, tetros especially.

I stepped inside. Whispers coiled in the darkness, sickling under my skin. Blood chilling, I cocked my head and listened but couldn't distinguish the voices, nor the words being said.

“Mom?” I called quietly. Silence fell with a
thud
. She didn't answer. I hurried down the stairs, not caring how much noise I made. “Is everything okay?”

Mom stood in the midst of her antimirror gallery, hands shaking. A can of rubber mirror sealant rocked on the floor beside her foot, undeterred by friction and natural forces. Antimirrors surrounded her on three sides, their panes dark as matte black space; the mirrors acted as portals to the territory between life and death, a place we called the Obscura. They allowed tetros to peer into that derelict sphere and speak to the spirits who lingered, the ones looking for cracks in the mirror glass and the energy to crawl back into the living world. The malcontented ones, the
dangerous
ones. The ones we exorcists banished from the living world.

One mirror bore a black slash of mirror sealant, as if Mom meant to silence whomever lurked on the other side.

“Mom?” I asked.

The can of sealant stilled. A whisper snuck from one of the mirrors, a breath of air tickling past my ear; I spun, but the mirrors stood empty. Silent. I rubbed gooseflesh off my arms, trying to shuck off the feeling of being watched. “You okay?” I asked, turning my attention from the mirrors.

“How much of that did you hear?” Her voice had a serrated edge, as though she forced her words around a half-swallowed sob.

Do you mean the whispers, or …
“The fight with Dad?”

Mom nodded.

“Enough. I'm sorry,” I said, realizing I didn't feel guilty for snooping at all, but rather for being the object of my parents' fight. “Do you really think I'm falling behind my tetro classmates?”

Her pause lasted a heartbeat too long. When she turned, her eyes picked up the wan light from the hall. They looked cold as cracked ice, her irises the color of blue lips and new bruises. Her gaze struck me as wounded, and I wonder who hurt her more: me or my father.

“Yes,” she said softly. “But your father's right; he needs your help to find the monster and he's safer with you to be his eyes. Our work can wait till the scissorclaw is dead.”

“You know I can exorcise anything,” I said. “Right?”

“
Not
anything,” Mom said, unsheathing steel in her tone. “You haven't seen half of what the Obscura can throw at you, Micheline.”

“Then show me.”

She turned back to her mirrors, her pale hair snapping behind her like a banner of war. “Difficult to do when you spend all your time with your father.”

“Why are you so angry with me?” I asked.

“Not with you, specifically. With the situation,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. “When Ethan was born, I thought you would be mine, that your father would focus on grooming your brother for leadership. I thought you would inherit
my
legacy, since you inherited
my
ability.”

“I can do both—”

“No,” Mom said, shaking her head. “You cannot expect to lead Helsing and chair the International Council on Tetrachromatic Affairs. Which, I might remind you, is a position the women in
my
family have held for generations.”

My
family. Not
our
family.

“I can and
will
do both,” I said. “I'm not doubling up on courses and working my ass off now to throw one of my parents' legacies away.”

“Language, Micheline.” Mom chuckled and shook her head. “You're so Helsing stubborn, I could just—”

Somewhere in the mirrors, something snickered. Mom tensed, turning slightly, her gaze locked on the mirror she'd slashed with sealant.

I followed her gaze, checking the mirrors one by one. Nothing moved inside them, but I still felt a sharp prickle, the one my gut used to warn my brain of danger and mayhem and monsters. “Was someone down here with you?” I asked. “I heard whispers.”

Her index finger twitched. “I thought I saw someone familiar in there,” she said, staring down the mirror as if it was some sort of contest. “But nobody's here but me.”

“Us,” I insisted.

“Yes,
us
,” she said, sighing. She turned and closed the distance between us, then tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. She smiled gently. “Come, shutterfly, you have a monster to hunt. Best not to keep your father waiting.”

I watched the mirrors as she ascended the stairs. When something rustled in the darkness beyond the glass, she called out, “Micheline?”

I turned my back on the shadows to follow her.

 

 

MARCH

“Guard duty,” Jude huffed, leaning against the wall and scowling. “We're the most important cadets in the academy and they're making us play rent-a-cop out here
.
”

“Your position doesn't exclude you from the rotations, lazy,” I said. The academy cadets took turns guarding the piers along The Embarcadero during the day.
Good practice,
Dad said.
And you kids don't need so much sleep
. Our reaping crew had been assigned to Pier 39 today. Jude and I took positions near the entrance while Ryder and Oliver Stoker—the fourth and final member of our crew—secured the place for the umpteenth time today.

I adjusted the M16 strap on my shoulder, scanning the pier. The day started to die; in another hour or so, the pros would show up to relieve us for the night. Fog billowed between the vacant shops, so thick it dropped visibility to less than fifty feet and emptied the city of sound. Fog in San Francisco could swallow the city in minutes, even on a low breeze. The stuff turned to dewy scales on my cheeks, and the wind tumbled in Jude's loose curls.

“The necro's still killing people,” I said. “It's possible the monster moves during the day, under the cover of fog like this.”

“More possible this thing's a pain in the ass,” Jude muttered. I let the comment slide—sarcasm was Jude's native language, though he spoke derision and contempt fluently, too. Still, you wouldn't find a more loyal cadet in the corps, so long as you weren't
dating
him. We'd become friends by default, being heirs and all—Jude was the nephew of Damian Drake, leader of Helsing's Special Ops.

We stayed friends because I tolerated most of Jude's bullshit. But he shoveled a hell of a lot of it, sometimes.

“It's out there,” I said. “Somewhere.”

“Well, of course it's
out there
,” Jude said, motioning to the city with his hand. “It's just not anywhere
near here,
Princess.”

I wrinkled my nose at the nickname, but his words got the cogs in my head turning.
She failed to kill the monster in the tunnels
, Dad had said. Well, I wouldn't fail a second time, given the chance … even if I had to
make
that chance.

Shouldering my M16's strap, I started toward the other end of the pier. “Then we should lure it here.”

“What? How?” Jude asked, his voice chasing me down the fog-bound pier.

I touched my comm and asked, “You guys got any rope?”

“Back in the truck, yeah,” Ryder responded, his voice raspy through the comms. “Why?”

I grinned. “Because I have a stupid idea.”

Ten minutes later, I climbed up on the pier's wooden balustrade with Ryder's rope tied around my ankle, a Colt secured at my hip, and a hunting knife strapped to the small of my back. The gray-green bay water sloshed against the pier's big concrete pillars—choppy, white-tipped, and frosted with fog. My plan hinged on our scissorclaw's relative intelligence … and its insatiable hunger.