Shutter
Authors: Courtney Alameda
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To Carol Lynch Williams
Thank you.
CONTENTS
C
ALL IT REAPER’S INSOMNIA,
but the dead wouldn’t let me sleep at night. Every time the sun went down, I swore I sensed them stirring, starving.
Killing.
Tonight was no different. As the boys and I pulled up to St. Mary’s Hospital, the scene seized and held my nerves at knifepoint. The hospital’s power?
Out
. Patients spilled into the streets—some barefoot, and blanket clad; others clutching IV stands for support. They gaped at our Humvee, shying back from the glare of our emergency lights. No doubt they’d recognized the decals on our vehicles—the famous H formed by interlocking crosses—and knew who we were. Or more specifically, what we meant:
The Helsing Corps only showed up when someone didn’t stay dead.
People jabbed fingers in our direction, questioning the nurses and security guards. Best they couldn’t see the staccato flash of ghostlight in the fourth-story windows, or for that matter, the spatters that light silhouetted on the glass. If these people saw the place the way I did, knew what I knew about ghostlight and death, they’d riot and run.
“Get out of the road,” Ryder said, laying on the horn. The crowd startled, pressed so close we could hardly turn onto Stanyan Street. “The place is a bloody mess. If the brass figures out there’s casualties in the building, Micheline, it’s your arse and mine.” Cadets weren’t supposed to take on hunts with a body count without professional backup.
“We don’t have time to wait for another crew to show,” I said. The closest tetrachromat crew was tied up in Walnut Creek with a poltergeist. Estimated time of arrival, one hour. I took stock of the twitchy bodies and gaunt faces outside, then drew a deep breath. “We’ll be fine.”
“Being
fine
isn’t the point.”
“No, but I can’t guarantee the entity will stay in the building until Cruz’s people can get here.” I reached into my camera bag and took out a quartz telephoto lens, my equivalent of a sniper rifle. “Three of Father Marlowe’s exorcists are dead, Ry. Someone’s got to take this thing out.”
“Sounds like Marlowe’s problem to me.”
“If it’s dead and mobile, it’s our problem.” I clicked my lens into place. As a descendant of Abraham Van Helsing, I’d inherited a legacy—more like a psychotic sense of noblesse oblige—which meant I had a responsibility to protect people from the undead. Dad would throw a fit when he learned our crew took on a killer without assistance, but screw it, I wasn’t going to abandon Marlowe’s people to a rampaging ghost.
When Ryder didn’t respond, I smirked and said, “You hate that I’m right, don’t you?”
“No, I hate that you’re as stubborn as your old man.” His Aussie accent flared, just as it always did when I’d gotten the better of him.
“If I weren’t stubborn I wouldn’t be a Helsing, now would I, mate?” I butchered his accent but grinned anyway—we’d been friends for years and I still couldn’t fake it.
“Got that right.” He jounced his shoulders and eased up on the steering wheel, hands unclenching.
Good
. I needed him loose. Even if he couldn’t help me trap a ghost on film, he was a steadying presence, another beating heart beside mine. Ghosts had no rules of engagement when it came to a fight and they didn’t play nice. Sometimes they’d climb into an available corpse and come after me with tooth and nail, rusty knives or bricks—pick your poison. As a somatic reaper, Ryder specialized in monsters with rot and bones. He and the other boys on our reaping crew made sure I didn’t go home in a body bag.
No matter how good Ryder was with a gun, he was useless against a ghost. Ghosts weren’t visible to the unaided eye; they were blurry spots seen in peripheral vision, vestigial shadows blending into the darkness. Normal human beings couldn’t tell the difference between a trick of the light and an actual ghost—it took a pair of tetro eyes to do that. Eyes like mine.
A tetrachromat saw a ghost haloed in violet light, an ability granted by the presence of a fourth color receptor in the retina. That fourth cone allowed me to see the spiritual auras of the undead—called ghostlight—in an explosion of color and luminescence. In short, I saw dead people in Technicolor. To my eyes, zombies glimmered like red dying stars. Their smarter, stronger paranecrotic cousins emitted a pus-colored yellow or orange light, monsters like Glasgow girls or scythewalkers. Clever hypernecrotics like scissorclaws glowed in greens and icy blues. And while I’d never seen a vampire—they were mostly extinct—I’d heard cobalt ghostlight ran through their veins.
The light in the hospital’s windows burned violet-white, brighter than any I’d seen before. Whatever haunted the fourth floor wouldn’t go down by the bullet, but by the lens.
Two cops approached our vehicle, their uniforms torn, bloodstained. One wore a cap of gauze on his head, a bandage covering one eye. The other looked like he’d played chicken with a brick wall and lost, his cheek marbled with fresh bruises and abrasions. Marlowe mentioned casualties, but he hadn’t told me so many civilians were hurt.
As Ryder rolled down his window, I craned my neck to gaze at the hospital’s fourth story, waiting to see another ripple of ghostlight. The windows gleamed like obsidian, two shades darker than any floor above or below them. Dread pricked my shoulders and sewed itself under my skin. Could I risk the boys’ lives in good conscience, knowing Marlowe’s exorcists died in there?
“It’s about time.” The taller officer shined his Maglite into the Humvee’s cab. The relief on his face turned jagged, his brows shooting high. “Wait, you’re just kids. We’re under attack in there”—he gestured at the hospital—“and Helsing sends us a bunch of academy brats?”
Brats?
Hardly.
“We weren’t dispatched from Helsing,” I said. Helsing was the Bay’s chief line of defense, but St. Mary’s was a Catholic hospital, so Marlowe responded first tonight. His offices were up the street at St. Ignatius’s Cathedral. “Father Marlowe called us in.”
“Unofficial business, mate.” Ryder flashed the Helsing cross tattooed on the back of his fist before jerking his thumb aft. “The
brats
in the back truck are with us, too.”
The cop looked at Ryder’s tat, then aimed his beam at the back of my hand. The black Helsing tattoo meant
reaper
, an insignia every Helsing Corps member wore, regardless of function or rank. My cross had a crimson outline, a bloodied gully between my reaper’s ink and pale skin. Only two reapers in the corps wore that thin red line.
The officer’s flashlight sliced into my eyes, sharp as a blade. “Hey, you’re—”
“Watch it.” I blocked the light with my hand, blinking the afterimage away. My pupils would take fifteen minutes to dilate again, though the worst effects would wear off in seconds.
The officer lowered his flashlight. “You kids can’t go in there, especially you, Miss Helsing. We’ve got DOAs inside, people we can’t even reach—”
“That’s why we’re going in.” Well, not we.
Me
.
Dead on arrival
—DOA—confirmed Marlowe’s report, and the officers’ injuries made up my mind. I couldn’t expose the boys to a monster they weren’t equipped to reap. Ditching them would mean breaking another one of Dad’s rules—no reaper hunts alone—but I’d never hold a rule higher than a human life. Not over my crew’s lives, not over civilian lives.
The second officer shined his flashlight on the Humvee behind ours. “Thought you kids were supposed to have some kind of adult supervision?”
“The backup’s busy. Clear the road,” Ryder said.
“But—”
Ryder didn’t wait for the cop to finish. He rolled up his window, muttering several fierce (read that: unrepeatable) words under his breath. Growing up in Australia taught him a lot of skills, but swearing was an art form Down Under and Ryder was an overachiever. “Even the bloody cops know we’re supposed to wait for backup.” He revved the engine, startling the crowd into motion.
“You’re welcome to wait for Montgomery’s team.” My words earned me a rock-solid, 100-proof Ryder McCoy glare, which flipped and pinned my stomach faster than a freestyle suplex. It wasn’t fair to make him choose between me and Helsing’s operational standards, because I knew in my head, bones, and heart he’d pick me over his precious rules. No contest. His eyes said as much, even if his words wouldn’t.
I felt a little manipulative but not at all guilty.
The Humvee crawled up to the hospital’s doors. The pulse from our emergency lights reddened the building’s facade. I toyed with my camera’s aperture rings, trying to loosen the snarl of nerves in my gut. Dad said this part never got easier, the conscious choice to face the dead. Tonight, I’d do it alone. I just needed an opening, one second to slip through Ryder’s fingers and disappear into the crowd.
“Don’t get out yet, I don’t want to lose you.” Ryder unbuckled his seat belt. Pressing the button on the comm unit hooked around his ear, he said, “Jude, Ollie? You ready?”
“Hold on, we’ve got a problem,” Oliver said. Ryder’s gaze flashed to the rearview mirror, his comm blinking blue. We kept our comms on anytime we left Angel Island—another one of Dad’s rules.
“What’s that?” Ryder asked.
“The hospital’s security cameras went down with the power outage,” Oliver said. “We go in there, and we’re going in blind.”
