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Someone, somewhere, had to have answers for me. As I kicked my leg over Ryder’s bike and held on to him, I wondered how many rules I’d have to break to do this.

How many lines I’d have to cross,

How intense I’d have to be—

To survive.

FRIDAY, 9:35 P.M.

T
HE
H
ELSING COMPOUND AT
the Presidio used to be sealed up tighter than Fort Knox: a twenty-foot-tall concrete wall enclosed the old base, Helsing crosses molded on its face, razor wire spooling around its top. Cameras and motion sensors watched every inch of the wall, so if anyone—or any
thing
—approached within a few yards, dispatch sent out a crew. Nowadays, the five-foot-high reflective-red signs reading
NECROTIC QUARANTINE: KEEP OUT
probably deterred more break-ins than the cameras and faux gun turrets; the speculation and urban legends that arose after Mom’s death bolstered people’s fear of the place.

Oliver knocked out the compound’s security systems on the drive over, placing the cameras on an infinite blind loop and impairing the motion sensors. Now we just needed to get in.

Ryder and I waited, motorcycle idling, while Oliver hacked into the gate computer. Mist wound through the trees on the other side of the twelve-foot iron gate, obscuring the road and the buildings beyond. From the absence of graffiti, refuse, and human decay, I guess this place scared people stupid. It sure scared me.

“You don’t have to do this,” Ryder said, quietly enough so that Oliver wouldn’t hear him. He leaned back. “There are places we can go that won’t make you…” The engine muttered and growled, saying what Ryder couldn’t or wouldn’t.

“Freak out?” I asked, leaning into him.

“Why face this hellhole now?”

“You know why.”

He blew out a breath and looked back at the road. I put a hand on his biceps, which wasn’t a safe, neutral zone. My fingers paled against the richness of his skin, overlaying the second Helsing tattoo he wore, the one he got for saving my life. A shiver rippled under my touch, and I wondered for the thousandth time why he refused to wear the leather jacket stowed in his saddlebag.

I squeezed his arm. “I’ll be okay.”

“Swear you’ll tell me if the place gets to be too much?” He held his pinkie finger out and I laughed. We’d done this dozens of times over the years, made promises to watch every George Romero movie together, or to only eat Vegemite for a month (I broke that one within hours; the stuff grossed me out).

“I’m serious,” he said.

I linked my pinkie finger around his. “I know.” He kissed his fist and I kissed mine—I’d never realized how close the gesture brought us, emotionally and physically.

The gate groaned, the lock releasing, metal shaking off dust and leaves and cobwebs as it shifted back. Oliver turned and gave us a thumbs-up.

“Should’ve bribed him to screw up,” Ryder muttered. With a wave, Oliver climbed into Jude’s truck. They headed out. We headed in.

The empty Presidio compound stood on a thousand acres. Historic Spanish-style buildings aged gracefully beside modern training facilities. Dad decommissioned the Presidio once construction finished on the headquarters at Angel Island. The Bay Area Corps had been preparing for the move before Mom’s death, and afterward, I think everyone was grateful to make this place a memory, including me.

The motorcycle’s headlight made a tunnel through the darkness. We drove past silent, tomb-like outer buildings. Dead vines dug skeletal fingers into the brickwork, and the streetlights rose like rib bones against the dark sky. I’d driven this road countless times, but I’d not seen this place vacant before. Desolate, with windows dull as dead men’s eyes and grass the color of rot. For a moment, I imagined Ryder and I were alone in a vast, empty world, and the feeling echoed in my soul.

Ryder turned off the main road and onto a narrower lane, which took us through a copse of trees. I gripped him tighter.

“Take a deep breath.” His voice was barely audible over the bike’s engine. We passed the place where we built forts in the summertime as kids. I swear I saw the foggy forms of my little brothers running through the trees, chasing each other. I shut my eyes and turned my face forward.

Real ghosts don’t look like that
, I told myself.

“You’re holding your breath,” Ryder said. “Breathe in.”

I took a breath.
The boys are just in my head.

“Now out.”

I exhaled. Opened my eyes.

The bike slowed and rocked to a stop. Ryder put a hand over mine and squeezed. This place held almost as many memories for him as it did for me.

The house sat apart from the rest of the compound, surrounded by aged, towering eucalyptus and evergreen trees. She was the grandest house I’d ever seen, a Victorian painted lady dressed in mahogany and white. On the outside, she had soaring gables and scrolling woodwork, a giant wraparound porch, and huge picture window. I imagined my brothers’ faces there, sticking out their tongues at us. They used to sing that stupid “Sittin’ in a Tree” song about Ryder and me. I’d insisted to them and everyone else Ryder and I were and always would be just friends. I’d even believed it back then.

“You ready for this?” Ryder asked.

“Stop asking me that,” I whispered, wishing the answer wasn’t
hell no
. He threaded his fingers through mine and squeezed my hand again. I hugged him tighter, then pulled away. I had to focus on the house and all her memories.

I swung off the bike. Fog hushed the property. The familiar earthen scent of the trees and the ocean’s crash should’ve calmed my nerves; instead, it took me back to my last night here, the night Ryder came and carried me out of hell or home or whatever this place was now. He’d cradled me on those front steps while we waited for the EMTs, telling me to hold on while I watched red ghostlight seep down the veins in my arm. Blood had soaked my shirt, pumping from the torn flesh in my trapezius, my world nothing but pain, shock, and worse.

“Micheline?” Ryder turned my name into a question—
Are you okay?

An owl croaked from the trees. The sound echoed in the empty chambers of my heart.

“I need to go in alone,” I said.

He started to protest, but I put my hand up. “Give me five minutes.” I pulled my old house keys from my camera bag. Without looking at him, I started toward the house and took the stairs one by one. I didn’t look back when the steps creaked after me. I’d let Ryder follow me to the threshold, no farther.

Inside, the house was shrouded, shuttered, and dark. It smelled lonely, like settled dust and dry, rotted roses. The floor squeaked in all the same places, boards my mother had stepped on with a grin, ones my father had sworn to fix.
It means this place has history
, she’d cajoled. Dad smiled when she wasn’t looking and left the floorboards loose.

The littlest memories bled like sores: Dad coming home and kissing Mom, ruffling Ethan’s hair, and lifting Fletcher on his shoulders. I swear I heard Mom’s voice, calling me. I almost answered her. I could see my parents slow-dancing in the kitchen, or feel the
whoosh
of air as my brothers raced past, chasing each other with Nerf guns.

“I’ll wait here,” Ryder said, framed in the front door. He shoved his hands in his pockets, scanning the depths of the house behind me. “Call me if you need me.”

“I will.” I drove my fingernails into my palms, holding on to my courage. I turned into the house, not bothering with the lights or even a flashlight—I knew every inch by heart.

The last family photograph we’d taken hung in the family room, right over the mantel. Mom looked like the center of our universe, our golden North Star. No wonder Dad and I lost our way after her death. I stepped closer to the picture. My hair was platinum blond then, like Mom’s, and fell past my waist. I started dyeing it black after her funeral—it was hard to look in the mirror every day and remember her.

With trembling fingers, I reached up and traced the planes of her face. For the briefest instant, her features darkened and snarled. I drew back as though burned, almost tripping on the coffee table. It’d been a long time since I’d had a PTSD flare, but here, in this house … the memories came back. The good, the bad.

The nightmarish.

I hovered on the kitchen’s edge. Mom died in here, the paranecrosis invading her frontal lobe so fast she’d screamed in agony. Ethan and I had run downstairs, yelling at six-year-old Fletcher to stay in his room. But he’d been right on our heels as Mom collapsed, her body oozing red light.

I didn’t have to close my eyes to see the scene: Fletcher sobbed and tried to run to Mom, I’d grabbed him back. Ethan was twelve and in the academy, old enough to know what was happening, old enough to know we had fifteen seconds before she got back up again, and smart enough not to lunge for her. Scared enough to follow me when I lifted Fletcher in my arms and ran upstairs.

Mom howled from the kitchen, and the sound hit like a chainsaw to the chest. Ethan shook and leaned on me, silent tears streaming down his face. He hadn’t started hunting with a crew yet and only dealt with the dead in textbooks.

We’d run to the end of the hall.
Panic room, panic room, panic room.
I punched my thumb into the gel reader and when the door snapped open, I pushed my brothers inside. Glancing back, I’d seen slushy-red ghostlight creeping up the stairwell.

“Call Dad!” I’d shouted at Ethan as I slammed the door, tripping the locks and alarms. The monitors on the walls flared to life, showing every room in the house.

Mom climbed the stairs, her movements slow but powerful.
She’s dead. She’s not my mother anymore. She’s dead, dead, dead—

Hands shaking, I’d logged into the security system’s administration to reset the cached prints. New paranecrotics maintained some of their long-term memory function for the first six postmortem hours and, during that time, usually possessed abnormal strength if not much dexterity. Mom might remember to press her thumb into the gel reader by the door. If she got in, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stop her, unarmed.

Fletcher sobbed and shrieked for our mother. Ethan grabbed him and clapped a hand over his mouth. He dialed a number on the landline with his other hand, lower lip trembling.

Mom’s next roar rocked my bones. I fought to keep from crying. I was the eldest, the hunter; I had to be the brave one. I scrolled through the administration panel’s windows, trying to keep my hand steady on the track pad. When I clicked on Security Controls, the system beeped and asked for a password.

On the monitors, Mom stalked into my parents’ bedroom, searching for us. A few doors down, now.

“Dad?” Ethan asked.

I entered Dad’s usual password into the system—Alexa&Len—and raced through the options. The system catalogued Reset Print Cache near the end of the list. I clicked it, heaving a sob.

“Something’s wrong with Mom. No…”

Ethan started to cry.

I took the phone from him. “Mom’s dead and mobile.”

Two beats of silence axed my heart.

Dad said, “You’re in the panic room? With the boys?”

“Yes.”

“Are you armed?”

“No.” My voice broke on the word.

“Don’t move. I’m coming.” He hung up.

I sank to the floor, wrapping one arm around Fletcher, and the other around Ethan. We clung to one another as Mom stumbled out of her bedroom and turned toward the panic room. I prayed that it wouldn’t take Dad long to get home from the main office buildings. We’d timed it before—six minutes, max.

Mom approached the panic room door. She swayed on unsteady feet. Her heart wasn’t beating. Her cells had stopped splitting. She wasn’t breathing, but she was moving.

Fletcher whimpered, watching the screens. “Daddy’s going to make Mommy better, right?”

“Yeah, baby,” I whispered back, clutching him tighter, feeling sick in my head and heart and numb everywhere else. “He’s going to help her.”

We watched Mom press her thumb into the door’s gel reader.

Once.

Twice.

The door stayed shut. I exhaled.

Nothing happened until she did something I hadn’t bargained for:

Reaching up with a trembling index finger, she started typing a code into the panel.

A-l-e-x-a-& …

Dad’s password. The manual override code.

L-e-n …

The door slid open.

*   *   *

T
HE PANIC ROOM DOOR
hung ajar, a black maw, still choking on the echoes of my brothers’ screams. I had failed to protect them from a monster, and would live with the scars from their deaths my whole life long. Worst of all, we never found the people responsible for infecting my mother. Dr. Stoker found a pinprick at the nape of her neck and an unknown, fast-acting strain of the paranecrosis bacteria, nothing more. No trace hairs or fibers, no evidence of a struggle.

My tears turned into a sob. Why hadn’t I grabbed my handgun off my desk? Why hadn’t I thrown the boys into the panic room and gone after Mom myself? At fifteen, I’d killed reanimates. I’d studied them, dissected them, hunted them down with knives and guns, and put their ghostlight out. Necros relied on their spinal cords and brainstems—a shot or slice to either would’ve been enough to stop her. But how could I put a bullet in my mother? Could Dad have done it, if Ryder hadn’t gotten here first? Or would his trigger finger stick even as her fingers tore into my throat?

Ryder’s trigger hadn’t stuck. Mom bit into my neck and he …

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, shivering. The room swallowed my words whole. “I’m so sorry.”

Before long, Ryder came for me. He put his jacket around my shoulders, and it smelled of motorcycle exhaust and gun smoke and something entirely him.

“They don’t blame you,” he said softly.

I pulled his jacket close. “They don’t have to.”

FRIDAY, 10:49 P.M.

R
YDER AND
I
REVIVED
the house—removing slipcovers from furniture, opening windows, dusting, and igniting the gas-powered generators. The work diverted my thoughts, but I tried not to make eye contact with the people in the family photos. I wouldn’t let Ryder take them down, either. I wanted this place kept untouched, this museum of my past life. The dryer still had clothes in its belly, little-boy-size shirts with baseball bats and cartoon characters on them. The bathrooms were stocked with half-used toiletries. The boys’ room had jumped-on bedspreads.
Stuart Little
waited on Fletcher’s nightstand, ready for me to read another chapter aloud.