Shutter (31 page)

I looked up at the encased reaping mirrors, which waited in a corner. Tonight, I’d take my chances with the mirrors; failing that, I would risk contacting Father Marlowe for backup.

The last few drops of twilight oozed down the walls, turning the room blue. My right arm ached as I took hold of the Ouija planchette, focusing all my willpower into its sturdy plastic body.
One last time
, I thought, shivering as my chains stretched down my hand and wrapped themselves around my fingers.

The planchette shifted, drawing my hand away from the city’s heart and into the bay itself.

Then stopped dead.

I waited for several long, itchy seconds, expecting the planchette to double-back for the mainland. “Come on,” I whispered at my soulchains. They shifted and grated against my wrist bones, surfacing out of muscle and sinew like tiny whales’ backs breaching the inside of my skin. I massaged them down with my left hand, trying to metabolize the panic building in my system.

Okay, don’t stress this
, I told myself.
The planchette might not work until full dark.
I glanced up at the windows, popped out against the black wall in cerulean blues. Full dark would fall a little before eighteen hundred hours, which gave me almost a half hour to kill.

I went upstairs and packed my camera bag, smiling when I found Fletcher’s little Matchbox car still tucked in a side pocket. Leaving it there for luck, I loaded up a spare of everything else: another clip for the Colt from my old gun locker, an extra flash, film, and batteries. My best telephoto lens, plus a spare. My monopod. I slid my gun belt through my pants loops, slung my camera bag around my waist, and slipped my jacket on.

Tonight’s hunt had an eerie sense of finality to it, one that made me feel like I’d swallowed a large, smooth stone, its weight indigestible. I popped a few more painkillers for my shoulder and watched the clock tick toward perfect dark, snapping my fingers to keep from chewing on hangnails, willing time to move faster. I even wandered down to the basement to “check” on Kennedy, but found the man grouchy, the antimirrors empty, and the basement devoid of Luca’s presence. Odd, I’d thought Luca would at least be curious about the intruder in this space.

When the windows blackened to soot, I returned to Dad’s study. The others gathered around the desk, solemn. Bianca perched on one of Dad’s chairs, straight across from me, her hand wound in Jude’s. On my right, Ryder braced himself against the desktop, his fingers pressed into its surface.

The planchette twitched in the cage of my fingers, scooting another centimeter into the bay before it snagged on an invisible obstruction. Rather than stop and die, the planchette trembled in my hand like a mouse under a cat’s paw.

“That doesn’t make sense,” I said, willing the planchette forward. “Why would the ghost be haunting the bay?”

“The bastard’s a smart one,” Ryder said. “Maybe it’s on a boat, thinking we’d have a hard go of reaching it?”

I winced, thinking of the climbing body count.

“No, it’s got to be moving somewhere.” Jude dropped Bianca’s hand to gesture at the planchette’s tip. “What’s this thing pointing at?”

“You don’t look at the planchette’s tip, but at its needle.” I bent over the map to get a dead-on view. “It’s sitting about a mile offshore, between the piers and Angel Island.…”

It’s in the tunnel.

The thought scorched me, hot as lightning, and must’ve branched off and hit the boys at the same time. “The tunnel, it’s headed for the island,” I said.

Ryder and Jude swore in unison, a harsh word that almost had me saying
jinx!
were it not for the hopelessness of our situation. Our entity would be loose on Helsing soil—and with Helsing’s tetrachromat crews currently deployed on the mainland, plus the regular reapers moving out for the night, everyone on the island would be defenseless:

Civilian families.

Cadets.

Doctors.

Schoolchildren.

I circled Dad’s desk. “Boys, we’re leaving. Bianca, I need you to call in an anonymous tip and tell dispatch the tetros’ target is headed to Angel Island—”

Jude gripped my upper arm. “I’m not leaving her alone.”

“She won’t be alone.” I rolled my shoulders to shuck him off. “Kennedy’s here. Someone needs to stay with him.”

He hesitated. Bianca pushed him forward, her cell phone pressed to her ear. “I’ll be safer here than with you,” she said. “Go.
Hurry.
”

I turned as he kissed her, and ran upstairs to grab the rest of my gear. I slid my Colt into its holster, grabbed my monopod off my desk, and met the boys in the foyer. Ryder had our reaping panes, zipped up tight for travel.

“Ready?” I asked them, flicking my comm on.

Jude flashed rock fists at me. “Let the good times roll.”

SUNDAY, 7:15 P.M.

W
E SHREDDED PAVEMENT DOWN
Highway 101, headed for Pier 50 and going balls-to-the-wall fast as the tires of Jude’s Chevy screamed over the engine’s roar. Horns blared. Cars scrambled out of our way, no more than red taillight blurs. Tonight’s lockdown wouldn’t take effect until twenty-two hundred hours, which meant the roads were jammed with commuter traffic. Ryder turned the radio over to the reaper scanner, listening for alerts from dispatch.

Jude’s hands slid over the wheel, the stitches in his gloves straining. Ryder rode shotgun and anchored himself with a foot on the dash. I sat in the backseat of the cab, holding the reaping panes. Out the driver’s side window, the bay zipped past, the city lights blurring like stars on warp speed. Behind us, the lights of the Golden Gate Bridge set the fog aflame.

“We’re going to the pier?” Jude asked.

“Head to the checkpoint,” I said. “We won’t be able to get into the tunnel again.”

He turned off the 101 onto Van Ness. The truck jolted hard, hitting a curb at sixty miles an hour. We rocketed past Ghirardelli Square. Up ahead, a semi wasn’t moving aside fast enough, bottlenecking the road.

“Watch it, mate,” Ryder said, tensing up and taking his foot off the dash.

“I see him,” Jude said. Instead of slowing down, he hit the gas, stoking the engine’s eight-chambered heart. We shot between the semi and a Ford Explorer, metal screaming on metal. Both the truck’s side mirrors busted off.

Jude just laughed, dodging a lunch box of a hybrid and speeding up, his hands deft on the wheel. He’d won the academy wheelman trials three years in a row—he made the truck slide and shimmy through traffic, scenery roller-coastering by. The stench of burning rubber filled up the cab. Asphyxiating.

We skidded off the road and into Pier 50’s checkpoint lanes, which stood empty at this hour. Guards stepped from their kiosks, waving their arms, warning us to slow down.

“Better stop,” Jude said, slamming on the brakes. The truck squealed to a halt, throwing me into my seat belt. Before he could even roll his window down, I kicked the cab’s mini door open and jumped out, propelled by adrenaline.

“I need a vehicle ferry to Angel Island,” I shouted at the guards, flashing the red-rimmed Helsing cross on my fist and mustering as much of Dad’s authority as possible. “There is a target moving toward the island that presents an immediate threat to compound security.”

“I’m sorry, Miss Helsing,” one of the guards said. “We’re supposed to take you into custody on sight, no questions asked.”

Another guard grinned. “There’s a bounty and everything—”

“Focus,” I snapped. “Lives are on the line, and if you think you’re getting a bounty when you’ve stopped me from—”

The guards’ radios beeped with an emergency alarm: “A five-oh-one red alert is being issued for compound sector two. Repeat, a five-oh-one red alert is being issued for compound sector two. Seward Memorial’s holding pens have been compromised. All personnel and cadets report to emergency defense stations immediately.”

Seward Memorial’s underground holding facility, better known as the Ninth Circle, housed a large number of necrotic specimens for study: hundreds of the world’s most dangerous necros—scissorclaws, behemoths, deathstalkers, and worse—all on the loose.

The entity beat us to Oliver, and then it beat us to the island.

It would not beat me tonight, not again.

One of the guards saluted me. “We’ll have you there in fifteen minutes, ma’am.”

“Make it ten,” I said, climbing back into the truck’s cab.

“Ma’am,” the guards said in unison.

In the cab, I checked my camera and the Colt, then with a shaking hand, touched the Helsing insignia on my chest.

Ready.

Or not.

*   *   *

T
HE FERRY TOUCHED DOWN
on Angel Island ten minutes later.

“Where to?” Jude asked.

“Seward Memorial,” I said. Our entity would entrench itself in a bunker of death and destruction, no doubt.

“Hang on.” Jude punched the gas. The vehicle rocketed off the ferry, shooting over the Angel Island pier. Reapers scrambled out of our way. We burst past the pier gates and slid onto the main road with an acrid screech. The streetlamps throbbed in emergency red, coating the pavement in a hellish haze.

The island’s lights were rigged to shine in four different colors—white for all’s well, yellow for a biohazard outbreak, green for earthquakes and other naturally occurring disasters. But I’d never seen the lights turn red before.

Red meant Helsing was under siege.

Jude pressed the truck to its limit, accelerating to seventy, eighty, ninety miles an hour. The engine roared. Speed pumped into my veins, adrenaline fueling me. In the distance, the compound high-rises appeared out of the fog. One building had lost power, only visible because flames chewed on its insides.

Commands burst through our radio scanner: “Immediate backup requested to the southern residential towers—”

Crackle. “Delta One crews report to the academy quad—”

“Harker Elite support requested ASAP to Seward Memorial—”

Then the scanner sputtered: “This is Damian Drake. I need a Spec Ops team to report to the Tank for a tier-two extraction. The commander in chief is down, I repeat, Commander Helsing is down and requires immediate medical attention—”

Damian’s words slowed time, congealing the blood in my heart and brain.

Dad … down?

The words didn’t make sense.

No, he can’t be.

My father was unstoppable—

But even my father couldn’t stop this monster.

“Faster, Jude,” I shouted.

Skidding off the main road, Jude took us straight through the compound. He skirted buildings, statues, and reapers on the ground. Ryder and I spotted for him, watching for crews on foot and other obstacles. Bright bursts of gunfire pocked the darkness. Flares of crimson and canary ghostlight burned everywhere. We mowed down necros either too stupid or too slow to get out of our way.

We tore into the main quad, squaring Seward Memorial in our sights. Uplights illuminated the building’s flanks, its windows and insides inky.
Hold on, Dad, we’re coming.

A bullet dinged off our roof. I ducked—but when I glanced up, a deep blue streak charged at the truck. Its color registered first, its splayed claws second.

“Scissorclaw, twelve o’clock,” I shouted. The necro sprang, smashing into the top part of our windshield and denting the roof. Slowing us down. Its claws punctured the truck’s ceiling, ripping the breath from my lungs.

Jude slammed on the brakes, throwing the truck into an uncontrolled slide. The monster held on, gutting the ceiling, its claws inches away from Ryder’s scalp. He dodged and fired his Colt into the space between those claws, but his .45 caliber bullet only pissed off the scissorclaw.

“Keep her steady,” I shouted at Jude.

Ryder twisted in his seat. “Micheline, no!”

Ignoring him, I threw open the truck’s back window and slid out into the bed. The scissorclaw bellowed at me, its mouth tearing wide, tongue extending like a muscular whip, teeth gleaming like blue spikes in its ghostlight. It pulled one huge claw out of the truck’s roof, but the other stuck tight.

I wrenched Jude’s toolbox open, grabbed a rifle, and butted the gun against my bad shoulder. Safety off, I took aim and squeezed the trigger. The recoil speared my shoulder, once, twice, point-blank bullets hitting home in the necro’s brain. It thudded against the roof and rolled off, its ghostlight burning out to embers.

“It’s down!” I stuck one leg in the cab to anchor myself, standing on the backseat, and slapped what was left of the truck’s roof. “Go, go, go!”

Jude stamped on the gas. The truck fishtailed on the lawn, found traction, and bulleted forward. We covered the quad fast. As wind screamed in my ears, I sniped at necros in our path or the ones engaging our crews on the sidewalks.

Seward Memorial’s uplights flickered as we rushed up its drive—Jude didn’t brake fast enough, and the truck skidded to the entrance, nearly throwing me from the bed.

“Bring the mirrors,” I shouted, grabbing my monopod off the backseat and throwing its strap over my shoulder. With the rifle’s barrel in one hand, I jumped over the truck’s edge and landed on my feet. I tore inside, hurdling a secretary’s half-gone corpse, her blood smeared over the revolving doors. Her scissored legs lay just beyond them, one shoe missing off a pedicured foot.

I crossed myself. The whole place smelled of coppery, slit-throat death. Fast, dirty, and mobile. I scanned the hospital’s massive, darkened foyer. Indistinct, lumpy forms scabbed the floor. The fountain regurgitated unnaturally thick water, bodies rocking in its shallow pool. Sparks fell from shattered light fixtures, scattering like snow. Screams and gunshots warbled through the building at different depths and distances, overhead and underfoot.

I swore to take vengeance for the lives lost, for all the families of the reapers who’d fallen tonight. The entity brought its psychological game to the field, no doubt trying to throw me off. It worked with Oliver, but I wouldn’t let it work here. Mess with me, fine. Mess with the people sworn to serve my family—innocent, good people—and I didn’t break so much as burn.