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“Chills are an early symptom of paranecrosis,” the nurse said, placing the back of her hand against my forehead. “You received H-three treatment at the pier clinic, didn’t you?”

I nodded. She pressed her lips together in a frown. “Well, you don’t have a fever and your color looks okay. I’ll get you a robe.”

When I rejoined the others, Jude lounged on a gurney, gloved hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling. Ryder paced the cordoned length of the room, anxious as a caged big cat. Oliver and his father spoke in low voices by the door. Dr. Stoker placed a hand on Oliver’s shoulder and gave him a little shake, his fingers the same length and shape as his son’s.

Of all the first families—of the forefathers shown in the painting—only the Helsing and Stoker bloodlines were still around. We’d lost the others, one by one, over the decades since Dracula’s defeat. My grandfather called it a curse, my father called it a superstition. As for me, I figured Dracula was
dead dead dead
and didn’t give a pint of blood about what the descendants of his killers did.

Still, my father and I were the last surviving members of the American branch of the family. Dad himself was an only child. His twin brother had died within hours of birth. My brothers had been dead for eighteen months, and my paternal grandfather didn’t live to see seventy. The UK branch wasn’t faring better—they’d lost their commander in chief in a bad raid last year, and the whole organization was now run by an “illegitimate sixteen-year-old upstart with more balls than brains.” (My father’s words, not mine.)

Oliver and I were only children. If we were terminal with this—this
thing
, this ghostlight under our skins—then our bloodlines would die with us. Dad was a widower who’d sworn to never remarry. Dr. Stoker was a divorcé of late and had silver wingtips in his dark hair. He was Dad’s age—fifty, maybe fifty-one—young enough to have another child, perhaps, but maybe not young enough to train that child to lead one of the corps’s major branches.

Dr. Stoker gave Oliver’s shoulder a squeeze as I walked in. The nurses rolled the curtains back, exposing the rest of the room.

“Pull some chairs around,” Dr. Stoker said, gesturing to the armchairs pushed into the room’s corners. “I want to know what happened at St. Mary’s.” He moved a chair into the middle of the room and sat, crossing his leg at the knee, his tablet in hand.

“Is this going to be an official statement?” I asked, accepting the armchair Ryder dragged over for me.

Dr. Stoker tapped his tablet’s screen. “What you say will be added to your personnel file and admissible to the academy’s disciplinary board. With that said, I would advise you not to amend your story for your statement. I can’t help you if I don’t know everything that happened.”

Hmph, he might’ve just said
checkmate.

Oliver and Jude pulled chairs up, too. Jude hunched over, forearms on his thighs, head down, while Oliver sat as straight as his father did, despite his injuries. Ryder perched on the arm of my chair—doubtless he’d be pacing in a few minutes, anyway. The guy didn’t know how to hold still.

“Where should we start?” I asked, blowing out a breath.

“At the beginning, when you first learned of the entity,” Dr. Stoker said. His tablet beeped at him, and he recited his name, the date, and the time for the recording.

Ryder nudged me. I took a deep breath and launched into a detailed description of the hunt, starting with Marlowe’s phone call. Quietly, I told Dr. Stoker about the pattern killings, the possessed corpse, and the ghost who wreathed itself in shadows. Dr. Stoker watched me closely as I spoke—my hands, my eyes, and my body language—no doubt looking for lies. He was a reaper’s equivalent of a Renaissance man, and even if I hadn’t planned on telling the truth, I’d be hard-pressed to hide my tells from him.

Dr. Stoker made me repeat the entity’s nursery rhyme twice.

“‘Eye for an eye,’” Oliver murmured.

“It’s the lex talionis,” Dr. Stoker said, glancing at his son. “Do you know what that is?”

“It’s an ancient Roman law, wherein an offended party could claim restitution equal to the offense. Literally equal, that is,” Oliver said.

Dr. Stoker smiled. “Very good. In this case, I should add that the Romans took the law from the Abrahamic tradition of the Jews,” he said. “Perhaps the line ‘chain up the souls of Abraham’s youth’ refers to such ancient practices?”

Abraham?
“Or maybe it refers to a famous ancestor of mine,” I said, thinking of the painting in the hall. “Of yours, too.”

Dr. Stoker’s brows rose, two storm clouds on the placid expanse of his forehead. “If that were the case, Micheline, I would assume, ipso facto, that someone meant to lure the four of you to St. Mary’s tonight, and that the attack was not a chance occurrence but a deliberately malicious one.”

I lifted my shoulders in a shrug, mostly to hide the many-legged shudder that crept up my spine. The feeling banished my confidence. I suddenly couldn’t find the words to tell Dr. Stoker how the entity called me by name, a detail that expanded my guilt and my fear. “Anything’s possible.”

“That’s quite the machination for someone dead,” Dr. Stoker said, but he was looking through me as though I were the glass lens through which he viewed a far-off and obscure subject. “One that would require forethought, even prior knowledge of your relationship with Father Marlowe and the Catholic church. Why else choose a Catholic hospital, one not two blocks away from Marlowe’s residence?”

“Who says the ghost came up with it?” Jude said. “Maybe some dumbass released the ghost in the hospital and
bam!
Instant deathtrap. And it wouldn’t take a lot of brains to figure out how to get Princess here running headlong into it.”

I stuck my tongue out at him.

“You’re such a lemming, Micheline,” Jude said.

“Who came running into the hospital after me?” I shot back.

“Enough.” Dr. Stoker rubbed his temple. “It is entirely possible someone released the ghost in the hospital. Investigations has procured the security tapes and will review them upon their return.”

“What about Marlowe?” Ryder asked. “Can we trust him?”

“Yes,” I said, so automatically that all eyes turned in my direction. “He was my mother’s best friend and confidant; he wouldn’t do anything to hurt me.”

“He put you in the path of a bloody killer,” Ryder said. “And after what happened to your mum, you’d think the bloke would know better.”

I pinned Ryder with a look, but he wasn’t game for a contest. He slid off the chair and started pacing again, scrubbing the shadow on his chin with his hand. I turned away, said nothing, not only out of loyalty to the memory of my mother’s friendship with Marlowe but because I had no rebuttal. Marlowe
had
asked me to go after a killer, after all.

“I’ll bring Marlowe in for questioning,” Dr. Stoker said, standing. “I’ve also been in contact with Dr. Stella Montgomery of Stanford, who will be arriving shortly to help me diagnose your infections. Infestations.” He waved both words away with a hand, as if neither fit his meaning exactly. “In the meantime, you’ll be subjected to a battery of tests, in hopes we find a physiological cause and remedy for your …
predicament
.”

Oh, joy.

“Dr. Montgomery is coming?” Oliver asked, perking. “Will Gemma be with her?”

Dr. Stoker nodded. Jude moaned and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms. Oliver might have loved Gemma, but the rest of us didn’t. Gemma Stone was Oliver’s haughty girlfriend with an IQ he touted like a double-letter cup size, the girl who’d been accepted to Stanford’s Paranecrotic Medicine program at the age of I’m-still-immature-enough-to-throw-it-in-your-face. Even Ryder rubbed the back of his neck as if the idea crimped him. It took a hell of a lot to make Ryder McCoy dislike a person—like maybe spreading rumors at the academy that Helsing Corps psychologists had me on antipsychotics, suicide watch, and house arrest after Mom’s death. That I’d wake up during the day, screaming, and Dad had to hold me down while my live-in nurse gave me a sedative.

Okay, maybe I wasn’t over what Gemma had said, either. Or over how Oliver told her the gory details of my three rounds in the ring with post-traumatic stress disorder.

I was better now.
Mostly
.

Dr. Stoker left us with the nurses. They turned me into a human pincushion—one nurse stuttered apologies as she missed the large vein in my arm once, twice, three times for a blood test. They swabbed my throat, scraped soot off my hands, shoved a thermometer in my mouth, and made me choke down barium for the MRI. They poked, prodded, and pierced me until “battery”
by
tests was right. I felt like I’d gone head-to-head with a meat tenderizer.

By the time I got out of the MRI, backup had arrived. Oliver lay flat on one of the gurneys in the exam room, abdomen exposed up to the bandages on his chest, while a female doctor examined his ghostlight marks. I assumed she was Dr. Montgomery, only surprised by the cut-glass green color of her eyes.
She’s a tetro?
Guess that made sense—Gemma was a tetro, too, so she needed to train with one. Gemma wiped at her cheeks with her knuckles, smearing watercolor trails of mascara over her cheekbones. Dr. Stoker stood beside her, wearing a pair of chromoglasses and a frown, watching Dr. Montgomery work.

The flat-screen television mounted on the wall played CNN on mute. Flashes of St. Mary’s appeared, as well as segments of a correspondent speaking to my father. The words
MALEVOLENT ENTITY TERRORIZES SAN FRANCISCO HOSPITAL
scrolled across the bottom of the screen, subtitled with
HELSING AUTHORITIES ORDER A DUSK-TO-DAWN LOCKDOWN FOR THE BAY AREA
. So the media jackals got to Dad—that’d put him in a mood. Worse, I’d only seen Helsing issue a night curfew twice in my life: once when paranecrosis ravaged the homeless population in the Tenderloin, and for the five months the Embarcadero Scissorclaw stalked the wharfs.

Ryder and Jude stood a few paces back, watching. I eased between them, so close our shoulders touched.

“Does she recognize the ghostlight?” I whispered.

“Never seen it before,” Ryder said softly, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Or heard of it, either,” Jude said.

Guess it wasn’t going to be an easy diagnosis.

Gemma looked up at me and blinked, her face crumpling like a crushed paper sack. “You,” she said, the word gushing out of her. “This is all because of
you
.”

Oliver turned his head and frowned when he saw me. “Gem, don’t—”

“You dragged him into this,” she said, rounding the gurney, pointing a finger at me like a pistol. “Taking off like that, leaving them defenseless. What is wrong with you?”

Dr. Montgomery looked up, recognized me, and straightened. “Gemma.” Her tone flickered with a warning.

Jude muttered, “Here we go” under his breath. Ryder leaned forward, almost imperceptibly, shifting his weight from his heels to the balls of his feet. Not to protect me from Gemma—he knew I didn’t need his protection—but maybe to protect Gemma from
me
.

“I didn’t ask anyone to come with me,” I said, squaring my shoulders. It was hard to look imposing when everyone in the room stood several inches taller than I did.

“You knew,” she spat. “You knew they would come after you, because everyone’s so worried about you and your precious family—”

“That’s enough,” Dr. Stoker said, cutting off the conversation at the roots. “You will desist, Miss Stone, or you will receive a demerit for insubordination.”

Gemma turned on her heel. “Insubordination? Oliver’s suffering for her mistakes and you’re calling it—”

“Gem, I’m fine.” Oliver pushed off the gurney and put his arms around her. She buried her face in his neck. “Fighting gets us nowhere. We have to work together, okay?” His gaze rested on me, weighty.
Play nice
, it said. Easy for Oliver to say, she’d never slandered him.

She sniffled and nodded. Jude made a gagging gesture with his finger in his mouth. I elbowed him. He bumped me with his hip. I slapped his hand, and he almost smacked back before Ryder hit him over the back of the head.

“Now that you’re here, Miss Helsing”—Dr. Montgomery pressed her right fist into her heart in a salute—“I think we can begin.”

“Begin what?” Then I noticed the antimirror.

Once a silver reaping pane was used to trap a ghost, it became an
antimirror
—a sort of portal to the space between life and death, a place we called the Obscura. Tetrachromats sealed antimirrors by dipping them in molten glass. Once the panes cooled, their silver surfaces no longer reflected the living world, but allowed us to peer into places stained with twilight and shadow, beaten down by ruin and rot, and full of psychopathic ghosts chained by whatever fears or regrets kept them from moving on into death.

Tetrachromats sometimes used the mirrors to communicate with the dead, to ask questions when faced with a spiritual anomaly or entity that couldn’t be explained by conventional means. Dr. Montgomery’s antimirror stood five feet tall—the height of a standard reaping mirror—propped up on a wire easel. The hospital room I saw through the mirror had chunks of flesh torn out of its walls. The light fixture dangled from the ceiling by its optical nerve, and a gurney lay in one corner, its frame twisted and bent. It was our hospital room … yet it wasn’t.

I’d learned to exorcise ghosts with silver mirrors as a kid. A power inverter hooked on to the reaping mirror with clamps that looked like jumper cables, which positively electrified the silver surface and turned it into a magnet for a ghost’s negative ions and opened a portal to the Obscura. Silver conducted electricity better than any other metal, too, which made it pure Kryptonite to ghosts. Of course, this process involved somehow forcing the ghost into contact with the electrified pane, which was neither simple nor safe.

Once they moved a ghost into the Obscura, tetros wrapped the antimirror in a static-free bag, and either dipped the pane to seal the portal, or sent it to Helsing silversmiths to melt it down. If a tetro left an antimirror unsealed or unmelted, ghosts could sometimes slip through during thunderstorms or power surges. On rare occasions, a ghost was powerful enough to electrify a silver pane on its own.