And what am I going to do about Luca?
I rolled my right shoulder back, wincing through the pain. Luca’s “help” almost got my arm ripped off. He wasn’t trustworthy, but his advice did help me track our captor-entity to the PacBell Building. Without him I’d be throwing darts in the dark; but was it unwise to use someone for information if that someone was dead? Someone who hid his motives behind smoke screens and smiles?
The front door slammed as I plated the last sandwich. Jude and Oliver dragged themselves into the kitchen, fell into barstools, and slumped over the kitchen island.
“What a night,” Jude said, resting his forehead on the marble countertop. “This is like the Dep Week from hell.” Once a year, academy students slogged through Deprivation Week—seven days of four hours of sleep a night, a halved caloric intake, and relentless psychological pressure and physical stress. I’d whine about it, but my father went into deprivation mode once a month, and expected professional reapers to complete at least one week every three months. It sucked, but it did toughen us up physically and psychologically.
“Least we don’t have to eat like it’s Dep Week,” Ryder said, grabbing a sandwich off the plate.
“Forever the optimist,” Oliver said, keeping his head down.
“Only about food,” Ryder said, talking to Oliver but looking at me. My memory conjured up the moment in the alleyway, the question he left unanswered. If you’re not optimistic about us, then why risk it? I wouldn’t be getting an answer, not that I was ready for one. Some answers weren’t worth the heartache.
We ended up in the family room, gathered around the television. Ryder and Jude each commandeered an end of the couch, so I got stuck in the middle. Oliver plugged in the television and snow fizzled over the screen. I thought of all the horror movies I’d seen with ghosts crawling out of staticky screens and hoped it wasn’t possible.
Grabbing the remote off the coffee table, I flicked through channels until I saw news footage of a high-rise on fire. I turned up the sound, the television anchor’s voice rising by degrees:
“… Firefighters are still working to control the blaze”—the television showed shots of the SFFD carrying hoses—“and the presence of a large amount of necrotic material at the scene has prompted Helsing’s involvement as well.”
Oliver slid out from behind the television, practically tripping over the cables to watch. The camera cut to a shot of a few Harker Elite guys in riot gear, running into the building’s basement with really big guns.
“Are they packing rocket launchers?” Jude asked.
Oliver shook his head. “No, those are our new modified buffalo guns.”
“They must’ve found the nest,” Ryder said. “Unlucky sods.”
“Pfft, buffalo guns,” Jude said. “I’d go in again if they gave me a rocket launcher.”
“Nobody’s dumb enough to give you a rocket-propelled projectile.” Oliver set his hands on his hips, back to us, so he missed Jude’s obscene gesture. “What are the chances the ghost will linger in the PacBell Building, Micheline? Should we warn our people?”
“The building’s safe enough by now.” I muted the television’s volume and continued: “Ghosts tend to abandon haunting sites once they’ve been discovered by a tetro or exorcist—they don’t want to risk exorcism.”
“So you’ll have to track the ghost again?” Oliver asked, making a half turn to look at me. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”
Ryder grumbled, “It’s a bloody stupid idea,” but I didn’t call him out on it. “The map and Ouija planchette aren’t the issue, and you’ve already sealed the silver frame,” I said. We’d have to hope that the entity didn’t pick another building chock-full of hypernecrotic nightmares for round three. If we hadn’t been chased out of the PacBell Building so soon … if I’d just had a little more time …
Jude pointed at the television. “Hey, Outback, the competition’s on TV.” Chris Kennedy, captain of the Harker Elite, stood talking to a starry-eyed female news correspondent. Kennedy was one of the men on Dad’s “acceptable” list—late twentyish, with a triple-digit killboard score, and a blood tie to the Harker family. A cousin, or something. He looked like a cover model for a men’s health magazine, and PR put him on camera or in print every chance they got. Dad made him my bodyguard after Mom’s death, when the investigation on what caused her paranecrosis still raged hot. I’m sure my father hoped something would develop between us during those long months—but when I didn’t cling to Kennedy in some soft-core version of Stockholm syndrome, Dad promoted him out of our house.
Without even looking over, Ryder threw a pillow and hit Jude square in the head. “Hey,” Jude said, laughing.
“Turn the sound back up, Micheline,” Oliver said.
“… Once-in-a-lifetime find,” Kennedy said. “This is an entirely new species of hypernecrotic. We’ve got a guy who did a couple of tours in Iraq, and he’s been calling them deathstalkers, after the scorpions in the Middle East—”
“That’s real cute, Kennedy,” Jude said. “Let’s put ’em in petting zoos.”
Oliver sighed, watching as a bunch of the Harker Elite loaded a mostly intact set of scorpion-necros into a truck. “Those specimens will go straight to Seward Memorial and the Ninth Circle, and I’m going to miss the initial dissections and tissue analyses.”
“Those things were this close to eating us, Oliver,” I said, pinching an inch of space between my thumb and forefinger.
“I know, but infected corpses fused into an entirely new hypernecrotic creature,” Oliver said, his face lighting. “You understand what this means, don’t you? The hypernecrotic strain of the Y. pestis bacteria is evolving into—”
“Save the lecture for the geeks who care, Lollipop,” Jude said, getting up off the couch and scratching his stomach. “I’m going to bed.”
“Keep it to six hours, mate,” Ryder said. “We’ve got work to do.”
Jude groaned.
I turned off the television and followed the boys upstairs, gravity trying to yank me to the ground with every step. I’d spent little of the last thirty-six hours asleep, so every part of my body whined as I dragged myself to bed. When I curled up under my comforter, nostalgia threatened to choke me up. I swallowed it down, unable to take the onslaught of memories. I’d hit my coping threshold for one night.
Closing my eyes brought on a host of still-awake nightmares instead of sleep—fathers who hit and ghosts who paralyzed with a touch; eight-legged monstrosities with their barbed tails dripping; and bright waterfalls of sparks moving over windowpanes.
I grasped the last image tight, even as my mind darkened with sleep. The PacBell Building taught me something about our entity—but what, exactly? What did that burst of energy over the windowpanes mean for exorcising our ghost?
It had something to do with the transfer of power, of energy, of light. It’s something to do with the strength of its light, the amount of it—
Before I could make sense of those thoughts, the curtain fell down over my consciousness.
I slept like the dead.
SATURDAY, 5:16 P.M.
I WOKE ICE COLD and shivering, despite the weight of my comforter. The embers of day burned low, edging my blackout drapes in afternoon light. It was strange to wake in my old room, and when I squeezed my eyes closed, I could almost imagine this place being a home again—Mom’s voice, calling us down for breakfast. Big thumps as my little brothers took flying leaps down the stairs. The deep timbre of Dad’s voice, telling the boys to settle down as he stepped out of my parents’ bedroom.
When I closed my eyes, I could almost remember what happy felt like.
Pushing up against my headboard, I took stock of the aches in my body. My shoulder’s ball joint rusted while I slept, and it creaked when I moved. I had a nasty welt on my back from getting whipped with the ghost’s manifested chains, plus an egg-shaped lump on my head from my fall. We’d gotten out of the PacBell alive but barely, riding on
a lucky strike combined with Jude’s foresight. Massaging my shoulder, I wondered what carnival of terrors we’d face tonight.
Footsteps padded in the hall, floorboards squeaked. Water whispered through the pipes. Taking a cue from the boys, I kicked off my covers and headed into my bathroom, stripped off my shirt to shower, and almost freaked:
My soulchain now covered my entire torso, crisscrossing my chest like glowing violet-black bruises. It twitched and scraped against my organs, spine, and rib cage with an unsettling, not quite physical mass. Invading me. Killing me. I traced one chain with a fingertip, trying not to think about them maturing, crushing rib bones, bursting organs, and squeezing the soul from my body. No wonder I woke up freezing—the chains sucked the heat out of my skin, out of the air around me. I scrambled back into my shirt until the shower pumped steam into the bathroom. Even then, I still felt cold.
Once out of the shower, I ran through my usual bathroom ritual: tactical blacks, ponytail, and eyeliner. I tossed back a couple of pain pills for my shoulder, too. When I turned off the bathroom lights, my soulchains glowed through my shirt. I hadn’t imagined they’d grow so aggressively. We’d been chained for less than forty-eight hours, how much worse would they get before the end?
While the boys were engaged in their own evening routines, I grabbed my camera and headed down to the basement, making sure to close the door behind me.
“I hate to say it”—I said to the leaden antimirrors—“but you were right.”
Thirty seconds passed, then a minute. I almost gave up, but just before I turned to leave, tendrils of blue light forked over the mirrors. Luca chuckled from inside the glass.
“So you found your captor?” he asked, his voice crawling into my ear. “Brava, nymphet.”
“Your little Ouija suggestion almost got my arm ripped off, thanks.”
He appeared in the mirror closest to me, several steps back from its surface. “But it worked, did it not?”
“It did,” I said through clenched teeth.
He took a step forward. “You’ll accept my offer to assist you, then?”
I held my ground and answered him with a glare. I’d be a fool to trust a ghost, especially one who crackled with his own dark, terrible energy. Something sinister lurked inside his words, obscured by his smooth attitude and annoyingly attractive face—one I wanted to break with my fist. I sensed a threat with my gut, even if I couldn’t see it with my eyes; it was in the way he lingered over the word assist, or the quick flick of his tongue against the corner of his mouth.
“The only things I want in return”—Luca said, leaning down—“are little pieces of you.” Half a heartbeat later, his pillowy, cold lips pressed against my neck.
“God,” I said, swiping at the air and scrambling away. I stared him down through the mirror, panting out my panic.
“Not quite, but I’m flattered, nymphet.” He put a hand to his mouth—at first I thought he was going to blow me a kiss, the sicko. But he looked down at his fingertips, and I saw the thin, black blister bisecting his lower lip. His gaze zeroed in on my breastbone, right on the little cross hidden beneath my shirt. “Tell me, where did that charming little bauble come from?” He spat the word bauble out like a poison.
I pulled out the cross, letting it fall outside my shirt. “It was my mom’s—”
At the mention of my mother, the edges of Luca’s lips twitched. “How … cute,” he said, the light in his eyes swirling into his pupils, disappearing like water down a drain. “That thing will do little to help you. If you’re lucky, it will keep the soulchain from infecting your brain too early, thus keeping your captor from possessing your body like a puppeteer taking up his pawn.”
I clenched my core muscles to keep from trembling. “Why didn’t you mention this before?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I am not so charitable, nymphet. I know a lot of things about your captor, including how to destroy him—”
“Then tell me,” I said, stepping forward and staring up into the mirror.
“Not without recompense,” he said. “You of all people should know that nothing comes for free, absolution especially.”
“What would you know about absolution?”
He circled me, running a finger down my spine, and chuckled. “I know it means the devil gets his pound of flesh.”
I turned away from the antimirrors and walked toward my darkroom. “Go to hell.”
“Already there,” he drawled. “You know, the problem with a cross is … no, never mind. I am certain it won’t happen to a girl as devout and clever as you.”
His words were hooks. Pausing, I looked over my shoulder. Luca leaned against one of the mirrors, arms crossed over his chest, icy as James Dean or blue glaciers or stone-cold corpses. Dangerous things, frozen things, heartless things.
I about-faced. “I don’t need your help,” I said. “I will find my captor and I will destroy him. And if I cannot, Father Marlowe will find a way to exorcise me.”
Luca’s laugh pealed through the basement like a cracked bell, so loud I thought he might bring the boys running. “You silly girl, no mere priest can exorcise a soulchain.”
“You’re lying.” I said the words too quick, betraying a sudden stab of doubt.
Luca pounced on the opening: “If your little priest couldn’t exorcise your entity, why should he be able to break your chains? Priests are weak, useless creatures who cannot help you.” He held out a hand to me. “I can.”
I eyed his extended hand, then the black mark on his lower lip. The virtue in the cross and chain looped around my neck burned him. It meant Luca wasn’t just dead, but the textbook definition of evil.
How many rules will you break?
How many lines will you cross?
How intense will you have to be to win, Micheline?
“No,” I said, my voice soft as mist. “Not if I don’t let you.”
His lip curled, just enough to show the ridge of his gums. “Then you are every inch a fool.”
“Still not fool enough to trust you.” I returned to my darkroom and pulled the door closed. Leaning both my palms flat on my desk, I counted backward from ten until the war between my heart and head quieted. Lives depended on my choices, and I’d never faced one so faceted and shaded in gray. Luca’s advice worked—even if its execution came at personal expense—and with two days gone, my desperation mounted every hour. Yet where was the line between thinking like a survivalist and being straight-up stupid?
For now, I’d draw the line at Luca—I couldn’t trust him, I wouldn’t. And as I swore it to myself, his whispers tumbled over my skin:
“The problem with a cross is…”
Ignoring him, I prepped the film developer tank in the sink and shut off the safety light. Moving quickly, I slid my film into the tank, glad to see some violet ghostlight eking off the roll. I poured some water into the tank and sealed it up, then set a timer for one minute.
Please let me find something tonight. I moved through the process of developing film, soaking, fixing, and washing it. The uneasiness Luca left in my belly unfurled, especially as the room’s temperature dropped and the breath of someone not there curled against the back of my neck, ghostly fingers gripping my hips.
“Stop it,” I said, blind to him without the antimirrors, blind in this perfect, underground darkness. “Pervert.”
He chuckled, his voice no more than a hoarse breeze without an antimirror’s amplification. It took all my determination to keep the light off, especially as I sensed Luca lingering so close, I’d bump into him if he had a corporeal body.
Twenty minutes ticked by slowly on my egg timer—the film could be exposed to light only after it’d been fixed. The routine of developing film usually untied the knots in my shoulders and unclenched the fists in my stomach; but tonight, everything was a threat, even love. In spite of Luca, I couldn’t keep my mind from wandering back to Ryder—to his lips pressed to the tip of my nose, the corner of my mouth, my lips. He cut us lo
ose with those kisses, and now we roamed in foreign territory with no map, no compass but our own hearts … and mine couldn’t find true north to begin with.
The timer finally chimed. I yanked the cord on my safety light, holding in a sigh of relief. I didn’t want Luca to see me scared, especially not of him.
I clipped the developed film to the drying line and unrolled it, careful not to touch the important parts. It’d be hours before it dried, so I attached a weight clip to the bottom. I’d spread the shots out over several frames tonight, so a few of the frames glowed with ghostlight. Rifling through cupboards, I found a flashlight and dimmed it with a piece of cheesecloth, intending to soften the beam and illuminate the negatives.
The first few shots showed the empty auditorium, inverted in ghostly white on black.
But then, then—
My breath caught. A figure appeared in the next shot, transposed against the window, a haze of violet in the negative whiteness of the frame. The ghost’s features blurred, which wasn’t unusual in combat. With high apertures, low light values, and fast film speeds, I aimed for ghostlight containment, not focus. Yet the most remarkable thing about the shot was the explosion of ghostlit sparks over window glass, as though the window wanted to absorb the ghost like a reaping pane.
“Wow,” I whispered, peering at the film. I’d never seen anything like it before, sparks flying over glass, captured on film. Far as I could figure, the reflective windows must have acted like reaping mirrors and amplified the sensitivity of my shot, allowing me to capture a greater concentration of the entity’s ghostlight.
A little laugh escaped my lips. By combining two methods of exorcism—the reaping pane with the camera’s lens—I could contain the ghostlight of a hyper-resistant entity. See, Luca? I can bring this monster down by myself. I didn’t dare say the words aloud, not wanting to taunt him more.
But how can I duplicate the fight conditions at the PacBell Building?
Footsteps echoed on the stairs. “Micheline?” Ryder called. “Are you down here?”
The room’s pressure shifted, the air whooshing past my cheek. Luca. Throwing the light-tight curtain back, I stepped out and almost right into Ryder.
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