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Marlowe unclasped a gold cross from around his neck. “Micheline, do you remember the mass exorcism your mother and I did in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico?”

How could I forget that case? My mother came home from New Mexico looking like there was less of her somehow, her skin worn to a paper-thin translucence. “I know it had something to do with the victims of a serial killer. I was just a kid, so Mom never told me what happened.”

“This cross saved her life,” Marlowe said, draping the gold chain in my hand. “But she couldn’t bring herself to wear it afterward—too many bad memories—so she trusted it to me.”

“I can’t accept this,” I said, but he closed his hands around mine, sealing the cross inside my palm.

“You must. Four exorcists walked into St. Mary’s, but only I walked out. The demon, it pays little heed to symbols of faith—but it stayed its hand when it saw this cross at my throat.”

“Why?”

“I’ve always liked to think … I don’t know, perhaps a piece of your mother’s goodness remained with the cross after she passed, but…” Marlowe faltered and shook his head. “Wear it always, and may it protect you as it has me, and as it protected Alexa.” He made the sign of the cross over me as I clasped the necklace at the knot of my spine.

“Now, you’ll need to leave out the rectory’s back door to avoid being seen,” he said, motioning to us. We followed Marlowe through darkened back corridors, an organ’s timbre trembling in the walls. When he released us into the night, he said a prayer over each of us—Oliver doing his best not to roll his eyes; Jude fidgety, cracking his knuckles and shifting his weight, acting as if he could hear thunder in the distance. Only Ryder waited with his eyes closed, head bowed, but I knew he did it out of respect for my faith, for Marlowe’s faith.

Marlowe gripped Ryder’s hand. “I’m relying on you to look after her, son.”

Ryder nodded, glanced back at me, and turned out the door.

I stepped up and into Marlowe’s embrace. “Thank you, Father.”

“I’m bound by law to report child abuse,” he said softly, so the boys wouldn’t hear. I stiffened. “The authorities, they won’t—”

“I’m no child, not anymore,” I said, pulling out of his embrace. “Report it if you must, but I’ll deny it to the police if they come asking.”

“Leonard doesn’t deserve you,” Marlowe said, shaking his head, but the words sounded tired, worn-out, as if he’d already said them a hundred times before to someone else. “Someone at the Vatican will have more information for us—I’ll be in touch soon.”

I met the boys in the back alley, their gazes touching on the cross at my throat. They all seemed subdued, with a certain kind of black-eyed exhaustion born from hours of hypervigilance. Dawn nipped at the shadows in the sky, and parishioners started wandering from the cathedral, cars rumbling away.

“We’ll meet you back at the house,” Oliver said, fighting a yawn and losing. We parted ways, sticking to the shadows and ducking by the strangers on the street. Ryder and I headed up Shrader, watching our backs despite our burnout, conscious of the growing light and open space around us.

When a Helsing Humvee turned the corner ahead of us, Ryder tugged me into an alley, pressed me into the wall, and leaned his forehead against mine. His body language said
play along
, and I thought maybe we looked like regular teens, despite our hunting blacks.

The Humvee passed us as I threaded my arms around his neck.

“Give it a few seconds.” He ran his hands down the sides of my waist, his intentions of hiding melting away in a touch.

He kissed the tip of my nose,

The corner of my mouth,

As if this deliberateness scared him as much as it did me. The pulse of his jugular beat against the insides of my arms, banging like a kettledrum through my body. We shouldn’t be so reckless—a badly timed kiss could buy him a one-way ticket home—so why did my lips ache and my body burn for him?

Ryder ran an open palm up my arm. I trembled, communicating more with an unconscious reaction than I wanted. He stilled, considered me for another beat, and pulled me closer. Pulled me under, more like, my reservations drowning in the tilt of his chest beneath my palm.

Before our lips touched again,

Before we pulled that trigger for real,

I asked, “Why this one?”

Ryder stilled, his lips close enough to brush mine as he said, “What?”

“Of all the rules you live by, why break this one?”

The liquid moment froze, then shattered. He pushed off the wall, shoved his hands in his pockets, and started down the street. I watched him for a few seconds, emotions at war. Part of me wanted to run after him, punch him in the shoulder, and tell him to forget everything. The other part wanted to shove him against a wall and kiss him until we inhaled each other.

Why start this now? Did he feel pressured by the chains looping around our bodies and the finite number of seconds left in our lives? Could I have one human interaction this week that didn’t threaten to claw out my heart and throw it to the vultures? Not even Dad confused me so much—love and hate existed on the same continuum when it came to my father. But how could Ryder and I balance our friendship and whatever this new heartache was?

The sputtering light from a streetlamp hit Ryder and scattered off his shoulders, then winked out. He’d be seen if he wasn’t careful. In the end, I ran after him and tugged him back into the shadows, leading him along.

When we reached his motorcycle, I squeezed his hand. He squeezed back. Neither of us said anything as we climbed on and turned home. He’d never stick an adjective on his emotions for me, but every so often he’d cut himself open to show me how his heart beat and broke.

We didn’t talk on the way. I wished I could tell him how much those kisses frightened me, but we Helsings weren’t supposed to be afraid of anything—not the undead lurking in the dark, not death; not love, not loss. But I was afraid of so many of those things, the things I couldn’t control, the things I couldn’t stop.

Love was the worst hard thing, the most frightening, the one that could strip my best friend out of my life. I’d already lost too many people to go through it again.

If I knew Dad would never know …

What if we only have a handful of days left?

Would that change everything?

I laid my head on his back as we rode, counting his heartbeats. The silence between us ached, especially at one stoplight, where he took a hand off the handlebars and laid it on my thigh. I didn’t pull away.

We arrived home before Oliver and Jude, just as the sky began to gray. I slid off the bike and rifled through my camera bag for my house keys, the trees shaking off the dregs of night, pale fog lapping at their knees. I made it halfway up the porch steps before I heard a soft voice singing:

“Ryder and Micheline sittin’ in a tree.”

The voice sounded so familiar, high, and innocent, almost like Fletcher’s.

I paused and glanced over my shoulder, but nothing moved in the yard’s vicinity. Had the world been so crazy silent before I stopped to listen?

“What is it?” Ryder asked.

I held up one hand, asking for silence, and placed the other on my camera.

Then, just over the crash of the waves and the wind: “K-i-s-s-i-n-g.” I pointed in the direction of the voice. Ryder’s eyes widened.

A boy-shaped bit of white flashed on the edge of my sight. I leapt off the porch and sprinted across the wide, craggy lawns. By the time I reached the trees, the light had disappeared into the fog. I looked right, left, wishing for a glimpse of him, a footprint, anything.

“Fletcher?” I whispered at the trees. They answered with wind-whistle voices and shivering leaves. “Fletcher!”

No answer.

Ryder stopped beside me. “Did you see him?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, still scanning the trees. “You?”

He shook his head. “No, but the singing’s creepy as—”

A giggle interrupted him, so close and life-like we both stepped back.

“Fletcher?” I asked. “Is that you?”

Nothing.

Ryder put an arm around my waist. “C’mon, let’s head inside.” As he led me away, I looked back, watching the darkness.

Fletcher didn’t appear.

SATURDAY, 5:53 A.M.

“W
HAT’S THE CHANCE THE
littlie got stuck around here?” Ryder asked, leaning against the countertop in the kitchen.

My hands trembled as I sliced cheese with a knife, the question bouncing around in my chest. I’d dealt with Fletcher’s death as best I could, but to have seen a spirit—to hear him singing—ripped the “dealt with” stitches right out of my wounds. What if Fletcher hadn’t passed on, what if he’d gotten stuck in the Obscura and hadn’t made it to … to whatever place lay beyond? Father Marlowe had promised me my brothers were too innocent to linger in the schism between life and death.

I sniffled. Marlowe had promised they would move on.

“Let me do this.” Ryder tried to take the knife from me, placing a hand on my own. I stared down at the wedge of cheese I’d mangled, several slices cut too thick to stack on sandwiches, knife marks hacked into their sides.

“No worries, we’ll use it for grilled cheese and Vegemite,” he said.

“You know I hate Vegemite.”

“Yeah, that’s the only pinkie promise you ever broke,” he said. When I wouldn’t give up the knife, he stepped behind me, gripped my hands, and steadied me as I sliced. A tear slid off my lashes and hit the cutting board. A second one hit his hand. I blinked hard and made it the last.

He went through the motions beside me—spreading Vegemite on bread, layering cheese, and grilling sandwiches in the frying pan—letting me work off the grief. We didn’t talk about what happened at the PacBell Building, the kissing, how exhausted we were, or how we used to make grilled cheese sandwiches for Fletcher. Words seemed too cheap to occupy the small space between us. Instead, he lingered closer, longer. I touched his arm and pointed when I needed something—a spatula, a plate, another raw sandwich.

When I leaned on him, he leaned back.

I made sandwiches till all the cheese was sliced up and the butter half gone, till the whole kitchen smelled of toasted bread and Vegemite. Being back in this house, it almost felt like winding up for a normal Friday night; I could imagine cutting crusts off sandwiches for my little brothers, getting ready to meet Jude and Oliver for a concert at the Fillmore, where I’d sit on Ryder’s shoulders and be taller than the whole mosh pit; or even sneaking into a bad slasher flick, where we’d throw popcorn at the screen and Jude would scream in all the wrong places.

Fantasy ached worse than my hollow reality—it amplified the distance between the
now
and
what once was
. Focus didn’t usually come so hard to a girl like me, but the house made it hard not to think of the past. Exhaustion and pain rolled out the welcome mat for nostalgia, too—and right now, everything ached, inside and out.

So I just rubbed my eyes and shut those thoughts off like a tap. I had other, more pressing issues to face, like figuring out how shooting the ghost against a reflective surface amped up my shot, or dealing with the fact that Luca gave me good information.

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.”