Shutter (28 page)

“I appreciate the sentiment but, no,” I said. “You’re not a reaper, you haven’t trained for this kind of thing.”

“Trained for what kind of thing?” Jude asked, coming back into the hall, armed. Ryder’s steps pounded the stairs behind him.

“She wants to come with,” I said.

Jude took one look at Bianca’s determined expression. “Okay.”

“
Okay?
” I whirled on him. “We are not taking a civilian-class cadet into a dead zone.”

He cocked his head and gave me a narrow look, as if to say,
Are you stupid? I know she’s not dying tonight.
Behind me, Bianca’s heels clacked on the hallway floor. Half a second later, my gun holster lightened. When I spun back around, I stared down my own barrel’s cyclops gaze.

“Hey!” Ryder and Jude snapped in unison. I held up a hand.

“Stand down,” I said, feeling ice crack in my tone, looking beyond the gun and at the girl beyond. Bianca dropped her arms, but in a few quick movements of her hands, discharged the clip, unhinged the slide, and thrust the pieces of my weapon at me.

“I’m no reaper,” she said. “But my parents survived the Hong Kong holocaust, and there’s no way they’d raise a girl who didn’t know her way around a gun.”

Jude wolf-whistled; Bianca smiled around the steel in her eyes. Had to admit, part of me was impressed.

The other part was pissed.

“Put it back together,” I said. “
Without
looking at it.”

Bianca put the gun back together, holding my gaze the whole time, then extended it to me butt first.

“Fine,” I said, taking the Colt, slipping it back into my holster, and hoping I wasn’t making another huge mistake. “Jude, she’s your partner. You’re responsible for her safety. I say run
,
you both run like hell. Am I clear?”

Bianca saluted. I glanced back at Jude—he grinned like he’d won something, and I wanted to smack the look off his face. Ryder didn’t meet my gaze, regarding Bianca with a cool dispassion. She’d surprised him. Damn, she surprised
me.

“Give her a gun, grab the med kit and the reaping panes,” I said, turning toward the door. “And for God’s sake, find her some shoes that won’t wake the dead. We’ve got to go.”

SUNDAY, 3:35 A.M.

P
ALO ALTO LAY TWENTY-ONE
miles south of San Francisco, and Jude sped the whole way down. After forty-two minutes of panic, worry, and cab silence, we pulled up to a wrought-iron gate in a posh neighborhood. Trees, large shrubberies, and shadows obscured the property beyond.

“Why is the gate open?” Bianca whispered. “Her parents are crazy about keeping the gate shut.”

“Would a power failure affect the gate?” I asked.

“Maybe,” she said. Jude glanced at me in the mirror before he pulled forward, taking us up the dark avenue. The streetlamps had imploded, their delicate glass skulls cracked open, wires and fuses dangling out. Our tires crunched over the broken glass, and no lights glittered in the house’s windows ahead.

“It’s already here,” I said. Bianca tensed up, hands clenching in her lap. The boys already had their game faces on—they knew what a blackout meant. “We stick together in there, find Oliver, and extract him and any survivors. We’ll call dispatch for cleanup.”

Bianca trembled.

“Aim for the limbs, not for the kill,” I said. “The entity can reanimate corpses with its miasma, but bullets in the head and chest will be worthless. Limit a target’s mobility through the hip, thigh, and knee if possible.”

“And Ollie?” Ryder asked.

“If the entity’s taken control of him, knock him out,” I said. “Live possession is limited by the victim’s state of consciousness.” Ryder didn’t ask what to do if we found Oliver dead—no need to unearth words like those.

Jude parked in the midst of a cobblestone courtyard. The house beyond was a magnificent Tudor mansion, like Shakespeare’s house dropped in the midst of the Palo Alto hills. With an Oreo-cookie-cute exterior, gabled eaves, multiple chimneys, and arched, diamond-paned windows, the place looked too fairy tale-sweet to house horrors.

I stepped down from the cab, scanning the chalkboard-black windows for ghostlight. My soulchains shifted and pressed against my skin, spilling shivers through my system. Ryder slid on his hunting pack, his gaze on Bianca and Jude. “She’s scared,” he said under his breath.

“Of course she is,” I said softly, checking my camera and Colt. “She’s not stupid.”

“Got a brave face on, though. I think she wants to impress you.” Ryder reached out and took my hand, scissoring our fingers together for a few seconds.

“Let’s just make sure she gets out okay,” I said, watching her take the med kit from the backseat.

“She’ll get out alive,” Ryder said, taking the safeties off his Colts. “Can’t promise she’s going to be okay.”

Fair enough. Ryder and I rounded the truck’s back, removing the reaping panes from the bed. Ryder hitched one over his shoulder on the jury-rigged strap, then handed Jude the other.

“I know the code to the back doors,” Bianca said, waving us forward. We followed her through a grand stone archway, across a cobblestone courtyard, and up to a set of French doors. While she typed a code into the keypad by the door, I unholstered my camera and loaded up a quartz lens. The locks clicked, the right-hand door cracking open.

I stepped inside first, the house’s temperature nipping at my skin. The gloom inside accentuated the house’s ornate interior, clinging to the red damask walls and greasing the gilt fireplace. Sixteenth-century artwork stared down at us from the ceiling. The place smelled of gardenia mixed with something ashen, like cigar smoke. No sound rippled down to greet us, rendering the place silent. Eerie.

For a moment, the claws of some uncontrollable feeling extended into my gut—I wanted to scream Oliver’s name, to raise hell until I found him, the last and closest thing I had left to a brother. Instead, I shoved the feeling into a pocket of my heart and downed a deep breath. Only a cool head and hand could help him now.

The others flanked me, the beams from their flashlights dwindling into the house’s murk. Camera primed, I took the lead, tiptoeing into the massive room. Despite the ballroom’s size and picture windows, the air seemed tightly tamped, almost as claustrophobia inducing as the bay tunnel had been.

“It’s colder in here than it is outside,” Bianca whispered, her voice shivery. “Is that a ghost thing?”

I nodded, but the boys shushed her in concert. We swept the room with light, draining shadows from the corners, then moved into the hallway. Large Gothic windows arched their backs along one wall, illuminating a corridor stretching two ways into the darkness. A few bloody handprints were stamped onto the wall. Jude reached out and scraped some blood off with his finger.

I looked to Bianca. “Which way?”

“Well, Dr. Stone’s offices are that way”—she said, pointing right—“but Gemma usually studies in their library, in the mansion’s north wing.” She turned her head left, peering into darkness that seemed perfect and complete. She clutched her coat to her chest.

“How big’s this house?” Ryder asked.

“Big enough to get lost in,” Bianca said.

“You guys check Stone’s office,” Jude said, motioning at Ryder and me. “We’ll take the library.”

“We are not splitting up,” I hissed through clenched teeth. “If you find him—”

“We split up, we find Einstein faster.” Ghostlight sparked in his irises.
Ah.
Jude already knew which direction we’d find Oliver. He intended to lead Bianca away from danger, and send Ryder and me straight into it.
Perfect.

“You find anything, get on the comm,” I said, trying to sound as pissed as possible for Bianca’s benefit. “Don’t engage the entity or any affected persons without me, understood?”

Jude grinned and saluted, surreptitiously wiping the blood on his pants. “You got it, Princess.”

“Stone’s office is on the first floor, just past the foyer,” Bianca said. “Be careful.”

Pretty sure that’s my line.

We split up. The long hallway led Ryder and me into the house’s foyer. The walls wore mahogany scales, which made the room feel twice as dark. A grand chandelier hung in the middle of the room, its jeweled arms trembling and scattering splinters of moonlight on the walls.

From somewhere above, I heard a girl say in a singsong voice, “Eye for an eye…”

My gaze traveled up the two-tier staircase, daring the shadows to move. At the stairs’ head, one shadow seemed more three-dimensional than the ones on the wall behind. Ryder’s flashlight arched up the staircase—and I held my breath until the beam touched on the bare, blood-splattered shins of a girl.

The girl darted left, far faster than human reflexes allowed. Ryder and I sprung after her, leaping up the stairs and scrambling into the hall beyond. She’d disappeared into the darkness, leaving a slammed door and quaking curtains in her wake.

One door had a crimson handprint wrapped around the jamb. Upon seeing the blood, Ryder swapped his flashlight for his gun and set his mirror down outside the room. He backed against the wall, his left hip inches from the jamb.
Beta entry,
he mouthed, meaning I’d open the door, but he’d be first in. He pulled the slide on his Colt, chambering a bullet, and he flicked on the gun’s barrel-mounted flashlight.

Ready?
I mouthed.

He nodded. I turned the knob and shoved the door open. Ryder made a 180-degree turn, pointing his gun into the room. The open door threw a silver arc of light on the floor, veining the shattered screen of Oliver’s cell phone. Beyond that, blindness.

Ryder’s flashlight washed over a canopy bed with its twisted, lifeless bed sheets. A girl’s white cardigan lay on the floor, speckled with gore. I stepped into the room behind Ryder, sensitive to the tang of copper and salt on my tongue—blood and sweat. Jiggling the light switch, I released a shower of sparks from the chandelier overhead. They fizzled out on Ryder’s hair and shoulders. He twitched, keeping his gaze and weapon trained forward.

The bedroom was huge—more of a suite, really, and from the frosted layer-cake bedclothes and the photos flickering like candles in the low light, I knew it belonged to a girl. The room, however, appeared empty.

On our left, the bathroom door hung ajar. Ryder nudged it open, shining his flashlight on something inside. His breath hitched, sharp as a whip’s crack.

“Come here,” he whispered, stepping right to keep me between his body and the wall. It meant he’d only found one of them.

I slipped against the bathroom jamb. The broken mirror snarled at me, blood spattered all over the countertops and floor. Small scabs of red rosary glass and slivers of wood gleamed in the low light. My heart made a jagged beat.
His rosary … it’s shattered.

Oliver crouched by the toilet, his back to me, dressed in jeans and his rumpled, ash-and-bloodstained bandages. Soulchains marbled his torso, covering him hip to shoulder and wringing his neck. Something pecked and clawed at his skin from the inside.

“Ollie?” I whispered.

“You’ve been very persistent, Micheline.” Oliver’s voice rasped like sandpaper over my skin, but his speech pattern had a languor I didn’t recognize. “All this suffering for naught, simply because you are too obstinate to accept your fate.”

My spine stiffened. “What have you done to Gemma?”

“Oh, the girl’s still very much alive, don’t you worry.” Oliver rose, bones groaning, muscles spasming as if they worked at cross-purposes. Blood stained his fists. A face pressed from inside his flesh, its mouth open in a suffocated scream. I recognized the straight nose, his aristocratic cheekbones, and …
dear God
, that was Oliver’s face. His chest undulated with hands trying to press free of his flesh. I swore I heard Oliver—my Oliver—scream for help inside. I swallowed down a sob.

“Where’s Gemma?” My voice trembled.

“
Hmph
, I think I have a bit of her here.” The entity laughed and relaxed Oliver’s fist, dropping something round. It bounced like a rubber ball over the floor, rolled past my boots, and stopped in our wedge of light.

A naked eyeball stared at the ceiling.

I recoiled, my skin ready to scramble straight off my muscles.

“Where’s the girl?” Ryder stepped forward, leveling his gun at Oliver’s body with both hands.

Oliver reached out and gripped a dagger of glass from the bathroom countertop. Blood dripped off his fingers, fresh spots blossoming over the floor. The hall door swung shut, chopping off all the light save for Ryder’s beam.

“She’ll drop in, no doubt,” the entity said, turning. Oliver’s eyes were obsidian shells, cruel as black widow carapaces in Ryder’s flashlight. The ghost possessed Oliver via his soulchains—if it had taken up residence in his body, his eyes would’ve burned with its ghostlight.

I took a step forward, but Ryder put an arm out as if to corral me. “I’ll ask you one more time, you bastard. Where’s the girl?”

“How does that old adage go?” Oliver’s lips tweaked into a smile. “Oh, I know—be careful what you wish for, because you just—”

A wetness tapped my shoulder.

“—might—”

A second droplet hit my hair, too heavy to be water. I turned my face toward the ceiling.

“—get it.”

Gemma stared down at me, blood dripping from her empty eye sockets.

“Heads up,” I shouted.

She lunged with a cry, slamming me into the floor. We skidded toward the door, my camera skipping away from me, our limbs tangling, her nails scrabbling on my eyelids. My training kicked in—I trapped one of her arms to her chest, but I couldn’t get my leg around hers for a flip.

A crash echoed from the bathroom, porcelain or glass shattering. Ryder grunted in pain.

Screw careful
, cheap shots saved lives. I struck Gemma’s windpipe, stunning her, then busted the heel of my hand into her nose. Cartilage cracked. Her growl gurgled, blood gushing from her nose. She palmed my face, dug her nails into my skin, and rammed the back of my head into the marble tile. Pain rang from the back of my head to my frontal lobe. The world darkened. Time slowed.