Shutter by Courtney Alameda Read Free Book Online Page A

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