Shutter by Courtney Alameda Read Free Book Online Page B

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