Trigger by Courtney Alameda Read Free Book Online

wait for backup.” He revved the engine, startling the crowd into motion.
    â€œYou’re welcome to wait for Montgomery’s team.” My words earned me a rock-solid, 100-proof Ryder McCoy glare, which flipped and pinned my stomach faster than a freestyle suplex. It wasn’t fair to make him choose between me and Helsing’s operational standards, because I knew in my head, bones, and heart he’d pick me over his precious rules. No contest. His eyes said as much, even if his words wouldn’t.
    I felt a little manipulative but not at all guilty.
    The Humvee crawled up to the hospital’s doors. The pulse from our emergency lights reddened the building’s facade. I toyed with my camera’s aperture rings, trying to loosen the snarl of nerves in my gut. Dad said this part never got easier, the conscious choice to face the dead. Tonight, I’d do it alone. I just needed an opening, one second to slip through Ryder’s fingers and disappear into the crowd.
    â€œDon’t get out yet, I don’t want to lose you.” Ryder unbuckled his seat belt. Pressing the button on the comm unit hooked around his ear, he said, “Jude, Ollie? You ready?”
    â€œHold on, we’ve got a problem,” Oliver said. Ryder’s gaze flashed to the rearview mirror, his comm blinking blue. We kept our comms on anytime we left Angel Island—another one of Dad’s rules.
    â€œWhat’s that?” Ryder asked.
    â€œThe hospital’s security cameras went down with the power outage,” Oliver said. “We go in there, and we’re going in blind.”
    â€œGood hell,” Ryder muttered.
    I glanced through the back window, spotting Jude Drake at the wheel, mid-yawn. For growing up so posh, the guy had no manners and even less chivalry, but his laissez-faire approach to everything from reaping to girls played in my favor tonight. We’d been eating lunch at a deli in North Beach when I’d gotten Marlowe’s panicked call, and Jude said let’s go before I hung up.
    If I wanted to do something that wasn’t quite legit, Jude was game. Break into Dad’s office to clean up our personnel dossiers? Done . Switch out the orchestra’s music at the Christmas ball and pay off the conductor so they’d play “Stairway to Heaven”? Of course . Help me escape the penthouse to shoot cans under the Golden Gate Bridge at dawn? Hells yeah .
    Oliver Stoker rode shotgun, his fine, aristocratic features lit by the glow of his tablet computer. Born three months and ten days apart, Oliver and I would be together from cradle to coffin, just like our fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers had been. The Helsings and Stokers had more than a hundred years of history together, two of the great reaper families who allied in the year of 1893 against Dracula’s threat. Van Helsing led the charge against the vampire, and Bram Stoker collected and edited the crew’s letters, memorandums, and diary entries. Their camaraderie echoed through the generations and bound Oliver and me together the way our fathers were bound together—in bonds of unshakable friendship.
    The Helsings remained the hunters, the Stokers the historians. Nowadays, my family’s role extended to the executive leadership, the day-to-day administration, and training of the corps. The Stokers kept our reapers alive via research and development in weaponry, equipment, and medicine—a burden once shared by the Seward family, may they rest in peace.
    Oliver and I designed my camera’s technology together, after he’d taken apart an old Nikon and realized it had a tiny mirror inside. We nearly wound up dead the first time we tried to exorcise a ghost—the average glass lens worked as an insulator against their electrical energy. Every once in a while, I’d catch Oliver looking at one of my quartz lenses and chuckling, remembering.
    â€œIt’s a hospital,