Trigger Read Free Page B

head and listened, then said, “We’re fine. Coming back your way now.”
    Bubbles rose to the water’s surface. Large bubbles. A man’s dismembered hand bobbed up, streaking the water red. Ryder and I backed up a step. “Go,” he said, keeping his rifle trained on the water. “I’m right behind you.”
    Fight or flight —
    Now we chose flight.
    Â 
    Â 
    JANUARY
    The media dubbed the necro the “Embarcadero Scissorclaw,” after the street that bordered the city’s many wharves. The necro snatched its earliest victims from the area, before Helsing caught wise and shut the waterfront down. Fisherman’s Wharf and Pier 39 became ghost towns, visited only by police officers and Helsing reapers in riot gear.
    By night, Dad and I patrolled the city’s drains, sewers, and tunnels, aided by hundreds of heavily armed reapers. Dad summoned our best trackers from all over the country—still, our scissorclaw had endless places to hide. We found a lot of monsters in the tunnels; ran into traps that dismembered, traps that killed; and stumbled over claw-gored corpses, with no sighting of the monster we tracked.
    Weeks passed. Then months. After the new year, Dad offered a six-figure reward to the reaper who brought him the Embarcadero’s head. But with every dawn, we came home empty-handed and hollow-hearted. The body count piled higher, night after night. My father’s frustration turned to fury, then mania, then a kind of grim, stoic silence that signaled his desperation.
    He devoted his every waking moment to taking that monster down … and every one of mine, too.
    One frosty evening, as I geared up to head back into the tunnels with Dad, my parents’ raised voices thudded against my bedroom floor. I frowned. Mom and Dad never fought—my father might be as stubborn as they come, tenacity running thick in Helsing veins—but he denied my mother nothing.
    Well, almost nothing.
    Slipping from my bedroom, I headed down the hall, careful to keep my footsteps from echoing through the floor. The hall stairs tried to creak underfoot, but I skipped the loudest steps and eased over the others, slinking onto the first floor. On the other side of the darkened hall, my brothers cut small silhouettes in the family room, their eyes cartoonish and large. I waved them away.
    Dad’s study sat just off the front room. Stepping through the hall, I hung on the room’s edge, listening:
    â€œYour hunts are always more important, aren’t they, Len?” Mom’s voice punched past the study door.
    Dad cleared his throat. “This isn’t a permanent arrangement—”
    â€œIt’s been a three-month-long arrangement,” Mom snapped. “Do you realize it’s been so long since she’s worked on her exorcism technique, she’s falling behind her tetro classmates?”
    I narrowed my eyes. Like the other tetros could even keep up with me in the first place, cowering behind their mirrors like they did. Since the end of October, I’d gone out hunting with my father every night of the week, leaving little time for anything else, especially exorcisms. But if Dad could hunt seven days a week, I had to prove I could do it, too.
    â€œThe other tetro girls aren’t being groomed to lead the corps.” The coldness in my father’s voice chilled the room. “Nor does the responsibility to protect this city rest on their shoulders.”
    â€œIt’s your responsibility, not Micheline’s,” Mom snapped. “She’s fifteen years old, for heaven’s sake!”
    Something screeched inside the office, maybe a chair against the floor. “I don’t care how old she is,” Dad said. “She’s a Helsing. And since she failed to kill the scissorclaw in the tunnels, she’ll hunt with me every night until we destroy the monster.”
    A flush rose through my chest and burned in my cheeks.