Free Shutter by Courtney Alameda

so hard the room rattled.
    “Dad, I—”
    “Sit.” He left the lights off, most comfortable in the semidarkness. I perched on a chair across from his desk, watching him remove his Colt 1911s from their holsters. He switched their safeties on and set them down, the barrels staring at me. He pulled my cell phone and comm from his pocket and placed them beside the guns.
    He steepled his fingers against the desk. “You have thirty seconds to explain why you accepted an unauthorized hunt with a body count.”
    I lifted my chin. “I wouldn’t be much of a Helsing if I ignored a call for help.”
    “True as that may be, it doesn’t exempt you from following code,” Dad said. “Marlowe should have called six-one-one—”
    “He did call six-one-one. Dispatch told him help wouldn’t be available for an hour.”
    “That doesn’t give you authorization to take a team into a dangerous situation, Micheline. The rules exist to keep our employees and cadets alive.”
    “But civilians were dying—”
    “Last I heard, you are dying.”
    The words he didn’t say echoed in the silence that followed: And it’s all your fault. I did my best to maintain a poker face, but my father knew my tells the way I knew his. He’d catch the way I bit down on the inside of my cheek, or how I shifted my weight and pressed my legs together. I’d never been good at hiding guilt from him.
    “What am I supposed to do with you?” Dad’s fingertips, pressed hard into his desktop, were bleached of blood. Anger rasped in the squared breaths he took, the ones for shooting and fighting and not losing your head; it deepened the shadows under his eyes and throbbed in his jugular. “What the hell am I supposed to do for you?”
    “I don’t need you to do anything,” I said. “Let me hunt it.”
    He actually laughed. “No, I’m assigning every tetro crew in the city to hunt this abomination down and destroy it. Until then, you are on house arrest, effective immediately. I want to see all your weapons and equipment on my desk in five minutes.”
    “What?” I leapt up from my chair so fast it hit the ground with a bang. “A regular tetro can’t capture this monster with a mirror—”
    “You’d better hope they can and do.”
    “If I stop reaping, more people will die.” The words tumbled from my mouth, tripping over one another in their rush to get past my lips. He couldn’t do this to me, couldn’t lock me away and expect someone else to save my life. “You’ll be responsible for all those lives lost, reaper and civilian alike, when your tetro crews fail to stop that demon—”
    “You yourself failed to stop the entity,” Dad said.
    “Once! But I can fight the ghost at a distance with a lens,” I said, my voice rising. “The other tetros have to initiate contact between their mirrors and the entity; they’ll die. I can stop this ghost—”
    “Absolutely not.” Dad punctuated the statement with a finger thrust at me. “My reapers expect to put their lives on the line, but I’m not risking yours. Your safety and the continuation of the Helsing line is of the utmost importance—”
    “Is that it? You’ll lock me up because you need me to be a stupid breeding cow for the ‘line’?” I snapped, making air quotes around the word line .
    Dad’s face and neck flushed. “I have never been unclear about your responsibilities to the family.”
    “You raised me to be a hunter, not pregnant and barefoot in the freaking kitchen—”
    “Enough!” His voice rang in my ears. He rounded his desk, advancing toward me. “ I will take care of this—”
    “I don’t need you to save me,” I shouted, backing away, almost tripping on the upset chair. “I can save myself.”
    “You can’t save anyone, Micheline.”
    The words smacked the breath out of me. I’d read them in his face before, seen them in his actions, his coldness, in this half life we shared; but hearing them spoken gave them bones and sinews, it made them