Read Online Dark Siren by Katerina Martinez - Free Book Online

brighter-than-normal flash, and Alice blinked. When she looked through the viewfinder again, Emily was gone. The camera made a whirring sound and spat a Polaroid out of the front slot. Alice took it, shook the thing once, twice, three times, and asked Nate to shine the light on it.
    There was a girl in the picture alright, and it was Emily. But unlike most of the entities she had Trapped during her career, Emily’s likeness was unmoving. She was also sitting on one of the chairs, and not running or trying to hide as Alice would have thought. It was like she was watching a movie. There was something else in this picture, too, something Alice hadn’t seen through the eye of the camera.
    There was a hand on Emily’s shoulder.
    The hand was connected to an arm which stretched off the picture. It was thin and fragile, female maybe, skin as pale as milk. But as Alice looked at it, the hand slowly disappeared so all that was left in the frame was Emily. Unmoving Emily. Alice wondered whether her camera was broken or if her powers hadn’t worked. Why wasn’t she moving? Why hadn’t Emily been captured? After a moment or so, Emily also began to disappear from the picture, and in a couple of seconds all that remained was a still shot of a couple of empty chairs.
    A sudden pressure began to build behind Alice’s eyes and she rubbed them hard.
    “It was her,” Nate said, “That was Emily.”
    “I know,” Alice said.
    “You know? So why aren’t you doing anything?”
    “Will you shut up and let me think?”
    It was as if someone were pressing a pair of thick thumbs into Alice’s eyes. She shut them tightly and gritted her teeth, hoping the moment would pass, but it started to feel like her eyes were going to pop out of their sockets and explode. Before she knew it, her back was starting to feel like it was burning. She winced from the pain, but could do nothing about it.
    “What’s wrong?” Nate asked.
    “We have to go,” she said, gasping for breath. “It knows we’ve seen it. We need to leave.”
    Alice grabbed her backpack from the floor and began to quickly walk toward, and then up, the stairs leading out of the auditorium.
    “Go? What do you mean, go? Emily’s here!”
    “And she’s going to stay here for a while. Unless you want to end up like her, you’ll leave with me right now. I’m not waiting for you.”
    Alice made it to the top of the stairs, indulged herself in one final scan of the theater, and headed across the lobby to the exit. Taking a lungful of the outside air was like breathing ice, but it soothed the fire in her mind and in her back. Nate stepped out of the theater as she was packing her camera into her backpack. He flicked the flashlight off and began locking the door in a hurry. It seemed he had gotten the ‘ get out’ message in his own way, just like Alice had.
    “What the hell just happened?” he asked. He dropped his keys as he tried to lock the door, picked them up, and tried again.
    “ That ,” she said, emphasizing the word, “Was something telling us to get the hell out of its space.”
    “ Its space? This isn’t its space, it’s my theater.”
    “I thought you told me you were just the projectionist.”
    “Fine, but…”
    “Look, I get it, Emily is your friend, but I need to figure this out and determine a plan of action.”
    “But—”
    “—one that doesn’t include you.”
    “You can’t leave me out of this!”
    Alice straightened out, snatched her flashlight out of Nate’s hand, pocketed it, and said “Watch me.”
    Nate frowned. “Do you really expect me to sit on the sidelines after what just happened in there? You took Emily’s picture, and she wasn’t even in the room! How did you do that?”
    “She was in the room, Nate. You saw her sitting on that chair.”
    “But how is that even possible?”
    “It just is. Lucky for you, you don’t need to understand this. The only thing you need to understand is that this place is no longer safe for