Dark Siren Read Online Free

all the lights in the building. Alice Werner approached the door at the end of the hall, stepping lightly—more out of habit than as part of any kind of strategy—and breathing calm, long breaths. This wasn’t her first rodeo, but even experienced riders weren’t exempt from the pre-game jitters.
    The owners of Mack’s Pub, a couple of old-bloods who identified more with their Irish roots than the American soil they were born on, had never seen the intruder, but they knew it had taken residence in the store room like a rabid possum. Alice was the person called when the weird and otherworldly required eviction or extermination. The two most important words in this particular case were intruder and now .
    She knew two things. Number one, the thing which had been upturning kegs of beer, ripping pipes right out of the ceiling, and slamming the door to the store room at all hours, was just as much pissed off as it was unwelcome. The second thing was the intruder had only recently started making a mess of the place, so it was likely to be some poor, angry new kid on the block, or an old, nasty haunt freshly awoken from a century old sleep.
    Having committed herself to a lazy day when she had woken up this morning, Alice hoped for the former.
    “Is this the room?” Alice asked, in a low, almost whispered voice.
    Mack and Sherry Byrne had walked Alice as far as the corridor leading to the store room, but had stopped at the mouth of the hallway and looked like statues—frozen in time, and deaf to Alice’s words. She frowned and tried again.
    “Is this it ?” she asked, pointing to the door at the end of the hall and speaking a little louder. There were two other doors in the hall, one of them probably led to a kitchen, the other to an office. All of the doors were closed, though the one at the end of the hall looked pretty worse for wear. Thin, jagged lines expanded in a spider web pattern around a central point of impact, but the wood was bent outwards suggesting it had been hit from the inside. Enough force had been put into the blow to cause the wood to chip and crack in some places, and the paint to flake off and collect on the ground in front of the door.
    What the hell hit this? Alice thought.
    “That’s it,” Mack said, but before he could say anything else, Sherry said “Don’t get too close.”
    One of Alice’s eyebrows came up in an automatic, quizzical gesture. “Didn’t you hire me to get close?”
    The couple gave no response. Sherry looked like she was one sharp breath away from a panic attack. She was turning a rosary over in her hands so fast it looked like she was rubbing her palms, her eyes were red and puffy from tears, recent and old, and she was muttering something that could’ve been the Lord’s Prayer.
    Alice set her backpack on the ground and cracked her knuckles. Unzipping the backpack, she removed a smaller bag from within and pulled a peculiar looking old Polaroid Instant Camera out. The hairs on her arms stood on end as she carefully handled the machine, an instrument so old it had been taking pictures since before she was born.
    The camera was black all over and had a matte finish. A red stripe ran across the top with the word ‘Trapper’ written in black paint. Feeling cool to the touch, it seemed to almost hum in her hand, as if singing with delight—if such a thing was even possible. Alice flicked the camera on, waited for a second, and brought it up to eye level.
    “You’re going to take our picture, now?” Mack asked.
    Alice spun around and saw him through the eye of the camera. Aside from the trigger button, the camera had a slider toggle on the side. One setting read “REF,” the other read “MAT”. It was always set to REF because setting it to MAT and accidentally triggering it with a human in view wasn’t something she wanted to risk doing. Alice double checked— REF. Concentrating her will into the camera, Mack and Sherry’s forms suddenly seemed to shimmer as if