The Resurrection Game

by Michelle Belanger

  As she writhed on the pavement, pinkish-gray sludge seeped from her nose and her ears—her brains, leaking out of her head like pink slurry. The smell was somewhere between spoiled meat and rank sushi, and everything in my stomach threatened to come up at once. No matter how many times I killed these monsters, the wreck they left of their human hosts never failed to gut me.

  Noticing my distraction, the cacodaimon twisted fiercely, whipping the spiny tip of its tail straight for my head. I brought my forearm up to deflect, but half a second too late. The impact sent me reeling and the parasitic nightmare jerked free of my grip. Shrieking with triumph and mockery, it zipped like a rocket for the dark growth of weeds in the vacant lot across the street.

  Bellowing with pain and frustration, I raised my own shout—three potent syllables that echoed through the night.

  “Za—qui—el.”

  My station. My power. My Name.

  Light crackled with renewed fury around my fingertips, and I charged across the empty ribbon of street. Even so, I almost lost the creature in the deep shadows. Undeterred, I let my vision spill to the Shadowside, the realm of spirits one step off from mortal reality. There, the black-on-black nightmare sketched an unmistakable silhouette against a landscape of stark, amorphous gray. It moved stealthily now, gliding with the eerie grace of a beast born of deep water.

  Stumbling over roots and weed-choked junk, I pursued with single-minded purpose. The treacherous footing gave the cacodaimon a growing lead.

  Abruptly, I slammed into the mesh of a chain-link fence, and uttered a startled curse. With all my focus on the spirit-realm, I’d missed the thing completely.

  Shaking the gathered power from my hands, I twined my fingers through the wire lattice and bodily dragged myself up. Near the top, my jacket snagged on a rusty bit of wire, and for a moment, I teetered, stuck. All at once, the jacket pulled free and I tumbled in a heap to the slick grass on the other side. Catching most of the impact on one shoulder, I rolled to my feet and charged onward.

  The cacodaimon was yards ahead, making a swift beeline across a wide, flat park, heading for the erector-set sprawl of a public playground. Moray-swift it flew across the lawn. Glancing back, it loosed a taunting cry, the slitted crimson of its eyes gleaming in the dark.

  Calling on a burst of speed again, I felt the strain blossom under my ribs with a breath-hitching burn. My sprint covered less distance than before, fizzling as my feet traded grass for damp wood chips. The cacodaimon dove into the shadowy hulk of a jungle gym, disappearing into the tubes of a tunnel maze only to charge hissing from the other end like some obscene jack-in-the-box. I lost it at the base of an enclosed spiral side, staggering in circles as I strove to pick up the trail while fighting to catch my breath.

  Another shrill screech told me I was off the mark entirely—the cacodaimon had doubled back and was halfway to the road again. A lone car crawled west along Lakeshore, its driver slaloming drunkenly from lane to lane. Its lights dimmed as a shadow flew past, and, for a terrible moment I feared the cacodaimon was intent on claiming another vessel—minds weakened through drugs or alcohol were easier to subvert.

  But the creature twisted sharply, angling its body toward a distant arch of brick and concrete on the far side of the road. Broad marquee letters stretched between the twin towers of the gateway.

  EUCLID BEACH PARK

  It was heading for the lake.

  I pelted after it, but couldn’t move fast enough, and the burning stitch in my side that came with each breath was a warning. Nevertheless, I ignored it, and with the dregs of my physical reserves, I pushed.

  This time, the speed didn’t come. The thundering ache in my chest cut so sharp, for a minute I couldn’t breathe. My legs went all watery and I nearly pitched forward.

  While I floundered, the cacodaimon arrowed toward escape. Once it reached the silt-choked waters of Erie, I might as well quit. Cacodaimons belonged to the deep places, and those were places I couldn’t—and wouldn’t—venture.

  What I needed was a Crossing so I could face the creature on the Shadowside. That was my turf, the unique purview of the Anakim tribe. The transit had a price, of course—every power did—but it didn’t grind me down as fast as the Nephilim speed. I needed the use of my wings. On that side, I didn’t have to run—I could fly.

  Concentrating to make my head stop spinning, I threw my senses wide, seeking the telltale stain of human trauma. Crossings required a special alchemy—the perfect blend of drawn-out violence, fear, and desolation. The gas station attendant’s death had been brutal, but too swift. He’d been bleeding out before he even processed the attack.

  Just as I was about to give up, there was a prickling presence. Turning toward the glimmer of distant apartments, I homed in on the source. If I could find the nexus and cross quickly, I could take to the air and get the drop on this monster so it couldn’t return and claim another life.

  Through the thunder of my pulse, I found the edge of the psychic imprint about thirty feet to the left of the archway. There, an incandescent moment of human suffering played against the landscape like a movie loop on endless repeat, invisible to mortal senses. My focus narrowed until the shadowy echo was all I could perceive—an elderly woman’s brutal assault.

  Details flooded over me in a rush, images and emotions twining indistinguishably. I seized them like a rope, and for a moment I was completely immersed. I saw the snowy cap of her hair, buzzed close to her scalp so she didn’t have to fuss. Arthritis put a wobble in her gait that had embarrassed her twenty years back. Now, not so much. She was simply happy she had legs that carried her along. Too poor to own a car, she’d given up on cabs long ago. Cabbies didn’t stop for folks so dark, not even with that much white in their hair.

  The loops of heavy plastic grocery bags cut into her hands, and she fussed about the apples that fool of a clerk had dumped down at the bottom beneath the bread. She just knew she was going to lose one through a tear, and those apples were destined for a pie. A reward for a very special grandson. Straight A’s another semester.

  Boy was going places.

  She was so proud.

  As she paused to rearrange the bags, two men—teens by the look of them—sauntered up behind her. She daydreamed about her grandson standing tall in cap and gown, and was so fixated on the sight of that future diploma that she didn’t notice the shadowy figures looming close by.

  They didn’t like the look of her. Their brutish emotions blurred in jagged bursts across the vision, momentarily blotting out the image of the elderly woman. The Shadowside gobbled the sounds of their voices, but it was easy to guess the slurs.

  The scene stuttered forward and the woman was locked in a desperate struggle. She didn’t take their treatment quietly, never tolerated that sort of ugliness—not when she was young, and not now—but her days of fighting were long behind her. She swung the grocery bags at her attackers, it wrecked her balance, and she went down. Enraged by her defiance, they kicked and punched and beat her, mouths twisted in silent shouts.

  She shielded her head from the worst of it, but her body rocked with every blow. I imagined I could hear the crackling of broken ribs, the high and tremulous keening of her pain.

  They didn’t kill her. When she didn’t beg, they grew bored. In the end, the tallest stole an apple, cheerfully eating as they left her in a heap among her smashed and scattered groceries. His smug triumph filled my mouth with bitter bile—

  And then I was through. Blinking, I swayed in the grayscale landscape, briefly uncertain where the imprinted emotions ended and my own began. The chittering cry of the cacodaimon lasered my attention back to the present. The sound dopplered in the distance. If I didn’t hurry, the bastard would escape.

  With a few solid strokes of my wings, I took to the sky.

  3

  Below me stretched the phantom of a bustling amusement park—Euclid Beach, gone for decades but so firmly imprinted in local memory that echoes of both park-goers and rides re
mained in the patchwork landscape of the Shadowside. Faded as photos on antique film, the coasters and crowds stuttered in and out of existence, shuffled over by other, less distinct imprints—the blocky hulks of construction equipment, barren fields, and the brittle ghosts of long-dead trees.

  I spied it near the lusterless form of an endlessly spinning carousel—a shadow so black that light sank into its depths. The cacodaimon glided sinuously from one old-time ride to the next, swimming through the air as easily as water. In an instant, it became aware of my attention, doubling its speed to disappear beneath the cover of a broad, flat building perched on Lake Erie’s edge.

  Beyond the specter of that building, the great maw of the lake gobbled the horizon. As I pounded the air, that growing sharpness tightened within my chest. It was more than a holdover from the failed attempt at Nephilim-speed. Every minute in this twilit realm sucked precious vitality. Though I was technically immortal, if I overstayed my welcome I still could die—at least the physical part of me. The rest would drift, unmoored, while I struggled to attach myself to a new incarnation.

  It was a process I hoped to avoid. I didn’t trust it. Steeling myself, I scanned the ground and readied my weapons. Spirit-fire licked along the gleaming curves of my daggers, a perfect echo of the light streaming from my wings.

  The cacodaimon finally darted from its cover and toward the sucking void of the lake. I dropped like a thunderbolt and caught up with it on a thin strip of sand perhaps ten feet from the edge of the blackness. With the yawning chasm of Erie at my back, I defiantly spread my wings. The cacodaimon reared and hissed in their glow, baring a maw bristling with teeth.

  “Eeeeeat yyoouu, Sssskyborn. Ssssnuuufff yoouurrr liiightttt.” The voice of the creature flensed the air, shrilling like metal collapsed beneath its own weight.

  It lunged, and I lashed out in swift response. The cacodaimon dodged—but not fast enough. Half a dozen insectile limbs fell twitching at my feet. It recovered quickly. Feinting left, then right, it strove to snake beneath the living barrier at my back. Talons raked my side as I pivoted to block its escape. The thick leather of my biker jacket deflected most of the blow, but one stinging line of cold blossomed along the exposed flesh of my throat. Cloying numbness trailed in the cacodaimon’s wake.

  Shaking off the damage, I buffeted the creature with the joint of one great wing. Wherever it made contact, the light sizzled the nightmare’s rubbery flesh. My breath hitched at the stink.

  Though I was running on fumes, the lust of battle kept me moving. My curving daggers flashed once, then twice, tearing through the cacodaimon’s central mass. Still dazed by the blow from my wing, the creature thrashed feebly, scything its tail toward my knees. The strike never connected. After a third pass from my daggers, the chittering horror disintegrated into chunks of black jelly—sticky as Napalm but with an arctic burn. They spread freezing numbness wherever they touched skin, then, like snow on hot pavement, melted clean away.

  In the wake of the fight, I sucked air in heaving gulps. The stench of burned cacodaimon seared the back of my throat. I spat its foulness onto the ground, but it was the kind of taste that lingered. Tomorrow I’d wake up with it pasted to my tongue.

  Wiping the gunk from my blades, I crossed back into the flesh-and-blood world. Dropping to my knees in the dirty sand, I struggled to get both daggers back into the Kydex sheaths that ran the lengths of my forearms. My hands shook with post-adrenaline tremors as I tugged the cuffs of my jacket down to conceal the rounded pommels. A fishy gust from the lake chilled streamers of sweat trickling down my face.

  My whole neck felt wet. Tacky.

  That wasn’t sweat.

  Blindly, I sought the edges of the wound, trying to get a sense of its length and depth. Scalpel-clean, it didn’t hurt or sting, at least not yet. That probably wasn’t good, but, so far, nothing spurted. A nick to jugular or carotid would have meant near-instant death.

  While I shoved my fingers into the slice at my throat, someone uttered a harsh whisper.

  Behind you.

  It came so fast I couldn’t tell if the voice belonged to a woman or a man. I wasn’t even certain it was human. Awkwardly, I whirled to catch sight of the speaker. There was nothing—and no one—behind me. It wasn’t uncommon for me to hear spirits, but Lailah was the only one I might expect to issue phantom warnings. Yet I’d know her voice, even in whispers.

  This wasn’t the Lady of Shades.

  Overhead, the blind eye of the moon peeked through a scudding veil of clouds, making its first appearance in hours. As I scanned the silvered landscape, a rush of motion rustled the hair at my nape. It carried with it the strangest scent, like the wind scouring distant tundra. Frigid and desolate, it stirred emotions deep in the hinterlands of my brain—something familiar that I couldn’t place. I lurched to my feet in an instant, yanking out both gleaming blades. Brandishing the weapons, I pivoted to meet an attacker.

  Again, there was no one.

  Either I’d lost more blood than I’d realized and was hallucinating, or someone was fucking with me. The soaring moon winked in and out, its light strobing the empty beach, making monsters of piles of driftwood. On high alert, I turned in every direction. From east to west, no living being stirred, only deep shadows. Even the sand showed only the footprints I’d made, beginning where I’d exited the Shadowside.

  Nevertheless, I couldn’t shake the sense I was being watched. So I wove a cowl to cloak the more-than-human parts of me, adding extra layers to distract and obscure my presence. Tentatively re-sheathing only one of the weapons, I lingered uncertainly on the gray stretch of beach, struggling to place that cold, desolate scent. Nothing came. Heart still surging, I shifted my vision to peer into the Shadowside.

  No spirits. Nothing. Just the sucking chasm masquerading as a lake.

  Baffled, I started limping back toward the road. The more distance I could put between me and those haunted waters, the better.

  4

  As I scrabbled up the steep embankment, a call came through on my cell.

  At first, I just jumped at the manic buzz against my backside. The traitor moon had fled and, in the gloom, lights from the distant apartments were barely visible through a stand of second-growth trees. The phone buzzed again and I dug for it in my pocket, if only to shut the thing up.

  A fine tracery of wards prickled my fingers when I brushed the slim case. I was proud of that work—the wards were probably the only reason the device had any charge. Ordinarily, Shadowside travel sucked the life from electronics, especially the delicate inner workings of smartphones. Over the summer, I’d done enough theorycrafting to sort out a fix. So far, the protective mesh of magic had held.

  My first instinct was to send the call straight to voicemail. I’d done that so often, I could thumb the red CANCEL button without even looking. Then curiosity overrode my antisocial tendencies and I flipped over the screen. The upwash of light blew my already iffy night vision as I squinted at the name.

  Bobby Park.

  At this hour, if my detective friend was calling, he had to have good reason. I just hoped it wasn’t related to the two corpses I’d recently left at the gas station. I didn’t need any more WANTED bulletins in my life. Still, I hesitated a moment, but all my instincts screamed this call was important.

  “Bobby,” I said. My voice came out ragged and I roughly cleared my throat. Swallowing caused the cut to twinge beneath my jaw. “Hey.”

  “You answered your phone.” He sounded stunned.

  “People keep telling me to do that,” I said, wavering near the crest of the embankment, reluctant to move forward with the afterimage still floating against my retinas. “What’s happening? My name come over dispatch?”

  “No,” he answered cautiously. “You in trouble?” I pictured him rubbing restlessly at the back of his scalp—his stock gesture. He always looked shocked to find his hair so short.

  “Hopefully not.” With the back of my arm, I swiped a trickle of sweat before
it made it into my eyes. The rough leather of my jacket found every scrape landed by the cacodaimon. “So what’s up?” I asked. The muffled murmur of the wind rattled through the nearly naked branches of the trees.

  “If this isn’t a good time…” he offered.

  I scanned the shadowed landscape for any sign of further threats. It was empty. Cacodaimons weren’t subtle creatures—if there was another one, it would have already jumped me. “Good as any.”

  “OK,” he answered skeptically. There was a pause and a brief rustle of fabric. “You remember those two women you had me looking for? The ones from your letter?”

  “Marjory and Tabitha,” I said. “Of course I remember.” As my eyes adjusted, I headed deeper into the tangle of second-growth. The broad, flat field that had once been the midway for Euclid Beach Park stretched maybe twenty yards beyond the thicket. It hadn’t seemed that far from the air. “They’re supposed to have keys to some safe deposit box of mine. I have no idea what’s in there.”

  “Well, there wasn’t much to go on,” he said. “Mother-daughter pair, maybe based in Parma. No last name. Every search kept coming up empty.” Distantly, the sound of heels scuffing tile came through the phone. He was pacing. Echoes told me he was in an empty room—probably a back hall of the precinct.

  “Something changed.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Zack, before I say anything else, I’ve got to ask. Are you sure your parents live in Kenosha?”

  That came out of left field. Startled, I paused, and something crashed noisily through the carpet of dead leaves.

  “No, I’m not,” I responded, glancing around. “Amnesia, remember? You’re the one who told me about them.” Nerves and exhaustion stropped an edge to my words, harsher than I’d intended. Squinting in the direction of the crackling twigs, I tried to make out the shape of an animal, but it was impossible to see in the gloom. Whatever it was, it sounded big. Even so, nothing appeared.