The Resurrection Game

by Michelle Belanger

  Probably just a deer. Sure—because, in my life, everything was harmless.

  “How’s any of this connected anyway?” I demanded.

  Bobby ignored the question. “Then you haven’t had any contact with your parents since your accident?”

  “No,” I snapped. “What the hell would I say? ‘Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad. I don’t fucking remember either of you, but here’s a card for the occasion.’” The crunching sounds stopped.

  “Zack, I’m not trying to be an asshole here.”

  “If you say so,” I answered. “Spill it, Bobby.” Three beats of silence. I counted as I started walking again, trying to duck low-hanging branches. Bobby sighed, and the sound rattled the mic like a windstorm. Finally, he spoke.

  “I’m pretty sure I found Marjory,” he said. “But you won’t like it.”

  My stomach dropped.

  “She’s dead,” I said flatly.

  “Murdered,” he answered. “And it’s not pretty.”

  Quietly, I digested this. “Are you sure? With no last name, how do we know it’s the right Marjory?”

  “Residence in Parma. Daughter named Tabitha,” he said. I could practically see him ticking off points on his fingers as he moved restlessly with the phone trapped between cheek and shoulder. “And—here’s the kicker—she’s got you in her contacts.”

  “Hunh,” I murmured. The deer—or whatever—was long gone. “I suppose that’s not a surprise. After all, I trusted her enough to leave her with the keys to… whatever,” I said. “Why are you so knotted up about this?”

  “I don’t like laying this kind of news on somebody,” he said. “Especially not a friend. This Marjory—she’s more than just a business contact, Zack. After her daughter, she has you listed as her next of kin.”

  5

  “I’m what?” I squawked. A startled night bird took to the air in a whirr of wings. I dropped my voice, making a token effort at becoming stealthy. “Are you sure? Does it mention how we’re related?”

  “No, and no,” Bobby replied. “It just gives your name, and some address in Tremont.”

  A welter of questions roiled through my brain. After my beach-front fight with the cacodaimon, I felt ill-equipped to deal with any of them. It took all I had to put one foot in front of the other to get out of the damned trees. “Tremont” struck a chord, though.

  “I’ve got a stash out there, but it’s in an abandoned video store,” I said. “No apartment, not that I know of.”

  “Nothing you remember, anyway,” Bobby suggested. The near-pity in his voice would have rankled, had it come from anyone else, but with Bobby, empathy was a reflex, as irresistible as breathing. Not always an asset in his line of work.

  Mounded leaves crunched underfoot, obscuring knotted roots. My boots found every damned one, though. Switching to speaker, I angled the phone at the ground like a flashlight, but the bluish light was little help.

  “What’s her last name?” I asked.

  “Kazinsky.”

  “Hunh,” I muttered. Nothing rattled loose at the name.

  “Look, Zack, I don’t know what to make of the next-of-kin thing, but in this case, it works to our advantage,” Bobby said, his voice tinny and distant. “I really need your eyes on this, and they still need someone to identify her remains.”

  “My Kawasaki’s sitting at a gas station about a mile away.” Assuming it’s not already been impounded. “Wait a minute,” I blurted, finally processing the last half of his statement. “Identify the body? Hasn’t the daughter already done that?”

  Silence. I still had four bars, so it wasn’t the call.

  “Bobby?” I urged.

  “No one can reach her.”

  “You think she’s dead, too.”

  “Can’t rule it out,” he allowed.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Bobby concurred. “Look, I’m on shift until six-thirty,” he said. “It’s not my case, but I called in a favor, so I can meet you at the county morgue.” Briskly, he rattled off the address for the medical examiner’s offices. I was familiar with the building, though I had no conscious recollection of visiting the place. A moment later, Bobby’s voice went all echoey, as if he’d cupped his hand over the phone. “If we do it tonight, I can get you direct access to the body.” Another long pause. “You need to see this, Zack. This attack was personal.”

  “Personal?” I echoed. “Are you talking about Marjory, or me?”

  On the other end of the phone a door opened, unoiled hinges creaking. Booted footsteps—not Bobby’s—grew loud. Abruptly his whole tone changed, getting louder, flippantly casual.

  “So, yeah,” he said. Cloth rustled. “We can do breakfast. No later than seven, ’K?”

  “Bobby?” I started, and then thought better of it.

  “Gotta go, hun,” he said. The call ended.

  “Dammit!” I hissed, scowling at the phone.

  I was about to thumb the CALLBACK button when another crash rattled the underbrush. This time, it was practically on top of me. That prickling sense of observation returned, sweeping along my spine to end in a vise-like tightness at my throat. I swallowed hard, and regretted it immediately.

  Deep in the shadows between the trees, two red eyes slid open. Baleful and gleaming, they fixed instantly on me. A chittering cry brought all my neck hairs to stiff attention.

  “You sneaky bastard,” I breathed. “You’ve been stalking me this whole time.” Quickly, I traded phone for blades, cursing my muddy-headed distraction. I should have known to stay vigilant, especially after the weirdness with that phantom voice on the shore. Just because I couldn’t see the monsters didn’t mean they weren’t out to get me.

  Marshaling my focus, I crossed my blades.

  “Bring it,” I hissed.

  With gnashing teeth, the third cacodaimon erupted from the trees. This one was bigger than the others, and just as ugly. Weak and sputtering, spirit-fire ignited my blades.

  A torrent of leaves skirled in its wake. That wasn’t right. Cacodaimons were spirits—they couldn’t properly touch things in the physical world. There was no way its passage should crackle branches and stir up leaves.

  They can’t change the rules, can they?

  The thought was fleeting. The slithery horror barreled straight for me, and all my focus narrowed to the work of staying alive. I didn’t have a lot of juice left, but I wouldn’t go down without a fight.

  The guttering flames of my daggers did little to deter the chittering nightmare. Maw open, it dove at me. I struck for the center of its body, but the creature reared up and back, nimbly evading my weapons. It slithered through the air with the grace of a serpent, utterly unfettered by gravity. With rapid undulations, it swept high above my head, unfolding countless jointed limbs to lash at my face, scalp, and neck. Points of bitter cold blossomed across every inch of exposed flesh.

  Waves of dizzying numbness swiftly followed.

  Instinctively, I spread my wings to leap and meet my attacker—but this wasn’t the Shadowside. I was grounded. Snarling in frustration, I pummeled the cacodaimon in a sweep of gleaming pinions—the wings might have no substance in the flesh-and-blood world, but to the cacodaimon, they still carried a wallop.

  Staggered, the creature lurched close enough for me to tag its belly. I plunged a dagger into the sectioned torso, opening a gash as long as my forearm. Viscous fluid came flooding out, covering my hand in stinking goo. Straining upward, I slashed to sever its lower half completely, but the cacodaimon whipped its twitching coils beyond my reach. The bony spike at the end of its tail narrowly missed my face.

  For a moment, the creature hung suspended in the air above me, madly shrilling its pain. Then it tucked its head and dove straight for the middle of my back. Swiping with my wings, I pivoted sharply, only partly deflecting the impact. Instead of my spine, it crashed thunderingly against one shoulder, spinning me around with the force of a battering ram.

  I kept my feet—just barely. Bringing m
y blades up to counter, I cut a swath of legs to steaming stumps as they scrabbled to pierce the armor of my leather. It had plenty more to work with. Little points of stinging chill erupted as a few of them burrowed past my defenses. The numbing contact drained some of the fight from me—those legs weren’t just cutting into my flesh. They were seeking purchase in my nervous system. That was how the cacodaimons rode their victims—and ultimately how they killed them. Immortal or not, I’d seen more powerful beings than me devoured by these horrors. It was a shitty way to die.

  Slashing wildly, I severed its connections—any I could reach—but it was a losing battle.

  The cacodaimon draped itself across my shoulders. How had it gotten to my back again? Hadn’t I dodged? It settled the center of its weight into that unreachable span between shoulderblades and wings. In tightening coils, it wound itself past my knees and I braced my legs, fighting to keep my footing.

  I couldn’t remember when the beast had trapped my hands, but then they hung against my sides, the light around my weapons snuffed completely. All of it was happening too fast and my brain limped uselessly. The coils tightened and the hilts of my daggers slid from nerveless fingers. Dimly, as if from a vast and echoing distance, I felt the impact of the weapons as they thudded to the leaves.

  Thoughts came in disjointed flashes.

  Frustration. Fury. Panic.

  I needed to get away—didn’t I?

  Too much effort. Even standing was a strain.

  Fight, you idiot!

  The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. Maybe just inside my head. It didn’t matter. I sank on trembling knees.

  In a slow-motion slink, the cacodaimon maneuvered its black nubbin of a head around from behind my right shoulder. Eyes cut into the black void of its flesh studied me, so close I was drowning. It had no pupils, just slits of unrelieved crimson. A membrane flickered, and—for a moment—a green as pale as poison bubbled up to drown the red. The color shift lasted only an instant, but something about that brief transition stopped my breath more completely than the coils constricting my body.

  “Knoww yyooouuu, Aannnakiimm. Huunntt yyoouuu.”

  Row upon row of wickedly edged teeth rippled the length of its gullet. Its mouth gaped wide enough to swallow my face and, for a terrible instant, it seemed to consider exactly that course of action. Then, quizzical as a hound, it cocked its head.

  “Whhyyyyyy?”

  Drawn far beyond the span of its single syllable, the question scrabbled at the air with creeping urgency. My slack lips hung empty of answers. I barely remembered the taste of words.

  It repeated its plaintive question, growing strangely docile. Without warning, the invertebrate horror released me, its coils unspooling so rapidly that I dropped heavily to the ground. With an eye-tricking swiftness, it vaulted heavenward, the contours of its alien form so dark they sketched a void against the night’s gathering clouds. In mid-air, it screeched, then twisted, plummeting past the edge of the embankment to disappear into the lake.

  Gasping, I sprawled in the damp nest of leaves.

  6

  For an interminable stretch of minutes, my brain clamored orders at a body that stubbornly refused to respond. Eventually, my arm twitched—that was something. Then I made a fist, and it felt like a triumph.

  With the angry ants of nerve pain swarming beneath my skin, I dragged myself into a sitting position. My head throbbed and the world swung wildly, so I didn’t try to stand right away. Feeling around in the shadows and tree clutter for my blades, I found first one and then the other, wiping them on my jeans with an unsteady grip.

  Sheathing them was an adventure. I still couldn’t fully feel my hands.

  Head clearing, I levered myself up and leaned my back against the nearest trunk. A sighing wind stirred the branches and I tensed, half-expecting the hollow clack and rattle to herald the return of the cacodaimon. But the chittering horror had fled deep beneath Erie’s waves.

  At least, I hoped it had. Things had gone bad so fast.

  I still couldn’t figure out how the thing had gotten the upper hand, or why it hadn’t pressed its advantage. The creature’s bizarre behavior was the only reason I wasn’t a corpse oozing gray matter out of my ears. If it decided to return for another attack, I didn’t like the odds for my survival.

  All questions and no answers. My head ached.

  Heaving to my feet, I took a few, halting steps to make sure I could walk without pitching over. Every muscle burned with exhaustion, but I needed to get across town. Marjory’s body lay on some anonymous slab, and I needed to see what had Bobby so rattled. More than that, I needed to get the hell away from the lake.

  One foot in front of the other…

  My inner cheerleader sounded pretty weak.

  Slogging out of the woods, I started across the broad, flat field that was all that remained of the old midway. Halfway to the gas station it started to rain—a gentle fall of drops that made the night smell strongly of damp stone and turning leaves. Then a wind gusted from across the lake, tearing the bellies from the clouds. In an instant, the soft patter became a deluge. Rain pasted my hair against my scalp, sluicing down my neck to soak the T-shirt under my jacket. The gash on my neck stung like hell—as did every other nick and scrape landed by the cacodaimons.

  The half-mile to my bike was starting to feel like half a million. I wanted my Vulcan, but I wasn’t even certain I could trust myself to ride it, especially not with all this rain. Peeling my phone from my pocket, I started texting Bobby, but remembered that he was on shift.

  I hit backspace until all the letters disappeared.

  Sluggishly ticking through my narrow options, I dithered on the side of the road as the storm cut tiny rivers through the gravel at my feet. Father Frank didn’t own a vehicle, and he sure as hell wasn’t calling Sanjeet at this hour. Cabs didn’t run this late—not on this side of town, and what cabbie in his right mind would pick me up anyway?

  Remy? I’d been avoiding him of late, but my brother owed me one. No question he’d be awake, too—all the Nephilim were essentially vampires, right down to the pointy little fangs.

  Hell, no. Dealing with Remy meant dealing with his boss Saliriel, and I’d be safer with the cacodaimons.

  Doggedly I lurched onward, swiping rain from my eyes and struggling to ignore the way the muscles trembled across my back and legs. Coming within sight of the gas station, I kept to the shadows, taking shelter under an expansive sycamore that had yet to surrender its autumn wealth of leaves.

  My bike stood off to one side, just outside of the pool of light. The helmet lay on the pavement where I’d dropped it. But getting to the Kawasaki wasn’t going to be easy.

  Emergency responders crowded the lot, most of them clustered around a seizing heap sprawled at the threshold of the convenience store. Amazingly, it was the woman, and she wasn’t yet dead. Brains leaking out of her ears, somehow, she had managed to drag herself past the first row of pumps to get all the way to the swinging door. Two sets of EMTs struggled to get her on a stretcher, and she fought with bloodied teeth and nails.

  Horrified pity swelled in a gutting surge as I huddled in the shadow of the tree. Those poor bastards had no way of knowing she was only a husk of meat and instinct, everything else devoured by the cacodaimon. Still, they struggled to save her.

  Things like this are why I can’t sleep.

  One of the medical techs finally pinned her shoulders, holding her prone while she struggled to take chunks out of his forearm. Another got her legs, narrowly dodging a kick to the jaw. The two remaining worked hurriedly to strap her in place.

  While they wrestled, a small, uniformed officer exited a squad car parked on the other side of the building. Something told me it was a woman. She wore a clear, shapeless poncho that draped her so thoroughly, she could’ve passed for a Jawa. Opening the back door of her vehicle, she motioned impatiently. The lanky figure that unfolded was dressed head-to-toe in black, so he was even harder to see t
han she was, but something about him riveted my attention. He hunched self-consciously in the rain, his back turned to me. He wore a leather jacket. From this angle, it looked a lot like my own.

  Maybe that was what caught my eye.

  They spoke in a rapid series of exchanges, the tall man mainly nodding as the woman replied with animated gestures. Rain lashed sideways as the storm intensified and then she turned abruptly, seeking the cover of the canopy. The tall man hesitated long enough to sweep his dripping hair from his eyes, then, with loping strides, he jogged after the tiny officer.

  When he stepped into the glow of the overhead lights, I shivered down to my marrow. The stark brow, the long, angular features—the finer details were lost to the needling rain, but the guy could’ve passed for my twin brother. Even his clothes were the same, right down to the biker jacket. Hurriedly, I teased open my perceptions to examine the man’s echo on the Shadowside.

  What the hell?

  The guy was just a hollow spot knocking against my vision. If he had a cowl or some other kind of cloaking magic, it was wrapped so tightly, I couldn’t spot any metaphysical seams.

  A gnawing sense of familiarity grew and blossomed the longer I watched the guy, like notes of music heard from a vast distance. I almost understood what lay in front of me—knew with absolute certainty that I should—but each attempt to pluck at that thread of recognition only caused the surrounding details to unravel. With mounting trepidation, I realized this was knowledge that had been taken from me, one more crumb of understanding denied post-mortem by Dorimiel.

  That couldn’t be good. All my hackles went up, and it took everything I had to stay under that tree.

  With painful effort, I quashed the impulse to tackle him, my fingers digging so deep into the mottled bark of the sycamore, little splinters shivved under my nails.

  The lady cop said something, and he gestured impatiently toward my motorcycle. She scowled, but he spoke again and, under the rain-speckled folds of her poncho, her shoulders slumped in something like resignation. With a brusque note of warning, she tossed him a set of keys. They sketched a perfect arc in the air, and even in the rain it was impossible to mistake the distinctive shape of the pewter Millennium Falcon I kept on my keychain.