The Resurrection Game

by Michelle Belanger

  Leaning closer, I struggled to read what was there. Within the mottled bruising, almost invisible against the severe discoloration, rows of carefully incised symbols flowed in a tight series of concentric circles. Sinuous and angular by turns, the letters were burned directly into Marjory’s skin. The Y-incision distorted several of the lines, but one set of glyphs I recognized with thundering immediacy.

  It was a Name.

  “Zuriel.” The syllables shivered through me as I whispered. No clear recollections emerged, but in the depths of my soul I knew him. On the heels of that awareness welled a sense of loss so sharp, it left me reeling. Remy’s word, shalish, returned.

  “You OK, Zack?” Bobby asked. “You’re really pale all of a sudden.”

  “He—he’s woven dense layers of magic here,” I muttered, not exactly answering. I could unpack that reaction once I sorted the rest of the words. The lettering was delicate, none of the symbols larger than the nail on my pinky. “With all this damage, I’m fumbling.”

  “I can bring the pics up on my phone,” he offered.

  Shaking my head, I held one hand poised above the pattern of sigils, keenly aware of what physical contact would bring.

  “I’ll get more this way.”

  “There’s a box of gloves on that counter,” Bobby suggested.

  “Can’t do gloves,” I said. “It dulls the perceptions.” Bobby frowned. “I think, at some point, I trained myself to see gloves and even clothes as psychic barriers—convenient for shielding from a barrage of random perceptions every time I bump into someone, but I haven’t figured out how to turn it off for something like this.”

  “She’s already been processed, but it’s not a good idea to touch her directly—”

  My hand was already descending. I needed to see what they’d done to her, not just the physical assault, but everything that had led up to it.

  The first thing I heard was her scream.

  14

  She knew no one could hear her. That didn’t stop her from wailing as loud as she could every time he left her in the dark.

  Her voice was long past ragged. No idea what anyone would do if they found her. She was beyond saving. On some level, she knew that, wasn’t really sure how she’d lasted this long. Funny, the will for survival. She hadn’t understood it with Sammy, a husk full of tubes, whittled to nothing by the cancer, still fighting for each painful breath.

  Now, she got it. Grokked it on a deep and unequivocal level. The body didn’t like quitting, even when the mind knew there was no other escape…

  * * *

  I’d dropped straight into the vision. Everything came from Marjory’s perspective—not exactly through her eyes, but certainly filtered through her head. She hunched in darkness, bound to something. Probably a chair, though she didn’t remember any more. It could have been an elephant for all that she could feel it. Pain had cycled her to some distant place where sensation was just a river that occasionally broke its banks.

  Every time it flooded, more of her eroded. Longer and longer bouts of empty dark.

  Really, it was a blessing.

  She longed to descend and never surface, but her stubborn body wouldn’t let her. He wouldn’t let her, either. So much anger in that one. Always, he shoved her over the edge only to drag her back and do it again. He asked his questions. She wouldn’t answer.

  Rinse, repeat.

  Rinse, repeat.

  What did you do with Tashiel? I know he came out here, you stupid cow. Why can’t I hear him? What do you know about it?

  Tashiel, Tashiel. The endless refrain. Tashiel was a name in a dead man’s journal.

  Why was your name in his ledger? You have something that belongs to him, don’t you? You cunt! Give it up.

  Travelogues. Her guilty pleasure. She’d spent thousands on first-hand accounts of other peoples’ adventures, the more doomed the better. She loved the survive-against-all-odds narrative.

  Not so thrilling as the survivor.

  You think I can’t see my brother’s mark on you? You can’t fool me. Look at me when I’m talking to you! Where is he?

  She sent herself on one of those journeys every time his questions started. Among headhunters in Borneo. Through the pioneer wilds of America. The Congo. Everest. Antarctica. The Tashiel book wasn’t even that interesting. Tired stuff, really, but it had meant something to Zaquiel—and for that, she kept its secrets. Zaquiel’s, too. So many secrets.

  That was her life. One big closet.

  Poor Sam. Patient unto death.

  The endless stream of consciousness was a riptide, dragging me under. Flailing, I fought for traction. Marjory’s thoughts were so terribly present, it felt as if she was still living every second of her torture. The information was useful, though. I recalled nothing of a travelogue, but Tashiel I knew.

  At least, I knew of him. He was another of the Anakim.

  There was a memory, gleaned from the stolen stores of Dorimiel in our life-or-death struggle above the lake—the sole time I’d willingly used the powers of the Eye. The Nephilim decimus had shoved the knowledge as a distraction in my path while I’d ripped through his mind for my real prize—the sigil-phrase that unlocked the seal of Lailah’s binding jar.

  Tash had been traveling with Anakesiel and other members of my tribe through what might have been the Swiss Alps. It was the early eighteen hundreds, moments before Dorimiel had ambushed the Anakim Primus in a bid to acquire the Stylus. Tashiel had been scouting ahead. He’d just returned to warn of the impending attack.

  The intel came too late.

  I had nothing on the actual fight, but I knew its result. Anak and three of his lieutenants captured, their souls trapped in jars—the same vessels now hidden in my desk. Notably, Tash wasn’t among them. Had he been Marjory’s sole survivor, recording the events in a personal journal? It wouldn’t have been the first time some scrap of our history had weathered a centuries-long trip. Yet how could that journal be worth so much torture?

  The things Zuriel did to her…

  Zaquiel, is that you? Have you come to save me?

  Her voice clutched at my thoughts with desperate ferocity.

  Let me out, she pleaded. I want to see my Sammy again.

  My head whirled as I struggled to process what was happening. All those half-lucid ramblings—I wasn’t reading some fragment of past events caught in the amber of her skin. Her ghost was trapped in there.

  It was a corpse. It shouldn’t be.

  Please, Zack. He won’t let me leave!

  * * *

  “Jesus, Zack, what’s wrong?” From a vast distance, Bobby’s voice battered my awareness. I felt a harsh tug on my arm. “Come on Zack, let go. Snap out of it!”

  * * *

  At the mere possibility that she might see release, Marjory flailed in a welter of need. Lucidity drowned in a stupefying rush of sensation—the misery of her torture, determination to keep her promises, rising horror when she realized how she’d survived for so long.

  She hadn’t.

  That was his worst cheat, locking her to the wreck of dead flesh. Maddened, we clawed against the insensible shell, desperate for any response.

  All the bindings held.

  * * *

  Her screams chased me all the way to the surface. Finally, I tore my hand free.

  I was on the floor, with no recollection of my transit from her body to the tiles. Half of the vinyl sheet had been dragged down with me, and Marjory’s arm draped lifeless over the edge of her cold metal resting place.

  In the room of buzzing lights and sterile steel, Bobby shook me until my teeth rattled. I bit my tongue. The pain—my pain—gave me some traction. Gasping, I recoiled, overwhelmed with revulsion.

  “She’s in there,” I blurted. “She’s in there. Holy fuck. She’s still inside her dead skin.”

  15

  Flesh and gray tendons hung like grisly streamers from the absence of fingers. Hot bile rose bitter at the back of my throat.

/>   Bobby was at my side, his voice low and urgent. I didn’t process anything that he was saying. With firm persistence, he strove to drag me to my feet. With our difference in height, it was comical. The rhythmic patter of his words brought me back in stages. Eventually, I scrambled from the floor, putting some distance between myself and those tortured fingers.

  The screaming dulled, but didn’t stop.

  “What just happened?” Bobby demanded. Now that I stood, his words rang sharp—my collapse had left him rattled. That made two of us. With trembling hands, I gripped my head.

  “He left her in that body,” I choked.

  All my horror echoed back from Bobby’s face. Eyes creeping to the spectacle of the cadaver, he groped for composure.

  “Why?”

  Not “how.” Bobby had been down that rabbit hole before. The smartly dressed detective might not understand my world, but he knew about its truths. This was just one incomprehensible horror among many, and he didn’t need to know the how of it in order to offer me his help.

  “She didn’t give him what he wanted.”

  “Good for her,” he said.

  Marjory’s voice, hushed but still panicked, reverberated just beyond hearing. Endlessly, she pleaded. With reluctant steps, I approached her corpse once more.

  “I’ve got to release her,” I said. “This isn’t fair—she suffered to protect me.”

  “So this is personal?”

  I nodded. Steeling myself, I went to place my palm over the sigil burned into her flesh. Those three rings of text were the key. Bobby seized my wrist before I could make contact.

  “Whoa, whoa,” he said angrily. “What are you doing?”

  “I’ve got to get a better feel for the spell,” I explained, tugging away. Bobby relinquished my wrist, but inserted himself between me and the body.

  “A minute ago, you touched her and it put you on the floor,” he said. “How is this a good idea?”

  “I can’t leave her like this, Bobby.”

  A muscle ticked in his jaw as he glared up at me. “No,” he insisted. “First you tell me how to fix things if this goes sideways.”

  “What?”

  He pushed me away from the drawer, back braced against its metal lip. Stunned by this uncharacteristic resistance, I gave ground—a single step. Marjory’s lifeless arm dangled behind him. I still couldn’t look at it.

  “I can’t believe you can stand there with her looking like that, and not worry that this is a trap,” he said. “Someone knew enough to find this woman and to carve that thing into her skin. That person obviously knows you, so they know what you’d do to access that magic—am I right?”

  Grudgingly, I nodded. With a soft grunt of vindication, Bobby folded his arms over his narrow chest. The gesture crimped his tie.

  “Bobby—” I started.

  Gruffly, he cut me off. “Maybe it’s normal for you, people using human beings as stationery, but it’s not normal in my world, Zack,” he said. “I have no idea what to expect here, and I’m not going to stand around feeling useless. I can’t.” His voice faltered, a bitter reminder that I had shut Bobby out when his partner had needed him the most. Things might have turned out very differently for Garrett if I’d shown my friend a little trust.

  “Look, I don’t know what to expect any more than you do,” I countered. Bobby’s dark brows stitched as he scanned my face for dissemblance. I wasn’t lying—wouldn’t do him that injustice, not again. “If I’ve ever encountered something like this, I don’t remember. You know how it is.”

  His grip on his elbows tightened until he all but hugged himself.

  “You can’t do it some other way?”

  Abruptly, footsteps resounded through the hall, and we both froze. Closer and closer, they halted near our door. Keys jingled. Bobby poised with his hand on Marjory’s drawer, ready to roll her back into darkness the instant we heard someone try to get in.

  After a nerve-wracking silence, the steps moved away. We let ourselves breathe. I slipped around Bobby to face the corpse.

  “I can’t do it any other way, not if you want us out of here before someone kicks us out,” I said. He hovered near my elbow, doing a nervous shuffle.

  “You start screaming again and they’ll kick us out regardless.”

  “I was screaming?”

  He nodded. “And not in English.”

  “Hit me.” At his startled look, I repeated the instruction. “I’m serious. If I do it again, smack me in the face or something. I bit my tongue when you shook me earlier, and that pulled me out of it.”

  “That is a shitty plan, Zack,” he grumbled.

  “I’ve had almost zero sleep over the past five days,” I said. “It’s all I got.”

  My friend didn’t look happy, but when I reached again for Marjory’s body, he didn’t stop me. He retreated a few paces away, so tense he vibrated. I closed my eyes for a moment, cutting him from my awareness. With a deep breath that hardly left me feeling any steadier, I concentrated on the three concentric rings of symbols scored into Marjory’s chest.

  The layered magic of the sigil stung the tips of my fingers before I even made contact. As I watched, the rings ignited with a pale, arctic glow against the deep bruising, lifting like a hologram to hover in the air before me. Each on its own axis, the rings twirled and spun, dials on a combination lock crafted from pure energy.

  Zuriel’s Name burned brightly, repeating in a pattern through the graduated circles. In shadows beneath it, I could just make out another triad of syllables. I expected this Name to be Tashiel’s. Instead, it was my own.

  The symbols twisted weirdly together with Zuriel’s. It gave me the strangest feeling. All of Bobby’s warnings clamored in my head.

  Too late.

  The whirl of characters burst in a soundless explosion. Arctic fire drowned my vision. Trailing light like a comet, the heart of the sigil crashed into the center of my chest. The impact rocked me backward and I staggered away from the open drawer. Marjory started shrieking. She seized my wrist with the stumps of her fingers, and I felt the slick press of each exposed knuckle.

  “He knows,” she cried, the words mushy around the edges. Shards of teeth tumbled from dead lips as she worked her broken jaw. “What you did to Tashiel. He knows.” I strained in her grip, but the ragged nubs held fast.

  “Let go.” I clawed wildly. Where the fuck was Bobby?

  She clambered from her cold slab, the vinyl sheet spilling to the floor. Still gripping my wrist, she pulled me into a tight embrace, sagging breasts crushed against my jacket. She pressed her cheek to mine, flaccid lips against my ear.

  “Everything you took, he’ll take from you,” she whispered. “You broke your promise. You’re a traitor to your brothers. Traitors pay.” She hissed the words fiercely, her voice distorting until his voice emerged, the sound as familiar as my own.

  I’m coming for you, Zaquiel, it said. You’re going to suffer for what you stole from me. In a lightning-stroke, a face leapt the chasm of memory. A near twin of my own, only older. Drawn and haggard.

  Tashiel. I knew it without thinking.

  On the heels of this vision, there was a crushing weight of guilt devoid of context. A cascade of confusing images. White sheets. Sharp hospital smell. The rhythmic huff of some machine. The shreds of knowledge blew through me so fast, I caught no sense of their meaning. They spun like blasted cinders, and I reeled in the void they left behind.

  Shouting wordless negation, I flailed against the message-bringer, finally tearing my wrist from her noxious grip. With ferocious effort, I shoved the dead woman away. She stumbled back, clouded eyes blinking dumbly. This wasn’t the person I’d first encountered, the one locked in darkness, pleading for release.

  Marjory.

  I called her name in a silent scream.

  Marjory Kazinsky.

  Abruptly, the milky corneas cleared. All the brutal damage dropped away. A face emerged, alive and vibrant. One I’d seen in nightmares—as re
cently as my nap by Euclid Beach. For weeks, she’d haunted me, calling, pleading. She hadn’t been some guilt-born dream. She’d reached through our connection. In that instant, I knew we had one. A psychic bond.

  More than that.

  The knowledge almost surfaced, then sank out of reach. The next words she spoke were her own again, free of Zuriel’s influence. They bypassed her lips to ring directly inside my brain.

  Help me, Zaquiel. I can’t endure this one more day.

  Her desperate, lucid contact brought me back to myself. With mounting clarity, I caught the flaws in the room that surrounded us. Too many shining doors lined either side. The sterile walls stretched like a gleaming funhouse tunnel. All of it spun, flat and distorted.

  Bobby was nowhere to be seen.

  “It’s a projection,” I breathed. “I’m in my head. This isn’t real.”

  The whirling sigils cycled through all of it, three rings of gleaming magic fueling the façade. His power had a taste—close to my own, but colder and sharper, like the bite of air on a brisk winter’s day. Something about it was hauntingly familiar. Hate and anger seethed in its chill.

  Marjory—as she must have appeared in life—stood rigidly against the drawer that was her current resting place. Her battered corpse stretched behind her.

  I’m real, she pleaded. Get me out of here, Zack. Please.

  Recognition teased just beyond reach. “How do I know you?” I asked. She gave me the saddest smile.

  Find Tabby before he does. She’s always trusted you.

  “Is she still alive?” I demanded. “Do you know where to find her? Why did you die for me?” I surged forward to shake her for the answers, but something yanked me back. A hand on my arm—it had to be Bobby, pulling me out—but I didn’t want to go. I needed her answers. I tried to jerk free of his grip, twisting around until I could see him.

  “Let me finish!” I bellowed.

  The pull was hard enough to knock me off balance. Something wasn’t right. Bobby’s face—it started melting, like a cheap candle left in the sun. Waxen rivulets of skin dripped to obliterate his features. From beneath, another face bulged.