The Resurrection Game

by Michelle Belanger

  I hoped it was enough to keep Zuriel away.

  Thumbing the button on my key fob, I crossed the yard and slipped behind the wheel of the Hellcat. The engine thrummed in a steady, soothing rhythm. Pulling back onto Mayfield, I turned toward the ripening brilliance of the afternoon sun and started the trek to Parma. Once I caught I-77, I dug my smartphone from where I’d stuffed it in a pocket. When Lil, Father Frank, and Halley all agreed on roughly the same point, even I wasn’t stubborn enough to ignore it.

  I needed to suck it up and ask for help.

  27

  My first call went to Lil’s new number. After three rings, a computerized voice recited a canned message so anonymous it could have belonged to anyone, from a broker to a hitman. I hoped it was the right number.

  “Hey, Lil,” I said, guiding the car around a rusted-out sedan sitting in the breakdown lane. “You told me to start asking for help, so I’m asking.” Thoughts and mouth still ran at odds, so it took a little effort to choke through the words. “Could you… drop by Halley’s house tonight?” I faltered again and hoped she’d have the patience to listen through all my fumbling pauses. “I need someone to keep eyes on the kid and the padre.” Just before the voicemail beep cut me off, I managed one more word. It was the hardest. “Please.”

  Wiping an unaccustomed slickness from my palms, I waited a few miles before attempting my next call. The setting sun painted glare across my windshield, and I sat straighter in the driver’s seat, trying to get the right angle with the visor so I could see the other cars around me. The world bled to hues of gold and orange and the highway shimmered like a molten river.

  Using the voice function, I pulled up Bobby’s number, then hovered with my thumb over the green call button. A mile streaked by, then two. The screen faded to black. Eyes sweeping cautiously between the phone and the road, I tapped my passcode into the lock screen, then brought the number back up.

  And then I choked. Again.

  Asking Lil for a favor had been a cakewalk by comparison. Bobby deserved an apology, but what could I possibly say? I’d been a royal ass to him. The real bitch of it was, I could recall every vicious comment I’d uttered, and they still felt justified. I knew it was Zuriel’s spell talking—you mad, bro?—but that didn’t change the emotions. They lingered in stark contrast to any reason.

  Finally, I worked up the nerve and jammed my thumb onto the call button. One ring. Two. On the third, I almost hung up. By the fourth, I didn’t have to. Bobby’s phone went to voicemail, just like Lil’s had. Unlike Lil’s, his message was personal, his voice both business-like and cheery as it rose crisply from my phone.

  “This is Park. Leave a message. I’ll get back to you.”

  When I opened my mouth, nothing came out. The only sound his voicemail recorded was the whirr of the tires on pavement and the soft thrum of the Hellcat’s engine. I fumbled for something—anything—I could say, but all I managed was his name. Then the beep cut me off.

  “Shit,” I grumbled, then tapped the brakes, guiltily dipping the phone out of sight. A State Trooper had his cruiser angled in the median. He stood in the open driver’s-side door, back against the sun, the black cannon of a radar detector aimed at oncoming traffic—my lane. The Hellcat was on cruise, so my speed was fine, but I didn’t want a ticket for using the cellphone.

  Hitting my turn signal, I slipped behind an intervening semi like I’d been meaning to for miles. Once I’d skated passed the trooper, I hit the call button again, waiting for the now-familiar greeting.

  “This is Park. Leave a message. I’ll get back to you.”

  I drew a breath. “Hey, Bobby,” I said. My voice still came out tight. Awkwardly, I cleared my throat. “So… this morning. Kind of a cluster fuck. All those things I said…” I trailed off, keenly aware how short his voicemail ran. Struggling for brevity, I tried again. “I was an ass. I’m sorry. I can explain more later, but if you don’t want to hear it, I understand.” My mouth felt dry at the prospect. “One more thing,” I added quickly. “A favor, but only if you’re willing. I need a report filed for the Vulcan, but I don’t have time right now. Can you take care of it? Shoot me a message if you can.”

  The beep cut me off before I could fit in a “thanks.” Changing lanes again, I resisted the urge to call back and clutter his voicemail with yet another message. If he wanted to talk, he’d text, sooner or later.

  I hoped.

  As I merged from I-77 to 480, the sun dipped lower, reaching that point on the horizon where no amount of adjustment could block it with the visor. I dug around as best I could for sunglasses, then after a few miles I resigned myself to squinting through the glare. It made my head pound, and my stomach roiled sourly in tandem. The food at the Cat House had been hours ago, and I hadn’t grabbed anything at the apartment after waking up. There wasn’t so much as a breath mint in the car. That was dumb.

  Lil was right on one point—when it came to looking after my own needs, I failed. Miserably.

  Traffic on 480 hit a snag about ten minutes from my exit. Brake lights flashed, and everyone slowed to a crawl. As I inched forward, a state trooper—probably the same one running the speed trap—zoomed past, wheels spitting plumes of dust as he drove half on the shoulder. Shortly after, he was followed by a fire truck, its horn whooping to get people out of the way. Despite the racket, almost no one moved—there was nowhere for any of us to go.

  The left and middle lanes were shut down completely, and everyone was jockeying to get ahead. Between that and the rubbernecking, what could have been a fairly simple situation turned the highway into a parking lot.

  The ten minutes to my exit dragged into twenty. I filled the time with my final and longest call of the afternoon—the one to my insurance company.

  No human answered the phone. Instead, I got to navigate a seemingly endless series of computerized menus, each narrated by a canned female voice that reminded me of GLaDOS. By the fifth menu, I expected her to passive-aggressively begin goading me toward a murderous rampage.

  It wouldn’t have taken much at that point.

  While I negotiated the voice-recognition program, the battery on the phone drained rapidly. Digging the cord from my pocket, I switched the phone to speaker and balanced it in a cup-holder, plugging it in so it didn’t die. I didn’t think I could go through all those menus again—not without punching something.

  The only upside to being stuck in phone-menu hell was that it kept my mind off of my real-world worries, especially those revolving around Marjory. In the back of my mind, though, I wondered what I was going do if I got to her house and found my baby pictures all over her walls.

  28

  I wrapped up the insurance call just in time to hit the exit and switch my phone to the map function. The speed limit dropped to twenty-five miles an hour, and I drove through street after street of anonymous, pastel colonials, tension crackling through my shoulders. The houses in this section of Parma were arranged with uniform precision, their postage-stamp lawns so picture-perfect, they belonged in the backdrop of some charming ’50s sitcom, or maybe a Twilight Zone episode. As I followed the directions toward Marjory’s address, no recognition stirred—although that didn’t really mean much, not with the holes in my memory.

  The instant I turned onto Marjory’s street—Parmenter—my phone declared “You have arrived,” and I began scanning for number 635. No lurid “X” of yellow police tape marked the door where death had so recently come knocking, and no mailboxes sprouted alongside the sloping concrete driveways as I crawled well below the posted speed. The houses were set just far enough back in their yards that even when they sported numbers, it was impossible to make them out—the fours looked like sevens, and the threes, fives, and eights were even worse.

  Rolling through a stop sign at a cross street, I thought I finally had it, but then the numbers jumped abruptly from three to four digits. With a grumbled curse, I did a three-point turn and started over again, slowing my speed ever further. It was
n’t like I had to worry about traffic—the street was empty. No one was even out in the yards.

  The Twilight Zone vibe grew oppressively persistent.

  Scouring the tatters of my memories, I strove to find some detail that felt remotely familiar—a color, a particular twist in one of the trees, the shape of drawn curtains behind a window. But there was nothing. If ever I’d been here before, that knowledge was gone from my brain.

  Abruptly, I swung the Hellcat to the side of the road and parked with the wheels halfway up on the curb. Flipping through all the little doodads on her keychain, I searched for anything that might offer a clue, then got out and marched toward the nearest yard. The idiot babble of a television drifted from somewhere on the other side of the street, so there had to be someone on Parmenter Road. It only felt like a post-Apocalyptic wasteland.

  The first house I checked didn’t have a number posted, not even on the little brass mail slot beside the front door. Baffled, I went around to the side door, looking there. Nothing. No car in the drive and nothing I could see through the spattered windows of the garage.

  Feeling like a stalker, I craned my neck to peer into the side window of the house itself. Kitchen cabinetry, a spider plant, a tin clock shaped like a crowing rooster—nothing that looked familiar, and no sign of any living residents. I knocked anyway.

  No answer—that figured. So I moved to the next home. This one had a grinning frog statue hidden partially behind a line of shaped hedges that spanned the front of the house. Ridiculously, the frog lofted a sign above its flat head—633. There was no fucking way I could have seen that from the road. With a rush of elation, I darted quickly across the neatly trimmed grass toward the little green two-story house that sat next door.

  No number, but it had to be Marjory’s.

  As I approached the front door, my breath caught in my throat, the anxious spike of emotion at odds with the house’s bland appearance. Curtains were drawn at all the windows, and in the gloom of dusk, the sheer fabric turned all the furniture ghostly. A festive autumn wreath hung sandwiched between the front and the storm doors, its bright plastic berries and glitter-sprayed twigs bristling against the glass.

  When I tried it, the storm door was locked. Sorting through her mess of keys, I couldn’t find one that fit. Unwilling to break anything yet, I stuffed the keys back into my pocket and tested the psychic feel of the entrance, looking for my usual cheat. Most doors were used so frequently that they held no existence on the Shadowside, making it possible for me to skate right through. All I had to do was find a Crossing.

  Not in this case.

  As I pressed my fingers against the glass above the wreath, there was only a dull emptiness. Not even a flickering impression remained. Unsettled for reasons I couldn’t quite articulate, I headed around to the side of the house. Another door nestled beneath a green aluminum awning. Two fat pots of wisteria sat on either side of a shallow step, the naked runners of their vines twisting up the awning’s thin metal supports. Beyond the makeshift trellis, the screen door hung slightly ajar, shifting rhythmically with the breeze so that the house appeared to be breathing.

  Mindful of both Lailah’s warnings and Zuriel’s proven treachery, I braced the screen door open with my shoulder and laid my palm flat against the flaking paint.

  Again, no impression.

  Baffled, I quested for any sign of wards or other magic that might be obscuring the energy of the house. Yet again, I came up blank. Whatever Zuriel had done to scrub the place—and it had to have been Zuriel—it had been scarily effective.

  Visually scanning the doorframe for inscriptions, I tested key after key until one of them fit. Relatively certain no wards were going to fry me, I closed my hand around the knob and pushed. No magic exploded—at least, not yet—and I took a halting step inside. The door opened onto a cramped landing made smaller by the crush of coats hanging from a set of pegs directly behind the entrance. Beyond the coats, stairs led down to a musty basement, a washer and dryer just visible in the patch of dim light filtering from behind me. A hamper of laundry rested atop the dryer, as if Marjory still planned to come back for it at any minute.

  The hollow knock of the psychic space teased all my hackles to stiff attention. Drawing one of my blades, I moved to the basement, pulling a cord to turn on an overhead light. Nothing lurked down there but cobwebs and moldering boxes of old Christmas decorations.

  Back at the top of the stairs, I followed a short flight of three steps into a cheery kitchen with white cabinets and yellow tile. Collector’s plates featuring characters from the Wizard of Oz grinned from a display above the sink. Everything was neat and orderly, from the placement of the toaster, coffeemaker, and knife block, to the arrangement of tea tins across the back of the bread box. This made it easier to spot evidence that the police had been there.

  The silverware drawer hung partly open, smudges of fingerprint dust still visible on the lip and the handle. A slot in the knife block was empty—one of the big ones, from the look of it. More fingerprint dust stood out on the wooden surface of the kitchen table. An arc of the black dust speckled one of the nearby curtains where someone had been sloppy.

  The oppressive absence of psychic impressions continued from the landing, through the kitchen, and onward to the living room, dogging my every step. My ears rang with the weight of it, as if my physical senses were compelled to invent some sensation to make up for the utter void. Doing my best to ignore it, I moved methodically through each room. At every new door or archway I paused, hugging the edge to visually inspect the corners before stepping through.

  The house was as empty physically as it was psychically. Even some of the furniture was missing, likely carried off to the forensics lab to aid in the investigation. In the living room, there still was some outside light filtering through the curtains, so I just turned on one table lamp. Framed photos decorated every wall, but here and there a brighter rectangle in the paint betrayed the recent absence of an image. A large square of carpet had been cut from the center of the floor.

  One whole wall featured a pastiche of travel photos arranged above a glassed-in bookshelf crammed with leather bound volumes—her precious collection of travelogues. I scoured the titles, but none of them matched the time and place of Anakesiel’s attack. If she’d kept the damning journal that named Tashiel, she’d stored it someplace else.

  Like a safe deposit box.

  That tracked—and it would be just my luck. But I wasn’t here only for the journal. There were other things that nagged me about Marjory, conjectures about our connection that might have their proof in pictures.

  With a thrill of trepidation, I closely studied all the photos above the shelf. The search derailed my thoughts about the journal. I was looking for something much more personal—younger iterations of my face. But no evidence of little Zack peered back at me. No Tabitha, either. A significantly younger Marjory grinned, often windswept, from all of the pictures. In many of the photos another woman’s face—always the same—repeated alongside Marjory’s. Stocky build, short hair, she might have been a sister. They both smiled giddily. For a span of what looked like ten or fifteen years, she and Marjory had done everything together.

  None of the photos with her were recent.

  The missing photos on the other walls grew increasingly ominous—and more deliberate.

  Goaded by suspicion, I moved quickly from frame to frame, intentionally avoiding the missing square of carpet. Most of the remaining photos appeared to be graduation portraits. A host of bright-eyed young people smiled stiffly, wearing suits and fancy dresses. I couldn’t think of them as family images. Black, white, yellow, and various shades of brown, they couldn’t all have been related. Maybe Marjory had been a teacher and the photos were mementos of every proud success.

  Still no Zack, and no one I could identify with any certainty as Tabitha. Searchingly, I pressed my hand to a rectangle of paint two shades lighter than the rest of the wall. The psychic space was just
as blank—as if all emotional significance had been scoured with the magical equivalent of a sandblaster.

  Perhaps I’d met her as a student, or even a co-worker.

  Co-workers don’t get claimed as next-of-kin.

  Turning toward the center, I stared uneasily at the four-foot square cutout. That had to have been where the body was found. Impressions in the carpet to either side suggested that a heavy piece of furniture had stood there—probably a sofa. So, either he’d laid her on the couch and enough fluid had dripped to make that carpet swatch useful to the police, or he’d dumped her in a heap at the foot of the sofa. Either way, the furniture itself was missing, and nothing lingered on the exposed floorboards except the hint of a brownish stain.

  Accustomed to the layers of information that normally lingered on the Shadowside, I pressed my fingers to the wood. Zuriel’s touch was here, too. He’d left me nothing.

  Tired of all the strangers’ faces staring at me from the walls, I quit the living room, passed some stairs that led upward, and moved into what appeared to be a home office. Marjory’s computer was gone, but the desk appeared relatively untouched. The cops must have figured there was nothing else of use here. Removing a hemorrhoid cushion from her swivel chair, I sat down, turned on a desk lamp, and dug methodically through each drawer. Stationery, postcards, little modular baskets full of neatly sorted paperclips and thumbtacks—nothing at all unusual, but also no memory sticks or external hard drives that might take the place of the missing computer.

  In one drawer, there were two stacks of old letters tied together with faded pink ribbon. Their postmarks dated to the fifties. I got excited for a minute, but they turned out to be love letters between Marjory’s mother and father, neither of whom bore names that seemed to have any bearing for me. I scanned a few of them anyway. The contents were steamy, and I felt like a peeping Tom. As often as I ended up rifling through other people’s business, voyeurism wasn’t really my thing.