The Resurrection Game

by Michelle Belanger

  The filing cabinet seemed a safer bet. All the drawers were sealed, and I couldn’t match them to a key on the ring, but the locks were cheap and easy to pick. I had the top drawer open in under a minute. Tugging the handle, the casters squealed as it swung heavily open.

  The thing was packed. Marjory was an obsessive records-keeper, and the more I paged through her meticulous ranks of tax returns, utility bills, and credit card statements, the more her absence from searchable records seemed to have been orchestrated. Bobby and I had spent months trying to track this woman down, and neither of us were amateurs. We should have turned up something.

  Here was an obvious paper trail—years of it. She did her taxes. She had a driver’s license, social security card, even a passport. The woman hadn’t been living off the grid. Someone had to have buried her records for a reason.

  With my luck, it was me, I thought. It felt like the punch line to a bad joke, but all too probable. Dragging open the second drawer, I hit the mother lode—literally. Every file had a person’s name, and the contents matched the graduation photos in the living room.

  Marjory had been a foster parent.

  Again, Marjory saved everything. The folders were alphabetical, each containing birth records, photographs, test scores for college entrance exams, and even newspaper clippings. The first file—Marlon Baylor—had Xerox copies of a high school diploma, then a Bachelor’s in Science, and finally a Masters in engineering. Clippings from the student newspaper showing his name on the Dean’s list. The back of the file held a graduation photo. I recognized him immediately—the young black man with wire-rimmed glasses and a shy, crooked smile.

  According to her records, Marjory had fostered him between the ages of seven and twelve, but she’d never lost contact, encouraging his pursuit of his education and, judging from some of the receipts in the file, also helping to finance it. That didn’t come cheap—and I hadn’t seen anything in her tax records to suggest she had that kind of money.

  I didn’t devote too much brain to the puzzle of where she got the funds, fixated instead on finding my own name on a file, rushing back toward the W’s. This had to be our connection. In my current life, Remy had been teaching me since I was fifteen. He’d let the number slip several times in casual conversation, and I’d never asked for clarification.

  Supposedly my parents lived in Kenosha, Wisconsin. How, then, had they let me come all the way to Cleveland, Ohio to learn weird things from an even weirder man?

  What if they hadn’t? There were no photos of them in my apartment. Nothing in my wallet. No numbers written down. Maybe they were both dead, or we were estranged.

  Questions I’d been avoiding, and there were no answers to be found in Marjory’s foster drawer—but I did find Tabitha, tucked all the way back in the V’s. She’d started life as Tadhana Villanueva, and her picture was out there in the living room. I’d passed it up completely, expecting Marjory’s daughter to be a white girl. Tabitha was mixed Asian, probably Filipina, especially with that Spanish last name.

  Chastened, I studied the file to see what else I might have missed. Of all the fosters, Tabitha had stayed with Marjory the longest, beginning when she was only four years old. Curious, I flipped through the records of her life. There was the usual collection of academic paperwork—award in middle school for language and writing, first place in the regional Spelling Bee. More art than science, but lots of strong grades. Scanning forward, I expected to find report cards from high school, but a fat wad of paperwork got in the way.

  In the summer between seventh and eighth grade, Tabitha had been adopted.

  At first everything seemed routine—nothing in this stack could tell me Tabitha’s current whereabouts—but then a name leapt out next to Marjory’s, on the line marked “husband.” I’d assumed she’d been married to a man named Samuel.

  The name was “J. Remington Broussard.”

  29

  I nearly choked. Broussard was my brother Remy’s last name—at least, the current one. Lil still called him Remington, at least when he slipped up and called her Lillianna.

  That couldn’t be coincidence.

  With too many bizarre scenarios vying for space in my head, I reached for my phone to call Remy. I deserved some answers about this.

  “Fuck me running,” I snarled. The phone wasn’t in its usual place in my back pocket—I’d left the damned thing in the car, attached to the charger.

  Tugging the sheet with his name out of the stack, I hastily pocketed it. He wasn’t going to talk his way around this one. Slamming the drawer shut, I went back to the one that held all of Marjory’s tax and personal records. If a marriage certificate existed, that was where she would keep it.

  As I dug through page after page of bureaucratic effluvia, a muffled thump came from somewhere beyond the tidy office. Whatever it was, it sounded like it was inside the house.

  I froze, listening, one hand drifting to the hilt of a dagger. With my other elbow, I slowly eased the drawer shut. Before it closed completely, the sound came again—a soft thump and then a clatter—from the direction of the kitchen.

  If it’s not inside the house, it’s damned close.

  Switching off the lamp, I crept to the door of the office, moving on the balls of my feet and pressing myself into the tiniest space possible against the inside of the jamb. Taking shallow sips of breath to minimize my noise, I peered around the corner to study the room beyond.

  Full dark had fallen in the time I’d taken to sort through Marjory’s files. I’d left the single lamp burning on a side table in the living room, and the rest was a chamber of shadows. Wan faces stared dolefully from their frames on the walls, all their grins transformed into snarls. At the mouth of the kitchen, a patch of darkness convulsed, deeper than all the rest.

  Holding tight to my cowl, I teased open my psychic perceptions. It took every ounce of concentration I had to both sense that side of reality and obscure myself from it. I got nothing for my effort—whatever the fleeting shadow might have been, it left no trace upon the Shadowside. The whole of the house rang as empty as when I’d first entered.

  Lailah’s warning clamored in my head.

  I almost drew the dagger, then reconsidered. From the sounds, whatever was out there seemed physical, but if it wasn’t, the blade’s arcing power would give me away as surely as a spotlight. Partly unzipping my jacket, I put my hand instead on the butt of the Legion, stopping just short of drawing the firearm.

  Moving with as much stealth as I could muster given my lanky frame, I quitted the door to the office and stalked to the edge of the living room. I stayed out of line of sight from the other doorways, hugging close to the walls—using the shadows to my advantage, even though Lailah’s warning made me wary.

  The bulb on the lamp flickered unexpectedly and I halted, half expecting it to fizzle out with a sudden pop. Then the light steadied, just as the sound came again—a little different this time, more a rattle than a thump.

  Drawing the gun, I pointed the muzzle toward the ceiling and moved cautiously forward. Despite the crowding dark in the living room, nothing spectral jumped me as I crossed closer to the kitchen. Shoulders angled to the wall, I halted just this side of the doorway, reluctant to trade soft carpet for the noisy expanse of tile. In silence I waited, struggling to listen over the thudding in my ears.

  I measured a minute by the hammer strokes of my heart.

  Two minutes, and nothing. I couldn’t hold still any longer. With a flickering rush of motion, I swept around the corner, sighting every potential hiding spot down the barrel of my gun.

  The kitchen was empty. And then—clack, slam!—so close, I jumped and nearly squeezed off a stray round. But I knew that sound. Aluminum and an ill-fitting screen, banging together in the wind.

  To confirm, I descended the short flight of stairs to the coat-cramped landing. The basement door was still closed, just as I had left it—that was a comfort. Twitching back the checkered curtains from the window on
the side door, I peered into the driveway. Aluminum banged again, practically in my face.

  The screen door hadn’t latched.

  Feeling like an idiot, I stepped out into a night grown restless with wind. It was going to rain again. Hadn’t I seen that damned screen door heaving when I’d first entered? Even so, I had to test it, just to be sure, so I pulled it back and let it bang. It was almost the same sound. Maybe inside the house, it had an echo.

  So why were all of my neck hairs still crawling?

  Staring up and down the lane, I was struck again by the stifling quiet of Marjory’s street. Lights burned behind curtains in the house across the way, but otherwise, the whole neighborhood felt abandoned.

  Shaking off a deep unease, I holstered my gun and turned to go back inside. The house had yet to reveal all its secrets—I still hadn’t ferreted out any mention of the safe deposit box, or found a way to search for Tabitha.

  Something—not a sound this time—caught my attention. I halted with the screen door part way open. Poised between the rustling vines of dead wisteria, I wavered as an odd pulse twisted the air. Faint and distant, it thrummed like the subsonic kick of bass from a car, and it spread a rancid taste on the wind.

  If I hadn’t come outside, I might have missed it.

  The pulse faded, and I strained to catch a sense of it again. It returned a moment later, stronger this time. Gooseflesh prickled in a rush all down my neck and forearms. That pulse didn’t feel like anything that belonged in the mortal world. It was something deeper, stranger, and altogether sinister.

  Like a sleepwalker, I drifted away from the house and into the front yard, head cocked and psychic senses flung wide as I struggled to pinpoint the source. It wasn’t Marjory’s house or her immediate neighbors’, but the epicenter wasn’t far.

  As I reached the end of the driveway, the not-sound surged again and a reflex of power crackled from the tips of my fingers all the way to the ends of my wings. From the murky depths of memory, fragments of recognition welled into consciousness—no details I could name, but a feeling as certain as the heart that heaved against my ribs.

  Somewhere along this quiet suburban street, someone was working magic. And it tasted like sacrifice.

  30

  Guided by instinct, I turned to the left, half-jogging along the sidewalk. Porch lights glimmered up and down the lane, but all the houses were locked tight, their windows bulwarked by thick curtains drawn against the rest of the world. Throwing wide my psychic perceptions, I plucked at their brittle façades, seeking for the focal point of that awful magic. As I rushed toward the end of the street, the gut-twisting pulse grew more frequent, my boot heels thudding in counterpoint.

  At the first cross street, I could tell I was close. Two homes from the end there sat a little bungalow with a FOR SALE sign staked in the yard. Faded by weeks in the sun, the grinning face of a realtor peered hopefully across the lawn. Tufts of dandelions gone to seed attested to its neglect. There was a lull in the pulse, and I almost moved on, but something drew my eye to the garage at the back of the lot.

  Gotcha.

  Tucked to one side of the house, a Vulcan 900 was parked in the drive. No lights burned in the yard, so I couldn’t make out the license plate, but there was no mistaking it. That was my bike.

  Hugging the side of the house, I arrowed for the motorcycle. Definitely mine—right down to the decals for the Rebel Alliance over the gas tank. The engine ticked softly, still faintly warm. He must have parked it shortly after I’d started my search at Marjory’s. Trailing my fingers along the grips and the handlebars, I sought hopefully for some impression left behind by Zuriel. Nothing. The bike had been psychically sanitized, just like every inch of Marjory’s house.

  Still can’t hide whatever you’re doing in there, I thought, moving toward the empty home.

  The lock on the back door had been jimmied, and I took advantage of it. The door opened onto a kind of mud room, oppressively dark. Easing it shut, I waited for my eyes to adjust. No curtains covered the nearby windows, and while the dim gray filtering through them hardly qualified as light, it was better than nothing. Mindful of my heavy boots, I crept forward to the kitchen.

  When I was halfway to the dining room, a staggering wave of twisted power came crashing up from the floor. Dazzling whorls of arctic light burst against my vision and I wavered, blinking away searing after-images. The basement—that had to be where he was working. I needed to find the stairs.

  The house’s layout was nothing like Marjory’s. The stairs to the basement weren’t off the mudroom or the kitchen, but they had to be close—the place wasn’t that large. Every instinct clamored for me to rush, but I forced myself to move with exaggerated care, doubling down on the layers of my cowl to hide my presence for as long as possible—assuming Zuriel didn’t already know I was here.

  This whole thing stank of convenience, and the trap he’d tied to Marjory had me checking every corner and doorway as I delved deeper. The pulses of power rose to a cycling rhythm, surges of sound and magic that painted weird shapes against my retinas. Trailing my free hand lightly along the nearest wall, I guided my progress by touch as much as any other sense, striving to shield my thoughts against the flickering assault.

  Ahead, near a bend in the hallway, a reddish light guttered in a short line along the baseboards. At first, I mistook it for more visual bleed-over from the magic, but, when I scrubbed the back of my hand against my eyes, it stayed—candlelight spilling through a sliver of space beneath a door. The thin vein of light prickled my eyes after such oppressive darkness, and I groped blindly for the doorknob.

  Finally, I pulled one of my daggers, clamping down on the spirit-fire that eagerly rose to lick along its blade. Plastering myself to one side of the frame, I eased the door open and listened. The mounting energy of the spell made my ears ring, but I thought I heard a hitch of breath and a sob—muffled, as if through a gag.

  Sidling onto the first step, I peered down the steep flight of wooden stairs. They hugged a cinderblock wall to my left, blank and unadorned. Orange and gold flickers danced across its pitted surface, the candles themselves still out of sight. A plywood half-wall on the other side blocked my view of all but the bottom landing, and it had scraps of paper tacked all over it. Photos, I thought. A dark smear of crimson led from that landing deeper into the basement.

  Blood. The air was thick with it—raw and dank and briny.

  Blade in hand, I eased onto the first step. It creaked the instant I put any kind of weight on it. In the wake of the sound, the cycling of power abruptly ceased.

  So much for trying to be stealthy. Tightening my grip on the dagger, I rushed down the steps, angling so my back was to the cinder block. I tried to sense what lay beyond that plywood wall, but the whole room was drowned in a haze of power. Here was the exact opposite of Marjory’s home—a space so flooded with impressions that I couldn’t separate one from the next. As I reached the bottom, the molten wax of scented candles vied with the briny tang of carnage. My stomach flipped, then clenched into a tiny, miserable knot when I saw the source of the stink.

  Blood flooded the center of the concrete floor, stubs of candles puddling around it in a broad and flickering ring. In the spaces between the candles, sigils flared, so obscured by the jellied gore they were impossible to read. The grinning realtor from the sign outside sprawled in a messy heap just outside of the circle. His throat had been slit, dead eyes fixed on the ceiling in a startled accusation.

  It was his blood filling the circle—it had to be, because the woman dangling at its center was still moving. Pale, limp, and silenced with a gag, she hung by her wrists from a sturdy metal pipe that ran through the exposed rafters. Loops of rope swallowed her hands in their coils, so thick the metal glint of handcuffs beneath seemed like overkill. Her shoulders strained to the point of dislocation, toes barely touching the floor. Tauntingly, a little stool tilted on its side just beyond where her feet could reach it.

  “Tab
itha!” I cried.

  At the sound of the name, her head snapped up. Eyes racooned with a broken nose, she squinted blearily through a clotted veil of hair. Purpling bruises marred her cheeks, her jaw—she’d been severely beaten. When she finally got her eyes to focus on my black-clad form, she recoiled as if mistaking me for her attacker. Then she stilled with apparent recognition. Wild-eyed and urgent, she shook her head.

  “I get it,” I said. “He’s close—but I’ve got to get you out of here.”

  31

  Eyes peeled for any sign of Zuriel, I moved swiftly to the edge of the circle, but couldn’t cross beyond the sigiled ring. The harsh prickle of magic halted me, thrumming in a palpable wall from ceiling to floor. Pressing my hand to the stinging mesh of energy, I tested the strength of the barrier. At my touch, the power leapt angrily, sending jolts of pain all the way up to my shoulder. Answering energy swept defiantly along my wings.

  The circle was potent, but I’d made stronger wards. Zuriel would have to do better if he wanted to keep me out.

  Hissing the syllables of my Name, I slashed my dagger across the wall of the circle. Sparks flew, a vein-like pattern flashed on the air, and a tear opened up. Tabitha yelped, eyes bulging as she stared at the lightshow. She shouldn’t have seen it—not if she were an ordinary mortal. There wasn’t the sort of pull I’d have felt if she was an anchor, but there was so much psychic interference, I couldn’t be sure.

  “Just close your eyes,” I said. “I’ll get through.”

  Aiming for the same spot I’d already weakened, I hammered the blade into the magic, my power and Zuriel’s clashing in a burst of brilliance. The stench of singed blood wafted up as one of the sigils on the floor ignited, pale flames sizzling through the gore. I drove the blade forward and the sigil sputtered, burning out completely.

  The runes to either side began to smoke. A third strike, and the mesh of woven will and magic shredded with an audible crackle. Ozone and scorched blood stung the back of my throat as I shouldered my way through the breach.