The Resurrection Game

by Michelle Belanger

  “This her current address?” I asked.

  “That’s where they found her,” he responded tightly.

  I memorized it and shoved it into my jacket. The license was useful, but it still wasn’t what I wanted. There was a fan of clear vinyl sleeves tacked in place with a little closure. It was fat with credit cards and—I hoped—something that would prove or disprove all my awful suspicions about why she’d marked me as next of kin. Wedging my nail under the snap, I popped it open. Insurance cards, emergency contacts—including my name and the mysterious Tremont address—an old-school card for the Clevenet Public Library system.

  Not a single photo.

  “Fucking hell!” I shouted. Her two rings jumped as I slammed my fist onto the desk’s metal surface.

  “Could you at least tell me what you’re looking for?” Bobby demanded.

  “I’ll have to find it in her house,” I snarled. Grabbing Marjory’s keys, I stuffed them in my pocket. Everything else, I left in a heap on the desk. I shoved at Bobby. “Out of my way.”

  Mutely, he complied.

  17

  Imagining all the creative ways I wanted to torture Zuriel for what he’d done to Marjory, I stalked past the properties clerk and toward the nearest exit. The halls were thick with people now. Most took one look at my expression and got the fuck out of my way. Bobby trailed for a few steps behind me, asking useless questions. He had the box with the rest of Marjory’s possessions tucked under one arm. He kept trying to give them to me, but I had what I wanted—her address and her keys. Eventually, he gave up and retreated.

  No one tried to stop me, which was good for them.

  Outside, I dug for my own keys as I neared the Hellcat, clicking the fob to disarm the security system. At its chirp, Lil popped her head up from the other side of the roof. I’d forgotten all about my wild-eyed escort.

  “What took you so long?” she called.

  Fists clenched, I wavered on the curb. “Go away,” I snapped.

  “Fat chance,” she scoffed. “Someone has to play babysitter.” She held out one hand, the little gems set in her manicure catching the light as she beckoned. “Give me the keys.”

  “Like hell,” I snapped. Blinking against the grit of sleep in my eyes, I debated the wisdom of walking the mile and a half back to my apartment. On any other day, it would have been easy, but I felt like hammered horse shit. Lil marched past the Hellcat to where I lingered on the curb, hands on her hips as she glared up at me. Quick as a snake, she made a move to snatch my keys, and I fended her off—barely. Sealing my fist around the bristling metal, I decided to take my chances and turned toward Cedar Glen.

  Lil darted quickly after.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she demanded.

  “Walking home.”

  She tugged at the arm attached to my keys, trying to drag my hand out from where I’d stuffed it in my pocket. “Stop being such a stubborn ass and hand them over,” she said. “The way you look, you’re not making it to the end of the block, let alone your apartment.”

  “Let. Go.” I yanked my arm from her grip, bringing my elbow up and angling for a strike. I almost went through with it, too, aiming for the vulnerable spot at her temple. Immortal badass or not, that would ring her bell. “I’m not fucking around,” I warned, arm still lofted.

  For once, she backed off. “No, you’re not,” she said, hovering an arm’s length away, and I started off again. She easily matched my stumping pace. The light went red at the crosswalk and I charged forward anyway, walking right up to the edge of an old Buick Regal as it flew through the intersection. It missed me by inches, the driver honking wildly. I graced him with a single finger salute. On the opposite corner, an old man dragging a wheeled suitcase gave me a wide berth. Lil jogged after me, cursing.

  “You’re not going to make it, you know,” she observed. “If you could see yourself, you’d know that I’m right.” I kept walking. “You look worse now than when you went into that place, and you didn’t look so good to start out with.”

  “Like you fucking care,” I snarled.

  “Who pulled your ass out of the fire the last three times you had your back against the wall?” she demanded. Not even pausing for my response, she answered her own question, legs pumping. “Oh, that’d be me.”

  “I don’t need your help, Lil,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “Of course not,” she chirped. “You’ll just stomp up the hill to Coventry, maybe stop and eat someone along the way.”

  A hot wash of guilt swept over me, followed swiftly by waves of seething fury. I rounded on her, fire kindling in my eyes. She met my inhuman gaze without blinking.

  “Why do you think I came along, flyboy?” she prodded. “The last time you looked this rough, you killed a woman with your bare hands just to get the power you needed to heal yourself. Or did you conveniently forget that ugly little incident?”

  I clenched my fists so hard, the knuckles ground with an ugly crackle, blue-white fire licking from between my fingers. “Do you think I enjoyed that?” I snarled. “I’m not some kind of monster. I know better than anyone exactly how awful it is to have someone reach in and tear your fucking soul apart just to get what they want!”

  The draft of mounting power stirred the hair at my brow, and I was about to launch a fistful at her face—but when I drew back my hand, the flames sputtered. Irritably, I shook off the clinging remnants. My pulse thundered from the effort, and an echo of its rhythm ticked with urgent heat through the scar in my palm.

  “I will never forget,” I growled.

  “Well, that’s good,” she said. “Because you’ve tied yourself to a corrupting artifact of tremendous power, and I don’t think you fully appreciate what that thing is doing to you.”

  “Shut up about this, Lil,” I warned and started walking again. “I’ve got it under control.”

  “Yeah?” she demanded. “How would anyone around you know? You can’t even talk about the thing because Sal oathed you into silence.” Working herself into a real lather, she matched me step for step, stabbing a finger accusingly into my side. With unnerving accuracy, she found the box with the Stylus. It banged against my ribs. “So tell me again how you’re just going home to sleep it off. I’m sure to believe you.”

  I seized her wrist before she could poke me again. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” I twisted angrily until I could feel the grind of bone against bone. With a wracking, full-body memory, I flashed back to Zuriel’s psychic dreamspace of mirrors and illusions.

  You mad, bro?

  Mad didn’t begin to cover it.

  Lil went motionless in my grip. With a calm more threatening than any show of fury, she tilted her head to meet my seething gaze. Her lips were inches from my own.

  “Find someone to bang.” She nipped the ends of her words. “Sex generates a hell of a lot of energy, and you need it right now.”

  Disgusted, I shoved her away. “You’ve got to be kidding,” I snarled. “I’m not having this conversation.” Muttering a blistering string of curses, I stomped down the sidewalk, making it as far as the loop of Cedar, Carnegie, and MLK. The five-way intersection was a tangle of cars and pedestrians and I had no choice but to stand at the corner waiting for the light to change. Lil took full advantage of the situation, smacking my shoulder to make sure she had my attention.

  There wasn’t even a handprint on her wrist.

  “I’m dead serious, Zack,” she said. “You’re squeamish about taking what you need from crowds or strangers, but if you keep depriving yourself like this, the Eye is going to take over.” A woman heading to the crosswalk caught the barest snippet of our argument and abruptly turned in the opposite direction. The rapid retreat of her heels beat a stark counterpoint to the thud of blood in my ears. Lil stepped in front of me, bodily blocking my access to the street. “You’re being such an ass about this because you know I’m right. You’re just too scared to admit it.”

  The WALK si
gn switched on. I shoved past her.

  “If you won’t take my advice, I’m going to keep following you so I can stop you before the inevitable happens and you hate yourself even more than you do now,” she promised, sticking close to my heels. “You don’t remember what those Icons can do. I’ve witnessed the things at the height of their power.”

  “Glad to know you’ll be here to kill me the instant I’m no longer convenient to you,” I grumbled. Head down, I lengthened my stride, forcing her to trot to keep up.

  “That’s not what I said, you idiot,” she snapped. “Look at yourself. Look at how you’re acting. This is crazy even for you. Take a fucking breath and assess for a minute.”

  We reached the crumbling overpass of train tracks on Cedar Glen Parkway. Pitted concrete stanchions divided the lanes of the causeway, one of them so weathered the lattice-work of rebar showed through. Graffitied walls rose to either side of us, trapping sound and shadow in the hollow space between. It was the perfect place to kill someone.

  “You should stop following me now,” I said. My hands rested on the pommels of my daggers. Angling my back toward the nearest wall, I found the surest bit of footing on the neglected sidewalk and dropped into a fighting stance. We were well away from prying eyes. “I’ve got my blades, and I’m pretty sure I can murder you, if I really put my mind to it.”

  “Bleeding Mother, you’re really going to do this?”

  “You’re the one threatening me,” I barked. “If you don’t want to do this, back the fuck away.”

  Rolling her eyes, she took a step sideways, going for something in her little white clutch purse. I had the daggers out in the next instant, their flame-kissed metal alive with the thready dregs of my strength. To my utter bewilderment, Lil produced nothing more deadly than a tube of lipstick, twisting it to freshen her smile. Mutely, I stared, the guttering spirit-fire casting weird shadows around us. Lil shot me the reddest of grins.

  “Poor Zack,” she said. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  With a coughing roar, a huge and tawny specter erupted in my peripheral vision. Before I could process what I was seeing, Lil’s ferocious lioness descended. Conjured purely in spirit, the animal’s massive paw nevertheless struck with stunning velocity. The ringing blow spun me, and I retained just enough clarity to realize that Lulu kept her claws carefully retracted even as she forced me to the pavement.

  Then Lil hit me with a neat little sap, and stars chased me down to darkness.

  18

  Stiff and aching, I woke in the trunk of my car. My jacket was gone, as were the blades and wrist-sheaths. My face was shoved against the canvas of a duffle bag of gym clothes I kept in the Hellcat but never managed to use anymore, and I was drooling on myself. With a click, the lid popped open, needling my eyes with a flood of light. Against the brilliance, Lil stood over me, smiling cheerfully.

  The expression was utterly unnerving.

  “Have a nice nap, Anakim?” she purred.

  I answered her with a swift right hook—or, at least, I tried. My hands were so numb I’d completely missed the zip ties. Lil snorted amused annoyance, shoving me back with next to no effort, and slammed the trunk shut again.

  “We can do this hard or easy, Anakim,” she said from the street outside. “We both know you don’t have the strength to fight me—and whose fault is that, anyway?”

  “What the fuck did you do with my things?” I demanded. “I want my blades back, and my jacket!” Furiously, I kicked at the trunk around me. The space was too cramped to get any kind of leverage and, humiliatingly, Lil was right. There was no strength left in any of my blows. I’d spent the last of my dwindling power posturing under the Cedar Glen overpass.

  “I know what you really want, Anarch,” she said. “I’ve had the Stylus once before, and, if you remember, I gave it back nicely.” In punctuation, she thumped the top of the trunk soundly from outside. The thunder of it made my ears ring. “I told you then—I don’t want the damned thing, but I wasn’t going to let you anywhere near it, not with the crap you had lodged in your chest.”

  “What?” My voice cracked.

  “I cleared it for you,” she responded. “You can thank me any time.”

  Stilling in the dark enclosure, I gave my body a chance to check in. My head still throbbed where both Lil and the lioness had clobbered me, and the circulation was shit in my hands. But that tugging fishhook beneath my ribs was gone, along with the blinding haze of fury that had clamored in my mind.

  Rage.

  The only word I’d deciphered from the middle ring of Zuriel’s sigil. Combined with my brother’s repeated taunt, it started to make sense. He’d bound Marjory and used her as a conduit, not merely to get into my head, but to leave behind a present. Something that festered. Anger in excess of any reason.

  “You mad, bro?”

  He knew I was, and he’d used his ridiculous refrain as a trigger. Over and over again, he’d primed me to respond with the fury always simmering in the dark spaces of my psyche. And it had worked like gangbusters.

  I’d been such an ass to Bobby. Lil, too.

  “What’d you find exactly?” I asked.

  “Are you ready to cooperate?” she replied.

  Impatient, I banged on the carpeted roof of my prison. “Just let me out, and stop fucking around, Lil.”

  “Before I let you out, I need you to promise not to fight me or try to run away unless I’m actively harming you,” she said. “Swear it for the space of one hour, starting once I cut the zip ties.”

  “An oath?” I barked, kicking uselessly again. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “Take it or leave it, flyboy,” she answered. I twisted against the plastic bonds. They bit tight into my skin. Her heels clicked on pavement—she was walking away. “You’ve got enough air in there for a little while, yet,” she called from a growing distance.

  “Wait,” I cried. The retreating footsteps halted. “One hour?”

  “One hour,” she confirmed, her voice somewhat less muffled as she took a step nearer. “And I promise—I’m not trying to hurt you, Zaquiel. This is for your own good.”

  I tested the restraints again. They showed no sign of breaking.

  “Fuck me running,” I sighed. “Fine. I swear it.”

  As the binding power of the oath shivered through me, the lid opened to reveal a cloudless stretch of autumn sky.

  19

  The Hellcat was parked in front of a three-story white farmhouse complete with slate gray shutters, old-school lightning rods, and a weather vane in the shape of a tin rooster. Set near the back of a rolling green lot slightly larger than all those around it, the house looked like a relic from the forties that had probably once commanded acres of land, but had gotten parceled out as times grew lean.

  In the intervening years, suburbia had crept around it like a pastel contagion. Neatly trimmed lawns and perfectly spaced houses—each a variation on one of three styles—spread as far as the eye could see. It was picture-perfect, and a little stifling.

  From the sun’s position, at least an hour had passed since I’d parted ways with Bobby at the Medical Examiner’s complex.

  “Where the fuck are we?” I asked. Circulation returned reluctantly to my legs as I stumbled against the back of the car. Lil steadied me, cutting through the zip ties with a wickedly sharp switchblade she then returned to her bottomless purse.

  “A charming little neighborhood in Mentor,” she replied crisply.

  Turning around so I could face my redheaded abductor, I tried to massage feeling back into my hands. Blood surged to the tips of my fingers in a rush of pins and needles, and I muttered some choice words in conjecture of Lil’s parentage. Unruffled by my insults, she smiled primly a few feet away near the curb, tucking the severed zip ties after the switchblade. The little purse wasn’t particularly deep or even wide, but the items went in as if she’d dropped them down a well. I wondered if that was where my jacket and other things had gone. They we
ren’t visible anywhere inside the car.

  “One of these days, you’re going to tell me how that thing works,” I said.

  “Dream on, Anakim,” she laughed. She pointed a bedazzled nail in the direction of the farmhouse. “Now march.”

  I balked. “Not until you tell me why we’re here.”

  “Mother’s Tears,” she sighed. “You’re still going to argue?”

  “Look who’s talking,” I snapped.

  Feeling a little naked without my jacket or the blades, I dug in, daring her to try to move me by force. We faced off in stiff silence. From its perch on the nearby power lines, a mourning dove took up its plaintive call. A dog yipped a few yards away. The only thing lacking was the whirr of a lawnmower.

  Neither Lil nor I blinked. I was fully prepared to park my ass on the back bumper of the car and just wait until the hour had passed. That would satisfy the barest requirements of the oath and frustrate whatever Lil had cooked up with this latest stunt of hers. She might have saved me from Zuriel’s spell, but I still didn’t entirely trust her.

  The Lady of Beasts huffed her displeasure. “It’s not a trap, Zack,” she said. “I’ve got some friends inside who can help you.” The wind whipped long curls of red hair across her face and, impatiently, she shoved them behind one ear. The bright morning light caught the fire from a diamond stud in that lobe. I didn’t remember seeing the piercing before. “If you keep running around in crisis mode without taking a breath, you’re going to fall flat on your face. Look me in the eye and tell me you don’t need to rest and feed, at least a little.”

  The breathless fishhook under my ribs was gone, but in its absence, the hollow burn of hunger was unmistakable. I’d been running on fumes since before the fight with the cacodaimons, and she knew it. Squirming, I looked away.

  “Thought so,” she responded. “I’m really doing you a favor, Zack. A big one.”