Neither of us answered. The insect buzz of phone broke the thick silence. At the sound, Tanisha’s mouth pressed flat with disapproval—despite her request, I’d never bothered to make it completely silent. I’d expected Zuriel to reach out again, had expected some text or blood-drenched photo the instant those alarm sigils had been tripped.
With brittle calm, I reached into my back pocket and plucked out the phone. On the locked screen, the message lingered like a thought-bubble, short and predictably awful.
Wut piece u want next?
Over and over I read those mangled words, my grip tightening until I was in danger of shattering the screen. Sal stood silent behind me, too furious to utter a single sound. As I trembled with impotent rage, I couldn’t shake the sense that Zuriel was right there, watching and laughing at us—at me. Some deep, unspoken gnosis clamored that he couldn’t resist a spectacle, especially not one of his own design.
I yanked my vision so hard to the other half of reality that black starbursts exploded against my retinas and, for a span of dead seconds, I was completely blind. Blinking until I could see, albeit blearily, I sought any sign of the asshole Anakim—a deepening of shadows in the corner, a blur of pallid wings—but there was nothing. If he was here, he had to have come through the Shadowside, had to still be hovering to watch us from that twilit realm. As part of the same tribe, I was connected to that place as much as he was, and still, I could not see him.
“Damn that motherfucker!” I snarled.
As soon as I yelled it, the phone trembled with the palsy of another incoming message.
30 min
I didn’t have to ask thirty minutes to what.
42
“We’re on a timer now,” I yelled, pitching my voice to carry out to Ava and Javier. Tanisha winced at the sudden volume.
“Paint a target on our backs, why don’t you?” she snapped. Tension tightened all the planes of her face, broad cheekbones shiny in the living room’s brassy light. Behind me, Saliriel said nothing, simply stepping forward to bend toward the desolate coil of shorn hair. The metal of her heels glinted like twin daggers. Her expression was too alien to read.
“He’s already seen us,” I spat with a vague gesture toward the proof lying right in front of us. While I tapped the timer on my phone to track the deadline, my sister plucked the hair from the floor, twining the black plaits loosely in her long fingers.
The motion was akin to reverence, but my skin crawled weirdly. I knew what it was, knew it had come from Remy, but I had zero desire to touch it. I couldn’t explain the feeling. While Sal twisted the hair into a tight, portable knot, I continued peering across to the Shadowside, uselessly seeking signs of Zuriel. Still nothing. I hissed a quiet string of obscenities. “I’m pretty sure he’s here right now. I just can’t see him.”
Sal straightened. One step took her an inch from my chest, towering like the statue of an ancient and very wrathful goddess.
“Seeing such things is your job, Anakim,” she snarled. She clenched the knot of hair in one bony hand, and I shied from it for reasons known only to my gag reflex.
“You know how much I’ve lost,” I reminded with quiet heat. “It was one of your tribe that took it from me. I know what’s at stake here, and I’m doing the best I can.”
Sal drew herself up to her most imposing height—six feet and six inches of pale, leggy vampire, plus lethal heels. She lorded it furiously over me.
“Do better.”
I refused to flinch. Words like lava ignited in my throat, the whole, bitter torrent rising to be spat in Saliriel’s face. Yet I snapped my jaws shut like a bear trap. Robbed of easy escape, the heat swept down both arms to gather in my fists, where it erupted in a nimbus of crackling energy. I held it there, my potential for violence cupped and ready, telling myself all that anger would soon have focus—but not my sister. No matter how much she baited me, no matter how hard she pushed.
Without a word, I turned my back and started marching for the side door, leaving Sal and all her towering rage for Tanisha to handle. If they followed, that was their choice. I knew where I had to go next. Javier stood with his back to the door like a one-man blockade, and I crushed the screen door against his shoulders because he wouldn’t get out of the way. The man—who hadn’t spoken a single word since our departure from Club Heaven—simply looked at me mutely, the obsidian flecks of his eyes tiny in such a great slab of a face.
“Move,” I snarled, pushing hard enough to rock him. My voice wasn’t human, and I no longer gave a shit.
Javier looked to Ava. The driver nodded very slightly. Her eyes went hooded and a little glassy as she watched me shoulder past, all my power singing around me. A flush crept from the tight collar of her driver’s uniform to kiss her cheeks to pink. With all my senses sharp as razors, I couldn’t help but taste her arousal. As I swept past her position beside the Denali, it clawed at me, sharp and hungry.
Ava got off on monsters. No wonder she stuck to Sal like glue.
Too angry to feel disturbed or even disgusted, I marched down the darkened street, boots crunching on the husks of dead leaves.
“You coming?” I called over my shoulder.
Ava followed like I’d tugged a leash.
As exposed as we were, nothing jumped us as we made our way. Ava followed a few short steps behind, covering me with her Beretta. The gun sketched a blocky silhouette in her small hands, but she handled it with confident ease. When I glanced back, only her eyes looked a little shocky, darting from house to house and showing too much white. The cloying taste of arousal was still there, and, if anything, it seemed heightened by her fear. I shoved that unwanted awareness from my mind, striding purposefully toward the house where Tabitha—and probably Marjory—had died.
There was no attempt whatsoever at stealth—I just wanted Remy back, and at this point, I was prepared to find a Crossing and fly back and forth across the entire neighborhood until I spotted some sign of the kidnapped Nephilim. Slow and steady was definitely safer, but searching houses top to bottom burned a lot of time.
Anxious, I slipped out my phone to glance at the running countdown.
Twenty-two minutes.
I grimaced, stuffing the phone back into its pocket. No way I should have stood there arguing with Tanisha and Sal. Huge waste of time. Arguing always was.
“Where are we going?” Ava asked breathlessly.
Wordlessly, I pointed to the FOR SALE sign sagging in the unmowed lawn three houses ahead of us. Everything was exactly as I’d left it. Squinting in the crappy lighting that streamed from a distant neighbor’s porch, I reassessed that initial impression.
Not quite as I’d left it.
My Vulcan lay in a heap across the drive, a few feet from where I’d abandoned it. In a burst, I jogged the short distance to the bike. Ava’s footfalls slapped the sidewalk behind me.
A huge scrape cut through the paint on one fender of the Kawasaki, revealing dullness beneath. Another ended in a dent on the gas tank. Trembling around it in the air, I could feel a whisper of violence—not just the obvious evidence scratched into the paint job, but an echo of conflict stamped across the Shadowside.
Steeling myself for a brutal rush of images, I laid all my senses bare and seized the handlebars—
* * *
—and my hand was Remy’s hand, resting on the grip while the other fluttered near the engine, testing for its heat.
“Too late. I’ve gotten here too late.” Worry verged into fear. Remy had checked Marjory’s house because it was the only place he could think of. Tried calling. Tried texts. No answer, again and again. The crash had sounded bad. The silence, worse.
“And now this. A well-laid trap? But where would Zuriel take him?”
Remy wished—not for the first time—for skills akin to his brother’s. He could sense a few things, but so often felt blind by comparison. How great a gift, to be able to touch a thing and understand what had once transpired. His paltry knack was more a taunt
—it showed him just enough to know the world held more. And such a costly effort, but he had to try, needed to see which of his brothers had touched this last, and whether one of them was hurt.
It was like straining to open stitched eyes. But there was something. A lingering spark…
* * *
Diving deeper into the vision, I surrendered to Remy’s perceptions. My essence on the grips of the motorcycle—Remiel’s version of Anakim sight, translated through Nephilim eyes. Pallid threads of fleeting blue like moonlight on a lake. Gray. Silver. White. A hazy film of aura that shimmered like summer heat. Under all of that, an ancient backbone. Sharp as metal. Clean, with the same glinting bite.
Then something pulled me under, sensation so intense, immediate, I lost myself entirely. No Zack standing beside the scratched-up Kawasaki. Just wave after wave of perception, choking, bitter—
* * *
—stabbing, deep into the meat of both shoulders. Swift, so swift, he couldn’t react. Daggers—the blades of daggers buried in his flesh. He’s driven forward. He faceplants on the bike. The Vulcan topples and he can’t get any leverage. His arms refuse to work. There’s magic in the weapons—cold and burning all at once. Anakim steel. He knows the taste.
His body strives to fix the damage, but the weapons cauterize even as they cut. Tendons, nerves, and muscles. Down to bitter bone. The agony’s enormous and he—
* * *
—has the bastard on the ground, but he’s got to get the cuffs on quick. They heal fast, the Nephilim, so he’ll only get this chance. He got the drop on the bloodsucker, and that’s the edge. Stalked him from the house—stroke of luck the fucker tripped the wards. Ruined an hour of work, but what the hell? It’s not like they’re hard, and look at this.
It’s the face, the face in the photo, the one who raised their brother with that dried-up Polish bitch. Just got to get the metal to click—
* * *
—shut on his wrists and he screams, not with pain, but with terror. He can’t stop it. Can’t think past it. Too well, he knows the bite of that magic, had it chew him to pieces as he hung, starving, in chains. And it’s happening again, all happening again, no matter that he’s better. That, unlike others, he has changed. The effort should count for something. He’s loyal. Unfailing. All his debts are—
* * *
—payback’s a bitch, and this debt’s thick as Bibles. It’s an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and this guy’s going to suffer because he still can’t find Tashiel. And he has to. He has to. Maybe when Zaquiel’s mentor’s hanging in pieces, he’ll spill.
Got to know the rules, though. Catch them fast and cut them slow. And he’s going to make every slice count for something, just like Tashiel showed him how—
* * *
Gasping, I shoved back from the bike, my head spinning with a chaos of conflicting perspectives.
My thoughts.
Remy’s.
Zuriel’s.
They whirled in a dizzying maelstrom, shifting and so entangled, I could barely separate one from the next.
“Are you all right?”
Ava’s question echoed through crashing waves. I concentrated on my breathing. The feel of the concrete driveway under my feet. The sharp half-moons of pain as I drove my nails into my palms. My splintered vision began returning to something like a normal focus—just my thoughts, just my eyes.
“Yeah,” I answered. “I’m good.”
The breathless rasp sounded anything but. A skeptical Ava hovered near my elbow, caught between grabbing my shoulder to hold me up and stepping back to give me some space. She held the Beretta pointed skyward while she wavered with her empty hand. I didn’t like the idea of Sal’s pet stunt driver touching me, not even through the jacket, not when I felt like this. Weakly, I waved her away, leaning forward to catch my breath.
“That was weird,” I muttered, struggling to unpack the densely layered impressions. Warring snippets of Zuriel and Remy still spun in a confusing miasma around the bike.
Ava watched with wary eyes, lips pursed around a comment. Whatever it was, she never voiced it. A rush of wind stirred the bushes at the nearest corner of the empty house. Incredibly focused, the burst of breeze rattled only the barren branches of what might have been an aging lilac. A tall and sooty shadow appeared, revealing the source of the uncanny wind. The Nephilim could move fast when they wanted. But Sal’s fleet passage defied any possibility to track her.
One moment, nothing—and then she was there.
“What have you found, Anakim?” Casting a glance up and down the street to assure herself of safety, she strolled from her cover with easy grace. Ava stepped back immediately, bowing her head as her mistress approached. She could have said something about what she’d witnessed, but instead she waited for me to speak.
“I have a lead,” I answered, “but it’s a little confusing.”
“Your motorcycle?” Sal sniffed.
“Remy was here,” I explained. “He touched it. So did Zuriel. Their impressions are… intertwined. Caught in a moment of struggle. It’s hard to get a clear reading.”
“More excuses.” My sister’s eyes caught the faint light of a distant porch lamp, reflecting it back as yellow fire.
“Ma’am?” Tanisha said as she caught up. Her volume strained, she still hadn’t quite abandoned a token stealth. She spotted Ava lingering nearby with her Beretta still out and relaxed—but only a touch. “You really shouldn’t cluster in the open,” she offered.
“Thank you for the suggestion,” Sal responded stiffly. She leaned into me. “Dive back into it, Zaquiel. We have no time for squeamish hesitation.”
I wanted to punch her—except that she was right. So far this was the biggest breadcrumb the oppressively quiet neighborhood had to offer. If I could manage to navigate the burst of impressions, I could probably get some sense of where Remy had been taken.
“If I pass out, I hope somebody thinks to catch me,” I muttered. “Not a big fan of head trauma.”
I stretched my fingers to clasp the Vulcan’s handlebars.
Immediately, the echoes sucked me back in.
43
I drowned in images—a prison. No, two prisons, one ancient, one modern, both stinking pits of bleakest desolation. Slouching boys with angry voices. A gleaming dagger. Rusted chains—
* * *
—Again. Bound again. He couldn’t do it. Too many years spent in that Anakim dungeon, the maddening whispers of promised power clawing in his brain.
* * *
An image of the Eye, clear and startling. Not in my palm, but in Remy’s. Pale, ferocious, blood dripping from his hands. Clothed in robes, a diadem glinting from his brow. He seemed a different person. I knew him only by the brilliant azure of his gaze.
* * *
I shoved impatiently at the fractured memories, striving to steer the vision toward the events of the last few hours. That was where I’d find my answers. I needed to know where Remy had been taken, not where my brother had been in our long-dead past.
There—a flicker of startled pain and gleeful sadism. In the tangled psychic residue, I caught a replay of the attack on Remy, this time from Zuriel’s perspective. So much anger. Jealousy. Betrayal?
And then I lost them. Compressed strata of emotion whirled in an ever-widening gyre. Guilt and trauma bound hunter to victim, both hopelessly entwined around a pivot-point of fear. Remy’s fear of imprisonment.
Zuriel’s fear of—
* * *
—abandoned. He’d been abandoned. It wasn’t fair. All the other times, he called and his dad came running. He’d get a lecture, but the charges disappeared. This time, he got told to learn his lesson. So they booked him. Fucking pigs. Stuck him in with twitching junkies and puffed-up hoodrats—all of them his age, but hard. Nasty.
The smell, the feel of people crammed in so tight a space—it made him kind of crazy. Too many voices in his head. That no-lip fuck who just kept staring… He snapped. He smash
ed that kid to pieces. Made his face a part of the wall. And something happened—a way opened up, just as the guards came to beat him.
He learned a lesson, all right. He learned to walk through walls.
* * *
The chaos of densely packed impressions dragged at my own awareness, making it hard to think. I struggled to direct the flow of information, but Zuriel was loud—so loud. The kid had a ton of baggage, and it spilled through everything he’d touched.
More images, punishingly stark. Zuriel murdering his father. He did it as soon as he got out, blind with rage at being left with human trash. He was better than that. Special.
He’d used a knife from the kitchen, astounded at how the metal glowed when he gripped it in his hand. Jumped dad in his office. Painted blood across his books. Then the anger left, like turning off a switch. Dizzy and hollow, he ran—left his mother, little brothers, upstairs, all asleep. His head rang with voices, none of them his own. He couldn’t touch things. If he did, the world skewed and turned strange. And the gray place—he stayed away from that. It choked him, almost to death.
Tashiel found him, filthy, starving, sleeping in a crumbling mill. The boy believed himself crazy, but Tashiel understood. He handed the boy a better pair of daggers, a set his hands remembered, even if the memories hadn’t fully blossomed in his child-brain. Together, they went back and killed the ones he’d left. An old-style baptism, red with his false-family’s blood.
Free from mortal obligations, they could be soldiers together once again.
* * *
“That fucking bastard!” I snarled. The venom tugged me from the depths. If I’d done something to Tashiel— killed him or somehow made him disappear, I felt justified in that moment. Tash’s idea of mentorship—no wonder Zuriel was a mess. I almost felt sorry for the kid, but he was as much immortal as he was a moody teen. Sympathy couldn’t excuse the things he’d done—was still doing. A part of him should have known better. A part of him should have known enough to stop.
The Resurrection Game Page 26