Resurrection Read online

  Chapter 3

  “Mmhff!”

  My voice was muffled within the woman’s chest and clothes. I tried struggling but my body was stiff and foreign and did not respond to any of my commands.

  The hands holding me pushed me back, and I stared at my sister’s large green eyes—her huge eyes.

  “Erik?” she asked.

  “Gil?”

  “Erik!” She hugged me again, pressing me to her giant body, and once again, I could not breathe or move.

  “Gil!” I said as loud as I could.

  She released me and set me down. “Oh my god, Erik. It’s really you?”

  She reached out and I realized she was grabbing my arm.

  My tiny, doll-like, arm.

  “Gil,” I began. “Where am I? What am I? I can’t move. And why are you so damn big?”

  She reared back, white hair swaying, and laughed. “I did it. I did what that old bastard never could. I did it!”

  My sister whooped, which was disturbing in and of itself. My sister never whooped. She never laughed or showed any emotion really.

  She looked at me, wide-eyed and ecstatic. “I did it!”

  “Gil!” I roared. “Calm your shit for two seconds and catch me up.”

  She nodded.

  “Of course, of course.” She took a deep breath. “It’s so good to have you back, Erik. What’s the last thing you remember?”

  “Um, I was dead,” I said. “Then I went to… somewhere, I guess. Samael was there, chasing me and a few other ghosts. Then everything went to shit and these weird tendrils of magic started coming at me…”

  “Soul Snares,” Gil supplied. She could barely contain her glee.

  And with good reason.

  “You’re shitting me,” I said. “That’s what that was?”

  Allow me to provide some context. While I identify as a wizard, plain and simple, I was raised as a Warlock, a kind of Specialist that mixes science and magic to do some really out-there shit. My father was one, and now my sister had followed in dear daddy’s footsteps.

  Soul Snares were about as nasty a spell as you can imagine. They served one purpose: to snatch a soul from the afterlife and bring it back to the land of living. No rituals, no human sacrifice—just the magical equivalent of a kidnapping.

  This was how they trapped spirits and ghostly creatures in objects back in the old days. Ever heard the one about the genie in a bottle? Soul Snares, baby.

  The spell was banned for multiple reasons—namely that it required so much magic it usually left the casters dead, or in a coma—but the main two were the need for an appropriate vessel to contain the spirit (this part did generally require human sacrifice) and the… how shall I put this… ‘enslavement clause’.

  “Erik?” My sister’s voice was now cautious. “How are you feeling?”

  “Gil,” I said. “I feel like I died and then came back. Why can’t I move?”

  “Because you’re in a doll.”

  “I’m sorry, my hearing must still be a little off because I thought I just heard you say I'm in a doll.”

  Gil produced a mirror and stuck it before me. My eyes worked fine, even though I wished they didn’t.

  Looking back at me was a plushie doll. Upon closer inspection I saw that my new body was made out of straw with big black buttons for eyes and a sewn red line for a smile.

  And the worst part: I saw a tag that said Made in China sticking out of my ass.

  “What the actual fuck?” You know when you have so many questions you just can’t pick which one to choose, so you fixate on the dumbest shit? “You bought this?”

  My sister removed the mirror and shook her head.

  “There was no time,” she said. “And using your body would have required far more Necromancy than I was willing to delve into. But this is good news. Now that your spirit is here, we can take our time to bring you back properly.”

  “You resurrected me back into a fucking plushie!”

  “Technically, it’s a simulacrum,” she said. I saw her eyes lowering. “It was one of Akasha’s.”

  Yeah, that sobered me up.

  Akasha, formerly the second most powerful magic-user on Earth, second-in-command of the Grigori. And until her untimely murder, my girlfriend.

  “Erik. Are you okay?”

  I nodded, or tried to. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I’m fine. But, Gil, you shouldn’t have done something so risky. I mean just the energy alone…”

  “Let me worry about that,” she said.

  I watched as she smiled. It was a lovely smile and seemed so foreign to her face. Not that my sister is not pretty. But it seemed that she hadn’t smiled in so long. Being dead, where everyone wears the same face all the time, makes you look a little deeper at the minutia.

  Like the crow’s feet around my sister’s eyes, or the unkempt state of her usually-immaculate hair. Her gaunt face, tired, exhausted—far more exhausted than what a single spell should take. She seemed older, even.

  And then it occurred to me.

  “Gil, how long have I been gone?”

  My sister looked at me. I saw her lip tremble slightly. You’d have missed it if you weren’t looking for it. Her eyes glistened and she finally said in a choked voice:

  “The Soul Snare itself took a little more than ten months to prepare. And that was not my first attempt at bringing you back. It was my last resort.” She inhaled raggedly. “Brother, you’ve been gone for a little more than a year.”

  Shock comes in two forms. There’s the fiery kind, where emotions pile so high that they push you into action. You scream, you move, you act, you do something to relieve the onslaught raging inside you.

  Then there is the cold kind of shock. The one where you freeze and stare at nothingness. Where you are stunned and in disbelief, and even if your rational mind agrees with the statement of facts, you—the you that makes you human and whole—cannot move on.

  This was the kind of shock I experienced when my sister filled me in on the last year.

  After I was thrown out of a fleeing helicopter and slammed into the ground with enough force to create a small crater, and after my sister and my allies had warded off the small army of Asmodaii and other assorted evils, they had rushed me to the Ashendale Mansion.

  My sister put my body—mutated as it was by Life Magic—in a storage unit, where the liquids and fluids would preserve it. Then, she began attempting to resurrect me.

  Locating my soul was next to impossible, likely due to Samael and his weird dimension. Weeks, then months, went by.

  And that’s when my family, blood-related and not, began unraveling.

  Jack, the metal elemental, crumbled first. Abi, my secretary and apprentice, had cut him off from missions once he started making obvious and deliberate mistakes. She told him that if he didn’t want to be there, he could leave. So he did. Gil said it was to save his soul—which I get. Jack may have put on the tough guy act, but he was sensitive. Perhaps too sensitive.

  Amaymon, my demonic familiar, disappeared soon after. He never said anything. True to his nature, he just up and left. Gil told me of several sightings of him both aiding the Black Ring Society and opposing them. Her speculation was that someone had managed to summon him to work for Greede and the bad guys, and Amaymon was fighting it off. But there was no denying it—my familiar had abandoned us.

  Greede, the evil asshole who started all of this, had encroached on La Fortunata, eventually taking over Eureka, and was rapidly spreading his malevolent influence.

  Gil, though she would not admit it, was shattered. I could see it now, the obsession. She had spent the past year focused solely on me at the cost of maintaining her business and her territory. As a result, several monsters and nightmares had managed to crawl out of their hidey-holes. Mephisto was now in charge of maintaining things, while the Lady of the House tried and failed over and over again to bring her brother back from the dead.

  The Soul Snares had been a last desperate atte
mpt. For ten months my sister collected essence from every magical creature and practitioner she encountered. She weakened the barrier between dimensions, breaking several Grigori laws in the process.

  But the Grigori had mostly been slaughtered, and the ones left alive ran underground. So to hell with the Grigori, was what she had said.

  Using my DNA and one of Akasha’s voodoo dolls, she had created a temporary body for me. She also reassured me that there was no enslavement clause, which resulted in a weaker bond.

  “You can only stay in the doll for one hour,” she said. “After that, you wander.”

  Great. One hour of doll time, and then it’s Erik the not-so-Friendly Ghost.

  “And Abi?” I asked. “What happened to her?”

  If anyone would have kept it together, it would be Abi. The witch-succubus hybrid was one of the best people I had ever met. Abi was determined, dogged, resourceful and definitely someone you wanted in a fight.

  She was also someone you wanted outside of a fight, because the woman had heart.

  It was at this point that my sister started tearing up. And then she told me.

  Abi had spiraled into a depression a few months into a botched resurrection attempt. At first she had refused to leave my office, crying all the time. Then, she had sought help. Not the therapeutic kind.

  No, Abi had been pissed off. Gil had let monsters run the city, and no one had been left to carry on my legacy. Abi had stepped up. She had begun training with Sun Tzu, one of my mentors, and had progressed well until he had expelled her.

  That was an answer in itself.

  Sun Tzu was a patient man and an insanely good teacher. He never lost his temper, never spoke out of turn. The guy had literally written the book on warfare.

  If Abi had been expelled by that guy, she must have spiraled bad.

  Apocalyptically bad.

  Then Gil showed me the reports of a masked vigilante. There was no mistaking the red hair, the slender sensual build of her frame, and the golden staff she used as her channel.

  The vaguely-feline mask, reinforced leather and ballistic armor, and twin guns strapped to her back were new additions.

  I caught the look in her eye as she fought nightmares and monsters. There was none of that mercy she had before I died. There was no heart. She had become brutal, efficient and deadly.

  I may have died and lost my soul, but I was finding out that everyone around me had lost their hearts.

  Everyone had lost hope.

  And that was worse than death.

  Chapter 4

  I had always wondered where ghosts went when they weren’t haunting dwellings or victims. I quickly found out after my hour was up.

  First came the willies—turns out those are real even to dead people. Following that, the sensation of something pulling at my body from every inch, every part of my body, inside and out.

  And then, whoosh.

  I was floating through the air hurtling through Limbo. I’d heard of Limbo before but never seen it. Most people don’t. We tend to think of Limbo as this in-between dimension, kind of like a waiting room for the dead. Wait for your turn to get judged and then it’s either the elevator to Heaven or a trapdoor to Hell.

  Reality does not work like that. Your judgment is something that’s ongoing. One bad deed does not mess up your chances for a good afterlife. It’s who we are, our essence, our nature, that determines if we are good or bad. I have done my fair share of fucked-up shit. And yes, I haven’t passed on, so I may be biased—but I have to believe that it’s who we are that counts.

  I am a good person.

  Or, well, I try to be.

  Limbo is the place where magic takes form, where our thoughts and intentions are formed before they are made manifest. This is why it’s so easy for ghosts to latch onto their haunts. They don’t follow the person or a specific address but the energy that flows through Limbo.

  And let me tell you, we humans have some insanely powerful thoughts.

  As I hurtled through the dimension, I could sense everything around me. A million strands of color, like ribbons made out of pure lightning, spun and spiraled, and waved and arced and flew about, seemingly at random. Every shape, every shade.

  One of them grazed me and I was suddenly crying. Depression, sadness, cold and dread. Despair. If I followed the thread back, there would be a real person at the end of it, probably crying in a corner. Not quite suicidal, but close enough.

  A red ribbon grazed my leg and suddenly I was flung on the opposite end of the spectrum. Love, lust, pleasure. Young people in love. I could feel their every touch, was with them as they made love and gave into their passion.

  A flock of yellow birds, flying close to create a single cluster, phased through me. This was something I recognized. Magic. Thaumaturgy. Someone was casting a spell. I reached out, curious.

  No, not just curious.

  I wanted to feel magic again. The energy of a spell, the control of casting it, while at the same time letting go of the restrictions of the real world to create something fantastic.

  The spell flew out of my reach, disappearing towards the nothingness of Limbo.

  Something big and dark followed. Its body was willowy and composed of pure despair. It was not a creature I had seen before, but I had felt that sort of energy before.

  A wraith.

  Now that I was standing at the factory line and watching how they were made, I understood something that had eluded me before. I always thought wraiths were foul ghosts, souls that spent too much time roaming around.

  But now I saw their hollow, vacuous nature up close and personal. Wraiths were Limbo’s janitors, chasing after ghosts that in turn chased after the living. Some dead people just couldn't stay dead. If a ghost became feral, a wraith would tear it up and devour it. It just so happened that feral ghosts were creatures of despair—and despair was a wraith’s favorite meal.

  The wraith disappeared from my sight and I let out a breath. Those suckers were tough enough when using magic. Unarmed and in my current state I’d be about as easy a meal as they could find.

  I saw the wraith again as it manifested solidly around a streak of energy. If the others were neat ribbons of lighting, this was a raging tsunami, whipping and lashing all over the place. I could feel the heat of the energy all over my body, stinging like the flames of a bonfire.

  Magic.

  This was an act of violent, cut-loose magic.

  And much like an aftershock, the emotions powering it came crashing down. I had felt terror before but there was something else here. Hatred, anger, helplessness were all emotions I had felt before—I deal with horrors on a daily basis.

  This was a thousand times more amplified. I don’t know if it was because we were in Limbo or because whoever cast the spell was just that emotionally volatile, but there was no denying the torrent of negativity surging from the spell.

  The wraith glided towards the spell like a hound on a scent. I watched, caught in the torrent but stayed far enough back. This wasn’t my battle after all, and if some dark wizard had cast a black magic spell, then let the damn wraith eat him alive for all I care.

  And then I heard it. The sobbing of a child. Here in Limbo it wasn’t just a wail. I felt the heart break, saw the fear reveal itself as a literal monster, lived the anger and helplessness. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that someone was going to die as a direct result of this magic.

  Magic that was centered around the child, a boy no older than twelve.

  “Aw, shit.”

  I watched as the wraith reached for the energy. In seconds, it would cross the threshold. Before I knew what I was doing, I was running towards the spell, racing the wraith to get there first. It saw me but was stuck in its path and couldn't do anything about it.

  The spell raged and roiled, threatening to rip everything apart. Both myself and the wraith struggled to maintain our footing and raced towards the core.

  But I had one massive advantage over the w
raith. I know magic much like birds know air currents. Magic is an integral part of me.

  And this despair—shit, I had lived that for so long.

  Everything about this terrifying magic was familiar, too familiar. I could easily plug in, so to speak.

  The magic responded to my memories, the fact that I was a creature that had once walked these familiar roads, and sucked me in. Suddenly, I was spiraling through space and time and the world went both light and dark.

  Finally, I was spat into the middle of an apartment kitchen. The table was thrust to one side. A woman with a bloody face sat in the corner, her knees hiding her face as she sobbed silently.

  A man held a folded belt in his hand and was in the act of snapping it on the table, shattering a glass in the process. Burly and unkempt, with a scraggly five-o’clock shadow, and wearing a dress shirt that was once crisp-white, now stained yellow with sweat, old faded-black slacks and office shoes, he swung his hand back, winding for another shot. His clenched fist caught the boy who came to the rescue of his mother.

  I watched in horror. Everything around me was grey and hazy, not quite solid. Sound did not quite translate—every time the belt and fist connected with the child's flesh the world pulsated, becoming colorful and solid once more.

  The child, battered and bloodied, sobbed silently, but looked at his father with pure hatred. Dark magic hung around him. In the real world it was just a dark aura, nothing too serious. But this kid had a natural talent for magic, that much was clear—a talent he was using to fuel himself as he stood up to his father.

  The man grabbed the belt and swung it at the kid, catching him across the body. The kid screamed and the man shoved him hard before grabbing him by the neck and squeezing.

  “Let him go!” I screamed.

  Instinctively, I lunged at the man, only to pass through him like I was… well, a ghost.

  The kid struggled, life ebbing from him.

  “Shit, shit, shit.” I turned around, desperate to do something, maybe see something that could help.

  The mother was still trembling in her corner.

  “Help him!” I yelled, hoping my voice could cross the threshold. “He’s your kid. Help him!”