Page 3 of Resurrection

“Funny. Since you’re married to one.”

Married? Gabe grasped at the thought, again the flicker of a face, but not enough to really see it. “I don’t remember.”

“Ronnie will love that. Play dumb. He might forgive you sooner. Or put you back in the ground.”

“Forgive me. What did I do?” A thousand things echoed through his head all at once. The noise becoming too loud. Too many things. Deaths even. Monstrous acts. He caved in on himself, rolling up into a ball and trembling in the wake of too many memories trying to find a place in his mind.

Before he knew it, he was in a box, the scent of dirt surrounding him, and the lid slid closed as Sam stood over him. “This is seriously bad timing.”

Gabe wanted to ask questions, but the top closed and he felt sleep drag him down. The comfort of the small place, dirt and darkness, letting him chase back some of the scattered memories. He let it all flit away for a while, resting with the memory of a dark-haired stranger who’d been his first kiss.

Curious how clear that was. That moment, though obviously a different place and time. Gabe felt the box moving and the pull of his grave letting him go as he was carried away from it. Even with the dirt in the box, mixed with soil from the grave, he knew the distance meant something. A strain on his control, rising hunger, but total exhaustion.

He tried to follow the memory of the dark-haired man. Older than him, but only by a few years. Gabe sat on the edge of those thoughts, similar to a faint dream, watching the man grow and go off to battle, and finally watching him die.

That ached, similar to a wound to his chest, deep and piercing. Raw. He cringed away from it, trying to relax and ease the feeling, though he was lost in the sensation of dying all over again.

Chapter 2

Seiran Rou wasn’t in the media enough anymore. That was why he kept ending up in situations like this. Apparently being the director of the Department of Magical Investigations within the Dominion, the ruling body of magic, wasn’t enough to warrant him enough cool kid points that drunk frat boys knew him on sight.

Teaching classes on the University campus for almost a decade, and hundreds of lectures across the country, meant everyone should have known him. But it had been a few years since he’d been on a major network, mostly because the magical world had been calm and quiet. At least the public thought so. The few mishaps that did pop up each year he helped shut down before they could become major network news.

Of course, if Sei hadn’t been all Sherlock Holmes, “Aha! Dear Watson!” to one of the researchers, and gone off on his own to pursue the lead they’d found, he’d not be stuck here, in a dorm room, strung upside-down in some precariously flickering rope trap.

It seemed to be on some sort of timer. Which didn’t make sense. But every few minutes the ropes would loosen, and for a half second, he’d plummet to the floor, but it would catch him and tighten again, like a snake coiling and uncoiling.

However, it was fast bordering on becoming a problem. And none ofthissort of shit should happen on his campus. Now he knew why his Aunt Lily had been so eager to retire and hand him the reins. College kids did a lot of stupid stuff, and he was often caught up in the middle of it trying to unravel their mistakes.

Unfortunately, he still often got the deer-in-headlight look from the non-magic masses, despite being a largely politicized figure by the media. Had the kid who’d let him in the door to the dorm earlier known? Who Sei was or what awaited him? Had this been planned, or had he just stepped in someone’s bullshit?

Sadly, it was most likely the latter. Which meant not only had he been caught in a badly constructed magical booby trap, but he was also locked in with a somewhat concerning enchanted golem.

Technically, he’d been searching for the golem.

After a handful of incidents on the UofM campus had been brought to the administration’s attention, he discovered that a couple of students were using a golem to take tests for them, or cover for them in lectures. Not smart, since golems were creatures of questionable magic who only spoke truths. It could memorize textbooks and answer quiz questions, but it could not rationalize essays with human morals and consequences. Golems would also do a lot to fulfill its commands. It made them easy to turn to darker things, including theft and murder.

No one had died. Yet.

The magic woven around it, making it look like a regular person, had begun to unravel. More than a handful of reports around campus of a guy with “his face falling off” had been the first indicator. Golems could only play human for so long before the blood magic began to fade.

Unfortunately, spells steeped in this sort of magic tended to go sideways fast. The golem had attacked a group of football players—who Seiran personally had always thought deserved a beatdown—and ended up on a couple of uploaded camera phone videos. They’d taunted it and pushed it around, which normally wouldn’t have a golem lashing out. But the fact that it had reacted, meant something had either gone wrong with the magic that created it, the players were interrupting a set of commands, or the bond the caster had to it was weakening. Possibly all three.

Four college kids were in the hospital. All would recover, but Sei needed to find the golem before the next batch of kids it crossed paths with didn’t.

Kids… sigh. He was getting old. Thirty-six wasn’t that old, was it? Most of the kids… students, he was trying to save were barely twenty. Many not old enough to legally drink alcohol. Seeing them made him think of his own kids, though they were much younger, and the need to catch this thing intensified. Just because it had stayed on the college campus so far, didn’t mean it would forever.

When someone found or created power from killing something, they tended to forget the rules. Magical power needed balance, which meant the longer this golem lived, the more it would pull from the environment, and possibly its creator or creators. The more the creators exploited it, the more they would feel emboldened to do. Taking tests was a small thing, but how long before it migrated to revenge, or even murder as it unraveled?

Tracking the golem down should have fallen to one of the inspectors. But as usual, the department was understaffed. The fall season was always the worst. The warning stretch of winter coming, a sleepiness in the earth, and a reorganization of “who worked where” as people were promoted, demoted, or moved. A half dozen newbies had been welcomed a week earlier. All wet behind the ears, with stars in their eyes about saving folks and stopping magic crimes. Kids.

Sei sighed thinking back on the past few weeks. He was not about to send the first-year researchers into the field. Not after a golem. He wasn’t even sure most of his new hires knew what a golem was. He had been fighting for years to have more diverse curriculum added to the magic studies programs. The Dominion had the idea that not teaching certain things could keep students from experimenting with them. A stupid philosophy that was disproven as a regular part of Sei’s job.

There were a dozen ways to create golems, though the physical makeup was mostly the same. None of the rituals were particularly nice, and at least half of those required blood sacrifices. Usually death, unless the witch casting was extremely powerful. The Dominion didn’t really recognize black magic as a thing, as intent mattered more. But killing someone to create a shapeshifting body double to take tests and attend lectures? That was a bit of a stretch on the positive intent spectrum.

It was more self-exasperation that kept him trapped in the rope trick, than anything else. Well, that and the fact that every time he tried to use magic, the golem began to move. Lying on the tiny dorm bed it looked like little more than a pile of sticks tied together in a sort of humanoid shape. A head, arms, legs, a torso, but nothing else definable. No current command or intent that required a human face. Either that or the magic had unraveled so far it couldn’t be human.

The golem smelled of rot, dirt, and underneath, the edge of something green. Within all that decay was some bit of life.