Redemption Song (Daniel Faust #2)(72)

“Non,” he groaned, shaking his head. “Non, non, non! How? How did you—”

“Magic,” I said, and it was true in a way.

Back in the day, and I mean way back, Bentley had a vaudeville routine. Sort of a low-rent Houdini. Thing is, a lot of escapology tricks have valuable real-world applications for guys in my line of work. Like for instance, the fact that handcuff keys are universal. If you keep one stuck to the inside of your belt with a blob of putty, slipping out of a pair of cuffs just takes a little practice and a few seconds of distraction.

As far as the chrome-plated .22 in my hand, that was easy: Harmony had slipped it into my pocket when she shoved me into the car back at the motel. I knew Gilles would be too arrogant to actually learn anything about how a real cop would operate, and he wouldn’t think to search me. Too late now.

“Speaking of magic,” Harmony said. She marched to the one-way window and licked her fingertip, drawing a swirling rune across the glass in spittle. She whispered sibilant words under her breath, and the winds of power rose and tingled like static electricity against my skin. A rime of frost spread across the mirror’s face, turning the glass pearly white. She paused, studied her handiwork for a moment, and left the room.

I pulled up a chair and straddled it, keeping the gun on Gilles.

“Alone again,” I said.

“What now?” he demanded. “Shoot me? I’ll just jump into another body, and this man, an innocent, will be dead.”

“Right. See, Harmony is pretty tight with Lars—”

“Aha! See? You don’t dare shoot.”

“—which is why I’m the one with the gun,” I said. “Not her. She couldn’t pull the trigger on her buddy. I can.”

His smile of triumph faded a bit.

“This is the last resort,” I told him. “Just in case.”

“Just in case of what?”

The door rattled and Harmony came back in, toting a pair of brown paper grocery bags. She set them both on the table. She reached into the bag on the left. Mama Margaux’s spirit-bottle glittered in her hand, the glass festooned with a rainbow of sequins and dripping with the magic of prisons, the haunted echoes of red bricks and black iron. She set it down where Gilles could get a good look.

“In case we have trouble fitting you into your new home,” I said.

I peeked into the other bag. Harmony had brought everything I asked for. I took out a slender blue glass flask of perfumed water and walked around Gilles in a slow, steady circle, splashing droplets on the floor.

“You’re mad!” Gilles cried, thrashing against his shackles. “You can’t do this to me! I’m a nobleman!”

Next came the chant, words spitting from my lips in guttural grunts. The language was Germanic, but the rhyme was older, more primal, from a cold and bitter age. I opened a canister of sea salt from the bag, wet my fingertips with the last of the perfumed water, and dipped them in. Then I gripped Gilles’s chin with my other hand and smeared a blasphemous sign across his forehead in salt, the crystals suddenly sharp as a hundred tiny razor blades. I pulled my bloody fingers away as Gilles let out a shriek.

As I cursed, Harmony beckoned. She sang, waving her pale, long-fingered hands across the surface of the sequined bottle, making them glitter in response to her gentle voice. She sang of the sea, of movement, of grace, in words I felt more than understood.

“Please,” Gilles screamed as rivulets of salty blood ran down his face. “Please, I don’t want to go back. I’m begging you. I don’t want to go back—”

As my voice grew more strident Harmony’s grew softer, yet somehow still keeping pace, spinning through the room, weaving between the jagged consonants of my cursework. My spell washed over Gilles’s stolen body, poisoning the meat and spreading toxins through muscles and bone. Harmony’s fingers spun the bottle into a glimmering beacon, a lighthouse on a distant shore offering serenity. We spiraled upward, upward, reaching a sudden crescendo that ended as we both spoke the same word at the same moment.

“Go.”

Gilles lurched forward as his spirit boiled out of Lars’s body in a violet cloud. It streamed from his mouth, his nose, his ears and eyes, tendrils slithering from under his fingernails to join the growing mass. Like a fish on a hook, the roiling cloud flew toward the open mouth of the bottle. As the last glimmering mote slipped inside, Harmony slammed in the cork.

I slumped against the wall, spent, my shirt caked to my body with cold fever-sweat. Harmony flopped back in her chair, panting.

Then Lars opened his eyes, reared back as he drew a desperate gasp of air, and threw up.

I stumbled over and patted his back. “That’s it. Get it all out. Had to make your body an unhappy place to live. You’ll be feeling queasy for a couple of days, but it’s better than the alternative.”

The burly Norwegian wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He sat there, mute with shock, and shook his head. When he could finally speak, his words came out in fits and starts, like he was learning how to speak all over again.

“I couldn’t…I couldn’t do anything. It was like I was a…prisoner behind my own eyes. I tried to fight, but…I couldn’t.”

I looked at Harmony and said, “You’re gonna need to have a long talk with this guy. Not fair not to clue him in. Not after what he’s been through.”