The Killing Floor Blues (Daniel Faust #5)(50)

That was the simplified version. There was more to it, the foundations every sorcerer had to learn: visualization, breathing, how to raise and channel raw power without giving yourself a heart attack or burning your brain into a charcoal briquette. I could talk to a Taoist alchemist from Hong Kong, a Senegalese medicine man, or a blood witch from the backwoods of Kentucky, and up to a certain point we would all be speaking the same language. Working with the same primal cosmic forces, even if we gave them different names.

The deeper you went into a given tradition of magic, the stranger stuff got. Could I explain why offering the blood of a white dove over graveyard dirt on a Saturday at midnight could help break a family curse? Nope. But I’d been paid to do it, and I knew it worked. That was why, when you were working with somebody else’s spells—especially the really old, really esoteric stuff—it paid to steer as close to the original as possible. You never knew when one tiny change might yank out a metaphysical load-bearing wall and make the whole ritual come crashing down.

I was making a lot of tiny changes here.

Instead of a meditative circle of candles, I had a filth-smeared floor and broken toilets. Instead of a murderer’s hand pickled in brine, it’d been marinating in soapy mop water. And technically, the murderer was supposed to have been not just executed, but specifically hanged.

The last execution by hanging in the United States was in 1996. You can’t always get what you want.

I laid the hand before me and rested my hands on my knees, palms up. My breath slowed, my pulse slowing with it. The stench and the outside clamor faded away, and so did the light, my world eclipsed in a glowing darkness.

I could hear my heartbeat in my ears. Glacial now, like distant rumbling thunder. A drumbeat for a dirge.

Bentley’s cramped handwriting glowed like blue neon. I felt the words more than read them, the half-Latin, half-English chant rolling off my tongue in a sibilant whisper. As the chant hastened, my pitch deepening, my upturned fingers clenching at shadows, a lance of fire burned up my spine. Power from the dark, raw and eager to be used.

Sleep, now sleep. Silent in my wake. Be as the dead for this dead man’s sake.

I bent back the rigor-clenched fingers, one by one. The fire in my spine arced across my arms, from my fingertips to the hand’s. Then came the twine, and the final ingredient.

Traditionally, a Hand of Glory’s light burns from white candles, candles rendered from a human corpse. I didn’t have those. What I had was a suspicion that what really mattered wasn’t the candle, or even the flame: it was the smoke.

I unwrapped the cellophane from a pack of Marlboros and shook out five cigarettes.

The chant unceasing, my voice and my hands working in unison, I lashed a cigarette to each of Paul’s fingers with twine. They stood like tiny smokestacks at the end of each bloodless fingernail. I held the hand high above my head, energy coursing into it. The grimy bathroom mirrors rattled in their steel frames, and my ears filled with an electric hum.

“Sleep, now sleep,” I hissed at the climax of the spell, “silent in my wake. Be as the dead for this dead man’s sake.”

With a faint crump, the cigarettes ignited.

Their tips glowed vivid orange, like alien suns, and sent up wispy streamers of silver smoke. The streamers wrapped around me like tinsel garlands as I rose with my prize clutched in both hands.

Outside the bathroom, Jake and Westie’s energetic conversation suddenly fell silent as the enchantment washed over their senses. They stood there, slack-jawed and empty eyed, toys with their batteries yanked. I walked past them, and the silver smoke trailed behind me. As I climbed down the metal stairs to the hive floor, an oppressive silence spread in all directions.

Heads drooped. Shoulders sagged. Men stood like broken statues, lost in opium dreams. Where I walked, no one saw me. Where I walked, no one saw anything at all.

Ahead, the ultimate test: the ring of red paint around the base of the central guard tower and the sign reading “NO WARNING SHOTS WILL BE FIRED.” I steeled myself, took a deep breath, and stepped over the line.

No shots rang out, and the silver smoke swirled as I strode toward the tower door.

“No lock deters the Hand of Glory,” I whispered, focusing on the key-card reader beside the steel door. “No secrets shall I be denied.”

The red light above the reader flickered and turned green. The door handle clicked. I let myself in.

As I climbed the stairs, weaving past stupefied and slumbering guards, my heartbeat quickened. I had a new problem, and I wasn’t sure how to fix it. My version of the Hand worked just how it was supposed to, despite my substitutions and corner-cutting, but it wasn’t built to last.

A proper Hand was supposed to endure for hours. My improvised cigarette “candles” had already burned halfway down. I had just enough time, if I was lucky, to snag the night-vision goggles and get them back to my cell before the cigarettes burned out and shattered my spell.

The original idea had been to hide the Hand, take it along to help with the raid on the motor pool, and use it to get the prison gates open once we’d secured our rides home. Now I was jogging up the steps two at a time, just to make sure I could get the first part of my plan done.

No Hand, no open gates. The shining road to freedom was turning into a great big electrified roadblock.

Focus, I thought, swallowing down a surge of sudden panic. Worry about that later. We’ll find another way.