But I felt a familiar pressure squeeze between my brows as my Ajna chakra opened its petals wider. Something else.
I took the chain and the keys, dropped them in my pocket. I reached for the mug of overpriced, and now cold, coffee on his desk and dipped a Montblanc pen into it. I stirred counterclockwise as I incantated, “Aperio latito conspici … iam.”
I took the pen out of the mug and moved it across his still chest, left to right then right to left, finishing the charm by circling his chest widdershins and touching the tip of my makeshift wand to the spot where his cool, still heart was.
This was a risk. If the killers had planned on me using the Art to search, I could get a nasty surprise, but this was a very unobtrusive bit of magic. A trap would have to have a hair-trigger to activate against this.
The skin wavered like asphalt on a hot day and the tattoo appeared, spread across the dead man’s chest. Emerald ink, racing, arcing, forming symbols, finishing in the pattern of the pyramid with the All-Seeing Eye boring into me as it hovered at the apex amid a halo of brilliant radiating light rays.
Illuminating.
“Shit,” I said, with more than my usual amount of West Virginian twang. I said it out loud to no one but the dead man and me, a soon-to-be dead man.
“You’re with the fucking Illuminati.”
TWO
I exited the office building of the late James Berman—would-be secret master of the world—faster than a preacher leaving a whorehouse. The sky was ash. Dawn was a thinly veiled threat of bruised light only moments away. The row of streetlight orbs that stood silent sentry glowed in perfect unison. No busted streetlights on Wall Street. They winked out one by one as I passed them, their duty to hold the night at bay finished.
It was September, and dead leaves, empty Starbucks cups, and crumpled McBurger wrappers swirled in the terminus of the wind cutting between the shafts in these concrete fortresses. I pulled up the collar on my ratty Navy pea coat, lit a new cigarette, and kept walking away from the crime scene with my aura all over it. My stupid, unique, mega-magicy redneck aura.
The Illuminati. Fuckity-fuck-fuck.
Down the street, a group of Occupy protesters were huddled together beside a small domed tent, trying to avoid the wind’s cold regard. Their cardboard signs bent and bowed in the force of it. None of them looked like they had gotten much sleep. I recalled not too long ago when there had been thousands of them down here. Most had packed up and headed home, but not these kids. They were young, college age, and they were true believers. In other words, cannon fodder.
While their leaders gave speeches and then drove home to Rockaway or Brighton Beach, or NYU for dinner and a nice warm bed, these kids manned the front lines. They were foot soldiers, the ones who end up dead in every war, the dumbasses who most likely volunteered.
Screw volunteering.
Belief has power. Getting someone else to believe what you believe has even greater power. I’ve always been all about the power, not so much with the following or the believing. I believe in me, that’s pretty much it. Believe in someone else too much and they’ll fail you or screw you, or both.
One of the kids handed me a flyer. It was shaking, snapping in the wind.
“Learn the truth about who is running our country into the ground, bro,” the kid said. He was maybe twenty and had a mop of curly, brown hair stuffed under a Nike lid. He sported a week’s growth of beard. A blue North Peak jacket helped keep him warm, and he had an iPad in his hands with Angry Birds fluttering across its glowing screen. “Help fight the corporations that are bringing us all down.”
“Irony,” I said. “Do you know it?”
“Huh?” the walking billboard responded eloquently. I shook my head and took his flyer. “Fight the power,” I said, and gave him a fist bump of solidarity as I slid the two Montblanc pens into his pocket without him seeing. I kept walking. If he knew who really ran this world … well, he’d be as screwed as I was. If they found those pens on him, he’d be a damn sight worse than screwed.
And better him than me.
* * *
The Illuminati. Really? For half a second I thought maybe Boj was setting me up to get killed. I did owe him, and maybe he thought this would be a good way to get fair market value out of me. One last “gotcha.”
No. I saw the look on his skull-face, in his heavy-lidded eyes: hate. Not for me but for the man who had taken the only light he had known in this world. No, Boj had said Slorzack had mojo. If he was hooked up with the Illuminati, it might explain why Boj couldn’t find him.
I fell into a booth at Jack’s Stir on Front Street. For the millionth time since I saw that symbol manifest on Berman’s chest, I thought about saying fuck it and rabbiting. Boj would be dead soon and I could tell him I did my best but I couldn’t find Slorzack. I’d live, Boj would die either way. You mess with the “I” and you end up with someone using your nerves as violin strings while you lie somewhere and feel every draw of the bow, every note of agony. No, thank you.
The waitress was pretty, Mediterranean with long black curls and tanned skin showing in all the places to help with the tips.
“What to drink?” she asked. Her English was pretty good. The tag next to her cleavage said DANNI.
“Cheerwine,” I said as I unwrapped, and tapped, a new pack of smokes. I knew I couldn’t smoke in here without a lot of bullshit following me, but the ritual comforted me and made me think of the next cigarette to come.
Danni frowned. “Wine? I’m sorry, we have no liquor license for…”
“No, darlin’, Cheer-wine. It’s a soda.”
“Soda.” Danni nodded. “Oh, pop. We have Pepsi … we have…”
Suddenly I felt like I was in an old Saturday Night Live skit with John Belushi. No Coke, Pepsi. I shook my head and smiled.
“Coffee, darlin’. Black as my soul and those pretty eyes of yours.”
Danni looked confused and then smiled and wrote something on her pad. “Coffee. Yes. Very good.” She looked me in the eyes. I sent a little current back to her, just a nudge of power from my sacral chakra, to make sure I got a decent cup of joe and her attention while I was here. She walked away and glanced back to see if I was watching her. I was. We both smiled.
Great. Here I was in the Big Rotten Apple, no fucking Cheerwine to be had—I hated going north. No one ever carried it up here. I could make the most of this day right now by asking Danni to come back to my hotel with me.
And then there was Boj, dying. Waiting for me. Fuck.
Boj. He took a 9mm rune-carved heart seeker for me in Vegas, back in ’99, when we burned Joey Dross and stole his philosopher’s stone. Boj was the only one who came back for me when everything went to shit in ’01, with us trying to save that little girl from the breeding pools under Carrabelle, Florida. He risked his life to pull me out of there when the Mosquito Queen was draining me dry and I was begging for her to do it. He stayed with me during the sickness, madness, and addiction that followed.
Boj, black-hearted, grinning, mean as a snake, smooth as gun oil, eager to die—happy to kill. Alexander the Great of the occult underworld, the Life. Boj.
I couldn’t give this up, not now. And not for any noble reason you might attribute, not out of loyalty, or friendship, or debt. No. It was the small, cowardly, skittering part of me that had kept me alive for so long. It said that the Illuminati were now in this and they would find me, after my visit to Berman’s office. No, I couldn’t just drop this. The only way out was going to be through. So I needed time. Time to figure out the link between Berman and Slorzack, to find out what Berman’s handcuff keys were all about, time to work some angle with the Illuminati that kept me from getting disappeared.
I drank my coffee and admired Danni’s ass in her tight uniform and listened to my inner bastard tell me exactly what I needed to do.
I tipped Danni fifty dollars and walked out into the growling late Manhattan morning.
I stopped at a newsstand on Water Stree
t. The guy running it had a Rasputin-style beard and was wearing a ratty Primus T-shirt over his enormous beer gut.
“Give me a pack of American Spirits,” I said, handing him some crumpled cash, “and a white Bic lighter.”
He handed me the cigarettes and a purple lighter out of the display behind his counter.
“No,” I said to Rasputin, “I asked for a white lighter.”
“What’s the fuckin’ diff, man?” Rasputin rumbled. “’Sides, white lighters are bad luck, everyone knows that.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I know. Now give me the damned white lighter.”
* * *
I went back to the hotel and was saddened that there wasn’t a hot Greek waitress waiting for me. I got my working bag out—an old, frayed canvas bag with two worn handles and a zipper that often stuck. The bag was the color of desert sand. It was covered with various symbols and runes drawn in black Sharpie. It had a few dark, ominous stains. It also bore the logos of numerous bands I had been enamored of in my youth: Kiss, Led Zeppelin, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Alice Cooper, AC/DC, Pink Floyd, the DKs, and, of course, the Stones.
Pop quiz: What do Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Kurt Cobain all have in common? Answer: They were all awesome. They were all left-handed, they all died at the age of twenty-seven, and all the police reports said that a white plastic lighter was found in their possession at the time of death.
I stripped in the stale, silent air of my hotel room. My body was still in pretty good shape for my age. Not bragging, but I was rocking the Iggy Pop look, without the heroin diet plan. Still a little muscle, still a little cut, still a little rock star in me. My skin was covered with tattoos and scars. A lot of my ink was work related, you might say. Symbols, formulas, pacts, and wards. My scars, ah, my scars. They came from motorcycle accidents, knives, bullets, claws, broken bottles, bites, whips, self-mutilation, and a bunch of other stuff, not the least of which was the wound in my back from being impaled by a giant mosquito woman. That one still itched most nights, and sometimes, when the moon was new and far away, her wound sang horrible, beautiful songs to me.
I closed the drapes to hide from the light and to muffle the never-ending scream of the city. I wanted to make sure I didn’t lose any of Berman’s psychic “scent” off the cuff keys, so I put them in a safe place—the glove. I took it out of my canvas bag and unrolled it. It was the skin of a powerful santero down in Miami, tanned and treated with all the fingers still intact, taken from his hand, severed at the wrist. Anything put in the glove was preserved and hidden from the view of the world and those with the Art. In short, it was gruesome mystic Tupperware. I dropped the keys in the glove, folded it up, and set it on the nightstand.
I took my working bag and entered the bathroom. I set up candles of black and red around the tile floor and on the sink counter. I took a handful of ritual Klonopin pills, called benzos on the street by the nice young man I had purchased them from, and washed them down with cold champagne ordered from room service. Then I sat down on the floor, lotus style, and closed my eyes. I centered the energies of my chakras. I felt the loci of forces align and then dipped into the power building in my Rasatala chakra, a minor point of energy in my ankles. I let the forces of selfish energy build and channel up my legs. I mixed it with the fear in my Atala chakra in my hips; I began to feel the power swirl in me, like the first smoky, heady rush of heat from a sip of good whiskey. I rolled the power around in me and felt the high envelop me. The candle flames all flared, burning bright blue, illuminating the dark bathroom. Goddamn … Why the hell would anyone be fucking normal if they didn’t have to be?
The universe was roaring through me like an open door, and I told it what to do. Yeeeeesssss. I stood, took the white lighter out of my bag, and placed it in the sink. I looked at myself in the mirror, lit up by acetylene blue light. My eyes were wide and dark, pupils dilated. I smashed the mirror with my left fist. An explosion of silver-blue fire supernova, jagged teardrops falling down into the sink. A distant, muted echo of pain, screaming from my nerves. The power welling up in my chest, in my throat.
Shape the words, carve the energy, vomit it up into the sink, into the lighter.
Ego sum mea parasitus
Nil opus hostiam vivam
pascimus off de invicem
Possumus nostrum endorphins
Doll CARNIS! Test cibum!
The words carried the power with such force, they felt like they were loosening my teeth. Even through the chemical shroud of the benzos, I felt like shit. This was dangerous magic for an old bastard like me to be trying.
Non opus est mihi molestus varius novum amicus
Non opus novum amicus tribulant me titio
Et non indiget aliquo egere me
Video balneo patet
Puto autem quod alicuius prope
Scio quod aliquis post me, O yeah.
I clutched the counter and growled the words into the sink. With each syllable, the shards of mirror snapped and fragmented.
Habitabant in speculis me auferre, cum viderem me omnes. Crepitus ego me spiritum meum et specula, nunc adest mundo videre. Etiam Castella fecit de arena, cadunt in mare …
Blue smoke drifted from the sink. I looked at my bleeding left hand as if it was some alien thing, unattached to me. I let the blood drip into the sink, onto the broken glass of the hotel mirror, onto the pure white lighter. Drip, drip, drip. Suddenly, I was in Berman’s office again. His pale, blood-streaked face looked up, and his eyes opened. They were Granny’s eyes, milky white, soulless.
Nosti opinor penitus infantem et non in corde recto,
Numquam numquam numquam Numquam exaudiet me cum clamavero nocte
Infantem et clamavi tota die;
Sed quotiens me, inquam, bene ferre possum dolor
Sed in armis tuis me dicis, ego iterum psallere.
Dicam age, age, agite, et sequere eam?
Power, any power, has a price. I was preparing to damn someone to a painful death, to an eternity of suffering. To save my sorry ass, to buy me a few extra days. I reached into the sink and my cut, bloody fingers wrapped around the white lighter. I was damned too. Damned again.
Tolle it!
It was done. The candles’ guttering flames were no longer blue. I staggered out of the bathroom, feeling the cosmic hangover of the power departing me. Like a junkie coming down. No longer a god, only emptiness and remorse. A hollow man.
I carried the champagne bottle, taking deep, thirsty gulps, pausing long enough to pour some over the wounds on my hand, and then taking a nice long draw off the bottle. I set the lighter on the nightstand beside the glove. It was pristine, clean, and perfect.
I fell into the bed, the bottle still in my hand, and I slept, the only sleep my kind ever truly enjoys—drugged and dreamless.
I slept for about a day. I awoke to the predatory sounds of night in the city. For a moment there was a thrill of terror, that I had waited too long, that the faceless crucifiers would be crashing through the hotel room door any second.
I got up, stood in a hot shower for a long time, and wrapped my busted-up hand with duct tape. I put on clean clothes, a Bauhaus T-shirt and jeans, and I began to feel human again. I gathered all my things and finally, as I prepared to leave, I put the lighter in my pocket. The hotel room looked trashed. I left the lights on and shut the door.
The Port Authority Bus Terminal is on 8th Avenue, near the New York Times building. I walked there. It was cold, but the fresh air helped me. I entered the terminal and made my way to the men’s room. There was a rancid lake of piss on the floor. In the gang tags and graffiti smeared across the walls and stalls, I saw the names of twenty-six minor lords of Hell, hidden.
I placed the lighter on the counter by the sink, looked at it for a second, and then walked out, kept walking.
Someone would pick it up. I didn’t know who exactly, but I did know the person would be twenty-seven years old and left-handed, and would be inheriting all my troubles with the Illumina
ti. Whoever it was would be tracked, disappeared, questioned, tortured, and then would finally die, if he was lucky.
The sounds of the street and the cold air slapped me as I walked out of the terminal and down the street, looking like just another asshole.
I couldn’t see the face of the person who claimed the lighter. And I could see them all.
THREE
The sun choked on the concrete mountains of Manhattan and died. The night was ascendant, swollen with victory, the shrill howl of sirens, the dull murmur of human misery, and the spoor of blood, sex, and garbage soaked the air. One of the reasons the night is so full of hungry things is that it is born of death and rapacity.
I took the subway out of the city. The Keep had been operating out of “the Gates of Hell”—the abandoned Glenwood Power plant in Yonkers—for the last few months. The building was impressive in its dark sprawl. It squatted like an old whore pissing in the Hudson River, its lower levels already flooded and eaten by rust. The club moved on a regular basis, trying to stay one step ahead of New York’s finest. I got the address from a Haitian cabbie for a hundred bucks and a bag of weed.
The building was huge, its crumbling, filthy walls thrummed from the bass of the sound system inside. At one hundred yards my guts were vibrating. A crowd of club kids practiced looking bored as they waited to be chosen to go inside. Their breath and cigarette smoke swirled about them like warring ghosts. Two muscled myrmidons wrapped in Kevlar, armed with steel batons, stood watch over the dented fire door that was the only way into the Keep. Their faces were bland masks with cold, laconic violence leaking out the eyeholes.
I walked up to the bigger one, a black guy with a shaved head. I noticed a sheet of paper taped to the fire door. It had a symbol on it: a circle that held the yin-yang teardrops, but this symbol included a third teardrop, the trio eternally circling, like little Zen sperm.
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