Dead Man's Hand - SCP Foundation

Anorrack

Dead Man's Hand (5658 words)

Author: Anorrack

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Other Quinn Law stories you may enjoy:

Spellbound and Hellbound: A demon on the loose. A necromancer on the hunt. Love is in the air.

The Saint Sebastian Slasher: A serial killer stalks the Great Lakes, looking for his next victim, and only the Coast Guard and the UIU can stop him.

Transposthumousism: A man's head explodes at dinner while Quinn is walking the beat. How can she turn down such a case?

Columbia, Alabama, 18:17

Quinn Law, federal necromancer, stood in the warm rain in plain-clothes. She was standing in front of a modest townhouse a little ways away from the city center. She once again checked the crumpled paper sheltered in her hands, a hint of sulfur still mingling with the smell of parchment. 1173 Wicker Lane, AL, stamped in type-writer font. She clicked her tongue. Quinn knew probing the future was a hard ask, but did the Office of Prophecy always have to be so damn vague? Well, that wasn’t fair. The sage collapsed from a near stroke after getting that out, so the Lighthouse Mafia was most likely running counter-intel on any attempts at scrying them. Maybe the UIU was lucky to get an address instead of a fortune cookie horoscope.

The townhouse was well-maintained, contrasting the neighboring rundown buildings, with white paint cracking on their trims and windows clouded with detritus. Their lawns were overgrown and gnarled with weeds. Shrubs duked it out in the undergrowth while the heavy branches of trees hung over the road, threatening to break in a strong gust. The buzzing orange streetlight percolated through the branches, casting warped shadows on the craggy sidewalk. All of which made the well-manicured, orderly appearance of 1173 Wicker Lane all the more strange.

The intelligence on the property had been slim. No recorded disturbances or police reports originated near the house. It seemingly had been owned by the same woman for decades now, living out her retirement. Any other details were scarce. What could the Lighthouse Mafia want in this neighborhood? Could be anything from a safe house to a distant relative.

Quinn's skin prickled, though that wasn’t a useful indicator of death in this case. The dark clouds that brought the warm rain threatened lightning overhead, the smell of ozone thick in the air. Coupled with the idea of delving into an unknown property owned by unknown persons with no intel at all, it made her skin crawl all the more.

Quinn adjusted her belt, and made sure the safety strap over her M1911 was snug in place and concealed by her jacket. Feeling through her pockets, she went down a mental checklist of the components and gadgets she had brought. Some dead mice, banishment bullets, a HoG-43, silver bells, et cetera.

She walked over the crooked pavement slabs, and jogged up to the door of the condo, taking the steps two at a time. When she pressed the doorbell, it made a deep-throated chime, which echoed throughout the building for a moment. Shortly after, shuffling could be heard from behind the door, followed by the sound of rattling locks and deadbolts.

Quinn pulled her sleeves down a bit more to conceal tattoos that, if one looked close enough, would seem to slightly wriggle and writhe on the skin. All of the tattoos that covered her upper body had a specific, dedicated use, most of them inked on after she learned the hard way she needed something of the kind.

They were placed in important areas, on nerve clusters or pressure points, several down the center line between Quinn's neck and navel, as well as some spiraling down her arms, following the arteries, either to focus magic or to redirect it from the more important places. Most UIU agents had at least a protective glyph, and in Miami it was a rite of passage to get one done after a big bust. The majority of her unit had serious ink.

The door opened, and Quinn was faced with a short Native woman, whose wrinkled and creased skin looked the color of saddle leather, as tough as it, too. Hard flinty eyes stared into Quinn’s own. “What do you want?” A lit cigarette dangled precariously from her pursed lower lip, the smoke exhaled from her nose was the same color as her hair.

From behind the woman, stacks upon stacks of things led deeper into her home, artificially narrowing the hallway with piles of papers and crates. A hoarder’s house.

Quinn flashed her undercover badge. “Quinn Law, FBI. We have reason to suspect that you are the target of a criminal organization. Would you mind answering a few questions for me?”

The woman’s brow knotted in bemusement, and she looked behind Quinn, seeing no one else but her. She considered something for a moment, and gestured with a gnarled hand, inviting Quinn into the house. Following the beckoning hand, Quinn stepped over the threshold and entered.

“Well this is a turn of events.” The old woman's voice was raspy, like sandpaper on wood.

She made her way from the kitchen, completely a disaster as evidenced by the piles of plates on the counter, and the veritable tower of Babel of cast-iron pots and pans kept in the sink. But everything was clean. Cluttered, but obsessively clean.

She held a tray with a tea cup neatly balanced on top, the cups barely moving as she nimbly waltzed across the junk-strewn floor, padding across the carpet. The woman passed one teacup to Quinn, who was drying out on an ancient, squeaky leather chair.

“You live quietly, I presume?”

The woman flapped her hand as she sat down in a floral-patterned love seat opposing Law. Her small frame was almost absorbed by the soft and thick cushions. The cigarette held on for dear life to her lip as it drooped downwards. “Haven’t had the feds around here in—hell, I don’t know—ages, maybe.”

“Well, I’ll try to get out of your hair as soon as possible. I don’t want to make a fuss. You didn’t have to make tea, you know.”

The crow’s feet in the corner of the woman’s eyes deepened as she smiled. “Oh, that’s quite alright… Quinn Law, was it? I just adore doting on people. Haven’t had the chance to in a while.”

“You don’t mind if I record this conversation, do you?”

The old woman took a drag. “Help yourself.”

Quinn put the teacup to the side, and reached into her sodden jacket, pulling out a notepad and a digital audio recorder. She flipped the notepad open and started the tape.

“Could you give your name for the record, please?”

The elderly lady flapped her hand again. “I’ve gotten so many names, it’s almost hard to keep track, especially at my age. People gather them like a stone gathers moss, by my reckoning.” She thought for a moment. “Call me Miss Funi. Old Choctaw name.”

She leaned back into the love seat. The old crone looked like a child sitting in a high chair. “Now, what’s this about criminals targeting me?”

Quinn forcefully relaxed the grip on her pen. “Well, Miss Funi, have you heard of the Lighthouse Mafia?”

Funi rolled her eyes and scoffed. “They should’ve workshopped the name a bit more, sounds moronic.”

A pause. “So, we have reasonable intelligence that they either have come by recently, or are planning to come here, but we don’t know why. Have you heard or seen anything to indicate something like this?”

Funi snapped, the cigarette dropping gray ash on her cardigan. “Well Quinn Law, have they come by or no? Shoddy surveillance network you feds have, if you can’t tell if they’ve been here or not. If they were here, wouldn’t I have known it, anyways?”

“Yes, you would.”

The vaguely accusatory statement hung in the air like a lead weight.

Funi’s derisive snort led into a phlegm-filled cough, a hasty wiry hand catching the cigarette stub before it fell from her lip, mashing it into an ashtray. After the coughing fit, she shakily grabbed a cigarette pack out of her rose-colored cardigan and lit up another. She mumbled around the cigarette, “Don’t even know why I paid my taxes.”

The itch on Quinn’s hands hadn’t gone away, even as she entered the building, and as the storm lightened, the itch remained, only growing in intensity; it was almost unbearable. Quinn was becoming irritated, with the intensifying urge to scratch and the interview of a hostile subject going nowhere.

Even though the house was clean, with every visible surface scrubbed to mirror shine, there still hung a scent of mildew and rot. As if something between the stacks of newspapers and the piles of old furniture had died and moldered. It was a smell that Quinn had experienced time and time again, working with corpses pulled from basements and shallow graves, covered in thin skeins of fungus and slime, but it still rankled her.

There was… something else. Something that annoyed and scratched at her, but she couldn’t identify what, exactly. The sensation danced on the edge of perception, muted, almost, by something else. She nodded along respectfully to the old woman’s complaints and sharp barbs about the state of the country, but underneath it all, Quinn stretched out her sixth sense, a tattoo studded with rose-thorns on the back of her neck heating up to the temperature of pavement in the noonday sun.

Quinn's eyes flickered to the side, and she saw something slip across her vision, a distortion, a bulge in reality, rotate and slide across the knick-knack-covered wall. It wasn’t real. Or at the very least, perceptible to normal people. The bulge was a knot of concentrated EVE, condensed magic, glowing like a hot coal in the dimly-lit house. The knot was near the floor, hovering over a closet door, sandwiched between the kitchen and a hallway leading further into the cramped house.

For just a moment, penetrating through the muffling force that was holding the noise back, a single, clear voice came through in Enochian, the language of the dead. <Save us.>

Quinn’s mind immediately snapped to attention, though she was careful not to reveal any emotion. She needed to investigate further. How the hell could I distract this rambling bitch?

She eyed the tower of cookware that thrust itself from the bowels of the kitchen sink.

“—God damn.” Funi’s meandering, pointless rant stuttered to a stop and she lurched with a start. Her hand clutched her chest and eyes bulged with shock. The pile of pots and pans had finally given way to entropy and clattered to the ground, the noise of metal-on-metal piercing Law’s eardrums.

Funi’s mouth was contorted into a snarl, as she stood up and shuffled into the kitchen. While the woman’s back was turned, muttering swears under her voice as she bent to pick up the pans, Quinn slowly, quietly, got out of her chair, careful not to make the leather squeak as she stood. The hair-thin, near-invisible cord of spider silk untied itself from the handle of a particularly large pan and snaked its way across the floor. With the slightest twitch of her hand and barely-muttered phrase, Quinn reeled the enchanted cord back into her pocket.

The path to the door was clear, but she still had to dip out of the way of some protruding chair legs and wooden handles from nearby piles of junk as she snuck over to the closet. With a last quick glance to make sure that the old woman’s back was turned, Quinn quickly cracked open the door, the slab of wood gliding noiselessly on its hinges.

The cabinets and shelving had long since been torn from the walls of the closet. Clear markings showed where the paint had faded everywhere but where the shelves used to be, leaving impressions of the shelves like imprints of fossils in a sedimentary layer. Or the off-white ribs of a skeleton, a far more apt comparison.

The floorboards had also been torn out of the closet, leaving nothing but bare earth and soil. Someone had dug down deep into the ground, creating a large pit, filled with stacks of corpses at various stages of decay. Beady-eyed rodents of all stripes, rats, mice, even some squirrels, stared at Quinn, strips of flesh and skin dangling from their snaggle-toothed maws. An ancient refrigerator cooling unit had been bolted to the side of the pit, supported by a few rickety spars of lumber, coughing and exhaling cold air and mist, lowering the temperature of the closet. Only a single word could describe the sight. A larder.

Quinn heard the creaking of the floorboards, and glanced up, to see Ms. Funi staring first at the open closet, then at Quinn, still holding a cast-iron pan. Shit.

"Can't I just live in peace without people like you mucking it all up?"

Funi approached Quinn, the pan gripped tightly in the hag's hand. Quinn quickly backed away from the door, unholstered her pistol and aimed at Funi in one smooth motion.

“What was your deal with the Mafia?”

Funi was spitting venom, a sneer distorting her face. “No concern of yours, I’ll say. A fair trade, at least Spider understood that. Unlike you people.”

Quinn stumbled backwards still, trying to keep Funi in her sights as Quinn tripped over the piles of discarded, old, useless things.

Funi seemed to grow taller, her weight shifting forward onto her toes, and her heels slipping out of their loafers as they elongated and angled upwards, bones crackling and tendons rearranging. She dropped the pan, and flexed her fingers as they grew and her nails sharpened and lengthened, turning into claws the length of blades.

Her matronly hair shortened and spread, covering all visible skin with patches and tufts of coarse gray-black fur. Her nose flattened against her face, as her cheekbones pushed outwards, forming a dull snout. The color of her iris burst out of its borders and filled her sclera, twisting and swirling and darkening until her eyes were as black as pitch. A large, prehensile tail covered in long, puffed fur lashed around behind the creature, voicing displeasure by knocking over furniture and trash. A mutant squirrel.

Quinn fired once, twice, triple-tapping Funi in center mass, forcing her back with the sheer inertia of the hollow-points. The former old crone reared back as black ichor sprayed from the triangle of impact wounds. Law cursed and reached into her pocket, fishing out the magazine of banishment bullets as Funi recovered from her near fall and straightened back up, the dull copper rounds slowly pushed out by the pumping of ichor in her rotten heart.

The squirrel-monster leapt forward, and slashed down at Quinn, bringing down its claw like an executioner’s axe, tearing through Quinn’s blouse and biting into her arm. Quinn's wards flashed a blinding white, and—with a sound like a discordant violin note—broke, searing her arm and sending both women tumbling backwards. Funi shrieked as she held her smoking paw close to her chest, claws broken and burnt. “You bitch.”

Quinn let out a barely restrained shriek of pain, firing another triple burst into Funi before thumbing the magazine ejector and swapped the rounds, slamming the rack back into place. “Tell me what you traded with the Mafia, or I will put you down like a dog.”

The creature snarled, jagged yellow teeth glistening in the dim living room lights. “Never.” The guttural phrase was punctuated by another three shots. The silver bullets trailed white-hot tracers as they impacted the snout and jaw, burning through meat and bone as the blessed rounds detonated in miniature conflagrations of holy hellfire.

The monstrous squirrel screeched and clawed at the flames in its eyes, its jaw hanging at an odd angle. Quinn took the brief respite and dove behind the furniture, her right arm protesting with another shower of pain. She thought at first that the room spinning purely due to her injury, but quickly realized that the house was rotating on the w-axis, making new rooms and halls visible on the floor and ceiling, revealing labyrinthine passages deeper into the house, all filled with piles of garbage and collectibles. Quinn had to roll onto the back of the couch she had hidden behind as the floor suddenly became a wall, the living room becoming an M.C. Escher-styled chasm.

"You'll never get out of here alive, Agent Law." The scratching voice crowed. A stray thought bubbled through Quinn's mind—past the cacophony of pain from her lacerated arm—as she looked at the new twisting hallways that unscrolled in front of her, filled with garbage and chittering vermin. It’s a Rat’s Nest.

The squirrel had stopped yowling in pain and anger, and had gone silent. A skittering could be heard on Quinn’s left, as on a perpendicular kitchen—the dimensions of the house turning inside out and back again—Funi scampered across the kitchen tile, climbing the sheer, slick surface with ease. The squirrel's head twisted and rotated inhumanly on its neck to fix its gaze with Quinn’s, a predatory gleam spreading across its furred face. The monster squatted on its haunches, ready to leap across the distance between them.

Time seemed to slow as adrenaline siphoned from Quinn’s pineal gland with record speed. She had to make a plan. Regulation bullets didn’t seem to affect her, and banishment rounds barely slowed her down. What was she​? A demigod? A concept? Why wouldn’t she just die?

Her gaze flickered to all four corners, trying to find a way out of this mess she got into with zero back-up or notice—pretty much all her fault upon reflection. Just before the crone leapt across the gulf, Quinn’s eyes made contact with the ajar closet door.

As discussed previously, necromancers do not raise the dead, but commune with them. However, the manipulation of souls can be used for more than learning about dead letters. There are two main techniques used to reanimate the dead as pawns and chaff: the first —called by professionals “faux-necromancy”—is just animating bones and ordering them to walk around, like the brooms in Fantasia. It can be done by any thaumaturgy student with an abjuration major, albeit sloppily.

True "stage" necromancy, and in Quinn’s mind, the superior form, involves binding souls to an object, like a skeleton, and utilizing their innate EVE output and localized poltergeist field to power the working and movement instead of using your own reserves. Much more energy-efficient. Though that particular bonus was the last thing on Quinn’s mind as she holstered her pistol and summoned the horde, steam rising from her skin as her wound self-cauterized and sprouted wending citrus vines from the sheer energy of the working. The skirting boards buckled and the wall paper peeled from the temperature plunging to meat-locker levels, frozen mist collecting in the air as all of the heat in the room was redirected and transformed into binding energy.

The bones of the angry and the dead burst through the floorboards, out of the closet and from beneath piles of clutter on the floor and ceiling. Picked clean of flesh by rodent teeth, the pits of their eye-sockets glowered with dark, murderous, and infernal hate. Directed by their formless anger made real, they shambled, clambered, and piled on top of Funi from all directions and orientations, colliding with the squirrel mid-air and changing its trajectory to land painfully on the wall below.

Tax collectors, policemen, FBI agents, and regular street hoodlums were all present within the ranks of the legion, wearing tattered outfits in various states of decay. Noticeably, one leather-clad corpse still had its mummified pompadour intact, though the greaser was hardly recognizable with his nose bitten off and empty eye-sockets glowing with congealed ectoplasm. All people that crossed Funi and didn’t live to tell about it.

The old crone cackled then, an animalistic cry that raised the hairs on the back of Quinn’s neck. “You feds think you can kill me? I am Squirrel! I consumed the sun itself during eclipses, bringing darkness to the land! I broke into man's caches and ate all their foodstuffs, leaving them to starve in winter! I stole Bear’s tail, and kept it for myself! And you think the dead threaten me?”

She…

If she was a myth, then she has weaknesses, something obvious, archetypal. Predators? Cats? Fire? She couldn’t be put down by any modern machinery, something not accounted for in her legends and stories. Quinn’s eye was caught by the pots and pans scattered where they laid on the kitchen floor across the spatially twisted gap. Noise. Prey animals hate noise. Quinn put her back to the ground, ruffling through her many coat pockets—which as per UIU standard, were much deeper than a normal coat’s, reality-breakingly so. Finally, a misshapen brown spheroid emerged from a breast pocket, which Quinn clutched tightly as she muttered the activation phrase, modifying the wording for maximum output.

As Quinn watched, the sun-dried flesh of the shrunken head began to peel apart at the forehead, revealing a bloodshot, ice-blue eye. It glared reproachfully back at her, as if angry for its current employment. Quinn glanced down, and met eye-to-eye with Squirrel, who was brushing teeth and marrow off of its shredded cardigan. It was dispatching the undead horde with an infuriating ease, though the remaining murderous corpses didn’t seem to care for their fallen comrades as they continued to charge forward.

"Go get her, tiger," Quinn whispered to the harmonic grenade, dropping it over the couch, quickly plugging her ears and letting her jaw go slack. The head hit the wall below with the grace of a pack of burger meat and rolled to a stop facing Squirrel. The two stared at each other for a moment in bemusement, the baleful eye soaking in their essence. Squirrel didn’t know to back away, their whiskers and nose twitching at the new object, as its sewn lips tore apart at the seams and it screamed.

The scream was loud, obviously, but there was something else behind it, too. The sound almost had a physical texture to it, like the frequency almost made the air solid around itself, beating and tenderizing and vaporizing organics. Hidden behind cover and protected by wards, her jaw slack, Quinn still felt the pressure like iron bands around her ribs, her brain pulsating against her skull.

Being on the receiving end of the head at full volume emitting the brown note, pink note, and everything in-between, any normal creature would feel the pain as their organs hemorrhaged, eyes liquefied, and bones were shaken to powder. Squirrel wasn’t a normal creature, but they were at heart a squirrel, and startled like one, too.

Caught in the epicenter of the sonic blast, Squirrel's pupils shrunk to pinpricks, hackles raised, and they shrieked, though it was almost completely lost in the wake of the paint-stripping soundwave. Squirrel preternaturally bounded around the room, cursing in several different tongues as they bounced off the floor, ceiling, walls, before diving down a vertical hallway, and through the crack below a door, distorting its body to manage the feat.

With no hostiles in range, Squirrel gone and the skeletons shaken to dust, the harmonic grenade’s scream ended as quickly as it began, the eye retreating behind a veil of skin as the head slipped back into dormancy. Seemingly de-energized by Squirrel’s disappearance, the shifting, ever-changing rat’s nest of a house returned to its proper configuration as well. Quinn rolled painfully to the floor as proper gravity reasserted itself.

Quinn closed her jaw and swallowed, forcing her ears to pop painfully. Even behind cover, not directly in front of the head nor in its effective range, she still suffered from some after-effects as she stumbled to her feet. Cracked plaster and bone dust had fallen from the ceiling and walls from the shockwave, and she could hear the sounds of nearby car alarms. Quinn picked up the head and patted off the dusting of drywall before putting it back into her coat pocket. Her hair hung heavily from her head, the rain-soaked curls near flash-froze during the battle, and were just beginning to thaw.

The agent pulled the M1911 from its holster, comforted by the warm wards on its rigid grip. Her finger off the trigger, and barrel pointed up, she advanced on the bathroom door. With one hand on the pistol, the other on the door, she turned the knob and let the door swing open. She leveled her gun at whatever was inside.

Funi, the Black Squirrel—curled up in the bathtub—continued to yammer, this time in English. “Platonic silver, platonic silver! I traded with Spider for platonic silver! I found it at the roots of the world, and gambled with man as gaunt as death." The Black Squirrel shivered where it laid, a far cry from the towering monster mere moments before.

"What did you give her?"

"Traded the bars for a gem with Spider, in that chiffarobe.” It jutted its chin out the door and down the hall, towards a large oaken cabinet standing imposingly above the stacks of knick-knacks that were strewn about the house.

Quinn backed away from the squirrel, but didn’t lower her gun. She gestured with the barrel, and the Black Squirrel sullenly got to its feet. Their form subtly shifted and cracked as they limped down the hall, tufts of gray-black fur falling to the ground and snout rearranging into a mouth and nose, until Funi stopped in front of the large wardrobe. She looked tired, wobbling on her feet as if she was about to fall asleep standing up. Funi had most likely used up all of her energy for that burst of aggression, maybe a year’s worth of reserves. Centuries of disbelief would do that to any spirit, Quinn supposed.

Funi carelessly kicked over the stacks of newspapers and boxes in her way, scattering them to the ground, as she cleared the area. Funi then pulled a large keychain out of her cardigan pocket, packed with dozens of keys of different makes, models, and eras. From this keychain, her trembling fingers selected a key and unlocked the wardrobe, opening it up with a complaining deep-throated creak.

The spirit rustled among its shelves for a moment, before bringing something out, and kicking the wardrobe door shut. She tossed the object to Quinn, before shuffling over and collapsing into her floral-patterned love-seat.

With a glance at Funi, who quietly sipped her tea, Quinn holstered her pistol as to properly examine the object. A necklace with a simple leather cord, and a small pendant with a shimmering white glow. The pendant contained fractals, many hundreds of different reflecting planes, all glinting cold pinpricks of light. As Quinn tilted the pendant, she could see a changing roster of wrathful ethereal faces, staring out from within the pendant into Quinn’s soul. Her hand buzzed with power from just holding the crystal.

Pneumanite. Frozen breath of the dead. Ectoplasm made solid, containing the personality matrices of the spirits used in its creation. Very few examples still existed in the modern day, and were highly sought out by private collectors and necromancers alike. Fragile, but powerful occult focuses, many gemstones like this one—all larger—were made in the 40s, but they all imploded due to the sheer density of vengeful rage contained within the crystal. They were rare for a reason, as the murder required to create one was cost-prohibitive, and banned under the UN to boot.

“Fifty-five wretched souls, each guilty of five crimes,” Funi muttered from her love-seat.

Quinn was still inspecting the pneumanite pendant, a look of both horror and anger written across her face. “Is it home-made, or is it from a third party?”

“Made to order for a religious nut in Frisco, but the deal fell through after the Mafia created it.”

Quinn looked up. “How much for it?”

Funi scoffed, blowing smoke from a new cigarette sourced from her seemingly infinite supply. “It’s not for sale.”

“No, but what about barter?”

The hag turned to stare at Quinn, her flinty eyes glittering. She was seemingly re-energized by the offer, all remnants of hostility gone at the thought of trade. “What’s your deal?”

Quinn’s mouth twisted into a wry smile. “Don’t suppose I could sell my soul?”

Funi puffed an O-ring of smoke out the side of her mouth and snorted. “Nah, that’s taxable income. Your measly soul couldn’t pay for fifty-five of the same, anyhow.”

Quinn paused, and patted her pockets for something, anything, that she owned worth the lives of fifty people. She always over-prepared for cases, but most of her gear was loaded up in the rental, and Quinn didn’t want Funi to have second thoughts while she was rifling through the trunk.

As she searched her pockets, her hand brushed against the loose, thready hair of the harmonic grenade. No, that would just be an insult. Then, her fingers made contact with a waxy cylinder. Perfect.

“I may have something that might be of interest to you, Miss Funi,” Quinn withdrew from her pocket a candle made of an off-color wax, which emanated a sickly-sweet smell that was immediately recognizable to both Quinn and the crone. The base of the candle quickly followed, and was revealed to be a shriveled hand, dried and preserved, fingernails missing. Glyphs were inscribed in spirals around the fingers, which were dried into a claw-like shape. The candle was mounted on the palm, fused to the flesh by some arcane ritual, and was about as long as the hand’s index finger. The candle’s wick was unburnt. Quinn carefully placed the hand on the coffee table in front of Funi.

Funi nodded slowly, analyzing the hand with squinted eyes. With a look, and Quinn’s permissive gesture, Funi gently lifted it from the table, and checked the hand from every angle, sniffing the wax and poking the flesh, examining the lines of runes wrapped around its joints with the air of a seasoned appraiser.

She glanced at Quinn. “What’s its history?”

“This is a HoG-43, the model designed for World War II. Fashioned from the fat and the hand of the last man to be hanged in the territory of Hawaii in 1944. Old, but does its job well enough. Never been lit before, so you might get twenty minutes of use out of it. Collector’s item, worth more in mint.”

Hands of glory were not easy to come by, requiring the use of the hand of an executed man, preferably guilty. In a rare win for progress, their creation was banned after the Vietnam War, but America is nothing if not known for its military surplus. When lit, they allowed the user to pass undetected through hostile areas, the scent of the burning wick blocking certain neural pathways related to the senses. With the advent of CCTV and autonomous security drones, their use had since fallen out of fashion. But still, useful for a lone federal agent on a case. Or a fallen spirit on the run from the law.

Funi gingerly set the hand down. “I’ll take it.”

“Great.”

“But I also want your silence.”

“Don’t want me telling the feds your location?”

A smile bordering on a sneer. “Don’t want more dead cops filling up my closet.”

“Deal.”

Funi held out a hand. Quinn met it and gently shook, unsuccessfully preventing her arm from twinging with pain. Funi pulled Quinn close, whispering into her ear with a breath that stank of cigarettes and mold. “Many people have reneged on my deals, Agent Law. And they all lived just long enough to regret it.”

With that word of warning, and the pneumanite in her hand, Quinn was escorted to the door by Funi, who clasped the HoG between her bosom. The rain had let up, and the sun reflected off of the surfaces of a thousand dewdrops. The sky was clean and blue.

Quinn had just stepped onto the sidewalk when Funi called out to her. “Goodbye, Agent Law. I never want to see you again.” Punctuating her final words, the heavy door slammed shut, the deadbolts thrown into place.

Quinn was well on the highway before she dared to call SAC Carter. The phone only managed to ring once before his gravelly voice groaned from the speaker. “Tell me you found something.”

Quinn glanced at the pneumanite pendant, perched atop her folded jacket in the passenger seat, glinting in the afternoon sun. Her mouth was suddenly dry, and the back of her neck burned at the thought of the words upon her tongue. Did she actually curse me? Quinn didn’t know if she wanted the answer to that question, though it loomed large and dark in the back of her mind. The power of a wrathful mythotype, no matter how forgotten, was not something that even a combat wizard would dare to invoke.

“Quinn?”

She licked her dry lips before responding. “Yeah, yeah. Just an abandoned safe house, looked like they cleared it out before I got there.”

“Damn it all.” Quinn could tell that Carter was holding back some other choice words.

“Found a lead, though. Another contact found that the Mafia managed to purchase some ingots of platonic silver.”

Carter sucked air between his teeth, the sound crackling over the line. “That’s really fucking bad. I’ll get some boys to dig up some references on it, maybe a few relevant rituals and rites. You’re on the ball, Law.”

“Thanks, Carter. I’ve already got a few more leads up in Tennessee, I’m going to head towards those before my next check-in.”

Quinn hung up, and with a sigh dropped the phone into the center console, keeping her eyes on the road. Ghostly voices, that had stayed on the periphery of her senses during the conversation, crept in to fill the silence, their intonations brimming with barely concealed spite and malcontent. Her eyes darted to the pendant, and she could feel the pinpricks of eyes staring at her from within their fractal planes. That, and the possibility of a curse looming over her head.

She turned on the radio to thwart the voices, a twanging banjo forcing them into the background, but they were still present. Quinn didn’t think she would get a good night’s sleep for a while.

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