Splintered

Book 2: An Arcane Underworld Novel

by Jamie Schultz

Genres: Fantasy; Urban Fantasy; Horror

Synopsis

“Like a cross between the TV show Leverage and Jim Butcher’s ‘Dresden Files’ books.”—Library Journal
The author of Premonitions continues his Arcane Underworld saga...
Anna Ruiz is on a mission: Help her friend and partner-in-crime Karyn Ames break free of the tangle of hallucinations and premonitions that have cut her off from reality. With the aid of her crew—ex-soldier Nail and sorcerer Genevieve—she’ll do whatever it takes to get Karyn help, even if it means tracking down every lowlife informant and back alley magic practitioner in the occult underworld of Los Angeles.
But since a magical heist went to hell, the crew has been working for crimelord and doomed magus Enoch Sobell. Between fighting Sobell’s battles with some seriously scary demonic forces and tangling with a group of violent fanatics who want to manipulate Karyn’s abilities for their own gains, Anna, Nail, and Genevieve are beginning to realize they’re in way over their heads.
And now that Karyn’s secret about seeing the future is out, even more unpleasant parties—human and otherwise—are about to come knocking…
"Jamie Schultz breathes new life into the urban fantasy genre." (Fresh Fiction)

Release date: July 7, 2015

Publisher: Ace

Print pages: 352

Sample

PRAISE FOR PREMONITIONS

Also by Jamie Schultz

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Chapter 1

“I hate this,” Anna said. She twisted her body to look out the back window of the parked car. Street mostly dark, nobody moving. A pair of headlights swung by and vanished as somebody made a wrong turn onto the street and then turned right back around. “I hate every damn thing about it.”

Nail didn’t say anything from the driver’s seat, but he scowled. She heard the sandpapery sound as he ran a hand over his shaved head, and she could feel the annoyance radiating from him. It wasn’t hard to imagine what he was thinking. Something along the lines of I heard you the first six times. She turned to face forward again, held still for almost ten seconds, and then started monkeying around with the car’s side mirror. She caught a glimpse of the side of Genevieve’s face, watching out the window from the seat behind her, just a line highlighting the profile of her cheek and a small arc of metal gleaming above the shadow of her eye socket.

“What time you got?” she asked.

Nail made a slight, skeptical smile and raised his eyebrows. “One forty.” A long pause, and then, with a smirk playing around the corners of his mouth: “One forty-one.”

“Not funny.”

“The hell it ain’t. I never seen you with nerves like this.”

“I never fuckin’ kidnapped nobody before, neither.”

He shrugged. She wasn’t sure if he was conceding the point or indicating that it wasn’t really a big deal. You think you know a guy . . .

He was right, though. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been so jittery. Ten years, maybe, back when she and Karyn had first gotten into their bizarre line of work, swiping items of usually dubious occult value from their so-called rightful owners. Maybe the first job, the first time she’d found herself standing in a stranger’s house at night, wondering, hey, what if they were actually home? And armed? Maybe not even then. Her heart raced like she’d downed a pot of coffee, and the acid- burning sensation in her gut wasn’t too dissimilar, either.

The fatigue wasn’t helping. She hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in weeks, not since the disaster at Enoch Sobell’s office after the last job. There had been a showdown—gunfire and magic, a demonic creature summoned by the cult known as the Brotherhood of Zagam, and once the bodies had been cleared away, Anna’s little four-person crew found itself in a sort of indentured servitude to Sobell.

And Karyn, Anna’s friend and partner-in-crime for over a decade, had been put out of commission, wandering her weird interior world of visions from displaced times.

Helping Karyn, however she could, was job one, but Sobell’s demands never stopped, and Anna was in no place to tell him to go fuck himself. But the current mission had now dragged on for weeks, diverting attention from Anna’s real job. She just wanted to get it over with, however horrible it was.

“Van Horn’s taking his time,” Anna said.

Nail nodded. “Yeah.”

She checked the side mirror. Still nothing. No movement of any kind. There was an empty lot, overgrown with high weeds and strewn with bricks and other construction debris. Then a body shop, closed down with metal shutters at this time of night. Past that, Bobby Chu’s party shack, a big metal building that pulsed with bass. Lights flashed through the seams, extending multicolored fingers out through the windows of the cars that crowded around.

“What’s he doing here?” Anna asked.

“Depends what he needs, I guess,” Nail said.

“I guess.” Still, it wasn’t quite in pattern. They’d found Van Horn and his creepy entourage three nights ago, and this was by far the lowest the group had crawled down the socioeconomic ladder. The last few nights, Van Horn had been visiting well-off criminals who were plugged into the occult underworld in some way or other—one of them had, in fact, given Sobell the tip that had led the crew to Van Horn. Bobby was plugged in, but not with the grade of crook that Van Horn or Sobell trafficked with. More like the kind of scum that grew on the rocks at the bottom of the lake.

I hate this, Anna thought, again, but at least this time she kept herself from singing that refrain aloud and aggravating Nail and Gen with it once more. Bad enough that Sobell had them doing every odd shit job under the sun, but it was escalating. She’d thought she’d drawn a sharp line when he told her to act as a bagman—just this one time, and then it’s back to business as usual, she’d said, her voice stripped down to a cold steel edge. He’d pretended to hear, or maybe she’d read agreement where none had existed, and then sent her out again the following week. The week after that, it had been another “pickup job,” except she knew it wasn’t, not really, not when Sobell had said, “Far be it from me to instruct you in the finer points of your business, but I strongly suggest you bring that big fellow, Nail, along. For the ride, as it were.” And the pickup job had turned into a beatdown when Ernesto “Spaz” Rivera chose to live up to his nickname. He’d been short on the cash, but rather than talk it out he’d gone for intimidation, which rapidly turned into violence. Nail hadn’t actually been necessary. Pepper spray, it turned out, was more than adequate for the likes of Spaz Rivera. That wasn’t the last beatdown, either, and there had been a couple of other unsavory demands sprinkled in as well. It had barely come as a shock when Sobell upped the stakes to kidnapping.

“I shoulda told him to fuck right off,” Anna muttered.

“Who the hell are they?” Nail said. Anna followed his pointing finger to the barrels and tubs stacked against the side of the body shop. “I don’t . . . huh.” No, there was somebody there. Hard to see in the shadows thrown by the streetlight, but there were at least a couple of people lurking among the trash. As she watched, one peeked around the corner at Bobby’s place.

“Here comes Van Horn,” Genevieve said.

Anna checked the side mirror. Van Horn and his crew were leaving Bobby’s place, throwing long dancing shadows as, bizarrely, they jumped and spun and collided with one another. Somebody fell down hard, and the first sounds of the group reached the car—laughter, high and hysterical. Seconds later, the whole group erupted in the same sort of frenetic, desperate laughter as well, making an eerie chorus that grabbed Anna’s spine at the base and twisted.

There was a ripple of motion to Anna’s left as Nail actually shuddered.

“You okay, tough guy?” Genevieve asked.

He nodded. Anna studied his face for a moment, then slid down in her seat and resumed watching the mirror. It looked like the same drill out there as the last several nights. Van Horn walked in the middle, head down, fedora pulled low, hands in the pockets of his pin-striped slacks. He wasn’t close enough for her to see his face or hear him well, but if the past nights were representative, he was either grinning like a fool or whistling an eerie music-box-sounding tune. Around him, a shifting, spinning cloud of chaos. Maybe half a dozen men and half a dozen women, and a more motley assortment couldn’t easily be imagined. Two of them looked like Genevieve’s crowd—lots of black, trench coats despite the scorching heat of August in Los Angeles, and lots of piercings. The others, not so much. There was a skinny black kid in a basketball jersey. An old white guy with a mustache, wearing a black suit. He’d look like a slimeball attorney, if only he weren’t capering and shouting and stumbling down the street without any shoes on. A twentysomething hippie in what appeared to be a tie-dyed muumuu, tossing invisible handfuls of something at the group and laughing.

It looked as though the membership had dwindled again. Seemed that every day, one or two of Van Horn’s entourage disappeared. There had been fifteen or so to start with. Genevieve had joked that maybe the missing ones had been eaten by the others, and nobody had laughed. Anna had wondered if she and the crew could just wait until nobody was left and Van Horn was alone, but she eventually decided there was no guarantee that would ever happen, and Sobell was not a terribly patient man.

The mob got closer, and the shouting got louder, and Anna slid farther down into her seat. Even Nail did his level best to make himself small. They hadn’t been noticed before, but Anna couldn’t help feeling that, if Van Horn’s deranged entourage ever did pay them any attention, a bad scene would follow.

In the mirror, Anna saw the lawyer stop. He weaved unsteadily on his feet, waved his hands in the air, then pointed at a trash bin that had fallen over in the mouth of an alley.

The trash ignited.

“Oh, shit,” Genevieve said.

Van Horn spun on the lawyer and, in a sudden move totally unlike the easygoing, down-on-his-luck businessman he’d seemed to Anna all week, clouted the other man viciously on the side of the head, shouting something Anna couldn’t make out. The lawyer rocked, then fell back, tensed and half crouched, and Anna could have sworn he was about to spring on Van Horn. She had the sudden crazy impression the man was about to attack Van Horn with his teeth, and then the rest of the entourage formed up, standing to Van Horn’s left and right. The lawyer’s body went limp, submissive, all trace of a fight gone. He laughed. Even from here, Anna could tell he was playing it off like a joke. Hey, sorry, man. Just got carried away. That kind of thing.

Van Horn’s entourage wasn’t placated. They began spreading in a semicircle around the lawyer.

“They’re gonna kill him,” Genevieve whispered.

Anna thought she was right. The hippie chick’s face was contorted in a crazy sort of zeal that was visible even from here, eyes avid and gleaming with red and blue light from the party shack, and the Goth kids had curled their hands into fists. No, not fists, but claws. A brief crazy thought ran through her mind. Call 911. The lawyer was undoubtedly an asshole, but he didn’t deserve this. Whatever was about to happen, it was going to be awful.

The lawyer evidently reached the same conclusion. His strength deserted him, and his legs gave out. He fell to the asphalt.

The semicircle closed around him. Anna stopped breathing, her chest locked tight in horrified anticipation. It didn’t matter if she called 911 or not. Nobody could get here in time. And yeah, she was armed, but the guy about to get himself killed had started a fire in a trash can from forty feet away. Who knew what the others were capable of?

The whole group paused, coiling to launch themselves on the prone lawyer, and then Van Horn stepped inside the circle and extended a hand to the man. The others held where they were, seeming to tremble with the strain of it.

Sudden movement pulled Anna’s attention from the reconciliation as the guys behind the body shop stepped out. There were four that Anna could see. Before she could say anything, they opened fire.

The man—kid, really, one of the Goths—on Van Horn’s left went down first, shot in the back. The others dropped to the pavement, spreading out and staying low behind the row of cars. One of them began laughing hysterically.

Another barrage of shots sounded. They went wild, shattering glass and punching holes in car doors, but if they hit anybody, Anna couldn’t tell.

The remaining Goth kid stood. A blade shone under the light, and he slashed it down his palm. Sparks flew as a bullet spanged off the car in front of him.

He flicked his hand at one of the shooters. Drops of blood flew from his fingertips, and the man was flung backward, slamming into a pile of fenders. Nearby, another barrel went up in flames. The kid in the basketball jersey uttered some strange words and tore a piece of paper in half, and a shower of rocks skittered across the sidewalk and pounded into the group’s attackers.

“Go!” Van Horn said.

Anna thought it was a sign to run, but it turned out to be anything but—the mob of ten or eleven stormed over and around the cars, charging the group by the body shop. After that, confusion in the darkness. There was noise and shouting, the sound of running feet.

Less than a minute later, Van Horn and his entourage emerged. They scurried for a van and a busted-looking old station wagon, got in among shouts and crazed laughter, and a few moments later, pulled out.

They left the Goth kid’s body in the street.

“Follow them,” Anna said.

Nail started the car. “Ain’t gotta ask twice.”

Van Horn and his entourage drove an erratic, circuitous route, probably assuming somebody was following them at this point, but they ended up back at the same place they’d ended up the last couple of nights—an abandoned meatpacking plant at the end of a very quiet tenement block. Nail pulled the car up a short way at the other end of the street and watched them get out and then file into the building.

He turned off the car and killed the lights. The three of them waited wordlessly in the vehicle. An hour passed. Anna played with the button on the glove compartment and wished for a cigarette. Nobody else showed up, and nobody came out of the building.

“Where’s that leave us?” Genevieve asked finally.

Nail grunted. “Same as before. He doesn’t go out alone, he doesn’t stay in alone. Either we grab him on the street and risk being killed or seen, or we go in.”

“And just risk being killed.”

“Any idea who those other guys were?” Anna asked. “Seems like we aren’t the only ones gunning for him. Sobell got somebody else on this, you think?”

“Doubt it,” Nail said. “Not if he’s so concerned about taking him alive. Which probably means we got even less time than we thought.”

“We scope the place tomorrow, then,” Anna said. “When they’re out doing . . . whatever.”

It was action, anyway. Motion in some direction. That didn’t make her feel any better.

*   *   *

Anna jolted awake, heart pounding and breath coming panicky and shallow, but Genevieve was there, close, hand on her shoulder, hip touching her hip. Ready with soothing words in the darkness. “It’s all right; it’s okay. Shhh. It’s just a bad dream.”

“Jesus Christ,” Anna said. She sat up and pushed the blanket away. Her T-shirt was glued to her body with sweat, her hair greasy and gross and hanging down in her eyes in wet tangles. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

“It’ll be all right,” Genevieve said. She moved her hand to the back of Anna’s neck, kneading as though pushing on the flesh would somehow purge the fear. “Really.”

“What time is it?”

“I don’t know. Four or five in the morning, I guess.”

So she’d gotten, what? An hour of sleep? Two? This was exhausting. “Did I scream?”

A pause. “Only a little.”

Anna grunted with disgust. She brushed the hair away from her face and stared into the blackness of the room. The room was entirely dark, and she figured that was just as well. The cinder block walls were oppressive, and she was convinced the pile of debris in the corner concealed a nest of wriggling, squirming creatures of some kind. Better not to see it . . . though now that she was listening, was there movement over there? A tiny piece of plasterboard sliding down the pile as some creeping creature pushed its nose out of its den?

You’re imagining that, she thought, but she grabbed for her phone anyway and flipped on the light.

Genevieve held up an arm, squinting. “A little warning would’ve been nice.” She looked worn down, too, in disturbing contrast to her usual energy. Genevieve had two arms tattooed in full, colorful sleeves, a shock of pink hair at the base of which blond roots had begun to show, over a dozen piercings in her ears and more in her tongue, lips, eyebrows, and nose, and she had an upbeat swagger about her that seemed impenetrable most of the time. Not tonight, though—she was peevish and tired, like Anna. Couldn’t really blame her.

Anna turned the phone so that it threw its fragile, diffuse beam of light toward the pile of stuff in the corner. Nothing moved. She swept the light around the room. A backpack and some basic camping equipment lay over by the wall. Near Genevieve’s sleeping bag, a stack of Genevieve’s paperwork—occult stuff, notes and fragile old documents covered in cryptic scrawling. Anna found that stuff almost as creepy as the pile in the corner, but in the circles they traveled, having somebody with a little occult know-how was as necessary as lockpicks and police scanners, and Genevieve was among the best Anna had worked with.

She moved the light back to the pile in the corner. Still nothing moving, and she wondered if that was because there was really nothing in there after all or because it was too smart to move in the light.

“We’re getting that cleaned out of here in the morning,” she said.

Genevieve nodded. “Same dream?”

“Same kind of dream.” Bang bang bang bang. Four shots, four holes in a human being. Another night spent reliving the clusterfuck at Sobell’s. She’d killed a man there, or what was left of one, before the bony horror the cult had summoned up tore itself loose from the guy’s carcass and attacked. The dreams were jumbled, fragmentary, and Anna no longer had a clear memory of what she’d seen and what her mind had reconstructed for her. She’d emptied an entire magazine into the bad guys; she was pretty sure that had happened. Adelaide had been there. She was definite on that. Hadn’t seen her since, which was a major fucking problem, since Adelaide was the only one who knew how to brew or conjure up the stuff Karyn called blind, the stuff that blunted her visions and kept her most of the way in the real world. In the dream, Karyn shoved Genevieve away from the business end of a shotgun just before it went off. In the dream, the blast caught Adelaide full in the face, turning her head into red mush and fragments. It hadn’t gone down quite like that in real life—Adelaide had survived, taking a few pellets instead of the whole blast—but it might as well have. Adelaide was gone, and Karyn was physically present but mentally in another time entirely, farther from Anna than if she’d been across the continent.

Now every time Anna got a few hours in the rack, instead of a stretch of blissful oblivion, she got to relive that night’s violence over and over. Nobody had ever told her that the hangover off an ugly adrenaline high like that could last for weeks. Or months. There had been tough guys on the street where she grew up, before she ended up a ward of the state, hard-core gangbangers who claimed to have killed a dozen motherfuckers each. Maybe some of them had. They sure didn’t act as though they’d lost any sleep over it. Maybe that was just bluster. Maybe they were wired differently.

Maybe I should just go ask them.

Genevieve tried to pull her close, but Anna held up a hand. “I’m just gonna get up,” she said.

“Come on, it’s late.”

“And I’m done sleeping. I keep seeing his face. Its face. Both of them.”

“Anna, he was a monster. It was a matter of survival.”

“I don’t feel guilty,” Anna said. “I just feel bad.”

Genevieve nodded, but it seemed perfunctory. That’s what you did with the traumatized woman, right? You agreed with her, even if you didn’t have the faintest clue what she was talking about. Genevieve’s heart was in the right place, she supposed, but it was still all so tiring.

“I’m gonna get up.” Anna stood up. No need to get dressed—they were all sleeping in their clothes anyway, awaiting the moment when everybody had to suddenly get up and run to meet Sobell, fend off a small army of Van Horn’s deranged entourage, or deal with whatever other nasty surprise turned up. Maybe she didn’t smell the freshest, but she wouldn’t get shot trying to put on her pants, either.

“Want some company?”

“No. Thanks anyway.” She bent down and kissed Genevieve on the corner of her mouth.

Concern warred briefly with exhaustion on Genevieve’s face before conceding defeat. Genevieve lay back on the bedroll the two of them shared and exhaled heavily. “Okay.”

Anna pulled on her beat-up old jean jacket and left the room. The main space outside, where most of the interior walls had been torn down, was dark. Just enough of the city light made its way through the broken-out windows and holes in the walls to reflect off the moldering piles of sheetrock and make the path visible. The building they were squatting in was an abandoned elementary school, half-collapsed and full of debris. As bad as Anna felt, the building made it worse. The place was familiar in layout, but disturbing and alien at the same time. She hadn’t gone to school here, but schools were all the same, and hanging out in this place felt like walking through the bombed-out ruin of her childhood. She would have thought she’d feel some kind of smug satisfaction at that—her childhood had been no great shakes—but no. Instead, it was more a reminder that everything went to shit in time, as though she needed a reminder.

She knew why they were there. She got the logic of it. They were about to orchestrate a kidnapping, and you didn’t want to haul the guy you’d kidnapped back to your apartment, after all. It still sucked.

Anna took the path around a pile of construction debris to the next room over in the row. Like most of the rooms, it hadn’t had a door when the crew moved in. Unlike with all the other rooms but one, they’d put a door on it right away. This one was a sloppy construction of three-quarter-inch plywood with some hinges Genevieve had scrounged up from somewhere. The other was somewhat sturdier.

Using the light from her phone again, Anna found the bar that held the makeshift door shut and slid it out. The plywood’s slight bow sprang back, pushing the door open for her.

Karyn was inside. Awake, unfortunately, and sitting in the corner with her knees pulled up to her chest. Her eyes didn’t move toward Anna, didn’t register her presence at all, even though the pupils dialed down to tiny dots as Anna moved the light over her. She was seeing another time, Anna knew, or more likely an amalgam of dozens or hundreds. Waking nightmares.

This was what Karyn had been most afraid of, back when Anna first met her. Not of going crazy, but of losing her mind in a more literal sense. The distinction was probably moot anyway. The effect was the same.

“How are you feeling?” Anna asked. She always did. Always said something. Karyn seemed to understand fragments of it sometimes, and Anna figured she must be awfully lonely in there.

If Karyn got any of it this time, she made no answer. She pulled her ponytail holder loose from her brown hair and retied it, seemingly apropos of nothing. The faint, permanent lines of anxiety in her forehead seemed deeper than usual, but that might just have been Anna, projecting her own fatigue on everything around her.

“I’ll find you,” Anna said. “I’ll bring you back. Just hang tight.” She waited a few minutes, hoping maybe Karyn would catch sight of her and say something. When Karyn remained silent, she left, barring the door once more.

“You’re up early,” Nail said. He sat in front of the door to the next room over, back braced against the cinder block wall. From here he was little more than a low, lumpy silhouette. If not for the orange ember of the end of his cigarette, she might not have seen him at all.

She walked over and sat next to him. He was a big guy, ex-military, still carrying most of the muscle, but she wondered if he was wearing down, too. He seemed squared away most of the time, though—boots polished, shirt tucked into his fatigue pants, clean-shaven every single day. “Any trouble?”

“Nah. Night’s pretty calm.”

“Wish I felt the same.”

Nail took a drag from his cigarette and offered it to her. She followed suit, watching the end flare up in the darkness.

“Can’t sleep?” he asked.

“What was your first clue?’

He tapped his forehead with his index finger. “Can’t hide nothin’ from me.”

She inhaled again, burning down a third of Nail’s cigarette in one long drag. Genevieve would give her a hard time, if she saw her now. I thought you quit, she’d say, frowning. No, Anna thought, suddenly confused. Karyn would do that. Gen never knew me when I smoked.

“You ever kill anyone?” she asked.

Nail took the cigarette back. Another brief orange flare as he inhaled. “Yeah.”

No surprise there. A guy didn’t tour Iraq with Marines First Recon to tickle people. She was surprised at his tone, though. Less matter-of-fact than she’d expected, a little heavier. Or maybe she was reading too much into it.

“It bother you?”

He flicked an ember onto the concrete floor. It fragmented, sending up a tiny shower of sparks. “Depends what you mean by that.”

She wished she could read his face, but there wasn’t enough light. “Like, you know. Insomnia.”

“Bad dreams.”

“Yeah.”

He turned his head to look toward her. She wondered if he could see anything more than she could. Maybe it was because he couldn’t that he continued.

“First guy I ever killed was because my brother’s a fuckin’ idiot,” he said. Not what she’d expected, though by all accounts his brother was, in fact, a fuckin’ idiot. “You know, he was in college? UCLA, where Dad worked maintenance. He woulda been the first on that side of the family to finish, if he’da finished.”

Anna waited while Nail seemed to collect himself. She remembered his brother, DeWayne. They’d met, briefly, during the first job Nail had ever worked with her and Karyn. Nail’s whole share of the take, or as near as made no difference, had gone to bailing DeWayne out of the kind of jam that usually ended with a body in a Dumpster or behind a warehouse somewhere. A whole lot of Nail’s money went down that hole, she thought, though she never asked about it.

“Trouble with DeWayne,” Nail continued, “is that he got more brains than sense. Everybody knows he got no sense. Always running some clever scam, always thinks he’s got the angles figured . . .

“He started running sports book his second semester at college. He’d made a little pile of cash his first semester betting on that kind of shit, and he thought he’d make a whole lot more if he set himself up as the house, you know? Thing is, it took off. Started with a few guys he knew, and then a couple guys at one of the frats wanted in, and they told their friends, and so on. Before too long, there’s thousands of dollars changing hands, I shit you not, and he’s takin’ his ten percent off the top. But that ain’t quite good enough. DeWayne, he’s figured all the angles, decides that the Badgers are a lock for the fuckin’ Rose Bowl or some shit, so he takes the money he’s supposed to be sitting on to pay the winners and he bets it himself.”

“Ouch,” Anna said. “He lost it, huh?”

“No, he won. Stuck his neck way out on the chopping block with other people’s money, and for a goddamn miracle, he didn’t get his head cut off. Won something like thirty grand.”

“I don’t get it.”

“DeWayne’s the kind of guy—let’s just say he’s got a knack for turning gold to shit. If everybody’s got one God-given talent, that’s his. The bet wasn’t the problem.