Premonitions

by Jamie Schultz

  You are the architect of my imprisonment, then.

  The mouth didn’t move, exactly, but it didn’t not move either, simply suggesting movement in a manner that was one of the most unsettling things Sobell had seen in a long life of unsettling things.

  “Architect of your imprisonment? That’s not bad. Style’s a shade overblown, perhaps, but I think I might keep the phrase around for later use. If you don’t mind.” He straightened his suit jacket. His pulse was pounding so hard he could hear it in his ears, and it helped to concentrate on something mundane for a moment.

  I have nothing for you.

  “A blatant untruth, as it happens. As you can probably tell at a glance, I am a man with rapidly dwindling prospects for continued existence on this plane.”

  You’re dying.

  “If you must be crude, yes. And, as you can also probably tell, when I snuff it, I will be tipped rather unceremoniously into the basement furnace, so to speak, having done my soul a fair amount of damage by dabbling in what the uncultured so stubbornly refer to as witchcraft.”

  I have nothing for you.

  Not the sharpest conversationalist, but the force of its presence—and that disturbing moving/not moving trick—made Sobell feel like he was losing the argument anyway. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in that position.

  “Of course you do. As it happens, I need some of your blood.”

  A pause, and a real motion this time. The being’s head cocked slightly, and the features gave an impression of simultaneous disdain and unwitting curiosity.

  I do not bleed.

  Again, the words were delivered with such power that for a moment Sobell doubted himself. For one instant he thought, Shit, of course it doesn’t. I should just leave. This was foolish. But he seized control of himself and forced a smile.

  He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a cross-shaped object, dull in the silver light from the creature, one end wrapped in a heavily warded black leather sheath. Sobell grasped the hilt and pulled the sheath away, revealing a rust-pitted length of scrap metal that had broken off about six inches above the crossguard.

  The scion’s blade.

  “St. George’s sword. It doesn’t look like much, but I’ve seen it cut through two inches of solid steel in a single swipe, and I’m told it’ll do for you as well.”

  I bleed for no one.

  “Now, see, this is progress. A minute ago, you didn’t bleed at all. Let’s be reasonable about this. I need, say, a couple tablespoons of your blood—basically as currency, to treat with a rather stubborn sort of creature who can help me with my problem. You give me the blood and your word that neither you nor yours will seek any vengeance, and I’ll let you walk out of here with little more than a paper cut to show for it.”

  The being seemed to grow, looming over him and filling the small room with blinding light. Sobell squinted. Sweat popped out in beads all over his forehead.

  “Parlor tricks aren’t going to get you anywhere,” he said, more firmly than he felt. “You and I both know your balls are clipped in here.” Unless I fucked up, he thought, and he jammed the treacherous thought back down as hard as he could.

  The creature was ten feet tall now, nearly touching the ceiling—a neat trick, given that Sobell was pretty sure the room had an eight-foot ceiling to begin with.

  I will swear no such thing.

  “It’s you or me, my friend, and I’m simply not going down that easy.”

  Lay a finger on me, and you will be cursed, your soul shriven, your fortunes driven to ruin, your line doomed to produce the misshapen and monstrous until—

  Sobell swung the fragment of sword. It was an awkward swing—he wasn’t practiced in swordsmanship, and the balance of the broken sword was pretty terrible besides—but that didn’t matter. The creature’s flesh parted like paper where the weapon touched it. Sobell sliced it from the left shoulder down through the torso, meeting no more resistance than if he’d been swinging the sword in an empty room, and shining light leaped forth.

  The creature didn’t even scream. It fell back against the wall and slumped, sliding to the floor as far as its shackles would allow. Blazing light from its chest scoured the room.

  Sobell held up an arm to shield his face, produced a small vial, and edged in next to the corpse. He held the vial to the creature’s body, and was momentarily nonplussed when he realized there was no liquid coming from the wound. It really doesn’t bleed—oh. Maybe it didn’t bleed liquid, but the light itself was pooling somehow in the vial. That should do nicely.

  He filled the vial and was ready to leave, when an awful thought occurred to him.

  “I’m going to Hell for this,” he said, and he gave a grim laugh. Then he readied the sword and started cutting.

  A few minutes later, he emerged from the room. His suit jacket was in one hand, wrapped in a tight bundle. Fierce white light leaked from the seams.

  Gresser looked at the bundle with badly disguised alarm. “Get everything you need?”

  “Yes. Burn this building down. Then go through the ashes and burn them.”

  Gresser nodded. The two men walked rapidly away from the little room. Sobell could hardly stop himself from running, could barely keep from looking back.

  Gresser paused at the door to the outside. He wore a pained expression, and Sobell could tell that he was forcing his words out not because he wanted to but because he felt driven to. That wasn’t a natural state for Mr. Joseph Gresser—he asked questions only when he really needed to know something. “Was that thing really an angel?”

  “You mean like in a theological sense?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who the fuck cares?” Sobell jammed his trembling hand in his pocket and walked outside.

  Chapter 5

  “Let me get this straight,” Anna said. “He wants us to steal a piece of a god.” It had been a long time since she’d gotten such a bad vibe off a job, and this was not helping.

  Nail nodded. “Sounds like it.”

  “It’s not a god.” All eyes turned to Tommy. “What? It’s not. I mean, I’m pretty sure.”

  Anna folded her arms. The four thieves sat in the living room of the house Tommy lived in, shrouded in the thin tatters of gray light that managed to make their way past the perpetually closed blinds. Dust swam in the air. The whole place made Anna’s skin itch every time she came in, and she had no idea whether that was from the general uncleanliness or because the basement she was standing over creeped her out so badly. The things Tommy did were damn handy, but there was a nasty stink about them. You had to wonder about any kind of work that needed so much blood, and maybe you had to wonder a little bit about the kind of man doing it, too. Tommy was a good guy, trustworthy and reliable, but she’d walked in on him gutting a cat one time, and you didn’t forget that sort of thing real soon. Tommy swore it was a spell of some kind, something that had to do with divining the future, but all Anna knew was that it was gross, and that the cat had still been weakly mewling when she came in.

  “Look, the Brotherhood of Zagam is just a low-rent cult,” Tommy said, waving a hand at the papers and photos spread out on the table. “Maybe a medium-rent cult. But they don’t have a line on a god, or even a piece of one. Believe me.”

  “They’d better have a line on something,” Anna said. “Because I get the impression Enoch Sobell is smart enough not to pay a couple million dollars for a bone with a few stars painted on it.”

  Nail frowned. “Could be a bunch of things.” He ticked them off on the fingers of his left hand. “A fake. Some kind of weird-ass heirloom. Some other kind of magic bullshit. Or a piece of a god.”

  “Not a god,” Tommy said again. “A demon, if anything.”

  Nail pushed his chair back, leaning dangerously. “I don’t believe this shit.”

  Tommy
grinned. “Fucking skeptics, man. Which shit, exactly, do you not believe?”

  “Who’s skeptical? I don’t care if it’s the pope’s goddamn hat or if it will give you a bad case of the clap on sight. I don’t see what we’re arguing about. Two million is two million.”

  Anna glanced toward Karyn, who was listening without saying anything. Typical. If she hadn’t gotten signs from beyond—or wherever—that the gig was an outright bad idea, Karyn usually sat back and let them decide. No help there.

  That left it up to Anna. “All right. Start with the easy stuff. What is the Brotherhood of Zagam?”

  Tommy sighed. “Like I said, they’re a cut-rate cult. They claim deceit is the cornerstone of human civilization and worship a thing—”

  “A god,” Nail interjected.

  “—a demon called Zagam. I’ve seen the name dropped here and there in some of the literature. As reliable as that shit usually is,” he added with a shrug and a wry smile. “Depending what medieval crackhead authority you believe, Zagam is the demon of deceit.”

  Nail, unable to hide the grin that said he was now openly enjoying fucking with Tommy, raised a hand. “Wouldn’t that be Satan? Prince of lies and all that?”

  “How the hell should I know? Demon hierarchies are like the family trees of inbred seventeenth-century aristocrats. Not to mention they all contradict each other.”

  “That’s great,” Nail said, rolling his head around his shoulders as if he were warming up for a prize fight. “Two million dollars. For taking a jawbone off some backwoods motherfuckers who think they broke a piece off the devil. Sign me the fuck up.”

  Karyn stirred, and Anna felt everyone in the room pause before she spoke. That pause, it seemed, could have gone on for minutes before anybody interrupted it. Even Nail held still. “What’s it do?” Karyn asked.

  Tommy bit his lip and squinched up his face. “Um . . .”

  “Cures constipation,” Nail said, before Tommy could answer.

  “Ah . . .”

  “Guarantees you a parking space downtown.”

  “Well . . .”

  “Actually, it’s cursed—it’ll give you venereal warts.”

  “Only if you rub it on your crotch, dickhead,” Tommy finally managed. He punched Nail on the shoulder, then shook his head. “I don’t have a clue, actually. Not a clue.”

  “It makes two million dollars appear,” Nail said. “I say we do it.”

  Tommy nodded. “Yeah.”

  Anna studied each of them in turn. This wasn’t a democracy, exactly, but nobody had to participate. So far, they’d been all in or all out as a group—either a job looked good, or something about it smelled so bad that nobody wanted a piece of it. Or Karyn killed it before they even had the discussion. Anna wished she knew what was making her uneasy about this job, wished she could just let it go and get down to business. Probably just the money. It’s a lot of money.

  She glanced at Karyn again. Common sense told her this job was more than they could handle, or maybe just more than she wanted to get into, but the intense look on Karyn’s face was tough to deny. You can walk away from half a million dollars, she’d said, and while that stung, it was true. That money meant a lot to Karyn. Anna’d been with her at the beginning, and during the few times they’d run too short on cash to pick up more blind, and it had been some scary shit every time. Karyn came wholly unmoored from reality, a ship drifting on imaginary seas, and watching her react to the invisible things she saw in the world around her filled Anna with sick horror. She couldn’t imagine what that was like, and couldn’t dream of turning Karyn over to that fate. Had, in fact, done a few very desperate things to help Karyn out of those situations in the past.

  No, she couldn’t deny Karyn this on a gut feeling. She nodded.

  Everybody looked to Karyn. Karyn looked right back, and it seemed to Anna that she lingered a long time on Tommy’s face, searching for something.

  “All right,” Karyn said. “Let’s line it up.”

  * * *

  “I hate this,” Anna said. “This isn’t how we do business.”

  Tommy glanced at her sidelong, his eyes darting briefly away from the spot just ahead of his feet he’d been inspecting so carefully since they got the news. “I said I’m sorry, OK?”

  “Not your fault,” Karyn said. “I get the feeling we’d be saddled with this regardless.”

  Anna bounced a pebble off the cracked dirt. It ricocheted, rolled, and came up against a crushed Pepsi can. “It’s still bullshit.”

  The four of them waited in the depths of a junkyard, a favorite spot for conducting iffy encounters. Ranks of cars surrounded them, all bleached to the same dead gray by years of sun and scouring grit. Here, toward the middle of the auto graveyard, the mechanical corpses were piled high, leaving narrow canyons between. Anything that happened in here was hidden from the eyes of passersby, and with some Hells Angels Anna knew keeping watch on the outside, nobody armed or unexpected could get in. Karyn’s crew would be in complete control.

  As much as possible, anyway, Karyn thought. They’d only just accepted the job, and “control” was already tenuous. Had been right from the first phone call. Gresser had picked up, listened to the news, and then proceeded to tell Anna how it was going to be, as Karyn sat and quietly listened on speakerphone. Boss says you messed up the Durante job, Gresser had said. Your boy missed one of the alarms. Not talking about physical alarms, Karyn knew. These aren’t guys that lightweights can handle, so we’re gonna send you some help. A pro.

  That’s all right, Anna had said. We’ll manage.

  No can do. Your, ah, “specialist,” according to the boss, doesn’t have the mojo to pop a zit. You’ll take the help, and you’ll say thank you. It’s not too late to find somebody more cooperative.

  Anna had flushed an angry red and her eyes had bulged as if she were going to pop, and the inevitable “Fuck you” was already on her lips when Karyn had pressed the mute button on the phone.

  This is bullshit, Anna had said—the first time, with many more to come. Tommy knows his shit. I’m not going to sit here and listen to this.

  It’s not about Tommy, and he’s not going to just let it drop, Karyn had told her. Of course they’re going to want to have a babysitter on us for a job this size. I’m not ready to walk away over that.

  Anna had almost argued, but something had stopped her—maybe something in Karyn’s determined expression, maybe something internal. Okay, she’d said, and that was that. They’d given Greaser the location and time and ended the call.

  “This guy better show,” Anna said.

  Karyn only nodded and chewed her fingernail, wishing for a cigarette. She’d traded one disgusting habit for another, she thought as she peeled away a thin, crescent-shaped strip of nail. Seemed like everywhere she went, she left little curls of herself in trash cans or occasionally on the floor. Tommy had told her a dozen times that that was a bad, bad idea—his ilk could apparently work all kinds of havoc with a few hairs or other pieces of human detritus—but she figured it beat the hell out of two packs of Marlboro reds every day. Most days.

  “Ten more minutes, and I say we bail.”

  “He’ll show,” Karyn said.

  “That your professional opinion?”

  She suppressed a sigh. That was the problem with being the local oracle—nearly every remark was treated as though it might be a divine pronouncement. “Just a guess.”

  No sooner had she said the words than the soft crunch of footfalls on gravel reached her ears. Tommy grinned as though Karyn had been playing a little joke on them. The others crossed their arms and waited.

  A woman emerged from the gap between the stacks of dead cars, and Karyn fought to keep her lip from curling up in a sneer, or maybe a growl. Every once in a great while, Karyn met somebody she took an instant, intense dislike to for no good reason,
and Sobell’s lackey somehow managed to push that button without saying a word. It wasn’t the woman’s cocky swagger, though that didn’t help. Neither did her appearance. She had short, spiky hair dyed a caustic shade of red, sported black tattoos in ugly abstract patterns down the length of her arms, and had what looked to be about a pound and a half of metal hanging in her face: dozens of piercings in her ears, lips, eyebrows, nose, and even cheeks. Dressed all in black, of course. All signs that screamed Look at me! as far as Karyn was concerned, or maybe My mama didn’t love me enough. As somebody who’d spent most of her life trying not to attract any undue attention, the spectacle was faintly sickening—which still didn’t quite explain the instantaneous hatred that seized her.

  Some people just rub you the wrong way, she thought. Pheromones or something.

  The woman walked into the clearing, trailing her fingers along the dusty side of an ancient red and white Plymouth Fury. “You Sobell’s crew?” she asked. Her mouth pulled into a fuck-you grin that made Karyn’s fist ball up of its own accord.

  “No,” Karyn said. “This is my crew. You Sobell’s . . . specialist?”

  “Independent contractor. But, yeah. He’s paying the bill this time.”

  Independent contractor, my ass. “I’m Karyn.”

  “I figured. Genevieve Lyle.” She stopped ten feet away, still smirking.

  Tommy coughed, shuffled his feet. His eyes were practically bugging out of his head, and an idiotic smile had affixed itself to his face. “Tommy, I’m Tommy.”

  “Nail.” The big guy crossed his arms, face unreadable behind dark sunglasses.

  “And you?” Genevieve asked, turning to Anna.

  Oh Jesus Christ, Karyn thought in disgust. Anna’s eyes had gone a little too wide, too, and a slight flush darkened her cheeks. Always the bad girls. Just great. At least she didn’t try on a stupid grin to match Tommy’s, though she did hold Genevieve’s gaze longer than seemed strictly necessary. And, if Karyn wasn’t reading things wrong, Genevieve’s grin widened the longer the moment strung out.