Any answer she could have gotten was drowned out by her own gunfire as she pulled the trigger again and again. In seconds, the gun was empty, the slide racked back, but she still pointed it at the assembled throng of Brotherhood and Sobell’s people. The tendons in the back of her hand jumped as she convulsively squeezed the trigger over and over, her face twisted in a wordless cry of anguish.
Two bullets tore into the wood paneling next to her head.
Karyn was down, not moving, stretched out on the floor at an uncomfortable-looking angle. Dead, Anna thought. She’s dead.
“Come on!” Genevieve shouted. “Now!” She dropped the piece of sword and grabbed at Karyn’s arm. “Anna! Help me!”
Finally, Anna turned her head, registering what was going on around her. She reached for Karyn’s other arm, and the two women pulled Karyn into the back room.
The last thing Anna saw before she pushed the door shut was Sobell, grinning out between the gap in a wall of his remaining people as the last of the Brotherhood fled or faced the guns. He looked awfully proud of himself.
Chapter 31
The apartment was practically empty. Nothing in the way. Nothing to trip on, if one’s sense of reality became distorted and confused.
Nothing to pack. As always.
Anna walked through the living room in a numbed-out daze. She knocked on Karyn’s door out of habit. There was no response, but she went in anyway.
Karyn lay on the bed. Her eyes were open, fixed on the doorway Anna had just come through. Her brow furrowed, as though she were trying to puzzle out some intense mystery.
“How you doing?” Anna asked. She got no answer. Karyn’s gaze didn’t move from the doorway, even though Anna now stood by the side of the bed. What was she seeing? When was she seeing? She had been unconscious for almost two days after the doctor stitched up the mess of shredded flesh just above her left hip, and when she finally woke up, Anna had been there holding her hand—and she’d been gone. Not catatonic. Functional, sort of, but nothing she said made sense. Everything was a non sequitur, an answer to a question nobody had asked.
Nothing she saw was now anymore.
Anna slumped against the wall. Did she know? Anna wondered, for maybe the thousandth time. Had she seen it coming? Had she known that she’d be trading her sanity for Genevieve’s life? And, if so, how long had she known? Moments? Days? Anna had run through all the scenarios in the days since the disaster, then gone back and raked through her memories, looking for any little tic or word that might tell her something about how and when her oldest friend—her only friend, for so many years—had decided to plunge headlong into the insanity that had been her greatest fear for so long. Part of her couldn’t help wondering if Karyn had kept so little stuff not because she was afraid of barking her shin on something she couldn’t see, but because she’d known this was coming, known that one day it would fall to Anna to deal with her and all of her earthly possessions, and she didn’t want to make it any harder than it had to be.
Oh, bullshit, Anna thought, but the numbness had cracked a little, and tears gathered in her eyes.
So it had gone since the night at Sobell’s. It seemed that every few moments, she could feel the limp weight of Karyn’s body in her arms, and she relived those last terrible seconds over and over again. The chaos behind Anna as Sobell’s men regained their senses and the violence in the room ascended to a whole new level faded to a distant noise, buried beneath her own sobs as she and Genevieve pulled Karyn’s body to the back room.
Each time the memory resurfaced, it triggered a mess of warring emotions. She wanted to be angry, rage over this last, deepest abandonment, knock over Karyn’s shit and break it into pieces, and she wanted to curl up in a corner, weep for her friend, and never come out. She’d spent an entire day waiting for Karyn to wake up, not moving or saying a word, just lying in bed and going over the scattered moments that had somehow coalesced into a decade of fighting, fleeing, surviving, and more, emotions she couldn’t put a name to—moments that simultaneously seemed more important than ever, yet hollowed out and empty now. The image that came back most was Karyn, standing on the civil administration building steps, cigarette in hand, matter-of-factly facing down insanity.
They’d beaten it, though.
It had come for her again, though—and it would keep coming. And, dammit, Anna would beat it back again. Somehow. Alone, if she had to.
The doorbell rang, jolting her from her reverie. Numbness, she reminded herself. That was the order of the day, the only way to get through all the necessary bullshit that came next. She composed herself, then crossed the small apartment to open the door.
Genevieve stood there, looking about as exhausted as Anna felt. The light outside the door cast harsh shadows on her face. “You, um . . . ready to go?” she asked softly.
Anna opened her mouth, but no sound came out. A hard, painful lump had formed in her throat, and her eyes were beginning to sting again. She swallowed once, forcefully, closed her eyes. “Yeah. Let’s—let’s go.” She didn’t move, though, didn’t open her eyes. She just stood there trembling, hands clenched into fists by her side.
The sound of movement—the sliding sound of jeans, the faint jingle of the chain running from Genevieve’s belt loop to her pocket—and then Genevieve’s arms were around her. Her body softened, and she leaned against Genevieve for support. She could feel the tears battering against that shield of numbness, slamming against it in waves like a furious ocean battering down a wall, and her shaking got worse.
Don’t cry. Don’t cry. No more goddamn crying.
“It’s gonna be OK,” Genevieve whispered.
Don’t ever fucking tell me that, Anna wanted to say—but the numbness chose that moment to crumple.
Genevieve shut the door and held her while she wept.
* * *
The cash sat in a scattered pile on Sobell’s desk, dumped as if by somebody who just didn’t give a damn about it. Anna stood and watched Sobell’s face over the heap. The wound in his forehead was a crusted black hole over which, for whatever perverse reason, he had not bothered to put a bandage. He grinned, but Anna thought she read deep fatigue underneath the bullshit.
Blood still stained the carpet in a dozen spots, some mere spatters, others great brown smears the size of a man’s torso or larger. From where Anna stood, she could see the splotches on the wooden desktop where Greaser’s life had run out. She wanted to take Genevieve’s hand, take some comfort from it—but not in front of Sobell.
“Would you like to count it?” Sobell asked. “I’ll wait.”
She shook her head. In truth, she just wanted to get the hell out of there. The place made her feel cored out, a wasted shell filled with little but horror. She began clawing the bundles of cash into the duffel bag while Sobell waited. The money wouldn’t have to stretch far—it was just four of them once more. Tommy was dead and Drew had been found dead alongside a couple of off-duty cops who had been summoned to the building for whatever mysterious purpose.
Nail would live, and he’d even gotten out of the hospital after a few days. He still looked like shit, but at least he’d chuckled when Anna had told him so.
Anna zipped the bag and hefted it to her shoulder. “We done?”
“There is one more thing,” Sobell said.
“Yeah?”
“The four of you work for me now. Do what you want on your own time, but when I call, you should find your schedule miraculously clear. Understood?”
A dozen biting replies leapt to mind, but all the fight had been ground from her spirit. And, whatever else she might have learned, it was still unwise to make an enemy of Enoch Sobell.
“Yeah,” she said.
“Excellent.” He looked to Genevieve. “Ms. Lyle, might I have a word with you in private?”
Genevieve nodded. “I’ll be right out,” she
told Anna.
Anna walked out.
* * *
Despite her punk-rock fuck-you attitude, or whatever the kids were calling it these days, Ms. Lyle was looking considerably the worse for wear, Sobell thought. He could sympathize. His head hurt like blazes, his most trusted and capable lieutenant was dead, his new lieutenant had also been killed, he had dead men scattered across the city, and even his vast resources would be hard-pressed to keep him from going to prison for something after this latest debacle. That was disappointing and inconvenient, and it would be an unwelcome distraction while he got about his real business.
“I have a question for you,” he began. “I trust we are past the point where I need to make veiled threats and dire pronouncements on the price of bearing false witness?”
“Yeah. Way past.” She would have chuckled at that at one point, he thought, but he supposed they’d all been through a lot since then.
Sobell stood and walked to the end of the room, near the main door. He opened an elegant wood cabinet to reveal a small flat-screen TV.
“The authorities have done a fair job of raiding the premises for evidence, despite the best efforts of my attorneys. To their disappointment, I’m sure, they’ve found that all the security footage has gone missing.” He held up his hands to show how powerless he was. “Incompetent staff, I’m sorry to say.”
“That’s rough.”
“There is one surviving tape,” he said. Without taking his gaze from Genevieve’s face, he flicked on the television.
She flinched. It was quick, so quick that he might not have noticed had he not been watching for it, but her lips pulled back in a moue of disgust that she immediately suppressed, not much different from the expression he’d seen on her face the night of the firefight.
Sobell turned to look at the screen. It showed a single still image from the night of the battle royale in his office. A dozen men and women were frozen in as many poses, running, falling, shooting, or shouting. In the top left quadrant, a face was caught in a clear three-quarters view. A man with angular features and a patchy beard.
Sobell put his finger to the screen. “This man. Who is he?”
“His name is Hector Martel,” Genevieve said. “And he’s not a man anymore.”
“A demon.”
“Yeah.”
Sobell smiled. “Beautiful. Do you know which one?”
“Which—no. How would I?”
“You know him from somewhere.”
Genevieve didn’t look at him. She couldn’t, it seemed, take her gaze from the screen. Her fingers absently pulled at a stud in her eyebrow as she stared. “Yeah, but—it was a while ago. He should be dead by now.”
“How long?”
Genevieve was twisting the stud back and forth now in what had to be one of the more unpleasant nervous tics Sobell had seen in some time. “Few months.”
Sobell closed the cabinet. Line of sight broken, Genevieve’s attention drifted back to him.
“That’s long, but not that long,” Sobell said.
“I don’t know. The only other guy I know who—who had that happen lasted about two weeks.”
“Maybe so, but if Mendelsohn made friends with a demon, somehow, that would explain his sudden aptitude for conjuring up things he shouldn’t be conjuring, as well as his untimely demise.” Sobell pondered this for a moment. “What do you suppose it wants?”
“I don’t know,” Genevieve said. The stud pulled loose and slipped from her fingers, falling to the floor. “He saw me. Here, that night. He recognized me.”
“I thought as much,” Sobell said. The expression Sobell had seen on the man’s face that night had been hard to mistake, even with all the chaos.
“This is not good.”
“No, it’s really not. I suspect that, in an otherwise innocent quest for material enrichment, you and I have both stepped in something nasty. Not to worry, though. Whichever demon it is, I’m sure it’s entirely the forgiving sort.” If it was, in fact, Forcas, he was entirely sure it was not. But Genevieve was right about one thing—a few months was a long time. Forcas, formidable as it may have been, probably wouldn’t have had the wherewithal and discipline to keep a human body alive and relatively intact that long. That was worrisome, suggesting that Forcas either had potent help or some other access to power it normally wouldn’t.
Genevieve answered with a desperate-sounding moan.
“Nothing to be done for it now,” Sobell said. “Tell me everything you know about him.”
* * *
The scene was all wrong. Instead of a folding card table in empty apartment, they sat around a real dining table, a regular old slab of oak Americana, in a place that, Anna had remarked more than once, looked like Mr. Rogers’s digs. Instead of four of them, there were three. Karyn sat alone in the living room, and Tommy’s presence at the table had been changed out for Genevieve’s.
There was the money, though. A huge pile of it, looking even more ridiculous here than it had on Sobell’s desk. Anna and Genevieve had already divided it into four mostly equal stacks.
Across the table, Nail glanced from the cash to Anna, his face expressionless. His arms hung by his sides. This, too, was wrong. At this stage, he usually sat leaning back, arms crossed, a smug smile on his face. The proverbial cat that ate the canary.
“You guys want to . . . you know. Count it?” Anna said.
Nail made a disgusted sound in his throat. “No. Fuck that.” Genevieve merely shook her head.
Anna looked to the living room, as though now that everyone was in position Karyn was going to wake up and resume her triple duty as leader, oracle, and friend. But she only sat, her lips moving soundlessly, eyes flicking left and right.
“Yeah,” Anna said. “Fuck that.”
They sat in silence. Nobody pulled out a deck of cards. Nobody reached for the booze. Nobody moved.
Eventually, Anna shifted. “Sobell says we work for him now. We can line up whatever we want on the side, but when he needs us, we come running.”
“That’s not all he says,” Genevieve added. “We pissed off a demon when we broke up the party at Sobell’s the other night. Probably killed another.”
“What’s that mean?” Nail asked.
“Means we’re in the middle of some shit now.”
“More than usual?”
“Yeah. I think so.”
“Look, I don’t really care about that,” Anna said. “I’ll keep Sobell happy because he might be useful, and because I think we might need the money. That demon shit—I can’t do anything about that. Put him on the list of people we’ve pissed off.”
“Long list,” Nail said.
Anna ignored him. “Karyn is . . . She’s out of commission. This is what she’s been afraid of her whole life. I’ve got a pile of money here, and I’m going to blow every last dime, burn every last contact, and steal every goddamn thing in Los Angeles County if that’s what it takes to get her straightened out.”
“Fuckin’ A,” Nail said. “I’ll drink to that.”
“I’m in,” Genevieve said simply.
And that was it. She hadn’t even had to ask. Relief cut the bands of tension around her chest that had been keeping her breath shallow and short, and she felt a ghost of a smile on her lips.
“All right. Where do we start?”
Read on for a special preview of Jamie Schultz’s next novel,
SPLINTERED
Available in July 2015 from Roc.
“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 Anna tho
ught she could feel annoyance radiating from him anyway, and 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 cheek and a small arc of metal gleaming above the shadow of an eyesocket.
“What time you got?” Anna asked.
Nail made a slight skeptical smile and raised his eyebrows. “Two forty.” A long pause, and then, with a smirk playing around the corners of his mouth, “Two 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 weird 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.
“He’s taking his time,” she said.
“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.
Premonitions Page 34
