PRAISE FOR PREMONITIONS
“One half heist and one half damn good urban fantasy, Premonitions has it all.”
—Seanan McGuire, New York Times bestselling author of Sparrow Hill Road
“The development of the three women’s relationships will keep readers coming back to this gritty series.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A sterling urban fantasy debut with a great cast of characters. . . . The action is nonstop and extremely well plotted. Like a cross between the TV show Leverage and Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files books, this series is off to a terrific start.”
—Library Journal
“Dark, gritty, and utterly captivating! . . . Jamie Schultz breathes new life into the urban fantasy genre, giving readers a whole new take on what happens when crime lords and denizens of Hell collide. Premonitions is a wild ride.”
—Fresh Fiction
“Definitely unique. . . . I really enjoyed [Schultz’s] voice and unique world setup.”
—Smexy Books
“An amazing debut from Jamie Schultz. It’s got everything you could ask for in a novel that blends a high-stakes caper with supernatural abilities. It’s a little bit of The Italian Job . . . mixed in with a lot of grit, unpredictable alliances, and some truly scary individuals.”
—Team Tynga’s Reviews
Also by Jamie Schultz
Premonitions
ROC
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014
USA | Canada |UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China
penguin.com
A Penguin Random House Company
First published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC
Copyright © Jamie Schultz, 2015
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
ISBN 978-0-698-14092-9
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
Praise
Also by Jamie Schultz
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Excerpt from the next Arcane Underworld novel
For Jenny
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It’s easy to carry around the impression that an author is some sort of creative island. We get an idea, spend a bunch of time rooting around in our own skulls looking for interesting bits to place in proximity to the idea and hoping they’ll leap to one another like magnets, and then pound out thousands of words at a keyboard while sucking down too much caffeine and grunting at anybody whose orbit passes through our general vicinity. Or maybe that last bit is specific to me. In any case, nothing could be further from the truth. An author isn’t an island, and books don’t happen in a vacuum. There’s a veritable army involved, from the people who help work out the creative kinks to the tireless publishing folks to the people that make our lives work on a daily basis. I don’t have enough space—or even a good enough memory—to thank all of the people who helped make this book happen, but here’s a start.
Huge thanks to:
Evan Grantham-Brown, of course. I sometimes tell other writers that you don’t necessarily need a critique group to help you work your craft. You need a single person who gets your work and can be candid with you on its shortcomings. Evan has been that guy for me for a long damn time.
Janet Sked and Conrad Zero, for additional feedback and criticism. I said above that you need a single person, but having an embarrassment of riches in that department ain’t a bad thing, either.
Jessica Wade, who has a wonderful talent for pointing out exactly which crud needs to be cleared out, which elements need to be shored up, which excesses need to be reined in, and where a story just plain isn’t getting the job done. I don’t know if “saving the author from himself” is explicitly in an editor’s job description, but it should be.
Lindsay Ribar, for helping get this book out into the world and for helping me navigate a new and unfamiliar world while she did so.
And my wife, Jenny, for not only putting up with me writing at all kinds of weird hours but for actively encouraging that sort of behavior.
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 kil
led 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.
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