Sacrifices

“Gritty, intense, and tersely written . . . an intriguing premise into an outstanding urban fantasy/horror series.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“A sterling urban fantasy . . . 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

“One half heist and one half damn good urban fantasy,
Premonitions
has it all.”

—
New York Times
bestselling author Seanan McGuire

“[A] unique and compelling crime drama/urban fantasy series . . . expertly weaving an exciting story with engaging characters . . . Schultz is an author to watch, breathing new life into an overworked genre.”

—
RT Book Reviews

“Exciting, scary, and tightly plotted, but the real fascination is the characters. . . . Interesting and creepy.”

—SFRevu

“Definitely unique. . . . I really enjoyed [Schultz's] voice and unique world setup.”

—Smexy Books

“Dark, gritty, and utterly captivating! . . . Jamie Schultz breathes new life into the urban fantasy genre . . . a wild ride.”

—Fresh Fiction

“Amazing . . . 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

“The Arcane Underworld series has it all. Demons. Fanatical cultists. Dark magic. . . . I'm burning for more dark urban fantasy in my reading, and Jamie Schultz definitely knows how to bring it.”

—The BiblioSanctum

Premonitions

Splintered

INTERMIX

Published by Berkley

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

Copyright © 2016 by Jamie Schultz

Penguin Random House 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 Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

INTERMIX and the “IM” design are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

ISBN: 9780698140936

First Edition: June 2016

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.

For
Jenny

I wish I could gather all the folks to whom this book owes its existence and hand out awards, like the Wizard of Oz. But these people already have plenty of heart and brains, so I guess that would be terribly redundant. Instead, I offer a big old heap of thank-you to:

Evan Grantham-Brown, who reads all of these things and makes them better;

Conrad Zero, for beta-reading above and beyond the call of duty;

My editor, Jessica Wade, who always manages to spot the point in my ravings where the edges don't line up. If the story is coherent, you have her to thank. If not—well, you should have seen what she had to work with;

My agent, Linday Ribar, for helping get these books out into the world and providing me with really good advice. Seriously, do you know how many people actually provide really good advice? Take my word for it—it's a small number;

Jenny, for virtually everything
else.

The alley stank.
Best as Anna could tell, the people from the burger joint that let out back here were dumping their grease in the storm drain. Had to be a health code violation, or a violation of some other kind of city ordinance. There was a freaking horde of rats down in there, squirming over the congealed, reeking mess.

Horrifyingly, Anna's stomach grumbled.
The demon,
she thought.
That's not me.
It felt like her, though, and it was getting increasingly difficult to tell where the line was. Not for the first time, she wished she could choke the living shit out of Belial, the demon that had afflicted her with her new live-in guest.

She approached the next door down. It was the back exit from one of the city's more eclectic pawnshops, a place where people dumped off the small and weird for cash. Rissa, like half the pawnbrokers she knew, was a fence, and if unusual goods were moving around, there was a good chance Rissa had heard about them.

The door opened while Anna was still ten feet away, and Rissa froze in the opening. She was in rough shape, mouth pulled down in an anxious, squirming frown, and she had a set of blue-black rings under her eyes from lack of sleep. She'd let her hair grow out some, the gray tresses pulled back in a ponytail that fell past her collar.

She was hauling a suitcase behind her.

“Hey, Anna,” she said, the words dragged out in slow trepidation.

“Hey.”

“I'm closing up.”

“I got that impression. For good?”

Rissa shrugged. “Don't know. But I'm sure as shit getting out of here for a while.”

“Can I come with?” Anna said, smiling to let her know it was a joke.

“What in the world are you mixed up in? Actually, never mind. I don't want to know.” Rissa came out, set the suitcase to one side, and locked the door.

“What's going on, Riss?”

The older woman searched Anna's face in the light from the window. She didn't owe her anything, Anna knew, but they'd done a lot of business over the years, and it had always been fair. Anna hoped that counted for something.

“This is a bad time for somebody like me to be around,” Rissa said. “it's . . . it's like the pillars holding up the earth are shaking.”

“Huh?”

“The whole occult underworld—and the regular old criminal underworld—they're a mess. Cops looking for Enoch Sobell, some kind of massacre or something at the old women's prison. I hear that was mixed up in the occult, too. Really weird stuff.” She gave Anna a frank look. “But I guess you know about all that.”

Not for the first time, Anna marveled at the sneaky, serpentine paths information took around the city. The scene at the prison had been a real mess, the crowning clusterfuck of a long series of disasters that had befallen Anna, her best friend, Karyn, and their small crew of occult thieves. It had begun a couple of months before, when the crew took a job working for Enoch Sobell, the city's most notorious crime lord, in the hope of scaring up the funds to purchase more of the black market drug that kept Karyn's precognitive hallucinations from overwhelming her. That job had gone sour and had ended with the crew under Sobell's thumb, uneasy, permanent employees with no way to get out of working
increasingly unpalatable jobs. Then Sobell had gotten desperate enough with his own personal problems to double-cross them, team up with the demon Belial, and, at the aforementioned prison, use the threat of violence against Anna to extort prophecy from Karyn. That had happened shortly after Belial infected Anna and a couple of dozen or so low-life criminals with demons of their own, making an already volatile situation practically explosive. An FBI raid and some frankly terrible occult shit had blown the whole scene apart, ending with a lot of people dead and a lot more scooped up by the authorities. Sobell and Belial had disappeared in the chaos, along with Anna's lover, Genevieve, and it was a small miracle that Anna and Karyn had gotten out alive. Overall, the whole thing had been a mess, humiliating or incriminating for everybody involved. Who out of all the people involved would possibly have talked about it? But here it was, just days later, and word was out.

“None of that's got anything to do with you,” Anna said.

“Four crime bosses got guys in jail,” Rissa said. “People are gonna get squeezed. Information's gonna get out that I don't want getting out. Time for me to take a break—that's all.”

“I ain't buying it,” Anna said. “You're not mixed up in this. So the big guys throw boulders at each other awhile. Big deal. It happens.”

“Those rocks gotta fall somewhere,” Rissa said. She watched Anna's eyes again, then scowled. “I got a call from a lawyer. She had some questions about relics.”

Anna's gut clenched. “A lawyer. She give a name?”

“Julia Tran.”

“Fuck.” Sobell's lawyer. Bad because that meant she was already making the rounds. Good, because that meant they hadn't found whatever Sobell and Belial were searching for, the mysterious object from Karyn's prophecy, which meant Anna and the rest of her crew might still be able to get ahead of them. Get to it first, and then talk deals. Anna thought her life probably depended on it. She'd seen what happened to some of the others who had harbored Belial's demons. They were dead, mostly. She'd seen more of them
than she'd cared to, a whole mess of them working for one of Sobell's old enemies, a guy named Edgar Van Horn who had been killed at the prison. The demons were violent, erratic, and heedless of risk, driving their hosts to increasingly dangerous extremes while feeding their out-of-control appetites and dabbling in some pretty destructive magic. The hosts didn't stand much of a chance, and that was without considering the weird, damaging effects of the possession itself, which eventually seemed to kill the hosts outright. At the moment, Anna had control, mostly, but her demon was already stirring, like a grumbling stomach. With no other options and a rapidly ticking clock, she was hanging most of her hope on either Sobell or Belial having the key to getting rid of the damn thing.

“Yeah. I asked around. I know who her client is. You ask me, that's as close as I need one of them rocks to fall before I get the message.”

“Jesus, Riss. You're right. I'd get out of town, too, if I was you.” Anna paused, then: “What'd you tell her?”

“Told her I'd ask around.”

Something about the way she emphasized the word “told” suggested there was more to the story. “And the truth is . . . ?”

Rissa said nothing.

Anna pulled a roll of bills from her pocket. “I think it's two grand. You won't buy a summer home with it, but it'll get you a hell of a long way from here.”

Rissa glanced at the bills, but that was it. She bit her lip, shook her head ever so slightly.

“This ain't a regular job, Riss. I don't get ahead of Sobell, I'm gonna be a very unpleasant person for a while, and then I'm gonna drop dead. Please. Anything you got could be a big deal for me.”

“Don't mess with me on this, Anna. This for real?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, shit. I don't know about any relics, but it seems there's a hell of a market for one all of a sudden. Tran was the second person to come looking.”

“Yeah?”

Rissa nodded. “About a week ago, a guy came in looking for relics. Not just any old relic, he said. Specifically body parts. St. Christopher's walking shoes wouldn't cut it.”

“That's . . . weird. And gross.”

Rissa shrugged. “I get a lot of weird requests. I probably wouldn't even have remembered it if he hadn't offered to pay in gold.”

“No shit?”

“None.”

“He give a name? What did he look like?”

“Latino guy with a teardrop tattooed at the corner of his left eye. He gave a name, but he had to think an awful long time about it, and then it was so obviously fake I didn't bother to remember it.”

A pause. When Rissa added nothing else, Anna laughed. “Okay. That's, like, hundreds of guys in L.A. Got anything else?”

“He had a big gothic number seven tattooed on the back of his hand. Some other gang tats, but I don't really remember.”

“Gang tats? That's fucking weird.”

“I don't even blink at fucking weird anymore.”

“Did you have anything for him?”

“Hell no. This isn't twelfth-century France. This side of the pond, we don't tend to have St. Peter's knucklebones hanging from a sack in the nave.”

“Well, it's a start.” She tossed the cash to Rissa, who caught it neatly and made it vanish in a pocket in one smooth motion.

“Don't let this come back on me, Anna,” Rissa said, her voice low and serious. “I don't stick my neck out for people much. Don't make me wish I hadn't.”

“I won't,” Anna said. “Now get outta here before I get all weepy.”

“Yeah, right,” Rissa said, but she smiled. Then she hustled down the alley, leaving Anna alone with the stench of cold grease and the squeaking of rats.

*   *   *

Today was one of Karyn's cacophony days, where the images and sounds around her were all going full blast, all the time. They left her with a raging headache, but, perversely, she was glad of these days. Sure, everything around her was in a constant state of flux, the present overlaid with dozens or hundreds of overlapping futures—and, for all she knew anymore, pasts—but there was a trick to handling it. The building that was collapsing across the street, the shooting in the alley, the raspy buzz of the metal grinders from the shop below all clamored for attention, but she thought of it like being in a big noisy crowd. Lots of people yelling, but it could all be background noise if she'd let it. Just let it flow around her and pay none of it any special mind.

It would have been paralyzing a few days ago. With no way to tell what was actually going on around her, all her senses lying to her, the only course of action would have been to sit tight and wait it out, like so many other days. Now she had a demon, or some part or manifestation of one, to help her. Anna had found it for her when her usual drug became unavailable. It now lived in a little splinter of black wood that had been jammed in under Karyn's thumbnail. All she had to do was simply focus inward, and it supplied her with a clear mental image of her surroundings. Some strange side effect of its mode of communication, she thought. In any event, it was enough. Not only could she navigate the world, but she could often match sounds to images, which helped her track conversations and hear what was going on.

She just wished she knew what the demon wanted in exchange for its favors. It seemed a different sort of creature than the one that Anna had been afflicted with—Karyn felt no overpowering or destructive urges, nor had she any sudden insights into dark magic that she couldn't wait to put into practice. All she got from the demon were the images, a little bit of much-needed clarity on the world, but she knew better than to assume that meant it was benevolent. It said it only wanted a ride. She was pretty sure that was a load of crap. Yes, the splinter that carried
the demon was embedded in Karyn's flesh, so technically it was getting a ride. But there was no way she'd believe that was
all
it wanted.

She concentrated on picking out the details of the room around her, trying to match up what she saw in her mind with what she saw with her eyes. Her mind told her she was in the room Anna had found for them, an open, nearly empty loft above a machine shop. The image showed the gray unfinished floorboards, the mattress, and the curtain that cordoned off the shower and toilet. Above it all, the open ceiling exposed rafters, ducts, and plumbing. Her eyes showed her none of that. The room no longer existed, for the moment. It had been leveled, or subdivided into apartments, or burned down. All of these at once. She was standing in rubble, in somebody's living room, or in ash.

The door to the loft opened, and Anna and Nail came in. They both looked terrible. Anna, thin to begin with, was positively wasting away, her collarbones jutting above the loose neck of her oversize Ministry T-shirt, and she didn't bother to brush away the black hair hanging loose in her face. The dark skin of Nail's face was tight, under perpetual strain, and the muscles in his forearms jumped as he clenched his fists. Isometrics, he called them, but he really only started doing them when he was keyed up. He did them all the time these days. She thought he might even have a trace of five o'clock shadow and a light peppering of stubble on his usually clean-shaven head, which might have been the most concerning of all. For Nail to let that go was beyond unusual. Once a marine, always a marine, as the saying went, and in a lot of ways, he lived it.

Anna pulled out a chair, swung it around, and straddled it, resting her arms on the back. “Relics,” she said. “I think Sobell's looking for relics.”

“Hmm,” Karyn said. “Are you sure?”

“Not
very
sure, no, but one of my contacts told me it was Sobell's lawyer that called her asking about it.”

“Did she narrow it down any?”

“Yeah. Sort of. Specifically, pieces of saint, and by ‘pieces' I mean body parts. Tran's not the only one looking,
either, so maybe Belial's got guys out, too, or something. Anyway, there's a sudden, lucrative market for saint parts, and at least Tran is offering top dollar.”

“Why in the— Oh. St. Sebastian,” Karyn said. She made a disgusted face and pretended to thump herself in the head with the heel of her hand. “‘Bound, naked, and shot through with arrows.' Aunt Florence would kill me for missing that.” The words were part of the prophecy she had uttered, a part of the answers sought by Sobell and Belial when they'd basically made her prophesize at gunpoint. She'd committed the words to memory:
Life, you seek life, one reprieve from the abyss, the other escape. In the valley of the garden, here in this Gomorrah, a man, naked, bound, and shot through with arrows, in dying finds salvation. In his salvation, you will find yours.
The images that had accompanied it still drifted on her mind like light swirls of oil on water. A terrible blue light, a vision of the bound and dying man, other pieces she couldn't clearly define or understand.