Premonitions (3 page)

Anna flicked a wary glance in her direction. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means . . . It means you can walk away from this shit. One day, you’re going to get it all out of your system, go find a nice office job, shack up with some nice girl, and adopt an army of kids. And me”—she shrugged, trying to look noncommittal—“I’ll still be here, shifting cursed necklaces and crap like that for the terminally insane.”

“I don’t like nice girls,” Anna said.

Karyn looked toward the window. Why had she even opened her mouth? She’d known for a long time that she’d never have what you’d call a normal life—her condition and the constant need for serious amounts of cash wouldn’t allow it. There would be no career, no SUV, no house in the suburbs, no husband to come home to and trade boring work stories. She was OK with that, or at least had come to terms with it. It was only during the latest of nights she got maudlin like this and ended up thinking about how Anna didn’t need this crap, how she surely wouldn’t put up with this forever. Even the best of friends drifted apart eventually; that was just part of life. People moved on, sent the occasional Christmas card, and called every year or two. One day, Anna would move on. That was a fact, and Karyn did her best not to let it get to her, tried not to wonder how she’d keep her life, such as it was, together afterward. And she for damn sure didn’t talk about it.

After a long moment, Anna made an exasperated noise. “I’m not going anywhere. And if I ever did, you could walk, too.”

Karyn mustered a sad smile. “Not really,” she said. “I’ve got a
very
expensive habit—and I can’t even drive myself to my dealer.”

“True that,” Anna said. Then, a speculative sound in her voice: “Half a million dollars.”

“That’ll keep your average hallucinatory precognitive in blind
for a good long time.”

Anna snorted. “There are no average hallucinatory whatevers. There’s you, and there’s Adelaide.”

“Well, it’ll keep
me
in the present tense for a good long while, then.”

“Plus we could move out of this shitty apartment.”

“Let’s see what we’ve got here,” Karyn said, and she opened the envelope.

“You are a demon.”
Even with slitted eyes, one hand held out to a chair to steady himself, Enoch Sobell was able to expertly knot his tie. It looked immaculate. Gresser had seen this done maybe two dozen times, and it still impressed him.

“Sir?”

“No decent human being would wake me up at this hour. Ergo . . .”

“Your instructions, sir.”

“Even so.” Tie finished, Sobell pulled on a sock, wobbling on one foot. “Jesus Christ, did somebody order up extra sun this morning?”

Gresser looked out across L.A. through the huge floor-to-ceiling windows. Around him, the detritus from the previous night’s debauchery lay in broken piles. Smashed glasses twinkled in the morning sun, a heavy leather couch had been knocked back onto the marble floor during God knew what kind of nocturnal calisthenics, and a line of alternating panties and boxers had been laid out along the entire length of the bar. All that was missing were the people, who had, in accordance with custom, presumably been rounded up and shooed out at some pitch-black hour before Mr. Sobell awoke. “No, I think this is standard issue.”

“Fuck.” Sobell put a hand to his head and cracked open his eyes a little further. “Fuck.” He cupped his hand in front of his face, exhaled loudly, inhaled, and
grimaced. “Fuck.” He straightened, tottering just a bit. “Seems I’m still drunk, Mr. Gresser. Thus, a little hair of the dog is in order. Would you mind?”

Gresser shrugged. “Which dog?”

“That goddamned vodka-and-tonic mongrel should do nicely.”

Gresser walked around the bar and found a glass. This wasn’t the first time he’d found Mr. Sobell like this, nor even the twentieth, and he still wasn’t sure how much of it was an act. That some of it was an act was indisputable. One evening about five years back, Sobell had been playing the Merry Drunkard at some godforsaken dive he enjoyed when he was slumming, and some creep had tried to roll him in the bathroom. Gresser had walked in just in time to see Sobell sober up in a shocking hurry and bury a letter opener four inches into the guy’s eye. Sobell’s cheerful, drunken half smile was gone, his eyes hard and clear for one short moment—and then he’d gone right back to it. “Got a bit of a problem here, Mr. Gresser,” he’d said, and he’d hiccuped for good effect afterward.

This morning, Sobell hobbled about looking for his other sock while Gresser poured. Ice, vodka, more vodka, open the bottle of tonic and pour some down the sink, and presto! A vodka and tonic the way Enoch Sobell liked it.

Socks found, donned, and held in place by a couple of thousand-dollar shoes, Sobell made his way to the bar. Half the vodka went down in one toxic slug, and Sobell’s face brightened. And, just like that long-ago night in a men’s room in a shitty part of town, all at once he looked alarmingly sober.

“Ms. Ames and company? I assume they’re on board.”

Gresser put both hands on the bar and shook his head. “Not yet. They wanted to think about it. They did deliver the, um, object.”

“Fine work, that.” Another gulp of vodka. “What did you do with it?”

“Dropped it in the first trash can I found. Fucking disgusting.”

“Too right.” Sobell cocked the glass, pausing before downing the last of it. “So, she wants to sleep on it. Not a lot of time for that, but it could be worse. Anything happen afterward?”

“Met with her crew. Partied. Ruiz and Ames headed out at about three.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Went to just about the worst part of town I can think of. Looks like Ames’s got a connection down there.” He tapped the crook of his elbow with two fingers.

Sobell’s brow tightened fractionally. “Where, exactly?”

“You want an address?”

“Yes. That’s exactly what I want.”

“Uh, Norton Street? East of LaBrea, somewhere in the two hundred block.”

“Hmm,” Sobell said, nodding. His eyes narrowed; with his body backlit by the rising sun, they looked like black slits. “Adelaide.” Gresser could have sworn that the fearless Enoch Sobell actually shuddered.

“I don’t know where that is.”

“Not where—who. If Ames is visiting that charming young nut job, she’s almost certainly the real deal. That’s a good thing.” He didn’t look like he thought that was a good thing. He looked like he thought it was on par with eating a handful of lye.

Gresser hesitated before speaking his next words. He hadn’t gotten into Enoch Sobell’s good graces by accident, or by being careless, and it wasn’t his style to extend himself much. But, still—two million dollars? For
Ames
? That was dumb. “Maybe we can leave her out of this,” he suggested. “Me and a few of the boys can—”

“No.” Sobell put the glass on the bar with a dry, precise click. “For every job, there is an appropriate tool. Karyn Ames and her crew have a few rather specialized skills. And, frankly, you have a different role to play in this absurd comedy.”

Gresser nodded. He’d learned long ago that many of his questions would be answered in time, as long as he was patient.

Sobell pulled his jacket off the nearest barstool and put it on. “I assume the car is waiting?”

* * *

Sobell paused before the warehouse door, a dingy little side door next to the big overheads, and stepped aside. Gresser obligingly turned the knob and opened the door for him. He walked into the dimly lit space and stepped through the heavy, hunched shadows cast by obscure machinery rusting in the dark. Blue-white fluorescent lights flickered and buzzed, spitting feeble illumination into the vast volume. Gresser shut the door with a clang and quickly caught up.

“All has been quiet here, I assume?” Sobell asked.

“Yes, sir.”

Sobell nodded. He wasn’t looking forward to this next piece of work at all, but he couldn’t put it off much longer. Any day now, Mendelsohn’s pet may very well escape and vanish beyond Sobell’s reach, or—rather more likely, he thought—escape, kill every living thing in Mendelsohn’s home and a hundred-yard radius, and then vanish beyond his reach. Ames and company needed to cooperate, and Sobell needed to get his preparation under way, which meant taking care of the nasty business at hand. He would have much preferred to deal with Mendelsohn’s creature without having to mess with the entity he was on his way to meet, but it simply wouldn’t do to show up without payment, and he couldn’t think of a better way to get it. Had, in fact, worked a small miracle or two to arrange this . . . meeting.

He surveyed the darkness, unable to clear the self-satisfied smile from his lips. “Lead on, Mr. Gresser.”

Gresser edged around him and took a sharp right at the next clear spot between shelves of inscrutable equipment. Sobell stepped over some kind of winch and narrowly avoided twisting his ankle on something that looked like a giant ball bearing—not that he’d know a ball bearing from a socket wrench, if it came down to it. His talents had always lain in other areas.

“Charming place,” he said. “Union shop?”

Gresser grunted a short laugh. “Through here.” The
heavy overhanging shelf of his brow wrinkled in a question. “Ready?”

“Of course.”

Gresser pushed open a door covered in flaking paint, a green so dark it was nearly black in the fluorescents. Soft silver light poured from the room.

Sobell squinted. “Bit shiny, eh?” Gresser had already stepped aside, outside the room. His face was an expressionless mask, though Sobell could see the tight bunching of muscles at his jaw. He didn’t like this one bit. Probably time to throw him a bonus, then. Good help, and all that.

Sobell brushed past his discomfited lieutenant and went through the doorway. The room beyond, perhaps once a small storage room, was now quite plainly a cell. It had been emptied by some of Gresser’s gorillas, but the thousands of glyphs and symbols that lined the walls had been drawn on the panels by Sobell himself before they were installed. It was not the kind of work one left up to lackeys.

In the corner of the room stood the source of the silver light. Man-sized and roughly man-shaped, it still wasn’t something you could call a proper human being. It was more like a department store mannequin of unearthly beauty, a form that suggested a thousand shapes rather than actually taking one itself. It didn’t even have eyes or a mouth that Sobell could see, merely indentations that implied some, and as it turned its head to acknowledge him, the pattern of light and shadow shifted to suggest disdain.

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?”