Premonitions (An Arcane Underworld Novel, Band 1) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jamie Schultz has worked as a rocket engine test engineer, an environmental consultant, a technical writer, and a construction worker, among other things. He lives in Dallas, Texas.

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THE NEXT JOB

ROC

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Chapter 1

“Where the fuck is it?” Anna whispered.

Karyn shrugged, at a loss for a response. The damn thing was supposed to be right here, on display in the stupidly cavernous room ahead of them, but even as they huddled at the mouth of the hall in near darkness, she could see that it was gone. The glass case was right where it should be in the center of the room, but nothing rested inside. So much for recon, she thought. “He must have moved it. We’re going to have to search the place.”

“I don’t even know what a severed rhino dick is supposed to look like.”

“Like a severed elephant dick, only smaller,” Tommy put in.

Anna snorted laughter. The sound was barely loud enough to be heard a couple of feet away, but to Karyn it seemed to set the silence humming with its echo.

“C’mon, guys,” Anna said, “let’s pretend to be professionals here.” Karyn watched her eyes, the only part of her face visible behind the balaclava, as they flicked from Tommy to Karyn and back. “Any ideas?”

Karyn looked around the room one more time. It looked more like a gallery in a museum than somebody’s living room. Polished wood floor. Sparse white walls broken up with abstract paintings, some with low spotlights on them even at this hour. A couple of couches for sitting back and staring at the walls. The empty glass case.

“You getting anything?” Anna asked.

“You know it doesn’t work like that,” Karyn said.

“Doesn’t hurt to ask.”

Tommy’s low laughter sounded near Karyn’s ear. “Come on, now. If you were a fifty-eight-year-old man, and you had a two-thousand-year-old virility charm—”

Karyn touched the radio at her hip. “Nail, where’s the master bedroom?” she whispered.

Nail’s voice fired up in her earpiece instantly. “Say again?”

“The master bedroom,” she said as loudly as she dared. “Where is it?”

“Upstairs. Southwest corner.”

“Roger.” She nodded at the others. “That way.” She took a step into the gallery and froze as she saw a shadowy shape emerge from the hallway across the room. It crouched, bringing up its hands into a firing position. They jerked twice, as though shooting a soundless gun.

Karyn glanced at Anna, who regarded her with a puzzled expression. She doesn’t see that. Ergo, it wasn’t happening—not yet, anyway. “Back down the hall, go!”

Anna and Tommy rushed back away from the room, Karyn close behind them. They ducked into the nearest doorway. Moments later, clicking footfalls echoed to them from the gallery.

The footfalls faded.

“Clear?” Anna asked.

Karyn listened for another few seconds. “Think so. Just a security guard. Armed, though, I’m pretty sure.”

Anna frowned. “I thought they didn’t carry guns.”

“They didn’t, yesterday.”

“Should we bail?”

Karyn peered toward the gallery. She saw nothing alarming, and while she wasn’t going to bank on that or get cocky about it, it was reassuring. Her hallucinations weren’t exactly reliable, but they tended to be up-front about anything that was going to clean her clock in the immediate future. “No, I think we’re OK.”

“Lead on.”

Karyn paused at the end of the hall again, searching the gallery. Nothing moved, real or imagined. She strode quickly across the floor to the doorway in the right-hand wall, then through and up the stairs beyond.

On the second floor, heavy carpeting muffled the already faint noise of her steps. There was less light, too, which she regarded as a mixed blessing. Running around here waving flashlights was to be avoided if at all possible, especially if the guards were carrying guns now.

She put her hand on the wall to her left and used it as a guide while her eyes adjusted. The only light came through closed curtains—not much, but enough to give her a sense of the things in the room. Looked like a little living room/kitchen suite up here, decorated in what she’d come to think of as Rich Guy Standard. Leather furniture lined the walls, thousand-dollar barstools sat in front of the bar. Anna elbowed her and pointed. A huge painting hung above the couch. “Original?” Anna whispered.

It was impossible to make out, but Karyn nodded. “Of course.”

The two women relaxed somewhat, and Karyn knew Anna was smiling. She felt the same relief. There was nothing weird here, just the trappings of a garden-variety investment banker. Thank God. For once, they hadn’t wandered into the lair of some kind of cult leader, underworld magician, or sexual pervert. By all appearances, the pudgy, balding, middle-aged man who owned the place was just a pudgy, balding, middle-aged man who’d accidentally stumbled across the wrong family heirloom.

Karyn crossed the room, turning toward a door off the kitchen. She pressed her ear to it, heard nothing, tried the knob. Locked.

She stepped aside and nodded to Anna.

As Anna approached the knob, lockpicks at the ready, orange-and-yellow light flared up from behind the door, blazing through every crack and seam.

Karyn’s heart clenched like a spasming fist, and she threw up a hand to block the light. She squinted through the glare. Anna, unperturbed, started to fiddle with the lock, but Tommy looked at her with worry in his eyes.

“Everything cool?”

“Yeah.” She lowered her hands. “It’s cool.”

Now Anna looked up. “You want me to open this or what?”

Karyn squatted to get a better look at the light coming from beneath the door. Orange, yellow, red, screamingly bright in the gloom. It flickered like it was blinking, too regular to be flame. What is that all about? she wondered. She had no idea. It didn’t look like an overt threat, but who could tell?

“Yeah,” she said. “Carefully.”

Anna turned the knob and slowly pulled the door open, taking care to keep the door itself between herself and the opening. Rays of brilliant golden light, shot through with red, poured from the room, and once again Karyn held up a hand against the worst of it.

“There,” she said. “On the table.”

Tommy stared into the room. “What table? I can’t see a thing in there.”

“Come on,” Karyn said. She ducked into the room, waited for the others to follow, then shut the door with a quiet click. She didn’t know what the others saw, but for her the whole room was lit up with a bloody golden radiance, emanating from a table near the head of a nondescript king-sized bed. The red light pulsed, alternately letting the gold shine and blocking it out.

“Light?” Anna asked.

“Go ahead.”

Anna flicked on a flashlight, which presumably helped her and Tommy out quite a bit. Karyn couldn’t even tell it was on except by the way Anna held it in front of her.

The three of them approached the table.

“That’s nasty,” Anna said.

Karyn nodded. The rhinoceros penis, she presumed, sat in the center of the table, a wrinkled tube of desiccated skin about the size of her forearm, with a weird kink in the middle. Symbols written in silver paint covered its length.

“I thought it was the horn that was supposed to have magic powers,” Tommy said. “I mean, you know....