by E. A. Copen
“For taking down LeDuc and his operation?”
“For surviving. For succeeding where all the others have failed.” He crossed his arms. “I don't think anyone at the top expected you'd go as far as you did. You've turned Paint Rock on its head. Digging up the old, long decayed corpse of justice in a place that isn't accustomed to it is bound to draw some attention, and not all of that attention is going to be good.”
“I thought everyone wanted LeDuc gone? Even Marcus Kelley didn't seem to mind that I was taking out one of his bedfellows.”
“I'm not talking about Marcus.” Father Reed leaned over the bed and placed his lips next to my ear, saying in a barely audible whisper, “Others are watching you, judging your worth. What you've stumbled on is bigger than Paint Rock. It's bigger than all of us.” When he leaned back to look into my eyes, I saw the glimmer of fear in his. “God has a plan for all of us whether we see it or not. Even evil things like Andre LeDuc had his role to play in building the Kingdom.”
I swallowed the gathering dryness in the back of my throat. Whatever Reed was talking about, it terrified him. I'd watched the man survive more serious injuries than anyone in the battle against LeDuc.
He should have been in a hospital bed right next to me. Instead, here he was, up walking and talking. Publicly, he'd only admitted to being a pyromancer but, if I was right, Gideon Reed was something far older, something far more dangerous. If he had wanted to, I knew that Gideon Reed could have mopped the floor with me on my best day, judging by his aura. If he was scared of whatever was coming, that wasn't a good sign.
“Who do you work for?” I asked Reed, narrowing my eyes.
He looked as if I'd slapped him. “Heaven,” he said simply.
“Whatever happened to thou shalt not murder and thou shalt not lie and all the other shalt nots?”
“Heaven has need of warriors, too. We all have a purpose.” He looked up at the door and waved a hand. It swung back open of its own accord.
Hunter, who had been pressing his ear against it, tumbled into the room.
“I suppose it would be presumptuous to assume I would see either of you at mass on Sunday?”
I jerked my arm toward the door and growled, “Get the hell out of my room. Now.”
Reed nodded and went without further prompting. I sat in my bed, glowering after him. “Is everything okay?” Hunter asked after Sal helped him up.
“Yeah,” I said and settled back into bed, getting as comfortable as I could. “I feel like I stepped in the biggest, nastiest, oldest bit of chewing gum in the universe, and all I've managed to scrape off is the top layer.” I looked up at Sal. “What the hell is going on in this county, Sal?”
“Wish I knew, Judah,” he said, shaking his head. “I wish I knew.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
A week later, I stood outside of Valentino's garage, watching him pace down a line of broken-down cars.
“Flat tires,” he said, kicking Chanter's truck. “Busted windows. Framework.” He walked over to the Prius. “I think I can salvage most of this one. Needs a lot of bodywork, tires, windshield, and a window, but I can work with it.” Valentino wiped his thumb and forefinger on either side of his face as he paced over to my Firebird. “This one? Shit, lady. I ain't a miracle worker.”
“All it needs is a starter and an oil change,” I said, crossing my arms. “Maybe a few knobs or odds and ends on the inside.”
He looked back at me and raised an eyebrow. Then, he gave the bumper a tap with his shoe, and it detached on one side to fall to the pavement with a clang.
“Okay, and maybe a tune-up.”
“Seriously, Judah. I appreciate you saving my boy and pushing through all the paperwork to make him legal, and all but these repairs are going to cost you more than the whole car is worth. If I charged you labor, I could probably pay off all of Nina's student loans.”
I frowned. “If you didn't want to fix my car, you shouldn't have made the offer.”
“Valentino will fix your car.”
I looked up to see Chanter standing on the front porch, sucking down a cigarette.
“And he will fix the Prius, and put tires and glass on my truck. Otherwise, he will experience a rash of bad luck such as this world has never seen.”
“Can you do that?” I asked Chanter.
He grinned. “Girl, in my sleep.”
Valentino threw his hands up in defeat. “Fine! Valentino the miracle mechanic at your service. Don't come whining to me when you get my bill for parts.” He walked into the garage, grumbling, “Can throw curses around in his sleep, but he doesn't have a spell to fix junk cars. What a hack...” The grumbling continued in Spanish, but I stopped listening when Chanter launched into a serious coughing fit.
“You okay?”
“Never better,” he lied and took another drag on the cigarette as if it were the cure for his cancer. “How about you?”
I walked up the path and sat on the bottom step. Mostly, things had gone back to normal since I'd gotten out of the hospital. I was back at work, back to paying my bills and washing dishes and changing light bulbs. It was nice for what it was worth, but I couldn't shut out that nagging feeling that I'd stepped in something big.
“Why did you call up Alex's spirit in the Way?”
Chanter was silent for a long time behind me. I was getting used to his long pauses, and they felt less and less uncomfortable. That was part of speaking to Chanter.
“We inherit from our same-sex parents. Boys from their fathers, girls from their mothers. It's how our kind is made. Lines are distinguished that way and, so, it is a father's duty to prepare his son for the change. It is a void only a father can fill. It's...difficult to explain. But the boy needed the presence of another strong male, one of his own line. And, to help him, I needed to know from what line Hunter had come.”
“Line?” I turned around to look at Chanter.
“Like clans or families. Once, there weren't many. We're social creatures. We need the presence of our own line to be at ease. Raised alone, we lose control. The change takes us, makes us mad. I needed to invoke someone of his own bloodline.” He was quiet and I watched Valentino work. “There is something you should know, Judah.” I turned around again and watched Chanter drop his cigarette butt on the porch. He stomped it out before picking it up and continuing. “There are likely others of your husband's line out there. They may track him down someday. Or you could track them down. Maybe you could learn a thing or two about your late husband.”
I thought about what Chanter had said for a good long while. I'd always been curious about who Alex was, what the other half of his life was like. It was like he was two people, and I'd only gotten to know one of them. He was as elusive as the wind. Maybe that's why he'd fascinated me so much. I've always been a sucker for impossible odds and hopeless causes.
Sal came out of the house, his hands full of beers. He passed one off to Chanter and then offered one to me before setting another off in the grass for Valentino when he was ready for it. “So, what's the verdict on the Firebird?”
There was a loud bang and a long stream of Spanish curses from underneath my car. I popped the top off my beer and swallowed a mouthful before answering Sal. “Depends on if you believe in miracles or not.”
“It might surprise you what I can believe.”
“That optimistic attitude isn't changing the tires on my truck,” griped Chanter.
“Guess I could go give Val a hand.” He smiled at me and held his bottle out. “Otherwise, we're going to be here until the government finally gets that fence built between here and Mexico.”
“Hell will freeze first,” Valentino grunted from under my car. He slid out from under it and wiped his hands on a rag hanging from his belt. “You work for the government, vieja. You should know first-hand all about the man and all his red tape.”
“If there's one thing I hate, it's red tape,” I grumbled, turning my bottle around in my hands.
Valen
tino paused, sighed, and then walked over to fetch his beer. He popped off the cap and raised it in the air. “Fuck the man,” he said. “And fuck all the fucking red tape. And fuck the government. They're the real monsters, what with all their taxes and their anachronistic organizations. FBI, CIA, BSI...”
I chuckled. “I think you mean acronyms and, technically, since they're not pronounced, they're initialisms.”
“Whatever. Fuck 'em. Who's with me?” He raised his beer higher, staring straight at me.
Chanter raised an eyebrow and exchanged a serious look with Sal.
I stood and tapped my bottle against Valentino's. “I'll drink to that.”
Sal grinned and raised his bottle, too.
“Bunch of anarchists,” Chanter muttered and then raised his bottle. “What the hell?”
When I first came to Paint Rock, if you'd told me I'd be standing around in the middle of the day, drinking beers with a pack of werewolves, toasting my disdain for the agencies that signed my paycheck, I would have laughed in your face. I've never been a particularly good employee. I didn't expect to win any employee of the year awards. Still, before Paint Rock, it was just a job. I clocked out and went home. It always felt odd, as if I had walked into a different world.
There, my work was my world. The people I protected and served didn't live in some far-off neighborhood. They were my next-door neighbors. They were the people who fixed my cars and took care of me while I was sick. I suppose some people would have been freaked out by the idea of a doctor's office filled with zombies, a werewolf mechanic, or a vampire-owned laundromat. For me, that felt more normal, more real than anything else. I was comfortable there.
No, it was more than that. There were people there who would fight alongside me. Ed, Chanter, Valentino, Sal... For the first time since I found out there were monsters in the world, I had friends. For a moment, I felt like I had at least a partial understanding of what it meant to be part of a pack.
And that’s how I deal with my job. I've learned to grab hold of every happy moment and hold onto it like it might be my last.
Every night, things wake up, evil things. They crawl into bed with good people, people like Zoe Mathias and whoever Andre LeDuc had once been. It destroys them from the inside out, eating them alive.
My job was to strike back. I ask the questions no one else wants to ask, go places no one else wants to go, and kill things no one else wants to kill. Sometimes, I saved people. A lot of the time, I didn’t. That kept me up at night. After the things I'd seen, it would worry me if I slept soundly.
But, for one afternoon, I got to drink with friends and pretend like the world wasn't full of bloodthirsty monsters that wanted to kill me. I got to laugh. I got to live. That was more than some.
Volume Two
Book 2 of The Judah Black Novels
Chapter One
There was blood on the ceiling. It started dead center next to a light fixture and tracked down one side of the wall, coalescing into a pool of mashed meat when it reached the floor. The wet penny scent of blood and the distinct smell of human viscera hung heavy in the air. Tiny red specks dotted an array of film equipment as if someone had swung a paintbrush dipped in red paint. Given the sheer number of discarded boom microphones, cameras, lights, and other film equipment, I would have thought the whole thing part of the movie set if someone hadn’t already told me otherwise.
The room was a faux bedroom of sorts, though it didn’t have all the typical trimmings of such a space. There was a round bed with leather restraints at regular intervals and black satin sheets. The bed was an odd find in the back room of a nightclub like Aisling. Then again, I’d been hearing rumors that Aisling sold more than dreams and desires for fifteen months now. I didn’t know why anything about the fae and vampire owned club should surprise me.
A little-known fact about most crime scenes: they put a plastic-lined bucket by the door. On entering, I made use of it with all the dignity and charm befitting a thirty-something professional female investigator. I turned, doubled over, and threw up the coffee I’d chugged on the way there.
A sympathetic hand came down on my back. “Jesus Christ,” Detective Tindall cursed, rubbing his arms. “Why the hell is it so damn cold in here? And what the hell is that smell?”
When a grizzled old cop like Tindall gagged, you know it’s bad.
Outside, it was still dark and the air cool, but it wasn’t cold. The ambient temperature inside the room made up like a bedroom hung somewhere near freezing. The contents of the bucket in front of me steamed. My stomach turned again, and I gagged. Thank God all I’d had so far was coffee.
One of the cops at the scene came up to us. He was wearing an Eden PD uniform and little plastic baggies over his polished shoes. “You can’t be in here.”
I spat and pulled a paper towel from a roll someone had been thoughtful enough to put up, thankful for the bucket. “Special Agent Judah Black,” I announced, pushing the woozy feeling away and drawing my badge out of my pocket. “BSI.”
The beat cop looked relieved. “Feds? Who called you guys?”
“I’m not—” Tindall started, and I gave him an elbow to the ribs to shut him up.
“A concerned citizen called with an anonymous tip,” I answered in Tindall’s place. “Who’s in charge here?”
“I am.”
I turned around and almost ran into a red-faced, silver-haired cop in a county uniform. His forehead wrinkled and he paused to draw a handkerchief across his face, leaving it in place over his nose and mouth, trapping clouds of warm breath. As he did, I spotted the sheriff’s badge on his chest. I offered him my hand. He paused, stared at it, and then reached out to squeeze it with palms as thick and soft as a baby’s cheeks.
“Sheriff Butch Maude,” he said in a gruff tone and wiped his hand on his shirt after I let him go.
“Good to meet you, sheriff. I’m a little surprised to see you here.”
“And why wouldn’t I be here? I’m heading this case personally,” he said with a grunt. “Messy case like this, just weeks before the election? The opposition would eat me alive if I didn’t show. Who called you in?”
I hesitated with my answer. My office was down the road on the Paint Rock Supernatural Reservation. Ever since I got shipped out there, I'd had my hands full with a pack of werewolves, shifty vampires, and the fae. It was all I could do most days to keep the peace. The reservation may have only been three square miles, but it needed a full-time presence from the Bureau of Supernatural Investigations. I was well within my rights, though, to pursue cases beyond the reservation, provided I cleared it with my supervisors.
Considering what I had heard about the victims…Well, the case was going to land on my desk eventually, procedure or not. I viewed stepping in from the get-go a much-needed foray into the dying world of government expediency. Cut out the middle man, I reasoned, and save the taxpayers a dime or twenty. Plus, a friend had called me with the tip.
But I hadn’t expected to run into a sheriff with election fever. The election loomed just a few weeks away. I doubted Maude would be so present if this wasn’t an election year.
“I got an anonymous tip from one of the patrons here,” I said with a shrug. “I figured you could use everybody you could get on this.”
Maude, still red-faced, jerked his chin toward Tindall. “And you just thought you’d bring my opponent down here with you, huh?”
Tindall sucked in a deep breath and worked hard to keep from muttering a curse. “Look, Maude, can we put all this election…crap behind us? I’m here to help, not to drum up votes.”
Maude narrowed his eyes. The two men entered into a stare-off until I cleared my throat. “Boys, come on. Can we get back to the dead bodies in the room?” I put a hand on Maude’s shoulder. “Walk me through what you know so far. Why the film equipment?”
“Disgusting,” Maude spat, shrugging my hand away. “Smut movies. One of the vics was a porno director. Vampire. Hence the smell. Apparently,
their guts have a special odor. That’s him…or what’s left of him.” He pointed to the smear of viscera on the wall. “Eden City Council’s been trying to shut him down ever since he filed for the permits but he’d greased enough palms to keep rolling. Been filming out here at Aisling for six weeks now. Name on the permit was Harry something.”
“Harry Hardrata,” one of the beat cops chimed in. Maude leered at him.
I paced over to one of the cameras. “Tell me they were rolling when it happened.”
“If only we could be so lucky,” Maude said with a grunt. “Of course they weren’t rolling. I thought the same thing. I also thought witnesses would be more helpful, but so far, all I’ve gotten is two piles of Jack and shit. I don’t think you’ll find them talkative.”
“There were witnesses?” Tindall asked. “Where? How many?”
“Three, but don’t bother. One bit it just as the meat wagon showed. Surprised he made it so long. His torso was a pancake.”
"And the other two?" I asked, trying to mask the hope in my voice. An open and shut case was exactly what I was hoping for.
"Vampires." Maude almost choked on the word. "Some foreign diplomat who's been about as useful as tits on a boar hog."
“I’d like to talk to them, just the same.”
Maude let out a booming laugh at Tindall's request. “You must think I’m stupid." He leaned in closer. "Read my lips. Hell no. You’ve got about as much jurisdiction here as a cow does at the Burger Barn. The fact I haven’t had you escorted from the premises is a stretch of favors. This isn’t your crime scene yet, Detective.”
“It’s not technically yours either, Sheriff, until Agent Black determines it is.”
“We’ll see.”
I tuned out the political mudslinging and went over to the second body. Harry’s wasn’t going to yield many clues in its current state. Maybe I’d get lucky with the girl. The medical examiner stood over the body, making notes on a tablet. Every once in a while, I’d hear the shutter click as she positioned the tablet to take a picture.