The Judah Black Novels Box Set

by E. A. Copen

  “Whoever is responsible, he must be punished for his crimes against the Stryx.” Crux set his pale, gray eyes on me.

  “I’m arresting the guilty party, and they’ll face a trial here,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m not about to hand them over for whatever your kind calls justice.”

  Crux slammed a fist down on the table. Sven jumped at the sound. “A blood debt must be paid with blood!” he screamed. “No other currency will satisfy what is owed! Blood must be met with blood! It is our law, agent, and our birthright demands it.”

  “We’re not in your territory,” I told Crux with a glare. “And the law of this land demands the criminal justice system punish the guilty. Stay away from this. Let me do my job.” I put my hand on the door and pushed it open.

  “Then you’d better find him first,” Crux spat after me, rising from the table. “Come, Sven. Let them find their own perpetrators.”

  I slammed the door closed and stormed back to the table, putting all my weight on it as I leaned forward on my fingers. “You’d better sit your ass down in your chair and think good and hard about your next move, Crux, or you can spend the night in a cell.”

  “For what?” He wrinkled his nose and pressed a hand to his chest, feigning offense.

  “I can hold you for twenty-four hours for no other reason than I feel like it. After that, I’ll throw an obstruction charge at you. And those cells are pretty damn tiny, Crux. I can’t guarantee you and Sven will be roomies.” The vampire let out a grunt of frustration and sank back down into his seat. “Keep yourselves available,” I instructed as I pushed off the table and went to the door. “I’ll try to think up more questions for you two.”

  I should have been happy Crux gave me anything at all to work with, but my investigative high had already worn off. All I felt was pressure. Crux wasn’t going to give up looking for the person responsible, and there was nothing I could do or say to make him short of putting him in a cell. He was more connected than I was and had more information he hadn’t shared with me. If the Kelleys were in his corner, as I suspected they were, they could stall this investigation until Crux found his man. I wasn’t about to trade one killer for another. I needed to find whoever was behind this and fast. The clock was ticking.

  Chapter Six

  I went to my office to collect myself. My office is smaller than most closets and seems to have gotten smaller since I moved in just over a year ago. Aside from the secondhand desk I had brought in, I also put up a corkboard and a dry erase board and installed a filing cabinet. All three were overflowing with papers. Pinned photos of the missing fae littered the corkboard while dried up and curling sticky notes, now held in place with tape, occupied the wall around it and the dry erase board. More colored sticky notes plastered my phone. At least two stuck to my filing cabinet urged me to organize it.

  Instead, I ignored them all, plopping down in the worn leather office chair behind my desk with a loud sigh. I pushed a pile of papers off of my laptop and opened it, staring hard at the screen as it booted up.

  In my head, I ran down a list of the usual supernatural suspects. Ghosts caused cold spots. Vengeful spirits could even kill. I needed to go back to the scene with an EMF meter and see if I got any hits. Still, it didn’t seem to fit. What kind of ghost killed two people in two completely different ways? Spirits were creatures of habit, old recordings stuck on a loop. They didn’t leave whatever they attached to, be it a place, thing, or person. If Aisling was haunted, why was this the first time anyone was noticing? It just didn’t fit, no matter how hard I tried to cram the puzzle pieces together.

  But ghosts weren’t the only incorporeal being. It might be a demon. Dealing with demons and the occult was my specialty, but I hadn’t worked a case involving a demon in quite a while. Such cases were often dark, messy, and never had a clear resolution. Demonic activity would explain the pounding and the level of violence, but I’d seen enough demon-related crime scenes to think this didn’t fit the bill.

  Maybe it wasn’t a spirit at all. Humans were capable of some evil things, and with the right magick, anyone could do what I’d seen. Clean cut evil like you see in the movies just doesn’t exist. More often than not, good people did bad things because they thought they had no other option. I couldn’t imagine being so cornered I would let a demon touch me, or any of the darker spirits. Even in the darkest, most desperate of times, a smart practitioner wouldn’t summon a spirit as a first choice.

  First of all, the cost of doing so was too high. To call up a being powerful enough to do what this one had done…Well, let’s just say I wouldn’t have been surprised to find other dead things.

  Living cost other lives. It was true whether I was talking about an eco-conscious vegan (even carrots are alive at one point) or a hungry demon. Everything in the world lived at the expense of other living things. Science called it the food web. I called it the law of equal exchanges. Big things needed more than small things to survive. Small things provided fewer resources than big things. It was a fact, the principal every system, from business models to elephant herds, had to abide by. This law drove all life everywhere, and so, too, magick must abide by it. I was able to enhance my muscles to jump higher, run faster, or react quicker. Doing so for an extended period of time had consequences. Whether the energy was expended over the course of a day or a minute, it used calories, water reserves, glucose in the bloodstream. It strained muscles and built up copious amounts of lactic acid, meaning I couldn’t do it for long. But, before I ever took an extra jump or ran the extra mile, I had to eat. Woman shall not live on coffee alone, after all.

  Once the computer finally booted up, I went about logging into all the proper BSI databases to file my paperwork, pull files, and get all the information necessary so I could brief my team. This was the glorious and fun-filled life of any investigator. Ninety percent of the job was done behind a desk, on a computer, filling out redundant forms.

  The first thing I had to do was the most important. I had to file all the necessary paperwork through BSI’s online database that confirmed I was taking over the case. Until I did that, BSI had no record of what I was doing, and I couldn’t get paid for my time. In retrospect, I should have filed the papers before talking to Crux and Sven so that I could claim the forty minutes or so I spent with them in the interrogation room, too. But doing that particular bit of paperwork was something I was dreading.

  A foreign vampire belonging to a prominent and powerful clan had been murdered on my watch. Not only that, but another vampire family, the Kelleys, was tangled up in it. And once I mentioned that my main witness was Crux Continelli, son of the Stryx clan leader, BSI would send a specialist down to stand over my shoulder and make sure I was handling things well.

  The government didn’t trust anyone, least of all its own employees. Once the story hit the news, they’d select someone to handle damage control. The last thing the American government needed was to spark outrage across the Atlantic at how we were handling such a case. Once I filed the paperwork, it would start a timer. Within twenty-four hours, someone from Washington would be standing in my office, telling me how to do my job while only managing to get in my way. It was not something I was looking forward to.

  But, if I wanted to eat, getting paid was a necessary evil. Remember how important eating is?

  After filing the paperwork, I hit the research, pulling together everything I could on Harry, Crux, and Sven. Considering how high they were in the Stryx hierarchy and foreign citizens and, therefore, not required to register with BSI, I didn’t find much except for public records. Harry’s film company, though, had an American subsidiary, and that’s where I was able to find dirt on him.

  The Continelli Climax Corporation, better known as Triple-C, was a multi-national corporation with enterprises in Italy, New York, and Greece. On paper, Harry was a millionaire. He would have been expected to contribute a large part of his income to the family, and his financial statements showed he was doing his part. Ha
rry was making once a month donations to the Stryx Medical Needs non-profit fund. When I put his information into the INTERPOL database, though, several flags came up. As it turns out, he’d been investigated multiple times for allegations of human trafficking, drug possession, various sexual assaults… INTERPOL was never able to pin anything on him. Mishandled evidence, disappearing witnesses, and withdrawn charges made him impossible to hold. The guy was slimy, no two ways about it. I felt dirty just reading about him.

  Crux was cleaner but no less suspicious. While he’d never faced any charges, his name came up in depositions as an alibi for Harry too many times to keep from rubbing me the wrong way. In fact, it looked like the two of them often served as each other’s alibis whenever questioned. Never married, childless, and without any strong connections other than to Harry and a few other seedy personalities, Crux stuck out of a Stryx family line-up like a chicken in a peacock parade. While the rest of the Stryx lived life in high society, dining with queens and presidents, Crux partied with strippers and toured the world on private jets and a cruise ship owned by daddy. Knowing he was an entitled brat, even on paper, just made me hate him more.

  But the real discovery didn’t come from reading up on the Stryx. It happened when I pulled Aisling’s financial records. Several public notices came up, showing KK Enterprises, the venture behind the club, was in deep with creditors. The club was hemorrhaging money and had been for months. If things didn’t turn around soon, Aisling would be filing for bankruptcy. No wonder Kim was letting Harry film there, I thought. If the contract included kickbacks from the film, it would help Kim keep the lights on.

  But why isn’t daddy fronting you the cash?

  The Kelleys were filthy rich. Marcus Kelley’s pharmaceutical company, Fitz Pharmaceuticals, had an exclusive contract with BSI to provide all manner of medical supplies and testing for supernaturals. Whenever BSI used a blood test to determine if someone was, indeed, a supernatural, it was Fitz’s test they used. Kim was the daughter of a billionaire. Why was Marcus just standing by and watching his darling daughter’s enterprise sink into failure?

  I went back six months of financial reporting before I found the answer. I’d always thought requiring supernaturally owned businesses to file monthly financial statements with BSI was superfluous, but in this case, it was helpful. Six months before, right around the time Aisling’s financial troubles got started, the club took on two extra-large expenses. The first was a once a month donation to Romanvicorp, which BSI flagged as a Upyri venture. The Upyri were Eastern European vampires, a younger clan but still a force to be reckoned with. They’d been taking small bites out of Stryx territory in a cold war for years.

  The second new debt was smaller but no less important. Those checks for roughly fifteen thousand dollars a month went straight to the Stryx.

  “What the hell?” I said out loud, leaning in closer to my screen. Why had she taken a loan from both clans? It was dangerous dealing. If even one side found out she was making deals with the other, things could get messy for Kim, and fast. No wonder Marcus had distanced himself from his daughter’s business.

  After reading through the files, I threw together a quick bulleted list of things I needed the team to do. I needed Reed’s take on whether there was some kind of demon or spirit behind this. At least a signed deposition from him as a consultant backing my case would be helpful. It was my way of covering my ass at the local level.

  I’d called in a mental health worker, thinking she could help me talk to Sven. Just from my brief interaction with him, I felt it was obvious he suffered from some sort of delay or difficulty. If it turned out my case hinged on his words, I needed to know his testimony was solid.

  The cops would help me check in with the people who fit the profile, and Tindall, his partner, Quincy, and I would do the rest.

  While trying to think of another bullet point, I glanced up from my desk, my eyes falling on the corkboard full of smiling faces. My will wavered and my heart sank as I remembered this homicide wasn’t the only case on my desk. The office was overflowing with smaller but still important cases. Those missing fae were just the tip of the iceberg. I still had unregistered supernaturals in the reservation to deal with. There were supernaturals illegally having children without filing for the proper permits, and I needed to go get the paperwork started to make sure all those kids were documented, the parents fined. Add in the thefts, property damage complaints, and fraud accusations that crossed my desk, and my job was a never-ending nightmare. Tindall and the rest of the force helped but a lot of it was up to me. Many cities had whole departments to do the job I was doing alone. Work was an ocean and I was drowning in it.

  And then there was my secret case, the one I couldn’t tell anyone about. As I thought of it, my hand drifted toward the top drawer of my desk, checking to make sure it was locked, its contents undisturbed. Last year, I’d chased down a pair of wendigos, one of which happened to be pregnant. She also happened to be Sal’s ex-wife. The stress of the situation ultimately sent Zoe Matthias into labor, and complications meant I had to make a choice that still haunted my nightmares.

  Zoe had begged me to save her child. Her frail and white hands gripped my shirt, pulling, pleading for me to cut her open and save the child before I burned her body. I didn’t want to. But I didn’t want another innocent child to die because of me, either.

  My hands shook as I took up the sterile scalpel I’d fished out of the emergency surgical kit in Andre LeDuc’s bedroom. Cutting into her with it was so easy, so painfully, sickeningly easy. I killed her…and I saved the child only to have Father Reed snatch it away and carry it to parts unknown.

  Because the child was undocumented, because going forward with an official case would have forced me to put to light my part in Zoe’s death and the child’s kidnapping, and because Reed was hiding behind the promise of legal protection from the Church, I had no choice but to pursue the case in secret. Reed would tell me nothing. For so long, I had nothing to go on, no leads. Then, Mara showed up.

  I’d never seen someone so good with tracking magick. With a little preparation, I could scry using a map. If I had blood or hair from the person I was looking for, I could even narrow their location down to a few city blocks if I was particularly well focused. Mara blew me out of the water. Just by holding an item in her hand the other person had touched, she could tap into their senses, feel what they felt, smell what they smelled. Sometimes, she could even see what they saw. More recently, she’d been working with bilocation, which allowed her to even project a version of herself psychically across the room. If she got good, she would even be able to do it farther.

  With a map in front of her, I’d seen her point out streets and follow people’s movements with her finger, tracking them in real-time. She was a human GPS unit. Her skill would be invaluable when she made it into BSI, something I intended to make sure happened for her.

  For months now, I’d been debating bringing her into the secret, off-the-books case. From the original crime scene at the caves, police had recovered boxes upon boxes of evidence. It took me months to sift through it all before I found what I was looking for: a scrap of bloodstained, white silk sheets. The fabric was beaten and torn but there was no mistaking it. The scrap matched the bedsheets Zoe had been lying on when she delivered a healthy baby girl.

  I intertwined my fingers around the drawer handle, remembering how easily Mara had found me with her tracking spell. To me, the scrap of sheet was almost useless. While I could throw together a tracking spell, it wouldn’t be as good as Mara’s. She was a natural. But she was also a civilian. I’d already crossed the line asking her to track the missing fae, but I hadn’t had to take anything to do that. Everything I’d given her to work with was freely given by friends or relatives of the missing people. Moreover, I hadn’t told her exactly what she was looking for, which kept her out of the case on an official level.

  Prior to sitting in my locked drawer, the scrap had been in a secure
evidence locker where it was supposed to stay, especially since I hadn’t officially signed it out. If it was discovered now, the worst I could expect was a strong reprimand. Once I took it out of the precinct and handed it over to a civilian, I’d face criminal charges. And if I handed Mara a bloody sheet to use in a tracking spell, she’d refuse to help unless I gave her the whole truth, something I didn’t want to do.

  Unless I could get Reed to crack and give me more information, a tracking spell was my only lead to finding Zoe’s baby.

  I left the drawer closed and went to collect my papers. Reed would see reason this time. He had to.

  Chapter Seven

  After grabbing all my things from the printer, I went down the hall to the briefing room. It was one of the nicer rooms in the station because it didn’t see much use. A large rectangular table surrounded by high-backed leather chairs took up most of the room. Large floor to ceiling windows on one wall made up for the cramped space, and all the natural lighting made the room seem bigger. There was a telephone in there for conference calls, but I didn’t think it’d ever been used. A projector box hung from the ceiling, ready to throw its images onto a whiteboard. I didn’t have a presentation or anything fancy, so I left the laptop in my office and decided to rely on the papers I’d printed out. Sometimes, simpler is better.

  By the time I arrived, most of the team had already beaten me there. Daphne Petersen, the mental health professional I’d asked for, gave me a slight nod, pushing her plump cheeks up into a smile. She was a member of Sal’s pack and a student pursuing her master’s degree in chemical dependency. This wasn’t a drug case and she wasn’t a licensed psychotherapist or criminologist, but I trusted her implicitly. The Silvermoon pack had always been good to my family and me. She would also have the training needed to talk to Sven.