The Judah Black Novels Box Set

by E. A. Copen

  “Shit, Judah.” He adjusted the phone and continued a little quieter. “You can’t bring him here. Valentino’s got a kid, and the whole pack is already in bad sorts with the full moon and all.”

  “I owe him my life, Sal. He might be the only person alive who can help me take that thing down.”

  There was a short pause. “We can clear a place in the shed. How soon?”

  I looked out the window, trying to guess where we were compared to where we needed to be. “ETA in five minutes.”

  Sal hung up. I didn’t wait. I dialed the next number I needed: the gate at the edge of the reservation. If the border patrol stopped us, we would lose valuable time. Some commander whose name I didn’t catch picked up on the second ring.

  “This is Special Agent Judah Black. I’m in a yellow Ferrari, ETA two minutes. I need to bypass the gate. Official BSI business.”

  “Badge number?”

  “Four-one-six-five-nine.”

  “Say again?”

  I cursed him inwardly. I didn’t have time for incompetence. In less than a minute, we were going to crash through the gate, open or not, and I didn’t want them opening fire on us. I repeated the number a little slower.

  The car jerked off the highway and to the left as we made the turn. The mechanical arm blocking entry to the reservation barely got high enough. We cleared it, but only barely. I breathed a sigh of relief and proceeded to give directions to Kim.

  Creven’s fingers tightened around mine. I looked down. Even for an elf, he was pale, but at least he’d regained consciousness. The whole back seat was shiny and red with blood. The bump in his throat bobbed up and down. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t talk,” I said. “We’re almost there.”

  “Need to say it.”

  “Shut up, elf. I don’t like to be second-guessed.”

  Creven tried to laugh and succeeded only in coughing up more bright-red gore. His chest heaved with the effort to breathe. He attempted a word and failed several times before he managed, “Oh, Jaysus…” Then he closed his eyes. His head tilted to the side and his breathing stopped.

  Chapter Twelve

  Our car slid into Valentino Garcia’s driveway, narrowly avoiding the El Camino he had up on blocks. Valentino was a mechanic for the Silvermoon pack and, by de facto, most of the people of Paint Rock. Normally, when cars tore into his driveway, it was because of a loss of steering or a brake failure and not because I was in the backseat, frantically performing CPR on an elf.

  The door behind me opened and Kim swore, somehow managing to utter half a dozen curse words in a single breath. The rear passenger door jerked open wide and there was Sal, pressing his fingers to Creven’s neck to check for a pulse.

  A long time ago, Sal was an army medic, trained by the United States government in the fine arts of triage. On the battlefield, his primary role would have been to determine who was worth saving and when and how to best delegate others to the task whenever possible. His healing magick helped, but skill with mundane medicine was always his first choice. That side of him came out in the driveway as he barked for Daphne to prep an IV and get the emergency surgical kit from the bathroom. His orders weren’t like mine would have been, driven from a place of worry and panic. He was calm, collected as if he were doing something as simple as washing a car instead of saving a life.

  “How long have you been doing CPR?” he asked me. At the same time, he pulled Creven from the car and laid him out on the pavement.

  I was too stunned to answer. The effort of all the magick I had used was taking its toll on me, along with a day of no sleep. It was all I could do to stay upright.

  Nina, Valentino’s wife, handed Sal a stethoscope, which he put to Creven’s chest. After a painful few seconds, he pulled it from his ears and, without a word, went to stand behind Creven’s head. Nina grabbed the elf by the ankles, and both of them heaved him onto a sheet Valentino had brought out and spread over the ground, careful not to bump the steel in his stomach. Then, each of them lifted their respective ends of the sheet and carried Creven toward the shed behind the house. The whole process was over in less than a minute.

  Before anyone could say Jack Robinson, everyone crammed into the tiny shed, which had hastily been transformed into a makeshift ICU. They put Creven, sheet and all, onto an old army cot in the middle of the building. Daphne squeezed in beside Nina with a blood pressure cuff and took over with the stethoscope while Sal readied an IV. Between them, they called out numbers and orders so fast, it made my head swim. I got one bit of useful information from the back and forth, though. Creven had a pulse. It was weak and thready, but it was there. After a few quick attempts at mouth to mouth, they even got him breathing on his own again.

  Kim came up next to me, her manicured fingernails digging into the flesh of her face. She hadn’t dressed to be out in the late afternoon sun, and every bit of exposed flesh was bright red. One spot on the back of her hand had blistered, but she barely noticed. Creven’s blood was still all over her and her eyes were wide and black. Still, somehow, her concern outweighed her hunger.

  “He’s alive,” I told her.

  Sal looked up from injecting something into the IV port. When his gaze fell on Kim, he narrowed his eyes but said nothing. He turned back to his patient and gripped the metal sticking out of him. Daphne and Nina both stood by with clean white towels. “On three. One, two…” He jerked the steel straight up. Blood spurted everywhere before Nina could get her towel down over the wound. “I need to know his blood type.” He looked up at Kim, tossing the metal aside. “What is it?”

  Kim hesitated, opening and closing her mouth once. “O positive.”

  Sal turned back to Nina. “Find me a match. Where’s my surgical kit?”

  “I can’t stay,” Kim said, her voice distant. “I…I need to feed.” She turned away and walked back out into the sun toward her car.

  “Wait a minute,” I called after her. “Where are you going?”

  “My father and I may have our disagreements,” she said. “But he’s still Master of this place. Every coven in the state owes him loyalty and is obligated to shelter me if I request it.”

  “And if the giant comes back? How am I supposed to protect you if you’re not here?”

  Kim didn’t listen to me. She just got into her car, blood and all, backed out of the driveway, and zoomed down the street.

  For a while, I stayed at the entrance to the shed, watching Sal, Daphne, and Nina work. Occasionally, Valentino wandered out with supplies but he mostly kept inside the house. I watched as they stripped off the tattered remains of Creven’s clothes, cutting away the expensive fabric with scissors. Sal packed the open hole in Creven’s body with clean gauze, stitching together what he could. He kept muttering he wasn’t a surgeon the whole time. But, if I understood correctly, they’d managed to get the bleeding under control.

  When Sal was done, Nina, who was more experienced in closing wounds than I would have first guessed, got to work with a curved needle and thread, sewing the wound closed. The skinny elf didn’t have much skin to spare. After much coercing, shifting, and pinching, though, she managed to get enough skin together to close it.

  Daphne followed behind her with ointment, a roll of gauze, and some medical tape, covering the stitches. She rubbed the ointment liberally over Creven’s pale skin with gloved fingers, every move gentle. Somehow, just watching the way she cared for someone who was a stranger was comforting. After her reluctance to help me earlier in the day, her help relieved some of my frustration with her.

  While both of them tended to Creven’s physical injuries, Sal stood behind Creven, hands cupped against either side of the elf’s head. Sweat formed on his forehead and streaked down his face and arms. He didn’t move to wipe it away. Even after Nina and Daphne finished their work and turned on the tap of the work sink to clean the blood from their hands, Sal remained statue still.

  I jumped as a hand squeezed my shoulder. Daphne gave me a reassuring nod
and whispered, “You should come inside. This will take a while.”

  “Is he going to make it?” I asked once we’d exited the shed. I winced at the pain still in my leg, but I was fine as long as I kept the weight off of it.

  Daphne looked to Nina, who said with a shrug, “Sal wouldn’t be spending so much time on him if he didn’t think there was a chance. Of course, these days, seems like he’d do anything for you.”

  I turned and stumbled a little. Daphne propped me up so I could look Nina in the eye. “If you’ve got something to say on the subject, just come out with it.”

  Nina took a step forward. She was tall and lean and beautiful, a perfect mix of the Shoshone and Latina genes she’d gotten from Chanter and his late wife. Neither childbirth nor motherhood had slowed the diva down. It hadn’t muted her sense of fashion, which I supposed was good for someone who owned a nail salon. Nina’s makeup, clothes, and appearance were always perfect. She looked like someone who could have walked onto a magazine photoshoot at any moment and been right at home. A starker contrast than Nina and me, you’d be hard-pressed to find anywhere in Paint Rock.

  She pressed her angular nose down in my face. “My cousin’s too good for you,” she announced with a low growl only a werewolf could manage. “I don’t like the way you jerk him around, playing his heartstrings like a two-bit, out of tune guitar. You call him up at all hours, getting him involved in this vampire mess…” She waved a manicured hand. “Bitch, you are trouble on two legs, and trouble is the one thing this pack doesn’t need. Sal certainly doesn’t need it, not after the hell he’s already been through. You don’t own him. He’s not at your beck and call. He’s nothing to you. He belongs to us.”

  “Nina.” Daphne put a hand on Nina’s shoulder, pulling her back. “Come inside.”

  Nina took a step back. Her eyes were golden, a sure sign she was angry. I suspected it had more to do with the full moon rising in the distance than me, though things between Nina and I had never been smooth. She gave me one last growl before spinning on her heels and marching back inside, hips swaying.

  “It’s the full moon,” Daphne offered. “Nina means well. She’s just overprotective.”

  “You’d think she’d be more grateful. I saved her kid last summer.”

  Daphne sighed. “I don’t think she’s not grateful. Look at it from her perspective. She and Sal were raised together. They may have different parents, but that’s her brother. No woman’s ever going to be good enough for her brother.”

  I had to laugh. “Oh, Sal and I aren’t a thing. We just hang out sometimes. He helps me with Hunter. We’re friends, Daphne.”

  She pursed her lips. “Look at our past. We let ourselves get close to a human once before, a human Sal chose to bring into pack business. Zoe was a bitch, but we accepted her. We made her part of us. When the split happened… One werewolf doesn’t just divorce a spouse. The whole pack does. To us, when someone who was pack leaves or dies, it feels like losing a sibling or a parent. It’s no simple matter.” She gestured back toward the front door. “Nina was friends with Zoe. That rejection hurt. Now, rather than risk facing rejection again, she alienates herself from all of us. And now that the full moon is rising, she’s more vulnerable than ever. She doesn’t want you to see that.”

  I crossed my arms. “Then why are you telling me?”

  “So, you understand,” Daphne answered. “Nina lashes out because she’s afraid. If you really want to be a part of this pack like you said, if you want your son to make his place here, you’ll love her anyway.”

  “That’s a tall order, considering she hates my guts.”

  “She doesn’t hate you. She hates that you could hurt her. There’s a difference.”

  I looked down at the ground and, realizing I was standing on a bloodstain, moved two inches to one side. “You’re going to be a damn good shrink, Daphne.”

  Daphne laughed. “Well, technically, I’ll be an addiction counselor. As much as I love listening to people whine about their family and relationship problems, I tend to think addicts are in greater need.” She gave me a wink and a smile and then gestured back toward the house again. “Speaking of addicts, Chanter said he wanted to see you when you were free.”

  I nodded and we went into the house together, me limping alongside her.

  Valentino and Nina Garcia have the biggest, nicest house of anyone in the pack. Even with everyone crammed inside, the place felt roomy. We stepped into an eclectic kitchen with Americana décor. The gentle hum of a dishwasher permeated the room along with the soft and welcome scents of lavender and rose. The blinds were closed and the curtains drawn, blocking most of the outside light.

  Valentino was the main reason they kept the house shuttered during the full moon. Migraines were a common symptom among werewolves during the full moon, as were other symptoms like body aches, fever, chills, upset stomach, and general malaise. It wasn’t a fun time for them. But, when the moon was finally up, they’d shift and run the streets, stretching sore limbs. Somehow, shifting alleviated the symptoms better than any medicine known to man. That’s where all the myths about them only shifting during the full moon came from. It wasn’t true they could only shift then, nor did they have to. The smart werewolf, though, listened to the body and moved with the cycles of the moon and Earth. That’s what Chanter would say, anyway. Since I wasn’t a werewolf myself, I had no idea what it was like.

  We went on through the kitchen and into the living room. There was a sofa sectional with an attached recliner, a big-screen HDTV, and all the trimmings of a home with a young child. Toys were strewn from one end of the sofa to the other. Leo Garcia was toddling back and forth amongst the mess, leaning on a push mower toy, the kind that made a popping sound. Only, this one didn’t. Someone had removed all the little poppers from the toy so it only made a gentle whoosh as he pushed it, blowing quiet but colorful confetti through the clear top like a snow globe. When he saw me, he stopped, smiled and flapped a chunky little palm at me. “Juba.”

  “Hey, champ,” I said, squatting down to give him the high five he wanted. My leg tingled and burned, screaming at me not to put more weight on it. Still, I wasn’t going to miss the chance to chat with my favorite one-year-old. “How’s the potty training?”

  Leo giggled. “Uh-oh.”

  I pinched my nose in exaggerated fashion. “Pee-yoo!”

  He imitated me. Nina came by and snatched him up without a word, carrying him down the hallway toward his nursery for a change. I gave him a sneaky wave. He giggled back.

  “And where is your son?”

  I looked up to see Chanter coming in from the den. The old man looked a lot worse than the last time I saw him. He’d lost a lot of weight, despite refusing the chemo, and a lot of the muscle tone was gone, leaving the skin just to sag. The old biker vest he wore hung off his arms, now two sizes too big. Even the faded ink on his arms looked older. He came in and sat down in the recliner, cigarette burning between his fingers. He smashed it into a half-full ashtray. It was only then I noticed the green oxygen tank hidden behind the sofa. He wasn’t using it, but seeing it and knowing it was his felt wrong. The alpha was supposed to be the strongest wolf, not the weakest. In his current state, it looked as if Chanter was barely hanging on.

  But I didn’t mention it. No one did. In no uncertain terms, he’d forbidden anyone to talk about his cancer or his refusal to treat it. Anyone who did risked the wrath of the whole pack now.

  “Detention for another half hour or so,” I answered, standing. “He said he’d walk over after school.”

  “He’d better,” Chanter grunted and then coughed. Out of instinct, I moved forward, ready to help him if he needed it. The old werewolf swatted me away. We didn’t talk about it. “Is he fighting at school again?”

  “It was a girl this time, Chanter. Thank God she didn’t need stitches. This is the second time this year, and we haven’t even made it to Thanksgiving break yet.” I plopped down on the sofa close to Chanter with a s
igh. I swung my leg up onto the cushion beside me. For the first time, I noticed dried blood on my jeans. “What am I going to do with that kid?”

  “Hm. Good question. But it must be hard for a young man in the world today, especially when his mother would rather spend her time chasing monsters than talking.”

  I gave him a reproachful glare. “You know that’s not how it is.”

  “Sure, I do. You don’t have to convince me. It’s Hunter you have to convince.”

  Daphne came in from the kitchen, two open beers in her hands. She offered me one and gave the other to Chanter before sitting on the opposite arm of the sofa. I took a long drink and reveled in the taste of cheap beer and good company for a moment before continuing.

  “I’m not so sure it’s my approval he needs,” I said, turning the beer bottle around in my hands. “It’s been fifteen months, Chanter. I hate to ask, but at what point does he get a spot here in the pack?”

  “When he is ready,” said the old Indian before taking a swig.

  “And when is that going to be?”

  “Soon.”

  I rolled my eyes. That’s what he always said. “To be honest, I’m going to need something more concrete. You said he would start the Change soon, too. So far, he hasn’t transformed into a little wolf boy. You’d think I would have noticed.”

  Chanter laughed. “The Change happens first in the mind, girl, and body second. He’s embraced the possibility, and now he fights with the acceptance of what it means to be what we are. Once he works through it, the Change will come. But that’s on his time, not ours. As difficult as it is for us, we have to be patient. Now, let me see your leg.”

  I frowned. Chanter would want to try to heal me or, at the very least, want to help me bandage any damaged tissue. I didn’t want him to waste his energy on me. I’d heal on my own time. But refusing him would do no good so I reached down, pulled off my shoe, and rolled up my pant leg, making a face when I saw the injury for the first time.