The Judah Black Novels Box Set

by E. A. Copen

  Tindall matched Marcus’ intense gaze. “Looks like I’ve got my work cut out for me, then.”

  “If you need any assistance, I’m only a phone call away,” the vampire added with a fake smile. He rapped twice on the partition separating the passenger compartment from the driver. The SUV slowed to a stop. The bodyguard lowered his gun, pushed open the passenger side door, and got out, holding it. The sounds of Tindall’s victory party, still going on in his yard, drifted into the car. “Enjoy the rest of your evening, Tindall.”

  Tindall hesitated, looking at me.

  “Go. I’ll be fine,” I said, answering his unasked question. “Just make sure Hunter gets some sleep. He’s got school in the morning.”

  “Take care, Judah.” The words were simple but layered with meaning. Both of us knew I’d stepped in something bad, and it was only going to get worse as the night went on.

  He got out of the car and stood on the sidewalk. The bodyguard climbed back in. I waved to Tindall as he closed the door behind him.

  “Now…” I turned back to the vampire and Zoe the wendigo. “What do you know about the missing little girl? You said she was in danger. Where is she? How do you know?”

  Zoe looked down at her hands and opened her mouth, her jaw quivering. “She’s…dying.”

  Marcus put a comforting hand back on her leg and squeezed. “We don’t know that. In fact, the problem is that we know almost nothing and yet everything at the same time.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”

  “I think it will be better if you see.” Marcus tapped on the partition.

  The SUV slid forward and back out into traffic. I swallowed, closed my eyes, and decided that I should focus on the problem in front of me. For months, I had been itching to find out what happened to this little girl, and now I knew she was in danger. For some reason, Marcus and Zoe thought I could help. I needed to find out as much as I could as soon as possible.

  “I have to say, I’m surprised you’re alive,” I said to Zoe.

  A year and a half ago, I’d gutted her and left her for dead in a cavern in the desert. But Zoe was a wendigo, a monster that subsisted on the flesh of others. I knew from experience that wendigos did not die easy.

  Her smile never touched her eyes. “Why should you be surprised? Did you think I would spontaneously burst into flames? Did I not tell you fire was the only way to finish me before I came back as a monster?”

  “If you’ve been alive and your daughter’s been in Concho County all this time, why am I just now hearing about it? Does Sal know you were around?”

  “Vampires, werewolves, and fae have all managed to hide from human detection for well over two thousand years.” Marcus gave another dismissive wave. “And there are hundreds of other non-humans out there still in hiding. We’ve gotten very good at keeping secrets from the government.”

  My hands clenched into fists. “But you knew I was looking for her and said nothing.”

  Marcus raised his chin. “You think very highly of yourself. Tell me, what right do you think you have to that child?”

  “What right do you have?” I snapped back without letting the words filter through the rational part of my brain. I couldn’t help it. Sometimes, dumb things just fall out of my mouth.

  Marcus’ face hardened, and his posture stiffened. “You must think of me as some sort of villain, a great criminal mastermind spinning many plates and heading some sort of evil, underground empire. You are Sherlock Holmes and I am your Professor Moriarty. You’ve been waiting for me to get caught up in a crime since you came to town. Nothing would be more satisfying for you than to see me behind bars, to validate your distaste for wealth and power. We are all the heroes of our own stories in our own heads, Judah.”

  “Are you saying you’re an innocent man, Marcus?”

  “I don’t believe in innocence. If such a thing did exist, however, I would be far from it. As would you. Your hands are not clean, either.”

  I bit my tongue and turned my gaze to the tinted windows, watching as empty desert passed by under a blanket of stars. “I’m nothing like you.”

  The SUV cruised past the neon lights of Aisling, the local strip joint. I wondered how the proprietor, Robbie, was faring after his brush with death. I had meant to look in on him, but that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. After that night, I needed to keep my distance from the Kelley family, for Hunter’s sake.

  As we drove into Eden, it sank in that I had left my son behind. I hadn’t said goodbye to him. But Marcus wouldn’t keep me for long. He couldn’t. If I didn’t show up for work in the morning, someone would start asking questions, wouldn’t they?

  We took an exit off the freeway and came down the ramp near the hospital. The Eden Memorial Research Facility and Hospital was more than just one building. The main structure took up most of a city block. The hospital had purchased the land across the street, too, and was in the process of building another tower and a skywalk to connect the two. All that space wasn’t just for show. Eden Memorial was one of the best hospitals in the nation, and the only one with specialists on staff for supernaturals. Counting the dozen or so satellite offices and clinics scattered throughout Central Texas, it was also one of the largest privately-owned healthcare systems in the country. And I was sitting across from the man who owned it all.

  I turned away from the window and searched his face for any hint to why we were pulling into the hospital’s underground parking garage. “Is she sick?” I asked, referring to the kid.

  “You might say so,” Marcus answered with a frown. “It’ll all be clearer momentarily.”

  The SUV stopped in front of the parking garage elevator, and Marcus opened the door. The roar of eight motorcycles echoing off the concrete walls filled the car as Marcus stepped out. The bodyguard got out stiffly. Zoe put her hand on the door, hesitating before turning back to me. “You’re here to save my daughter’s life. Don’t forget that.” She pulled herself out of the car.

  The night felt cooler underground. I wished I’d worn a jacket, or at least long sleeves. Or maybe earplugs. The noise of idling motorcycles was deafening. Four of them had stopped in front of the black SUV and four behind, just as they had been when they pulled up to Tindall’s place. I wondered if they’d broken formation at all on the ride over. Sal sat at the head of the formation, directly beside the club president, Istaqua. Istaqua shut off his bike, and the rest followed suit as if it were habit. Then, they sat there, still as stone, in the newfound silence, waiting for an order that never came.

  Sal turned his head, but thanks to his riding goggles and helmet, I couldn’t read his face. If he was surprised to see Zoe standing there, alive and well, he didn’t show it.

  “This way, Judah,” Marcus said from inside the elevator.

  I joined him, and he pressed the button that would take us to the fifth floor. The hospital directory on the wall next to me labeled the fifth floor as ERMH Behavioral Health. The kid couldn’t be more than sixteen months old now. It had only been that long since I delivered her. What was a toddler doing in the behavioral health unit?

  The stainless-steel elevator doors opened with a chime on a hallway of watered-down yellow. A blue strip curled along at eye-level, creating the illusion of childhood whimsy. Marcus stepped out and made for a set of electronically locked doors, fiddling with his watch. As he approached, the light on the locking mechanism changed from red to green, and the doors swung open.

  The ward beyond was done up in the same colors. Dead ahead in the center, and behind two blocky yellow columns, was a set of comfortable furniture upholstered in more bright colors. A poster tacked to the wall with tape showed a list of initials and a short, simple sentence beside each one. Take my medicine. Attend therapy. Listen to the doctors. Daily Goals was written at the top of the poster, and a fat, yellow sun with sunglasses grinned back. Half a dozen tables sat unoccupied to the left of that. Bookshelves lined the back wall.

  A pale, grim-faced t
eenager in hospital scrubs looked up from her place on the floor where she basked in the blue light of a big-screen television. Her gaze was eerily empty, the muscles in her face slack. I knew that look. Defeat.

  “Mister Kelley!” a woman’s voice exclaimed in a high-pitched, chipper tone.

  It snapped me out of my thoughts, and I realized I’d taken three steps forward. Marcus and Zoe were behind me, standing at a semi-circular nurse’s station. The woman who had spoken wore Tweety Bird scrubs and a nametag that read Uhl. She pushed her chubby cheeks up into a smile that made dimples. “I didn’t know you were coming,” she said.

  “Here to check in on the special patient.” Marcus finished signing his name on a clipboard.

  Zoe took the same clipboard and scrawled her name across it. Or, rather, she used the obvious pseudonym of Jane Smyth. Guess I ought to sign in, too, I thought and stole a glance back at the girl. She had her arms wrapped around skinny knees, rocking back and forth.

  “She’s still in quarantine,” the nurse informed Marcus as I walked back over. “We haven’t moved her.” Nurse Uhl hesitated in handing the clipboard to me. “Do you need an escort?”

  “No, no. We’re only going in for a peek,” Marcus promised.

  We affixed white visitor stickers bearing our names to our clothes. Mine was the only one she misspelled, even though I wrote it clearly on the page. When I took the badge from Nurse Uhl, I applied it to my forehead, turned to the girl, and stuck out my tongue. She gave me a weak smile.

  Nurse Uhl glared at me, so I peeled it off and affixed it to my chest. “Sorry. My mistake.”

  “I have rounds to finish,” she said with a frown and clutched another plastic clipboard to her chest before scurrying off.

  Marcus bid me follow him away from the nurses’ station in the other direction.

  The ward was divided into four sections, pods one through four. Calling the sections pods felt like a sick joke. The girl in the lobby was an empty husk, probably medicated out of her mind as if she’d been grown in a pod, an emotionless clone of whoever she was before. Don’t get me wrong. Modern medicine can do a lot of good, but it kills me to see young people so medicated they don’t know what day of the week it is. There comes a point where quality of life ought to be considered over the sanctity of life. Too many people get it backward these days.

  We went into pod four, which broke further down into eight rooms, each with a cold, stainless steel door and an electronic lock. A double layer square of safety glass, reinforced with crisscrossed wire between the layers, was the only window inside the locked doors. Even those were covered with strips of black construction paper.

  “Jesus,” I whispered. “I’ve seen prisons less secure.”

  “The facility meets or exceeds all the statutes handed down by BSI for the mental health treatment of children and adolescent supernaturals,” Marcus assured me.

  “They’re kids, not criminals, and if they’ve got something wrong, what’s locking them behind a reinforced door and doping them out of their minds going to do?”

  Marcus stopped in front of Room F. “I don’t pretend to be a mental health expert. I don’t make the rules, and I didn’t design the facility.”

  “You just fund it.” I frowned.

  “BSI funds forty percent of it.”

  Zoe pressed up against the door and stood on her tiptoes to lift the black square and peer inside. Marcus put a hand on her back and fiddled with his watch some more, and the door buzzed open.

  It looked just like any patient’s room might: sterile, threadbare, devoid of all but the most essential equipment. There was only one monitor tracking her condition and no furniture other than the plain crib and a camera with a blinking, red light. The crib itself was white, egg-shaped, and made of shatter-resistant plastic.

  Zoe pushed past me and went to the crib. She tucked her arms gently under a small child and lifted her, careful not to bump the IV. Zoe’s little girl was big for a toddler. The last time I had seen her, she was a newborn. Almost fifteen months had passed since then, and she’d grown into a toddler with curly, dark hair and a cute, wide nose. A thin white liquid-filled tube ran out of her nose and to a machine on wheels. She looked like she was asleep, except that her eyes were open and fixed on the ceiling.

  “She’s beautiful,” I said.

  Zoe tucked her child’s head against her chest and turned her back to me, rocking the girl gently.

  I looked to Marcus. “What’s wrong with her? Why is she here?”

  “She’s torporic.” I turned around to regard a bespectacled man, small of stature, with thinning, grayish hair. He shuffled in wearing a white coat, gave a stiff bow, and spoke in such a soft voice that I had to strain to hear him even though I was only feet away. “Welcome, Agent Black.”

  I hesitated, not sure how to respond. In the end, I decided on, “Uh…hi.”

  “Judah, this is Doctor Han,” Marcus said from behind me.

  “Doctor Han?” The name was familiar to me, and it took me longer than it should have to remember where I had heard that name before.

  Doctor Han lifted his head but did not straighten his back. The light caught on his glasses, and he pushed his age-spotted cheeks up into a tight smile. “I see you’ve heard of me,” he said quietly.

  “You’re a geneticist. You worked with Andre LeDuc. Didn’t he wreck your lab?”

  Han finally stood and pushed his glasses up his nose. “Indeed. He destroyed over a decade’s worth of research in his jealous fit and in pursuit of his selfish goal. But that is in the past. Holding onto that will not help Mia.”

  “Mia?”

  He gestured to the little girl. “Mia Matthias.”

  “You said she was torporic?”

  “A non-responsive state characterized by low body temperature and a slower metabolism for the preservation of energy.” Han stepped closer. “Similar to hibernation.”

  “Like the old vampire legends,” Zoe added in a grave tone. “They were supposed to look dead during the daytime. Dead but aware, unable to call out for help.”

  “Indeed,” Han added. “Unresponsive to outside stimuli. Yet her EEG and MRI scans suggest they vary between periods of complete awareness and a dream-like state.” He lifted a stethoscope to his ears and pressed the other end against Mia’s chest.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “If she’s practically comatose, wouldn’t a coma ward be a better fit? And how long’s she been like this? What’s it got to do with me?”

  Marcus put a hand on my shoulder and gestured back to the door. “One question at a time.” We stepped out into the hall, and he slid the door mostly shut before he continued, “It started last week.”

  I crossed my arms. “Last week? How long has the girl been in your care?”

  “Do you want your answers, or do you want to make accusations and dredge up the past?” Marcus snapped. “Because one course will help that child, and the other will not be good for your health, Judah.”

  After a long moment of staring him down, I let out a breath, turned my head, and muttered, “Fine. Just tell me about Mia’s condition and how you think I can help.”

  “Her condition began with nightmares,” Marcus answered.

  That got my attention. Nightmares were usually benign, the brain’s way of working through fears or problems. Whenever they were listed as a first symptom, there was always the chance that there was more to it. Curses, damage to the aura, or even demonic possession all manifested as nightmares in the beginning, but it didn’t mean Mia had any of those conditions. Plenty of other mental health problems manifested as nightmares first, too.

  Marcus paced away from the door and sat on a wooden bench against the wall. “Nightmares became hallucinations and then fits.”

  “When you say fits, are we talking about tantrums or seizures?”

  “Seizures. The first ones were small. Thankfully, none have left lasting damage, at least not that Doctor Han can ascertain. But shortly after the nightmare
s began, she became ravenous. She would eat until vomiting and then weep, begging for more. I thought at first she’d taken after her mother, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Less than twenty-four hours after the hunger struck, she weakened and became unable to eat or drink. The downhill trend was fast and violent, Judah. I did my best to place her somewhere she could receive the best around the clock care with discretion.”

  “Anonymity,” I realized out loud. “She’s here because mental health records are the only ones I don’t have access to without authorization from a parent or guardian.”

  He folded his hands. “And you wouldn’t get authorization without opening a formal case against me. The girl is here because, like the priest who brought her to me, I don’t want BSI to know she exists.”

  I uncrossed my arms and put my hands on my hips as I took up pacing. “And yet, I’m here.”

  “Here and sworn to secrecy.”

  “This isn’t something I can help with.” I shook my head. “Your doctors—”

  “Doctor Han is the top medical mind in his field. His team was handpicked from a pool of thousands, and they have access to the best, most accurate testing that money can buy. They all conclude the same thing. There’s no medical cause for Mia’s current state, not physical or mental. Therefore, the natural next step is to assume it must be something metaphysical, something spiritual in nature.”

  I stopped pacing and glanced over to the door, behind which a little girl was dying for no reason. As much as I wanted to disagree with Marcus, his argument was sound. I couldn’t walk away, not without first offering to do what I could.

  “I want you to save her,” Marcus said.

  “And if I can’t?”

  His eyes narrowed, and he showed me fangs. “I will get irritable. I’ve already told you what happens then. I will not start with you.”