The Judah Black Novels Box Set

by E. A. Copen

  But all good things must come to an end. Just before the school bell rang and Hunter got out of the car to go in, a motorcycle swerved up onto the sidewalk beside us. Sal tapped on the window. I thought about just driving off, but Hunter was still in the car with me.

  “Sal,” he exclaimed and threw open the passenger door. My boy got out and stopped to trade grips with Sal as if Sal hadn’t blown him off last night. I rolled the window down to listen in on their short exchange.

  “Hey, kid. How’s the free throw? Still keeping up on it?”

  Hunter shrugged.

  “You’ll make the team next year for sure, kid. Tell you what. Why don’t you come straight over after school, and we’ll work on it?”

  You would have thought Sal promised him cheese over the moon. Hunter beamed. “I’ll be there.”

  The school bell rang, and I waved to Hunter. “Have a good day.”

  Hunter ignored me, waved to Sal, and turned to run full speed into the school. That’s how it always was. He never had the time of day to give to me, but he’d stop a moving bus to shoot the breeze with Sal.

  I turned forward and started the car. Sal’s hand came down on my car door. “Judah, wait.”

  Dammit. I’d forgotten to roll the window up. That didn’t mean I had to turn and face him. “I need to get to work,” I protested.

  “You need to give me a chance to explain.”

  “What’s there to explain?” I glared daggers at him. “And you had your chance this morning. You threw it away. Give me one good reason to give you another.”

  He lifted his goggles to his forehead, revealing droopy, bloodshot eyes. “If it were up to me, I’d tell you everything,” he said with a sigh that told me it was harder for him to say than he thought it was going to be. “But you know it isn’t.”

  “Aren’t you even going to apologize?”

  “Dammit, Judah! What the hell do you think I’m trying to do?”

  I blinked. It shouldn’t have surprised me that he would shout at me, not after this morning, but he’d raised his voice enough that other people stopped to stare. I felt the weight of their gaze on us and remembered Patsy’s words. My face burned.

  “You know what, just forget it.” Sal shook his head and pulled his goggles back down. “I need to go get Chanter.” He revved up the motorcycle, drawing irritated glares from all the other parents lined up to drop off their kids, and then sped off.

  I sat in my car, trying to pull myself together. I still felt stupid, hurt, angry. All of it was rolled into a ball of flaming ice in my chest. Try as I might, I couldn’t remember being this angry at anyone. Ever. And I couldn’t explain why. People yelled at me all the time. Hell, I was a fed. Lying to me was what the bad guys did.

  That’s it, I thought and winced when I realized the truth my brain had been dancing around all day. Sal isn’t one of the good guys. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll get out of this before you’re in too deep. My head knew that, but my heart resisted. I knew Sal. He and Chanter had pulled me out of more tight spots than anybody. They were my friends, and I trusted my friends. How could it be that my friends, people whom I’d trusted with my life, were career criminals? Maybe even killers.

  Someone laid on their horn and gave me the finger because I was holding up the line to pull out. I waved back with the same finger and pulled out into traffic, headed for the precinct. Whatever was going on with Sal, I’d have to sort it out later. I had to save his daughter first.

  My office was smaller than most of the broom closets in the station, but it was big enough to house a desk, two chairs, and an array of boxes and knick-knacks I’d never gotten around to putting up. My computer is hooked up to BSI’s databases, putting every major crime-fighting and information-gathering network in the country at my fingertips. I was also sure BSI had bugged the damn thing. For this job, my work computer was useless. I had to rely on the shoddy, old laptop I had in storage.

  When I pulled the laptop out of the bottom drawer, I blew a layer of dust off and choked on it. Then I grabbed the white cable I kept in the drawer with it and made the long trek to the port in the hallway, hooking one end there and the other in the laptop. That’s right. My laptop was such a dinosaur that the wi-fi didn’t work. The screen was cracked, and it blue screened on me every time I used it. With all those problems, the one thing I could be sure of was that BSI wasn’t tracking where I went and what I looked at. I kept meaning to talk to Ed about an upgrade, but I’d always had my back up at home. Not so now.

  Once I got the relic up and running, I visited the non-BSI investigator’s best friend: Google. Mia’s symptoms went into the search box and returned millions of results, most of which decided she had either a traumatic brain injury, some rare form of cancer, or lupus. As the great and wise Doctor House M.D. said, “It’s never lupus.” Mia’s doctors had ruled out the other two as well. I had to refine my search.

  I went back to the search bar at the top and typed in paranormal aura sickness. As I suspected, I was inundated with results concerning psychic leeches, spiritual attachment, and demons. Most of the general results weren’t useful at all, as they were amateur sites and second-hand accounts of urban legends. Buried deep on the third page, I found something that showed promise. An academic journal published four years ago ran an article written by none other than my old BSI mentor. The article was part of a larger magazine, but I found a pirated copy of it scanned online.

  For the record, I don’t advocate piracy. Had I been able to use my BSI accounts, I would have had access to it anyway. I just didn’t want to log in there and have my superiors wondering what I was doing.

  Anyway, the article was an extensive study concerning auric vampires. Nine out of ten times, when people talk about psychic leeches, they mean auric vampires. Auric Vampires feed off the life energy of others. Most of the time, they’re outgoing, alpha personalities with a long history of failed relationships. They weren’t spirit entities only I could see, so auric vampires were off the list.

  Ghosts fit some of what I was looking for, but it was incredibly rare for them to latch onto a person and follow them from place to place. Since Mia had been moved from Marcus’ home to the hospital and the thing had followed her, the chances that it was a simple case of ghost sickness were slim, unless there were other factors in play.

  Whatever that creature was, it was feeding off Mia, and Mia was evading it by letting her conscious spirit leave her body. So far, my theory would have been controversial to other BSI agents. BSI didn’t like for agents to talk about spirits, souls, and so on. Ghosts existed, but everyone agreed they were just residual energy left behind, the imprint of emotion and magick combined in a space. That only explained about seventy percent of so-called hauntings. The last thirty percent were dubbed IREs. Intelligent residual energies. I’d call that a disembodied soul. IREs hung around for unfinished business. They couldn’t be killed, and communicating with them was even more difficult. The important thing about IREs was that they remained for a reason. Being goal-oriented usually made them simpler to deal with. Usually, if you could find a way to help them achieve their purpose, they left on their own. I had never heard of an IRE that fed on people, though.

  Demons could feed on people, but I didn’t get the demon vibe from the thing I saw in Mia’s room. Scary, yes, but not demonic. Demons tended to do a lot more damage over longer periods of time. They were a long fuse on a big Earth-shattering ka-boom. There were instances where the possessed went downhill quickly, but this thing didn’t have the power that would have been necessary to do that.

  What was it, then?

  Maybe I was looking at it wrong. Rather than trying to match the symptoms to the creature, I could look at the origin and follow the progression. It hadn’t happened at the hospital. That meant I needed to see the place where Marcus had been keeping Mia before the hospital. I made a note to remember to ask Marcus about it at dinner. In the meantime, the best thing I could do was go and check in on M
ia and get some more information from her doctors. The medical jargon wouldn’t mean anything to me, but if I could establish a timeline and a definite progression of symptoms, I could narrow down my list of possible suspects much more easily.

  I paused and drummed my fingers on the desk. While I was at the hospital, I might be able to corner Chanter and get some information out of him, too. Just because Sal didn’t want to talk to me didn’t mean I couldn’t find out what they were up to. At the very least, Chanter had already told me more than Sal. And I knew Chanter wouldn’t be as hot-headed or let his feelings for me cloud his judgment. After a long pause for thought, I decided and grabbed my keys on the way out. There was no sense in leaving any stones unturned.

  Tracking down Chanter was easier said than done. The hospital was huge, and unless you’re family, you can’t just walk up to an information desk and demand to know where a patient was. Unless you had a handy BSI badge, that is. I wasn’t supposed to use it for that, but flash a badge in front of people and they tend to do whatever you ask without question. Humans did, anyway. Humans are conditioned to obey authority figures. It’s ingrained in our culture and our very way of life. That’s less true when it comes to werewolves.

  The oncology wing was a busy place divided into subsections and specialists that were further divided in ways I couldn’t hope to understand. Chanter had come in for another PET scan. I knew because I’d heard Sal complaining about how much convincing it would take to get him to go. Imaging was a restricted area, so I couldn’t just walk back there, not even with my badge. I checked in the waiting room and didn’t see Sal. I thought maybe I’d missed them.

  “What are you doing here, girl?”

  I turned around and saw familiar brown eyes and a long, wrinkled and tired face staring back at me. Chanter wore a plain white shirt and his King’s vest, on it the patch reading VP and several others. A three-legged cane kept him upright. The oxygen tank he hauled around on his hip kept him breathing. I gave a tight smile and put my arms around him. He patted my back lightly.

  “Where’s your escort?” I asked.

  “Saloso is no fonder of hospitals than I am. It’s the smell, I think. I sent him out before he got any more agitated than he already was.” Chanter looked me up and down, his forehead wrinkling. “You are wearing a new kind of worry on your face. Come. Tell me about it.”

  Chanter offered me an elbow. I smiled and slid my arm in his. I let him set the pace, even though I had to fight to stay slow enough for him. I waited until we were out of the waiting room and back in the hustle and bustle of the hall to say anything else. “Did you get your PET scan, Chanter?”

  “Thunder doesn’t need to see lightning to know a storm is coming, girl. I’m not long for this world, and I don’t need some educated, white yuppie to tell me that. My chances of waking up tomorrow are still better than yours if you don’t tell me what’s on your mind.”

  We approached a plastic bench. It had one of those donor plaques on the wall behind it, advertising that it was made from recycled plastic bottles in memory of someone who’d probably paid a lot of money to have their name on a bench. A nurse bustled by pushing a wheelchair carrying a tired, thin girl in her early teens. She stared at the floor, her eyes glazed from whatever was running in her IV.

  Chanter stepped in the way of the wheelchair after signaling for me to wait. “How are you, Alicia?”

  The nurse answered in the girl’s stead. “Making progress, aren’t we?” Her face stretched into an optimistic grin.

  The little girl, Alicia, stared blankly ahead until Chanter lowered his hand on top of her arm. I leaned forward as the familiar buzz of magick filled the air, unseen and unheard by all except for Chanter and me. Alicia blinked fast, as if she were waking from a long sleep, and lifted her gaze to Chanter. A hesitant smile of recognition crossed her pale lips.

  Chanter returned a warm smile of his own. “Chin up, child. Half the battle is attitude. You’re too young to look so grim.” He winked at her before he stepped aside.

  “What did you do?” I asked him, watching the nurse roll the patient down the hallway.

  “What I could.” Chanter’s voice was even more strained. “Dying is not the worst part of cancer. Sometimes, living is just as bad. The young bear the pain well, but their spirits are far more fragile.” Chanter hobbled over to stand next to the bench. He winced, and his wheeze was even more audible now than it had been before. “Now, this business of yours. Let me guess. Matters of the heart?”

  “Is it so obvious?”

  “Child, I am old, not blind. I do remember what it feels like to be lost in love. And considering the boy’s attitude this morning, and the worried weight you’re carrying in your forehead and shoulders, you two might as well have worn matching t-shirts. Now, tell me which thing it is the two of you have decided to quarrel over first.”

  “First?” I sighed and frowned. “I don’t know how many more of these I can handle.”

  Chanter chuckled and then coughed, but made a quick recovery. Even though he worked for every breath, Chanter’s eyes sparkled with the same joyous energy he carried wherever he went. “Welcome to the family. If there’s one thing someone should have warned you about up front when it comes to my nephew, it’s his ability to argue. Saloso invests himself completely in all that he does. Lets himself get lost in things, believing if he can just throw enough of himself at it, it will work out exactly as he’d like. When it doesn’t, he grows quickly frustrated.”

  I turned away from Chanter and studied the arm of the bench. “I need to know about the Kings, Chanter. I can’t be left in the dark. It’s just not in me. I need to know that I’m not going to be used to clean things up for the club. I can’t do that.”

  “Hmm.” Chanter drew his lips into a thin line. With most people, when they make a non-committal noise like that, it’s difficult to interpret. Over the months I’d gotten to know Chanter, I’d learned that response was more of an “Aha!”

  He hobbled to the other side of the bench and sat down with a grunt, leaning forward on his cane. “When we were young, my mother forbade my sister to go to a school dance with a white boy. No matter how much she stomped and cried, she would not budge. On the night of the dance, my sister snuck out the window and went anyway. She returned very late in tears. Even though she had disobeyed, my mother spent the night consoling her daughter and listening to the tale of how the boy had danced with other girls and ignored her. That was the kind of person my mother was. It was also the kind of person my sister was, to believe every man she loved cared as much about her. In many ways, that was how she died—loving the wrong man too much for too long. Saloso knows this was his mother’s fate, that she didn’t survive his father’s leaving. Consider that.”

  He cleared his throat and continued, “But the night my sister snuck out, as she lay in Mother’s lap, deep in tears while my mother brushed her hair, my sister asked an important question. ‘Mamma,’ she asked, ‘how did you know it would be so bad for me to go?’ To this, my mother, who was the wisest woman on the reservation, replied, ‘Daughter, I did not know. I knew only it could happen.’ My lovely young sister was distraught. ‘Mamma,’ she continued, ‘if you knew this could happen, why did you not tell me?’ And do you know what my wise old mother’s reply was?”

  I shook my head.

  Chanter took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “She said, ‘I did not tell you because you were not ready to listen.’ Being so wise, my mother understood something few of us do until we sit and stare death in the face. While my dear sister would have heard the warning, she would have chosen not to heed it anyway. A fool always believes he is wiser than the wise man, Judah. That’s what makes him a fool.”

  I frowned and crossed my arms. “Are you saying I shouldn’t ask because I’m not ready to hear the truth?”

  Chanter smiled. “I am saying, girl, that today I choose not to be the fool. A wise man knows not to step into a lover’s quarrel.” He laughed at
me when I gave him a sour face in response, and he patted my hand. “Saloso cares deeply for you. He took a big risk yesterday, bringing you out to Diabla’s. Your approval matters. It’s dear to him, even if he can never say it. What the Kings do, it is the greater good. Sometimes, that puts us at odds with the law. That’s not something I can deny. Some spend more time on the other side of that line than others. I can’t tell you more than that.”

  I withdrew my hand from under his. “Can’t or won’t?”

  “My nephew is a good man, Judah. You can trust him, and you can trust Bran. Be wary of the rest.” He coughed. I leaned forward to see if I could do anything, but he just worked his way through the fit before stopping to take a few deep breaths.

  “What should I do? I care about him, but I’m not sure I want that kind of complication in my life, Chanter.”

  Chanter closed his eyes and relaxed on the bench. “We all long for the simple life until we find it, girl, and then we wish for exciting times. I will tell you that a life lived in safety is not the one I would choose.”

  “But what do I do about Sal? How can I be sure I’m not being used?”

  Chanter’s hand smacked into the back of my head. It wasn’t the hardest slap I’d ever had, but it stung just the same.

  “Ow,” I complained, rubbing the back of my head. “What was that for?”

  “If Sal were here, he’d break my hand for doing that. The boy would jump in front of a speeding train for you. Like the bull-headed, stubborn, half-blind white girl that you are, you’re the only one who can’t see it.” He moved his hand and I flinched. But instead of striking me, he touched my cheek with the back of his knuckles. “You see, pain is not so easily forgotten. Saloso knows what it is like to be dragged through a relationship and discarded. It’s still fresh, like the buzzing pain in the back of your head. Do you want to know how you can be sure? The truth is that you can’t. None of us can. Surety is a luxury, girl. Trust. That’s what you ought to be seeking. If you trust me, if you trust Saloso, you will take us at our word.”