The Judah Black Novels: Boxed Set of books 1-3

by E. A. Copen

  The room on the other side was big, white and looked mostly free of dust. I wouldn’t have gone so far as to call it sterile, but it would do. Instead of an operating table, there was a large, cast iron tub in the center of the room. It was already full of ice water and Han was dropping more ice into it as I came in. I wondered who had hauled it in there since it was so out of place. There wasn’t any plumbing attached, so they must have brought the water from elsewhere.

  Marcus sat on a plastic orange chair, one leg crossed over the other. In his lap, he held a monogramed handkerchief with something bunched up inside. He regarded me with sagging, dark circled eyes. His fingers tightened around the handkerchief.

  Between he and I, laid out on mobile hospital beds on either side of the tub, were Zoe and Mia. A host of tubes and wires flowed out of each of them attached to silent, flashing monitors. I wasn’t a doctor but the stats I saw seemed dangerously low.

  Han dipped a disposable thermometer strip into the water and held it there a minute. “I suspect that neither Zoe nor Mia will last the day should you fail.” He looked at the strip and shook the water off it. Something gleamed in his eyes that made me very uncomfortable under his gaze.

  On a stainless-steel cart, rested against the wall where surgical tools might have normally been laid out, were an unusual assortment of tools. An old-fashioned mortar and pestle sat prominently among mason jars and small, fabric pouches with leather drawstrings. Right alongside that were bits of traditional medical equipment, sterile packaged syringes, vials of epinephrine, and rubber tourniquets. Modern medical science and traditional magick, side by side.

  Sal crossed the room in three steps and squeezed between the tub and Mia’s bed, stopping briefly to touch her hand. Then, he went to the cart and took up the bags, drawing out pinches of different powders, green, brown, and black, and mixing them, unmeasured, into the mortar. Once he had what he wanted, he turned and held his hand out to Marcus who hesitated before handing over the handkerchief. From the handkerchief, Sal drew out a very human looking finger bone.

  “Aisen tsaan,” Sal said and nodded his head in an exaggerated way that seemed to indicate thanks.

  Marcus wore an expression of worry but gave a stiff nod back.

  Sal dropped the bone into the mortar and pushed the pestle into it, beginning the arduous process of grinding bone to dust.

  While he worked, Hunter helped me out of the button up I’d worn. He folded it neatly and placed it on an empty chair. The skin on my arms prickled at the cold of the room, a pale ghost of the cold I’d feel once I got into the tub. I took off my boots and socks at Sal’s request and grimaced at the strange feeling of salt under my feet.

  Doctor Han wheeled over a portable cart and did a quick check of my vital signs, recording them all in a tablet he wore strapped to his hip. He affixed an oxygen sensor to the middle finger of my right hand and then told me to open my mouth. With a gloved hand, he attached something tiny and metallic on the backside of one of my front teeth.

  “A wireless thermometer of sorts,” he informed me. “I’m obligated to inform you that it’s not yet cleared by the FDA for human trials, but it did perform admirably in the chimpanzee trial.”

  “That makes me feel better,” I said, which came out as barely intelligible because there was an uncomfortable strip of hard plastic jutting under my tongue now.

  “Please remove your shirt.”

  I looked over at Sal who was still busy. There was no protest from him so I did as Han told me. Han came over with a tiny box and a bag full of suction cups with wires attached. After applying some lubricant, he affixed the suction cups to my chest and back, plugging the wires into the box. “Electrocardiogram,” he said, nonchalant. “The delay is less than a fifteenth of a second so we’ll know as soon as you’re gone and I’ll start the timer.”

  “The cut-off is four minutes,” I reminded him once I found a way to speak without making the wireless thermometer thingamajig smack into my tongue.

  Han smirked. “Four minutes without the ice. The induced hypothermia will give you almost double the time.”

  “Eight minutes still isn’t very long,” Reed said, frowning beside me. “Are you sure you can find the ghost and take care of her in eight minutes?”

  “We’re using the exact same magick that Cynthia delivered to Mia,” I explained. “Well, mostly. We’ve made a small modification that should keep the sickness from spreading beyond me. Even if I don’t come back, the only casualties will be me and the people already sick. I’m not going down without taking her with me.”

  “I’m still unclear on how you plan to do that,” Reed said. “I understand that interaction should be easier once you’re on the same plane as her, but there’s no guarantee that will be any more effective than the spell Saloso says you used last night.”

  “That... was an accident.”

  I didn’t want to outright say I didn’t have control over the big, scary spell that I’d done when I went on automatic the night before. If I did, everyone would freak out and realize how wrong the situation was. A practitioner was never supposed to lose control of their magick. That was dangerous. Slinging spells in that state was irresponsible. Someone could get hurt. They might ask me to call off the whole thing until we figured out what was going on. I couldn’t let them do that to me, not with Sal’s whole family on the line.

  “The spell would have knocked me out for a week if Sal hadn’t been there to help,” I explained quickly while Han affixed more electrodes to my scalp. So much for my clean hair. “Besides, it didn’t kill her. It just pissed her off and she came back with a vengeance. Look at Zoe. As for what I can do as a disembodied spirit that I can’t do here, I’ll be able to interact directly, affect the reality that Emiko’s spirit lives in. In theory, if I destroy her where she lives, I knock out the source of the spell and it goes away. Everybody wakes up and we have a happy ending.”

  Reed didn’t look convinced. “Talk about spiritual warfare,” he mumbled.

  “While I’m out, Sal will be just as incapacitated,” I said. “He has to keep the magick going, monitor everything. If he stops, the line tethering my spirit to my body snaps.” I looked at Reed. “Your job is to protect our bodies and protect Marcus. There’s still a fae assassin out there who’s failed her job twice. By now, she knows, and she’s not going to go back to her master empty-handed.” I nodded to Hunter. “You, young man, are to get the hell out if anything like that happens. You get help, whoever you can find, and bring them back.”

  By the time he got back with any useful help, Cynthia would have already made short work of the rest of us. At least Hunter would be safe and giving him that task made him feel useful. I knew how hard it was to feel helpless. Even if the job was a sham, it would give him something other than his dead mom to think about.

  Hunter nodded. Reed gave Marcus a wary look.

  “Oh, don’t worry about me, priest,” Marcus said, crossing his arms. “The fae will not get the drop on me twice. I am far from the helpless billionaire Judah thinks I am.”

  “I was going to say millionaire,” I said and Hunter snickered.

  “If this construction takes much longer, that may be the case.”

  Sal put the pestle down and turned around. “Judah, Hunter, come here.”

  Hunter went. I hesitated, drawing in a deep breath. Would this be the point of no return? My heart was doing jumping jacks inside my chest. I should have asked more questions. I didn’t even know if it was going to hurt or what to expect. I mean, I knew the basics. Tunnel. White light. Life flashing before my eyes and out of body experiences. Even knowing all that, I didn’t feel prepared.

  The coarse salt crunched under my bare feet as I went anyway.

  Sal asked us to each hold out a hand, palm facing down. My fingers trembled and it wasn’t from the cold. Something slick and cold swept under my hand before I could think about it. Hunter tried to jerk his hand away, hissing through his teeth in pain, but Sal held his
fingers tight and passed the ceramic bowl holding the powder under his hand. Two tiny droplets of blood fell into the pea-green mixture from Hunter’s hand. I gave a little more, but then, I wasn’t a werewolf and the knife hadn’t been silver. Hunter was already healing.

  “Go and stand in the water,” Sal instructed, his voice all business.

  Reduced to just my underclothes and jeans and covered in waterproof electrodes, I stepped into the tub.

  The coldest I’d ever been up to that moment had been when Hunter, Chanter, and I were stuck in the Way in his shed. Hunter fell through the ice and I went in after him. That ice must have been twenty-five degrees, but I had been fueled by adrenaline and fear. By the time I felt cold, we were tumbling through a door, back into the desert heat. It didn’t last more than a minute.

  That chill was nothing compared to the ice water in that cast-iron tub. I put one foot in up to the ankle and quickly jerked it back out on impulse. Everything in my brain screamed at me to stay out of the water. Extreme cold hurts for a very good reason. I fought that impulse for self-preservation with everything I had. Teeth grinding and muscles tense, I forced one foot to the bottom of the tub. The icy water chewed into my bare feet, the chill traveling up the tendons in the back of my legs and into my spine. It felt like walking on glass—only colder. When I put my second foot in, I had to let all the air out of my lungs and couldn’t help but whimper in pain.

  “W-what now?” I asked, hugging myself to try and contain the shivering.

  Sal dipped his fingers into the bowl and mixed the blood into the powder, forming a paste. This, he used to draw something on my forehead, upper arms, and over my heart. The mixture was like coarse mud. Everywhere the paste touched on my skin, it left behind a trail of numbness and the buzz of magick. It wasn’t Sal’s magick, at least not the healing magick I was used to. This was dark, angry magick. Hungry magick.

  He spoke words as he worked, but I found I was unable to concentrate on anything he was saying. The words had an odd cadence and his voice an unusual, deep pitch. To my ears, it sounded as if two voices spoke at once, though I couldn’t separate one from the other. They were two, and yet one.

  Wooziness hit as people on either side of me—I couldn’t turn my head to see who—took my arms and lowered me into the tub. The pain I’d felt when I first climbed into the water didn’t strike again. When the water rose over my chest, I couldn’t draw in breath. For a moment, every part of me that was submerged was paralyzed and I panicked. Control came back in fits but my movements were uncoordinated. Oddly, the cold didn’t bother me so much once I was in it.

  Flame hovered in my vision and I blinked, taking longer than normal to realize it was just Sal lighting candles around me. He walked a circle, placing and lighting candles at whatever intervals he needed to close the circle he was working with. I was only vaguely aware of the magick building inside the circle. My heart thumped in my chest to the beat of invisible drums at an irregular rhythm. I leaned back, the movement meant to make it easier to draw breath. The effort of air in my lungs hurt.

  After a moment, Sal knelt beside the tub, holding the back of my head. He lifted a plastic cup of foul, green liquid to my mouth, but I couldn’t make myself drink it. My head recoiled at the notion until he commanded, “Drink.”

  I swallowed a mouthful as he tipped up the cup and grimaced. It tasted worse than it smelled. It was like drinking watery sand mixed with mashed up insects and dirt. The mixture trailed down my esophagus. I was painfully aware of where it was, as it left the same magick numbness behind on the inside. As soon as it hit my stomach, I reacted violently. My whole body jerked forward with the urge to vomit, but Sal closed his hand over my mouth and nose, pinching both tight and cutting off my air. I had no choice but to swallow it a second time. It went down a little easier, but only because my tongue was coated in the stuff. I was more afraid I would choke on my own vomit than anything else. The second sip he gave me was even easier.

  By the time that one hit my stomach I was already seeing strange lights in the air. A drug-induced (or maybe just hypothermic) heightened sense of awareness mixed with the tired brain-fog that had already been there. It wasn’t a gradual thing. One minute I was just tired and nauseous. The next, everything was sharper, leaner, more finite. The words that pounded out of Sal’s mouth slowed, every strange syllable a spoken wave of power that I wanted to escape. It hurt when the sound waves struck me. The colors in the air were too vibrant, too alive, swirling and twirling. I couldn’t look at anyone’s face, no matter how hard I tried. Everything I tried to focus on was obscured by a blinding, bright light.

  Sal moved to the end of the tub where my feet were. I thought maybe the spell didn’t work, that it was over and I should get out. I tried to grip the sides of the tub, but my arms weren’t working right. The warmth of his fingers wrapped around my ankles. Maybe he was going to help me out.

  Instead, he pulled my feet up and held them. My head went down under the water with three inches or so to spare. I didn’t get a breath before I went down. The move surprised me enough that I let out the breath I had in a garbled scream. When he didn’t let me go so I could come up for air, my arms and legs thrashed wildly. I tried to kick him, to turn and jerk free, but Sal was too strong. I was out of time.

  I tried to fight the urge to breathe for as long as I could. In the end, instinct won out. Black closed in on the edges of my vision, highlighting the shrinking light that was focused on Sal’s face. I opened my mouth and filled my lungs with water.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  “You handled the medicine better than I expected,” said Chanter.

  We were sitting cross-legged in the air, not three feet from the tub, watching Sal drown me. Somehow, that didn’t seem odd and meeting Chanter as a ghost—or spirit, or whatever I was—wasn’t completely unexpected. If I had still been in my body, I might have been surprised, but the body is limited to the brain’s understanding of the world. Outside, free of the confines of the mortal body, everything seemed clearer and not in the same way the so-called medicine that Sal had made me drink made things clear.

  The room was quiet, the people still. My human brain would have perceived the moment as frozen in time. Ghost me understood that time as I understood it was a bullshit construct. Time wasn’t a line stretching from a perceived start to an inevitable end. It was dimensional, multi-faceted and full of little blips and junctions that I could explore at will. I was no longer limited to this time-space. I was everywhere and nowhere.

  Whoa. Talk about altered consciousness.

  Chanter’s ghost chuckled. “It’s a lot at first, isn’t it? Being dead.”

  I turned to look at him. He looked solid but then, so did everything else. “How do I—”

  “Know things?” He shrugged. “I could tell you that medical science has documented increased brain activity just before death, that all of this is a sort of short-circuit in the neuro-pathways of your brain. That’s how someone like Han would explain it. Or maybe it’s a deep and meaningful spiritual connection with some supreme consciousness. Maybe we’re just too stupid for our own good.”

  I swallowed. Then I realized I hadn’t been breathing. That was a weird feeling. Things like breathing, blinking, and swallowing the spit in your mouth are automatic. Not having to do that was...It was weird. Really, really weird.

  “Are you really here?” I asked of Chanter. “Are we actually outside my body and in the hospital on some other plane? Or is this all some kind of vivid death hallucination?”

  Chanter laughed and stood, extending a hand down to me. “Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Why should the afterlife be anything different?”

  That was vague enough that I could believe this Chanter was the real deal. I took his hand and he hauled me up. On my feet, I caught sight of my body below the surface of the water. The waves in the tub obscured my face but I stopped to study Sal. He was wincing. “I’m sorry you had to do t
his,” I said to him.

  “He can’t hear you,” Chanter said, tucking his hands into the pockets of his worn, dusty jeans. “No one can. That’s the trouble with being dead.”

  Chanter didn’t seem like he was in a hurry to get anywhere and nothing in the room was moving. Still, I felt like I was forgetting something important. There was somewhere I had to be, something I had to do. Time was more flexible now. I’d get around to it. I had an eternity now, after all.

  I decided to look around the room. Hunter was just a few feet behind my body’s head, perched on the edge of a chair, leaning forward and chewing on his bottom lip. His fingers gripped the edge of the plastic seat so tight that they were white. Reed stood next to him, his forehead wrinkled and sword raised off the ground. His back was turned to the door and he was frowning at the scene of my death.

  Behind them, pressed in the narrow space between the doorframe where the plastic sheeting hung and the ceiling, was Cynthia. She held in her right hand a glowing stick of silver. The glow had to be magick, but I couldn’t tell what kind of spell she might be working into the silver. Her face was blank, gaze focused on the back of Reed’s head. Her eyes were full of murder.

  I turned to look for Chanter, but he wasn’t there anymore. When I turned back around, he was in front of me. “Jesus Christ,” I gasped and stepped back. Well, floated back. Gravity doesn’t work quite the same way when you’re a disembodied spirit.

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Chanter said with a grin.

  “Knock it off, wise guy. Look.” I pointed to where Cynthia was perched and ready to strike. As soon as time started moving again, she would use the magick she was pouring into that silver stick and whack Reed in the back of the head. Another good jump and she’d be over the tub and on top of Marcus. And there was nothing anyone could do to stop her. Marcus was as good as dead.

  “Interesting,” he mused and nodded. “But inconsequential to why you’re here.” Chanter bid me to follow him and floated through the plastic. It didn’t so much as rustle at his passing. I turned around and surveyed the scene one more time and then followed him through.