Guilty by Association (Judah Black Novels)

by E. A. Copen

  I sighed. No wonder every BSI agent that had been assigned to Paint Rock left in a hurry if this was the hostility they faced day in and day out. On some level, I could understand their hesitance to trust me. BSI agents aren't known for their cooperation with local law enforcement. A lot of them are pretty confident that they're better than the uniforms on the street and even the detectives. Being a federal agent gave me lots of perks that I could abuse to get my job done. Unlike many of my fellow agents, I understood that the cooperation and trust of the locals was more important than an efficiency bonus at the end of the quarter.

  “Find anything interesting?” I asked the CSI who was collecting bloodstained bits of glass and placing them in a plastic tube.

  “A lot of blood,” she said in a cheery voice without interrupting her work. “Most of it's over there, though, where the body was. Based on that and the photos I saw, your vic was alive when his head went through this glass here.”

  “The body was in bad shape,” I told her. “Literally. Hard to say if there were any defensive wounds, given how fast werewolves heal.”

  “Well, at least I can verify that.” She capped the plastic bottle and pulled another from a small foam cooler sitting beside her, handing the second one to me. There were two broken bits of silver inside. I shook them and held them to the light.

  “What've you got there?” Tindall's voice said behind me.

  “An earring, I think. Some kind of ring, at least. Elias would have had to take it out to shift.”

  Tindall ducked down to look at it and squinted. “Silver? Thought that was fatal to werewolves?”

  “In large doses,” I said and popped the top off the evidence tube. “BSI mandates that all registered shifters wear silver except when they’re away from humans. Contact with silver keeps them from shifting, keeps them more human as far as the physical form goes. They can be cited for taking it off and shifting in populated areas like this.” I dumped the broken bits of silver into my palm.

  “Hey,” said the CSI, standing. “You can't contaminate evidence like that.”

  I ignored her and paced toward the center of the room. “Lots of shifter groups have adopted the wearing of silver into some sort of rite of passage. Getting this little bit of jewelry was probably an important event in Elias' life. Important items have their own sort of energy that can interact with other energies around them.”

  Tindall followed me. “So?”

  “So, his death would have left a stain on this place's aura. Given how violent his last few moments were, it may have left more than just a stain. Maybe there's an Impression.”

  “Impression,” Tindall murmured. “That some of that magick mumbo-jumbo jargon you types use or what?”

  “Of sorts,” I said and started trying to triangulate the center of the room.

  Empathic magick is my strongest suit. I'm an expert at working auras, emotions and non-physical energies. A lot of people that have the same type of expertise work in energy healing doing things like Reki. I'm not enough of a people person to work with healing energies, but I am very well suited for looking at crime scenes and piecing together exactly what happened. Empathic magick is generally pretty benign by itself. It's when you start mixing it with other energies that bad things could happen.

  Impressions are complicated and dangerous to manipulate for a variety of reasons. An Impression is more than just a replay of past evens. It's a collection of emotions and images, an insentient stamp of warning to any creature willing to disturb the scene. Sometimes, spirits get caught in the loop of their own death's Impression, reliving their deaths over and over until it drives them insane. Those spirits are looking for a way out. If I tapped into the Impression and Elias' spirit was still trapped in that laundromat, I was opening myself up for possession by a vengeful spirit. I was warded against possession but a particularly powerful or angry spirit might be able to slip in without me noticing. Ghosts can be funny that way.

  More than that, tapping into the Impression might mean drawing the attention of the killer. If he had been a supernatural entity like Elias, which seemed likely, his aura would be tangled up in the death Impression, too. I would get a glimpse at him, sure, but he would get a look right back at me. Elias had been a tough as nails, street wise werewolf. I was a five foot one human. Whatever had killed Elias stood a near equal chance of getting me, too, if I wasn't careful.

  Looking at an Impression isn't something you can do through a special pair of glasses or through a mirror or something like that. There really isn't as much looking involved as there is feeling. To explain it in layman’s terms, what I do is tap into the residual energy left behind and try to unravel the different threads. To do that, certain requirements had to be met, requirements like standing in the center of the room. Occasions like this are why I carry a tape measure around on my key chain. I walked from one wall to the next, counting feet and inches and doing math on my phone to try and determine the exact center, which, as it turns out, was currently occupied by a washer. I started to pull it out, grunting and only made it a few inches before Quincy came forward. “Here, let me help you.”

  “Thanks.”

  He huffed and he puffed but Quincy wasn't as strong as you'd think. His size was mostly show. Tindall had to come over and help us pull it out of the way. Patsy started screeching outside that we couldn't do that to her equipment but we ignored her. Once the washer was out of the way, I stepped into the center of the room and turned a full circle with my hands on my hips. “You boys will want to stand on the other side of the threshold,” I informed Quincy and Tindall.

  “You going to start chanting now?” Quincy asked. Tindall smacked the back of his head. “Ow. What'd I say?”

  “Come on, nitwit. Let the lady do her thing,” Tindall prompted and then half drug his partner to stand with Patsy outside. The CSI looked around, shrugged and then followed them.

  When they were gone, I closed my eyes and tried to focus on the energies of the room. That's the hardest part of magick, learning to focus. Focus requires being able to block out everything, every sight, sound and smell as well as personal thoughts. When I first learned to do it, it scared the hell out of me. One minute, you're standing there in a dead vacuum and the next a fog washes over you, drenching your senses in whole new sensations. The first twenty or so times I did it, I threw up. To this day, that shift was still jarring enough to be nauseating, especially in a place like this.

  The chemical smell of laundry and cleaning solutions faded, replaced with the visceral stink of blood and fear sweat. Lurking just below those smells was something heavy and foul, like death left to rot on a hot, humid day. The skin on my arms prickled as I held them out, feeling the air pushing back against me. I breathed it in and let it settle in my chest where it came alive and infected my heart, making it race until the steady beat of my own heart was all I could hear. A sticky feeling settled on my arms and on the back of my neck, one that reminded me somehow of the type of humidity common in the deep south. In the space of a few breaths, the sticky feeling drenched my whole body and things began to crawl and slither up my legs. Teeth and tongues, claws and fangs lashed out against me, ripping at my flesh. I screamed and tried to pull them away but everything just stuck to me in a thick, shapeless, black goo. It took a few moments to get my panic back under control and convince myself that what I was seeing wasn't real. It was just a vision. Slowly, the blackness melted away from my skin and scattered back around the room as I regulated my breathing to something near normal.

  When I opened my eyes, the room was empty but for the thousands upon thousands of red eyes peering back at me through the darkness. One by one, the eyes darkened until only one pair remained. A big, white smile appeared beneath the eyes and a throaty voice purred, “Why are you awake, little one? Go back to sleep.”

  Something stung the inside bend of my arm. I looked down and saw a big, black scorpion lash its tail forward and sting me another time. I sh
ook it away and fell back in a panic while the voice laughed at me. I hit the floor and pain shot up through my spine, pain that should have shaken me from the vision and back into reality. The darkness, though, didn't slide away. The glowing eyes and teeth didn't vanish and the laundromat remained hidden from my view. My entire reality remained shrouded in darkness and pain.

  In shaky, unreal movements the glowing eyes and teeth cut through the darkness to stand next to me. I turned and tried to crawl away but I wasn't fast enough. Something or someone grabbed my head from behind and slammed it hard into a wall of shadow in front of me. It shattered and suddenly my scalp was on fire. I wanted to fight, to run, to run and fight but I couldn't do anything. The pain shooting through my body was all I could think about. It consumed my entire existence, to the point that the death I knew was coming was a welcome reprieve.

  Soft, palmy hands picked me up from where I was lying in a pile of broken darkness and dragged me away to lean me against something cool. “You know that it was never supposed to be like this. I loved you like a son, even when no one else did.” The same hand brushed against my cheek. I tried to make a sound but the pain wouldn't let me. “Shh,” the voice urged. “I'm still going to save you, little one, the only way that I can now.” Hot, sharp metal pressed against the side of my neck and went in surprisingly easy. It didn't hurt, not compared to everything else. “Don't be scared,” said the voice, fading back into the shadows. The darkness shifted forward as the cut went deeper and I felt the cool of night seeping into me. “Sleep,” whispered a voice next to my ear.

  Then, the darkness poured out of me and I fell as if that had been all that had ever held me up. A voice somewhere called my name but I was too tired to answer. Sleep beckoned and I went to her.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  It's a universally acknowledged truth that vampires prey on the weak and injured. Unlike werewolves, they aren't super strong and, during the day, their enhanced speed is diminished. That makes it almost impossible for them to feed during the daylight hours. The studies published by BSI say that it isn't harmful for vampires to go up to seventy-two hours without feeding in most cases, though most vampires would have you believe otherwise. Their hunger never goes away. Any self-respecting vampire would never turn away a free meal, especially when it was bleeding from the head while lying unconscious on the floor of a laundromat.

  So, when I opened my eyes and saw Patsy kneeling next to me, drawing a pale tongue over her lips, I damn near gave myself a heart attack trying to get the hell away from her. “Whoa, easy there,” came Quincy's voice from behind me when I scooted into his shin. I tried to turn and look at him but instantly felt nauseated and just wound up groaning and touching a hand to the back of my head. “Quite a bump you got there. Should we call Doc Ramis down here?”

  Patsy stood and rested one hand against her wide waist. “I already had a dead werewolf in here. Last thing I need is for you to sue me over a bump on your head.”

  “I'm not suing anybody,” I promised and scratched at the bump. I must've fallen and busted my head on some of the exposed piping from where we'd moved the washer. I'd bled just enough to make a small clump of my hair stick to my head but I didn't think it would be anything serious. “I don't even need stitches.”

  “Well, if you aren't going to go see him, then you should call it an early day,” Tindall said, stepping into view beside Patsy. “Otherwise, the department is going to be up my ass when you decide to file for worker's comp. Unless you think you're going to heal that nasty cut up by yourself, Ms. Magic?”

  I glowered at Tindall and mumbled something about how magick didn't work that way. There were people out there that could heal with the laying on of hands but they were few and far between. I wasn't one of them. Like most practitioners, I'd dabbled in other stuff but I'm not particularly good with most of it. Some of it scares the hell out of me.

  “I don't suppose you could sign a waiver or something, could you?” Patsy asked.

  “I'm not going to sue you,” I snapped at her.

  She eyed me up and down. “Good,” she said at length. “Because I'd have to pay you in quarters.” Quincy snickered until Tindall shot him a warning glare.

  “So,” Tindall asked, helping me up. “What was all that? You got into position, stuck your hands out like a blind lady and then went crazy, making choking sounds. I thought for sure you'd done more than just knocked yourself out when you fell. That act of yours was pretty convincing.”

  “Whoever did this to Elias was a practitioner with a lot more skill than me.”

  Tindall eyed me with a blank look. “How do you figure?”

  I knelt down and searched the floor for the two broken pieces of earring, scooping them up and dumping them into the fallen evidence tube. The memory I'd experienced was incomplete, filtered through the veil of death. At least I knew that Elias' spirit had moved on. What I'd tapped into wasn't a memory that either he or his murderer owned. This one belonged to the place and the things around him when it happened. The whole building wore the smear of dark energy. While I couldn't explain to Tindall exactly how I knew it was another practitioner that had killed Elias, I knew that was the case. There's just a certain kind of energy that my kind leaves behind. We recognize each other.

  The memory was also rife with images that made no sense. I'd have to sit and think about what I'd seen, translate the images into something sensible. Bits and pieces were already coming together, but other parts were still elusive. What had he meant by saving Elias? Why had he had such a strange attraction to whomever it was that had killed him? It wasn't a romantic attraction. I knew what that felt like. Elias hadn't regarded his killer with fear, disdain or even disgust. There was a layer of respect there, understanding, even. They knew each other. That much I knew for sure. I could work with that.

  “I just know,” I said standing. “I need to get back to Doc's.”

  I started for the door. Honestly, I didn't care where I went so long as I could feel the warmth of the sun on my face again. That thing, whatever it was, had dragged me somewhere colder and darker than anywhere I'd ever wanted to be. “The scorpion sting,” I said, trying to work through it. “It couldn't have been a real scorpion, could it? Maybe a needle. I'm going to need to get some preliminary results on a tox screen to be sure.”

  Tindall jogged up beside me. “Hold up. What are you talking about?”

  “Valentino said he was clean, though. What if it was something a home drug test wouldn't pick up, something new?”

  Tindall grabbed me just as I reached my car and spun me around. “Black, you're going to have to slow down. First, you spaz out and hit your head and now you're spouting crazy talk. I'm not about to let you get behind the wheel of a car, not until I know you're firing on all cylinders.”

  I shrugged Tindall's hands away and leaned against my car, cradling my head. The fall hadn't been that bad but the vision was still there behind my eyelids every time I closed my eyes. It wasn't something I was likely going to forget anytime soon. Something that intense, it stays with you.

  “My head is fine. It's my nerves that are rattled. So far today, I've been passive aggressively bullied by a bunch of cops, had a shotgun shoved in my face and relived the death of a murdered werewolf. That's not even the worst of it. The worst is knowing that whatever killed Elias is still out there.”

  Quincy casually strolled up and looked as if he wanted to say something but it was Tindall who spoke. “Whatever? You mean whoever, right?”

  “Murderers don't get to be people. Not when they're that twisted.”

  Tindall and Quincy exchanged glances. “You sure you don't want to go to the hospital?” Quincy asked. “You know, just in case.”

  “I'm fine, thanks,” I said and then eased into my car, staring straight ahead. “Tindall, if you could call Doc and tell him I need those preliminary screens back ASAP—”

  “It's done,” said Tindall closing the door and leaning in the
open window.

  I hesitated. If I were back in Cleveland or Chicago or Philly, I wouldn't have gone straight home. I would have tried to bury the misery under half a fifth of whiskey first. “Hey, Tindall,” I said, turning toward him. “You wouldn't want to go have a couple of drinks with me, would you?”

  He smiled at me and dug out his wallet, slipping a large gold coin from behind his license to show me. “Sorry, Black. Five years sober and never looking back.”

  “Oh.” I turned back to stare out the windshield. “Well, take care then.”

  “You too, Black. Don't overdo.”

  I coaxed my car back to life and waved at both of them as I pulled out.

  The drive home was short and uneventful. I was already starting to get tired of the sad little buildings and the flat, dry yards that surrounded them. Before moving out to Paint Rock, I'd done an internet search to see what the place looked like. The pictures I'd seen of the old town, before the government bought it up and turned it into a reservation, didn't look so bad. There were a lot of old, dusty houses, sure, but at least it looked like a community. Now, there were blocks on blocks of nice, well-kept houses followed by whole empty blocks of nothing but dead grass and the broken down foundations of houses torn away to create something else. On the outskirts of town, where my house was, the reservation completely lost that sense of a grid pattern. People had come in and dropped trailers every which way without any particular direction. It even looked as if they'd put the roads in as an afterthought.

  I got through the door. Hunter hadn't made too much of a mess. I guess that's hard to do when you're sitting in front of the TV all day watching who knows what. At least he'd thought enough ahead to get dressed. While he cleaned up his pile of cereal bowls, I jumped into the shower. The icy water felt like heaven on the back of my head, though it made me acutely aware of my pulse. While I ran my hands through my hair, picking out bits of dried blood, I thought of what Chanter had said about my son.