Guilty by Association (Judah Black Novels)

by E. A. Copen

  Like most young people without a clue of what to do with their life, I went to college straight out of high school. It was at WVU that I met Alex during one of those random parties I somehow got myself invited to. Alex had been the kind of man that could fill up a room with his presence, even if he was alone. The whole time, he stood off in a corner, mostly alone, working the room over with those amazing ice blue eyes of his. I'd actually gone over to speak to him on a dare from my roommate. The rest, as they say, is history. Alex dropped out of college and took a trucking job that meant he was out of the state most of the month. Over the next summer, we got married, mostly because my family told me not to marry him. Somehow, I never put it together that his out of town trips always took place around the full moon.

  When the vampires came out and started facing all kinds of persecution, they forced the werewolves out of hiding to take some of the heat off of them. The werewolves had only been public a few days when the locals came for Alex on one of his days off. They dragged him off into the woods, shot a bunch of silver rounds into his chest and then cut his head off with a big machete.

  I'd never forgiven him for not telling me.

  If Hunter had his father's affliction, I'd never seen evidence of it. Hunter never turned into a fuzzy anything and full moons didn't make him irritable. He'd touched silver without any problems and I'd bandaged enough cuts and scrapes to know he didn't heal any faster than most kids. But, somehow, I knew that he wasn't like other kids. The older he got, the more afraid I became that he would start to shift and there wouldn't be anything I could do about it. Even if he didn't turn out to be a werewolf, what if he inherited magick from me? What if he inherited the supernatural from both of his parents? That was precisely the reason BSI required everyone that registered with them to apply for a breeding permit. If people just went and started mixing genes there was no telling what they could create. God forbid there should be any kind of monster out there that BSI didn't know how to put down if it went dark side. At least, that was their argument. I was still on the fence.

  Even taking my time to get ready, less than an hour passed between my walking through the front door and heading back out with Hunter, who talked incessantly about some talk show he'd been watching. He stopped long enough to wince when we stepped back out into the heavy sun.

  “Well, mom, you win,” he said shielding his eyes and looking off into the distance. “I never thought I'd say this but, damn, I miss Ohio.”

  “Hunter. Don't say that.”

  “What? That I miss Ohio?” He hopped down off the stairs and over the banister rather than walking around it.

  I frowned at him and opened my car door. “You know what.”

  “You cuss like a sailor,” Hunter whined. I started to reprimand him but he interrupted me, rolling his eyes. “I know, I know. Do as I say, not as I do, right?”

  “Get in the car, Hunter, or I swear, everything I bring home from the store is going to be green and organic.”

  He made a face but got into the car. It may have only been parked there for an hour or so, but it was already hotter than an oven on the inside. I burned my hands on the steering wheel just trying to get in. We rolled the windows down and had to sit and wait for it to cool off a bit before I could even touch anything to drive.

  In the meantime, I cast my eyes out over the horizon, trying to ignore the way Hunter sank into one of his handheld video games. My neighbors were home. At least, I think they were my neighbors, though the car parked in the driveway was too nice to match the exterior of the trailer. In fact, it was way too nice. Call me crazy but, if they could afford a big white Jaguar, they probably could afford to fix the deck that was falling off.

  While we were sitting there waiting for it to cool off, the back door of the trailer swung open so hard I thought it might come off its hinges and an overdressed and heavily pregnant doll of a woman stormed out. She was dressed to match the car: expensive, loud and proud with pumps that made me wonder just how she managed to actually walk in them, especially as pregnant as she was. Behind her came a man. He was tall, maybe six foot six. Long straight black hair hung down to his mid back. He was good looking but more in the rugged sense of the word rather than the model look. He might have been able to pass as an actor or something, so long as the movie was in need of an athletic, native-guy type. In contrast to the woman that was storming away, he wore a plain white t-shirt and a ripped up pair of blue jeans.

  When the woman reached the end of the walk, he caught up to her and said something. I was too far away to hear what was being said but it was obvious from the way he carried himself that the two were in the midst of a serious argument. She turned on her heels and raised her hand as if to strike him but he caught it before she could. The two stood toe to toe for a minute in a posture that said he could wipe the floor with her if he so chose. He simply chose not to. She smirked, jerked her arm free and then blew him a kiss and a teasing wave. Only when she got into the Jag on the passenger side did I realize that there was someone else in the car. The Jag took off out of the driveway, sending up a spray of red dust behind it.

  “Mom.” Hunter's irritated growl snapped my attention back to the car. I looked over at him and watched sweat trace a path down the side of his nose. “Can we go?”

  “Yeah. Sure.” I put my key in the ignition and turned it. The car coughed, sputtered and then died. I tried again. This time, I didn't even get a protesting whine from the car. “Shit.” I took a deep breath and rested my forehead on the steering wheel to offer a prayer. Please, car. Not today.

  “I thought you said not to cuss.”

  “Curse words are like magic words for cars,” I muttered and tried it again. Nothing.

  I looked up to see the neighbor staring my car down, hands casually tucked in his pockets. After I tried to turn the car over a fourth time without success, he started our way. Panic washed over me in the form of a cold sweat. It wasn't that I didn't want to talk to my neighbors, especially the good looking ones...Okay, so that was exactly it. I didn't want to talk to him. I mean, we were living on a reservation for supernaturals. All sorts of powerful, nasty things lived there, every one of them capable of snuffing me out with a whisper. Vampires, ogres, werewolves, wizards...all of them lived there. The only plain old vanilla humans that lived on the reservation were those cops unlucky enough to be assigned to the detail. That meant whatever was approaching my car was probably bad news.

  I got out and opened the hood of my car. Hunter followed, still absorbed in his game, and leaned on the passenger side door. Not sixty seconds later, my neighbor called out to me in a pleasant, voice oozing with confidence, “Need a hand?”

  I wanted to turn him away. The less I got involved with the locals, the safer I'd feel, even if that safety was an illusion. I also knew it was a long ass walk back into the main part of town where I could buy whatever parts I needed, if they even had them at all. “Maybe,” I said fiddling with the wires going to the battery. “She's not starting. You able to give me a jump?”

  I turned around and found him frowning, staring me down in the blandest, most expressionless way possible. “You just pulled in about an hour ago. How old's your battery?”

  Damn. Just my luck that I'd get a guy that knew a thing or two about cars. “Just replaced it last year.”

  “Well,” he said, leaning over the engine. “I could jump you, sure, but I don't think your battery is the problem. I think you've got a starter issue.” After a minute of just staring down into the engine, he turned and offered me a hand. “Sal Silvermoon.”

  I hesitated. That was the second time that day I’d heard that last name. Silvermoon was Chanter’s last name, too, wasn’t it? While that didn't necessarily mean the two of them were blood relatives, it just seemed like too much of a stretch to me that two Native Americans were living on the same supernatural reservation with the same last name that didn't share some bond. Judging by the two silver rings in his right ear, c
hances were also good that Sal was also a werewolf just like Chanter.

  “Judah,” I said and took his hand. “Judah Black.”

  That’s when I noticed something else, something even more unsettling about Sal. Sal had access to an unsettling amount of magick. and the pressure of it invading my space simply took my breath away. I've met a lot of wizards, warlocks, wiccans and whatnots in my day. Most of them are dabblers whose biggest trick is making someone else itch or break out in warts. There are very, very few truly powerful practitioners of the art of magick and even fewer still that were werewolves. I didn't know what kind of magick he specialized in, and wouldn't until I got a chance to do a little more snooping, but I did know that, whatever it was, he was very skilled with it. That alone set off some alarm bells in my head. I knew I needed to know more about Sal but I had to be careful moving forward not to let on that I was suspicious. I didn’t want to set him off.

  He took my hand in a crushing grip that he eased after a second and smiled. “That's funny. You've got a man's name.”

  “You've got a girl's name,” I pointed out.

  “Yeah, but mine's short for something else. Not many people can pronounce it right. I get Saloos and Salsa but no one seems to be able to get Saloso right. So, I'm just Sal.” He leaned around the passenger side of the car for a look when Hunter mumbled something to his game.

  “My son, Hunter,” I announced.

  “Uh-huh,” Sal answered in a tone that told me he was thinking pretty heavy. “Well, if you need a ride in town I have a truck. Parts store should still be open and there might be enough light left in the day that I can get that swapped out for you.”

  I offered Sal a strained smile. “Actually, I can do the repairs myself.”

  Sal shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said. “Offer for the ride still stands, though, if you’re open to it.”

  I looked over at Hunter. If I turned Sal down, I might not get another chance to find out more about him. If he wasn’t a suspect in the murder, then he might have some information about Elias that Chanter and Valentino had withheld. But getting those answers meant putting my son in an enclosed space with a potentially dangerous man.

  In the end, I reasoned that, if Sal wanted to hurt either of us, he would have done so already.

  “Sure thing, as long as you don’t mind Hunter tagging along.”

  “Not a problem at all,” Sal said, finally cracking a smile. “Come on, then. Truck’s out back.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Sal's truck had air conditioning. Normally, small things like that don't get me too excited, but today I'd take any excuse I could get. I sat in the passenger seat, Hunter wedged in between us, basking in the musty but frosty air washing over me on the ride back into town. The silence in the cab probably would have been more awkward if I had the brain power to think about it but, to me, it was just the first quiet I'd had all day. Of course, the fact that I was actually enjoying the silence meant Sal had to go and break it by addressing Hunter, who was still absorbed in his video game. “You know that stuff will rot your brain, kid.”

  “Cigarettes cause lung cancer,” Hunter said without looking up. “That's the pot calling the kettle black.”

  I had no idea what Hunter was talking about until I glanced around and saw the pack of cheap cigarettes tucked under a hat on the dash. Hunter hadn't even looked up since climbing in and the cab didn't exactly reek of smoke like most smokers' cars do. Hunter had always had a good nose on him. Underneath that surface explanation, though, I knew better. Maybe Chanter was right, but I couldn't just assume that was going to happen to him. After all, he'd passed every test so far and believe you me, BSI has a ton of them. Kids these days can't even pass from grade to grade in school without some verification that they've been through some form of testing. Every year, I signed the release forms and prayed. So far, it looked like someone upstairs agreed with me that my little boy didn't deserve to have that curse dropped on him. Maybe, despite everything, we'd be okay.

  “Got me there, kid,” Sal said, still maintaining a cheery tone. “Everyone's got a vice, I suppose. I just figure you'll make more friends if you look up rather than down.”

  “What's the point?”

  “Hunter,” I started but he finally lowered the game and turned to me.

  “Really. What's the point? I'm not stupid. This is the fifth place we've lived. We'll be lucky if we keep this place a year before they ship us off somewhere else.”

  “That's enough,” I snapped more sharply than I meant. If the silence wasn't awkward before, it was then. Hunter settled down in his seat, arms folded and his bottom lip protruding.

  Sal eased the truck to a stop at the next stop sign and lingered there long enough to shift forward in his seat to look at me. “BSI moves you around a lot, huh?”

  “News gets around fast here, doesn't it?”

  He chuckled. “That it does. But I can sympathize with all the moving around. I couldn't stay put after Iraq. Not until I got here.”

  I turned in my seat with a skeptical glance. I supposed that explained a few things like that cloud of cool confidence around him. If he'd been to Iraq, that meant he was a vet. The fighting over there had been pretty bad. Really, it had only come to a halt because of the riots back home when the vampires came out. The country couldn't afford to fight a two front war, one front being halfway across the globe. Still, he didn't exactly have regulation military written all over him.

  “You were in the military?” I asked as we pulled into the parking lot of the auto parts store. It was sandwiched in between a hardware store and what looked like some kind of herb shop. A big pop vending machine stood next to the door.

  At that, Sal rolled up the sleeve on his left arm, revealing a tattoo: two winged serpents intertwined over a cross, the symbol of a combat medic. The only reason I recognized it was because my grandpa had worn a badge with a similar symbol when we put him in the ground. “Managed two tours before I got tired of it.”

  Hunter turned toward Sal. I couldn't see his face but I could hear the morbid excitement in his voice when he asked, “Did you kill anyone?”

  “Hunter, that's not...That's rude.”

  Sal didn't say anything but put the truck in park and fished out his wallet. He dangled two dollar bills in front of Hunter. “Go and grab yourself a Coke, kid.” Hunter seized the bills and scampered over my lap and out before I could even react. “Hope that's fine with you,” Sal mumbled and tucked his wallet away.

  I'd already figured out that Sal wasn't in the habit of picking people up and driving them around. The cab of the truck was too small for this sort of outing to be a regular thing and the conversation we'd carried had been awkward enough that it was obvious he wasn't actually much of a talker. It seemed to me, just based on what had been said and what I'd seen outside of his trailer, that Sal was more of a doer than anything else. If he'd wanted to hurt that woman, whoever she was, he would have.

  I'd been replaying that scene over and over in my head, trying to decide what kind of expression to paint over his face while it happened. My car had been too far away to see any details but it mattered whether or not he had gripped her arm and stared at her with malice or hurt. After all, there was a killer on the loose somewhere on the reservation.

  “It's fine,” I said and purposely avoided looking at him. “I assume you have something to say you didn't want him to hear?”

  Sal sighed. “I knew Elias,” he offered quietly. “And I know the state Valentino's in. Chanter left a message with me an hour ago about you, too.” The upholstery of the seat creaked as he shifted his weight. “Given my history, and the fact that we're neighbors, I thought I'd give you a heads up. It wasn't me.”

  I turned around and stared at the end of his nose, figuring it probably wasn't a good idea to look him straight on. A lot of animals consider that a challenge and he was part animal, so... “Is there any particular reason I should rule you out other than sc
out's honor?”

  Hunter finished making his selection at the vending machine and started to walk back toward the truck. The sweating bottle of pop in his hands made my mouth water.

  “I'd like to help,” Sal said slowly, as if he had all the time in the world before Hunter got back. “I have information to give you but I can't do it openly.”

  “Why?” The question fell out of my mouth before it got through the filter in my brain and it came out short tempered so I just went with it. “Everyone else has been vague, uncooperative and downright obstructive to everything I've tried to do so far. Why would you help me?”

  He smirked. “You're asking what's in it for me?” That wasn't exactly what I meant but if it got him talking, sure. “That's the complicated part.”

  “Does it have anything to do with the woman I saw leaving your trailer earlier?”

  “Would you really turn away evidence if it did?”

  Hunter stopped next to the front of the truck expectantly, clearly waiting for me to get out. I turned to glare at Sal. Dammit. He'd known me less than half an hour and, already, he had my back against the wall. Whatever it was he wanted, I was probably going to have to help him with it in order to get his information. That seemed to be the way things worked around Paint Rock. No one was willing to part with anything unless you were willing to give something up first. “Your information had better be worth it,” I said, narrowing my eyes.

  “I'll just wait on you here, then,” he called after me as I stepped out of the truck. I made sure to slam the door behind me, just in case it wasn't clear that I wasn't happy about his quid pro quo proposal.

  * * * * *

  They didn't have a starter that would work with my car so I had to order one in, which wasn't surprising, given that the parts store was pretty much just an indoor lemonade stand for car parts. The only things I saw behind the counter were basic parts for oil changes and that sort of thing. The shop owner, though, assured me that the part would be in within two business days. That would have been comforting if it wasn't already Thursday. It would be Monday probably before I ever saw my part. I trudged out of the parts store more frustrated than when I'd gone in.