Guilty by Association (Judah Black Novels)

by E. A. Copen

  “Hunter...” I pulled him away from him and gave him a stern look. “You're old enough to understand that Father Reed and I have some things we need to talk about. Work things.”

  “But you're in the hospital. You shouldn't be working.” There was genuine anger and distrust creeping up in Hunter's voice. Even I could tell he was just a stone's throw away from turning and growling at the priest. I felt a twinge of pride, knowing I'd raised my boy up well enough to know what Reed did was wrong.

  Sal paced around the bed and put a heavy hand on Hunter's shoulder. “Let's give them some space, kiddo. Your mom's a tough lady. I'm pretty sure she can still rattle his clock if she needs to.” He directed Hunter toward the door and mouthed to me that he'd be in the hallway if I needed him.

  Reed waited until they were out of sight before closing the door. He didn't come to sit like Sal and Tindall had done but waited by the door, one hand folded over the other, letting the silence grow thick. “You're angry.”

  “That's the understatement of the century,” I mumbled and crossed my arms. “What the hell happened back there? I thought this whole case was about saving kids and you turn into a kidnapper? How does that make you any better than Zoe and LeDuc?”

  He sighed. “Judah, if I were free to speak I would tell you everything you wanted to know. There are certain truths I am not yet allowed to reveal.”

  “Certain truths?” I laughed. “What the hell? Don't feed me that line. After all I've gone through, don't you think I deserve more than a cop out on your part? Where is the baby? Who has her and why?” Reed was silent. “Can you at least promise me she's safe?”

  “She is safe,” Reed conceded with a nod. “And no harm will come to her. Please don't ask me anything else. I can't confirm or deny anything more.”

  I shook my head. “You're not allowed to pull that plausible deniability crap with me. I work for the government. Plausible deniability is my job. Tell me where you took her and why or I'll get a federal mandate to compel you to do so.”

  “The church has very good lawyers for a reason, Judah,” he said and walked over to the window. He stared out it in silence with his arms crossed for a moment. The orange light of the setting sun lit up his profile. For a moment, he looked very pale and very thin, as if he hadn't seen a plate of food or the light of day in all his life.

  “Fine. Keep your secrets. If you didn't come down here to sate my curiosity and apologize, then why the hell are you here?”

  “To warn you.” He faced me with bright sapphires glowing in his eyes. The light was there a moment and gone when he blinked. I don't know what it was but it certainly made me sit up and take notice. “There are going to be repercussions.”

  “For taking down LeDuc and his operation?”

  “For surviving. For succeeding where all the others have failed.” He crossed his arms. “I don't think anyone at the top expected you'd go as far as you did. You've turned Paint Rock on its head. Digging up the old, long decayed corpse of justice in a place that isn't accustomed to it is bound to draw some attention and not all of that attention is going to be good.”

  “I thought everyone wanted LeDuc gone? Even Marcus Kelley didn't seem to mind that I was taking out one of his bedfellows.”

  “I'm not talking about Marcus.” Father Reed leaned over the bed and placed his lips next to my ear, saying in a barely audible whisper, “Others are watching you, judging your worth. What you've stumbled on is bigger than Paint Rock. It's bigger than all of us.” When he leaned back to look into my eyes, I saw the glimmer of fear in his. “God has a plan for all of us whether we see it or not. Even evil things like Andre LeDuc had his role to play in building the Kingdom.”

  I swallowed the gathering dryness in the back of my throat. Whatever Reed was talking about, it terrified him. I'd watched the man survive more serious injuries than anyone in the battle against LeDuc. He should have been in a hospital bed right next to me. Instead, here he was, up walking and talking. Publicly, he'd only admitted to being a pyromancer but, if I was right, Gideon Reed was something far older, something far more dangerous. If he had wanted to, I knew that Gideon Reed could have mopped the floor with me on my best day, just judging by his aura. If he was scared of whatever was coming, that wasn't a good sign.

  “Who do you work for?” I asked Reed, narrowing my eyes.

  He looked as if I'd slapped him. “Heaven,” he said simply.

  “Whatever happened to thou shalt not murder and thou shalt not lie and all the other shalt nots?”

  “Heaven has need of warriors, too. We all have a purpose.” He looked up at the door and waved a hand. It swung back open of its own accord. Hunter, who had been pressing his ear against it, tumbled into the room. “I suppose it would be presumptuous to assume I would see either of you at mass on Sunday?”

  I jerked my arm toward the door and growled, “Get the hell out of my room. Now.”

  Reed nodded and went without further prompting. I sat in my bed, glowering after him. “Is everything okay?” Hunter asked after Sal helped him up.

  “Yeah,” I said and settled back into bed, getting as comfortable as I could. “I just feel like I stepped in the biggest, nastiest, oldest bit of chewing gum in the universe and all I've managed to scrape off is the top layer.” I looked up at Sal. “What the hell is going on in this county, Sal?”

  “Wish I knew, Judah,” he said, shaking his head. “I wish I knew.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  A week later, I was standing outside of Valentino's garage, watching him pace down a line of broken down cars. “Flat tires,” he said, kicking Chanter's truck. “Busted windows. Frame work.” He walked over to the Prius. “I think I can salvage most of this one. Needs a lot of body work, tires, windshield and a window but I can work with it.” Valentino wiped his thumb and forefinger on either side of his face as he paced over to my Firebird. “This one? Shit, lady. I ain't a miracle worker.”

  “All it needs is a starter and an oil change,” I said, crossing my arms. “Maybe a few knobs or odds and ends on the inside.” He looked back at me and raised an eyebrow. Then, he gave the bumper a tap with his shoe and it detached on one side to fall to the pavement with a clang. “Okay and maybe a tune up.”

  “Seriously, Judah. I appreciate you saving my boy and pushing through all the paperwork to make him legal and all but these repairs are going to cost you more than the whole car is worth. If I charged you labor, I could probably pay off all of Nina's student loans.”

  I frowned. “If you didn't want to fix my car, you shouldn't have made the offer.”

  “Valentino will fix your car.” I looked up to see Chanter standing on the front porch, sucking down a cigarette. “And he will fix the Prius and put tires and glass on my truck. Otherwise, he will experience such a rash of bad luck as this world has never seen.”

  “Can you do that?” I asked Chanter.

  He grinned. “Girl, in my sleep.”

  Valentino threw his hands up in defeat. “Fine! Valentino the miracle mechanic at your service. Just don't come whining to me when you get my bill for parts.” He walked into the garage, grumbling. “Can throw curses around in his sleep but he doesn't have a spell to fix junk cars. What a hack...” The grumbling continued in Spanish but I stopped listening when Chanter launched into a serious coughing fit.

  “You okay?”

  “Never better,” he lied and took another drag on the cigarette, as if it were the cure for his cancer. “How about you?”

  I walked up the path and sat on the bottom step. Mostly, things had gone back to normal since I'd gotten out of the hospital. I was back at work, back to paying my bills and washing dishes and changing light bulbs. It was nice for what it was worth but I couldn't shut out that nagging feeling that I'd stepped in something big. “Why did you call up Alex's spirit in the Way?”

  Chanter was silent for a long time behind me. I was getting used to his long pauses and they felt less and le
ss uncomfortable. That was just part of speaking to Chanter. “We inherit from our same sex parents. Boys from their fathers, girls from their mothers. It's how our kind is made. Lines are distinguished that way and, so, it is a father's duty to prepare his son for the change. It is a void only a father can fill. It's...difficult to explain. But the boy needed the presence of another strong male, one of his own line. And, in order to help him, I needed to know from what line Hunter had come.”

  “Line?” I turned around to look at Chanter.

  “Like clans or families. Once, there weren't so many. We're social creatures. We need the presence of our own line to be at ease. Raised alone, we lose control. The change takes us, makes us mad. I needed to invoke someone of his own bloodline.” He was quiet and I watched Valentino work. “There is something you should know, Judah.” I turned around again and watched Chanter drop his cigarette butt on the porch. He stomped it out before picking it up and continuing. “There are likely others of your husband's line out there. They may track him down someday. Or, you could track them down. Maybe you could learn a thing or two about your late husband.”

  I thought about what Chanter had said for a good long while. I'd always been curious about who Alex was, what the other half of his life was like. It was like he was two people and I'd only gotten to know one of them. He was as elusive as the wind. Maybe that's why he'd fascinated me so much. I've always been a sucker for impossible odds and hopeless causes.

  Sal came out of the house, his hands full of beers. He passed one off to Chanter and then offered one to me before setting another off in the grass for Valentino when he was ready for it. “So, what's the verdict on the Firebird?”

  There was a loud bang and a long stream of Spanish curses from underneath my car. I popped the top off my beer and swallowed a mouthful before answering Sal. “Depends on if you believe in miracles or not.”

  “It might surprise you what I can believe.”

  “That optimistic attitude isn't changing the tires on my truck,” griped Chanter.

  “Guess I could go give Val a hand.” He smiled at me and held his bottle out. “Otherwise, we're going to be here until the government finally gets that fence built between here and Mexico.”

  “Hell will freeze first,” Valentino grunted from under my car. He slid out from under it and wiped his hands on a rag hanging from his belt. “You work for the government, vieja. You should know first-hand all about the man and all his red tape.”

  “If there's one thing I hate it's red tape,” I grumbled, turning my bottle around in my hands.

  Valentino paused, sighed and then walked over to fetch his beer. He popped off the cap and raised it in the air. “Fuck the man,” he said. “And fuck all the fucking red tape. And fuck the government. They're the real monsters, what with all their taxes and their anachronistic organizations. FBI, CIA, BSI...”

  I chuckled. “I think you mean acronyms and, technically, since they're not pronounced, they're initialisms.”

  “Whatever. Fuck 'em. Who's with me?” He raised his beer higher, staring straight at me.

  Chanter raised an eyebrow and exchanged a serious look with Sal. I stood and tapped my bottle against Valentino's. “I'll drink to that.”

  Sal grinned and raised his bottle, too.

  “Bunch of anarchists,” Chanter muttered and then raised his bottle. “What the hell?”

  When I first came to Paint Rock, if you'd told me I'd be standing around in the middle of the day, drinking beers with a pack of werewolves, toasting my disdain for the agencies that signed my paycheck, I would have laughed in your face. I've never been a particularly good employee. I certainly don't expect to win any employee of the year awards. Still, before Paint Rock, it was just a job. I clocked out and went home. It always felt odd, as if I had walked into a different world. There, my work was my world. The people I protected and served didn't live in some far off neighborhood. They were my next door neighbors. They were the people that fixed my cars and that took care of me while I was sick. I suppose some people would have been freaked out by the idea of a doctor's office filled with zombies, a werewolf mechanic or a vampire owned laundromat. For me, that felt more normal, more real, than anything else. I was comfortable there.

  No, it was more than that. There were people there that would fight alongside me. Ed, Chanter, Valentino, Sal...For the first time since I found out there were monsters in the world, I had friends. For a brief moment, I felt like I had at least a partial understanding of what it meant to be part of a pack.

  And that’s how I deal with my job. I've learned to grab hold of every happy moment and hold onto it like it might be my last. Every night, things wake up, evil things. They crawl into bed with good people, people like Zoe Mathias and whoever Andre LeDuc had once been. It destroys them from the inside out, eating them alive. My job is to strike back. I ask the questions no one else wants to ask, go places no one else wants to go and kill things no one else wants to kill. Sometimes, I save people. A lot of the time I don't. That keeps me up at night. After the things I've seen, it would worry me if I slept soundly.

  But, for one afternoon, at least, I got to drink with friends and pretend like the world wasn't full of blood thirsty monsters that wanted to kill me. I got to laugh. I got to live. That's more than some.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  E.A. Copen is the sometimes frustrated but ultimately benign author of the Judah Black novels. She’s an avid reader of science fiction, fantasy and other genre fiction. After college, she worked in retail which may account for her sometimes cynical sense of humor. When she’s not chained to her keyboard, she may be found time traveling on the weekends with her SCA friends. She lives in beautiful southeast Ohio with her husband and two kids, at least until she saves up enough to leave the shire and become a Jedi.