Guilty by Association (Judah Black Novels) (41 page)

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.

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.