Guilty by Association (Judah Black Novels) (7 page)

On the way over, I stopped by the town's only gas station to fill up and grab my briefcase out of the trunk of my car. While I was away from prying ears, I called home to check on Hunter.

“Everything's fine here, mom,” he promised. I could hear the laughter of a studio audience on the television in the background. “Everything except the air conditioning. Oh, and we're out of milk.”

I wasn't surprised. All I'd managed to get in the house so far to eat was cereal, milk and hot dogs. “Tell you what, Hunter. You keep the place cleaned up and behave yourself and we'll go shopping together when I get home.”

“Sure, I guess. When you coming home?”

“Before six,” I promised, and then added, “I love you.”

He gagged on the other end. “Bye, mom.”

I hung up and thought hard about what Chanter had said. When BSI had rolled out their new program that required a blood test each year before enrolling in school, I panicked. Every year, I held my breath when they pricked Hunter's finger. Every year, we'd been lucky. But if Chanter was right, I was running out of time. Once he started to change, there would be no way around it. I would have to take him public. BSI would take him away from me. My whole life would be over. The thought of someone else raising my child made me sick but I didn't know if pack life was a better option, especially this pack. I hardly knew anything about the Silvermoons. So far, most of my interactions with them had been less than encouraging. What was the alternative? If I didn't have him in an established pack, there would be nothing I could do to protect him from the organization that I worked for. Nothing.

There's no feeling in the world worse than helplessness, especially when you're a parent. It eats away at you, rots you from the inside out and twists every thought into a panic attack. I'd made a lot of concessions in my life but my son wasn't going to be one of them. I climbed back into my car and made myself a silent promise not to let Hunter slip through the cracks like Elias had. I was going to save him.

Five minutes later, I was ducking under the crime scene tape across the laundromat doors. The scene was empty of everyone except Tindall and Quincy, who were standing guard, arguing with a heavy set lady dressed all in black. When I say all in black, I mean a long sleeved turtle neck, a black lacy skirt, a wide brimmed hat, gloves, sunglasses and, yes, even the umbrella that hid her from the sun was black. She wore the pallor of death on what little bit of skin that was exposed, though she'd attempted to color it with makeup.

She turned when she heard me approaching and fanned herself profusely with one of those cheap, Japanese style folding fans. “Oh, thank my lucky stars! You're a federal agent, aren't you? Tell these idiot detectives that I have a right to enter my establishment to assess the damages. I'm going to have to make a claim against my insurance for all this and I'm running out of time to do that.” When she spoke, I caught sight of her elongated canines, clicking against each other.

What a place I've moved into
, I thought.
Pawn shop owning werewolves on one side and a twenty-four-hour laundromat owned by a vampire on the other.

“Miss Adams,” Tindall started but she cut him off quickly.

“Patsy. I told you, detective. It's Patsy.”

“Well, Patsy, you have to realize we're in the middle of an investigation. We'll let you know when we're done. It shouldn't be long now.”

“It should be
now
,” Patsy insisted, stomping one boot on the ground. “I pay my taxes, detective, and I didn't break any laws. If I'm forced to wait much longer to re-open, I'll have to make a claim against you for my losses.”

“I doubt you make enough in one or two days to justify such a claim, Patsy.”

“You haven't seen what they charge to wash a load,” I muttered, drawing the vampire's attention to me.

She pulled her sunglasses down slightly, revealing amber colored, feline thin eyes. “How bad is it in there?”

I shrugged and looked away. “I can't comment on an open investigation.”

She twisted her lips and let out a hiss before sinking back a step. It's so nice to feel loved by the public for the way I put my life on the line every day. “This had better get resolved by tomorrow night,” she said. “Or I'm going to start getting upset.”

“Wouldn't want that, now would we?” I said and sidestepped her. Behind me, I could feel her fuming and took a little bit of satisfaction in that. I've never really liked vampires. Werewolves, I can stand on some level. Hell, I'd been married to one before everybody went public, though I'd never known what he was until it was too late. That made me somewhat affectionate toward them. Vampires, though, they'd caused the whole mess the world was in by going public. If they'd just kept to themselves like they'd been doing for centuries, a lot of people wouldn't have died and I'd probably be doing something else for a living. They'd made the world a darker place and I'd always been a little bitter about that.

Daylight didn't do any favors for the laundromat. The sunlight illuminated even more dents and rusty scratches in the metal of the washers and dryers but all of them looked old. There was lint everywhere. A few empty soda cans in one corner had attracted the attention of an ant colony. The gaping hole in the wall where a security camera once presumably rested looked even worse than it had that morning. Broken glass was scattered everywhere, even beyond where it had been earlier. Given the extensive coverage of glass on the floor, that was to be expected. I couldn't take two steps without stepping in some. A uniformed cop stood next to a woman in protective CSI gear, both of them examining the cracked glass at the emergency exit. I walked over to them, wincing at the sound of the glass crunching under my shoes.

The cop stepped away from the door to intercept me, crossing his arms. “Well, lookie who finally found the time to get off her high horse and come down to the scene to do some actual investigating.”

It took almost all of my mental power to keep from snapping back at him. “I've been busy,” I told him shortly. “And you standing in my way isn't speeding things up.”

He stepped aside. “Since you guys are finally on scene, maybe I can get some lunch, huh?” Glass crunched as he navigated the aisle toward the door.

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.”