Guilty by Association (Judah Black Novels) (8 page)

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 shook 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.

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.

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.