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  “You’re somebody special to them,” I said and nodded.

  ~

  I slept well and for the better part of the next day. It was near dark again when Hunter shook me awake from where I’d passed out on the sofa. “Mom! Mom, wake up!”

  “I’m up, Hunter. Where’s the fire?” I blinked sleep out of my eyes and almost had a heart attack when I saw the face staring back at me. It was the ugliest mask I’d ever seen in my life. “Holy hell, kid. Don’t scare me like that!”

  Hunter laughed and pulled the mask off. “Come on! I picked out one for you, too.”

  Hunter helped me up and walked me to my bedroom where he’d laid out a black dress, a big, black witch’s hat and a tube of green face paint. I smiled and dragged him close to kiss him on the forehead. “Alright, kiddo. Give me a few minutes to get ready.”

  With as excited as he got, you’d think I promised the kid a trip to Disneyland.

  A half hour later, we pulled up to the little white church on the other side of Paint Rock. The outside was all decked out in our Halloween decorations, or at least the ones Hunter had rescued from the flood. Someone had gotten a bunch of pumpkins and carved them into Jack-o'-lanterns.

  Father Reed, the local priest, was outside lighting the candles inside the Jack-o'-lanterns as we walked up. He’d traded out his usual collar and cassock for chainmail and a white tabard with a red cross on it. He wore his sword at his side. The father waved to us. “You’re late. And after all you went through to set this up.”

  “Did Ed get the invites out to everyone?” I asked and waved Hunter on inside. “I was worried there wouldn’t be enough time.”

  “Not everyone,” Reed admitted, “but the Lord works in mysterious ways and Paint Rock is a small town. It’s hard to keep a secret.” He chuckled to himself. “I should thank you, you know. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the residents get together to do anything other than argue.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t do anything. I was too busy fighting a giant snake monster.”

  His face went blank.

  I patted him on the back and started up the walk. “Don’t work too hard, Father. I expect to see you inside.”

  I opened the big, wooden door to the church and was greeted by the Ghostbusters theme playing at an obscene volume from a series of battery-powered boom boxes. Storm lanterns lit up the place, casting eerie shadows over the sanctuary. The pews had been pushed up against the walls and stacked one atop another to make room for the dozens of people who had found their way into the church to celebrate the first Halloween at Paint Rock in... Well, I don’t know. It was my first, but it seemed like it had been a while.

  Goblins, ghosts, and creepy clowns hopped back and forth. Patsy Adams, the local leader of the vampires, had donned white for once along with a pair of feathery wings and a halo. Somehow, the white only served to make her pale skin look even paler.

  “Hey, Judah!”

  I almost didn’t recognize the man who came up to me, waving. He’d tamed his hair for once and put on a blue lab coat in place of the white coat he sometimes wore, along with a bright red bow tie. I wouldn’t have recognized him if he hadn’t kept the glasses. “Doc Ramis?”

  “Bill Nye tonight.” He handed me a beaker full of something smoking. “Try my latest experiment? I wouldn’t have too many though. You’ll wind up like Gavin McCreedy.” He gestured to a corner where Gavin, one of the fae who was on the city council, was giggling and flirting with... A scarecrow?

  “Uh, thanks,” I said, taking the drink. “Hey, have you seen any of the werewolves around?”

  “I just saw Valentino the other day. He and Nina are doing Danny and Sandy from Grease. Chanter’s here somewhere. He just came as a werewolf. Boring.” He rolled his eyes.

  “What about Sal?”

  “Haven’t seen him.” The song ended and faded into She Blinded Me with Science. “Excuse me,” Doc said after stifling a hiccup. “This is my song. I promised someone a dance.” He excused himself and I smiled to myself as I watched him wander over to dance with Patsy.

  I turned and scanned the crowd, picking out people I knew. Most folks congregated at the center of the room avoiding the back wall and pulpit areas where Reed had set up some folding tables and chairs. There were some familiar faces in the mix. Detective Tindall and his wife waved to me from one of the tables. Even Quincy Morris had taken the night off from gambling to come enjoy the music and drinks here. But there was no sign of Hunter or Sal in the sanctuary, so I picked my way through the crowd headed for the back.

  There was a small room just off from the sanctuary that served as a kitchen for community events. It rarely saw any use. Today, however, it was bustling with people coming in and out carrying caramel apples or cheeseburgers with bacon tongues and olive eyes. Of course, Sal was running the kitchen. Where else would he be? I dodged Hunter leading a group of kids out and tried to catch Sal’s eye.

  Sal looked up from the tabletop charcoal grill where he was flipping burgers. “Wow, you are... uh... green!”

  “Wicked witches aren’t supposed to be pretty,” I said with a smile.

  “I didn’t say ugly.” He took off his apron and passed it to Ed. “Green looks good on you.”

  I stifled a laugh when I saw Ed decked out in his Hogwarts robes and the lightning bolt drawn on his forehead. The Kiss the Cook apron didn’t exactly match.

  “Take over for me, will you, Ed? I need a smoke break.” Sal came to join me.

  “And where is your costume, mister?” I said, giving him a playful shove. “Jeans and a t-shirt with an anarchy symbol on it don’t count.”

  He looked down at his clothes. “Hm. You’re right. Wait here.” Sal went back into the kitchen and returned with a roll of aluminum foil. He tore off a piece and put it over his head. “There. I’m a conspiracy theorist.”

  I chuckled. “Creative.”

  We stepped outside into the evening cool and he lit up a cigarette while I sipped at whatever Doc had handed me. It was something fruity and deceptively strong. A few beakers of that and I’d be on my ass in no time.

  “Valentino’s going to be fine,” Sal said after a while. “Leo too.”

  “And what about you?”

  “Me?” He gave me a funny look. “What was wrong with me?”

  I scooted a little closer, wondering if it was just warmer in Oz and maybe that’s why they wore such thin dresses. “I know the thing with Zara hit home for you a little. And carrying the added weight of responsibility for the pack on top of it must’ve been hard.”

  “Is what it is.” He blew out a mouthful of smoke, taking his time. “You know, it’s funny, but somehow all this has helped, even though I wasn’t really on the front lines with it. I can’t quite put my finger on what’s changed, but everything feels a little different now. You know what I mean?”

  I felt it too. I’d been feeling it ever since I watched Logan drive away. The world felt somehow smaller, the sky closer, as if we might reach up and our fingertips would brush the moon. But then, it always felt that way to me after I ran into some new supernatural in the world.

  Ten years ago, the world thought vampires, fae and werewolves weren’t real. One year ago, I knew there was no such thing as a wendigo, and a week ago both Sal and I had been sure there was no such thing as an afterlife. Now, it seemed like anything was possible. After all, I’d just helped one Cherokee legend defeat another with nothing but an oversized pocket knife and some good old-fashioned belief.

  We both felt the change, but I didn’t know how to put it into words. “Yeah.”

  The music changed again to something slower, that song from the snake dance in From Dusk till Dawn. I only recognized it because Sal and I had watched it together a couple of weeks ago.

  Sal dropped the cigarette and stomped on it. “Well, they’re playing our song.”

  “We don’t have a song.”

  “Not yet.” He stood and offere
d me a hand. “But feels poetic, doesn’t it? Snakes, vampires, and Tarantino movies? That’s pretty much you and me, babe.”

  “You think the Wicked Witch of the West and a conspiracy theorist werewolf have a chance?”

  “Why not?” Sal said with a shrug. “This is Paint Rock. Stranger things have happened.”

  I smiled and took his hand. “Stranger things indeed.”

  Don’t go yet!

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  Guilty

  By Association

  A Judah Black Novel

  ––––––––

  By

  E.A. Copen

  © E.A. Copen 2016 All rights reserved

  Chapter One

  There was a dead werewolf in the twenty-four-hour laundromat down the street from my house. He was a young, small-framed Hispanic man, no older than twenty-five. The only facial hair he had was an uneven peach fuzz on his upper lip. He was naked when I found him, slumped over in the corner against the dryers, chin tucked against his chest.

  I paused in the doorway, a basket of dirty laundry tucked under one arm, trying to discern if he was really dead or just passed out. From the door, it was impossible to know.

  I put the basket down and approached slowly. The last thing you ever want to do is sneak up on a sleeping werewolf, especially when you’re a stranger in what could be his territory.

  I hung back as far as I could, fingers outstretched toward his still body. “Come on, Judah,” I whispered. “It's only a werewolf. He might only rip your face off and feed it to you.” My fingers brushed against the hair sticking to his forehead. The skin was waxy and oddly stiff. A bluish tinge had crept into his lips and fingernails. He'd been there a while.

  I cursed and pulled out my phone to dial the only person that I knew would answer at six in the morning. Two rings later, a groggy voice on the other end answered. “Detective Tindall. Go.”

  “Good Coin Laundry on Willow road. Code one-eight-seven.” I paused for a minute before adding, “He's a werewolf.”

  “Wait a minute. Who the hell are you and how'd you get my number?”

  “Hurry up, detective. You better get your people down here to clean this up before the rest of the pack catches wind of what's happened or you're going to have a lot more bodies to deal with.” I hung up before he had a chance to respond.

  Paint Rock was a small town as far as population went, one of the smallest in all of Texas. There were maybe five hundred folks there, but they were spread out over more than three miles of empty, dead land in the center of the state. The locals tell me that it used to be the county seat of Concho County before the federal government relocated a bunch of supernaturals to the land. As the story goes, the government paid the former residents of Paint Rock over ten thousand dollars each to pick up and move to Eden a decade or so ago, and quietly put up the rickety old fence that marked the land of the Paint Rock Supernatural Reservation. If I had called dispatch, it was Eden they would have relayed me to and I would have had to wait hours for someone to sort through a bunch of government red tape before they drove all the way down. It pays to know people, especially when you live out in the middle of nowhere.

  At best, I had ten minutes of alone time with the corpse. That was enough time to go around and check the place for signs of a struggle or obvious weapons. I was careful not to touch anything. Contaminating evidence would not be the best way to start my new job. New job. I make it sound like I was a novice or something. Really, I'd been working the supernatural beat for almost a decade by the time I got assigned to Paint Rock, but my specialty was demons and the occult, not werewolves. And this was Texas. You know what they say about Texas.

  The laundromat had an emergency exit off door to the side covered in extra thick safety glass. It looked like someone had thrown a softball into it. The glass flexed outward without breaking, cracked into a million bloodstained pieces, some of which were still sticking out of the dead werewolf's head. Three washers had been dented beyond repair, and one near the victim had been uprooted and tossed aside, guts spilling out all over the floor. There had definitely been a struggle in there. Still, I didn't find any obvious footprints or clues. There was too much blood everywhere to determine what belonged to the victim and what might have belonged to his attackers. That was going to be up to CSI.

  I sighed and walked away from him, following a trail of broken glass and blood back to where the vic sat.

  What a mess, I thought and squatted down in front of him. His limbs were all wrong, caught halfway between digits and paws. His head was on all askew, stopping about a quarter of the way into growing his nose into a snout. The rest of him was mostly human aside from all the extra body hair and even it hadn't come in all the way. He'd stripped off all his clothes, making the scratches and cuts obvious. Some of them were still oozing a little. I leaned to one side and found a hole the size of a quarter an inch below his ear. Someone had gotten him in the jugular.

  I stood, cracked my back and looked around again. The laundromat was notably empty of baskets, soap or clothes other than the ones spinning behind his head in the dryer. I doubted my guy was the kind to wear lacy bras and pink halter tops. But then, I'd been wrong about that sort of thing before.

  About the time I started my second pass around the inside of the building, a car pulled up, a late model Cadillac with one of those detachable police lights stuck to the top. The man driving it was a walking cliché from a twentieth century neo-noir film. Middle-aged but still reasonably attractive, his hair was slicked back in a conservative fashion. He wore dress pants, a white shirt and a loose-fitting blue tie that accented the shoulder holsters he adjusted when he climbed out. He was overdressed for six-fifteen in the morning, I thought, until he passed under a flickering street light and I saw that everything he was wearing bore the distinct wrinkles of having fallen asleep fully dressed. For a moment, the detective paused under the lamp outside, patting himself down as if he'd forgotten something. Then, he reached back into the car, picked up a dark fedora and dropped it onto his head.

  The bell above the door chimed when he pushed it open. He took one look at me, scowled, and turned to the body. “Fuck, woman. One day in town and you're already attracting trouble,” he growled at me. “I knew you were going to be a problem.”

  “Nice to see you, too, Detective Tindall.”

  It wasn't like Brian Tindall and I knew each other that well. I'd just moved there. Most cities in the U.S. have government agents on staff from the organization I work for, the Bureau of Supernatural Investigations. That works fine for big cities like Chicago and New York, but out here in the middle of nowhere, the law was a little different. The reservations were supposed to be self-policing. In theory, that meant they arrested the bad guys and handed them over to the state for prosecution. The crime rate, though, was sky high and the concerned citizens of Concho County built a nice police outpost, staffed by trained professionals like me and Tindall.

  Trained professionals, my ass. We were there because we weren't wanted anywhere else. Tindall and I had that much in common, at least.

  “Where's your partner?” I asked as Tindall fanned himself with his fedora.

  Tindall shrugged and drew a hand down over his chin as he beheld the body. “Sleeping off his cups, probably. What was your name again?”

  I crossed my arms and leaned to the side. “Black. Special Agent Judah Black.” I made s
ure to say it slowly.

  He snorted. “Judah's a man's name. What's the matter with the BSI? Couldn't think of any decent code names to give a woman? Gotta go with something edgy, right? Young people today.”

  My name's not really a code name, not exactly. But Judah Black isn't my real name, either. BSI learned early on that it was safer for their agents to carry self-assigned pseudonyms. Call it an extra layer of protection against magick and whatnot. If it was easier for him to think of it as a code name, though, it didn't suit me to correct him.

  Tindall swaggered up to the corpse and squatted down next to it as I had. “Shit, what a mess.”

  “Stab wound to the neck probably did him in. Silver, given that he's a werewolf and all.”

  “Who died and made you the M.E.?”

  I turned my attention to the corners of the room. Any place that had a door chime probably had a camera. I found the hole in the wall where one might have been, but the camera itself was suspiciously absent. Damn. “They ripped the camera out of the wall. Any chance you know the owner?”

  “This is Paint Rock,” Tindall grunted at me and jerked on the dead werewolf's arm. “I know everybody, Black.”

  “Shouldn't you call someone? The coroner? CSI? Somebody?”

  He looked up at me and drew his eyebrows together. “That's what you're for.” Then he jabbed a thumb into the bend of the dead man's arm. “Track marks. Our guy was a junkie.” He stood and wiped his hands on his pants. “Werewolf, so he was either on the roid juice or on barbs to keep himself from shifting. Could be a deal gone bad.”

  “Hold on. You can't say that based on some old needle marks in his arms.”

  “See it all the time,” he continued. “Drugs and booze are a problem here, Black. It's common. But we'll give him his due process. Can't close the case anyway until we have an ID on him.” He frowned at the corpse. “I don't recognize him and I thought I knew most of the werewolves here. Maybe he's a stray. What the hell was he doing in here?”