Guilty by Association (Judah Black Novels) Read online

  “Ed is a little eccentric,” Daphne explained, gently taking my hand in hers. Her hands were warm and soft, the kind of hands suited more for turning pages than tools. “But I wouldn't trade my brother for the world.”

  “Eccentric isn't the right word,” Shauna mumbled and frowned at me. “You're shorter than I thought you'd be.”

  “I bet you say that to all the girls,” I said with a stiff grin.

  Shauna shifted her weight to the other leg. “Well, I only meant that everyone was so worked up about this new agent in town and here you are. I've seen cacti taller than you. Nobody got their pants in a bunch over them.”

  “Depends on how close you get to the cacti.”

  Shauna wrinkled her nose at my response. “That kid in there is your boy, huh?”

  “Hunter,” I said with a nod.

  “Do yourself a favor, lady, and get him help elsewhere.”

  “Shauna,” Sal started sternly.

  “What? I'm only being honest with her. We've seen problem kids with chips on their shoulders before. There's enough tension in the pack already. We don't need her dragging some stray in because she's got double standards.”

  “Wait just a second,” I said putting my hands on my hips. “Double standards?”

  “Your laws are good enough for us but not for you?” Shauna snorted. “I had to register and go through your re-education courses. Do you know how many of my classmates are still alive? Two. That's how many. Most of the rest put a silver bullet in their skulls or got black bagged by BSI.”

  “I didn't-”

  “Maybe you didn't,” she barked. “But that doesn't mean your hands are clean and dirty hands don't get my vote. You think you can just walk in here the same day we commit one of our own and beg Chanter to take care of you?”

  “Shauna...” Daphne put a hand on Shauna's shoulder and squeezed. Shauna visibly relaxed and Daphne shifted the gesture of support into a gentle hug. “Let's just get this done, okay?”

  “Yeah, okay,” Shauna said and the two of them went back to adjusting the pyre they were building.

  “Tough crowd,” I mumbled.

  Sal shrugged as if nothing had happened. “I did try to warn you.”

  “Maybe she's right, though.” I ran my fingers through my hair and wished I'd had the foresight to bring something warmer to throw on over my summer clothes. Once the sun dipped below the horizon it was going to get downright chilly.

  “Maybe,” Sal said. “She can be bitter about it if she wants but she sure as hell can't blame you for wanting to do what's right for him. Shauna's had a rough life but shell come around and warm up to you eventually. Or, she won't.”

  “Somehow, that's not very reassuring, Sal.”

  He stretched his arms above his head and cracked his neck. “That's life. Full of uncertainty. Here's a tip, though, that'll make everything easier. Let Hunter fight his own battles. I know your first instinct as his mother is to stand in and negotiate with everyone for him but it isn't fair for everyone to form an opinion of your kid based on their opinion of you and the organization you work for.”

  I frowned and watched Shauna and Daphne pull out a stack of newspapers and start lying them across the top, weighting them down with rocks so they wouldn't fly away. Watching them, I found my mind drifting off to the Summers again. I wondered who was handling their bodies, how many uniforms were on the streets, looking for their daughter. Had they died quickly or had the sick, twisted bastard drawn it out for kicks? Who died first and did he make the other one watch while he did it?

  “Judah.” The firmness in Sal's voice startled me from my train of thought. I looked up blankly and saw him watching me with those uncomfortably intense eyes. His face lightened almost immediately. “Why don't you go check up on him? We'll call you guys out when we're ready to get started if you want to watch.”

  “Yeah,” I said and sank my gaze back down to the ground. “Sure.”

  I walked back inside and found Hunter sitting on the floor, rolling a ball around. Ed was snoring on the sofa with an arm thrown over his face while the climax of another episode of Scooby-Doo played in the background. Velma pulled the werewolf mask off the monster of the week and declared the case solved when they found a substitute teacher underneath. I stared at the screen, watching Velma make perfect sense of a whole list of senseless clues while the rest of her group stood back and marveled in awe at her brain power. Of course, the werewolf wasn't really a werewolf. He was a guy posing as a werewolf in order to get away with his evil deeds, which was genius of him. In a world full of monsters, who would ever suspect a human?

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Twilight breathed its last breath before they lit the pyre and conducted funerary rites for Elias Garcia. Chanter didn't do the honors, despite being the clear spiritual leader. It would have spoken volumes about his stance on Elias' position in the pack. By abstaining, he could still maintain that he was neither upset nor relieved by Elias' passing. Before things got underway, he did go out and inspect all of Sal's preparations, pointing out some things about the big circle that had been drawn in the sand and rearranging some small things. Still, it was Sal and Valentino that hauled Elias' body onto the pyre. When it came time to light it, Chanter struck up the fire on a torch but passed it on to Sal who then gave it to Valentino.

  There were no eulogies or forced remembrances, no kind words for the departed. No one cried. Valentino simply thrust the flame into the pyre and stood by, watching it eat away the dead flesh.

  Before that moment, I wouldn't have guessed Sal had such an amazing singing voice but he did. It wasn't anything that would have gone along well with musical accompaniment but alone it was something to listen to. I couldn't understand the words but the cadence of it reminded me more of a lullaby than a prayer, though I was sure it was more the later than the former. If there hadn't been a body burning not fifteen feet away, I could have curled up and gone to sleep to the sound of it and the crackling of the fire. Valentino brought some mundane things, papers mostly, that didn't look like anything special to me but Sal treated them with the highest respect when he lowered them into the pyre. Once the last bit of fuel had been placed in with the body, Valentino stepped outside the circle and started stripping off his clothes.

  Then, slowly, he began to change.

  It was not an easy process to watch, the shifting of a man into a wolf. The desert echoed his cries of pain and frustration as the change droned on, taking a good ten or fifteen minutes, much longer than I imagined it should take. Hunter sat silent and still in my lap, eyes glued forward. I wondered if it was always this way for them to change.

  Most modern television shows dramatize it fairly well. Features shift and change, sometimes one or two things at a time and sometimes a whole set of things. The hair grows out and thickens to fur. The fingernails change into claws. What no program has ever gotten right is the sound. I’ll never forget the sounds of the Change. They are the stuff of nightmares. All of those cracking bones, breaking and healing almost instantaneously at awkward angles, the cries of anguish and pain, the choking, spitting and rasping...

  And then there's the blood. When they change, they grow out of their human bodies. Parts fall off. Skin tears and things poke through. Teeth fall out pushed by fresh, new fangs. None of that can happen without making a bloody mess.

  Hunter whimpered loudly as he watched. Chanter, who was sitting away from the circle with us, reached out and placed a hand on his shoulder. The two exchanged no words but the gesture seemed to calm Hunter.

  When it was done, Valentino the man was no more. In his wake stood a large black wolf covered in leftover gore. He shook some of it free from his fur and, like a cat having fresh delivered her kittens, went about eating the mess the birth had left behind. On a cloudy night, when the moon was hidden from view, the only visible part of him would have been his eyes, which still retained their distinctive brown. He threw his head back and howled. The re
st of the pack, still in human form, answered him. For the first time all night, the singing stopped and the circle broke up, Valentino's packmates wandering off toward him in various stages of undress. I could almost feel how big Hunter's eyes got when Nina pulled off her skin tight top and I raised a hand to cover his eyes. Chanter grabbed my hand and stopped me.

  I looked over with a scowl. “He's eleven.”

  “The link between nudity and sexuality is a modern invention. If there are no mysteries, there are no secrets, no shame when the time comes for him to Change. Our exterior bodies are borrowed treasures. You wouldn't hide away a beautiful bowl you borrowed from a friend would you?”

  “I wouldn't advertise it either,” I grumbled.

  “It amuses me that, of all the things you've seen here tonight, a little nudity is what you've decided to object to,” Chanter said with a chuckle. “Trust me when I say that an eleven-year-old boy is no stranger to gawking at attractive, naked women, not in the age of cell phones and internet. That said, it's best to gawk discreetly, Hunter.”

  “I wasn't,” Hunter protested. “I mean, it's not like I couldn't notice. Stop laughing at me!”

  Sal was the last to change and, when he did so, it was without the showmanship that accompanied some of the younger werewolves. One minute he was a man. The next, he was a big, gray wolf. He didn't go to Valentino as the others did but simply turned and trotted off into the desert and sat down to wait. Valentino threw back his head and let out another long, low howl and then trotted off into the desert, past Sal. The rest of the pack followed.

  Hunter wriggled free of my arms and ran off just a few yards to watch the wolves stalk into the desert. He watched them go long after their forms had faded into the long shadows.

  I turned to Chanter. “You're not going with them?”

  “For two reasons,” said the old Indian as he stood and cracked his back. “The first is obvious. There's a big fire burning just a short distance from my house. It would be foolish to leave it unattended. Second, this hunt is being led in memory of Elias. Valentino may object but it wouldn't be proper for me to involve myself with this since he wasn't part of the pack.”

  “The rest of them have no issues with it,” I mumbled. It didn't seem to me that it was a big deal whether or not he participated. Valentino probably would have appreciated the gesture of acceptance after the fact. Chanter struck me as the stubborn type that would rather follow tradition than make such a gesture.

  He snorted at my observation and stood. “The rest of them are not the alpha,” he said and then went back toward the house. “Come, Hunter. I could use an assistant getting the house cleaned back up.” Hunter rose and went with him without question.

  I stayed outside, watching Elias' body burn and letting my mind drift back to Donald and Teagan Summers, wondering how they'd died. I thought of the tongue in my shoebox and almost threw up all over again. The message was clear, even without the note. I was on the right track and someone knew it, someone I hadn't even realized was listening in on our conversation. But which track was the right one? I had two leads so far: the car and the club, neither of which I'd had the time to follow up on.

  So far as I could tell, the Summer's house had been empty of all but Donald and me. He had checked up and down the walk to verify I was alone and there were no cars in the driveway, no sounds or signs that anyone but Donald was home. If there had been someone else there, listening to our conversation, they had have been using some kind of magick, powerful magick that I hadn't sensed. That last thought was what scared me the most. I should have sensed a spell if it were at work inside. Maybe I'm not the most powerful energy worker in BSI or the most talented but I pride myself in being able to sense energy while it's at work, especially when I was looking for it. All I had sensed in Donald's house was the faint buzz of his wards. I wouldn't have been able to cross them without some serious back up. That meant that whatever had heard us and killed the Summers was bigger, badder and scarier than me. Exponentially so.

  I shivered, despite the heat coming off the fire and wished for the safety the circle around it provided. Magick circles aren't any more impenetrable than a concrete wall most of the time but they did make for a nice barrier between me and scary fae killing bad guys. I didn't expect there to be any out here, outside the reservation, but if it was in the Summers house, it could be anywhere and do anything. There wouldn't be anything I could do to stop it.

  A grouping of cacti off to my right shifted and I got to my feet, reaching for the trusty nine millimeter I hadn't brought with me. Sal had insisted I wouldn't need it, that Chanter's place was the safest patch of Texas there was. Now, I wasn't sure. The cacti wriggled again and the form of a skinny, half-starved looking werewolf pushed through, rubbing his back against the spines as if he had an itch.

  Werewolves don't look like normal wolves. They're bigger, for one, and their limbs are just a little off, too long or jointed ever so slightly in the wrong place. But they are similar enough looking that the untrained eye probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference, especially in the dark or at a distance. I knew better. What I didn't know was which one of the wolves this was, stalking up to me, and whether or not I could trust him.

  He came up with his head down, just kind of meandering slowly. I could see he had something small and red in his mouth but, whatever it was, it wasn't moving. The werewolf stopped a few feet from me, stretched and spat out a red, foam ball covered in doggie drool and then proceeded to stare up at me expectantly, panting and grinning. When I didn't immediately grab the ball, he bowed his head and used his nose to push it closer to me.

  “Which one are you?” I asked, not expecting an answer. Werewolves, like wolves, can't talk in their animal form. That doesn't mean they can't communicate, though. He sat there and used his hind leg to scratch an itch. I sighed. What was there to do but throw the ball for him?

  “I guess we all have our ways of dealing with awkward situations,” I said and picked up the ball. It was covered in dirt and slime but I cleaned it off with my shirt before tossing it back into the dark, as far away from the cacti and the fire as I could manage. I had just enough time to turn around and take a step back toward the house before he was behind me again, ball between us, panting. “Seriously? Shouldn't you be off hunting cute, furry creatures with the rest of them? You're a big, scary werewolf, not a Labrador retriever.” He whined at me and pawed at the ball. “Fine,” I said rolling my eyes. “But when I figure out which one you are, you're never going to live this down.”

  I tossed the ball out into the night for the skinny werewolf for what seemed like hours. In the course of our game, I somehow forgot to be scared of whatever was lurking in the shadows. I forgot about the murder scene that had been a home only hours ago and the corpses waiting for an autopsy because I had to go and poke my nose where it didn't belong. By the time the other wolves came trotting back several hours into the night, I was actually in a pretty cheery mood considering.

  I threw the ball one more time but he didn't go after it. Instead, he stared toward the road leading up to the house, lowered his head, took up an aggressive stance and growled. A few seconds later, I heard a car door shut and a few unfamiliar voices buzzing along with the distinctive sound of a police radio.

  I forgot all about the ball and the werewolves and wandered toward the front of the house to find Tindall arguing with Chanter while Quincy hung back and leaned on his door. A second car had pulled in and parked just in front of Tindall's Cadillac and I immediately knew something was wrong when I recognized it as the Jag that had pulled out of Sal's driveway the day before. Sal's ex-wife was standing in front of it with her arms crossed, just barely out of Chanter's reach. She was leaning on the arm of a man with a very confident vibe about him. Her boyfriend, Andre LeDuc, probably. He was wearing an unbuttoned, black leather jacket with no shirt underneath, a tight pair of blue jeans and cowboy boots. His tight, white smile cut through the night.
r />   “Please,” he was saying in an accent that sounded French but definitely wasn't. “We know he's here.”

  “I've no idea where he is,” Chanter spat back. “And if I did, I certainly wouldn't tell you.”

  The man's smile widened when Chanter growled at him. “Go ahead. Change. Rip me apart. Tell the world what monsters you people are.”

  I thought for a moment that Chanter might actually do it but Tindall stepped between them and scowled at the other man. “Get back in the car, Andre.”

  “We have every right to be here. That thing could have killed Zoe. As it is, she's already suffered unnecessary emotional trauma because of your incompetence.”

  Now, it looked like Tindall and Chanter might actually team up to take care of this Andre fellow. While I thought he deserved it for being stupid enough to challenge both Tindall and an alpha werewolf in one breath, I didn't want to do the paperwork. “What's going on here?” Everyone but Chanter, who obviously knew I'd been standing there, turned with an air of surprise. Everyone except for Andre. He still looked as if he were about to burst into laughter over a joke he hadn't told yet.

  Tindall sighed and walked toward me with his hands on his hips. “Black, maybe this is something better saved for when we get back to the station to book our suspect, huh?”

  “Book your suspect,” I repeated without understanding. How could he have a suspect? The Summers were barely cold. It would have to be something really damning to bring him all the way out here in the dead of night for an arrest. “What do you mean?”

  “I just came from picking up the pieces at the Summers,” he said slowly. “And I mean pieces. Black, the only time I've ever seen that much of a mess, it was a werewolf. Whatever it was...ate pieces of them.”

  “That doesn't mean it was a werewolf,” I protested. “And it definitely doesn't narrow your list down enough to make an arrest, Tindall.”