Page 65 of Freedom
Tobias gave him one of those looks that was growing more familiar: the worried, slightly skeptical expression that cast doubt on Jake’s sanity and ability to maintain his own safety. Jake saw that look every time he handed Tobias the keys to the Eldorado for a driving lesson.
The look made Jake grin as he shifted his grip on the flashlight and improvised phurba and took a first tentative step into the encompassing darkness.
He felt his way with one hand on the rough wall, sweeping his light over the cave floor and opposite wall, which faded out of reach of the light’s beam within half a minute.
Jake had no idea how far the cave went or what might be watching him from its depths. He didn’t like the idea of spelunking too far and letting something cut off his exit (or get Tobias where he waited at the entrance), so he wasn’t planning on going far. Just enough to get a sense of how big a cave he was looking at, whether this could be the right one.
Hyperalert for the slightest noise or rustle echoing across the cave, Jake lurched sideways when his hand slid from rough stone to nothing. He clawed for balance, stumbled, swore as his ankle twisted in a hole like a fucking socket wrench around a screw, and fell. He’d expected to hit a wall, something hard to answer the fresh throb in his ankle, but instead he hit some kind of springy, stringy material and bounced gently, inches away from the jagged wall.
His first response as he reached out and his hands promptly stuck fast to the strands wasWhat the fuck, spiderweb?The second reaction, rising up like a wave in response to a deep, low growl from across the cave, wasFuck, no, Toby.
He had kept his hold on the phurba, but the flashlight had slipped from his fingers, catching on a lower part of the web, splashing its light over a section of uneven floor. Jake struggled against the web, but that just wound the strands more thoroughly around his jeans until he had about as much chance of pulling away as he’d had escaping that clingy cheerleader back in Tampa.
“Son of a bitch,” he snarled, and a second later the same throaty rumble he’d heard before answered, accompanied by the shuffle of feet echoing across the cave.
Then, just to complete the nightmare: Tobias’s hesitant voice called, “Jake?” from the cave entrance twenty feet away.
“Toby!” he shouted, torn between telling him to stay back and to hurry over and cut him loose. The yeti probably wouldn’t be considerate enough to lean over and shove its throat into Jake’s tiny phurba. “Toby, watch out!”
The yeti (Jake couldn’t see shit, but he was willing to bet his ass that nothing good could come snarling out of a dark cave) growled louder, its heavy footfalls moving ever more quickly toward its prey.
A second flashlight shone from the entrance, roaming across the floor to where Jake’s light fell, just in time for the yeti to step into view.
It was eight feet of shaggy, matted fur (dirty with shit and mud, but pale under the stains), the flashlights glimmering off the long yellow fangs protruding from its lower jaw and glowing red from the small, beady eyes Jake saw fixed on him.
Then Tobias, moving swiftly and decisively, crossed the cave to place himself between Jake and the yeti.
Jake had told him that hunts would be dangerous. He had told him that if they ever went south, Tobias should run like hell and get a rocket launcher, that he shouldnotstick around to get dead.
What a fucking bad time for Tobias to stop following his directives to the letter.
But then again, the boy Jake saw from his twisted stance spider-glued to the damn wall was nothing like the Tobias he thought he knew.
The yeti, discovering closer prey, growled again. Tobias didn’t so much as flinch, his head tilted slightly as though he were Jake considering nothing more challenging than a choice of cereal in the supermarket. Then he slowly crouched down, set his flashlight on a slanted rock where it would illuminate the area between them, and took a step forward, shifting his grip on his six-inch knife.
“Hey, cocksucker,” Tobias called, voice strong without a single stutter or hesitation. He was standing tall—no hunching, no cowering—and holding the phurba Jake had given him with easy confidence. In fact, every bone in his body radiated confidence, his shoulders taut yet almost relaxed in readiness, and the look on his face... Jake would have killed to see that cocky self-assurance on Tobias’s face every day.
The monster lumbered forward. When it blinked, its two sets of eyelids moved at slightly different speeds, like a camera closing its shutter a second after pressing the release. It blinked toward Tobias once, twice, and then, as though it had found something it liked, its lips curled up to reveal rows and rows of curved, vicious teeth. This time its low-throated growl was enough to vibrate Jake’s body, make him jitter against the stones.
At that point, Jake Hawthorne would have gone for one hell of a bigger knife.
But Tobias Hawthorne just smiled and adjusted his footing. “That’s right, you ugly son of a bitch. I’m right here.”
When the yeti charged, Jake jerked forward uselessly. He might have screamed Tobias’s name too, but he needn’t have bothered, could have saved that heart-wrenching panic because Tobias dodged the blow as though they had choreographed it for years and then brought the knife around to slash at the yeti’s gut.
This wasn’t the same kid who on bad days wouldn’t look Jake in the eye, flinched away from casual touches, and hyperventilated in supermarkets. This was someone calm, competent, a flash of speed, a casually brutal application of force. This washis Tobiasas Jake had never seen him: vibrantly alive, relaxed in his own skin, taking on a monster that topped him by three feet and hundreds of pounds. It was terrifying, invigorating, and one of the hottest things Jake had ever seen.
Every swipe of a claw sent Tobias spinning backward, smoothly evading every blow, only for him to dart forward and shove his slip of a blade into the monster’s thick hide. Every time the beast snapped toward him, Tobias was simplygone, coming around for another attack, at another angle, often with an ingenuity or straight up ballsiness Jake couldn’t have imagined himself.
While the monster suffered dozens of wounds—tiny things that nevertheless left red streaks across its hide—Tobias picked up nothing worse than ruffled hair in the backdraft from those massive, yellowed claws. He was the smoothest, gutsiest, best damn hunter Jake had ever seen.
Jake wanted to hug him. He wanted to sell popcorn and tickets and cheer Tobias on. But more than anything, what he wanted was to get free of the fucking sticky web andfight. Monsters had a hell of a lot of endurance and were a hell of a lot less breakable than most humans, and in a battle between a boy alone and a beast, the odds were in the beast’s favor.
And underneath the giddy delight from watching Tobias be awesome, worry grew that the faint skittering from deeper in the cave was whatever had created the web in the first place.
Then it happened, everything that Jake had been dreading from the first second the web wrapped around him. Tobias stepped—just as smooth, just as easy, butwrong, so fucking wrong,Toby, no!—directly into one of the yeti’s blows. Jake’s heart seized, and he threw himself against his restraints even though he knew it was too, too late to see anything but Tobias bleeding out across the floor. The yeti roared in triumph, Jake screamed as, finally, too fucking late, the webbing around him started to give. Then Tobias, his lips pressed together in a silent, thin line, used the yeti’s blow as leverage to shove his phurba into the monster’s throat.
The yeti’s roar of triumph turned into a desperate gurgle, and Tobias, mouth fixed, eyes focused and clear, used one arm to pull himself higher on the yeti’s body and then twisted the phurba hard to the side.
