Page 37 of Freedom
Jake bit his lip, eyes still on Tobias. “He’s come really far. Seriously. But new places can throw him off. They take some adjusting.”
“Stop worrying, moron. I’m not expecting him to be Martha Stewart. I’ll see ya in a couple hours.”
“Yeah,” Jake replied, but Roger had already hung up.
When he got back to the Eldorado, Jake put on his best grin and gave Tobias’s shoulders a quick rub. Tobias watched him, like he tracked Jake the same way Jake tracked him, and it was unnerving and empowering. Jake hoped dearly he wasn’t about to fuck this up. “We’re good to burn some rubber?”
“Yeah,” Tobias said, still soft, and hurried to the passenger seat.
This would be fine, Jake told himself. Of course Tobias was worried, but that wasn’t a harbinger of doom. Jake knew Roger. They had nothing to worry about.
~*~
When the Eldorado trippedthe first early warning alarm pulling into his yard, Roger went out to meet the boys. He’d been fiddling with his bookshelf—not like he needed to sort his references again. He’d decided about the sixth time he lost Lotte Grimm’s annotated bestiary that he had to put things where he could find them rather than how it made sense to anyone else. The system was already as organized as he could stand to make it.
The first glimpse of Jake was heartening. He stood tall and moved with that easy Hawthorne confidence that Roger had missed the last several times he’d seen Jake. Those had been rough days, rougher for how the kid wouldn’t admit his own damn father had broken his heart, and Roger had grown wary of the restless, aimless energy that emptied his liquor cabinet.
This was Jake Hawthorne back in his element, flashing a grin at Roger as he leaned back against his smooth, spotless car (it was beyond Roger how the kid drove thousands of miles through Dust Bowl, USA and still maintained his machine in flawless condition), before glancing back toward the passenger seat.
Then Tobias got out of the car. Roger’s gut clenched and his mouth dried up, one hand too steady on the knife at his belt. He recognized the reaction—his instinctive response on hunts when a monster could be around any curve—and that itself made him sicker.
He didn’t know if he’d have recognized this Tobias if he saw him in downtown El Paso. Strange enough to see the boy in ordinary clothes (let alone upright, not chained to the floor;Dammit, how could you just walk away from something like that, Harper), no collar around his neck, no dried blood streaking the floppy brown hair. Tobias Hawthorne, according to the paperwork; forever 89UI6703 according to the Agency of Supernatural Control.
Tobias moved slowly around the car, eyes skittering once toward the porch and Roger, then dropping to the gravel under his feet. Jake waited for him with a patience that Roger wouldn’t have believed a few months ago. He had one hand open and half extended, as though he expected Tobias to grab it. Tobias didn’t. Shoulder to shoulder, they walked up to the porch together.
Roger kept his hands in his pockets and a fixed cheery smile on his face. “Hey, Jake, glad you could finally make it up to this dried-up patch of desert.”
“Hey, Rog.” Jake faked calm well—kid wasn’t legal to drink, and he had the swagger to be FBI, IRS, and ASC all rolled into one—but now Roger could see the subtle tension in his shoulders, down his back. Probably the kid even thought he was calm, but it was hard to say who was supported more by Jake’s hand on Tobias’s back. “I’d like you to meet Tobias.”
They’d met before. Once in the yard, when Roger hadn’t wanted to do more than assess the kid’s threat to Jake, and once in the interrogation room. And dammit, Roger could see that moment now, the emptiness in the kid’s eyes, the fear so complete and accepted, without hope, it didn’t even make him shake; Roger wasn’t sure he should ever forget, but it was harder to live with now, with the victim before him.
Then Tobias lifted his eyes, hazel peeking through his brown bangs. “H-hello,” he said, the second syllable almost inaudible. That one word seemed to take all his courage, and his gaze fell again to his feet.
“Hey, Tobias,” Roger said, and hoped his voice didn’t sound as forcibly hearty as it did to his own ears. “Good to have you here. Come on in.”
The boys followed him across the threshold with the antipossession wards painted on the ceiling and to the kitchen where Roger pulled out two bottles of root beer. Tobias’s attention was still wholly fixed on the floor, so Jake took both and passed one to Tobias, who wrapped thin fingers around the neck as though he wasn’t sure what to do with the bottle.
Roger motioned them toward the living room. “Go on, kick back.” As they settled on the sofa, he took an armchair—gun hidden in the stuffing in back—and tried to look at ease. It didn’t help his nerves to see Jake Hawthorne docilely doing as he was told without bitching, and more than that, Jake even looked nervous while Tobias didn’t so much as glance up from the bottle cradled in his lap. Roger popped open the top on his own root beer, and his fist tensed around the neck of the bottle. The holy water test didn’t work if the mark didn’t take a drink. “So, you boys been traveling?”
Jake latched onto the topic like he would a pretty girl, launching into a rambling account of their zigzag from Colorado, across the Midwest, to the East Coast and back. Jake rambled even more than usual, glancing at Tobias as though waiting for his two cents, occasionally nudging his hand. The only time Tobias moved during the entire thing was when he lifted that same hand to take a drink.
The whole scene unnerved Roger. Yeah, he was grateful Tobias was passing the holy water test—he had no idea how he could run the rest of the standards, though given how long the kid was in FREACS, most of them had to be redundant—but watching Jake cater to the kid and get no response, that was familiar. Roger had seen it in nursing homes sometimes when a husband or wife was still hoping their partner would shake off the vegetative state and be themselves again.
Jake ran down after about ten minutes of aimless rambling. Roger was impressed. Not many kids his age could carry a conversation that long when no one else was participating. Roger tried to help him along, he really did, but it was hard to care about where the boys had been when there hadn’t been a monster involved, and he couldn’t force himself to forget the possible threat in the room. Or the look in that same boy’s eyes when he’d been tortured.
Eventually it became too much for any of them. When Jake stammered to a halt after a half-enthusiastic comparison of mom-and-pop chain french fries around the Great Lakes, Roger made a noncommittal noise and then cleared his throat. “Hey, you boys hungry yet?”
“Yeah,” Jake said at once, with some relief. “Yeah, we could eat. We had an early lunch.”
Roger clapped his hands on his knees and stood up, catching the slight twitch in Tobias’s hands as he did. “Good, I’ll go heat up the grill. Picked up a few steaks from the store last weekend, plus baked potatoes and corn, if that’ll suit ya.”
“Sure.” Jake glanced at Tobias, who still hadn’t lifted his head. “Feeling hungry, Toby?” He nudged Tobias’s knee with the back of his knuckles.
Tobias peeked up under his bangs, barely enough for Roger to glimpse his eyes, and replied in an undertone he couldn’t catch.
“Not a problem.” Jake looked back to Roger. “Maybe just half of one for Tobias?”
“Sure thing.” Roger was glad that grilling gave him an excuse to escape the house. There was a good possibility that there was nothing wrong with Tobias, and for all their sakes, Roger should get a little distance.
