Page 8 of Freedom
He had never known anything like that existed.
The cool, melodious voice returned as Tobias lay dazed, not registering yet what had just happened or wondering if he would ever experience it again. He tried to breathe, tried to savor the moment and hold onto those wild, good sensations wrought from a few minutes of gorgeous, indescribable sound. He clung to them and almost felt tears rising and his throat clench when he realized they were slipping away.
And then a second piece of music began.
For the first time, Tobias wasn’t conscious of the minutes ticking by until Jake’s return. The click of the door opening took him off guard, breaking the trance of the music and sending him scrabbling hastily up from where he’d been lying on his stomach. Instinctively, he slapped the radio off before looking at Jake.
Jake stood by the door, car keys and key card in hand, watching Tobias with an odd expression. On anyone else’s face, a look like that would have sent Tobias sliding off the bed to his knees. Even now with Jake, after they’d come so far, it would have normally flipped Tobias’s stomach and set anxiety sprinting over his skin. But Tobias still had vibrations through his blood, tingling in his ears and head, from the beautiful music that no words could possibly contain, whose source or creator he could not fathom. He would have had no trouble believing that station had beamed in from another planet or dimension. And perhaps he should have been more worried, looking at Jake, but he couldn’t feel it. His pulse was ringing with crescendos.
“Hey,” Jake said, and dropped his keys and jacket onto the table. Tobias relaxed back down onto the bed as Jake crossed the room and sat down next to Tobias. His hand found Tobias’s hair, threading through it gently, and Tobias closed his eyes. This was one of his favorite ways that Jake touched him, and it made worry even more impossible. Jake had been drinking—Tobias could tell from the fluid slight-sloppiness of his movements, the way his gray eyes were more foggy than sharp, and he could smell a little on his breath—but only enough to ease his movements from the tension of dealing with a monster so much of the time. Yes, it was good for Jake to take breaks from him.
“Found something you liked on the radio?” Jake asked eventually.
“Yeah,” Tobias said. He didn’t worry as much anymore about confessing such things to Jake, who had never taken (or threatened to take) away anything that Tobias had liked. Jake had only driven away the things that could hurt him. It seemed that every day spent with Jake, every day of safety and kindness, left Tobias with such a particular glow of peace, stronger now that Jake was in the same room with him again, touching his hair with slow, even strokes. “I don’t know what it was.”
“Not sure I can help you out, Toby. I’m not much of an eighteenth-century, curly-haired music buff.”
Tobias blinked. For a moment he considered that Jake meant the music had streamed directly through a time loop across three centuries; then he remembered that any kind of music could be recorded and played again, just as Jake’s music was. “Eighteenth century,” he repeatedly slowly. Jake had already said this wasn’t one of his areas of knowledge, so Tobias wouldn’t push him, but—“Do you know what it’s called?”
“Uh... classical?”
Tobias blinked at him. “Like your music?”
“No, no, that’s classic rock. Classical’s, like, Beethoven, Mozart, Chekhov, all those guys in the powdered wigs and sticks up their—” Jake caught himself, and his thumb resumed even stroking over Tobias’s hairline. “We could dig them up,” he said instead. “A book about them, I mean. I don’t think any of them are buried—that is, if you want, you can learn all about them and tell me what I’m missing out on.”
Tobias felt a smile break over his face like the dawn, like the arcing sound of brassy horns breaking over the heartbeat of the lower whistling instruments, and then—he had never been so brave before, the happy buzz still overriding his usual inhibitions—he pressed his palm to Jake’s hip, against his shirt, right above the waistband of his jeans. Jake’s hand stopped, and Tobias’s eyes flickered up.
Jake looked arrested, like that was the last thing he’d expected Tobias to do and he didn’t know how to respond. Tobias wasn’t sure if he should pull his hand away. He liked feeling Jake’s warm skin through the cotton—he rarely got to touch even this much directly. At night, when they slept side by side, he usually only held Jake’s shirt, sometimes resting his knuckles against Jake’s chest. He only allowed himself touches that were indirect, blunted, leaving at least a shadow of the distance appropriate between a monster and a hunter, a freak and a real. But this touch, too, felt good. Reckless. Safe.
Jake drew his thumb slowly over Tobias’s forehead, his beautiful gray eyes fixed on him, lips red and parted. They looked very soft, and Tobias had a sudden urge to touch them too, to see if they felt as they looked. But that step, that choice, was far out of his capacity. Maybe someday, with more of this beautiful music to listen to, he could manage it. Or he could at least tell Jake that he wanted this too, just as much as books and desserts.
“Toby,” Jake started, an odd husk to his voice that made Tobias’s breath catch. For a moment, he felt a hot swoop in his belly, as he thought that Jake was about to bend over and cover Tobias’s body with his own—then Jake’s eyes fell shut, and he straightened off the bed abruptly. He snatched his hand from Tobias’s head, and Tobias’s empty hands fell to the bed, the heat on his palm just a memory.
Jake stumbled toward the bathroom, though Tobias thought it was more haste than alcohol. “I gotta piss,” he called without looking back. “Then we’ll catch some z’s and go on a super-duper oldies search tomorrow.”
Jake shut the door before Tobias could reply—not that he often tried to reply when Jake was moving away from him that quickly—but Tobias couldn’t feel disturbed, nervous, or anything he usually felt when Jake pulled away from him. Jake had come back, and he hadn’t told him he couldn’t have this beautiful music. Jake gave him everything, and tomorrow would be better simply knowing the music existed and he might hear it again.
When Jake left the bathroom, Tobias was on the verge of sleep, overlapping melodies sliding through his mind. Jake climbing in behind him and tucking his head over his shoulder was just the last soothing touch needed for sleep.
~*~
Dawn in Freak Camparrived slowly. Like every morning, the monsters waited for the barracks inspection and for the day’s work plans and assignments to be finalized. They shivered in their roll call lines for nearly an hour when the first rays of sunlight broke over the twenty-foot concrete and iron eastern wall. The vampires in line moaned as the sun touched them; it wouldn’t turn them to ash as some myths told, but it certainly wasn’t pleasant. They flinched and rocked from the burn on their skin but kept to their places. There were worse things than sunshine.
Like the guards.
While some inspected the barracks and common areas for infractions (and any pathetic escape attempts), others strolled slowly around the inmates of Freak Camp. Some guards muttered about the day shift taking their sweet time finishing the first cup of shit coffee in the breakroom. Others kept their eyes on the freaks with a cold, predatory eye.
Kayla, an eleven-year-old shapeshifter, looked at none of them. Today would be the worst day because every day was the worst day in Freak Camp. The first week she’d arrived, another freak had told her that. It had been the first of many survival lessons.
She stood in the third row on the far left. Edge positions were something of a privilege allowed to long-term inmates with no record of trouble. Kayla had been in Freak Camp for five years, and her record was spotless, but it wasn’t because she was smarter, stupider, or just plain luckier. It was because she’d been taught by a monster of unidentified species who had been in Freak Camp long before her arrival.
The guards had called him Pretty Freak. The monster inmates spatWhoreat him. To her, he was simply Tobias.
She still couldn’t believe that he was gone, and not to the incinerator. Tobias himself had been honest about their odds of dying and ending up as nothing but a smudge of ash. Those odds, he explained, were approximately ninety-nine-point-nine percent. No freak had ever escaped. Before Tobias, Kayla only knew one other monster that had been taken outside the camp, and they were for a hunter to use as bait. That shapeshifter had left trussed, drugged, and destined for a beast’s intestinal tract or else a makeshift pyre. No monster ever came back.
All the freaks knew that Tobias had been taken out as bait by the hunter Jake Hawthorne. They were sure Tobias was as dead as any other monster gone through the camp’s incinerator by now.
Kayla knew better. Or thought she did. Or hoped she did, even if hope was a deadly danger that Tobias had warned her against. She didn’t know for sure, but she didn’t think Hawthorne had taken Tobias to be a staked-out sheep for a chimaera or a wendigo. She didn’t know the real reason, and whatever it was couldn’t be good, but it meant that Tobias might still be alive.
