Page 1 of Fortress
Chapter One
The phone was ringing when Roger came in at two a.m., sore and tired from a hunt with a lot more running and hitting the floor than his old bones expected. He thought about just letting the damn thing ring—he hurt too damn much to be any good on another hunt, and if it turned out to be some idiot drunk-dialing him, he was going to have to shoot someone. But after eight rings, he sighed and picked it up.
“What?” This was no hour for pleasantries.
“It’s for Jake.” The voice at the end of the line was tense with barely controlled panic, high, male. “I swear it’s for Jake, please don’t hang up.”
It took a moment for Roger to make the connection. “Is this... Tobias?”
“Yes, yes, please don’t hang up, M-Mr. Harper, it’s for Jake.”
Roger wasn’t sure if his hand had gone numb or maybe his brain. Tobias had never called. Tobias had barely spoken when they were in the same room. “Kid, slow down, what’s wrong?”
“The fr-freak got him in the leg, and I g-got him wrapped up, but the w-wound is turning purple and spreading, and he’s feverish, doesn’t know me, and I think the claws had some kind of p-poison. His eyes are—they were turning blue around the edges, and now he won’t open them, and I can’t—”
“Hey, calm down.” Roger leaned against the wall. “Do you know what it was?”
“We th-thought it was a wyvern, there had been some classic sightings, but when we got there, it looked more like some kind of naga or j-just a big bat and... I don’t know, we didn’t know,but an iron round took it down. I have the corpse in the back, I didn’t know if you’d need it for a cure, if you’d k-know what it was. Couldn’t leave it for the re—c-civilians to find and didn’t have time to burn it.”
Even panicked out of his mind, Tobias had saved the evidence, cleaned the trail. Roger was impressed.
“That’s good,” he said. “Where are you?”
“F-forty minutes away,” Tobias gasped. “Less if I can be sure there aren’t any cops. Maybe twenty min-minutes. Please be there. You ha-have to help him.”
Roger swallowed, tightening his grip on the phone. “I’ll be here. Just get him here safely.”
Now that Roger was listening, he could hear the roar of the Eldorado in the background and a low groaning that had to be Jake. Tobias’s voice was tight, controlled and desperate. “Always.”
After he hung up, a fresh surge of adrenaline pounding through him, Roger considered the likelihood this injury was something Tobias had caused, set up, or allowed to happen. But the trick there was why Tobias would bring Jake here if that were the case. Even with his long years of paranoia, Roger couldn’t make sense of that. He would have to trust the kid, then, but watch his—and Jake’s—back at the same time.
Tobias made it in twenty-six minutes. Roger had expected the Eldorado to fly into his yard (his porch still had a dent from one time Leon had skidded to a stop with Jake unconscious in the backseat), but Tobias pulled through the junkyard gates slowly, gliding to an easy halt rather than slamming on the brakes. Then Tobias bolted out of the driver’s side and skidded around the edge of the car, knocking his knee on the Eldorado’s bumper on the turn. His movements held all the self-careless panic and speed that Roger had expected in how he would drive in.
Roger hurried down the steps, careful not to get in Tobias’s way as he worked to get Jake out of the seat—he’d even put a seatbelt on him.
“I got the couch set up for him,” Roger said. “Figured the trip upstairs would be a nightmare, and he should be close to the kitchen if it’s bad. Where’d you put the corpse?”
Tobias glanced toward him, then refocused on getting Jake out of the Eldorado. “Backseat,” he said. Jake moaned as Tobias maneuvered him out the door and jostled his own arm that he’d wrapped against his chest. Tobias flinched like he had been stuck with a pin. “Shhh. We’re here, Jake. You’re gonna be okay. It’s all going to be okay.”
Roger put an arm over the Eldorado’s roof to shade the window from the glare of the house’s lights and peered at the creature. He sighed in relief. It was a Rocky Mountain variation on a black quetzalcoatl. Not very common, and its venom could be lethal if left untreated, but mostly it was no worse to deal with than a slow-acting allergic reaction. Hunters died because by the time they started feeling the worst effects (widespread numbness and hallucinations), they weren’t in any kind of shape to get themselves to help.
After Tobias and Roger got Jake up the porch stairs and laid out on Roger’s battered couch—the kid was stronger than he looked, barely panting from bearing half of Jake’s weight—Tobias skittered away from Jake’s side while Roger leaned over the wound. It was an ugly slash in his outer thigh right above the knee—curling purple around the edges and spilling out a fresh flow of blood when Roger tentatively pulled away the makeshift bandage—but not particularly deep. Roger figured he’d shoot Jake with a basic yet reliable antitoxin and antihistamine and then place a poultice to slow the bleeding and draw out the rest of the toxin. He’d stitch the kid back together once he was sure he wouldn’t be locking something nasty inside his body.
The whole situation wasn’t great, but Jake would be fine.
“Is he—” Tobias’s quiet, cut-off comment had Roger’s head snapping up from the wound and one hand reaching for the knife at his belt. He wasn’t sure if momentarily forgetting the kid’s presence was a sign that his instincts felt he could trust the kid or if the fact that he still reached for a weapon when startled by him meant that Roger would be foolish to drop his guard quite yet. “Is it b-bad?” Tobias finished, hands twisted together.
Roger blinked into Tobias’s white, desperate face and realized that he hadn’t said a word out loud of his positive diagnosis, hadn’t offered a single word of reassurance. He didn’t know why. Sure, more than one person had called him a tight-lipped bastard—or maybe that had just been Leon screaming at him on several occasions—but usually if another hunter walked through the door, they either needed to hear what pumpkin-headed idiots they had been or had to know that they had done their best. Either way, he gave them that. It was part of being a general resource for the hunter community and still alive at his age. But he hadn’t said more than a few terse words of questions to Tobias since they’d arrived.
Roger looked at the kid. He was pale, tense, all his attention focused on Jake’s ashen face and Roger’s hands cutting away Jake’s shredded jeans. But Roger didn’t see just a young, inexperienced hunter, confronted maybe for the first time with the real possibility of death coming to someone that he loved. He saw a kid tied down in a blank white room of Freak Camp, waiting for the pain.
Maybe some part of him still saw the kid as a threat, something that could turn around and tear out Jake’s throat because he wasn’t going to be watching his back as sharp as he ought to with someone he was clearly head over heels for. But most of Roger just had a hard time looking the kid in the eye when every time he saw his too-thin face, it reminded him of thekind of monster he had been, watching a kid tortured in front of him and just walking away.
That ended now. That ended right now, or his name wasn’t Harper.
“He’ll be fine, Tobias,” Roger said. “I’ve got all the stuff I need. We’ll hit him with the basic antibiotics and something to cut the swelling, a wrap to draw out the poison, and hopefully by dawn we’ll be stitching him up. You stay with him. Let me get the poultice started. By tonight he’ll be fine, or at least as fine as a slash that big would let him normally be.”
Tobias looked down, his body sagging with relief. Roger hadn’t realized how tightly wound he had been until then. Probably Tobias had never really been relaxed around him.
