Page 29 of Fortress
Sitting in an armchair to the left of the desk was Dr. Kendra Turner, the resident supernatural specialist for the hospital. She was a middle-aged Black woman with a headful of thick braids tied back, and she bore the demeanor of someone who knew she was the last calm before a storm.
Sup-specs were a required member of every hospital’s staff. In Jake’s experience, they ranged from overeducated eggheads jonesing for their first confirmed vamp sighting to low-level medical personnel who had taken just enough classes to get the certification and resultant bump in pay. Their job was to check every injury with any possible supernatural origin to judge its danger to the population. No facility wanted to host Patient Zero for the next big supernatural outbreak. And just sometimes, a facility would land itself a freak.
ASC procedure was to identify, quarantine, and transport the supernatural to Freak Camp without delay. Usually, the black vans arrived at the hospital the same day.
Figuring out a way to throw a wrench into “normal procedure” that wouldn’t end with him and Toby running from the law for the rest of their lives was going to be one hell of a trick.
Dr. Cunningham drummed her fingers over her arm, her expression growing even more pinched. “Tell me again exactly what kind of supernatural threat you’ve brought into my hospital, Mr. Hawthorne.”
“I told you already, if you’d listened the first time, he’s ‘unidentified,’ which means the ASC never could give him a fu—a label. He’s never showed any damn sign of being weird,much less dangerous. He’s probably less of a threat to your patients than your damn doctors, seeing as Toby doesn’t go around cutting into people. He’s not contagious, outrageous, or even conscious right now. You better hope to hell that he’s getting top-notch care, because he ain’t done a fu—a damn thing wrong.” Jake glowered at her, fingers clenching his chair’s armrests.
“I don’t like your attitude or your explanation.” Dr. Cunningham looked at Dr. Turner. “Catch me up. What does an ASC classification of ‘unidentified’ mean?”
Dr. Turner shook her head. “It could mean pretty much anything, depending on the supernatural in question.”
“Ballpark me a threat level.”
“Low to moderate, most likely,” Dr. Turner replied. “Provided this supernatural was legally released from ASC custody. To give you any kind of better assessment, I’m going to have to make some calls—”
“You won’t,” Jake said suddenly. He was aware his voice had hit a dangerous register that was all his father’s, but it was a toss-up if people would react to Jake’s gravelly threat-voice the same way they would to Leon’s. Though from the way the two women were looking at him now,hemight have an ASC-graded threat level. They wouldn’t exactly be wrong.
He breathed in through his nose. Toby, unconscious on a fucking gurney right now, needed medical treatment to save hislife, and that depended on whether Jake could keep his temper.
He gestured stiffly toward the ID he’d slapped face up on the desk. “Run my credentials if you want. I’m ASC-licensed and can give you references from other hunters. They’ll vouch for Toby too. They signed his release papers.” Thank God for Roger and Alex.
“I’ll take those references, names, and numbers,” Dr. Cunningham said immediately. “And we will need those papers.”
Jake froze in reaching for the pen on the desk. “What?”
Dr. Cunningham’s eyes narrowed. “The release papers you just mentioned? We’ll need those for our records, along with anything else explaining why a registered supernatural isherein my hospital instead of behind the walls of the FREACS facility. Until we hear back from the ASC and I ampersonallyable to speak with someone who can provide a satisfactory answer, that documentation is the primary criteria I will use in deciding whether my staff is safe treating him or whether he should be here at all.”
Jake stood, and both women tensed in their seats. He felt more than saw (the ringing in his ears made it difficult to concentrate) Cunningham’s hand shift toward the edge of her desk. In another context he would’ve expected her to reach for a gun, though her goal was probably just an intercom. But for once, Jake wasn’t thinking of combat. “Papers,” he repeated. “Yeah, I’ll... I have those.”
Last week, as the short barren trees and snow-clogged fields of Iowa rolled past the Eldorado’s windows, Toby had asked, out of the blue, for those same papers.
It took a minute for Jake to process the request.
“Which papers, Toby?” There wasn’t a lot of paper in his life. Hawthornes tried not to leave a trail.
“The p-papers... from camp. From F-F-FREACS. The ones you signed to g-get me out.” The stutter was more pronounced than it had been lately, and Toby’s chin was tilted slightly down, but his eyes were focused on Jake.
Jake’s hand twitched, his mind going blank, only years of practice keeping them straight on the road. He couldn’t think of a response besides his own questions, but he caught Toby’s sidelong glance. He felt the silent query in it, wondering if Jake would pretend Toby hadn’t spoken at all.
“Why . . . What brought this up?”
Toby just shrugged. “If you don’t w-want me to see them, I underst—”
“No, fuck, it’s not—one sec.” Jake slowed down and pulled them to the side of the road. He took a shaky breath and hoped that it came across as thoughtful and not borderline panicked.
He hadn’t thought of those papers in months. Not since he’d shoved them into the glove box the day he’d sprung Toby from Freak Camp, before he’d beckoned Toby to take the shotgun seat for the very first time. He remembered the sheer euphoria of that hour, even overlaid with what happened that night and the following weeks.
Fuck, what did Toby want with those papers?
“It’s fine, I’m just... they’re in the glove box. I put them... yeah.” Jake gestured vaguely, but Toby was already opening it up, fishing the bent document envelope out of a debris of receipts and forged insurance forms. The sheaf of papers he withdrew from the envelope was way bigger than Jake remembered. Just to give himself something to do with his hands, he put the Eldorado back in gear and eased back into the highway lane.
He’d never read them. It hadn’t mattered, not that day with Toby standing against the wall where they’dleashedhim. Not when signing where he was told was the last hurdle to yanking Tobias him out of there and putting as many miles as possible between them and that hellhole. In the days and weeks and months since, he’d had more important things to think about than some goddamn ASC papers. Things likeTobyhimself.
And what the fuck did it matter if Jake hadn’t read them? He would’ve signed the fucking things anyway. A contract for his soul wouldn’t have stopped him from planting his John Hancock. No, Jake wouldn’t say sorry even if Toby found some key paragraphs of those damn papers written in some kind of demonic dialect.
