Page 46 of Fortress
Jake could barely keep his grin off his face, but he didn’t want to spoil the surprise. “Tell you inside,” he said, getting out of the car and leaving Toby to follow.
He slowed down once they got their tickets and found the entrance to the gardens. Other visitors walked the paths: solitary individuals, some families with small children, but beyond steering Toby toward the more secluded, quieter pathways, Jake barely noticed anyone else. His focus was Toby, how he peered and then gaped at the neatly trimmed shrubbery and the brilliant flowers hanging from the branches, both breathless and bemused.
He glanced over at Jake every so often, eyes shining, to see if Jake was marveling with him, and Jake let out the grin that he’d been holding.
They didn’t speak until they crossed a bridge that brought them to a large tree with dark bark, its branches drooping with clusters of pale pink flowers. Toby stopped underneath, gazing upward while a couple stray petals drifted down on him, and Jake stopped beside him.
“You planned this,” Toby said, eyes locked on the blossoms as one drifted down from its perch toward their heads. “It’s beautiful, and you wanted us to be here today.” He lowered his gaze to look at Jake. “Why? Why are we here?”
This was more than Jake could take. He tugged Toby in for a kiss, moving one hand to touch Toby’s cheek and jaw. It was slow, sweet, hardly any pressure behind it. When they stopped, Jake turned his mouth to Toby’s ear and whispered, “Happy birthday, Toby.”
Toby jerked back, shock in his face now, though he didn’t drop Jake’s hand. “I... I forgot.” He half laughed, but it sounded a little choked. “You, y-you’re the one who first told me about b-birthdays—I remember, but I’d forgotten. Even when—you brought me—but I’d f-forgotten completely the last few—”
“Hey, it’s okay.” Jake pulled Toby to his side, one arm around his shoulders. Toby leaned his head against Jake’s chest, struggling to even out his breathing.
“I’m not supposed to forget things,” he said, low, against Jake’s shirt.
Jake rubbed Toby’s shoulder with one hand. “You remembered mine just fine.”
“Yeah, because it’syours.” Toby straightened to lift his head, smiling again, if a little wobbly. “But you told me mine, and I forgot.”
“Well, so long as you remember mine and I remember yours, we’re good.” Something hurt in Jake’s chest—not exactly like something cracking, but like an old bruise pinched. “Hey, youmade me breakfast. I wanted... something for you, for the same reason.”
“I made you breakfast because I love you,” Toby said, matter-of-fact as he was when taking inventory on their ammunition or listing out the variables for one of his math problems. “Just like you did this for me.”
Jake stilled completely, not even able to breathe. Maybe he’d gotten pollen in his ears. He couldn’t have heard Toby saythat. Not when Jake had never heard him say it before. Just because, what, Jake had taken him to some gardens? If he’d known, he could have done this months ago. Hell, in the very first week. And what was Toby doing, giving Jake something like that on his own birthday?
Then Jake tightened his arm around Toby, pulling him close even as Toby peeked up at him for a reaction. Jake dropped his chin to steal a kiss, first on Toby’s lips, then throat, then anywhere he could reach. With a smile Jake could feel against his skin, Toby kissed him back.
The thing that amazed Tobias the most was how he hadn’t suspected the surprise at all. Sure, he had known that Jake pointed them south on purpose, but he couldn’t have imagined the botanical garden, and his birthday hadn’t even been on his radar.
The next morning, sitting at the table by the window with a fresh newspaper he found outside their door, his eyes kept straying to Jake, still asleep in bed. For the first time, Tobias realized he really believed that Jake had meant it when he’d said that Tobias would be the only one for him.
That didn’t mean that Jake would always feel that way, of course, but it was thrilling enough for now.
Still smiling, Tobias highlighted another passage in the article, cross-referenced the information with what he’d found on the local library’s online archive, and sat back. He probably shouldn’t be happy, looking at yet another sign of supernatural activity right in the St. Louis area, but it felt good to be researching again, with the promise of hunting in the near future. The question was whether Jake would let them look into it.
Tobias understood the importance of letting bones knit properly before exposing them to stress. Or at least he understood the theory. But camp had taught him what his body could take, what stresses it could handle before it broke again, and Jake didn’t need to worry about him. He felt more than ready to kick some supernatural ass.
Jake moved and mumbled in the bed, rubbing one hand over his face and then blinking at Tobias with bleary eyes. “Working on something, Toby?”
Tobias held up the paper with his careful notations. “Our next case.”
Jake blinked, and he looked for a second like he wanted to argue, like he would say again that Tobias’s shoulder wasn’t healed enough, that he had to rest up just one more week or one more month. Then he shook his head slightly and sat up in the bed, rubbing the back of one hand along his morning stubble. “Local?”
“Yes. Maybe twenty minutes north of here.”
Jake stretched out a hand. “Lay it on me.”
Giving him a slight smile, Tobias handed the paper over.
The situation felt like a straightforward haunting, though maybe one of the more gruesome ones. There had been a few suspicious incidents in the neighborhood (culminating in a suspected freak that the ASC had picked up two years ago), but none of that had been enough to prevent the Mitchelson familyfrom choking to death a few days ago. Official reports dismissed it as “asphyxiation, cause unknown, gas leak suspected,” but Tobias wondered if whoever wrote the reports was as wary of the ASC as he and Jake were.
The more significant indication of repeating supernatural activity was the discovery that the Dalton family had died in a similar way sixty years ago in the same neighborhood. The old records described them as “drowned in nothing but air.” The newspaper article from the period had contained a distorted image of the family taken just a week before the incident, the six members of the Dalton family staring soberly at the camera, the occasional hand or face moving too quickly to be perfectly caught by the technology. They looked, Tobias thought, almost like they knew that something was coming for them, though perhaps that was a projection. Photographs had been different then, and not everyone smiled like they did on the TV.
When Tobias and Jake rode into the quiet suburb, a public works van idled on the corner, and a handful of hazmat-suited workers were moving in and out of the Mitchelson home. A couple of small boys, worn basketballs forgotten in their arms, watched from closer than they should have.
Both of the Mitchelsons’ next-door neighbors had been out of town when the family died, but the Grant family across the street had been home. Tobias and Jake parked on the edge of their property and watched the public works crew for a few minutes. It seemed like what a couple of average guys would do, and no one watching them would guess they were looking for any hint that the official investigation had uncovered a supernatural cause. The Hawthornes had to be careful, not so much for the supernatural threat, but because the ASC would be on this town in two heartbeats if it got any kind of confirmation that what had happened here was not part of the natural order of the world.
