Page 15 of Fortress
He held it up, thinking.
Jake wore a silver ring and a thin, black, braided band around his wrist, so it wasn’t impossible that he would wear this too, that he might like it. And even if he didn’t, he’d probably thank Tobias anyway and tuck it away, leave it in the trunk, or let it drop somewhere, probably when Tobias wasn’t looking, because he was kind.
Even if Jake hated it, maybe he would still appreciate the idea of a gift, a piece of physical proof that Tobias understood more now, that he could pretend to be real as hard as anyone, and that he... cared. It wouldn’t be as though Tobias were trying to lay aclaimon him. It wouldn’t be like any kind of collar. Jake wouldn’t see it that way. And if it were, he definitely wouldn’t wear it.
A month ago, Tobias wouldn’t have even considered this kind of risk. Buying something as a gift—he wouldn’t have thought it possible, much less attempted it. This new understanding made him brave, even through the clenching fear in his stomach, the slight dizziness that hit him when he turned back toward the front of the store, the newly made necklace clutched in his hand.
Jake was still talking with the shop owner, but they’d gotten through the case details and were now arguing about the Rolling Stones versus the Beatles. Tobias knew which Jake preferred, so he knew which side of this argument would win, even if the fight never formally concluded.
“Hey, Jake, you good?” he called, keeping his hand tucked to his side.
“And you’re thinking with a modified vacuum cleaner instead of a brain if you think ‘Yellow Submarine’—hey, Toby! Yeah, we’re good.”
“I’m going to go to the restroom. I’ll meet you at the car?”
Jake raised an eyebrow, glanced at Rob O’Malley, and shrugged. “Yeah, sure. Shout if this idiot tries to tell you shit about Keith Richards.”
“Sure, Jake.” Tobias waited until the big doors swung closed after Jake before turning to O’Malley. “I’d like to purchase this, please, quickly?”
The man took one look at the compass necklace and grinned. “Good choice. Because I got to be honest with you, we don’t actually have arestroom, if you know what I’m saying. And this is a nice piece, not many like it. I was in kindergarten when this old traveler came through and sold a box of these coins to my granddad—”
The Eldorado’s horn honked once, and Tobias hurriedly scooped up his change. “I have to go. Thank you very much!”
Shoving the necklace deep in the inner pocket of his jacket, he dashed outside to catch up with Jake.
The next day, after a couple more fruitless witness interviews, they finally made it to the library, which offered proof that Mr. Krueger had been right about something. Records showed a similar pattern of child illnesses and deaths occurring about twenty years apart, as regular as a generation. Within five minutes, Tobias compiled a list of known monster types that attacked cyclically, along with an even longer list of possibilities. He headed back to the microfilm while Jake paced over to the archive shelves.
By an hour in, Tobias had narrowed the list to either a striga or an extremely comprehensive family curse. Then, just before the two-hour mark, he hit pay dirt. Newspaper photographs from the previous two attacks showed a doctor in 1954 and a schoolteacher in 1976 who looked like identical twins, and theyeach wore the same “I’m attempting to look sympathetic but I’m not pleased about getting my picture taken” expression. When no family connection could be found between them, Tobias felt the excitement of an accelerating hunt in his gut.
He printed both images and Jake showed the best of the two to the head librarian, a silver-haired woman in her late sixties with a kind smile and the ability to raise only one eyebrow, as she did at the photograph.
“Well, that’s odd,” she said. “Yes, Dr. Earl Wilson, my granddaughter’s pediatrician, is a dead ringer for that man. But I could have sworn he didn’t have any family in this area. You printed this off the microfilm? I could check the genealogies if you’d like, or call Annie. She would have Dr. Wilson’s phone number.”
“No thanks, that’s all we need,” Jake told her, already turning on his heel toward Tobias.
“That’s it,” Tobias said as the library doors closed behind them. “He must be the striga. That fits with the cyclical attacks, the external handprint evidence on the houses, and how it’s moving through the families. Which means...”
“Shit, the Sanchezes,” Jake said. “Their second daughter was the last to get hit—”
“So their oldest son is the next target,” Tobias finished. “Jake, it could be tonight.”
“You said that blessed iron works on this fucker?” Jake was already popping the Eldorado’s trunk, getting out what they needed.
“But only when it’s feeding. Even in Freak Camp, records show no one’s never been exterminated unless it opens itself up to absorb life force. How are we going to force it?”
Jake paused in rummaging through the trunk. “I’ve never iced one of these bastards before, but the fact that we gotta catch it in the act means we have to be really damn close.”
“Ah.” Tobias shifted, hefting the bag of ammo Jake had handed him. “D-does that m-m-mean we’re letting it a-a-attack?”
Jake straightened up and swore, quietly, viciously to himself. He hit the bumper of the Eldorado, and then turned to look Tobias in the eye. “I don’t see another way around it. It wants kids, it’s marked out its next vic—these things move like the fucking wind, we don’t got a chance in hell of catching it in the open. If we don’t stop it now, it’ll zap someone else maybe tomorrow, maybe twenty years from now. Look, we’re the fucking Hawthornes, right? So nothing’s going to happen to the kid. We’ll keep close and jump it soon as it’s inside and make sure it never leaves.”
Tobias nodded, slow and unhappy. “I don’t remember ever reading another way to do it.”
“And it’s not like we can wait around forever. It only takes one cocky son of a bitch to tip him off, and then it’s the same old shit in a couple decades, except we’ll be slower and creakier. We’ve got to give this our best shot now.”
Sixteen minutes later, they pulled up across the street from the Sanchez house. They had a decent view of three sides of the house, but if the striga sneaked in from the back, they wouldn’t know it was there until the scream—if there was a scream. Tobias hated that they were putting a real child at risk, but he had to have faith that Jake knew what he was doing, that this was a risk worth taking if it would save other children.
This wasn’t the kind of threat that they usually faced. The ASC bounty on a striga was huge, and that thought had left his hands shaking as he carefully replaced the books that he’d cross-referenced. This had to be done quietly if they didn’t want the ASC landing like a ton of bricks.
