Page 64 of Freak Camp
“Good.”Turning, Victor strode away to the break room, not looking back to see if Tobias followed.
***
They started up againafter Victor, but it was different.They didn’t just force him to his knees or wrap his hand around their cocks and hurt him until he jerked them off.There was always something—a sandwich, an apple, a blanket—after, and they always made it very clear that he had to want it.There were no interrogations at all.
Tobias figured that it was all because of Jake—he’d seen what Karl’s face looked like now, and it wasn’t pretty—and he was both grateful for the space and terrified, every day, that Jake would come back and learn what he had done, what he was doing.Jake wanted him untouched, and Tobias was anything but that.
He shared with Kayla when he had more than what he desperately needed, building up credit for when he needed something and couldn’t get it himself.They weren’t friends, but she watched his back, and it was good to have at least one monster who wouldn’t try to cut his throat for his blankets or just because he was the whore.He occasionally gave her advice, which she took.The guards called her Dream now, because after the first time Crusher fucked her, she never made a sound when they touched her.
“Carpenter’s dream,” Crusher had said, pushing her into the showers with the other monsters.“Lies still as a board, waiting to get nailed.”
Victor looked up.“Not your taste, then?”
“Boring as hell,” Crusher said.
A vamp might be Toothy because he couldn’t retract his second set of teeth, and witches were named Handy if they put out, the name traveling from one witch to the next as they died or moved on to their executions.But Tobias called the shapeshifter girl Kayla, and she called him nothing because she hadn’t spoken since the first time Crusher got her alone.
Then one day, after an assembly demonstration—one naked werewolf, caught trying to lunge through the door to Reception, now tied between the whipping posts—Tobias and Kayla found a place where they couldn’t see the bloodstained dirt.Tobias leaned against the wall, trying to think only about how it was a good temperature today (bound to get worse, but good right then), while Kayla looked at her hands.
Then he heard her voice: rough and emotionless, like the words were put together by someone with a perfect understanding of the meaning but no comprehension of the emotions involved.“I want to rip off their dicks and stuff them down their throats.”
Tobias looked at her in surprise.After a second, he licked his lips and answered the only way he could.“We don’t get to want things.”
She turned her head to look up at him, face flat and inscrutable, until she spoke with the same lack of inflection or feeling.“You want that hunter boy to come see you.”
Tobias jerked hard, twisting his head sharply away.He had reacted far less during his last beating.No wonder the guards all used that against him, if he was so transparent.
Kayla was still watching him.“Why?What does he do to you?”
He drew his arms tight around his knees, setting his chin between them.How could he possibly talk about Jake’s visits—how Jaketalkedto him so differently from anyone he’d ever met, how he touched him so lightly and never to hurt, how he never asked anything from him?There weren’t any words for it, none Kayla would understand nor believe.Tobias didn’t have any words for it himself.
It was beyond comprehension, the brief flashes of light that were Jake’s visits, the fact Tobias had ever been in his presence.It justwas, and while he couldn’t have begun to say why Jake always returned to see him and smiled the way he did when he saw Tobias, the truth that Jake would come back (please come back, I’ll be good for you) was the only reason some days that Tobias didn’t rush the guards, hoping to get a bullet before a club.
Kayla’s gaze was still on him.After a long pause, she asked, “Does he fuck you?”
Tobias took a sharp inhale through his nose.“No.”
She leaned closer to get a better glimpse of his face.“But he’s going to, right?That’s why no one else’s fucked you.That’s what they all say.”
Jake had never said anything about it, not one comment or suggestive smirk.He’d never reached past Tobias’s hands, shoulder—occasionally his cheek, but never his lips.He’d never hurt Tobias, even that time he was so angry.
“I guess so.”He didn’t know why else Jake would be so interested in him.
“What’s he waiting for?”At last Kayla’s flat tone changed, rising on a note of incredulity.
Tobias shrugged and turned away.He wished he could answer, but he didn’t know.She had been silent long enough to understand his silence now.
***
Not far into Jake’seight-week suspension, it fully sank in just how much he had fucked up.
Four years ago, Jake had promised to get Toby out.He’d never forgotten that promise, and he’d always known it would be fucking hard and take a lot of work, but it wasn’t like there was any amount of work that would stop him or make him give up.Not when it came to the most important task in his whole damn life.
But somehow it had never occurred to him that this wasn’t like any other hunt that would take research, legwork, night watches, and willingness to go mano a mano with something not yet documented, including how many limbs it had or if it might spit poison or acid.Fuck, he wished it was all those things, night after night for endless days.That, he could handle.
He had to admit he hadn’t done much research for getting Toby out yet.Maybe he’d assumed some kind of instruction manual would be handed to him when he turned eighteen and got his official license.But to snatch Toby out of Freak Camp—that would require something way worse than the dirtiest, smelliest hunt ever did.
Jake was going to have tosuck upto the fuckingDixons.
