Page 60 of Freak Camp
After what felt like an hour but couldn’t have actually been more than fifteen minutes, the doorknob turned, and Tobias stepped in.
He looked tired, thinner than he was the last time Jake saw him (and he hadn’t thought the short, skinny kid could get thinner), his eyes sunken and dark.He didn’t look healthy, but what stopped Jake’s breath was Toby’s blank, hollow expression.He could have been a sleepwalker or a ghost.A little panicked, Jake looked for some kind of recognition, and he thought he caught a flicker of some half-sick, half-longing expression, but then Toby’s face shut back down.
He sat without a word and put his hands on the table, palms up, fingers slightly curled.He didn’t blink.
Jake shifted in his seat.Something was wrong.Something was really fucking wrong.“Hey, Toby.”He had no idea what the words would do.Maybe Toby would actually look at him.Maybe he would shatter.Jake couldn’t fucking tell.
Thank God the hollow-eyed stranger in front of him relaxed slightly and becameToby.He didn’t change his position at all, but Jake could see the sharp, brittle edge of fear draining out of him.Toby tilted his head and met Jake’s eyes.He tried to smile and failed.“Hey, Jake.”
Relieved, Jake reached across to rest his fingers inside Toby’s palms.Toby jumped at the contact, but that didn’t worry Jake.Toby always twitched at first contact in every visit.Jake rubbed gently, careful not to push too hard on the reddened skin, smelling ammonia.Toby must have been on some kind of cleaning duty again.
“Hope you don’t mind the change.”Jake lifted one shoulder to indicate the room.“I was getting tired of people eying us everywhere we went.”Toby’s eyes flickered to the camera mounted in the upper corner.“I told them to turn it off.”
Another layer of blankness thawed from Toby’s face.“Just so we could ...”He swallowed, and a smile and some deeper, softer emotion flickered stronger in his eyes, a spark that could almost light.
Jake grinned.He never failed to get a nice buzz from producing that reaction in Toby.“I’m a Hawthorne.What are they going to do, tell me no?”
Tobias ducked his head, but Jake saw the flash of a grin before it disappeared.
Jake squeezed his fingers.“Sorry it’s been so long.I was chasing a bunch of ghouls down the East Coast, then got stuck hunting down a swamp monster in Florida.And then I was inMassachusetts.”
“That’s okay,” Toby said, as he always did.He was looking at Jake’s hands over his, the faintest smile still on his face.“So you got them all?”
Jake launched into his stories about the hunts, from the start of the drive down from Ohio and the weird-ass family he’d met on the way, along with all the other quirky details he’d filed away as Things to Tell Toby.He probably talked more about that stuff than he did about the actual hunts.He’d worried once about whether it was rude to recount his adventures killing monsters to Tobias, but Toby insisted he didn’t mind.“They’re doing bad things,” he’d said.“It’s good to kill them.”
Still, Jake knew monsters weren’t the interesting part of his stories to Toby.He focused more on the interviews, the lies he’d spun and how the poor saps fell for them every time, because he was just that good.Toby smiled nearly the whole time he talked, and Toby looked him in the face too, if only because Jake’s voice insistedlook at me, look at me, Toby.Jake was an awesome storyteller, if he did say so himself.
Toby had even been entranced by Jake’s description of the mysterious series of camouflage billboards without any text that he’d seen on the side of the road in Ohio.“What’re they normally for, though?The billboards?”
“They’re just trying to get people to pull off the highway and buy their shit.Souvenirs and burgers and antiques.”Toby had still looked perplexed, and Jake moved on—easily, by now, with so much practice—to telling him about the weird-ass family he’d encountered at a truck stop down south, who were on a four-state tour of art museums.“Like libraries but for paintings and shit,” Jake had explained, and Toby’s eyes had gone round with wonder, and Jake had found himself telling Toby about the time he and Dad had had to break into an art gallery to torch a haunted painting—that wasn’t exactly the same, but Jake didn’t think he’d ever actually been to an art museum.
Now he was finally getting around to the climax of the hunt, which had been pretty badass, the way he’d tracked the vampiric giant gila monster through the marshes and staked out its lair for hours from a vantage point high in a tree.
“Then, right as it started crawling down to its pit, Ijumpedits ass—” He grabbed Toby’s forearms in emphasis, and Toby gasped sharply, yanking his right arm back.
Jake stopped.He was used to Toby’s small twitches, but this had been nothing like that.“Toby?”
“S-sorry,” he said, but his face had gone gray, and he blinked fast as he stared at a low point past Jake.
Jake let go of his arm slowly.Toby’s sleeves were long enough to cover his knuckles, but they were bunched around his wrists.Jake covered Toby’s right hand with his own before turning it over and pushing his sleeve up to his elbow.
Toby gasped again, now from shock, and his body jerked back, though he didn’t try to wrench his arm away again.Jake didn’t notice.His eyes were fixed on a series of small, circular burns on the inside of Toby’s forearms, two of them still shiny and pink, the others darker and scabbed over.Turning his head, Jake saw they formed a smiley face.
Only after Jake had stood up, and Tobias had twisted his body as far away as he could with Jake’s hand locked around his arm, was Jake aware of moving at all.His breath came slow and steady, and his voice only sounded a little tight as he asked, “Who did that to you?”
Toby was trembling, his head bent so close to the table that nothing of his face was visible.He didn’t answer.
Jake felt his tenuous control slipping.He seized Tobias’s shoulder with his free hand, shaking him and shouting, “Who did it, Tobias?”
Even as his head rocked back, Tobias kept his eyes tightly shut.“K-K-Karl,” he choked out.
Jake released him, pushing back from the table hard enough to knock over his chair as he left the room.
Karl was assisting another interrogation in Room Four.He had just slid a hot, blessed knife into the vampire’s stomach when Jake Hawthorne kicked in the door.
“What the fuck—” He backed away from the vampire alongside the other interrogator, a hunter.
Jake grabbed a red-hot iron poker—also blessed—from the burner and advanced, a blank and wild look in his eyes.
