Page 4 of Fire
In the past, the Crossroads Inn had been like a second home—after Dad, the Eldorado, and the road. Now he felt more like he was walking out of a battlefield, bridges burning behind him.
* * *
Tina’s Cafewas a cute little diner with mismatched chairs, heavy pottery cups, and round tables just the right size to spread out a few textbooks so Tobias could pretend that he was studying while he waited, worrying about Jake.
Tobias drank his iced tea and turned pages just often enough that it could look like he was actually reading, all while listening for the Eldorado. Other vehicles came and went, but not the one he cared about.
When a battered sedan pulled into the parking lot, Tobias didn’t pay it much attention. But when the hunter walked into the cafe—for that was what he was, unmistakably, though Tobias couldn’t recall ever seeing his face before—everything else in his field of vision grayed out, all noise dropping to a distant buzz. Tobias felt himself freeze, turn to stone in his chair.
A second ago, Tobias hadn’t worried about how he looked, whether or not he fit in. Some days he did, but today had been okay. But the moment the hunter—who was not like Roger or Alex, not at all, he was every inch aFreak Camphunter—came in, Tobias knew the game was up.
The man had short cropped dark hair, peppered with gray. He was stocky and not as tall as Jake, but his face terrified Tobias. The cold, assessing gaze, the casual self-assured way he held himself, did not belong to just any hunter. A lifetime of pain had taught Tobias to brace himself when confronted with that body language, that calculating look.
This one would recognize Tobias for what he was.
Tobias could hope that stillness was enough to escape, to remain unnoticed, but he knew in the pit of his stomach that it was not. It never had been. Hunters always spotted him.
The man walked first to the counter, though he didn’t order anything. His sharp gaze swept the room. Tobias knew that, even though his own eyes remained fixed on the floor ahead of him, still as a mouse before a cat.
Then the hunter turned and strode toward him, unhurried but purposeful.
In that awful, last moment, Tobias wished he could be the real that Jake had taught him to be. He wished he could leap up, hurl his chair through the window, escape or defend himself with a shard of broken glass. He would not win, but at least he would leave behind evidence of a fight. When Jake returned, he could put the pieces together. He’d be proud of Tobias, even though Tobias would be long gone.
But there would be no fight. No sign of a struggle. Tobias would just disappear, and the other patrons would say he had left voluntarily with a hard-eyed man clad in denim. Why would Jake even bother looking for him?
Then the hunter pulled a chair over to Tobias’s table and sat down next to him. Very, very close, so that Tobias felt the hot gust of the hunter’s breath on his cheek, and his knee touched Tobias’s, and that was the end of Tobias’s ability to think anything.
His hands were still resting on the table, curled and empty, dead things. Tobias couldn’t feel them.
“You’re Hawthorne’s freak, aren’t you, boy?” The hunter’s hand settled heavily on Tobias’s shoulder, gripping hard, as though he thought Tobias had the strength to run or leap up. “Still making him happy?”
Tobias did not breathe.
“You’re looking good, freak. Bet you are making him happy. I bet Hawthorne’s the happiest fucking freakfucker in the country. We’ve run together a couple times, and he was the best damn hunter I’d ever seen—after his old man, of course. Whaddaya think, is he getting better or worse pounding your freak ass every night?”
The hunter’s hand left his shoulder, slipped down his arm and to his lap. Tobias tried not to react, not to make a noise, but he couldn’t keep some sound escaping his throat. It was too late, but he still strained for the sound of the Eldorado.Please, Jake, please—come get me one more time...
“You haven’t forgotten you’re a monster, have you? You go on giving Hawthorne a good ride, because the day you fuck up—and you will, that’s the one thing you can count on monsters for—you’ll be lucky if he gives you a bullet and doesn’t stake you out somewhere as vamp bait. Maybe he’ll drop you right back at camp. Maybe I get to have a go when you get there.”
Tobias tried to blank out while the hand traveled downward, tried to go somewhere that the hunter couldn’t reach him. The hunter couldn’t do any of those things that hunters had done freely at FREACS here, not in a tiny restaurant in front of civilians. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. But the hunter’s soft words rang in his head while he gripped Tobias’s groin roughly through his jeans.
Tobias tried to remember that Jake wouldn’t hate him, didn’t hate him. That Jake knew these truths already and had never hurt him.If it comes down to that, Jake will just shoot you. He wouldn’t make you ask more than once.
The hunter’s voice in his ear was a low rasp, too quiet for anyone else in the cafe to hear but loud to Tobias. “Heard you beg real nicely, don’t you, Pretty Freak?”
There were things that Jake didn’t know, things Tobias hadn’t told him. He closed his eyes and listened for the Eldorado. If only he could run to Jake fast enough, if they could just get away, then Jake would never have to know.
* * *
Still angry and a little rattled,Jake turned the Eldorado into the parking lot behind the little cafe where he’d left Toby. So some piece-of-shit reporter was sniffing around after him and Toby. And unsurprisingly, hunters were still assholes. At least Barbara hadn’t explicitly thrown him out—Jake had chosen to walk out when he did—which was something. Even so, he had a strong feeling that he was never going back to the Crossroads Inn during normal business hours again.
The moment he entered Tina’s, the first—the only—thing he saw was Toby hunched at a table with the hunter who had left Crossroads before Jake. And the hunter sat close enough?—
Jake’s blood ran cold with an unholy mix of rage and fear. Toby hated being cornered, flinched away from anyone who leaned in too close, but here he wasn’t moving. He sat hunched in on himself, as though he expected the bastard to shove a knife in him any moment.
Jake would have punched the fucker’s face in just for crowding Toby, but for that defeat in Toby’s shoulders? He was going to do far worse.
He moved before either of them saw him, fighting the urge to draw his gun in front of the civilians. Toby’s eyes were blank as the hunter’s whispers became audible to Jake.
