Page 22 of Freak Camp (A Monster By Any Other Name #1)

“Dammit, Roger, nothing got him. I came home, and he wasn’t here. He ran . . .”

Roger could not imagine Jake Hawthorne running away from his father. Sure, they were messed up in all the usual ways, and in a few that were purely Hawthorne, but he had seen how the kid always looked up to his father, followed his lead, did what he was told because he had that much trust in Leon.

The last time Roger and Leon had “talked,” when the guns came out, Jake had looked ready to pull his knife on Roger if he could only get a good angle.

More than once, Roger had wondered if he would shoot Leon some day or if Jake would always be there to remind him that it wasn’t worth it because the obsessed jackass actually mattered to someone.

He had never met Sally, but he assumed that she either had had the placidity and patience of a saint or had been woman enough to kick Leon’s ass every day and have him thank her for it.

He could not imagine anyone else living with Leon for longer than a weekend.

“ . . . he ran because I told him to, I told him to deal with it, and now I can’t find him. ”

“Slow down, Hawthorne.” Roger had a hard time believing that Jake had run, but if Leon had told him to, if Jake hadn’t gotten grabbed by something nasty, then there was a good chance that Jake would just show up again, one of those wicked grins on his face, like when he had been a kindergartner and ended up under the hood of one of Roger’s old beater trucks.

Roger had found the kid chewing on a sucker, covered in old engine grease.

Roger had tried to give him a tongue-lashing, but it had been damned hard with Jake so happy to see him.

The kid had charm that made people like him and convinced them that they could trust him. “Tell me what happened. Are you hurt?”

Leon was struggling to breathe, and Roger could hear every inhale and exhale as a gasp, full of pain. “My son is gone,” he snapped. “I told him to leave and he left and now I can’t fucking find him, what do you think?”

Slowly it dawned on Roger that it might be tears in Hawthorne’s voice. Holy hell , he thought , I never thought I’d hear Leon cry. Didn’t think he could.

“Leon, take a deep breath. Jake’s smart, resourceful. He knows how to take care of himself.” He bit back more scathing words about how losing Jake was maybe what Leon deserved for the way he had raised the boy. You taught him better than anyone how to disappear. “How long’s he been gone?”

“Two weeks.”

“Fuck, Hawthorne.” Roger was expecting a few days, a week at most. “Where . . . what happened?” Not that he really wanted to know. He didn’t think that one antisocial hunter could solve the Hawthornes’ problems. He didn’t know if God could solve the Hawthornes’ problems.

“I was on a hunt, and he called in the middle, said that CPS was there, and I couldn’t . . . Dammit, Roger, he’s my son and I told him to deal with that. He’s thirteen and . . .”

“What happened after that?” Roger didn’t want to address Leon’s choices, and more importantly right then he had a kid to save.

“I . . . I came home, back to the apartment we’d been staying at, and . . . nothing was there, it was empty, the locks were changed. I asked around, but there was some . . . trouble. I tried following the trail, but it was cold, so damned cold, Roger . . .”

“How long between the phone call and when you got back to the apartment?”

The silence made Roger nervous.

“Leon? Leon, I can hear you breathing. You don’t remember, or . . .”

“It took me three days to get back,” Leon said bleakly. “I figured . . . Jake’s never been in a situation that he couldn’t handle, and I thought . . .”

You thought that you could take your time because you’re so damned used to Jake being his own damn parent . Roger didn’t say it. He had said it in the past, and he had a couple of broken knuckles to prove it. He didn’t need to say it now. His silence said enough.

He was surprised when Leon broke the silence first, and not by hanging up. “Help me, Roger. You have to help me. I can’t . . . I can’t go to them and say that . . . I can’t tell them I lost my son. I’ll lose him forever. They’ve been trying . . . I can’t lose Jake too.”

It took Roger a long minute to realize that Leon was asking him to use his hunter contacts, to quietly ask people to be on the lookout for Jake. Maybe even to talk to ASC, in case they had the resources to find the kid.

Roger wondered now if maybe Leon had disappeared so thoroughly off the grid because he had been afraid that the Dixons would take Jake away and make him one of their own, make him “Sally’s son” and not Leon’s at all.

Roger had always thought that Leon was a little crazy, the way he disappeared, trusted no one, rarely used his own name, rarely told anyone the truth.

He was a conspiracy theory nut even amid the crackpot group that Roger knew as hunters.

But maybe only half of that had been because of the way Sally had died.

The other half might have come from trying to keep a four-year-old and a vintage Eldorado off the radar of what had become the most powerful government agency in the country.

Roger would have liked to think that the Dixons wouldn’t have tried to take Jake away, but if he had thought about stealing the kid just so Leon would stop fucking him up with his own particular brand of crazy, there wasn’t much doubt that the Dixons would have gone after anything or anyone that they considered one of theirs.

Roger had only met Elijah Dixon once or twice before he died, but Roger had always considered the man to be disciplined, intelligent, unshakable in a fight—but not nice, not an easy man to live with, not a man who would let any outsider come between him and family.

And to the Dixons, Leon Hawthorne would never be family.

No matter how many vamps he staked or werewolves he gave a bullet to, he would always be that damn civilian Sally married .

“Yeah,” Roger said heavily. “I’ll help you. Don’t worry, Leon. I’m here, and we’ll get him back.” He just hoped that he wasn’t lying as much as Leon lied to everyone else.

***

L eon finally found Jake through law enforcement gossip.

In towns, he drank slowly, and nothing but beer; he was there for information, not because he wanted a goddamned blackout.

Cops around him started talking about a wild kid that had turned up a state away in Jefferson, half crazy, stronger and meaner than he should have been.

Kid wouldn’t say where he’d come from, how he’d been surviving on his own, but he might have been the son of some outlaw, might have been just a poor abandoned shit, or even some kind of monster.

No one knew what kind—horrifying to think that monsters could look like kids too, all innocent and helpless—but anything was possible.

And you should have seen what the little bastard did to one of the arresting officers!

They weren’t sure how the officer’s nose would set.

It wasn’t that far a drive, but it felt like forever.

It felt longer than that first night when he had carried Jake into the Eldorado after Sally’s funeral, wrapping him in a coat in the front seat even though it wasn’t as safe as the back—Leon had been a careful man in those days, and Jake had been his baby, the only thing he still cared about—and driving, driving until he didn’t know the name of a single goddamned road.

He figured that if he didn’t know where he was, then the Dixons wouldn’t be able to follow.

If he didn’t have a plan, they couldn’t show up at his front door with that polite, insincere smile on their face, asking after Jake, asking if Leon was dealing okay, if maybe he would find it easier to deal with his grief without sole responsibility for an also-grieving four-year-old.

“He’s a child,” Elijah said. “Of course you can’t expect him to really understand what’s going on. We’d be happy to take him for a few days if you need a moment to yourself . . .”

“You can get off my goddamned porch,” Leon replied.

The smile dropped off Elijah’s face, and he was the same bastard Leon remembered from the days when he had been courting Sally, when Elijah had looked at him like the blue-blooded Pennsylvania gentry he thought he was and like Leon was just trash, born and raised in West Virginia.

“Watch your mouth, Hawthorne. That boy is ours as much as yours.”

Leon cocked the shotgun. Elijah looked unarmed, but he didn’t believe that for a second. “Leave and don’t come back.”

Elijah stepped back. “You can’t cut us out of Jake’s life. We’ll talk later.” He turned and walked away.

Arriving at the police station was worse, because only then did Leon realize that he didn’t have a plan.

Hunting was easy. Hunting made sense. Find a monster, then shoot it.

If it’s not human, if it’s hurting people, then it’s a monster, and you put it down.

He’d seen how any kind of power, any kind of extra ability could turn bad, could twist a person up inside until they weren’t really human any more.

Hell, he knew he had some black spots, and those he blamed on monsters too. Even the spots that he sometimes had to admit had been there before Sally died. It was easier.

If he walked into that station and said he was there to pick up the kid, they would check his ID, and if Jake had been giving them as hard a time as he expected— that’s my boy, give ’em hell —they would be thorough enough to see through the fakes that usually worked on civilians.

The civilians would accept anything he said, but these cops .

. . They would want to know, especially given all the rumors about where Jake had come from.