Page 23 of Freak Camp (A Monster By Any Other Name #1)
Rumors that made going in and admitting that Jake was his son— he was Leon’s goddamned son, give him back right now —more impossible.
He would be in for neglect at least— how could you leave a thirteen-year-old alone for a week?
Jesus, Leon, when did you become such a bastard?
—perhaps abuse; maybe they’d even have the balls to nail him for some of the things he’d done to keep them alive, back when he would have rather spit in his own eye than accept any aid from the fucking government that employed the Dixons.
Now he took the stipend, collecting through so many channels that they’d never been able to trace it, but over the years he’d done everything from small-time scams and credit card fraud to shoplifting and bash-and-grabs.
Yeah, he’d done things that he wasn’t proud of, but he didn’t think about them much, and no one gave a damn when he was saving their asses from the latest poltergeist.
He’d never had to think about any of that until now, when he knew any mention of his name could land him in a jail cell across from Jake.
At the very least it would send up a red flag, and a Dixon would be there within a day, maybe a few hours, and then they would take Jake away from him.
He knew they could. He had seen the Dixons put away enough monsters, had seen them convince enough senators and civilians that their torture camp was not only a good idea (though he had to admit, it was useful sometimes) but also a humane one, that he knew taking one thirteen-year-old away from a drunk, obsessed, criminal hunter wouldn’t be a problem for them.
But there was one way he could get Jake out with no one asking questions.
Yeah, the Dixons would see, and they might suspect, and it would give them more damned ammunition to use against him if they could ever really catch him, but he and Jake would be in and out before anyone could show up here.
They would hit the ground, head to Truth or Consequences, and lay low at Roger’s for a few days.
Leon hated taking charity, hated bringing anyone else into their problems, but it would be good to have another head, another pair of eyes watching Jake, making sure that someone was around to protect him when Leon was being a fucking idiot.
He wouldn’t even have to say that Jake was a monster. He could just flash the ID, and no one would ask any questions, because that was how the ASC worked. They would just look in his eyes, and they would know there was a monster in their building.
Shame that they would always guess the wrong one.
***
T wo states, ten days , two stolen cars, and three close misses—two authority figures and one pervert who hadn’t expected him to know how to break his fingers from that position—after running from the apartment, Jake got caught and was dragged kicking and screaming into the local precinct office.
After the first broken nose, they stopped treating him like a scared, misguided teen and took off the kid gloves. Jake was good, but they were full-grown adults, and there were a lot of them, forcing him into cuffs and dragging him deeper into the police station.
In the middle of trying to fight them off in an interrogation room, kicking kneecaps and calling them every dirty name he knew—and a few he made up on the spot—Jake realized that this prison, this confinement, was Tobias’s life every day.
Trapped in a little box, held down, beat up just because he was considered less.
Like a shoulder popping into place, a lot of things that Jake had been feeling for a long time, maybe for years, snapped together, and he knew what he was going to do if he ever got out of there, if he ever got to walk out in the sun, burn ghosts, or just get out of the damned cell.
Right then he decided he was going to get Toby out, no matter what. No one should have to live like this, and especially not Toby.
It wasn’t a new idea. It had been brewing in his head for a while.
But it crystallized the moment when his teeth sank into some asshole’s hand and an elbow slammed into his diaphragm.
After that it was just Jake fighting them, fighting them with his eyes when his arms and legs were tied down, and waiting for Dad to spring him.
He knew he would. Dad always came for him.
He just didn’t know if it would be gunplay, or a bomb, or a kind of one-man extraction heist like in the movies.
When Dad finally came for him, it was terrifyingly easy.
Leon walked in and held up his hunter ID. The Agency for Supernatural Control ID that he never used, barely touched, wouldn’t talk about.
“You have the boy,” he said.
The cop swallowed. He looked into the man’s face and saw death. Cold, merciless, unflinching death.
“Yeah. I mean, yes, sir.” He nodded at the ID. “Makes sense for him to be a monster. He put up quite a fight for a, what, fifteen-year-old? Couple of our people had to get medical attention. Guess we were lucky.”
“About what I expected,” Leon Hawthorne said, tucking the stiff, pristine, silver-edged ID back in his suit. “I need you to burn everything you have on him. Every photo, every file you put together. In fact, you should forget you ever saw him. It’s better that way. Where do you have him?”
The officer had never turned a monster over to ASC before, but he knew how it was supposed to work. No questions, no paper trail. “First door on the left, Mr. Hawthorne.”
When Jake saw his father at the door, when the cop released him from the cell—but didn’t take off the cuffs—he got up without a word and let himself be pushed through the halls with a rough hand between his shoulders.
All the way to the door, he noticed how eyes skittered away from him, afraid to catch the monster’s attention.
In the car, Leon’s face was even more emotionless and cold than usual. He didn’t look at his son, even as he handed over a small key. Jake twisted off the cuffs and threw them in the back seat. “Sorry,” he said, rubbing his arms and staring at the dash. “I fucked up.”
Leon didn’t look at him. “At least you’re not dead.”
The Hawthornes didn’t talk again for the next three days.
***
T obias hunched over his food, keeping an eye on the new shapeshifter.
The newcomer, nicknamed Hulk, was over six feet tall with muscles bulging against the thin fabric of his camp clothes.
The shape had probably seemed like a good idea while hunters were after him, but in camp it meant that he had more of a body to feed.
Food and kindness were both hard to come by in Freak Camp.
Everyone here understood the need for food.
But that didn’t mean they appreciated it when someone, like this asshole, decided to go after other monsters’ rations.
Tobias watched the shifter’s progress through the mess hall, accompanied by the occasional fist to the face, little stifled cries of pain as those accustomed to abuse gave up their meager portions to Hulk.
Those who still had enough self-preservation to notice approaching threats shoved their food into their faces, chewing furiously.
Usually, Tobias would have been among those stuffing his mouth with the dry bread and mush, but today he ate slowly, watching the shifter’s progress.
The guards, who usually would have stopped the shifter or made him be more subtle about his thievery—and whose presence would have limited Tobias’s options—were absent.
Tina Dixon had been in and out of Special Research all week, and some of the newer guards had been snickering behind her back from the first moment that she stepped inside the yard.
The male Dixons broke a few heads, but eventually Dave Donovan dropped a comment about her trying to make up for her lack of balls by borrowing the monsters’.
“Tina would do better to find a real man to put some steel in her spine,” he’d laughed as she walked past him.
She’d turned—the cheerful, angry look in her eyes the same one that had earned her the nickname Crazy-GDB Dixon—and smiled. “How about I break your spine and see if you’ve got any steel to spare?”
Now all the mess hall guards were outside, cheering on their favorites, betting mostly on Dixon to wipe the dirt with Donovan’s ass.
No one was watching the mess hall to make sure the monsters didn’t kill each other.
Hulk worked his way down the tables, stopping next to Tobias.
Tobias kept his eyes on his plate as he carefully scraped up the last of his mush with the last of his bread.
He knew he looked like an easy target, younger and smaller than most of the monsters in the camp.
As far as this shapeshifter was concerned—so new that the chartreuse tag on his arm still oozed effluvium where it pierced the skin and ran between his arm bones—Tobias didn’t seem like a threat.
Hulk placed one hammy fist on Tobias’s shoulder and pulled him back from the table.
“Hey, Baby Freak,” he said, slurring his words, grinning down at Tobias in a mediocre impression of Crusher drunk on some poor bastard’s screams. “Hand over that plate. You don’t wanna get on my bad side, do you?”
The hand on Tobias’s shoulder tightened. Tobias glanced around the room, meeting eyes frightened or as eager as the guards to see pain.
Tobias jabbed backward with his elbow, digging right into the sensitive point of Hulk’s thigh.
Gasping, the shifter loosened his grip. Tobias seized his hand, twisting it over and in front of him, forcing Hulk headfirst into the table, just as Tobias stood up to slam all his weight down through his forearm on Hulk’s elbow.
The shifter screamed as his bone broke, and Tobias rolled him over on the table—he was stronger than he looked—and brought the edge of his cheap plastic plate to the bastard’s throat, just under the stiff new collar.