Page 37 of Freak Camp (A Monster By Any Other Name #1)

That’s all you need, Tobias, to make him happy.

Crusher pushed him out of the showers, and Tobias wiped his hands on his pants, wishing he could stop to wash the cleaner off before Jake—

Before Jake touched him. Every visit Jake touched him, whether on his arm, his face, or his shoulder, totally unlike the way anyone else here touched him.

Soft, slow, not to hurt or hurry or because Tobias was looking at him wrong, but .

. . Tobias didn’t know why Jake touched him like that, but it was one of the things he couldn’t stop thinking about. Couldn’t stop craving.

Maybe Tobias wouldn’t have to talk, wouldn’t have to say anything.

Maybe today was the day Jake would turn him over the table and take him—no preliminaries, no gentle questions, no smiles, no jokes that Tobias didn’t quite understand but laughed at anyway.

Maybe today Jake would grind his face into the table and pull his pants down, and Tobias’s meager, pathetic dreams would die in the feel of Jake forcing his way inside him.

Shit, he should believe that. He should remember what he was—a worthless monster, a freak with only one use for his mouth—and he should not believe that nothing with Jake could hurt that badly. That Jake would never hurt him.

Of course, it would hurt. Tobias had been in the room enough times when the guards bent over some guy unwilling or unable to wheedle out of it, and he knew that it would hurt like hell, that he would bleed, probably scream, maybe not get up afterward if Jake was too rough.

But he still wanted that. He wanted it to be Jake because Jake would be touching him then, holding his shoulders while he forced his way in, maybe holding Tobias there after he was done instead of dropping him or telling him to pull his damn pants up and get out of his sight.

Nothing Jake did to him could be that bad if Jake really wanted it.

Better Jake than any guard, any other hunter. Better that Jake got the last part of Tobias that hadn’t gone through a dozen hands before someone else took it. Otherwise Tobias would have nothing left to offer. Jake could have anything—why would he want what everyone else had used and cast aside?

By the time Tobias crossed the yard, he was calm, almost hopeful.

Of everyone in Tobias’s world, Jake was the only one who could rattle him, could send him from horror, to despair, to .

. . something like contentment in the time it took to walk from one end of FREACS to the other.

He wanted Jake. He wanted Jake to do anything he wanted to him.

Hunter or no, real or no, Jake was the best thing in his world.

Any day he saw Jake was a good day in Tobias’s book.

That would be true no matter how it ended.

Then Victor smiled at him when he got to Reception, and his stomach dropped again.

“Here to see Hawthorne, Pretty Freak?” He made a mark on his clipboard. “Good boy. Jake’s looking good, you know, full-grown hunter. He’s got special plans for you today—requested a private interrogation in Room Three.” If anything, Victor’s expression got nastier. “Real shame. No cameras.”

Tobias’s mind shut off. Sure, a hunter would ask for no cameras if he wanted to fuck a monster in private, but he might also ask for no cameras if he wanted to cut a monster up without bothering with questions, without bothering with the forms and pretense of an interrogation.

Suddenly, Tobias couldn’t think of Jake, a hunter, without thinking of all the other hunters, the other guards who had tied him down and laughed while they hurt him, even as the cameras ran. He could imagine Jake smiling at him while he—

Tobias shut down the thought, clamped down hard, and retreated until he felt nothing, until he couldn’t feel the cold air around him.

Jake could do whatever he wanted with him, of course.

Tobias was just a monster. That was what he told himself.

But he knew, deep down where he hid all the things he could never admit even to himself, that if Jake tied him down and started cutting, Tobias wouldn’t be able not to care.

And without that shell that had kept him alive for nine years, he didn’t think there would be anything left of him.

Or anything Jake would find worth saving.

***

W hat are you doing , Jake Hawthorne?

The hardest part had been rattling off the ID number and not saying that he wanted to see Toby. They’d shown him into an interrogation room: stainless steel walls, table, and two chairs.

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 became Toby . 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 in Massachusetts .”

“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 insisted look 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, I jumped its 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.