Page 41 of Freak Camp (A Monster By Any Other Name #1)

Chapter Ten

F reak Camp made Roger’s skin crawl. He only went when he absolutely couldn’t avoid it—like now, when a captured demon might have intel on a case he’d been working for the last six months.

He tried never to linger. He’d walk in, see what he could get, and leave without glancing in the observation windows to see what was drawing out that particular human-sounding scream.

He finished working over the demon—straightforward enough with a hefty supply of salt, holy water, and a crucifix—and though there was minimal damage to the host, the smell of burning skin was never a happy one.

He thought only of the shower he would take back in the motel.

He didn’t like using the showers that the facility provided; they might wash off the blood and sweat from interrogation, but he’d just have to shower again later to get the smell of Freak Camp off his skin.

He had just stepped out of the room when he heard his name.

“Harper! Well, look who’s slumming in the freak playground.” Dennis Beam was walking down the hall, holding some black rods under his arm.

Roger took his hand in a quick shake. He’d only run across the man on a couple of hunts, but Beam had been full of admiration for Roger’s knowledge. “Only got here this morning, and I’m heading back home tonight.”

“What’s got your tail on fire? Guerrero, Sanders, and me are getting together at Hunters’ Deck for a round. Sanders owes us after we had to save his ass from a bunch of pixies.”

Roger shook his head. “Another time.”

“Well, before you go, let me show you something I just picked up from Sloan. A neat trick for taking down the freaks with softer nervous systems. And it don’t even leave any marks.

” He held up one of the thin, gleaming black prods and nodded to the room behind him.

“Come check it out.” He pushed open the door, and Roger reluctantly stepped inside.

His stomach turned over at the sight inside.

Tobias—he could still recognize Jake’s monster in the painfully thin teenager—lay on the floor, his hair and shirt soaked with sweat, wrists bound in front of his chest with plastic zip ties, and two chains stretching from either side of his collar to hooks set low in opposite walls.

There was barely enough slack in the chains for him to rise up on his elbows, though he wouldn’t be able to do even that with the handcuffs.

His glassy eyes didn’t move from the ceiling as Roger entered.

“Look how good this works.” Beam stabbed the prod toward Tobias’s chest, stopping several inches short of it making contact, but Tobias’s body spasmed violently in anticipation.

Beam and the guard—Sloan, by the name on his uniform—roared with laughter.

Panting, Tobias turned his face toward the wall, though his face showed no emotion.

“You sick fucks,” Roger muttered. “What’d he do?”

Beam looked at him, surprised. “C’mon, Harper, it’s a freak.”

Out of the kid’s line of sight, Sloan nudged Tobias’s thigh with his own prod.

A guttural cry ripped from Tobias’s throat as his body seized, jerking for several moments before falling still again, facing the opposite direction.

He choked and gasped for breath, and Roger realized his collar had half strangled him.

Tobias’s chest rose and fell so rapidly he looked ready to have a heart attack.

But most disconcerting of all was how—even as his limbs still twitched—Tobias’s face had smoothed over again to utter blankness.

“You’re a sadistic bastard.” Roger couldn’t keep his eyes off the kid on the floor, didn’t know when his right hand had crept to where his gun usually was. He forced himself to move his hand away. “What the hell did he do? You can’t pass this off as an interrogation.”

“I don’t know.” Beam glanced at Sloan. “What did he do?”

Sloan shrugged and stepped between the monster’s legs. “Getting careless with his teeth.”

A shudder worked down Tobias’s shoulders, but he made no attempt to close his legs, even as Sloan lifted his boot and slowly pressed down on his groin. Tobias keened, the sound slipping high and agonized from between his clenched teeth.

“Aww, what are you whining about?” Sloan cooed. “Monsters don’t need these, do they, Pre—”

“I’m having a hard time telling who the monster is!” Roger snapped.

Tobias’s eyes snapped open, and he looked at Roger—the first thing he had focused on in the room. Roger saw in his eyes no gratitude, pleading, or hatred—just a curious intentness as he looked at him. Roger swallowed, unable to break eye contact.

“What’d you say?” Beam said, face twisting ugly.

Roger scowled, raising his eyes. “You heard me. Bunch of tough guys, going after a malnourished freak kid with his hands tied. That how you get your rocks off?”

“Well,” Beam said, much cooler, “if you’re not enjoying yourself, Harper, you don’t have to stay.”

Roger glanced back at Tobias, but the kid’s gaze had moved to the ceiling again, lost and flat. Roger swallowed, fists clenching, bile sliding up his throat, then glared at Beam. “Lose my number. I don’t want to hear from you again, I don’t care what you need.” He slammed the door behind him.

Roger swore viciously under his breath with every step out of the complex, barely pausing to sign out and nod at the ever-so-sweet receptionist girl who bade him goodbye by name. As the security door swung shut behind him, he was dialing his cell phone.

“Hey, Rog, what’s up?” Jake sounded cheerful, oblivious, and it only increased the sick roiling in Roger’s stomach.

“Jake,” he growled. “You still interested in getting that Tobias kid out of the camp?”

“Wh—yeah, of course I am.”

“Well, you better start filing the paperwork. I don’t think he’ll make it another year.”

“ What?” Jake sounded like he had just been punched in the gut. “What do you mean?”

“Just what I said.” Roger hung up, seething too much to trust himself to keep talking. It was stupid on every level, he knew, to get emotional over a monster in Freak Camp. Couldn’t end well.

But he wasn’t able to just walk out on two sadists torturing a kid and not do a damn thing about it.

***

J ake stared down at the phone. That was . . . not what he had expected when he had seen that the call was from Roger.

The mobile phone was new. It still felt like a reward when someone called him, even though Dad mostly didn’t—unless they had to get together—and not many other people had his number.

When Roger called, it was usually to point them in the direction of a new hunt, or sometimes just to say hi.

Jake thought of it as checking up on him , but that didn’t mean it didn’t feel good to get the call.

He turned to see Dad watching him with a frown.

It was one of their rare weeks together, when both of their respective hunts were over—or a different hunt had brought them back together—and Dad sat on the second bed in the hotel room cleaning his guns, getting polish all over the cheap, ratty bedspread.

“That was short. Harper in trouble?” His tone implied that Roger could go fuck himself, but his hands, hesitating over the weapon he was cleaning, said that if Jake said the word, they would be on their way.

Jake liked that, how Dad trusted him sometimes, how he’d pay attention when Jake brought him new information.

Not that Jake ever really knew anything that Dad didn’t.

Dad was still the best, and Jake loved working with him, not just because they were family, but because if Leon and Jake Hawthorne went after something, that sucker was going down.

It was just a fact of life. Together the Hawthornes could stop anything.

Usually he liked that more. But then again, usually Roger had not just told him that he had to get Tobias out, get Tobias out now, in a tone that Jake had only ever heard before when he was telling some civilian to get the fuck down, it’s going for your heart .

Jake took a shaky breath, and then reached for his own guns. “Roger’s fine. You know how to get a monster out of Freak Camp?”

Leon Hawthorne froze and looked up from his gun. “Why would I know a fucking thing like that?”

Because you’re my dad and you know everything . “I’m getting Tobias out,” Jake said. “Figured I would ask you first because you usually know these things. I already called Leah Dixon in D.C., she hasn’t had any luck, so maybe I can try a different ASC resource hotline, and they can . . .”

With a scowl, Leon tossed a greasy rag to the floor, next to the trashcan. “Jake, I thought you were over this.”

Jake’s mind had been spinning, trying to find a starting place for how to get Toby out.

Research always had a starting point, after which the monster’s profile and vulnerabilities would fall into place.

Even if this was a hell of a lot bigger than confirming a werewolf attack from a list of fatal animal attacks, or pinning a string of strange deaths on a shapeshifter.

At last, at last, you’re going to do it, you’re going to keep your promise and stop putting it off like a coward —but he came back to the here and now at his dad’s tone.

“Sir?”

“I thought you had stopped obsessing over that monster.”

Jake blinked and considered. He still thought about Toby. He still thought about him all the time. He still . . . but no, he hadn’t talked about him in a while, not to Dad. Not since the fight at Freak Camp and the eight-week suspension.

He and Dad had had an hour’s shouting match about appropriate behavior with other hunters and ASC personnel.

Somehow the point Dad had landed on was that everyone ass-kissing the ASC really deserved a brand in their faces anyway, just for being Big Brother assholes, but Jake was still stupid and impulsive to do it.

Dad hadn’t connected that fight with Tobias, and since then Jake had stopped mentioning Toby, because Toby was his, and talking about him just made Dad angry.