Page 43 of Freak Camp (A Monster By Any Other Name #1)

Jake froze, his hand on the doorknob. “You don’t mean that,” he said, but his voice wasn’t sure. Dad had never in his life patched up a relationship unless it was a life-or-death necessity. When the emotional waters got choppy, Leon Hawthorne ran like hell and didn’t send postcards.

“I damn well do,” Leon said. His voice was rough. Jake could pretend it was tears, but he thought rage was more likely, and the skin on the back of his neck prickled in something dangerously like fear. “You can’t be my son and a freak lover at the same time, coddling some fucking monster.”

“Toby’s not a monster,” Jake said automatically.

He couldn’t focus on the other words, what he had just heard his own father call him.

Couldn’t admit that this was what it had come to.

Maybe he was a freak lover, maybe he was wrong, but he had made a promise and he couldn’t, would never, break a promise to Tobias.

In that moment, he realized that this could be the end.

Because of Toby, he might walk out on the man who had rocked him when he cried, who had carried him sleeping from the backseat of the Eldorado when he was a child.

The man who had given him his first gun, had taught him everything he needed to know about saving people and defending himself.

Leon Hawthorne might be a royal pain in the ass, but he had been the rock of Jake’s life.

The one thing to hold on to when blood, death, and monsters—some of them human—were the only real things in the world, and Mom was nothing but scattered ashes and a cold marble monument.

Jake realized that he could lose it all, but he still had to take this last step. Because losing Toby would hurt just as much. And if he didn’t go now, everything he took pride in—who he was , his identity as Jake Hawthorne—would be meaningless. A joke.

If Leon Hawthorne noticed the moment, if he could feel the same tension in the air that threatened to suffocate Jake, then he didn’t pay any attention to it.

“Damn right I mean it,” he said. “I would rather see you dead than welcoming a fucking monster into your life and your bed.”

Jake tightened his grip on the door and jerked it open.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you then, sir,” he said, when there was nothing more between him and the night air than the thin hope that Dad would realize what he had said and take it back.

Not that Jake expected that. He was Leon fucking Hawthorne, after all, and he had never not meant anything he said: not when he threatened a monster’s life, not when he had cried over Mom, not when he told Jake that the greatest hope in his life was a dirty, perverted, malformed desire.

Jake gripped the Eldorado’s keys in his pocket. “But I’m going, and you can’t stop me.”

Leon’s face went blank, and he reached for the gun on his bed. “Damned if I can’t.”

“You gonna shoot me, Dad?” Jake taunted. He mocked him so that he didn’t break down right there. Maybe to beg for forgiveness, or just to bawl. He hadn’t expected Dad to understand. But he hadn’t expected this.

“Jake, just close the door and we’ll talk about this.” But Leon was still reaching for the holy water and his gun. Jake hadn’t hunted with the man for years without recognizing the signs that meant he thought something in front of him was worth killing.

“You never fucking listen to me, Dad,” Jake said, and then he turned and ran.

He ran to the Eldorado, fumbled the keys into the lock, and was out of the hotel parking lot and speeding for the highway before he dared to look back.

Leon Hawthorne stood in the parking lot, staring after him, eyes wide, haunted and horrible. That was the face he wore when he remembered the people he couldn’t save, or when he talked about his beautiful, spunky Sally, dead on a pyre.

He shouted something as Jake turned the corner, squealing the Eldorado’s tires to put distance between him and the knowledge that he was leaving behind everything he had once thought made him him .

He didn’t know what Leon had said, but he had a pretty good guess.

You’re dead to me .

“Well, fuck you too, sir,” Jake said to the highway that stretched before him.

He was proud of how his voice didn’t shake at all.

When his cell phone lit up an hour later, Dad’s name flashing, he didn’t pick up.

***

R oger was having a quiet hot tea moment—with a little brandy stirred in to reward himself after a long but satisfying hunt—when he heard one of his proximity alarms placed around the border of the junkyard.

Tea sloshed out of the mug and over the table, and Roger grabbed a shotgun, a silver knife, and a flask of holy water and stepped out onto the porch, trying to look casual while looking everywhere at once.

He had plenty more trip wires and safeguards installed at the back of the property, including a motion sensor. Unless the thing moved too fucking fast to trigger those, he’d get another warning before anything happened.

He expected to have to wait ten, fifteen minutes—anything that could track him down in Truth or Consequences was probably smart enough to know that coming after Roger at his house was going to be a festival of pain for all concerned.

But about the time he was thinking that he should have brought his tea out to the porch so that it didn’t get cold before shit went down, the last enemy he expected to see walked down the dirt driveway.

Jake Hawthorne looked rumpled and a little wild, like he’d been invited to hell and jumped out of the basket halfway there. His eyes looked a touch crazy, and his hand kept straying toward his pistol on his hip, as though the junker cars and random machinery might jump at him first.

Roger moved to set the shotgun down—this was Jake , after all—but his hand wouldn’t quite let go.

Jake didn’t look like Jake at the moment, and Roger knew that the last thing the kid would want if he was out of his head or possessed would be for Roger to get gutted just because the enemy wore Jake’s face.

Jake stopped far enough away that Roger wouldn’t want to risk throwing the knife, but close enough that it would be easy work to nail him with the shotgun. He took in Roger’s gun and his mock-relaxed posture, and the crazy look in his eyes got worse.

“You gonna shoot me, Roger?” he called. It didn’t sound like he was joking. It sounded like he was angry and terrified, and that tone hit Roger hard.

“Hey, Jake. Could you throw your pistol down, kid?”

Jake glanced down, his hand moving to the gun, and then looked back up.

Roger felt like he’d been socked in the stomach. Was Jake Hawthorne tearing up ?

“Why? Want me to make it fucking easier? The unarmed ones are always the best, right? You can take your time lining up the sights.” Jake’s voice was mocking, but he unbuckled the gun holster and tossed it sideways.

Not somewhere that he couldn’t get to with a good dive probably before Roger could shoot him, but far enough away that Roger could feel some of the tension loosen in his back.

“What the hell are you talking about, Jake?” Roger put the shotgun down against his chair and stepped forward. He wasn’t sure what was going on, but he didn’t think it would get better with an iron-loaded shotgun. Maybe a little holy water would help, but he hoped not. “Come here.”

“I figured Dad would have told you by now.” Jake didn’t look any more reassured, but he was at least coming closer, mounting the stairs like each step led to his gallows. “I just hoped . . . seeing as you practically fucking told me to . . .”

Roger felt a lurch in his stomach, like the porch had dropped out from under him or a ghost had just tossed him down the stairs. “What did I tell you to do?”

Jake gave him a look. Roger couldn’t have said what was in the look, but it was nothing good. Nothing that a nineteen-year-old should have in his eyes. Then again, this was a nineteen-year-old hunter . That spelled seven kinds of fucked up already.

He couldn’t quite stop his hand from twitching for his knife when Jake reached for something in his back pocket, but it was only a crumpled piece of paper. It looked like a form for a driver’s license or maybe a passport.

Jake put it on the table between them, smoothing it out absently, like he couldn’t understand how it had gotten those crease marks. “I’m getting Toby out of Freak Camp.”

Roger’s breath stopped, realization creeping up on him with the same slow horror as a broken-legged zombie. Jake had acted on his advice, and something had gone wrong. Not that Roger was that surprised, but . . . he’d made that call maybe a week ago. Less than that.

He tried to think exactly when it had been but couldn’t piece it together. He’d been at Freak Camp, and then he’d gone to clean up a den of mountain trolls that had dared reenter Roger’s territory, and then he’d come home . . .

And now Jake was standing on his front porch looking like something the cat dragged in.

Or maybe the werewolf. Usually when shit went down, Jake would stand in the middle of it, swinging baseball bats and cursing and holding his own.

Not retreating to Roger’s porch looking like one shove would knock him down.

“Jake . . .”

“You gonna cut me off too, Roger?” Jake laughed. “I guess that’s what I get for being a damn freak lover, right?”

Roger swallowed. That was a horrible sound Jake had just made, and horrible words to go along with them. “Who said that, Jake? Who cut you off?”