Page 6 of Freak Camp (A Monster By Any Other Name #1)

Roger checked his pantry, scanning for snacks fitting for a ten-year-old. He pulled out a half-empty box of Fruit Gushers that Jake had left behind on his last visit. “Who’d you find to babysit Jake? Tell me you didn’t leave him in the car.” He tried to sound offhand, not suspicious.

“Nah. Took him in with me.”

Roger didn’t think he could still be surprised by Leon, but goddamn. “Jesus, Hawthorne, you took the kid inside?”

Leon looked hard at him. “You got something to say, Harper?”

Roger scowled, eyeing Jake, who looked to be in one piece. “Well. Did you get anything?”

After a pause, Leon said, “Maybe.” Roger figured that was all he was going to get.

Ever since Leon’s wife, Sally, died in the Liberty Wolf Massacre in 1984, he had had a single obsession: hunting the monsters behind the werewolves’ assassination attempt of the president.

Those werewolves took down a dozen Secret Service agents, bit the First Lady, and killed Sally Hawthorne as she threw herself before the president.

She had been there with her father, Elijah Dixon, who survived the attack.

He used the national shock and spotlight to expose the existence of supernatural creatures in the shadows throughout the country.

He told the world how he was one of a few dozen professional hunters in America who risked their lives to stop these inhuman creatures bent on slaughter.

Roger had been one of those hunters operating before the Liberty Wolf Massacre.

He’d known Elijah Dixon, though not on a personal level.

The Dixons were unique in how they passed down monster hunting like a family heirloom, allegedly all the way back to the American colonies before the Revolutionary War.

They certainly had the most power and money of all the ragtag hunters who usually operated solo.

Roger learned later that Elijah had already been using his government contacts to lobby for federal funding to create an official, though secret, monster-hunting agency.

Something like CIA: Supernatural Division.

But the tragedy of the Liberty Wolf Massacre gifted Elijah the opportunity to go public with national support on a level he’d never dreamed of.

It was a perfect storm for achieving his lifelong ambition. The national shock and horror gave him the stage to face the cameras and tell the country that he knew exactly what “unknown” menace had tried to kill their president, and he knew how to wipe them out.

Congress handed him a blank check within a month, and Elijah Dixon used it to create the Agency of Supernatural Control and to build the first facility to hold supernaturals: Freak Camp.

The facility opened January 2nd, 1985, and First Lady Dorothy Peterson became inmate 85WW0001.

She was never seen in public or on camera again.

Elijah’s son-in-law Leon Hawthorne did not join his mission.

Before all the funerals had finished, he took his four-year-old son, Jake, and disappeared onto the back roads of America, far away from the national spotlight and cameras focused on the tragedy and its heroes, including the slain young mother.

Roger had met Leon a couple of years later at a hunter’s bar. Leon was traveling under an alias, as he always did, and Roger joined him to take out a couple of mountain trolls before learning who Leon and his son actually were.

Even aside from the aggressive secrecy with which Hawthorne guarded his life and his son, he wasn’t an easy man to get along with or to keep in touch.

Hawthorne tended to discourage those who tried, intentionally and unintentionally.

Roger had only managed it for as long as he did because Leon knew that Roger could keep a secret, and that they could fall back on Roger’s homestead in New Mexico if they needed a pit stop or to bone up for a hunt.

For better or for worse, when it came to knowing Hawthorne, Roger was a steady, even-tempered man who’d survived as many hunts as he had by never losing his head, so he could tolerate Leon’s dark, broody moods well enough.

Plus, there was the kid. When Roger first met him, Jake had been a tiny terror who’d learned well his father’s distrust and paranoia of the whole damn world.

It had taken a few visits for Jake to decide that Roger wasn’t a threat who needed a pocketknife waved in his direction whenever he entered the room.

A few more years had smoothed out Jake’s jumpiness, replacing it with bravado that was at least half-earned.

Not even the Dixon kids knew more than Jake about the supernatural or could load a shotgun faster, even if the recoil would still knock him off his feet.

Roger had never had kids of his own or even wanted to go the fatherhood route, but he couldn’t shrug off the knowledge that he was one of maybe a handful of people in the country who had the privilege of knowing who Sally Dixon’s son really was.

Nor did it miss his attention that he was one of few familiar, reliable faces in Jake’s world.

The kid needed some role models who were no more than half the asshole his father was.

The Hawthornes stayed for dinner, which was sloppy joes, one of Jake’s favorites. The canned corn was less of a favorite, but it went over better than the green beans Roger had tried before.

Afterward Leon asked to borrow a couple of books on vampiric subspecies and settled down in the living room to read and take notes.

Roger took Jake onto his back porch, where he had some walkie-talkies that needed fixing.

Jake had quick fingers with anything mechanical, and he loved to brag that his dad already taught him everything there was to know about fixing cars.

“So you got to see the inside of Freak Camp, huh?” Roger asked. “There’s probably not a hundred hunters out there who’ve been inside.”

Jake grinned, straightening up. “Yep. Dad knew I could handle it. And it was a breeze, no sweat.” Roger raised his eyebrows, and Jake hastily added, “But I never let my guard down. I know how dangerous freaks are.”

“You bet your butt they are. And remember that just ’cause something felt easy the first time don’t mean it won’t put a Jake-sized hole in the wall the second time. Plenty of hunters get taken out by your standard-issue vengeful spirit when they get cocky.”

Jake nodded. “Dad always tells me that too.” Then he hesitated, and Roger looked up. “Did you know there’s kid freaks in Freak Camp?”

Roger didn’t answer immediately. He had only visited the facility twice since it had opened in 1985.

The whole place and the people who ran it left a bad taste in his mouth.

He didn’t remember seeing monsters there that weren’t adult-sized, but he couldn’t say he was surprised that the ASC had built a policy to hold younger ones too. “What kind of kid freaks?”

Jake shrugged. “All kinds. I mean, they only look like kids. I get that vampires and shifters can be any age. But they got some weird ones too. Stuff they don’t know how to label.”

Roger watched Jake’s face. Something was bothering the boy, even if he didn’t know how to talk about it. “Y’know,” he said at last, “you’re twice as old as the whole darn ASC and their Freak Camp. By rights, they should be in kindergarten.”

Jake grinned, and Roger set down his tools and stretched.

His back still ached from a recent tussle with a mountain troll.

They were his specialty, as he lived so close to the Black Range Mountains.

Jake was forever asking when he could come along for a mountain troll hunt, and Roger always told him they didn’t make kid-size harnesses for hunting trips, so he had some growing to do.

“Let’s go kick your dad out of the living room and see what’s on TV.”

Jake scoffed, his grin broadening. “I’d like to see you try.”

“Kid, I eat mountain trolls for breakfast.” Roger tilted his head in pretend consideration. “So all right, I’d say I got a fifty-fifty chance against Leon Hawthorne.”

***

T rue to his word, Dad took Jake back to Albuquerque, where they’d rented a mobile home back in August. Jake had started fifth grade there at César Chávez Elementary, but just a month later Dad had pulled him out for a hunting road trip through Colorado, Utah, and finally Nevada.

Dad had told Jake’s teacher there was a family emergency, which was his usual excuse.

Not many people wanted to argue with him or ask questions.

Now Jake had to go back to the boring old routine of riding the school bus, sitting through classes, and waiting for recess like all the boring kids around him.

None of them knew a fraction of what he did, and Jake knew that whatever Dad said, the two of them would probably be somewhere else by Christmas, so there wasn’t much point to making buddies.

At his last school he used to get into fights, until Dad told him that it wasn’t fair to the other kids to fight someone who was more than half a hunter already.

Sometimes Jake thought about the monster boy he’d met inside Freak Camp.

He knew Tobias didn’t have anything like normal school for humans, but it sounded like he learned plenty in that library.

It was hard for Jake to picture him while Jake sat in his brightly colored classroom with all the kids’ drawings on the wall and dumb posters telling them how great it was to learn math.

Nothing had been colorful in Freak Camp.

Out here in Albuquerque, it didn’t feel real.

When school let out, Jake was free to roam the neighborhood, making friends and enemies with older boys, figuring out ways to sneak into the movie theaters or snitch stuff from the convenience stores. The key was to run fast and not show up around the same place again.