Chapter 1 #2
In a haunted house with this level of unease and distrust, he would have expected an attack at any moment.
Barbara set the pint down before him, and Jake took a swallow automatically, trying to wash out the acrid taste of that wariness. The fizz of the beer didn’t do much to dispel it.
It took him another moment to realize that Barbara was watching him too. He wanted to believe that it was concern rather than shrewdness in her eyes, watching him down a beer at eleven in the a.m., but he wasn’t that stupid.
Jake put his glass down deliberately, like it was delicate china and not a solid-as-hell bar glass.
“So,” he said. “How much holy water is in this beer?” He wanted to keep it light, but his voice cracked toward the end (though whether from anger or something else, he couldn’t tell). His grip on the glass whitened his knuckles.
Barbara winced, but she didn’t exactly look ashamed. She held up her thumb and forefinger about an inch apart. “Just a little.”
Jake noticed that her other hand, the one resting someplace under the bar, hadn’t moved.
He wondered if it was a shotgun or something else designed specifically to take out a supernatural threat.
He forced his hand open, and the glass shivered and almost spilled on the bar.
“Watch it, Barb, or I’m going to start telling guys that you water your drinks. ”
“Better safe than dead.” Barbara smiled, but her expression wasn’t particularly cheery. “I’ve watered plenty drinks in my time, kid, and everyone knows it. How’ve you been?”
“Oh, just aces.” Jake didn’t think she believed him. Good. He was lying through his teeth. Barbara was a sharp woman, so she really shouldn’t believe him. “We’ve been good.”
He realized what he’d said the second it left his mouth, and he knew by her eyes and the stutter in conversation around him that the others had heard him too.
It raised his hackles, made him even jumpier.
But he would not be ashamed of Tobias, and he would not be afraid of these assholes.
So he said it again, loud and clear so everyone could hear him. “Yeah, we’ve been really good.”
He was Jake fucking Hawthorne, and he wouldn’t have been able to look Tobias in the eye if he’d let the unsaid threat in that room shut him up.
“You and . . .” Barbara trailed off, eyebrows raised inquisitively, and Jake nodded.
“Tobias,” he said. “His name’s Tobias. And he’d be able to drink your damn holy water just as well as I can.” Better than I can. All the eyes in the room were on him now, he knew without looking.
“You know that for a fact?”
“Fuck I—” Jake stopped himself. She wasn’t sneering or threatening.
She was simply asking the questions that he had to respect because it was part of the hunter life, even if he wanted to tell her to fuck off for asking them about Toby, who he’d rescued half-dead from behind the fucking walls of FREACS itself. “Yeah, I do.”
Barbara relaxed a little, and Jake felt better. No one else’s opinion here mattered the way hers did. Barbara was the final authority on who was welcome in her bar. “Good. So, you been hunting, or what—just putting your feet up in the mountains?”
Jake snorted. “Yeah, we’ve been hunting. Shut down a witch in Louisiana not long ago.”
“You hunt with—” She visibly stopped herself, then restarted. “I’ve never known you to hunt with a partner.”
“Toby’s good at it,” Jake said. “It’s a damn good thing he was there, or I’d be .
. . well, let’s just say I wouldn’t be here driving that Eldorado up to your door.
He’s got good instincts and . . .” He runs toward danger, not away, he’s fearless and brave and he cares so much more than me, sometimes it makes me think I’m doing it wrong. “He’s really sharp.”
One of the men stood abruptly, and Jake’s hand twitched toward his pistol. But the man, who looked vaguely familiar, walked out of the bar without a backward look.
“Good,” Barbara said, after a doubtful pause. “That’s good. Anyone has a right to get out of the life, but I’m glad you’re still in it.” She nodded at the empty glass in front of him. “Want another, or did you come in for something other than the refreshments?”
“I . . . yeah.” Jake pulled himself together to ask the question he’d come in to ask. “So, any more news about unidentified freaks?”
It took effort not to wince. He’d used the word without thinking. Maybe it was being back here in this bar, in a room full of hunters. The lingo came automatically, like a muscle memory.
Barbara raised her eyebrows. “Who said someone’s been asking?”
Jake raised his eyebrows back at her. “Harper.”
“Ah.” Her shoulders relaxed. “Good man. Glad you’re still in touch.”
He wasn’t going to be distracted. “So?”
She grimaced, but it seemed more to do with a memory than with him. “Yeah. Didn’t like the guy much. Not a hunter. Identified himself as a reporter for some rag. He wanted to know about you, actually.”
Jake stilled. “Really?”
“Really. Sniffing after gossip that doesn’t concern him.”
“Don’t suppose he left a name,” Jake said.
Barbara cocked an eyebrow. “You know what, I think he left a card. Usually I’d throw it out, but something had me hang onto it this time. Let’s see where I stuck it.”
She moved around to the other side of the bar, poking around underneath the cash register, then returned with a business card she held gingerly by the edges.
Jake took it. Grant Gordon, it read. The card was cheap, the type crooked to the edges, but something about it felt ominous.
“Thanks, Barbara,” he said, getting his wallet out as he stood and dropping a couple of bills on the bar. “That’s . . . good to know.”
“Tell you what—I hear from him again, I’ll give Roger a call and let him know.”
“That’d be great.” And Jake meant that from the bottom of his heart.
“Hey, where’s Sara hiding these days? Thought for sure I’d find her over at the arcade.
” Barbara’s granddaughter had been his on-again, off-again friend growing up, the most constant one he had after Toby.
Probably said something about his childhood that Leon had frequented Freak Camp more often than the Crossroads Inn.
Jake and Sara had forever been chasing and pranking each other, then testing their sharpshooter skills with a line of cans out in a nearby field.
He hadn’t seen her in more than a couple of years.
Barbara shrugged, suddenly reserved again. “Oh, she’s around. Not even a hunter can keep tabs on a teenage girl.”
Jake paused, then tested the waters. “Well, I’d like to say hi before I leave town. Think I can catch her if I swing by tonight?”
“I wouldn’t count on it.” Barbara’s smile was pleasant, but there was steel under her tone.
One of the hunters closest to him—a burly man with reddish hair—snorted. “Cut the shit, boy. None of us are gonna let you get near that girl.”
Jake rounded on him with a burst of adrenaline. “What the fuck does that mean?”
The hunter—Gregson, the name came to him—glanced at him coolly, not yet bothering to face him full on.
The little of his expression Jake could see was pure animosity.
“We know what the fuck you’ve been doing with your Tobias.
” The jeering disgust he loaded into Tobias’s name made Jake imagine smashing his high-strength glass on the counter and grinding the shards into Gregson’s eyes.
“And you know why you’ve been making yourself scarce.
So don’t go acting like you’re fit to show a girl a good time, ’less it’s some whore who won’t get any dirtier—”
Jake lunged out of his seat, his stool tumbling to the floor, and Gregson stood a split-second later.
“Cut that shit out!” Barbara’s voice rang across the bar, freezing them both in their tracks. “Both of you know better than to start that shit here! Not another word. You either sit down and ignore each other or leave. One at a time, because I don’t need blood all over my parking lot either.”
“I’m going,” Jake said. His heartbeat was pounding in his ears, but he felt clearheaded despite the adrenaline.
He could see the face of every hunter in the bar, and they were all unfriendly.
He knew almost all of them—some Leon had trusted enough to have his back—but he knew now that no one would take his side. Not even Barbara.
Jake felt the eyes on him as he left the bar, could feel the threat in the air as soon as he moved away from Barbara. And he could swear, as the door closed behind him, that he heard someone mutter “freakfucker.”
In the past, the Crossroads Inn had been like a second home—after Dad, the Eldorado, and the road. Now he felt more like he was walking out of a battlefield, bridges burning behind him.
* * *
Tina’s Cafe was a cute little diner with mismatched chairs, heavy pottery cups, and round tables just the right size to spread out a few textbooks so Tobias could pretend that he was studying while he waited, worrying about Jake.
Tobias drank his iced tea and turned pages just often enough that it could look like he was actually reading, all while listening for the Eldorado. Other vehicles came and went, but not the one he cared about.
When a battered sedan pulled into the parking lot, Tobias didn’t pay it much attention.
But when the hunter walked into the cafe—for that was what he was, unmistakably, though Tobias couldn’t recall ever seeing his face before—everything else in his field of vision grayed out, all noise dropping to a distant buzz.
Tobias felt himself freeze, turn to stone in his chair.
A second ago, Tobias hadn’t worried about how he looked, whether or not he fit in. Some days he did, but today had been okay. But the moment the hunter—who was not like Roger or Alex, not at all, he was every inch a Freak Camp hunter—came in, Tobias knew the game was up.