Chapter 5 #3
“Whoa.” Roger lifted both hands, palms out. He moved so that if Tobias tried for the door without an explanation, Roger would be able to snag him before he made it to the yard (and wouldn’t that be fun for both of them). “Slow down for a second, kid, and tell me what’s going on.”
“I messed up,” Tobias said, anguish barely held in check behind his tight words and tense shoulders. “This whole situation, everything. I made a promise, a deal, and I need to go to Jake. Roger, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do this, I swear.” His voice cracked.
“Tobias.” Roger barely stopped himself from grabbing the kid’s shoulders. “Tobias, I need you to sit down, breathe, and tell me what this is about. I’ll help however I can, but I need to make sense of it.”
Tobias half sat, half collapsed onto the sofa, hunching forward with anxious misery.
He looked ready to bolt. Roger took the armchair next to the sofa, sitting forward himself, wondering if he’d still be able to catch Tobias if he made a break for it.
Kid might be sick as a dog, but he was also damn fast.
Tobias spoke flatly. “I just now realized—I was wrong, I don’t think Jake is s-safer without me.
I thought he was, I swear. Better off without me w-when I’m im-impaired.
But we’ve been hunting for almost two years, and now he doesn’t have backup.
If he dies, that’ll be my fault, same as if I didn’t stop the freak in time. That’s why I’ve got to go.”
Roger was still trying to process that when Tobias drew in a shaky breath and looked up at him.
“I can function like this, Roger. I can. I’m not that sick.
” He turned to cough into his arm once, hard, and then visibly stopped and drew himself up straight.
Roger wasn’t sure whether to be horrified or impressed.
“Even me sick is better than him being alone right now. I made a promise, and I have to keep him alive.” Tobias’s hands were shaking, even as he clenched them together.
“I swore I wouldn’t be a liability or make him weaker, and I thought—” His posture collapsed as he dropped his forehead into his hands, digging his fingers into his hair.
“I couldn’t be with him when I was sick, but now, if something takes him down or just hurts him bad enough he can’t drive or get to a hospital—that’s my fault. ”
Roger drew a slow breath. What a bloody minefield.
“Hey, Tobias. Tobias.” He waited until Tobias lifted his head, revealing his overbright eyes.
“The biggest danger to Jake at the moment is that you’re about to give yourself a stroke.
He might not survive getting that news. I hear what you’re saying, and it makes a sort of sense, but you’re selling him way short.
Okay? I’ve tracked his hunting skills since before his voice cracked, and I know his blind spots.
You two’ve been hunting together for a couple years now, but that doesn’t mean Jake’s clean forgotten how to survive going solo.
Before you go off half-cocked and three-fourths dead and get both of you killed, you should give him a call.
Yeah, maybe he needs to be reminded to watch his damn fool back, but he’s not going to be able to keep his head in the game worrying about you either.
And whether or not you think he should, Jake will worry about you. So don’t be a total idjit about it.”
Tobias absorbed that, looking shaken, but also like he was thinking clearer for the first time in the last several panic-stricken minutes.
“I mean it,” Roger said. “Go on, call him now. And if you still think he’s in danger, I’ll drive you myself.” He’d do it, too, because with Tobias coughing up his lungs and Jake frantic about Tobias, someone would have to watch their backs, and Roger didn’t exactly know of any other volunteers.
Tobias hesitated. “He’s probably asleep. I shouldn’t . . .” He flushed and looked down at the floor. His hands were still shaking, but at least he was still. At least he was thinking and not panicking.
“Call and talk to him,” Roger said firmly. “I can’t let you keep worrying and then do some fool thing like driving off in the middle of the night. Jake would rip me a new one when you showed up at his motel halfway to death’s door.”
Tobias slowly picked up his cell phone off the table. “You don’t think . . . he won’t be . . . angry? He won’t, will he?”
Roger didn’t think Tobias was actually talking to him at that moment, but he shook his head anyway.
“Hell no. I think that he’d rather you called than you worry yourself to death.
And if you hear something you don’t like, just tell me.
What I said before still goes. I’ll drive you myself if you think that idjit needs us there. ”
Tobias nodded to Roger, short and quick, and then took the cell phone into his bedroom.
Roger kept an ear tuned from his office for a good hour afterward.
He could hear a little murmuring from the room at first, but that dropped out after a while.
Tobias didn’t reappear and Roger didn’t hear any windows open for a getaway.
Satisfied that Tobias wasn’t going to try to make a break for it tonight, he slowly returned to his daily routine, wondering if that routine would survive ’til dinner.
* * *
Worse than the coughing, the weakness, the stuffed-up nose, the struggle to breathe, the feeling of fucking uselessness, was the low-level terror that Tobias felt when he was sick.
Intellectually, he got it. He’d been reading up on these things, and it was pretty easy to spot the disconnect.
He knew, in his head, that Jake would not dump him over a cough, but that didn’t really matter to his gut.
And any trapped thing knows that when energy runs to empty and panic takes over, there’s not much else running the show but the gut.
Dropping the phone to the bed after Jake had said goodnight, Tobias stared up at the ceiling. Even over the rasping of his own breath, he could hear Roger moving in the other room, maybe thinking about checking up on him.
It would have been a fucking stupid thing to try to leave this house while he was like this. What would he have been able to do on the hunt with Jake—distract the ghosts with his coughing and rasping, hope that he would be able to outrun them?
But panic had grabbed him by the throat, as hard as any guard ever had, and dragged him to the door.
The conviction that Jake would die out there without him (and that Tobias had been wrong while Jake’s father had been right: it would be Tobias’s mistake that got Jake killed) was stronger even than the shaking in his legs, in his hands.
Now, in the quiet of Roger’s guest room, having spoken to Jake (Tobias had fucking woken him up, so that Jake was groggy and concerned on the other end), Tobias realized again that he was such a fucking mess.
If he had gone back to Jake, he would have just fucked everything up for him.
He didn’t know why Jake should ever come back for him.
He couldn’t do a fucking thing right now, and he wasn’t handling that well.
It wasn’t safe to be vulnerable. In the camp, that was as good as offering your neck to a vamp, offering your mouth to a hunter: there was no way it wouldn’t be taken, no way you could get back what you had lost.
Tobias was safe here, as much as any hunter could be. Roger was . . . good, and Jake would be fine, and he would come back because Jake had always come back for him. Even if it had taken almost too fucking long that last time. It would be fine.
Roger knocked softly on the door, and then opened it before Tobias had quite realized that he should have said something in response.
Roger didn’t come in, but he looked at Tobias, eyes dark with concern.
That made Tobias all the more uncomfortable because he couldn’t feel it deserved, not right now.
He pushed himself up until he was propped against the headboard.
“How was he?” Roger asked.
Tobias scraped up a smile. It must have looked as bad as it felt, because the furrow between Roger’s eyes only deepened.
“Fine. I woke him up, but he’s fine.” He tried to laugh, and though it sounded like a bird dying in a car engine, it must have at least been better than the smile, because Roger’s stance relaxed a little.
“How you doing?” he asked. “You hungry? Thirsty?”
What Tobias wanted was to curl up somewhere very dark and very secret where no one would find him until he could breathe again and push the old panic back to where it usually lived. He doubted that Roger would let him do that. Roger had already removed him from his closet once.
“I don’t think I can eat,” he admitted. “But maybe some juice?”
He had to keep going. He had to keep up his strength and beat this thing so he could get back out there with Jake. Because in the end, that was the only thing that would make him all right again: being where he belonged, where he wanted to be, at Jake’s side.
Roger looked reassured, maybe because Tobias had actually asked for something. “Sure, Tobias, I’ll grab that.”
Tobias thought he should follow him, should go with him to the kitchen and save him the trip back, but he wasn’t sure his legs would hold him, and that would be worse.
He sagged sideways into the bed. In the aftermath of the terror that Jake wouldn’t survive, that there might be too many ghosts, or that he would forget to watch the side that Tobias always watched, Tobias could feel his brief burst of energy draining away.
Roger couldn’t have been gone more than a few minutes, but by the time he returned, Tobias could barely keep his eyes open to drink half the juice. Then he sank back into fitful, exhausted sleep.
He was just awake enough to hear the door shut when Roger closed it on his way out.
* * *
The proximity alarm went off for the second night in a row. This time, it wasn’t a false alert.