Page 31 of Fortress
“Oh hell, what happened? Jake, what are we talking here, head injury? Broken bones?”
Jake inhaled, one hand locked tight on the steering wheel. “A fucking troll threw him twenty feet, Roger. I was so fucking—he’s got some broken bones. Maybe a concussion. There was a lot of blood, but I—the guy in the ambulance said shallow head wounds bleed a lot. I know that, of course I fucking know that.”
“All right.” Roger’s voice was calmer, grounding. “You did good getting him to the hospital.”
Jake hit the steering wheel hard with the palm of his hand. “Fuck, Roger, they got him locked up somewhere. They saw the scarring around his throat, and they won’t let me see him—they’re treating him like he’s fucking radioactive. They—” Jake pulled in another breath, forcing himself to focus. “Look, that’s why I’m calling. They want to talk to an ASC representativebefore they’ll even treat him, and I need you—please, Roger. Shit, they want to see his goddamn papers.”
“Of course,” Roger said quietly. “’Course I’ll vouch for you, kid. You don’t even got to ask. You got those papers?”
Jake swallowed hard, glancing at the envelope next to him. “Yeah. I gotta—I need to get back inside, the sooner the suit who runs this joint gets these, the sooner she’ll let Tobias get some goddamn medical assistance.”
“Go on. I’ll stick right here by my phone, not going anywhere. And Jake?”
“Yeah?”
“Keep your head.Do you hear me? Whatever it takes, donotfly off the handle. Watch your language, and remember that reaching for a gun can weird out civilians faster than even freaks can. You can do this, but you gotta do it right.”
Jake huffed out his breath and, with effort, moved his hand away from the pistol under the seat. “Yeah. Thanks, Roger. I got it.”
“Good luck,” Roger said, and Jake hung up.
He picked up the papers, braced himself, and pushed out of the car, into the cold, and back up toward the hospital and its fucking director. The hospital personnel let him go directly to her office. Dr. Cunningham silently took the envelope when he shoved it onto her desk.
While she read, an assistant came in to check Jake’s ID, gave him a skeptical look when he presented the shiny ASC badge, and asked him if he wanted a cup of coffee before leaving with the ID in hand. Jake forced himself not to fidget. He’d already told them he was Jake fucking Hawthorne. Were these really the only people in the damn country who didn’t recognize his goddamn name and think that maybe, yeah, he was a fucking real hunter, thank you very much?
Just let hertryto give him shit about Tobias’s papers. Jake could stare down any fucking civvie, and he had Roger and Alex to back him up if needed (and enough fireworks for a jailbreak, if it came to that).
Besides, she couldn’t accuse him of violating any of the biggest red flags. He was too much on the fucking edge to think about what would have happened if Tobias had gotten hurt this bad before last week.
At least now he knew what she was looking at.
He’d read every damn word of those papers himself just a few hours after Tobias had asked to see them, once they’d settled into a motel after dinner. Tobias had stretched out on the bed with a book, and Jake had spread the papers over the small table by the window. He could feel Tobias watching him, but he didn’t make a single comment.
No weapons. No civilian contact. No “disobedience.” No fucking rights. Jake might not have been a fucking lawyer to figure out a damn contract, but he could read between these lines well enough to know exactly what kind of shit he’d signed. He could practically seeand don’t let them catch you fucking or torturing itscrawled through the neatly typed paragraphs.
Afterward, the taste in his mouth bitter as blood and bile, he’d folded the damning documents back up and walked out to put them back inside the Eldorado. He’d never been so tempted to burn something in his life. Never so tempted without actually pulling out a lighter.
When he came back in, Tobias was watching him, both hands resting on the book, eyes expectant but not afraid. Jake took a seat beside him.
“So that fucking piece of a dead tree that thinks it can tell us what we can and can’t do, what our lives are supposed to look like, like some fucking—” Jake stopped himself and took a breath. “You need to know why we don’t listen to it?”
Tobias had blinked at him. “No, Jake. I know why.”
“You... know?” Dammit, that shouldn’t have come out like a question, but Jake had been dreading a lot of answers. His stomach was still clenched. Part of him didn’t want to know why.
“Yes.” Tobias’s mouth crooked up in a smile. “You see me as a real person.”
To you, I am a real person.
But now in the hospital CEO’s office, Jake was just grateful he had read the damn thing and had had the presence of mind to take Tobias’s weapons off of him before the paramedics showed up. Shitstorm though this was, no one here couldprovethat he had offended the almighty ASC.
Finally, Dr. Cunningham folded up the papers without comment, then fixed him with a hard stare. “Mr. Hawthorne, I have to say the circumstances of your arrival here raise a number of questions. Let’s start with why your supernatural was involved in an attack on a family while there have been numerous disappearances and supernatural attacks in recent months?”
Jake stared at her. It was a good thing Roger had given him that talk about guns and cursing or he might have shot his mouth off. Or just fucking shot her. “Tobias and I,” he said at last, in what he thought was a remarkably even tone, “saved the lives of that family. Toby, actually, deserves most of the credit, because he’s the one who threw himself onto the troll and he’s the one who blew a fu—fudge-ton of shrapnel into its chest so the Brady Bunch could get away. Usually, you’d give that kind of balls a medal.”
“Very heroic,” Dr. Cunningham said, though she did not sound convinced. “But I’d still like to know why an ASC-identified supernatural was assisting a hunter in fightinganothersupernatural?”
Again, Jake counted to ten as he stared at her. When he knew that the first words out of his mouth weren’t going to be related to her parentage or her intelligence, he said, “Toby and I are hunters. I’m the one with the ID, but Tobias’s out there in the field as much as me. He does it ’cause he doesn’t like monsters hurting people any more than you do, than I do. He’s not any more dangerous than you or me.”Less, Jake thought. Less, because Tobias would never hurt someone who wasn’t physically threatening someone else, and he couldn’t say the same about the woman across from him. Or about himself.
