Page 33 of How to Hack a Hellhound
I smiled at him and turned to walk away, hearing another thump against the door as he leaned into it again.
“Oh, you’ve got it bad,” I heard Aiden mumble, and then I was jogging to the house to get them on camera. And to get to work, because I did have some bad people to hunt down for Quinton. Anything to make him happy.
I was smiling and whistling as I walked up to the house, and I heard Jude and Corbin on the front porch. I walked around to find them lounging in chairs, looking freshly cleaned up and a little tired.
“Good night hunting?” I asked.
“Yup,” Jude replied, smiling. “But why are you so happy? We heard you whistling. That’s just fucking weird.”
“I’ve been upgraded,” I announced proudly.
Corbin and Jude both raised their eyebrows at me in question. “I’ve gone from Creepy Stalker to Sexy Stalker. A definite improvement, I think,” I answered.
Corbin nodded in agreement, but Jude just shook his head and rolled his eyes. “You guys are all hopeless,” he muttered. I ignored him and headed to what Quinton had termed my ‘“batcave.” It was time to get some research done, and of course, keep an eye on Quinton at the same time.
The week went by in a flash. Aiden and Quinton got back into the swing of working; Jude took them into work most days, while I made it a habit to pick them up. Quinton would come over and we’d do some research, then he’d head off to eat dinner with Aiden. I popped in twice at Aiden’s insistence for dinner as well, and it was nice to eat with the two of them.
Even when I wasn’t at dinner, I still got to watch them through the cameras anyway.
Much to my satisfaction, there had been no turning the cameras around. Quinton also never asked me to turn the sound off in his bedroom, and so I hadn’t. I was rewarded a few nights later with another “jerk-off sesh,” as he termed it. That time I didn’t even wait for him to head into the shower. The moment we were done, I was on my way over, and he didn’t seem surprised to see me appear in his bedroom door as he was getting on boxers.
He had smirked at my mussed look, then grabbed me and led me into the bathroom. I’d gotten to undress that time, although he had very cutely avoided looking at me naked. I’d hugged him under the shower spray, and there had been no tears, but he had gripped me tightly.
I knew he wasn’t over everything that had happened, and that was ok. We would go at whatever pace Quinton was comfortable with. I didn’t think he was quite ready for the intimacy of washing each other, so I let him pull away and wash himself off, then I did the same.
He said he supposed I needed aftercare again, to which I simply nodded. After we got out of the shower and dried off, he led me into bed. Aiden didn’t come in that night—it was onlyabout half the time that he did—and Quinton and I slept cuddled up until morning, when Aiden’s movement in the house woke me up.
I brought them to work that morning and picked them up, and that night, Quinton had whispered “Good night, Sexy Stalker” to the camera before turning off his lights.
I wanted more than anything to be laying in the bed with him, to feel his body close to mine. I knew he wasn’t ready for anything more sexually intimate than what we’d done, and that was fine. But I still yearned to be close to him.
I was being patient, though. I could be very patient for Quinton; he was worth it.
Quinton, however, was not the most patient person, as evidenced by his tapping foot as we sat in my “batcave” on Friday evening.
“We have a list of suspicious people. Isn’t it time to start invading homes or whatever?” he asked, staring at the list of names and pictures on one of the screens. I knew he recognized some of the people, and I knew that he was angry.
“I wish it were that easy. These are suspicious people. Most of them aren’t hellbound yet—they’re just… murky souls. Take this guy,” I said, pointing to one of the pictures.
“Todd,” Quinton bit out. “Should’ve known that bouncer was evil based on his frat boy name and shitty pick-up line. ‘Todd, with extra D,’ he’d always say while leering at the guys. Like eww, Todd. No one wants your D, asshole.”
I resisted laughing. Yes, the guy on the screen did look like a frat boy asshole (not that all frat boys were assholes—fraternity houses had the same ratio of rotten souls as most other dorms and complexes).
“The problem is that Todd isn’t fully hellbound, so I can’t kill him. There’s still hope for redemption,” I reasoned.
“How about a little torture, then?” Quinton asked.
I did laugh then. “No torture either. Someone could be murky for lots of reasons. Todd has made a lot of questionable decisions. Maybe he knows that James leads really drunk guys out of the club. Maybe he realizes that something weird is going on, but he doesn’t know exactly what. He’s complicit, yes, but withoutreallyknowing, he hasn’t done irreversible damage to his soul. He could find out what’s really been going on, be totally appalled, and turn his life around in order to do better and help people.”
Quinton snorted in disbelief.
“You’d be surprised,” I responded. “We’ve seen it happen. Lots of people are morally gray, and sometimes there’s something that tips them over the edge, one way or another. They could have a wake-up call and turn their lives around. Or, unfortunately, they could justify it to themselves and just keep spiraling until they’re hellbound. Free will.” I shrugged. “We can’t know which way Todd will go. Torturing him could inadvertently send him toward being hellbound, when just learning about what happened could send him onto a better path.”
Quinton sighed. “But where are the really bad guys, then? James wasn’t murky, was he?”
“No. James was actively drugging people and handing them over. That’s a little different than looking away. He was rotten.” I clicked through some of James’s social media, stopping on a recent picture. “Even so, he was pretty newly rotten. He’s hard to judge on the internet. I needed to be in person to tell for sure that he was fully hellbound. Some of these suspicious people might be rotten, but I can’t say for certain without being near them. My computer skills are pretty good, but not perfect.”
“Your computer skills are fucking amazing, Sexy Stalker. You can, like, code which people suck and which people don’t. So don’t sell yourself short,” Quinton insisted, and I felt warm at hispraise. “Where are the big baddies then, though? Like the people behind it? I’d think they’d be easy to spot.”
