Page 26 of Fire
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 wasthinkingand 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 fuckinguselessness, 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. Heknew, 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 alarmwent off for the second night in a row. This time, it wasn’t a false alert.
Roger saw the headlights of a pickup closing in on his house, and he didn’t waste a second hauling ass out of his room and down the hall to the stairs. There was only one kind of visitor who would come in the night.
But like the previous night, Tobias was already up. As Roger reached the stairs, he met Tobias hurtling up, hauling his duffel bag up with him.
“Roger,” he gasped, his voice hitching in panic.
