Page 2 of Fire
* * *
Jake droppedToby at a little diner called Tina’s Cafe not far from the Crossroads Inn. He waved as Jake drove away, his backpack slung over his shoulder like he was an honest-to-God college student. Worry flashed through Jake that his looks would send up a flag, like someone would notice there wasn’t a college or anything in the area. Then he could have kicked himself. Tobias was young enough still to be in high school, so that was how he would pass. Just another kid trying to get some homework done without being bothered.
Jake was stalling. He turned the Eldorado out toward the edge of town and the Crossroads Inn.
Located an hour outside Dodge City in Coldwater, Kansas, the Crossroads Inn had been a watering hole for hunters as long as Jake had been alive. The rumors were that the owner, Barbara Mikhailov, had been a hunter at one point herself, or someone close to her had been, and that was why the place welcomed the profession. Jake had even heard that the establishment had been hunter-friendly before the ASC existed. It wasn’t a place where you went to flash your badge and give a report. Rather, it was an establishment that offered cold drinks and sympathetic ears for wherever life had taken you... or taken out of you.
It wasn’t much to look at, but that was exactly the way the hunting community liked it. Just a basic bar surrounded by hay fields, just outside the tiny town. It was far enough from civilization that whatever was said (and whatever nasty might attack the place, should it come to that) could go unnoticed. Jake had only been there a handful of times with Leon, but he knew the regulars fairly well. It had been a good place to stop, lick their wounds, and catch up on whatever was going on beneath or around the ASC.
The bar looked the same as Jake remembered. Dark, battered wooden siding and a handful of pickup trucks in the gravel parking lot. Jake scanned them but none were black like his father’s, and he didn’t recognize any of the other ones.
Stepping through the door, he re-entered a world he thought he’d left behind for good. He’d been in bars since getting Toby out—hell, he’d been in barswithToby. But here, hunting protocols were brazenly obvious for those with the training to notice. He walked over a Devil’s Trap scratched lightly into the floor, and most of the half-dozen men slouching at the bar were openly armed.
They didn’t turn to look at him as he came in, but he could feel their eyes on him as he took a stool at the bar. It made his skin crawl. He hadn’t been expecting the easy camaraderie of years past: a backslapping greeting, a couple crude jokes, and all the beer he needed to wash down his sorrows. He also hadn’t expected to feel this much of an outsider.
Barbara herself was tending bar. She wore her curly gray hair pinned up and a blue western-style button-down. While her eyebrows shot up when she saw Jake, her smile looked genuine. The mild edge of concern was real too.
“Jake, long time no see. What can I get you?”
It wasn’t noon yet, but Jake felt that the moment called for a drink. “Beer. Whatever you’ve got on tap.”
“Sure thing.”
Barbara moved back around the bar, grabbing the glass and angling it under the tap. Jake was very aware of the eyes of the other men on him. Their gazes felt like spiders skittering across his skin.
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 aboutToby, 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.”
