Unleashed: The Deepest Fears Lie Within (Secrets of the Makai)

by Toni Kerr

  “If someone recommended me for the job, then they intended for you to be a sacrifice.”

  “That’s not true. I needed your help.” He had no idea what event Donovan was referring to.

  “If you weren’t meant as a sacrifice, you were a seed. And now, years later, here you are in my domain. Someone is using you to get to me, and I intend to find out what I’m dealing with. Do you, Tristan, in your heart, know what I am?”

  Tristan shook his head.

  “Do you trust me with your mind?”

  Tristan shook his head again, more firmly than before. “I haven’t done anything to you and I don’t remember ever calling you by name. This isn’t a good time. I drank too much. I can’t—”

  “Can’t put up defenses?” Donovan finished. “That’s what makes it so perfect.”

  He was going to say he couldn’t recall anything accurately at the moment, and that they’d been the ones to bring him here. He wasn’t some spy doing someone’s dirty work.

  The conversation was beyond confusing.

  He silently thanked Eleonora for the wine and wished he’d had just a bit more.

  “Donovan,” he heard her say, and opened his eyes to see if she was in the room or just in his head. Eleonora stood at the front door. “Your actions do not deserve anyone’s trust. I suggest you leave before matters get worse.”

  Tristan’s head flopped back as Donovan released his grip. He tried to get some distance between himself and the man, only to succeed in rolling off the chair.

  Someone caught him, presumably Victor, and he vowed to never drink again.

  “Tristan,” someone said, either Landon, Victor, or Donovan. Maybe even Eleonora. Something cold touched his head. It felt like permission to sleep and he accepted gratefully.

  6

  - WRITING ON THE WALL -

  TRISTAN FELT FOR THE GAG in his mouth, finding only his tongue. A sledgehammer pounded in his ears as the words ‘rise and shine’ reverberated in his skull. His blankets were pulled away; daylight stabbed through his eyelids. Shielding his eyes from the light, he made out Landon and Victor staring down at him through a slit in his fingers.

  “Go away,” Tristan mumbled, rolling over to face the wall. He felt for the pillow to cover his head, only to realize he’d gotten turned around during the night.

  “Hop in the shower,” Victor said with an unreasonably cheerful voice. “You’ll feel better once you get moving.”

  “Liar.”

  “Come on, we don’t have all day. You’ve got less than an hour before we have to be at Grumpy’s. It’s past noon already.”

  Tristan glanced out the window, groaning at the intense sunlight. He could barely remember the sound that had him crawling to the foot of the bed in the middle of the night—some sort of scraping noise in his front yard.

  “Enough already.” Landon headed for the bathroom and the sound of running water from the shower followed. “You can go in yourself or we’ll put you there.”

  “I’m going.” Tristan headed for his dresser, forgetting why once he got there.

  Victor opened the drawer for him. “Did you have fun at least?”

  “Can’t remember.” Now that he’d said it, he really couldn’t remember. How did he even get home? “Something about disappearing chairs.” He grabbed the first pair of jeans and shirt he came to, then shuffled to the shower.

  Tristan emerged half an hour later, fully dressed with his teeth brushed and hair combed. The smell of warm, buttery bread wafted throughout the cabin. His stomach grumbled. He wasn’t sure if he could handle food yet, but the smell was beyond amazing.

  “Making you toast,” Victor announced, raising a coffee cup in cheers to nothing in particular.

  Tristan’s stomach growled again appreciatively. He was also glad to notice Landon and Victor weren’t overly dressed for whatever event they were taking him to, both in cargo shorts and light-weight shirts. Maybe his worn-out clothing wouldn’t be a huge embarrassment. “Aren’t you guys eating?”

  “We’ll eat at Grumpy’s,” Victor said. “There’ll be a ton of ethnic foods and you’ll last longer if you’ve had something bland first. It helps to rub bites of bread against the roof of your mouth.”

  “Is Grumpy a person?” Tristan asked, as Victor slipped an oven mitt over his hand and pulled a plate of toast from a kitchen cabinet.

  “We haven’t gone over your appliances,” Victor explained, “but we can do all that later.”

  “Contrary to his name, Grumpy was really nice,” Landon said, as if toast from the cupboard was completely ordinary. He sat at the kitchen island and poured steaming hot chocolate from a thermos into a mug, passing it to Tristan. “No one could pronounce his name, which rhymed with grumpy if you left off the last three syllables. He hosted most of our gatherings and kept knocking down walls in his living room to accommodate more people, until his house became one big hall. We’ve kept it as a party house for Darnell after he died.”

  “People mostly refer to Grumpy’s as Darnell,” Victor added. “We’re a world-wide community, since distance isn’t relevant.”

  The theory sounded almost normal for how many times he’d heard it.

  “It helps to be multi-lingual,” Victor added, “but you’ll be fine. We’d better get going.”

  “We can walk, can’t we?” Tristan asked, unable to bear facing the lights with such a raging headache.

  “We’d be late.”

  “Walking is a good idea,” Landon said, opening the front door. Twenty minutes of fresh air and quietness should do him good.

  Tristan tried harder to tune out their personal conversation and put on the poncho. “Is it okay to wear this?”

  “May as well,” Victor said. “You can always take it off if it gets too warm. I’ll let Alvi know we’re running behind and catch up.”

  Victor vanished and Tristan followed Landon out of the cabin.

  “I’ll bring some clippers to cut a trail,” Landon said, speaking more quietly as they passed Eleonora’s house. “We’ll make a shortcut to the main trail.”

  “She’s nice.” Tristan glanced at an upstairs window with its curtains drawn tight. “She probably has pruners I could use.”

  “She’s a bad influence.”

  Tristan still couldn’t remember much of the evening, but recalled liking her.

  Victor jogged through the brush to catch up. “We should make a more direct trail, around her house instead of through her yard. It would be the politest thing to do.”

  “Okay, okay,” Tristan said. “Bring me clippers and I’ll start a new trail.”

  “Why use clippers?” Victor asked. “Just clear it.”

  Thinking of Dorian, the self-proclaimed plant goddess of the universe, Tristan wondered what the plants would prefer—being snapped in half by clippers or zapped into oblivion. Neither sounded preferable and Eleonora wasn’t as bad as they made her out to be.

  They walked along the edge of the clearing toward a distant trailhead. The trail was single file through a dense patch of trees for a long time, then widened.

  “Headache?” Landon asked.

  “No, now that you mention it.”

  “Good.” Victor slipped out of his long-sleeved shirt and tied it around his waist, revealing a T-shirt that read ‘FEED ME’ in bold pink letters. Tristan laughed.

  They crested a hill and overlooked a large amusement park. The scent of freshly mowed grass hung in the air, along with buttery popcorn, barbecue smoke, and the sweetness of cotton candy. Colorful tents formed an oval, following the forest line from one side of the clearing to a ledge on the other. In the middle, there were two roller coasters, a Ferris wheel, and a circular stage surrounded by bleachers for seating.

  “Is this…normal?” Tristan asked, relieved to see a crowd and nervous at the same time.

  “No,” Landon answered.

  “We throw parties once in a while because, let’s face it, we can’t really be ourselves in most parts of the w
orld.”

  “Don’t worry,” Landon added. “You’ll be a mingling stranger to just about everyone, and we’ll introduce you to people you might meet again.”

  Tristan followed Victor and Landon toward the gathering crowd. “Are you saying all of these people can hear thoughts?” There had to be at least a hundred. Maybe more.

  “Not all of them...but most have telekinesis abilities.”

  Half the booths contained food, others were for carnival games. Young children ran unattended, carrying large stuffed animals and handfuls of toys.

  “Here, these are fun.” Victor picked up a wooden dowel with ten colored, carved sections and tossed it to Tristan. Each part rotated both directions, scrambling the intricate design. “Know how a combination lock works? Try it out!”

  Tristan twisted the sections, amazed by the various scenes and animals taken shape as the moving parts rotated.

  “Keep it,” Landon said, moving on with Victor.

  “Just…keep it?” There was no one standing near the booth to confirm.

  “Everything here is donated,” Landon explained, seeming to search the crowd for someone or something in particular. “We wouldn’t expect guests to be stuck at their stations....”

  “It’s like a potluck unlimited to food.” Victor took a corndog from a heated display case. “By evening, there should be at least two, maybe three hundred people here. That’s when the real action happens.”

  “So if you get hungry, help yourself,” Landon said. “I need to check on a few things, but I’ll find you in a few.”

  Tristan nodded, then noticed a long line of people waiting at a tent with a wooden fortuneteller sign. Victor followed his gaze. “Eleonora will mess with your head more than anyone. Check this out.”

  Tristan followed to where a little girl, barely tall enough to see into the gaming booth, concentrated on a large tomato. There were metal rings dangling from a beam in the ceiling, numbered in a random order. The three surrounding walls were thick with dripping tomato guts.

  The man running the game was covered in tattoos that were almost as black as his skin. Not carnie tattoos, or jailhouse prison tats, but tribal markings.

  The tomato began hovering, then made a trembling path toward the first ring, which spun suddenly, hitting the tomato. Instead of smashing against one of the three walls, the tomato splattered against Tristan’s chest.

  The man in the booth widened his eyes, speechless, waiting for some sort of reaction.

  “I’m…fine.” He could certainly handle a ripe tomato, and it only took a few seconds to see it as a bit funny. He looked down at the little girl, who was staring up at him with big brown puppy-dog eyes.

  “You should clean that off,” she said, unblinking. “You should cut your hair too, because Mama says if your hair gets in your face, you can’t see good. Then you wouldn’t get hit by tomatoes.”

  Tristan squatted down, careful to keep the poncho from folding in on itself.

  “And if you don’t clean it right away,” the girl continued, “it will leave a stain. Stains are a lot harder to clean, then Mama has to do it.”

  “Could you clean it off for me?” Tristan asked, clueless as to how to do it himself, without taking the poncho off and dunking it in soapy water.

  Blonde curls flung from side to side as she shook her head. “I dropped chocolate sauce on my Sunday dress and tried to clean it before Mama could see and I made a big hole and Mama said ‘never do that again!’ so I’m not allowed to clean anything. You’ll have to fix it yourself. Bye!”

  Tristan nodded and glanced down at his poncho. The tomato mess was already gone and he looked up at Victor, who winked with a happy grin.

  “Victor!” the tribal man called. “Show the fine folks how it’s done.”

  “Sorry, man. Places to go...people to see....”

  “Come on, Victor,” Tristan said, fully intending to get in the right spirit of things. “Go for it.”

  “In that case, piece of cake! Tristan, this is Talak. Talak, Tristan.”

  Tristan waved as all six rings shrunk and began spinning on their own. Victor’s tomato flew through the first, returned for the second, then third. The sixth ring became a sort of stretchable paddle that caught the tomato and flung it against the wall with splattering thump. Talak plucked a rose made of black glass from a display case of prizes.

  “Nah,” Victor said, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Save it.”

  “I’d bet your little lady friend would think it sweet of you.”

  “Quite right.” Victor grinned. “I happily accept.”

  “How ‘bout your friend there?” The man looked at Tristan and placed a perfect red tomato on the pedestal. “It would give me the opportunity to make up for that...unfortunate incident.”

  Tristan shook his head and took a step back. “That’s okay, really.”

  The man bowed slightly as a small group of waiting kids rushed forward. The rings stopped spinning and grew to twice the size they’d been for Victor.

  Cheers erupted from the center stage and people shifted as one in that direction. “Go ahead,” Victor encouraged. “I need to find Alvi.”

  Before Tristan could open his mouth, Victor disappeared into the crowd.

  Tristan headed toward the stage, eager to see what drew everyone’s attention, surprised to find a huge transparent tank of water. Dolphins raced along the perimeter.

  He made his way to the tank itself and put a hand on the thick glass, utterly amazed by how something so large could just…appear. With living animals inside.

  The dolphins sped by, making a wave that crested the top of the tank.

  To his right, someone was distributing bright green rain jackets to whoever wanted them in the stands.

  A sound like fingernails on a chalkboard brought his attention back to the tank, to a faint crack in the glass.

  His pulse quickened.

  Just as he was about to look for someone to tell, the growing crack changed direction and curved upward. It almost made a letter U shape, but continued until it changed direction again, arching down to the left.

  “Hey! You!”

  Tristan tore his eyes away from the scratch marks and spotted a guy in a wetsuit jogging toward him, weaving through the people still looking for seats.

  “What are you doing?” the man called.

  “Me?” Tristan asked, horrified that he might be suspected for damaging the glass. “Nothing! There’s a—” He glanced back and saw that both dolphins had come to investigate.

  Inside the cracked lines, eerily shaped like a knife, the glass began etching itself where the blade would be. Water began seeping through, beading at the outline.

  “There’s a crack,” Tristan finally said, taking another step back. The nose of a dolphin barely touched the scratched design and a loud series of sickening snaps, followed by a creaking groan, silenced the people within earshot.

  As if keeping itself together until the last possible moment, the fractured glass expanded like a swelling blister, then exploded in a wave of water, dolphins included.

  People screamed.

  Tristan turned to escape, tripping over a redheaded boy. He covered the child with his body to protect him from the wave of water and glass fragments and waited.

  Nothing happened.

  When he glanced over his shoulder, the glass wall was solid again. The ground was dry and there were no beached dolphins flopping around.

  The man in the wetsuit looked furious.

  “I don’t get it,” Tristan said. He got off the child, who ran away, and stared at the glass, lightly speckled with drops of water. “I saw it crack.”

  “What happened?” Landon asked, half-jogging into the staging area.

  “It’s about time you got here,” the man said to Landon, still glaring at Tristan. “I’d say you’ve got your hands full with this one. Get him out of here.”

  “Me?” Tristan asked again, standing with his mouth open as the man in th
e wetsuit continued around the tank, calming the crowd with promises to start the show in a few minutes.

  “Come on, let’s go.”

  “But, Landon, you don’t seriously think I’d break the tank like that, do you?”

  “Is that what happened?”

  “You didn’t see it?”

  “He fixed it before I got here,” Landon said, slowing down to hand Tristan a paper cup with a lid. “This is for you.”

  “What is it?” Tristan asked, peeling back the lid.

  “Don’t look. It’s a hangover concoction to help you feel better. Are you having fun?”

  “I was.”

  Victor appeared in front of Landon. “I’m still looking for Alvi, have you seen her?”

  Landon shook his head. There was a security breach, you might check with Donovan.

  Tristan froze. Landon rolled his eyes. “It was probably just a glitch.”

  “Thanks,” Victor said, slapping Landon’s upper arm before disappearing.

  “Okay,” Landon said, leading Tristan away from the main path. “Right now, everything is completely normal and there’s no cause for alarm. Stop trying to analyze everything you see and have a little fun. Meet some people, go on some rides, go play in the motor skills area. You’ll find it over there somewhere.” Landon pointed across the crowd toward a makeshift racetrack. “I hate to leave you again, but give me ten minutes and I’ll be free for the rest of the day.”

  “Assuming there’s nothing major going on?”

  “Right.”

  “Go ahead,” Tristan said. “I’ll stay out of trouble.”

  “Thanks. I’ll be as quick as I can.”

  Eleonora’s tent was the closest attraction. Tristan waited in line, then entered cautiously, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness.

  Gold and silver metallic stars reflected light from a small stained glass lamp in the corner. Eleonora sat at a table for two in an armchair with an unreadable expression.