Unleashed: The Deepest Fears Lie Within (Secrets of the Makai) (27 page)

“You’re drugging me?” He couldn’t remember if Lazaro confessed or not. “Was it you all along?” He bumped the cup from her hand, spilling it on the spotless white tile floor, and tugged his arms against the ropes, testing the strength of the bar itself.

“We weren’t the ones drugging you. We just made it so you’d sleep, so you could get through the detox easier. I promise we’re not making it worse.”

“I don’t react well to drugs, you have to stop!”

Be nice to her,
said the man. His deep voice seemed to resonate in Tristan’s bones.
She’s the only one fighting to keep you alive.

Tristan slumped into her arms, lacking the strength and energy to stay upright. “Who are you?”

“It’s me, Shaely.”

Molajah,
answered the dark ghost.
I wish to negotiate the terms for your cooperation.

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TRISTAN GNAWED AT THE ROPES on his wrists, unable to tell if he was making progress in the dark. A train whistled from somewhere faraway; he listened for other clues to pass along if he ever got the chance. He couldn
’
t hear the tracks
—
that had to be useful for judging distance.

Fluorescent lights flicked on, forcing his eyes to adjust to the stark white room.

“I thought you’d be awake by now.” Shaely nearly skipped into the room in a flowing white sundress. A pink bow held her hair in a high ponytail. “Are you doing okay?”

“I would be, if I wasn’t tied up.”

“It won’t be for long.” Pearly lip-gloss shimmered as her smile grew wider. “I’m just glad you can carry on a conversation.” She toyed with a delicate bracelet around her wrist, reminding him of the tattoo Lazaro had mentioned. “Just tell them what you told me, and they’ll let you go.”

He highly doubted it.

“Anyway, I thought it would go easier for you if I was the one taking you to your cell. My brothers are...well, they’d love any excuse to rough you up a bit.”

“Thanks. I guess. Why am I here?”

“I’ll explain on the way.” She held up a single key on a large ring. “Let me warn you, if you try anything, they’ll beat the holy heck out of you and you’ll wake up chained to a wall instead of in a comfortable cell.”

“Would you?”

“No. But I have enough tranquilizers to knock you out in seconds, the whole sorry event would be recorded, and they’d never let me near you again.”

“Are you helping me?”

“No, not really. But I’ll do what I can to make it better.”

“Can you take this thing off my head?” He’d tried to pull the band off himself, but it seemed to have barbs that prevented it from sliding up or down. He’d only made it worse.

“Sorry, they would never allow that.” She pulled the blanket away and he stared at his feet as she unlocked the chain from the foot of the bed. The metal cuffs were practically embedded into his swollen ankles.

“I know it looks bad,” Shaely said. “But they weren’t that tight in the beginning.”

Tristan stared at her in horror. Speechless.

“Don’t blame me! You’re the one who kept struggling so much.” She snapped thick bands of metal around each wrist, over the ropes, and connected them with chains to the cuffs at his feet. “I can get you a wheelchair, but...”

“But what?” The chains had to weigh fifty pounds.

“It’ll take time and my brothers will be here soon. My plan was to get you there before....”

“I’ll walk.”

She pulled a pocket knife from her beaded purse and cut the rope at his hands.

“Aren’t you a little dressed up for this?”

Her cheeks reddened as she fiddled with a dangling pearl earring, smiling but avoiding any eye contact. Finally, she folded the knife in half and put it back in her purse. “It’s not far. I promise.”

Tristan pulled himself up, using the chains connected to his feet for leverage, and hissed at the instant pain.

“Should I get a chair? Painkillers?”

He might have passed out if Shaely hadn’t lifted him the rest of the way. “No.” Tristan held his breath and waited for his head to clear. The band on his head pulsed deeper into his flesh.

She lowered the bar on the bed and swiveled his feet to the floor. It took another long minute to adjust to standing. She belted a chain around his waist, linking it with the chain that hung from his hands to his feet. “We’ll be there before you know it.”

It was slow going down an endless hall, with the chain between his feet preventing decent forward motion. He made a map in his head, if he got the chance to run, but so far, everything looked the same: white tile on the floors, white walls, long corridors with doors and tinted windows at equal distances on both sides. Fluorescent strips of light buzzed. Rattling chains.

Who was he kidding? The turns they’d made were already a blur.

They rounded another corner and Tristan spotted the dark-skinned ghost standing at one of the tinted windows, the window frame behind him clearly visible through his transparent cloak.

“Is he with you?” Tristan asked, doing his best to point at the ghost with his chained hands.

Shaely looked in the right direction but shook her head. “This is the museum,” she said, glancing at her watch.

Tell her you want to see it.

“Can we stop?” Tristan asked. He hadn’t decided if the apparition should be trusted or not, but stopping would give his ankles a break. “I wouldn’t mind seeing the museum.”

The ghost nodded his approval.

“We only open it to the public once a year. Sometimes not even that.”

“Is that a yes? I understand if you don’t have authority....”

“Oh, I have authority. I just don’t want to risk my brothers catching us.”

Tristan didn’t care either way and prepared himself for more walking.

“I guess it’ll only take a few minutes, and it might explain why you’re on trial.”

“Sure.” Though, he’d rather get off his feet sooner than later.

Tristan glanced at the man to see if this detour was worth the effort. He looked a lot like Talak, in an old-fashion tribal sort of way. “Did one of your brothers kill Stanley?” Tristan asked.

Shaely rolled her eyes as she finished punching in a series of numbers on a keypad. “Don’t tell me you’re the one who started that rumor.”

“No.” The door slid sideways, retracting into the main wall. Only then did he notice there was no doorknob. “They questioned me and asked about you. I didn’t tell them anything.”

“It wasn’t a problem. And no, we had nothing to do with whatever happened to him.” She waved him in and followed behind. The door whooshed back into position and sealed itself. “This is it.”

Lights came on as Shaely aimed some sort of remote control at the wall to her right. Glass display cases, lit from within, spanned the entire length of the room. Intricate murals covered every inch of wall space, including an arched ceiling.

Tristan scanned the room in awe, stopping for a moment on the dark man, and turned away, so as not to project his thoughts outward by accident.
Molajah, wasn’t it?

Yes.

Tristan spotted his poncho under glass. “Is this mine?”

“Yes and no,” Shaely answered. “It’s why you’re on trial.”

“You lost me. And what sort of trial are we talking about?”

“They say the fabric is made of dragon fur, woven with whisker spines.”

“Fur?”

“Not all dragons are scaled, according to the records. And they probably didn’t have aluminum knitting needles back then. It’s an artifact. Any sort of fabric like this is extremely rare.”

“O-kay.” Tristan left it at that. “So, why am I on trial?”

“The elders sent us to New Zealand because they felt the presence of a dragon.”

“Felt?” What sort of cult was this girl messed up with?

“The elders spend hours meditating in the Forest of Darkness. They’re never wrong.” She clasped her hands behind her back and continued walking along the displays. “But they
are
getting old. Some of us wonder if it was just the artifact they felt. Not a dragon.” She pointed to a depiction in the mural where a man sat cross-legged in a circle of gray moss, surrounded by wicked-looking bare tree branches. “This is the Forest of Darkness.”

“So...if I donate the poncho to your museum, I’m free to go?”

Shaely almost laughed. “They aren’t planning to give it back, and it’s not that simple. The elders want you slain, just in case.”

“Slain? But I’m not a dragon! That’s just...murder!”

It is the spirit of a dragon that communes with those who enter the Forest of Darkness,
Molajah added.
His name is Whiromanie, and his soul will be forever snared in the forest until he can break the curse that binds him; a curse that can only be broken by killing every last dragon.

“They wouldn’t have agreed to the trial a hundred years ago,” said Shaely. “You should be grateful.”

“Yeah. Grateful.”
If Whiromanie is a dragon,
he continued to himself,
wouldn’t that mean he has to kill himself, too?

He’s already dead.

Shaely walked him through the scenes of war playing out in the murals. Villages burned, hundreds of dragons lay slaughtered across the land. The rivers flowed red. People speared the dying beasts. A man tossed a scroll to a burning pile—revealing a symbol Tristan had duplicated on the map in his cabin.

Are you...dead?
Tristan winced at the question, but clearly the man strolling alongside him was a ghost.
Why can’t Shaely see you?

I am tuning my conscious with your biorhythms, not hers. As for being dead, I have no earthly body, but my spirit is bound by the same contract that binds yours.

“Don’t feel sorry for them,” Shaely said. “Dragons nearly wiped out the entire human population, like evil demons swooping in at night. Our job as Slayers is to make sure it never happens again, to make sure they go extinct and stay extinct. Some say they can hibernate for a hundred years or more, so we can’t even guess at how many might be left.”

Whiromanie did have a following, and was rather cruel to the people. After he was captured by one of the gems, much like the emerald turning men into stone, he lured unsuspecting travelers into the Forest of Darkness and organized the Dragon Slayers. We were sought out and slaughtered.

“But there’s no such thing as dragons.”

“Look around you, Tristan,” Shaely said. “Some of this stuff is thousands of years old.”

Tristan eyed each case as he passed, guessing at half of it. He stopped at a metallic-looking bowl. “You’re making this up.”

“That scale is only a few hundred years old.”

Tristan moved on to a tinted, lopsided vase. It was half-full of liquid and sealed with thin leather and wax. Beside it were three arrows wrapped in dingy frayed gauze. “What’s in the jar?”

“Poison.”

“If there
were
dragons, they’re long gone by now. What’s this?” Tristan jerked his head toward what looked like a horn wrapped in leather cords. It had a familiar shape—like the fang he’d retrieved from Ireland, only five times the size. The one that made Dorian so angry when he tried giving it to her. The one he’d used as a murder weapon in attempt to kill a man from her village.

Maybe this trial was about Karma.

This fang is more powerful than the one you encountered, but has similar residual qualities,
Molajah confirmed.
In fact, if it wasn’t for that fang, the surrounding trees might have had this place torn apart by now.

“They say it’s an incisor.” Shaely shrugged. “Can you imagine how big that dragon would have been to have a tooth that large?”

Tristan didn’t want to think of it. They continued along the displays.

“The elders say that so long as one dragon lives, the world will be cursed.”

“Cursed how?”

“Disease, starvation, evil in our hearts....”

“And you seriously believe this?”

Shaely nodded. “I come from generations of Dragon Slayers.”

“So what? I come from Florida!”

“This is serious!” she chided. “It’s what we train for.”

“Then, why not go after all the little Chinese water dragons? What about the bearded dragons, or the komodo dragons?”

“Now you’re just getting silly. They aren’t the real thing.”

“Well hell, Shaely!” Tristan took a breath to calm down. “Why on Earth would anyone in their right mind think I’m the real thing?”

“And that’s all you have to say when they have you on trial. No one wants to murder anyone.”

Tristan clenched his teeth and Molajah shook his head in warning.

They continued through the room, stopping at a pedestal with a pile of polished gold nuggets. “Let me guess. Dragon loot?” Even as he said it, he noticed the gems placed throughout the stash—felt the pulse of power and made a quick count: six.