Freeks

by Amanda Hocking

  And then I saw him. Coming in between the trailers with blood staining his clothes, Gideon had returned, and he was alone.

  14. divination

  Everyone kept their distance, silently watching Gideon, as if he’d become contagious, and if you went near him, what happened to Seth would happen to you too.

  My mom must’ve been watching for him from inside the Winnebago, because she ran out toward him, her shawl billowing out behind her.

  “How is he?” Mom asked, her voice soft but desperate.

  “It’s not good.” Gideon took a deep breath and spoke loud enough so everyone would be able to hear him. “Seth is alive, but … Carrie’s staying with him, and I think she should be up there for as long as he is.”

  “Does that mean he doesn’t have very long?” Hutch asked.

  Gideon rubbed his forehead. “I don’t know.”

  “Did Seth say what happened?” Betty asked, frowning through her beard.

  “Did they rule out the tigers yet?” Zeke asked. “Doug has been insisting it’s my tigers, but you know that it can’t be.”

  Gideon held up his hand, silencing everyone. “I will be out to talk to all of you, but can you give me a few minutes to get cleaned up?”

  “Back up, everyone,” Brendon commanded. “We’ll have a meeting before the carnival starts. Go about your business.”

  Mom put her hand on Gideon’s back and walked with him into his trailer. I’d been cleaning the side of it, but I walked closer to the back door, where their words could travel through the screen door.

  “Lyanka, love, will you get me your cards?” Gideon asked.

  “You want me to do a reading?” my mom asked.

  “If you can, please,” Gideon said, and there was a desperation in his voice that terrified me.

  “Yes, of course. I’ll be right back.”

  I took a step back, so I was more hidden around the corner of Gideon’s trailer, and watched as my mom darted out of the trailer. As she walked across the campsite to our Winnebago, she pulled her shawl more tightly around her, as if keeping out a chill only she could feel.

  If I tried to talk to Gideon while my mom was there, she’d only tell me to leave him be and that he needed his rest. And I knew she was right, but I couldn’t shake the image of Seth, the darkness of his blood covering him. I had to find out what happened.

  Slowly, I climbed up the steps of Gideon’s trailer. The only light came from the morning sun streaming in through his dusty curtains. He sat hunched over the table with one hand buried in his black hair, still in his bloodied clothes. A half-empty glass sat beside a bottle of whisky next to his hand.

  I pushed open the screen door without knocking, and Gideon lifted his head to look back at me. Outside, he’d kept his eyes down, but now he was looking right at me so I could see them—how the light blue had gone so dark, they were almost black.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  He looked away, but it was too late. “It’s nothing.”

  “Gideon, I saw it in your eyes, and I saw Seth before he was taken to the hospital.” I stepped closer to him. “What happened?”

  “He couldn’t speak,” Gideon said finally. “But I read his mind.”

  “And?” I pressed when he didn’t go on.

  “It was mostly pain, blurred images. But whatever hurt him, it wasn’t human.”

  My heart dropped, even though I’d known it all along. Having my fears confirmed didn’t make me feel any better, though.

  “What was it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.” Gideon paused to take a long drink from his glass. “It was all claws and fangs and glowing eyes. But there was nothing clear. When I see someone’s thoughts, it’s not like a video camera replaying a movie. It’s all filtered through that person’s emotions and prejudices.”

  He looked back at me then. “So, it’s what Seth perceived, not necessarily what it actually was.”

  “So what does that mean?” I asked.

  He sighed. “It means that it could’ve been anything that attacked Seth.”

  The screen door creaked behind me, making me jump, and Mom brushed past me, her deck of tarot cards in her hand. She didn’t look at me, but she didn’t tell me to leave either, so I decided to stay.

  “Are you okay?” Mom asked, gently touching Gideon’s forehead, as if he had the flu instead of the ability to read people’s minds and see their most horrific memories.

  “I’m all right.” He stood up rather abruptly. “I should get changed before we do the reading.”

  Mom nodded and watched Gideon until he disappeared into his bedroom at the far end of the trailer. Then she took a fortifying breath and sat down at the table. With the cards in her hands, she began to shuffle them slowly, but her gaze rested on me.

  “How are you doing, qamari?”

  I shrugged, unsure of how to answer. “I’m okay.”

  “I’m sorry about last night,” Mom said, referring to her outburst before everything had happened with Seth. Her cheeks reddened slightly with shame, and she lowered her eyes so her dark lashes rested on her cheeks.

  “It’s okay.” I tried to ease her worries. “I understand.”

  “It’s not okay, Mara,” she said harshly, and shook her head, then she looked back up at me. “But I’ll do better. I promise you. Things will get better.”

  I forced a smile. “I know.”

  “And I’m sorry that you found Seth like you did this morning.” She set the cards aside. “I know the two of you were friends.”

  Seth had been traveling with us for five years now, so we’d practically grown up together. Two summers ago, we’d briefly tried our hand at dating and exchanged a few kisses, but it felt wrong to me, like dating my brother. But Seth had always been kind to me, and quick to help anyone who needed it.

  I’d often thought of him as a gentle giant, and I could still remember the strength of his arms when he had pulled me to him for a kiss. He could’ve crushed me if he’d wanted to, but I’d never felt anything but safe with him.

  And something had attacked him, something strong enough to take him down and leave him so weak he could barely squeeze my hand.

  “All right,” Gideon said as he came back, pulling me from my thoughts. “Shall we do the reading, then?”

  He sat down across from my mom, and I felt weird just standing and gawking at them, so I sat down in the chair beside my mom. I was careful to be as quiet as possible, because if I proved to be a distraction, I knew they would send me away.

  “It’s been so long since I’ve done a reading for you,” Mom mused as she handed Gideon the deck. Whenever she did readings, she always made sure her clients handled them first. She said they needed to get a feel for the cards, and the cards needed to get a feel for them.

  “It has been,” Gideon admitted.

  Years ago, before the readings had begun taking their toll on my mother, she would do readings for him often, getting a sense of where we should go and helping make decisions for the carnival. But once Gideon saw how badly they affected her, he’d stopped.

  “What kind of spread did you have in mind?” Mom asked as he shuffled the cards.

  “Just a simple three-card one.”

  “Do you know what you want to ask?” Mom asked.

  He nodded. “I have a question in mind.”

  “You don’t wish to share with me?” she asked, trying to keep the pain from her voice.

  He set the deck in front of her. “Not this time, love, if that’s all right.”

  “If it’s what you wish.”

  She broke the deck three times, so it sat in three piles before her. With a three-card spread, the first card would represent the past, the middle card the present, and the final card the future.

  Mom took a card from the first deck, and laid it in front of Gideon. It depicted a full moon in a dark purple sky, shining above a few trees. Hidden in the very bottom corner of the card was a white wolf, right above the name of
the card—The Moon.

  The second card my mom flipped over was upside down, so it faced her, which meant it was in the reverse position. It showed a man draped in robes of gold and purple, holding a ball of lightning above his head—The Magician.

  The final card she turned over, she saw it before Gideon did, and I heard her breath catch in her throat. It showed a skeleton in a black robe riding a white horse over a graveyard—Death.

  Mom folded her hands before her, staring down at the cards. “Do you know what the cards mean, or shall I do the reading?”

  “Do your reading.” Gideon leaned back in his chair. “I want to know what you’re sensing.”

  “I’m not sensing as much as I’d like, but I’ll do my best.” Mom tapped the first card with her long fingers. “The Moon in your past represents a confusing, dark time. You may not have always understood your actions, and the world may have put a heavy burden on your shoulders.

  “On its own, it means nothing negative,” she continued, moving her fingers to the next card. “But when paired with the Magician, it means that someone or something destructive is manipulating your choices, and you may pay a price.”

  Her shawl had slipped off her shoulder, revealing the large sun she had tattooed on her dark skin.

  “The Magician is a man of great power and talent, with the ability to cross between the spirit world and the world of humanity, but in reverse, it represents a blockage of that path,” Mom went on. “And if the Magician is not careful, he can lose everything that matters to him.

  “Death, as you know, does not usually mean death,” she said, but she didn’t touch this card. She’d tapped the first two, but this time, instead, she pulled her shawl up around her again. “It simply means that something is coming to an end. It can be a positive, that the darkness and financial loss that have plagued us these last few months might be lifted.”

  Gideon stared thoughtfully at the cards for a moment, then asked, “Do you get any other senses about what it all means?”

  “It’s not clear, Gideon. There’s something … here.” She gestured widely around us, referring to Caudry as a whole. “I think that’s why my headache was so bad before I’d hardly even done any readings. There’s another energy fogging everything up.”

  “So you can’t get a good sense of things?” he asked.

  She shook her head grimly. “No. I’m sorry.”

  “No, it’s all right, love,” he brushed it off, and continued staring down at the cards.

  “Do you feel it too?” I asked.

  “What?” He looked up at me, as if he’d forgotten I was there.

  “Mom said she’s feeling foggy. What about you?” I asked.

  He leaned back in his seat again. “I’m definitely getting a weird energy here, but I’m not sure if ‘foggy’ is how I’d describe it.”

  “Then how would you?” I pressed.

  “Do you know what a divining rod is?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “My grandfather used to use one,” Gideon explained. “He swore by it, though he swore by a lot of things I’m not so sure of. He would use a stick branched out in the shape of a Y, and that would be the divining rod.

  “Then he’d grab on to each end of the Y and walk into fields,” he continued. “The idea is that the rod would be able to sense water or metal or oil or whatever other worthy substance it was searching for.”

  “Did it?” I asked.

  Gideon nodded. “Sometimes, yeah, he did discover something of value. And sometimes it works like that for me.”

  “What does?”

  “It’s how I was able to find Lyanka.” He pointed to my mom, a small smile playing on his lips. “And all the other special people in the sideshow. I’d get a sense about them. Just something inside, and I knew that they were like me. Like us. So I’d ask them to join.”

  I crinkled my forehead. “So you’re, like, a supernatural divining rod?”

  “Something like that,” he said, then wagged his fingers in the air. “Except now, I seem to be getting false positives everywhere.”

  “How can you be sure?” I asked. “Maybe everyone here is secretly supernatural.”

  “That I might consider, but I’m getting senses from things that certainly aren’t—like a rock or a bush or the tigers or Hutch,” Gideon elaborated. “The rock and the bush, maybe something had rubbed off on them, but certainly, the tigers and Hutch didn’t suddenly gain some kind of power in the last twenty-four hours.”

  “Do you think the tigers had something to do with this?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.” Gideon shook his head. “There’s something strange about this town. Maybe that’s making the tigers act crazy.”

  “There is something dark here,” Mom said.

  Gideon stood up, startling both my mom and me. “And it’s about time I got to the bottom of it.”

  “Where are you going?” Mom asked.

  “To see Leonid Murphy.”

  15. blue moon

  For the second day in a row, I found myself in Gideon’s beat-up truck on the short ride from our campsite at the carnival on the outskirts of town to Caudry town proper. This time, Luka had been enlisted to join us, and I sat between him and Gideon.

  Whenever Gideon went to deal with someone who might be trouble—like a vendor who refused to pay us our dues or an unsavory biker gang that kept messing with Roxie and Carrie at the peep show—he brought along Seth and Luka with him. Seth because he was so strong, and Luka because he healed so quickly, he could handle just about anything.

  While I knew I wouldn’t be much of a replacement for Seth, I wanted to help. Truthfully, I think Gideon let me tag along on the off chance that I sensed something he missed, that I could pick up things like my mom did.

  We drove through Caudry until we reached the other side, driving on a wide road lined with cypresses and willows until we reached a building nestled right up against the swamp. The porch out front looked like it had seen better days, but the fresh coat of navy blue paint and new windows suggested that it was in the process of being fixed up.

  Along the top was a sign that looked brand-new, and the words Blue Moon Bar & Grill were written in big bold letters next to a painting of a crescent moon.

  “This is it?” I asked as Gideon parked in front of it.

  “This is a restaurant,” Luka said, pointing out the obvious. “Leonid can’t live here.”

  “Well, this is the address he gave me.” Gideon picked up the tattered postcard from the dashboard.

  The front showed an alligator, its mouth wide open and ready to snap down and take a bite. The back had Leonid’s chicken scratch, promising us riches if we came to Caudry. He tapped the address Leonid had scrawled on it—867 Brawley Boulevard, and the numbers on the side of the building were printed clearly as 867.

  “He told me to look him up when I came into town,” Gideon added.

  “I guess we should check it out, then,” I said, since there didn’t seem to be any other way to find Leonid, and he was our only real connection to this town.

  A sign on the window had the word CLOSED in bold red letters, but that didn’t stop Gideon. He gave the door a good tug and it opened, so we went inside.

  The place was dark, dimly lit by a few bulbs over the bar, and it appeared about the same as it had on the outside—newer tables and vintage artwork in shiny frames, but the floors were gray and warped. The bar in the back had a marble countertop, but the stools in front were worn and faded. The whole place felt as if it was in mid-renovation.

  The swinging doors to the kitchen pushed open and a man came through, holding a dishrag in his hands. He was tall, with a full head of thick wavy hair sprinkled with hints of silver. His skin was the color of dark caramel, and the lines around his eyes and mouth suggested he was in his early forties.

  “We’re closed,” he said, and his voiced rumbled with a strong Latino accent. “We open at four on Sundays, so if you come back in two hours, I
’ll be happy to seat you.”

  “Thank you, but we’re not here to eat,” Gideon explained. “We’re looking for a friend.”

  The man had been walking toward us, but he stopped and tilted his head. “Someone who works here?”

  “I don’t know, actually. This is the address he gave me.” Gideon gestured to the restaurant. “He’s called Leonid Murphy.”

  “Leonid?” An odd smile spread out across the man’s face. “There’s a small apartment just above the bar, and Leonid rents it from us. If you go around to the south side, you’ll find a staircase alongside the building that leads up to it.”

  “Thank you.” Gideon offered him a small wave, and we started making our exit.

  “Are you with the carnival, then?” the man called after us, stopping us just before we reached the door.

  Gideon paused for a moment, then turned back to face him. “Yeah, I’m Gideon Davorin. I run it, actually.” He motioned to me, then Luka. “This is Mara Beznik, and Luka Zajíček. They work there too.”

  “I’m Julian Alvarado.” He put his hand to his chest, and my mind instantly flashed to Gabe. His name was Alvarado, and in a town this size, I had to wonder if they were related. “This is my place.

  “I’ve heard a lot of great things about the carnival, but I haven’t been out to see it yet,” Julian went on, and I wondered if the good things he’d heard had come from Gabe. Had he spoken of me? “The restaurant keeps me busy.”

  “I would imagine,” Gideon replied with an uneasy smile.

  “But listen, if you guys or any of the carnival workers want to stop out here, you can have a drink on the house.” Julian pointed to the bar in the back. “It’s always great to have entertainers like you in Caudry. It breathes a bit of life into the old town.”

  Gideon thanked him again, and I hurried outside before Julian said anything more. He’d seemed nice enough, but I was terrified that Julian may be Gabe’s father and that he could make a connection I didn’t want him to make. If Gabe had mentioned me by name, “Mara” was uncommon enough that Julian would figure out that I was part of the carnival.