1 Chapter 1: The Talented Marcus

"Hey! Hey boy! Wake up!" Someone yelled from far away. The manager? No not this early. Probably just another visitor. Marcus drifted slowly back to sleep...

"EEEEEEEP!" Marcus jumped so high he almost hit the ceiling. He lifted his head to look at his latest tormentor. The figure was holding an air horn, which most likely woke him up. He couldn't see his face because of the sun rising behind him..

Funny, though Marcus, Why is the sun moving like that? Then it dawned on him.

"No! No no no no no no no!" Marcus leaped up and bolted to the bars. Yea moving. He was on a boat in the middle of the sea. Marcus hated the ocean. It was like a dark cavern waiting till you fell in its void so it could drown you. He knew how to swim, but its what was in the water that he was afraid of. Fish. In his opinion all fish were only good as food, sometimes.

Marcus was upset about the move. He was just in China the night before during the last show. At the end of it he sat back with the crew and had his supper. Although he remembers it tasting sort of off, he ignored it. Normally Marcus would enjoy moving, it gave him freedom from the tyrant visitors. All those people are so dumb coming to these "freak" shows.

If I wasn't in it, the entire show would be fake! He thought.

Marcus looked wearily toward the front of the cage, to where a little man in a funny outfit was leaning against the bars. The manager A.K.A. the ringleader of their so called circus.

"Eh, sorry bout' dat! I was tryin to get ya outta your snooze. Although its probably mah fault you was sleepin, seein as I put some sleeping medicine in your food last night."

"You drugged me? But everyone got their food from the same pan!" Marcus cried.

"Ehhh, not exactly. As soon as you got some and were knocked out we pulled up the real food so we didn't go nighty night too. Someone had to put everything on the ship. And well you don't seen much of the sea-faring type I suppose you would call it." Tom gave me one of his audience winks.

"How can I trust you when you don't tell me what your going to do next? Next thing you might tell me is that you lost a bet and now im going away... forever!" Marcus was furious.

"Well anyways" Tom cut him off, "Im gonna need more manpower when we pull into port. Oh and don't piss off the other fishing boats this time either!"

"Fine." Marcus replied the tiredness and sadness wasn't hard to make out.

Tom stopped and sat there a moment, "I know its been tough for ya fluffy but look on the bright side, ya got friends sort of a family and plenty time to just hang around. Its another day to live life. I would encourage you to leave but it's a harsh world out there. Things change and so do people. Come on fluffy, time to get rollin. Grab your extra set of keys and lets get a move on!"

Marcus was awestruck, "Really Tom? Lost your keys again?"

"Eh!" Tom yelled back, "I'm human, I make mistakes!"

Marcus sighed. He always had an extra set of keys in the back if Tom forgets his. Before Marcus grabbed the keys he looked at his tallies on the wall, one for every time the manager forgot something important. Fifty three marked the current number. Marcus had made a promise that fifty five mistakes meant he wasn't truly cared for, thus he would leave.

He had the feeling of leaving a while ago, back when Tom messed up for the tenth time. Marcus' ear twitched as it did when he sensed something such as a visitor or an animal near him.

"Come on fuzzy! We don't have all day! Hurry up!" Tom yelled.

Marcus hated the nickname fuzzy. It made him feel like Tom was a visitor instead of his friend.

"For the record," Marcus replied sharply, "You may be the boss of me, literally, but you don't control me. Nobody owns me."

Tom just smiled and replied, "You sayin my star attraction can just get up and leave? No remorse? No thought? Just get up and walk away whenever he wants? Is that right?"

Marcus suddenly grew angry and an unexplainable rage came upon him. Before he did something he would regret he caught himself and said through gritted teeth, "I'm saying, I stay here for only two reasons and two only! Because I have nowhere else to go, and because I respect you." Marcus left out the somewhat at the end, the conversation was tense enough as it was. With that Marcus hopped out of his cage and stormed off, tail up and dignified.

Marcus was content as a freak in Tom's sideshow. He had no human friends or family that he could recall after that one wretched day seven years before. He was a tall youth with dirty blond hair, brown eyes, and a few distinct features of that of a wolf. He had the ears, tail, and claws. But no matter how hard he tried he could never muster up a howl. He had been in the "circus" for almost six years. Marcus joined when he was eight years old. Marcus knew only the basic information about who or what he was.

Marcus only knew that he was originally born in the United States of America, but traveled with his parents during a business trip to Japan. He never found out why they went on the trip but I cost them their lives. They died when an oil processing plant near their hotel caught fire and exploded. If emergency vehicles would have arrived sooner they could have prevented the mile wide explosion. The hour of the explosion, Marcus was at school three miles away. He was experimenting with his newfound secret, his abilities and looks of a wolf. Marcus was able to turn his abnormalities of a wolf back to their original form whenever he wanted, such as when his parents were around.

When rescuers came searching the building after the explosion they found him huddled in a closet asleep and unaware of his situation he was now in. He wasn't told that his parents were dead or more likely incinerated, he was told he had to go to a special school. At the orphanage he stayed for little under a year before learning what happened and left. That's when he met Tom. He was walking when a circus appeared to be preforming in the area. When he waited until after the show to see the ringleader. He too was an American like Marcus and his parents. When they got talking Marcus started to show him his "magic" tricks. Tom gave him an offer then and there to be part of the show. Marcus accepted whole heartedly.

Marcus would like talking to the animals there. Tom arranged the cages in every show so that he was always next to the preforming cats, dogs ,and the occasional wolf, used instead of lions to train. The animals were the closest thing he had to a family. He was content with them and never wanted to start a day without saying good morning or giving them a pat on the head. They always loved Marcus right back, they accepted him as one of them.

"So Tom." Marcus went up to the manager to speak, "Where is the next show going to take place at? Hong Kong? Beijing?" Marcus was curious just as long as it wasn't...

"Well fuzzy," Tom replied, "We are going to a new area, some place the public has yet so see such a magnificent gathering of performers."

Marcus' stomach dropped, and it wasn't the nickname fuzzy or because he had just eaten two pounds of meat. He had that dreading feeling, like whenever he looked at the ocean.

"Yes, fuzzy. Were headed for good old Japan." Tom said with a smile.

Marcus felt sick. His head was active with alarms going off and painful memories flooding back to him. Japan, the place he left for the life he has now. Japan, the one place that reminds him of how much he missed his parents every day. He thought that maybe he could get by, maybe he could get through this without any mishap of any sort. Everything changed once they docked in Japan, for the worse.