Bright Star (16 page)

“Can’t you untie yourself?” Jackson asked, hoping his voice had not betrayed his frustration. His ability to subdue her surprised him. That surprise was only surpassed by the knowledge that his bindings had actually held her. He’d accepted she was stronger than he, but he’d been willing to take the risk. Still he suspected Rush had something to do with his ability to restrain her that night. He wondered if he could even release her now.

But he knew Rush was trying to trust him. Jackson needed, more than anything, to be worthy of that trust. Letting her go after he’d gone through all of this trouble to keep her bound would make him look like a fool.

“You have to do it. Untie me,” She pleaded. She begged. Her eyes were now a warming clear blue—the color of a tropical sea. They did not burn through him as they did when she was allowed to use her High Energy. Without the surreal glow, she looked young and vulnerable. Her burnished locks fell against her apple blossom cheeks. Her breasts shined as pale half moons over her white bodice.

Bright Star followed his gaze down to her chest and quickly covered herself. A rustle like wind pressed material up on her chest. Then she seemed to affix a smile to her face and looked up at him again. She willed her clothes away.

The Shift, minor though it was, sapped what Energy she had left. She sagged against her restraints. Her body was a cream white, rounded pastry presented for Jackson’s slow consumption.

“Untie me,” Her lips barely moved, pink and supple, they opened like watered petals over the words. “Please.”

Jackson’s resolve was shaken by the naïve sigh or the broken slant of her head on her slender neck. He couldn’t hold himself firm against the dim but fighting light in her eye. He stepped toward her again and instantly felt a crackle like a feeding flame. It was a warning. The universe was telling him not to let her go. Jackson was not heeding the warning. He began undoing the enchanted leather straps at her ankles. After they were unbound, he stood close to her as he unfastened the straps at each of her wrists. Her lips parted and he could feel her breath brush his cheek.

Jackson took a step back to give her room. Regretfully, he found she didn’t need it. As soon as her bonds were released her eyes blazed turquoise heat at him and her feet left the ground. It was as if she were a fairy or a pixie hovering naked before him and smiling an otherworldly smile. Her High Energy radiated powerfully from her body, and Jackson was a fool. Jackson’s mouth went dry. He could do little more than blink.

“Thank you,” she said with a girlish giggle then disappeared.

Jackson heard the giggle down the hall. He rushed out. There she was, floating down the foyer, and placing divine fingertips to the petals of devout flowers with white and yellow blossoms lined against the walls. Jackson had never seen the flowers before; he couldn’t reason through the fact that each seemed to have a displaced Energy inside and that they offered her deference. Flowers. Followers.

He trailed her gliding form. Her body was masked to him by what looked like either thin material or smoke swirling around her. Jackson was hypnotized by the substance until he realized with horror that each time she passed one of the places he had hidden a knife, it found itself free and levitating. The blades gleamed as the followed her like heat seeking missiles. Jackson felt his stomach start to flutter in anticipation, then drop as it would if he had fallen a great distance. He started to run.

Bright Star floated into the den where each knife, with the force of a cannon, shot through the air, mounting her against a bare wall.

Object

“What is it going to take?” Jackson demanded.

“What do you mean?” Her large eyes blinked patiently at him.

“What is it going to take for you to stop doing this, Bright Star?”

“Rush will have to accept his fate.” She said this as if those were the most natural words to ever come out of a person’s mouth. She said it in such a way—with a maternal and patient glance—that Jackson almost felt silly and childish for not knowing the answer already.

“Yes,” he yelled, shaking the insecurity from his mind; focusing. “You’ve said as much, but what does that mean? What will he have to do to assure you that he has done something as lofty as ‘accept his fate?’ He’s saved
you
time and time again.”

Bright Star didn’t answer readily. Instead, she leaned back against the counter and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, it was as if Jackson had opened his eyes as well. He looked around him. They were both seated on the shallow ledge of a cliff. Really, it was a small shelf in the rock face. Their perch overlooked crystal blue waters to the right that stretched out as far as the eye could see. As he remarked on the view to his left, Jackson gasped once more. They could almost see the entire luminous green island. The pristine sugar sand beach was lightly sprinkled with people and speedboats. There were shops and open-air restaurants lined on the shore. Obviously wealthy vacationers slowly strolled on the sand with wide brimmed hats, sunglasses, and vibrantly hued swimsuits.

The sun and wind touched his face in a warm caress. A sky that had been the only thing he’d ever seen bluer than Bright Star’s eyes presented a backdrop to the breathtaking scene. The sound of cawing birds, the smell of fresh salt and surf told him he had truly been transported.

“Paradise.” Bright Star reflected his thoughts in her word.

“Yes,” Jackson could only agree.

“Only one mile inland… just there,” she raised a slender arm and pointed beyond the stretch of small, tidy and expensive boutique restaurants and bars to a verdant forest sprinkled with white, yellow and red blossoms. “You see?”

Jackson saw the tops of hills cluttered with dry and brittle thatch roofs. He couldn’t see any people, but it was certain that was where the indigenous lived. Not the sleek and carefree set of supermodels with their wealthy sycophants promenading carefully along the beachfront.

“Look at this beach,” her voice betrayed a sad serenity. “I had never in life seen anything so beautiful. But look up there, in the mountains and in the thick, primal jungle. That is where he left me. Up there, white skin is equated with evil. Red hair—mine had changed from brown to red after Rush laid his hands on my head—was considered a reason to smother the life from newborns. Up there, women accept their lots as the bringers of destruction. When crops fail, they are blamed. When storms ravage the island they believe it’s because of a female’s sin. The women cut themselves and curse Her name. They slice their cheeks and arms and thighs. Some slice their stomachs, expecting and welcoming the suffering.”

“This is where Rush sent you.” Jackson’s voice was disembodied.

She responded only with a curt nod.

“How long were you here?” he breathed, wanting more than anything for her to tell him of her experience in the years before he found her on that rooftop.

“Two years,” she answered with a slow and sad smile. She repeated it as if she couldn’t believe it herself, “Two years.”

“He told me that… that he left you in this place without any money, any identification, any clothes even. He left you here to die.”

“He did,” Bright Star agreed. “But, though this island is small and remote, even the interior has been touched by our brand of civilization. It didn’t matter what they believed about me or my kind. They didn’t apply their rules to me because I was obviously foreign. All they could see was that there would be trouble if harm came to me. They wouldn’t touch me. Instead, the men fashioned gloves for their women before they allowed them put their hands on me. Then they wrapped me in a rough fabric made of dried leaves, and dropped me in the entrance to the Magnussand Golf and Racket Club.” She gestured with her head and Jackson made out a white, Grecian building that appeared to be right on the northern shore of the island.

“There’s one of those everywhere,” Jackson kidded although his voice seemed awkward even to his own ears.

“Yep,” she returned. “I was given clothes and questioned as to how I got there.”

“What did you tell them?” Jackson asked, transfixed by the calm she exuded as she told this tale.

“Nothing,” she answered, gradually turning to him to possess him with her eyes.

“Nothing?” he swallowed.

“Nothing,” she repeated. “Instead, I remembered where Jacob left me. I remembered that spot and I knew—knew with all my heart—that he left me there for a reason. They couldn’t talk to me. They couldn’t cajole me. They couldn’t force me. They couldn’t do anything that would make me give him up. Jackson,” she said his name to make sure he was listening though there had never been a chance that he would not have listened. “Jackson, I was so caught up in worry that he would find out I had gone, that I wasn’t where he left me. I… I…”

“What did you do?” Jackson prodded gently, knowing that she wanted to share this story with him.

“I asked them to take me back to the village.”

“But they wouldn’t,” he guessed.

“No,” she shook her head. “No, they wouldn’t. I could have had a plane ticket or yacht ride to any destination in the world, but no one would take me two miles back up that mountain. I had to make my way there on my own.” She squinted her eyes and peered up at the cloudless sky. “What do you think the villagers did when I went back?”

“Accepted you with open arms?” Jackson responded with some cheek.

She looked down at her hands, small and white, playing over each other in her lap. “They thought I had come back to bring death to them. The men cursed their own cowardice in ever allowing me to go down the mountain alive the first time. The women tried to make me leave. They worried and fretted over me. They even showed me a picture carved into an opalescent ancient stone of a goddess who, amazingly, looked as I should have. They showed me the person Rush had seen when he looked at me. Jackson, she
was
me. She was their Goddess of Destruction. But…” she choked on her words.

Jackson reached out an arm to hang inelegantly over her shoulders.

“But I am not Destruction. And I told them,” she continued. “I was not destruction. I was nothing but… a devotee. I wouldn’t leave, Jackson. The need to make them see overwhelmed all else. They did awful things to me, but I would not leave.

“Some wanted to sacrifice me, but none could muster the courage. They feared me and I could not understand why. All I knew was that their fear had been steeped in their religion, in this belief. So I did the only thing I could. I asked them to teach me this prophecy they feared. I asked them to speak of their gods to me and to tell me of that alabaster figure with burning blue eyes and bright red hair.

“They dressed me as she.” Bright Star stood on the ledge then and raised her palms to the sky at her side. In milliseconds she was naked, then garbed in something Jackson could only describe as tribal. Much of her pale legs, arms and torso were exposed. Her hair was covered with a three foot tall headdress of palm and mango leaves, sharp gray feathers, and spring blooms. Her eyes were startling, even more unnatural looking as they were outlined in black—charred bark. Flexible olive and orange fronds were woven together into a flaming bodice that curved over her breasts and unfurled towards her hips, but did not cover her back. It was held in place by a sweet smelling sap. The same woven leaves folded up and over her soft mound and behind her to cover her plump bottom, adhered there by the same sap, as they did not cover her hips. Blossoms were linked and twined around her wrists and ankles. “Then they told me her story.

“They told me that she was the goddess Burn. Burn had been born as a gift to the god Guard who had spent an eternity protecting the island. Because she had been born for him and of him, Burn longed for Guard with an intensity that transcended lust and even love. He held a part of her soul within him. Burn spent that life from childhood to womanhood working to make herself into all that Guard wanted. She watched him with women and changed her hair to that which he liked. She changed her childish body to that which he liked. She changed her eyes and nose and lips, to all of those to which he had shown partiality. After years of work, she knew herself to embody every physical desire Guard had ever harbored. Still, he showed no interest in her.