by Marx, J. A.
Rakshasa’s prototype? His fists clenched at thoughts of his mentor. Vétis had done all the work and, therefore, deserved all the glory.
Pangs of jealousy sparked suspicion. Why had Grand Master not boarded the Nave with the Lux council of magisters? Had he foreseen the mutiny and the bomb but not told Vétis?
Had he attempted to dispose of me?
Bitterness helped him see with clarity that fate had marooned him on this island … alone with the chosen one. Just as they were controlling Riki’s lethal animosity toward these males, the Forces of the Air were unlocking a gateway of opportunity for Vétis. He must execute his duties with perfection.
The screen door opened again, and the mongrels bantered with Riki. She accepted their invitation to a beach party.
Vétis bit his tongue against a stream of profanities. Riki knew nothing about their brand of party. Nor was she accustomed to laziness, a pursuit at which Americans excelled.
Let their lifestyle disgust her, he prayed.
Clothed in trunks, the mongrels led Riki off the deck—four hormonal toads in the shadow of Destiny’s empress.
She was going by an alias, as she’d been trained. This pleased Vétis, especially given her significance in his global project. He had insisted she and her parents know nothing of her calling. If he had informed her of her importance, would that have further empowered her to hold out against worldly infection? To eliminate these juvenile dogs without … flirting with the prey?
No. Forces of the Air had guided my decision for secrecy and now seek to test Riki.
When the five disappeared down the trail and into a tree tunnel, Vétis crawled out from beneath the mahogany deck. He hurled venomous prayers in their direction to poison all hedonistic influences.
Slinking into the bungalow, he scoffed at the Spartan dwelling, which left little to steal that wouldn’t be missed. Following the hallway to its end, he entered the sleeping chamber. A bunk bed on the right had an open duffle bag on each mattress and undergarments strewn like items at a charity deposit. The second set of bunks had been neatly kept, deserving of his approval.
Moving to the dresser between the two, he read the labels on a collection of bottles. Vitamins. Minerals. He proceeded to the edge of the unkempt bunks and stroked the guitar case on the upper mattress. Music, a universal tongue Riki knew well. Vétis had allowed her to perform under a false identity aboard the Nave. He’d also appointed a bodyguard to ensure no Nave client spoiled the attribute essential to her destined role. Her virginity remained intact.
Amply familiarized with the Americans via their belongings, Vétis returned to the living room. He came across a built-in shelf with books on tropical plants and birds and … the Holy Scriptures. Additional religious paraphernalia gave his spirit an ulcer.
Confidence drained from his bones. They were on enemy turf—the island anchored in superstitions that diametrically opposed Lux ideology.
He had planned to inoculate Riki against the futility of religion during Phase II. The amount of resources poured into this project was too great for him to tolerate anything less than perfection in Riki Hammad. She must survive the next three days until the bonding ceremony that would align her soul with the Left-Hand Path.
Vétis declared war on the mongrels.
Stealing what he needed from the kitchen, he abandoned the bungalow. He snatched the lonely sandal off the deck then hurried to chaperone the party.
No turning back. He resolved to launch Phase II at the appointed time. He would then give Riki command over the trained legion, and together they would dethrone Rakshasa.
Strolling down the hard-packed beach, Hope had an urge to run, swim, climb … but her aching head convinced her not to. Besides, she didn’t want to embarrass herself again and excite the alpha dog who evidently considered her health his responsibility.
The animated Ohioans clowned around in the waves. Isaac walked on his hands. Akiko wrestled Jase in the water. Sabio plowed into all of them. Uninhibited, easygoing, pranksters, yet civil.
Frightened by her own growing interest, Hope gathered an assortment of seashells and laid low in the shade of the bordering date palms.
Time paused … her mind’s eye captured the ghostly silhouette, hovering over her. Speaking. The image disappeared before she could fully grasp it. Eyes shut, she strained to visualize it again.
A different presence stirred her. She opened her eyes to the musician seated cross-legged with a brown bucket at his knee. How long had he been watching her?
“What’s up, sand princess?” Jase flicked one of her seashells, beguiling her with his smile and jovial mood.
“I’ve collected party souvenirs lest I forget this event come morning.” Did this social interaction feel as foreign to him as it did to her? “I thought Sabio drowned you.”
“Not yet.” He stood with the bucket. “Wanna build a sandcastle?”
She couldn’t deny feeling welcomed. “Challenge accepted.” Selecting a couple of shells for ornamentation, she started to rise.
Jase’s opened hand blocked her. The look in his eyes seemed harmless.
They’re all so … accommodating. Wanting his company more than she felt safe admitting, Hope let the musician pull her up.
Jase led her to a spot down shore where he dumped plastic shovels and molds out of the bucket. “I found this stuff in the bungalow. Pretty sweet, huh?”
“Sweet.” While contemplating his use of the word, she saw a plastic bag of red globs land on one of the molds. “What’s that?”
He scooped it up. “Swedish Fish.”
As in, lures? “Fish bait from Sweden?”
Laughing, he brushed the sand off his hand and plucked a glob from the bag. He held it above his upturned face. “Human fish bait.” And dropped it in his mouth. Chewed it up.
She gasped.
He held out the open bag. “Want one?”
Disgusting! She took a whiff. No odor. “That’s not fish.”
His amplified laughter launched a hot spell. He picked out a glob and held it toward her. “I take it you’ve never tried Swedish Fish.”
“Negative.” Oh, what the heck. Mimicking his method of ingestion, Hope opened her mouth and let Jase drop the fish in. It wasn’t slimy, as expected. It felt rubbery, squishy. And sugary.
So that’s what made him a smile junkie. Sugar.
Jase carried over bucket loads of moist sand, and she patted it into a compact mass. Settling in opposite her, he clawed at the mound.
“Do you want turrets?” She scraped at their budding masterpiece, enriching the details.
He leaned toward her side. “How is it you’ve built a perfect miniature castle, and my section looks like a Neanderthal’s hovel?”
She chuckled. “Castle building is a salubrious diversion.”
The simper on Jase’s face said he had no idea what salubrious meant. “I bet we’d hang out if we went to the same school.”
If that statement carried a hidden message, she didn’t get it. He seemed trustworthy for a stranger, but Hope hadn’t yet reached a trusting state of mind.
Using a plastic mold, she formed a building at the perimeter of the castle. Their lunch conversation was still nagging at her. “How would you define the faith Sabio talked about?”
“Well.” Jase dug out a moat by hand. “Have you ever walked into your bedroom and had doubts about flipping the light switch?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Then, even though you only saw darkness, you had faith in the switch to supply light. Right?” Bending over, he dipped his lips into the bag and sucked out another fish. “It takes that kind of faith to believe in God.”
Part of Hope wished she’d asked the Ivy Leaguer, who certainly would’ve presented an intellectual answer. Given her headache, however, she welcomed the musician’s peaceful, entertaining explanation.
She finished hollowing out the other side of the moat. “Let’s say you live your whole life having faith in somethin
g unseen, and at the end, the light never comes on. You’ve wasted your energy.”
Jase spit the sticky candy piece into the moat. “Pretend this Swedish Fish has faith that water’s coming. He has faith in me, who he can’t see, to supply it.”
She shaded the fish with a shovel. “He’s suffocating.”
Grabbing the bucket, Jase ran and filled it with ocean. He rushed back and poured some in the moat. “Now he’s satisfied.”
“Not for long. The water is going to evaporate or get absorbed by the sand.”
“Stank! You’re tough.” His laughter put her disturbingly at ease. “If he asks me, his invisible and perfect god, to tank up his faith, I’ll pour on more water. Then he won’t dry up.”
So childlike. Hope arched both eyebrows, groping for a reason to get mad. “That’s the relationship Sabio was talking about?”
“Totally.” Jase rubbed his arm, his gaze surfing the shoreline as if searching for something. “Do you feel that cold breeze?”
Hope fanned herself against an ominous heat wave. “It’s your imagination.”
Again, time paused.
Chapter 10
Breaking free from another fleeting image of the silhouetted man, Hope shook the sand off her hand and plucked a Swede from the bag. Her interest in castle building gave way to dissecting Jase’s animated storytelling. “Why would a perfect God even care about a fishy human?”
“God wants relationship with us, Hope.” He acted too convinced.
She bit off the fish’s head and pressed it to the roof of her mouth. “Perfection wanting imperfection? That’s as ridiculous as darkness and light co-existing.”
“True that.” Jase zipped the plastic bag shut. “All I know is even when I screw up, God still loves me.”
The musician is delusional. She added a building for crazies to their sand village. “What makes you worthy of his attention?”
“Faith.”
“You’re talking in circles.” Stomach gurgling, she abandoned the headless Swede in the moat.
“He understands me like no one else can.” His voice lacked the conviction from earlier. “He came to earth as a human.”
Ah, God morphed from a Martian. “Why?”
“Love.” Jase half-buried the beheaded bait she had discarded. “Someone had to get us out of our mortal mess.”
Mess resonated warmly in her heart, warm like a branding iron. “Did people like him?”
“Some. But his friends deserted him.” Jase formed a turret on the castle’s second level. “Others insulted and abused him. Eventually they killed him.”
“God died. Then what’s the point?”
“It was all part of his plan.”
Nonsense. Wishing her head would stop aching, Hope scoped out the comic bodysurfers a few meters away. Sabio, Akiko, and Isaac evidently got a thrill out of crashing into one another. She lowered a sympathetic gaze to the fish suffocating in the moat.
“His death gave me another chance to live.” Jase’s words pestered her emotions. “He sacrificed himself for me and for you.”
The internal discomfort worsened, but her legs wouldn’t run her away. “No God would sacrifice himself to rescue defective mortals. That’s illogical.”
“My God changes people, Hope. He’s changing me.” Jase inserted the headless, dirty Swede vertically into the topmost part of the castle. “I’m like this messed-up fish. Yet God accepts me. He’s repairing the messes and giving me peace.”
“Peace?” That’s it. Hope saw it in the Ohioans. Close enough to smell, yet beyond her grasp …
A frightening numbness overwhelmed her and melted her concentration. Help me. The plea never made it to her mouth.
Lord Vétis crouched among giant ferns where he could monitor the chosen one. Without field glasses and a listening device, he’d have to burn his energy using extrasensory abilities.
Riki sculpted the sand as if enjoying her idle activity. Where was her aversion to the outside world?
To develop in her a distaste for civilization, he had authorized Max to “employ” her aboard the Nave. Masquerading as a lawyer—his perfunctory profession—Vétis had boarded the vessel to evaluate her prospective cover. Her performance more than pleased him—except for her stage name. She habitually defied her tutors by rejecting the title Destiny had granted.
He shook his head at the stubborn prototype then piled twigs on a flat stone. “Great Forces of the Air, make Riki Hammad ready for her future … with me.”
Opening the matchbook he had picked out of at least twenty in the kitchen drawer, he lit the kindling. He clasped the golden scarab beetle and let passion unleash. His treasured pendant represented reincarnation, power, and protection. Successfully launching Phase II and deposing Rakshasa would guarantee his transcendence into godhood.
Rubbing the beetle between two fingers, he prayed, cursing the spiky-haired mongrel. His whispery chants drifted down shore—
A backlash of energy surged through Vétis’s neck and shoulders. The enemy knocked him flat, every bone on fire. He let go of the beetle and clutched his chest, wheezing.
The childhood sensations that woke him that morning swallowed him again. He relapsed to an adolescent, strapped to a pole behind the orphanage. The barbaric older boys mocked him to his face. They beat him black and purple. But they underestimated his supremacy. Hatred had empowered him to save himself, and he swore they’d die for their crimes.
Vétis wrenched himself out of his paralyzing nightmare and sat up, panting. Vengeance roused, he gunned down the mongrels with a glare. “May Jehovah desert you as he did me.”
No turning back. Gripping the leather sandal, he focused his energy solely on Riki. He conveyed a message she could feel in the physical.
Seeing her legs in front of her proved she hadn’t left, yet Hope felt removed. Distant. Had to be the bump on her head. Perhaps fatigue. Whatever the problem, she couldn’t let this strangeness control her.
A canteen floated her direction, and Isaac appeared next to Jase. “You’re pale. Drink water.”
She willed her hands to grasp the canteen … put it to her lips. A silky stream cooled her throat and her fragmented self reunited enough to perceive the boys’ nosy stares. She’d somehow made another spectacle of herself. The headache. Yes, that stupid lump was what caused the short-lived dysfunction.
Rising, she hoisted up her baggy shorts. “I’m going to sit in the shade for a while.” She stumbled toward her seashell collection under the palms and didn’t chance looking back in case Alpha Dog wanted to examine her.
Perching on a shaded rock overlooking the Cay’s picturesque bay, she took another drink from the canteen and revisited the sandcastle conversation. Jase revealed what the boys had that she did not. Peace. It reflected in each one’s eyes and speech.
I want it.
Beyond that, she didn’t buy into his ludicrous mythology about a self-sacrificing deity. Yet, for argument’s sake … “Suppose God exists.” She looked skyward. “If you are real—”
Pierced in the solar plexus, she screamed and doubled over. The burning prongs abruptly ripped out of her, forcing a sharp gasp. Gawking at her tingling midsection, she saw no holes. No blood. Nothing.
Nobody was around.
The Ohioans were rushing toward her.
Forcing herself to sit erect, Hope stashed her trembling hands beneath her thighs.
Isaac halted a meter in front of her, dripping wet. The other three fanned out behind him. “You okay?”
If her façade of stability held up well, she might disarm any suspicion. “Of course. Why?”
“I thought I heard you scream.” His dissecting gaze handled her like a lab specimen.
Her phony smile was better than no smile. “You worry too much.”
That put a frown on his mug. “It’s time we head back.”
Akiko raised his hand. “I second that.”
Third. The sharp tingling in her midsection diminished steadily but not qui
ck enough.
Climbing off the rock, she accidentally stepped on the canteen she didn’t realize had fallen. A pool of spilt water moistened her fingers as she picked the container off the sand.
Isaac didn’t badger her about the shrieking episode, but his insistence upon escorting her to the path didn’t let her off the hook either. At least walking beside him kept her out from under his mining stare.
“Did you have fun this afternoon?”
“Best party I can remember.” Wiping her damp, sandy fingers off on her shorts, she blamed dehydration for the abdominal attack—the only adequate classification for an experience that eerie.
They moved through the tree tunnel, and the foliage behind them rustled.
Hope glanced over her shoulder and sped up.
After a unanimous vote to return to the bungalow, Akiko helped gather the beach toys. He disapproved of the med tech’s merciful handling of the psych patient. Certain girls knew how to snare a guy’s sympathy then act as if nothing was up. Hope proved she dominated that sorority by blatantly lying about her barbaric screaming.
What happened to Isaac’s common sense? Akiko flared his nostrils at Hope luring his friend into the tree tunnel. “He’d better not fall for her tricks.”
“What tricks?” Jase said, hoisting the bucket onto his shoulder while Sabio collected towels.
You’re both blind. He tossed a missed shovel into the bucket. “Never mind.”
Walking toward the sandbank, he scratched a persistent tickle on his scalp. The annoying itch worsened, as if his hair were ant-infested.
His friends were impatient to return so he waved them on. “I’ll catch up.”
Bending over, he swiped back and forth through his ocean-dreggy hair to dislodge the nuisance. Nothing there. He proceeded up the bank carpeted with sea purslane. The fleshy leafage scraped his feet, accusing his soles of lacking callousness. He checked each foot. Finding nothing wrong, he continued into the tree tunnel.
A hand shot out from the elephant ear leaves and hooked his arm. “Where’s the gift I gave you?”