Bright Star

by Grayson Reyes-Cole

  Jackson said nothing. There was a stubborn set to his jaw.

  “You have to know that I am always going to protect you…”

  “You have protected me my whole life, Rush. You think I’m stupid, but I’m not.” Jackson told him, feeling emasculated by the cracking in his voice. “I have never done anything, accomplished anything that didn’t have you at its heart. You made me!” Jackson was yelling it now and pools of water started to collect in his eyes. “You made me!” he yelled it again. Then, with a sweep of his arms, he overturned his dresser and the heavy wood smashed against the floor. Jackson dropped to his knees. “I am no one. No, not no one. I am your brother.”

  Rush was silent. Jackson knew the truth of his birth, he knew the truth of it all and there was nothing stronger than the truth. No suggestion would ever repair the damage that had been done by the simple, unerring truth. Jackson was not great. Jackson was not remarkable in any way other than by being Rush’s brother. Precocial was a lie… derivative. He reached a hand out to Jackson but knew that Jackson would reject it. The last thing on earth he wanted was Rush’s support.

  “What did you mean?” a weeping Jackson asked.

  “By what?”

  “What did you mean when you said that you had corrected the wrong that had been done?”

  Rush did not answer right away.

  “Did we…” Jackson’s jaw dropped. His eyes widened, and he seemed to hold his breath. Rush—correctly—read the look in his brother’s eyes as horror. “Did we have a baby?”

  Still, Rush was slow to respond. He considered the question as he watched his brother without expression. It was true. He could listen to Jackson’s thoughts as well as he could listen to his own. At that very moment, a montage of images were sifting through his brother’s mind. Some of them were shapeless, emotions only. Happiness. Sadness. Humor. Pride. These emotions were intermingled with images of Bright Star and a red haired child with light blue eyes. The child’s sex changed from girl to boy and back again as the images flowed. Its age also changed from baby to teenager to adult. So many permutations of the family ran through Jackson’s head that Rush was sure this had not been the first time he had considered this as an outcome. Although, this was definitely the first time Jackson had thought of it in the realm of reality. He could have gotten Bright Star pregnant. He could have had that child with her. And maybe, maybe that would be that crucial step in changing her. Maybe this was what could save her.

  But none of that would come to pass. Rush had stated plainly that he had “corrected” his and Bright Star’s wrong. All of sudden, Jackson felt as if eels were writhing in his stomach. His head was spinning. Saliva started to pool below his tongue. He and Bright Star would have had a child. His brother had done something, perhaps to the child itself to prevent that. His legs seemed rubbery beneath him and he lowered himself to his bed once more. When he looked at his brother again, it was an agonized and tortured plea. He didn’t know what would happen if there had actually been a child.

  But finally, Jacob Rush, Jackson Rush’s big brother, shook his head. He gave a tight and labored upturn of his lips, “You should understand that your child would suffer death after death at the hands of its mother. You should know that your child with Bright Star would change this world forever. I won’t let a mistake send us all to Hell. No, Jackson, that wrong was righted long before now.”

  Jackson accepted these words. He did not believe them, but he did not have any more strength. His stomach quieted, his skin warmed, and his breathing returned to normal.

  And Rush tried to be at peace with the lie. This lie that had been his shame for months, years. He’d kept things from his brother, used his brother, betrayed his brother. Then he had sinned. And in days, he knew he would risk the world… For her.

  Night Crawler

  The dream was remarkable. Really. Only muted colors: blues violets, roses. There was the smell of spring rain and hot patchouli. His body was writhing in warm satin. Slipping and sliding against the softest material—skin—he’d ever touched. It was everywhere, the scent and the feel. His lips glided smoothly then parted. Others parted slightly on his and he could feel his tongue being suckled gently. His fingers found the cleft of a round bottom and his erection tightened painfully.

  “Jacob,” her soft voice called to him in his sleep, beckoning him. Rush felt heavy laden. He struggled to wake. When finally, he jerked up in his bed, shaking himself of the honeyed dream of a small brown-haired girl he’d once known, he breathed deep and slow measured breaths. Inhale. Out. Inhale. Out. He needed to calm the raging emotions warring inside of him. He had halfway risen from the bed, but now he flopped back only barely missing Bright Star with one muscular and flailing arm. He stared at the pocked white ceiling wishing for the corrugated slate of the home he’d created for years with Shift.

  “What is it, Bright Star?” he asked groggily, turning over to meet her. She had eased closer to him. Reading his thoughts, she changed the fleece blanket to dark satin. The ceiling dripped into the wall. The room looked to be a natural cavern, a deep earth aqueduct. She curled her body up though her only touch was her soft, slender fingers brushing back his hair.

  “You do know what day it is, don’t you?” she whispered the question. She leaned in to put her lips next to his ear and let the soft satin nightgown she wore fall open over her rounded breasts. The brown-haired girl had had small breasts. She had moved cautiously with eyes that watched furtively. She had been untouched and wary. This woman, while only minimally more experienced, had spent four years concentrating on this moment. She’d fantasized about it. Rush read her thoughts, her history, and saw—half-way experienced—every want, every way that she had imagined taking him into her. And her fantasies, they didn’t stop with her own desires. She’d been cautiously, painstakingly slipping into his own mind, stealing his own desires. His fantasies were just as strong inside of her as her own. And they were too strong for an innocent.

  Rush considered his own thoughts. Could Bright Star have come to him untouched, untried and been successful? He’d told Jackson any number of times that he didn’t want her. He’d believed it, but why did this new path seem to usher in these uncertainties? Rush knew she would go to Jackson again, knew that he would never let her succeed in her horrifying folly. But he had to admit that something inside of him. Some buried morsel of him had wanted her to be incapable of seducing his brother either through her own epiphany or Jackson’s.

  He watched her. In truth, she had made herself into the very image of Jacob’s fantasy. Her body, her skin, her hair, even those radiating eyes. They were all as Jacob would have wanted. But Rush was older. He knew more than Jacob ever could have about nature and future. Bright Star’s fingers continued to play over him gently.

  He swallowed. Rush was hungry. He was always so very hungry when he woke. She knew it as well as he did. She had to know it. The hunger she felt when she woke was antithetical, complimentary. Her hunger was a palpable force raging, pacing, snarling in the room with them as his was leashed in there, temporarily docile. It growled and whimpered like a trapped beast inside of him. Slowly, deliberately, and with a strength reserved only for his kind, he reached out a hand and ripped the gown from her svelte body. With an irrepressible smile Bright Star rolled further onto Rush’s body with one leg thrown over his hip. Her wet sex rubbed against his hard thigh. She brought her lush lips to his jugular and rubbed them there. Then, she softly grazed her teeth over the spot before she lathed it with her tongue. Rush wanted her to nibble at him. She knew it, but she was holding out. With an excruciating slowness, her teeth came again, lightly on his flesh. Saliva pooled in his mouth as he waited and considered clasping her with his teeth as well. He let his head fall back against his pillow and closed his eyes. Finally, she sank her perfect white teeth into his flesh, then sucked gently to ease the minor sting.

  Then she slid up and laid a thigh on either side of his hips. She leaned down until her breasts were crushe
d against his chest. She was nearly nose to nose with him, and then she was still. She waited. Rush knew what he would see when he opened his eyes, and he tried to delay the inevitable. But he opened his eyes. When he did, her tongue slipped into his mouth, then away. She pulled back her red locks with one hand and exposed a creamy sculpted neck. His teeth itched to take playful nips at her. He didn’t want to break the skin. He just found it erotic, he would have her clamped her with his teeth as he came inside her. But that would never be.

  “No, not today,” he whispered to her much as she had whispered to him earlier as she tried to plant her soft suggestion in his head. He pushed her forcefully off him and onto the floor. Then he slipped out from the Shift-made sheets and stood stretching his arms toward the ceiling that was, again, stark and pocked and white. The rest of the Shift faded away as if it had never been, and his body slowly started to cool.

  “Rush, don’t leave me,” she begged as she grabbed the side of the bed and pulled herself up onto it again. Her torn gown fell away from her body as she breathed heavily, lying on the hospital-white sheets with her legs apart and her hands sliding over her own flesh.

  Rush watched her. His lips were pressed into a stern and pensive line. Slowly, he neared the bed and slid a warm hand over the soft inside of her thigh. When he cupped her, he could feel her hunger rushing through the veins beneath his palm. High Energy. He knew her hunger could only be slaked, never satisfied through sex. In the end, sex would be the means to an end.

  “Bright Star?” he called as she stroked her milky flesh. He had known for moments that she was not Elizabeth.

  “Yes, Rush?” Her voice was little more than a purr as she squirmed beneath him. Slowly, she physically transformed. Her hair turning a glistening red.

  Rush lowered himself onto the side of the bed. He lay down beside her, his body curling around hers as his fingertips explored her addictive flesh even as it changed before him. He pressed his lips to her ear and asked, “Why aren’t the lives I’ve saved enough?”

  He could feel it, actually feel something crawl underneath her skin. He looked down, and again it moved. It was like fireworks beneath her skin. Each explosion causing tinted bumps to rise and move, distorting her body. Her naked, raw Energy was a hard thing under her flesh, pushing, cracking, and reshaping her from the inside out. For a moment, he thought of the pain. Only he and the Monk seemed to know. Bright Star suffered extreme pain at all times. All times. Yes, they all saw that she was troubled by the never-healing leg and the scar that nearly bisected her face. But they didn’t know this.

  He thought of Jackson’s Service. How did they ever manage to know everything and nothing at once? Rush was certain they didn’t know that High Energy could manifest itself as a physical disease and living entity within a shifter willing to embrace it, allowing it to take over his or her very cells. The incessant pain was, in truth, not the disease, but a symptom of it caused by a voracity for High Energy. It was like a teenager with a growth spurt. All of a sudden, the Energy was doubling and redoubling inside the host and required more High Energy to sustain and stabilize itself.

  Rush could only feel for it again as he wondered if Bright Star would ever be in control of it the way he was. Even though it only grew by the years, his physical dependence on it had lessened to almost none. In fact, now his hunger was only sparked by dreams, dreams of her: Elizabeth. She had been dead for years, killed by Bright Star. Bright Star who was now ruining not only his life, but his brother’s. He’d told Jackson she would destroy the world one day if she could. He’d done his duty and warned his brother even though he didn’t believe it at the time. He hadn’t been able to grasp her power. But, as always, his gift had been correct where his natural, mortal self had thought that if she were around and he could keep an eye on her, nothing would happen. That hadn’t worked.

  “That’s what today is,” he said aloud as if stunned.

  “Yes,” Bright Star said, moving one hand to her breast and the other to the moist spot between her legs. Rush’s heart beat an irregular staccato, but then remembered what was important about that day. “I’m happy.” Bright Star continued, “At least after today, she won’t haunt us anymore. You won’t hate me because of her.”

  “How do you know that?” Rush asked, his eyes again drawn to where her hands were making her own breath catch.

  “Because even though today is my last on this Earth, Elizabeth will not escape. Even though today is your last on this Earth, you can’t send her back,” she said, rising up on her knees and pushing her hair back so that she didn’t obstruct his view.

  Rush didn’t even want to ignore his hunger anymore. A flash of a hand moved through the air to latch on to Bright Star’s neck. She felt it squeezing, cutting off her breath, freezing delighted words on her lips. The only thing that moved about her were her veins and the beasts of hunger rippling and distending her skin. He stood for a moment just listening to them beat out a rhythm. All in unison her veins were calling to him as he realized that his were doing the same to her. He lifted her from the bed by the throat. He smiled at her, his feral, starving smile that allowed her to see how his hunger had changed him.

  But even as he killed her, her body was renewed itself, saving itself. He hadn’t saved her from the pipe bisecting her on that train. He hadn’t saved her when she drowned beneath the sea. He’d stopped saving her long ago. The only Follower that understood was Monk. Rush had cast off his role as savior months ago. It was Bright Star who perpetuated this madness.

  Rush flung her down against the bed. He winced when he saw her head crack against the headboard. He hadn’t meant to hurt her. He hadn’t meant to use that much strength. She scrambled to get up, struggling with her broken leg.

  Frustrated by his own actions, Rush felt his body tense, his fists clench at his sides. “You’re strong, Bright Star. Not that strong. You can’t give me a suggestion that will overcome my disgust for you.” He took a deep breath. “Do you remember how you were—who you were—When I first met you?”

  “I…” Her brow crumpled. She seemed to be thinking. “You saved me.”

  “That is not my question, Bright Star… Elizabeth.”

  “Don’t call me that!” Her eyes flashed as she got to her feet.

  “But that’s who—”

  “No!” her voice was strong and forceful. The one she used to reach all of her Followers. “Elizabeth will die today. For good!”

  “You are Elizabeth!”

  “I am who you made me!” she raged vehemently.

  “Where is she?” he demanded, coming to wrap his hands around her arms. He squeezed tightly until she was lifted from the bed.

  Even still she peered at him coyly from beneath her hair. She wasn’t listening. Again, the suggestion of sex was clouding his vision and causing him to harden painfully.

  He shook his head and continued scornfully, “I see you know you’re not pregnant.”

  Her eyes widened and her mouth dropped open. She gave the appearance of shock.

  “You know what I’m talking about,” Rush glared at her. He even leaned nearer her to elucidate, “We both know you tried to get pregnant. You used Jackson. And we both know that even though you had him twice, you aren’t pregnant. That’s the only reason you had the audacity to try what you have tonight.”

  “Forgive me,” she lowered her head.

  “I won’t,” Rush declared. “You know I don’t want you, and yet you tried anyway. But—Look at me!” Rush commanded as her head remained down. “Look at me!” He commanded again and this time, she showed him her shame. “I just want you to know. It’s not Jackson’s fault. No matter what you think. You can’t get pregnant.”

  “What?” Bright Star gasped, pressing her hands to her womb, her completely empty womb. He turned to leave as hot tears started to course from her eyes. She started to shake and utter a low moan.

  “Jacob, you had no right to do this to me—”

  “I beg to differ. You’ve
told me plenty enough times that you believe whatever I do is right.”

  “Yes, Rush. Yes, you’re right,” the tears dripped onto the floor, She sniffed as she wiped the back of her hand across her face. Awkwardly, she flattened the gown around her body. She called again before he closed the door. He didn’t want to, but he turned and there before him was skinny, mousy, humble Elizabeth. The very sight of her caused a knot in his chest.

  “Bright Star,” he bit out. “I hate you.”

  “You don’t hate me,” she contradicted in the voice that had haunted him for days… months… years. “You love me,” she dared.

  The fury started a tightening of his jaw. It grew into a slow burn in his chest. The burn seemed to constrict his lungs so that he could not breathe. He opened his mouth to drag in deep breaths. His eyes began to sting and water. Impulsively, he reached up his hand and pressed two fingers to his throat. For a quick moment, he had believed he was having a heart attack because the pain and confusion were so strong. But he knew… Jacob Rush knew that he wasn’t having a heart attack and there was nothing physically wrong with him other than the testosterone, adrenaline and empirical rage building within him. His hands balled into fists and he squeezed and squeezed, trying to get his hands to be still.

  Then he struck. Rush hit Bright Star. He didn’t slap her. He didn’t use his High Energy to hurt her. No, there had been nothing paranormal about his assault. It was a pure and undiluted ferocious man’s rage. He hit her with his large and sturdy fist. He connected with her jaw and down she went.

  Rush hadn’t expected the release and didn’t want to feel anything good about hitting a woman. But he couldn’t help it. He wanted to hit her again and again until the pain went away… until she would… just… stop.