CENTAURIAN
All Rights Reserved © 2021, Rick Haydn Horst
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
CHAPTER TWO
7:50 PM, June 21st
The jet began to shudder and shake.
"Mr. Adrianus," said the flight attendant, "we are experiencing some turbulence. May I stow your bag for you, sir?"
She stood over him, the only flight attendant on the private Lear jet, wearing her red uniform and pillbox hat, performing her job as anyone should expect. They had only an hour left of the flight, and the bag in question lay in the window seat beside him. He rested his hand upon it, knowing it contained the dagger given to him by the woman who called herself Happiness, so he felt protective and defensive of it. "This is the second time you have asked me during this flight," he said, "so for the last time, no, and if you ask me once more, I will fire you."
"I'm sorry, sir. I'm merely trying to keep you safe."
Adrianus gazed up at her, laughed a little with a slight shake of his head. He turned his attention out the window to the sunlit clouds during that last hour before sunset, he recalled years earlier during one of the many times he killed himself off. While on a solo flight, he allowed himself to endure a plane crash, having left all his money to a nonexistent son whose identity he would assume, so he could eventually claim it. By her reflection in the window, he could see the flight attendant hadn't left his side, he raised the crystal lowball glass in his hand to her. "Just pour me another."
He had watched the 4K video on the tablet several times. What he found so ironic and galling is that Henri believed he outlived his child, and yet, hundreds of years later, there he sat on a private jet headed to Miami. Over time, he had evolved into the perfect model of a man both lonely and friendless, who had just outlived the father he never knew, while this Ronan person, who Henri knew only a few years, had received all the love and companionship that should have come to Adrianus by birth. He knew Ronan carried no fault for that, but he hated him for it anyway.
In the video, the fire passed from his father to Ronan, after which, Adrianus saw his father fall to ash and the skinny young man lying there for the entire night in that awkward position, undisturbed, unconscious, and unmoving. The next morning, as the sun began to rise and the light level increased enough to see, it showed that Ronan had never moved, but he appeared different from the man his father had placed onto the ground the previous evening. No longer skinny, his body had swollen with muscle, and he seemed taller.
A few minutes before eight that morning, a female jogger of about thirty, dressed in running tights and a t-shirt came upon the man.
She pulled the earbuds from her ears when she stopped. Sounding disgusted, she said, "Oh no, another drunk." Bending over him a little, she gave his body a closer inspection. "My god, it's the man from Nantucket." She knocked at Ronan's leg with her running shoe. "Hey, you can't stay here. Get up and move along, will you?" He never moved, so she shook her head in dismay and called the police. She noticed something off-camera, retrieved it, and tried to cover the man's genitals by scooping them up with the red solo cup she found, but it refused to stay put. With her hand, she pushed down on the cup and attempted to wedge it into place by moving him into an even more awkward position with her foot. A few minutes later two other people loomed over the man, and not long after that, a policeman arrived driving an olive-colored Jeep.
Adrianus noted the license plate, and given an opportune moment, the video had the officer at the perfect angle. He zoomed in and could easily read his name tag, L. Phillips, and his sleeve had a patch stitched with the words The Village of Key Biscayne. He concluded, by the officer's concern, that he most likely drove him to a hospital. He made an online search and based on the distance, Mercy Hospital seemed most likely, so Adrianus would start there when he could talk to the morning shift.
Thinking of killing the man on the video with his own hands, he thought, "I'm too wealthy to kill someone myself. That's what money is for!" He couldn't imagine any hitman agreeing to use the dagger when they probably had their preferred methods, and he wouldn't know how to acquire a hitman anyway, not that that would present the greatest complication. He accepted what the woman had told him with relative ease because he had lived for hundreds of years. He couldn't imagine how a mortal not already exposed to anything otherworldly would view the dagger given to him by the woman. He gazed into his glass and stared transfixed at the single transparent sphere of ice that chilled his drink and the light fog that had settled over his whisky.
After the woman had vanished from his office, he studied the dagger. The metal of its handle and scabbard he had never seen before, but the curiousness of it paled when he unsheathed it. He beheld a transparent blade whose subtle vaporous wisps from the sharpened edges and pointed tip vanished into the air around it, manifesting its ethereal nature.
Waking from his thoughts, he asked himself, "What sort of magic is this?" He lifted the drink the flight attendant had brought him to his mouth and downed it in one gulp, but the thirst of his anxiety remained parched, and he demanded another.
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The aptly named lucky fox, Felix Raposo, worked as a bellhop at the luxury boutique hotel on Miami Beach called The Cerulean Sea Hotel and Spa. He had worked there for a year, and not once had anyone mentioned the little side-hustle he had going with the owner/night manager, Mr. Moreno, who covered for him.
The handsome nineteen-year-old of Puerto Rican descent took pride in his considerable abilities and the unblemished, sienna-skinned body that displayed the virile athleticism for which he was known. And by word of mouth alone, new clients gathered to him faster than he could ever have imagined. Monday through Thursday, he could count on having one client a night—two at most. However, from Friday at check-in through Monday morning at checkout, he could have a dozen clients, and many of them stayed at the hotel just for an experience that only Felix seemed capable of providing.
One such client, the math teacher from a local middle school, learned that his best friend, the teacher of English Literature, hadn't exaggerated in his assessment of him, rewriting and repurposing a famous Shakespearean quote from Hamlet, "What a piece of work is Felix. How solicitous in spirit. How seductive in speech. In form and movement, how capable and confident. In action, how like a lord. And in pleasure, how like a god."
With the math teacher both contented and fast asleep, Felix took a quick shower, redressed in his cream-colored uniform, pocketed the money left for him on the table by the television, and quietly closed the door behind him. In the elevator to the lobby, he counted the cash and tucked half of it into his wallet. The other half he held in his hand to slip to the owner who crammed it into his pocket before anyone noticed.
Mr. Moreno was not Felix's pimp. They had a reciprocal arrangement. Mr. Moreno pretended to hire him as a bellhop, and that allowed Felix to hire Mr. Moreno to cover for him with other employees while taking care of a client rather than taking care of someone's baggage.
Unlike some boutique hotels, The Cerulean Sea Hotel was not a Dadaist's dream, nor one that, upon entry, screamed MIAMI in a pastel nightmare of neon capital lettering. The Cerulean Sea Hotel had a nature-based décor both stylish and timeless with a serene atmosphere. The lobby's contemporary modern furniture, based on tried-and-true styles, sat atop mottled, latte-colored marble slabs for flooring. But the spectacle of the monolithic black granite check-in desk with its gravity-defying cantilevered design overshadowed all else.
Standing at the sandstone Bellhop-wall that evening, Felix watched a limousine drive beneath the covered drop-off. He walked to the entrance and when the door attendant opened the car door, a late 20-something man wearing a coal-colored Armani suit exited the vehicle, and he shouldered the satchel he carried.
"May I take your bag, sir?"
