The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina (78)

“I’m just a girl.”

“No wonder you cry out for help.”

Heat coiled in the pit of her belly. “If I’m here for your insults, I’d rather just go.”

He grew sullen. “I would have thought your darling husband would have told you already.”

“He said you’re a real, true star.”

“I am so much more than that,” Lázaro said softly. “There are beings across the heavens, above and below, in the between. Sometimes, we find planets and rule over them. Become gods and saints and prophets. Other times, we become weapons.”

“How?” she paced the perimeter of his cage and he turned to keep her in his line of sight.

“I will tell you when we have a deal. When you agree to set me free.”

“I can’t accept a deal without knowing what I’m walking into.”

Lázaro’s laugh was the distant roll of thunder. “And yet is that not what your marriage was? A deal with a man you barely knew.”

Orquídea hardened her heart and it showed in her smile. “Mock me one more time. Do it. As soon as we arrive in Guayaquil I’m leaving, and I don’t have to take you with me.”

His light became inverted, a silhouette of shadow and prisms of light in every color. “Think it through, Orquídea. You have done this once before. You ran with nothing to your name, and you found Bolívar. Will you do that once again?”

“I’m not the same girl who left.”

“That is not what your deepest wishes tell me.” He relinquished his dark light and appeared human again. His skin shimmered as she’d imagined stardust would. The more he moved, the more he looked like a supernova living under his skin.

“You truly are a wishing star that walks the earth.”

He leaped to the bars and gripped them tight. He shook. “If the earth is this cell block.”

She took several steps back reminding herself that they were alone, and she was pregnant, and he was naked.

“I apologize,” he said. “I have been here so long. But yes, I hold the power of wishes. Desires. True, unfathomable want. When I fell here, to this planet, your sun and moon solidified my corporeal form.”

“Is that why you are so very shiny?”

“Luminous,” he corrected, and laughed, despite how much he did not want to.

“How old are you?”

He resumed pacing again and traced long, elegant fingers across his torso. “This form is perhaps two decades old. But my consciousness is older than that, though I have begun to forget the longer I am locked in this place.”

“Are you cold?” she asked.

“I no longer feel it.”

“Is your light not warm?”

He looked up. His strange eyes never left her face. “For you, but not for me.”

Orquídea finally sat on a crate. Her body ached, down to her bones. She shivered, but she removed her scarf, thin as it was, and offered it through the bars.

Lázaro stared at it for so long she waved it like a flag. He accepted warily, but wrapped it around his shoulders and sat cross-legged on the hay to make her less scared of him.

“Do you get to choose?” she asked.

“Choose?”

“What you become. If you’re raw power hurtling through the galaxy, and you don’t know what you’ll become or who you’ll become until the planet gives you form—isn’t that disappointing?”

Lázaro toyed with the fringe of her scarf. “There is nothing brighter than a wish. It comes from true hope. Humanity is so full of that. Desperate hope. Joyous hope. Even those in anguish, especially those in anguish, I should say, have hope. The anticipation that tomorrow will be better than the next day. I find it terribly amusing.”

“Then you’re cruel,” she stated simply, without a trace of accusation.

“Humans put me in here. Well, one human. Did your darling husband tell you how he came upon me?”

She nodded. “He said his father found you in a crater.”

Lázaro turned away, looking at the other beasts in the cages beside him. “When I fell to this planet, I came in a meteor shower. I fell outside his encampment. I was weak and recovering from the crash. I told the man I would give him a wish in exchange for his help. All I had with me was precious alloy from my galaxy, my armor, and my sword. Ah, and my clothes, for I did wear clothes once. While I slept, his son melted it all down and made these manacles for me and a ring. It is the only thing in this world that can restrain me.”

“If I break you out of here, then you’re free?”

“Not quite,” Lázaro said, a sad smile. “Even if I break free, he can call upon me. Control me.”

Orquídea let out a frustrated breath. She hadn’t thought betraying her husband would be easy. She rubbed her belly then. Could she really do it, when the days passed, and her anger ebbed? When he looked at her as he did the first day they met?

“Your heart need not be metal to be strong,” Lázaro told her.

“Stay out of my thoughts,” she hissed.

He chuckled lightly. “Ah, but that is the very core of it. I can sense what is in your heart and mind. That is how I know that this is the only deal which will make you whole, if you keep your word. I know you desire more than this. Even the ocean we travel across is not big enough to fill the desire in your heart. Neither is Bolívar.”