Chapter 2
Sun, moon and stars
Logan Rush stands on the upper deck of the yacht, his head crooked under a low-hanging red lantern. A wry smile curves his mouth.
Eager party-goers cluster around him — lesser planets orbiting a dazzling sun — singing “Happy Birthday” and cheering. A series of booms, cracks and whizzes sounds overhead, and every eye looks up at the ruby rocket flares, emerald spirals and cascades of topaz lighting up the night sky. But I keep my binoculars trained on the star below.
One Saturday night four years ago, Logan Rush was discovered playing bass guitar in an unknown band in a grungy nightclub in downtown Atlanta. At the time, the search was on for a teen actor to play the Beast in the film version of the international best-selling books. The rest of the cast, including Britney Vaux who would play the female lead, had already been selected, the locations scouted, and the script written. Thousands of handsome hopefuls auditioned in the countrywide castings that were part talent-search and part publicity stunt, but the lead actor who could bring the beloved character from printed page to silver screen had not yet been found.
And then Logan was spotted and brought in for an audition.
“Instant chemistry!” cooed Britney Vaux on Facebook, Twitter and on E! News.
“He is the Beast,” enthused Mary E.E. Stephen, author of the bestselling Beast Trilogy of novels.
“Thank God,” breathed the relieved producers and the L.A. moneymen.
But the fans of the books had a different opinion.
“No way!” they screeched. “Logan Rush — who’s he? He’s nothing like we pictured. He’s not even handsome!”
One of the rabid objectors, a teen from Ketchum, Idaho, started a blog — NoRush.com — and a petition calling for Logan Rush to be ditched and the lead role to be recast. She got tens of thousands of signatures, too, but then the movie studio craftily released several publicity shots of Logan — all bronze-skinned, tousle-haired, and electric-eyed — and the fans changed their screams.
“Gimme! He’s awesome, perfect, epic! Just how we always pictured him, just what we wanted. And he’s so handsome!”
Fickle.
For the record, I liked him from the get-go. My fourteen-year-old heart knew a good thing when my eyes saw it. And I’ve remained constant — I still subscribe to seven fan sites and five newsfeeds about him.
In the trilogy of Beast books, the hero — a teenage boy called Chase Falconer — takes the natural world for granted, exploiting and polluting until the day he makes the mistake of insulting a shaman, who is a direct descendent of a line of shamans stretching back to the Incas.
The mystical medicine man says, “To learn respect, you must learn compassion. To learn compassion, you must master empathy. To master empathy, you must walk in the feet of the other.”
Then he bops the young man on the head with a ceremonial gourd, and from then on, Chase is cursed to wander through nature as a shape-shifter, taking the form of fierce, endangered creatures in the battle against poachers, hunters, land-grabbing industrialists and other greedy humans. Along the way he meets a pretty activist, Fern Lightly, who rescues him from a hunter’s trap, and their cross-species love story begins.
It sounds weird, but it’s brilliant! And Logan plays the role of Chase Falconer like he was born to do it. Gah! I can’t wait for the next movie to come out.
In the movie adaptation of the first book, Beast: Sun, which was set in India, Logan’s character shape-shifted into the stripes and fangs of a hypnotic-eyed tiger. In the second, Beast: Moon, he fursploded into a dagger-toothed wolf in the woodsy, snowy mountains of Alaska. Now he’s in my corner of the world, Cape Town, South Africa, filming the last in the trilogy — Beast: Stars, in which he morphs into a great white shark, tackling the scourges of long-line fishing and shark-finning under the starlit oceans of the South.
I can hardly believe that he’s right here, working the party just in front of me — less than twenty metres away. And more than a million miles out of reach.
He accepts a glass of champagne from a passing waiter, downs it in one, and takes another. Britney Vaux moves in close and chats to him, moving her hands expressively in the air and tossing her blonde hair. She’s sheathed in a glittering red dress with a plummeting neckline and a back cut low enough to play peekabooty. I’d be tempted to toss some peanuts down the back of it, if I were up there with them. Which I’m not, of course.
The stripe-haired, tall woman from earlier and a couple of Logan’s co-stars join the pair and talk excitedly to Logan. They touch him constantly — squeezing an arm, perhaps to emphasize a point, or patting a shoulder, shaking his hand, or slinging an arm around him while posing for photographs. Britney Vaux picks something off his lapel, then cuddles up close to him to take a selfie on her phone.
I might be imagining it, but to me, Logan looks uncomfortable. His feet move constantly in an odd sort of dance. Every so often, he backs up, stepping away from the people in his space, sometimes under the guise of turning to greet someone else or to accept another glass of bubbly. But they follow him, flowing into the gap left by his retreating feet, always moving in — closer, nearer — every time he buys himself some space. Give the guy some breathing room, people!
I can’t hear anything Logan is saying, but I paddle around the yacht, watching his advance-and-retreat two-step. The water around me shimmers with silver light from the half-moon and stars above, and the reflected colours of the hanging lanterns. Shadows of the water rising and falling play tricks on me, taking the shape of rippled wakes and dorsal fins, and when a big swell rolls beneath my board, I panic for a moment then relax as it passes under the yacht. Just a surge — no shark would be able to lift and lower the boat like that.
Some of the partiers squeal as they lose their balance on the rocking yacht. Logan himself topples backwards onto a recessed cushioned bench and then disappears from my line of sight. I should head back to shore — there’s no point in staying out here and freezing if I can’t see him. Plus, I’ve been out on the water for over an hour, and my arms are growing tired from paddling and holding up the binoculars to watch the increasingly raucous crowd.
I decide to give it ten more minutes, and if my prey doesn’t reappear, I’ll call it a night. A wonderful, magical night. A night about as far from my small, boring life in my small, dull world as I could possibly get. I sigh. Tomorrow, it’ll be back to books and studying for me.
With my head full of the sights and sounds of the night, I circle the boat one last time, hoping to get a final glimpse before I head home.
And then I see something which changes everything.