Mona Lisa Eclipsing m-5

  Mona Lisa Eclipsing

  ( Monère - 5 )

  Sunny

  The national bestselling author returns with a new passionate, erotically charged paranormal novel.

  Roberto, a jaguar-shifter of mixed Monère heritage, arrives in Cozumel to kill a rival. But he finds a more valuable prize in Mona Lisa, a Monère who's lost her memory and can be manipulated into believing anything—no matter how dark or dangerous.

  Mona Lisa Eclipsing

  (The fifth book in the Monere: Children of the Moon series)

  A novel by Sunny

  To two wonderful fans Janon Swink and Candace Clemons, and my fellow author Mima—the three angels who convinced me to hurry up and write this next part of Mona Lisa’s story.

  ONE

  THE SWORD WHISTLED toward me in sharp descent, almost too fast for a human to see. But not for a part human, part Monère, and whatever else part thing I was, which was, oh yeah, that’s right—demon dead.

  I parried, feinted to the left, then thrust to the right. “Gotcha!” I crowed as I tapped Edmond smartly on the ribs.

  My young partner lowered his sword, rubbed his side, and grinned as I did a small victory dance. With protective padding and dulled weapons, he could afford to grin. Practice was much more civilized and far less bloody than real life would have been.

  “You didn’t let me score on purpose, did you?” I asked suspiciously.

  “No, milady,” Edmond said. “You’ve gotten better than me, sure and true.”

  “You hear that?” I said smugly to the big guy watching us, Nolan Morell, our sword master instructor. “I’m better than Edmond now.”

  “Progress, indeed, milady,” Nolan agreed blandly. “You can defeat an eighteen-year-old boy.”

  “An eighteen-year-old Monère warrior-in-training who has been practicing with the sword since he was ten, whereas I have been swinging a practice blade for only three months,” I corrected.

  “And no longer just swinging but thrusting and parrying, attacking and counterattacking,” my stern teacher relented with a brief smile that faded all too quickly. “But your footwork is still sloppy, your crossover too slow—”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” I dismissed the oncoming lecture with a careless finger wave. “Indulge me for a moment. Let me enjoy my brief glow.”

  Both of them waited a couple of seconds as I rested, sucking in deep breaths.

  “Enough glow, milady?” The dryness in Nolan’s voice could have rivaled the finest aged wine.

  I straightened. “Sarcasm doesn’t become you, Nolan.”

  His tone, if anything, became even drier. “I will be sure to take note of that, milady. Now let us continue. En garde!”

  We practiced for another twenty minutes concentrating on footwork, then finished up the session with more challenging blade work. Whatever Edmond lacked in skill, he made up for in exuberance as the multiple sore spots where he had tapped me attested. Of course, I’d delivered quite a few whacks myself, I thought with satisfaction.

  I saw my progress in swordsmanship much as I did the ruling of my new territory and its many people—much improved. It had been half a year since I had become a Monère Queen, the Queen of Louisiana specifically. It was a mantle that had been awkward at first but now fit more comfortably. I had over four hundred people under me, Monère men, women, and children. I knew almost all their names now and their varied relationships within our insular community.

  “I’m going to miss you, Edmond,” I said as we wiped down our equipment and hauled it inside.

  “You have only to say the word, milady, and I will be happy to stay with you.”

  And here was where the easy camaraderie that we had shared over the past few months became strained. Because what he was really asking was that I take him into my bed. That was what Monère Queens did to fresh and dewy eighteen-year-old virgin Monère boys: take them into their beds and enjoy their harmless, lusty vitality for a handful of years before they tired of them or they grew too strong, too powerful, and were kicked out of their Queen’s bed. Because then it was not mere copulation anymore, an exchange of pleasure that took place, but an exchange of power and sometimes of talents and abilities.

  Awkwardness fell as the ticktock of life intruded on us. The summer solstice was coming up, and in several months Edmond would leave his home, all that he had ever known, to seek service in another territory with another Queen, one who was willing to make him her lover—our Monère version of going out into the big, bad world. It made worry flutter in my stomach like any mother sending a kid off to college would feel, but to keep him here safe with me would be even crueler because I had no intentions of taking him into my bed. It was much too crowded already.

  “Ah, Edmond,” I said, sighing. “I would be doing you a grave disservice if I asked you to stay. Find another Queen who will appreciate the gift of your Virgin Claiming. Me? I’ve got too many lovers as it is.”

  “Not enough, milady, and half of those are not even with you regularly.”

  He was referring to Amber, the Warrior Lord who ruled the adjacent slice of Mississippi territory, a portion of my own domain that I had induced the High Queen’s Court to officially split off and deed to him. I’d upgraded Amber’s status and downgraded his time with me. Gryphon, my other Warrior Lord, my first love, had died and become demon dead. He resided in Hell now, but that wasn’t a barrier for me. I could visit him, was the only Monère who could, actually, thanks to that quarter human part of me: my blood was warmer than a Full Blood Monère, allowing me to survive Hell’s scorching heat. Of course, the fact that I was out of sorts with Halcyon, the High Prince and ruler of Hell, who not only happened to be my demon mate but also the sponsor of my newly dead first love . . . well, that made visiting Gryphon a bit awkward. My other lover, Dante, was missing. Of course, I’d sort of kicked him out, but I’d had a change of mind and heart. Only problem was he didn’t know that. He hadn’t come back.

  “Only Dontaine is here with you now,” Edmond noted.

  Dontaine—my breathlessly handsome master at arms. He had stuck despite my best efforts to push him away. I seemed to be my own worst enemy.

  “The others might be absent but they still count,” I said firmly.

  “Still, that is only five men.”

  “Only.” I rolled my eyes, my humor returning. How could it not at such an outlook. “Only five men. If I had it in me, I would blush, but my human upbringing seems to be fading more and more each day I spend with you guys.”

  “And they are all old,” Edmond complained. “You should try someone younger and more tender.”

  “Yuck,” I grimaced. “You make yourself sound like a piece of steak.”

  A smile widened his lips. “Juicy and succulent, prime and untouched—”

  “Stop, just stop. You’re turning me off steak, and if you do, I’ll never forgive you.”

  The two of us shared a laugh, then in a more serious vein because I had become fond of my young practice partner, I told him with honest regret, “I cannot give you what you need and deserve, Edmond. I’m weird that way. I happen to like older guys, especially the ones I’ve chosen. And I know I may be fucked up, because I was the one to push them away, but I’m waiting for them to come back to me.”

  Edmond gave me a gentle smile. “Then they surely will, milady, for I cannot see any resisting you.”

  “How about forgiving me?” I asked wryly.

  “That, too,” he said with an earnest kindness that allowed a glimpse of the strong and wonderful warrior he had the potential of maturing into . . . if the Queens whose beds he passed through in the next few decades of his life weren’t totally fucked-up bitches—which, unfortunately, most of them were.

 
“After you’ve enjoyed your time with as many Queens as you can glut yourself on, Edmond, when it becomes too dangerous for you . . . you know that you can always come back here, right?” Young and dewy fresh though Edmond was now, he had only fifty years or less to play paramour to a Queen, a century at most after that to serve as guard. Then would come the grim fate of death or desertion. Because most Queens ended up killing their oldest and most powerful warriors, who became not only threats to the Queen’s authority but also potential competitors for a territory of their own should they gain enough power to attain Warrior Lord status. Either they were killed or they fled and went rogue. They were never invited back to the territory of their birth, offered a promise of safety and shelter, as I was now offering Edmond.

  My words clearly stunned him.

  “That is very generous, milady,” Edmond said, greatly moved. Kneeling, he kissed my hand.

  “Please don’t forget,” I said, fondly tugging his hair. “You have a place to come back to, okay?”

  “Yes, milady.” Bowing, he took his leave, tossing over his shoulder as he walked away, “And I’ll be older then. Just the way you like!”

  Impudent boy. I was still grinning when I left the locker room. Nolan was still at his desk, jotting down notes in the lesson book he kept on my progress.

  “Did you mean it?” Nolan asked, looking up to meet my gaze.

  “About Edmond being able to come back here?”

  “No. About waiting for your lovers to come back to you. About wanting them to.”

  Our relationship abruptly shifted from student and teacher to the more complicated relationship of a woman facing the father of one of the men she loved. “Do you mean Dante?” I asked softly.

  Nolan nodded.

  “Yes . . . if he can forgive me.”

  “Goddess bless us. I believe it’s the other way around, as does he, likely: whether you could forgive him.”

  “I would hope that we could forgive each other.” There was quite a lot to forgive, on both our parts. “I keep expecting him to return, but he hasn’t. It’s been three months since he left.” Truth—since I kicked him out. “Have you heard anything from him?”

  “No, he hasn’t contacted us.” A flicker of worry, quickly concealed. “But he will soon, eventually.”

  “Do you think . . . he wouldn’t try to end his life, would he?” That was my greatest fear. That he would die and this time not come back—be reborn. That was his curse, you see, laid down upon him by none other than yours truly, or who I had been anyway, this fierce Warrior Queen from long, long ago: a curse of dying and being reborn into an ever-diminishing bloodline until his family line finally ended. The number of his descendents was down to a trickle now, just him, his twin brother, Quentin, and his father and mother. But that wasn’t really the part of the curse I worried about—Quentin was even now enthusiastically sowing his seed, and Nolan and his wife, Hannah, might still yet bear more children. What worried me most was the possibility that the curse I had laid upon Dante so long ago might have been broken by the life we had created, the child that had lived so briefly within me before I lost it in a traumatic miscarriage.

  It had almost destroyed Dante when I’d lost the baby. He’d taken out his grief by slaughtering all of Mona Teresa’s warriors, the Monère Queen who had injured me and deliberately caused the loss of our child. Last I’d heard, Mona Teresa still hadn’t recovered yet; few warriors had been brave or desperate enough to swear themselves into her service. If Dante had not been legendary enough before, slaying the first great Warrior Queen . . . well, he was certainly infamous now after he had single-handedly sliced and diced, and viciously torn apart Mona Teresa’s thirty warriors with exceptionally cold and bloodthirsty proficiency.

  Dante and I had a real complicated history, you might say. We had been enemies long ago, then lovers in my second cycle of life in a most ironic twist of fate. The wonder was not that I had pushed him away: it was why I wanted him back.

  The answer to that lay in his eyes—what I had seen in them as I had cramped and bled and lost our child, his hope for ending the curse. The way he had touched me and held me with a tenderness and concern that had fractured and broken my heart even more.

  I had saved him, started to love him until my memory of him, of my first life, of being killed by him, returned. Then I had feared him and pushed him away, ordered him gone. And I was afraid now that he might be gone forever.

  I know. I was one really messed-up gal. I pushed the men I loved away from me, and then when they left, I wanted them back. But I was aware of my issues and I was trying to change. Fate had given me a second chance with Dante, and though I had managed to screw up the first part of it, this second opportunity was not yet over. Please, Goddess, I prayed. If you give me another chance, I promise I’ll do my best to make it right this time.

  The door opened and Hannah Morell rushed into the room. She glanced quickly at me, then fixed her gaze intently on her husband. “Dante has been seen on the island of Cozumel.”

  And I discovered, to my surprise, that sometimes prayers really do work.

  TWO

  “ COZUMEL?” I DON’T know why, but when I’d imagined Dante alone and suffering somewhere, I hadn’t pictured him in a tropical island paradise. “Are you sure?”

  “It makes sense,” Nolan said, “if he took a boat from New Orleans.”

  Leaving on a boat, and not just any boat but a cruise ship? I hadn’t imagined that either. After killing Mona Teresa’s warriors, had he traveled back to my territory, watched us and made sure we were doing well before going off into exile?

  “Who saw him?” I asked.

  “A group of tourists on horseback came upon him in the jungle,” Hannah said.

  “Tourists?” I felt my eyebrows climb up my forehead. “Not a Monère Queen or one of her men?”

  “No, milady.”

  “Then how do you know it was Dante they saw?”

  “They saw a saber-toothed tiger; that is his other form. It’s creating quite a stir since more than one witness saw him.”

  “A saber-toothed tiger? For real? Aren’t they supposed to be extinct?”

  “They became extinct over eleven thousand years ago,” Nolan answered quietly. “When they died out, so did the animal form in Monère shifters.”

  Which meant that Dante had lived and died and been reborn for at least that long. Over eleven thousand years . . . Sweet Goddess! I’d laid one whammy of a curse of him. One whose painful depths I hadn’t fully comprehended until now. The wonder was that Dante hadn’t torn me apart, murdered me painfully and slowly the moment he had seen my Goddess’s Tears, the pearly trademark moles embedded in my palms, and realized who I was: that I was Mona Lyra reincarnated. It was a wonder he was capable of having feelings other than sheer loathing hatred for me after what I had done to him.

  When I’d asked him once if he remembered his previous lives, his answer had been, My memories are most clear of my last incarnation and of my first life. That, I never forget. I get random flashes of other lives, occasionally. I think it’s my mind’s natural defense, that selective memory. Remembering everything would probably be too much for one single mind to handle.

  The last sentence had been a vast understatement.

  “I’m going after him,” Nolan said.

  “Good,” I said, nodding. “I’m coming with you.” But leaving wasn’t quite as easy as that.

  My men threw a hissy fit. It might not be the best words to apply to a collection of fierce Monère warriors and former rogues, but that’s essentially what they did. They didn’t want me to go, too dangerous. Not just where I was going but who I was going after. When that didn’t dissuade me, then they all wanted to come along to guard me. I had no problem with that.

  “Whoever can be ready to leave in an hour can come with us,” I said agreeably. “Be sure to bring your passports. We’re catching a six forty a.m. commercial flight that leaves in”—I glanced at my watch—“fou
r hours.”

  The relief on my men’s faces turned back into fierce scowls.

  “I do not have a passport,” said Tomas, one of my guards, his usual smooth-as-butter Southern drawl completely absent from his voice.

  “Neither do the rest of us,” said Chami. All of my inner-circle guards were old, but Chami was probably the oldest among them. His full name was Chameleo, for his chameleon’s gift of blending in with his surroundings. He could virtually disappear in front of your eyes. “But that won’t be a problem for me,” he said, smiling.

  “And I can fly,” Aquila said, stroking his neat Vandyke beard. “It’ll just take me a little bit longer to get there.” A former rogue, he now served as my steward, handling all of my territory’s vast business concerns. He was the only one among my guards with wings; the other form he shifted into was that of an eagle.

  “Wait.” I held up a hand. “None of you have passports?”

  “I do,” Nolan said. “But that is because my family and I lived so long among humans.” They had had to flee from an evil Queen.

  Hearing Nolan had a passport didn’t surprise me. I had expected him to have one since he was the one who had suggested taking a commercial flight in the first place, and had called and booked our reservations using his credit card; I had promised to pay him back. It was just easier to let Nolan handle things. Good thing, because Aquila, who handled all my financial matters, likely wouldn’t have done it so quickly or easily, not without a great deal of argument and compromise first. Among my people, Nolan and his family were the only ones financially independent. The rest lived the traditional, old-fashioned—and backward, in my eyes—Monère way. They relied on their Queen to supply everything for them, which was a great way for Queens to control their people: keep them needy and dependent on you and make it hard for them to venture out and survive on their own.