Mona Lisa Eclipsing Read online

  “I’m fine,” I said, shrugging. “I could do with a tan.”

  He shifted himself, grunting. “Good, I seem to have the use of my arms back.”

  “You didn’t before?”

  “No, I think I broke my back. That part, at least, seems to have healed.”

  It was amazing how he seemed to take it all for granted, healing paralysis in a handful of hours. His body had to have expended a great deal of energy to accomplish such healing in so short a time. Remembering how ravenous I’d been after waking up from my own accident, I asked, “You hungry?”

  He nodded.

  I slipped into the water and scissors-kicking, guided our raft closer to shore.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, propping himself up on one arm.

  “I’m bringing us to shore. Maybe I can find some berries.”

  “No need. Come back up.”

  “No need as in, I’m not hungry. Or no need as in, I can get food another way.”

  His eyes crinkled down at me. “The latter.”

  “Okay.” I heaved myself lightly back on board, dipping the raft down.

  “Help me closer to the side,” he said.

  I did so and watched Dante dip a finger down into the water. “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Fishing.”

  He continued staring intently at the water. A swirl of energy slapped my senses, and for a moment I thought his eyes glowed silver. I didn’t know what I expected, but it certainly wasn’t the leaping fish that suddenly came out of the water onto the raft.

  “Catch it, quick,” he said as I scrambled after the flopping fish. It was a good arm-length size.

  Grabbing it up by the tail, I clubbed the fish against the rough wood of our raft and it stopped moving. “Is it stunned or dead?” I asked.

  “Probably just stunned. Here, let me.” Dragging himself over to me, he extended his hand. I watched his nails extend into two-inch-long claws. With a quick, neat slice, he cut off the fish’s head.

  “Neat trick,” I observed. “Wish I could do that. It would have been much easier to fish the bullet out of you that way.”

  “You probably will be able to in time.” With neat, efficient strokes he sliced off the skin and tail, filleting the white flesh into one-inch strips. “Here, try a piece.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Think of it as sushi,” he said, eyes crinkling, “which it essentially is.”

  “I never ate sushi.”

  “Your first time then.”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  The smile disappeared. “You need to eat and replenish your energy. Just a small piece,” he urged.

  He refused to eat until after I had done so—the only thing that made me swallow a slice of the slippery, raw fish. “It doesn’t taste that bad,” I said with surprise. A belated thought popped into my mind. “What about worms or parasites?”

  “It didn’t have any,” he assured me. “Even if it did, your body would easily rid itself of them.”

  “How do you know? I’m part human, remember?”

  “Have you ever been sick?”

  I squinted in thought. “No, never. No colds or ear infections as a child. I’ve never been sick or ill before at all, come to think of it.” Pushing up my left sleeve, I glanced at the clear skin of my arm. The yellow bruising had disappeared. “This is the worst I’ve ever been injured. I can’t believe it’s healed so quickly, even though it took longer than my head.”

  “Our body heals our worst injuries first.”

  “Is that why your legs are still busted up?”

  Dante nodded. “Yes. Back, ribs, and head first—the cheekbone was a simple, clean break and easy to fix. Legs next—a lot of bones were shattered. At least I can wriggle my toes now.”

  He made me eat one more slice, and then he finished off the rest of the fish himself. He tossed the skin and bones into the river, and I splashed some water over the side to clean away the blood-tinged residue.

  “How did you make the fish jump up like that?” I asked.

  “I lured it close with my finger and then compelled it to jump out of the water. A trick I learned over the years.”

  “Hmm. Never thought to apply that trick to a fish before.”

  We had another aquatic meal for lunch, and a third one for supper. By that time, I was thoroughly sick of raw fish. “I think I’ve had enough sushi to last me a lifetime,” I said. “Berries tomorrow.”

  “We’ll see,” he murmured, drowsing under the shaded canopy of the woven branches. It seemed adequate cover for him. I was glad when the sun finally set and the cooler darkness of night set in.

  His legs, by that time, had healed enough for him to stand up and stretch.

  “The wounds on your back”—from his knife and my fingers—“still haven’t healed.”

  “They’ll go last—the least serious. Still finishing up the legs,” he said, glancing down the river. “Do you hear that?”

  “What?”

  “Listen.”

  I did. After a moment’s concentration, I heard what he had: the sound of water was louder ahead of us. It grew louder still as we journeyed forward, until, finally, we saw with our eyes what we had first heard with our ears. Ahead of us, the river abruptly ended, plummeting down into a waterfall. From the sound of it, it was a long drop.

  “I guess we go to shore,” Dante said, gazing out over the distance. I felt him cast his senses outward, and in response, loosened my own senses as well.

  “No sign of our pursuers,” I murmured. “I think they stopped following us a long time ago.” If they had even bothered to.

  Dante didn’t say anything as I slipped into the water and guided the raft with strong kicks toward shore.

  “Just let me do it,” I said in protest when he eased himself into the water. “You’re still healing up.”

  He ignored me. “Don’t pull the raft ashore. Let it float down and go over the drop. We’ll follow along the bank.”

  “I don’t think it’ll survive intact. It sounds like a pretty big drop, and I spent a lot of time and effort making this raft,” I said, frowning. “Maybe I can carry it down.”

  “No, I’d rather you had your hands free. I’ll help you gather up the logs again if they separate.”

  It turned out he didn’t need to. The moment we were onshore, a net came flying over us. Silver, I realized, at Dante’s sharp hiss of pain, but it had no effect on me—no pain, no lessening of strength. I tore it apart easily and flung it off us.

  Familiar undulating war cries shrilled the air, two close by that we somehow hadn’t sensed. The eerie chant was taken up more distantly by the rest of our pursuers.

  Before we could spring away, another silvery net came down over us, entangling our limbs. I started to rip that away also and felt a stinging prick on my arm.

  I yanked a dart out. Silver. But with something else as well. Drugged or poisoned, I had a moment to realize as my limbs grew unbearably heavy. Then darkness muffled me and swept me under.

  THIRTEEN

  WHEN I CAME to, it was not with a simple and easy drift-to-wake consciousness. No, it was much cruder than that. Pain first, a rough shaking of shoulder, then even rougher slaps across my face. Two voices yelling, angry. One of them was familiar—someone I knew, if only I could wake up. Then a cold, wet splash of water—a bowlful dumped across my face, I saw as I blinked the heavy lids of my eyes open. A dark, frightening face, painted black and brown, with a red eye drawn crudely on the forehead, looked down on me.

  Ah, yes. It was all coming back to me: silver nets, a drugging dart, capture by these heathenish Monère. My impression of the race so far wasn’t that great. First a drug lord. Then what I had thought were bandits. Now this half-naked primitive bunch.

  I turned my head and saw a familiar face belonging to the familiar voice. Dante. My poor comrade-in-arms. Me, I just hit my head and spilled out some memories, and, oh yeah, turned into a vulture. He was, however, by
far getting the worst of things. Atop of his old injuries, now his right eye was swollen shut, with new bruises adorning his chest and arms in garish disarray. Couldn’t tell if his poor legs had been rebroken or not because he was lashed to a pole, arms and legs tied. His single unswollen eye glittered like a hard, pale diamond.

  For all that he was bound, he looked more scary than scared.

  At a woman’s command, I was pulled to my feet and secured to a similar pole, my wrists bound together with silver ties similar to the material used in the nets that had captured us. My arms were lifted up, tied, and my legs bound in likewise manner below. I was helpless to stop them—my limbs felt leaden and my wits just as heavy and slow. What the hell had they drugged me with?

  A woman sauntered into view. The woman who had given the command, no doubt. She had black lustrous hair. True black, not the shade mine had been before, a brown so dark that some had mistakenly called it black before a talented stylist had skillfully lightened the color.

  She had threads of gray streaking through the black strands—odd to see against an unlined face. Without those betraying gray hairs marking her age, she could otherwise have passed for thirty. How old was she now, midforties maybe?

  She was lighter skinned than her men. Would have been the fairest one here but for myself. Even with my newly acquired tan, my skin was almost white compared to the brown pigment clearly marking her Latino ancestry. There was a curved roundness to the pretty features of her face and a softness to her small and shapely build, all but the eyes. Her eyes, the color of dark soot, fringed with long, fanning lashes, were hard and frightening, with not a smudge of softness in them.

  “You have caused my men much trouble,” she said in lightly accented English. Her voice, like her eyes, was hard and authoritative. It was a bit disorienting. Like hearing a soldier’s voice coming out of a pretty doll’s mouth. Did she command all these hundred-odd poorly clad people surrounding us? Most of them were men, less than a handful were women, and even fewer, children. She seemed way overdressed standing next to her people in the long black gown she wore.

  “Sorry,” I replied. “Wasn’t my intention. We weren’t trying to bother them. Quite the opposite.”

  She assessed me coolly. “They said you broke our silver nets as easily as ripping through paper.”

  “I’ll be happy to repay you their cost,” I offered.

  She sneered. Not the answer she was looking for apparently. “And yet you are held by them now.”

  Because you drugged me! I wanted to say, but kept my mouth shut. No need to give the enemy any more knowledge or advantage than they already held. But it seemed they had already figured out the reason for my weakness.

  “Our venom affects you oddly,” she said in chill observation.

  “Venom?”

  “Viper venom.” She gave me a most unpleasant smile. “It kills humans but acts only as a brief sedative to those of our kind. It affected you more than him.” By him, I assume she meant Dante. Had he been knocked out by it also?

  “You have the faint smell of human in your blood, and yet you feel as powerful as a Full Blood Monère.”

  I didn’t respond. She hadn’t asked a question, after all.

  Her voice suddenly dropped down into an ugly snarl. “What are you doing here, another Queen in my territory?”

  Her territory? Had that leisurely drift down the river brought us closer to danger instead of taking us farther away from it? And here was that Queen stuff again. If it was confusing to me before, it was even more so now with a thick head and dulled wits. I bypassed it and stuck with what I knew. “We were running away from your men. They were the ones who drove us here; it was not our intent to trespass. We will be happy to depart as soon as you release us.”

  Her cold smile told me it would not be that easy. “Of even more interest, what are you doing in his company, this Queen killer?”

  Huh? “What Queen killer?”

  “Him!” Her finger speared at Dante.

  “Dante? He’s not a Queen killer.” Was he?

  “Dante . . . is that what he calls himself now?” An alarming mixture of hatred and vicious satisfaction glittered her obsidian dark eyes. “He is the most legendary Queen killer in our history. And not just merely for the death of my mother.”

  I swallowed sickly. Oh, crap.

  “She deserved killing,” Dante said clearly, heard by all. “I spared your life, an innocent child, but that seems to have been a mistake.”

  A child, I thought in confusion? How old had Dante been when he had killed her mother? Five? Had he lied to me about his age, or was this angry Queen younger than she looked?

  She whirled to face him like a rabid badger. Small and mean—something that could tear your limbs off. “So you admit it,” she growled.

  “Yes. I am who you seek.”

  Triumph and an almost sick ecstasy filled her face, as though she had just gotten the confession she had expected to take hours to beat out of him. She sucked in a harsh breath in delight. “Queen killer. I have waited a lifetime to meet you again.”

  “I dispensed justice. Evil deed for evil deed. Your mother was one of the most vicious I have ever met in my long existence,” Dante said with a calmness I sure wasn’t feeling. “Is what I did any less foul than you do, murdering other Queens?”

  “It is not forbidden for a Queen to slay another Queen who challenges her.”

  “Whereas if a male does the same, it breaks our most sacred law.” Dante’s lips tautened with cynicism. “You have twisted our law into gross turpitude, Mona Sierra. If I am guilty, you are guilty ten times more so. Even from far away, I have heard of your slaughter of other Queens.”

  A kind of panic was fast clearing my mind. My body, on the other hand, still felt weak, my muscles unable to obey the urgent command I sent to break free of these bonds.

  “This Queen with me is different from the others,” Dante said.

  “Yes, she tried to help you.” Mona Sierra made it sound like the most heinous crime ever committed.

  “This Queen is the one who started my legend.” He addressed his next words to me. “Show them your palms.”

  With my hands tied above my head, all it took to do so was uncurling my hands. I opened my palms, wondering all the while what Dante was up to. Nothing to see there but my moles. They were unusual, yes, but not so unsightly as to cause the vastly startled reaction that ran like bolts of lightning among those gathered. More than a few choked out a name. Mona Lyra.

  Mona Sierra strode over to me, stopping a foot away to stare intently at my hands. “Who are you?” she asked.

  “Lisa Hamilton,” I answered, wetting my lips.

  “She is Mona Lyra reincarnated,” Dante said, his voice ringing out.

  Mona Sierra whirled like a scalded cat. “Then why was she helping you? If she is Mona Lyra, why would she help the one who killed her?”

  It was more than confusing now. It was becoming surreal. And I had absolutely no idea what was going on, or what Dante was trying to accomplish with this fantastic claim of his.

  “She does not know or remember,” he said.

  “That may explain her actions, but not yours. Why would you try to help the one who killed your father and laid this curse upon you? No,” she said, shaking her head, “you lie.”

  “You see with your own eyes the Goddess’s Tears embedded in the heart of her palms. The mark of favor from our Mother Moon never seen in any other.”

  The feeling of unease was palpable now among the crowd. I could even see it subtly affecting Mona Sierra. She shook it off. “Pah! Nothing but lies. She is tainted with human blood.”

  She made that sound akin to a butt-ugly mongrel dog.

  “This Queen is not one you should toy with,” Dante said with calm reason. “Let her go. You have me—I’m the one you seek.”

  Things became clearer then why he was making all these outrageous claims. He was trying to free me. A variation on the old take-me-but-let-her
-go ploy.

  “You bargain with nothing in your possession,” Mona Sierra spat back at him. “Nothing but false claims to try to trick us.”

  “If you do not believe the mark of favor everyone sees plainly embedded in her palms, then believe this. The woman before you is the High Prince of Hell’s chosen mate. Kill her and you will bring down Hell’s wrath upon you.”

  “Another lie. You grow desperate trying to save your little Queen.”

  “She wears his necklace,” Dante stated.

  Mona Sierra faced me again, eyes narrowed into slits. “That should be easy enough to disprove,” she sneered, reaching down my collar to lift out my necklace.

  There was a flash of blinding light and the sharp smell of burning flesh. Mona Sierra’s scream shrilled the air. I blinked, momentarily blinded by the light. When I was able to see again, I saw the other Queen fallen in front of me, clutching her hand. Black burn marks were visible on her seared fingertips. Six hunters ran to her, pulling her away from me, eyeing me warily as if I had been the one responsible for hurting their Queen.

  Not me. I didn’t do that, I wanted to babble but was not stupid enough to do so. If they wanted to account me powers I didn’t possess, far be it for me to correct their false assumptions. I wondered, though, how Dante had pulled off that impressive bit of magic. If he could do that, why the hell didn’t he free himself?

  “What did you do?” Mona Sierra hissed from behind the wall of her men.

  I didn’t have a clue and didn’t know what to tell her. It was Dante who answered. “It was the necklace you touched. It reacts against those who intend harm against her.”

  She rapped out a command in Spanish, and a hunter with the red mark on his forehead advanced with knife drawn.

  “Uh, Dante . . .” I said uneasily.

  “Be still,” Mona Sierra snapped, pushing her men aside. “We only wish to see your necklace.”

  I swallowed as the hunter carefully inserted the tip of his knife down my shirtfront and drew out the necklace with his naked blade. “The chain is silver,” he murmured in heavily accented English. It was odd hearing words come out of his mouth. Like hearing a wolfhound unexpectedly talk.