Mona Lisa Craving Read online

  I woke up gasping, my hands clutching my chest where the knife had stabbed me. I felt a presence besides me and rolled away with a startled cry.

  “Mona Lisa, it’s just a dream.” It was Dontaine, I realized, looking into his handsome, worried face. Dontaine. Not Barrabus. I glanced down at myself and lifted my hands away from my chest, expecting to see blood. No liquid redness, though, gushed out, and the flesh beneath was unmarred, uncut. But my palms, my Goddess’s Tears…I looked down at them with horror and felt them throb in aching remembrance.

  My eyes shot to Dontaine’s bare chest, searched it frantically, a visual inspection only. I dared not touch him. “Are you okay? Did I hurt you?”

  “I’m fine. You were just dreaming,” he said. Drawing me into his arms, he held me close. His heart beat reassuringly beneath my ear.

  “Oh God, Dontaine. I remembered…”

  “What?”

  “I remember killing Barrabus.”

  The fierce son of Barrarus slew our heart, our hope, our Warrior Queen.

  I’d killed Barrabus, Dante’s ancestral father, in a past that suddenly seemed not so distant. A past that felt as if it had only just happened.

  Dontaine drew back to look at me, his eyes shuttered. “You were saying his name.”

  “Whose?”

  “Barrabus’s.”

  “I took out his heart with my Goddess’s Tears,” I said and hugged myself, more to keep my dangerous hands away from Dontaine than because of the sudden cold filling me.

  “So it’s true. Those stories of Barrabus, of Mona Lyra. You are her, returned,” Dontaine said softly.

  “I don’t know. It’s the first time I’ve ever dreamed”—or more accurately, remembered—“something from that time.”

  “So Dante truly is this Damian. Cursed for killing you long ago.”

  “I don’t know.” A shiver ran through my body. “I just know that I recognize him somehow, that we’ve met before.” Not in this lifetime, but another. A concept I had a hard time wrapping my mind around, even though my heart believed it to be true.

  The woman in my dreams had felt older, harder, her soul much darker than mine. So heart sore and body weary. Was that me? Was I her? Or were we different people now? Different people capable of making different choices? In another time, a peaceful one, we would have likely been friends, had been my thought of Barrabus. Might it be true now for his descendant, for Dante? Or were we destined to be enemies once more?

  So many chances we’d already had of being that again—enemies. But I had saved Dante, brought him back from the brink of madness. He’d drunk down my life-giving light and had spilled his seed into me in turn.

  We had not been lovers before, that I instinctively knew. Already so much was different from the past now. We’d shared our bodies generously with each other before we’d known who we were, who we had been. I remember his gaze falling on my palms as I’d held up my hands to ward him off after I had fled outside after making love, fleeing from what I’d done and had allowed him to do. I remembered the stunned look in his eyes, his distracted manner. That odd way he had looked at me when I had asked him: Do I know you? He’d known who I was, had had a chance to kill me then, to harm me again, but he hadn’t. In turn, I had held back my men’s swords, stopped them from killing him and his family.

  Blood, once shed, was a hard stain to ever wash clean again. I’d learned that long, long ago.

  God, I’d killed his father! And his father had killed those who had meant much to me, would have killed Shel had I not intervened. Innocent lives lost on both sides, caught up in a war not of their making. We had a second chance now. A fragile peace.

  No more bloodshed, I prayed. Please. No more of that senseless wasting of lives.

  Dontaine murmured my name, drawing me away from my thoughts. “Mona Lisa. You’re shivering. Come here, let me hold you.” The same thing he’d said to me when he’d asked to share my bed and I had hesitated, too upset, too distracted to want sex. Let me hold you. I just want to give you comfort…and to receive it, he’d said with an open and vulnerable smile on his first day here in this house as resident, not guest. I’d let him join me in bed, fallen asleep held by him, and had awoken with my Goddess’s Tears throbbing after dreaming of using them in a most horrible manner.

  I looked at them now, those pearly moles. I glanced from them to Dontaine’s beautiful unmarred chest, remembered the throbbing power that had ached in my hands when I had awoken, the energy I had felt there waiting to be released…and felt a wave of nausea rise up in me.

  “I’m sorry, Dontaine, could you go back to your room? I need to be alone right now.” So I don’t accidentally hurt you. Or kill you. And because my thoughts were on another man, on Dante. Not on the man beside me in bed.

  Guilt churned with worry and a fresh dose of horror upon this newest revelation…what those innocent-looking moles in my hands were capable of. Death. Destruction.

  Dontaine slid out of the bed and picked up his clothes, not bothering to put them on. “If you need me, you know where I am,” he said with a smile that was gesture only. A thin shield to cover the hurt I had inflicted by asking him to leave. Of all my lovers, he was the one I rejected the most.

  Another apology formed on my lips. But what could you say, over and over again, besides sorry? Perhaps a suggestion to look for love elsewhere? “Dontaine…”

  “Hush,” he said, stopping the words from being said. “Try to go back to sleep.” With that quiet urging, he left.

  Sleep, however, was the last thing I wanted to do now. As I’d told Dante before, I’d really rather not remember. So instead of risking another dream, another memory, I lay there in that big bed staring up at the ceiling, trapped by Dontaine’s knowing presence next door. If I got up and slipped out of the house, he would know and follow me, and I did not want to see him, talk to him so soon while I still felt so raw. I might have been better protected, but my freedom was curtailed, and it felt stifling.

  So I lay there, still and alone, and despite myself, played and replayed that little snippet of memory endlessly. Truth or mere dream, a fabrication of my mind? Only one person could tell me. And with that thought, my mind circled back to Dante.

  I had believed myself unarmed when I had walked up to him. No sword, my dagger sheathed. But in Dante’s eyes, I had been armed in the deadliest of manners. And he’d let me touch him.

  Who are you? Who am I? And why have we come together again?

  Last time we had, it had ended with my death. And as I had just discovered, I did not want to die yet. So soon, so young, with no afterlife ahead of me…triggering another thought. Was I really young, merely twenty-one years old? Or did my previous life, and the long stretch in between, make me an ancient hag? And regarding that long stretch of time in between, had I lived other lives before and not remembered them?

  I gazed down at my moles as if they could provide me with an answer. And in their fashion, they did. The Goddess’s Tears and their incumbent gifts had not been seen since the time of the Great Exodus when the Monère had fled their dying planet. So, no. Chances were that I hadn’t lived other unremembered lives in between. Just before…and now.

  Dante. His name was a soft whisper in my mind. I have a lot of questions to ask you. I wondered briefly if he would answer them. If he could? Or would it be better if he did not?

  You may feel differently when you remember.

  My flesh prickled with goose bumps and I shivered again.

  For the next several long hours, as sunset inched slowly closer, the most tantalizing, morbid question of all teased my mind.

  How did you kill me? How did I die?

  THIRTEEN

  AS DAYLIGHT EBBED, the house finally stirred and I was freed from the prison of my room. Thaddeus hadn’t returned yet; the space where he normally parked his car was still empty. I wanted to talk to him, tell him what I’d learned. Perhaps comfort myself with his presence. He was not aware yet of the revelations
of the night before because he ran on a different time schedule than the rest of us did. The normal human cycle: sleeping at night, going to school during the day.

  After school, in deference to our flip-flopped habits, Thaddeus usually studied at the library, doing his homework there so as not to disturb the rest of the sleeping household. And probably not wanting to be inhibited by us either, restricted by the need to be quiet. He returned to the house when the brilliant hues of sunset began to paint the sky.

  Chami, Thaddeus’s unofficial guardian, hadn’t liked the idea at all. If it were up to him and the other men, Thaddeus and I would have been guarded at all times, Thaddeus because he was the men’s hope for a different future. My brother was the only male who could call down the moon’s light, who could Bask, something before now only Queens could do. They had wanted to put a guard around him 24/7. Both Thaddeus and I had balked at the idea. Thaddeus had argued that instead of protecting him, it would point him out as a target. His greatest safety lay in secrecy, in letting no others know of his gift. In treating him like a normal Mixed Blood. And trust me, they were not guarded around the clock. Far from it.

  I’d backed Thaddeus because I had promised to try to give my brother as normal a life as possible…and because had I allowed the men this twenty-four-hour watch, the next person they would have imposed it on would have been me. Same blood that we were, we both were used to our freedom, and did not wish it restricted so.

  Chami had finally relented, agreeing that Thaddeus would probably be safer among humans. In general, humans were much more peaceful and civilized than Monères were. In general, though, as I found out, did not take into account the high school teenage subspecies homo sapien idiotae. Schoolyard bullies.

  Thaddeus made himself scarce that evening after returning home. And I saw why in multihued blue-and-purple glory when he slid quietly into his chair at dinner that night. He was sporting not only a black eye, but a bloody nose—one that had stopped bleeding not too long ago. The faint iron-rich scent of fresh blood clinging to him was unmistakable.

  “Thaddeus, what in Hellfire happened to you?” Chami demanded, beating me to the question by a nanosecond.

  I repeated the question. My version of it. “Yeah, what the fuck happened to you?”

  I’d invited the Morells to join us for dinner, with thoughts of having them get to know us better. All thoughts of polite table talk, however, went flying out the window as I gazed at the livid bruises that swelled up Thaddeus’s left eye and puffed up his nose like a bumpy balloon.

  Thaddeus sighed.

  What had he hoped, I wondered? That we would just ignore the black-and-blues and pretend that someone hadn’t used his face as a punching bag?

  “I got into a fight after school.”

  That much was obvious. We waited, but nothing more was forthcoming. I was sorry about focusing everyone’s attention on him, but the fury, the trembling outrage that rose up in me demanded answers now! Not later.

  “With who?” I asked in as calm a voice as I could manage, which was not very calm at all.

  “With three other guys from school,” Thaddeus muttered into his plate.

  “Three other seniors?”

  He nodded. His eyes were cast down so he didn’t see the heat flash through my eyes. Three seniors! Eighteen-year-old boys who were probably taller than I, and way bigger than Thaddeus. He’d basically skipped a grade, and was not only a year younger than the other seniors in his class—he’d only turned seventeen a couple of weeks ago—but he was much smaller in size and of slighter build, making him look years younger than his age. His predominant Monère blood made him mature more slowly, so that while all his classmates had already hit puberty, cruised long past it, he was only just starting to enter it. Only just beginning to hit that fast spurt in physical growth and supernatural strength. He had almost a Full Blood’s strength, but he’d suppressed that part of him through denial.

  Thaddeus had grown up thinking himself human. When his sharper senses and supernatural strength had started to emerge, he’d thought he was going crazy. He’d imposed an unconscious blanket of control over that part of himself, so that his greater Monère strength flared only when that control cracked, usually during times of anxiety and stress. Still…being ganged up on by three boys much bigger than you…that had to count as one of those times of stress.

  “Tell me that they look worse than you do,” I said. “Make me feel better about this.”

  My little brother shook his head.

  “Why didn’t you wipe the floor with them, Thaddeus? You could have if you’d wanted to.”

  His answer surprised me, and made me close my eyes and grind my teeth.

  “This sudden spurting strength is so new, Lisa.” He was the only one who called me by just my human name. “I was afraid of hurting them if I fought back.”

  If I fought back. Meaning that he hadn’t. He’d just stood there, or lay curled up on the ground, letting them beat on him without fighting back. Shit.

  “I was worried that…I don’t know…that I might even kill them without meaning to,” he mumbled. “I didn’t start it.”

  “I know that, Thaddeus.” He didn’t have to tell me that; I knew my brother. Even in the short time we’d known each other, I knew he was not the kind of kid to go around looking for trouble.

  “Why were they picking on you?” I asked.

  “Why else? I’m smarter than they are and much smaller.” It obviously bothered him, his short stature and skinny build. “I’m helping a girl out in calculus who’s failing the class. Her jock boyfriend didn’t like the time we were spending together. He and his football buddies decided to let me know just how unhappy they were today after school.”

  A girl, I thought, gritting my teeth. Of course it had to involve a girl. A jock boyfriend usually implied a pretty cheerleader-type girlfriend. A popular blond ditz who, if she stayed true to stereotype, was stupid enough to fail calculus but smart enough to latch onto some brainy guy and use him to help her pass the course. And who better than the new kid, someone desperate to fit in, make some friends? I wondered if Thaddeus had a crush on this girl. I wondered if maybe it wasn’t just the Neanderthal boyfriend and his two buddies I should beat up but the girlfriend as well—the real instigator of this mess.

  I took a deep breath, determined to act responsibly, both as Queen and as older sister. I would not give in to my primitive urges, which were screaming for vengeance.

  “I’ll talk to your principal, Mr. Camden,” I said, not knowing what else to do.

  “No!” Thaddeus said with horror. “If you do, you’ll make it impossible for me at school.”

  “He’s right, my lady,” Quentin said, speaking up from where he sat with his family down at the other end of the long table. Speaking to Thaddeus he said, “Dante and I just went through what you’re going through now. High school can really suck if you have some guys gunning for you. My brother and I taught at my dad’s self-defense school. We’d be happy to work with you. Get you used to your new strength, show you how to defend yourself. Make you more comfortable with how much strength to safely use against human opponents.”

  “You two went to high school?” Thaddeus asked. “During the daytime?”

  It surprised me, also.

  “Sure, most of the time in school is spent indoors. We only went out during gym, only a forty-minute period. A few guys used to pick on me because of my looks. Called me a girly girl, said I was gay, things like that.”

  “What did you do?” Thaddeus asked.

  “I ignored them, but they kept bothering me until one day I fought back and knocked them on their asses. They left me alone after that.”

  And therein lay the answer to Thaddeus’s dilemma. He had to stand up for himself. If someone else did it for him, it would only make him look weak, and the bullies would continue to pick on him.

  Thaddeus looked to me with eager excitement. He obviously wanted to accept the help Quentin was offering,
help given by someone who knew exactly what he was going through. It had been my original plan to enroll Thaddeus in Nolan’s self-defense school—a school that might never be now.

  My own safety I might be willing to risk. But the real question was: Did I trust Dante near my brother? Because the help Quentin had offered had included Dante. We’d be happy to work with you.

  “That’s generous of you, Quentin. Thaddeus, would you like to train with them during this next week while they’re here?” Anything longer than that was not guaranteed. Come the next Council powwow, the twin Morell boys were likely flying this coop.

  My brother nodded enthusiastically. “Yeah, that sounds great.”

  “Then I would be very grateful for your help,” I said to Quentin, accepting the offer.

  Quentin smiled at Thaddeus and me. Dante did not. His pale, hooded eyes gleamed at me. Opaque, inscrutable.

  “Great,” Quentin said. “We can begin tonight.”

  FOURTEEN

  THEY DID INDEED begin that very night, right after supper. Not in the clearing, which was deep in the woods, but on the lawn behind the house. Another smooth move on pretty boy Quentin’s part—choosing a spot where it would be easy for everyone to keep a discreet and not so discreet eye on them. Aquila and Tomas chose to do their watching from the kitchen window, which overlooked the back lawn, while Nolan and Hannah more tactfully sipped tea in the parlor, affording them a nice side view of things.

  I was much more blatant about it. Come on, now. This was my baby brother. And not just him but Jamie, who had volunteered his help as the human Thaddeus could practice on. With Jamie’s Mixed Blood strength, he was essentially just that—only human strong. His sister, Tersa, had silently come outside with the rest of us to watch. The rest of us being Chami and me. Chami was ostensibly acting as my guard. His true charge, though, was Thaddeus.