Mona Lisa Eclipsing Read online

  “So I’m the first woman you’ve dined with in public?” I said skeptically.

  “No, I have had other dining companions. But you are the only one I have ever touched or kissed like this.”

  Roberto, when he turned on the charm, was mesmerizing, and despite myself, I found myself relaxing beneath his warm, intoxicating attention. Two glasses of fine wine also no doubt helped.

  “Are you enjoying yourself?” he asked as our waiter discreetly cleared the plates from our table. Not only had I eaten a main entrée and dessert, but I had guzzled down soup and salad and an appetizer as well—much more than I usually ate.

  “The food was divine, the company wonderful, and the setting exquisite,” I said, sitting back happily replete.

  “I am only wonderful, while the food was divine and setting exquisite?” he said sadly. The twinkle in his eyes told me he was teasing.

  “You’re good,” I drawled back, “but not as good as the food. Especially the dessert.”

  “Oh, you wound me.” Mockingly he clasped his chest.

  When I giggled, he smiled happily. “You know, I have never had a more wonderful time. Dance with me.”

  “Where?” Live music was playing, but there was no space to dance.

  “Outside on the patio.” He drew me to my feet and pulled me out the terrace doors.

  “It feels unreal,” I said as he enfolded me into his arms outside. “You feel unreal.”

  “I’m very much real,” Roberto murmured as he brought me close against the hardness of his body. We swayed in time to the music as a cool sea breeze blew across our skin.

  “Kiss me,” I said, lifting up my face, feeling more relaxed than I’d ever felt in my entire life. Feeling almost beautiful.

  “I’ve been wanting to all night.” His head dipped down and claimed my lips, and with sweet magic that ever-present chemistry flared up between us.

  His kiss, his touch, sent pleasure thrumming through me. With a small sound, I parted my lips, inviting his tongue in to tangle with mine. I ran a hand through the thick silk of his hair, touched the close-shaven side of his face, and felt desire—wonderful, miraculous desire—course through me like a shaft of brilliant sunlight, as if the sun was shining brightly beyond my closed eyelids.

  Roberto’s abrupt withdrawal opened my eyes, and I found that the light I had thought I’d imagined was real. Only it wasn’t sunlight, it was our skin: my skin blazing brightly with white luminescence, Roberto’s skin a dimmer glow.

  I gasped. “My God. We’re glowing! What did you do?”

  “Nothing,” Roberto said, as startled as I. “I thought you might know what this was.”

  To our vast relief, the glowing of our skin dimmed and disappeared after we broke apart.

  “No one saw us,” Roberto said. “What just happened?”

  “We lit up like two freaking lightbulbs. That’s what happened!”

  “Yes.” He gave a brief, shaky laugh. “But what caused it?”

  Reality shifted suddenly again.

  The moon full and round, pregnant with light and energy. Rays, shafts of light, coming down from it. No, that wasn’t quite right— pulled down from it. By me. Hitting me, filling me with buzzing power like a battery getting a sudden blast of charge. Light filling me, pouring out of my skin, setting me aglow . . .

  I crashed back to the present. To Roberto’s voice.

  “. . . it was almost as if sunlight emanated from us—”

  “No,” I whispered hoarsely. “Moonlight . . . moonlight spilling from our skin. What in God’s creation are we?”

  Sudden awareness rippled across my skin, that feeling of like to like, as energy brushed faintly across me.

  “What’s that?” I asked as my skin prickled. Turning in a circle, I tried to pinpoint where that feeling was coming from.

  “What is what?” asked Roberto.

  “That. Don’t you feel it? It’s like what I feel with you, only it’s more distant. It’s coming from . . . the sky. There!” I pointed to a bird on the distant horizon and wondered if I was crazy. No airplane, no crazy tourist hang gliding or parasailing. Just the bird—my vision zoomed in. An eagle.

  Roberto suddenly urged me inside.

  “What is it?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s another like us,” he said, sounding grim.

  “Where?”

  “Where you pointed.”

  “I pointed to a bird.”

  “Exactamente.”

  “You can’t be serious.” I stopped. Turned to look at him. “You are! You think that eagle is someone like us?” I said with disbelief.

  He nodded. “If I can take on the form of an animal, so can someone else.”

  My voice squeaked up an octave. “You’re telling me that you can shift into an animal?”

  “Into a jaguar. Can you not shift into animal form?”

  “Uh . . . no.”

  That seemed to surprise him. He shook his head as urgency regained its hold. “Inside the restaurant, quickly.”

  “Why? If it’s someone like us, don’t you want to meet him?” I asked, bewildered.

  “It’s a male,” Roberto said. Opening the door, he ushered me inside the restaurant. “I have found other males to be quite dangerous.”

  “You’ve met others?” Aware of our environment, I lowered my voice. “Like us?”

  “Met them and killed them.”

  “You killed them?” I said in a shocked whisper, swinging around to face him. We were drawing attention again, but our voices were lowered beyond what normal humans could hear.

  “It was kill or be killed,” he said, gripping my shoulders. “Other males come here occasionally to challenge me, to try and take my territory.” Planting a quick kiss on my mouth, he spun me around and led us back to our table. With a gesture from Roberto, our attentive waiter rushed over. A quick spatter of Spanish later, Roberto was leading us out the front door. His two bodyguards, waiting near the entrance, fell into place, one in front of us, one behind.

  “I didn’t see you pay,” I continued to whisper, even though there was no longer a need to.

  “I had the waiter charge the bill to my account.”

  No credit cards, just charging things to your account. It struck me as hilariously funny for some reason. I started laughing as I almost ran to keep up with Roberto’s brisk pace, his hand tightly clasped around mine.

  “What’s so funny?” he asked, glancing back.

  “You are. This whole situation—bodyguards, just signing instead of paying a bill, running from a bird.” And unsaid, our skin glowing with moonlight, and learning that there were other people like us who Roberto had killed and who had tried to kill him. And discovering that people like us could shift into animal form!

  Our car quickly pulled out in front, and we slid inside into the dark, tinted interior. The two guards squeezed in front with the driver, and off we went, blending swiftly into traffic. There were fifteen minutes of alert tension but nothing happened, and I began to think that we had lost whoever, whatever, had been flying toward us. A bird. A freaking bird, I thought with disbelief. Had I not felt that frisson of awareness, I would have wondered whether Roberto was paranoid or deluded.

  Shifting into an animal . . . Roberto had claimed he could as well. Never in my wildest dream had I imagined being able to do something like that. But as we pulled off the main highway and threaded our way onto less crowded residential roads, I felt it again, that sharp frisson of awareness.

  “He’s here,” I said a second before something big struck the roof. The car jolted with the impact, and taloned claws—alarmingly big, almost the size of a man’s hand—punched through the metal above us with a screeching, tearing sound. Gravity tilted as the car was jerked abruptly onto its side, my scream lost among the blistering sound of metal scraping along asphalt and the loud, explosive din of guns being fired at close range.

  The taloned claws disappeared, and the car careened to a stop. We
were amazingly uninjured, I saw, as I climbed out of the upended car. I looked wildly around for a large eagle and felt him close by but had only a fraction of a second to glimpse a naked, bleeding man sprawled on the road before my senses were awash with another onslaught. Not just one but many, I had time to think, and then three men were suddenly attacking us.

  Our two bodyguards had crawled out of the car and were shooting in a wild burst of fire but seemed unable to hit any of our attackers. Roberto came closer to hitting his target with the gun he had pulled out and was firing. Close but no cigar. His bullets struck and deflected off the thick, metal bracelets his attacker wore on his forearms, using them like an ancient warrior of old to block the shots—a wild-looking man with long, dark hair and a thick, unruly beard. It was a scary and impressive skill he had. Even more impressive were the three-inch-long claws curving out of his fingertips!

  I blinked my eyes to make sure what I was seeing was real. Holy crap, it was.

  He was a seasoned fighter, much better than Roberto, it became quickly obvious as the two neared each other. Blood scented the air, pungent and coppery thick, as he sliced across Roberto’s chest and, spinning nimbly, cut deep bleeding furrows down his back. Before I had time to think, I was in motion, as with cold, eerie calmness he executed another neat rotation, raising his right hand—his right claw—for a beheading stroke.

  “No!” I threw myself in front of Roberto, coming face-to-face with eyes so pale a blue that they looked like ice. I saw my death in those eyes and had no time to brace myself for the oncoming blow that would end my life.

  Emotion flashed in those arctic eyes, something like confusion, maybe even surprise, as he twisted himself violently away. I felt his claws whistle pass my neck, felt the brush of passing wind whip across my skin, and braced for pain, but none came. No blood, no wet splatter. He’d missed . . . he’d deliberately missed.

  “Mona Lisa,” he rasped hoarsely, words that jolted me. As I stared into those odd, pale eyes, his body jerked as a gun fired behind him, blasting my eardrums with the close shock of the loud noise. My eyes dropped down to those deadly claws, so long and lethal and inhuman, and watched with awful fascination as they shrank down in a fluid wave of transformation to become normal nails on normal hands.

  “Silver bullets,” the pale-eyed attacker said, looking down at his unblemished chest. No exit wound. The bullet was still inside him, buried in his flesh.

  As he dropped to his knees, Roberto came into view, his dark eyes shining with satisfaction as he shot the man a second time. The bandit jerked again and collapsed on the ground.

  One moment I was alone with the fallen attacker, shielded behind Roberto and the two bodyguards; the next instant a hand grabbed me out of nowhere, an invisible hand I could not see, matched by an invisible voice that said, “Let’s go, milady, quickly.”

  “No!” Frightened and bewildered, I instinctively resisted the invisible hand gripping me. “Let me go!”

  Roberto aimed to my left and fired. More bullets whined.

  I heard, even felt, some of them passing by. Heard two of them hit their invisible target as I twisted and fought against my unseen captor. My wrist was abruptly released, and I sensed whoever had been holding me move away. He made it only a few yards away before the first drops of red blood spilled out at stomach height, as if from the very air itself. Then abruptly, as if a veil had been yanked away, a man suddenly appeared, tall, wiry thin, with short, curly brown hair. He looked like a young graduate student instead of a road bandit; certainly not someone capable of playing the invisible man and inspiring the choking amount of terror he had in me.

  All guns trained at him and fired. If I had wondered before if we were capable of moving faster than a speeding bullet, the answer is yes, sort of.

  Roberto and I were the only ones who saw the other attacker move, the biggest one, tall and strongly muscled, with a beard like the other man but shorter and more neatly clipped—the only one left uninjured among our group of attackers. He moved as I moved when I ran free, out of sight of prying eyes: inhumanly fast. He snatched up Mr. Invisible (who had now turned visible) and darted out of the way of fire before the bullets reached where the other man had been standing.

  Roberto was the only one fast enough to fire a second round. The big guy deflected two of the bullets with metal wrist guards similar to what the arctic-eyed bandit wore. Even as he ran, fast, so fast that it was nothing but a blurring streak to human eyes, I saw him turn back and look at us . . . no, not us. At the other man who had fought like him and been shot down, fallen near me, blocked from rescue behind Roberto and the bodyguards.

  “Go! Leave me,” I heard the injured man say as he tried to crawl away from us, making pitiful progress. The words should have been lost beneath the gunfire but I heard him and so did the big man.

  The large bandit raced to the naked eagle guy and swung him over his shoulder. Unhindered by their weight . . . indeed, acting as if they weighed nothing more than a feather each, he sprang into the air, one impressive bounding leap that took him to the end of the block where he veered around the corner, disappearing from sight.

  I was still reeling from what I had seen, not the world-record-breaking leap—that I could do myself, though maybe not with two other men hanging over my shoulders—but rather from what I had glimpsed when he had swung the naked man onto his shoulder: the neat Vandyke beard and mustache adorning the bird-man’s face.

  Looking just like a character out of England’s Victorian age.

  SEVEN

  THE DRIVE BACK home was made in tense silence, with the prisoner gagged and bound in handcuffs—silver, I noted, not the stainless steel they appeared to be. My nose smelled the difference. The cuffs had the same sharp metallic scent as the fired bullets, and seemed to physically pain the prisoner upon contact—no sound, just a subtle clenching of his face and arm muscles. They had dumped him in the trunk of our car, and though he was out of sight, it was impossible to forget him.

  For some reason, I didn’t like knowing that we sat comfortably in the car while a shot and injured man lay locked in the dark and cramped trunk space behind us. Could he breathe? Did he have enough air? He must have or Roberto would not have put him there, I didn’t think, but I couldn’t even ask Roberto. He had been on the cell phone speaking in rapid Spanish ever since the car started moving.

  I had a number of questions I wished I could ask the captive. Number one was how he knew my name, my secret name that no one else knew. Mona Lisa. The second was about his companions—the big wrestler-type, the guy with an old-fashioned Vandyke beard and mustache, and Mr. Invisible. Together, with him, they made four men, half of whom clearly matched the description my landlord had given me. The other two descriptions were off, however. The poor schmuck bound and gagged in the trunk was neither movie-star handsome nor average looking, though the latter might apply to Mr. Invisible—a startling trick, by the way, turning invisible; almost as good as turning into a bird and being able to flip big cars onto their side. I felt an edge of hysteria grip me for a frantic instant and didn’t know if I was going to laugh or start crying. Thankfully I did neither, just sat there feeling my world, my reality, distorting.

  Okay, deep breath. Clear thinking.

  No telling what the guy in the trunk looked like with all that mountain-man hair and beard covering his face. He didn’t look movie-star handsome, but maybe he’d dressed better and hadn’t had all that facial hair when my landlord had seen him. Maybe he’d been smiling instead of tearing his way through flesh with horrific clawed hands. First impressions really did matter, you know.

  Another surge of demented giggling threatened for a thin, precarious moment, then subsided.

  Jesus. Maybe I was going crazy because now that I’d had time to think about that chaotic fight, a couple of things bothered me. For one, they didn’t seem to be trying to rob us as I had first assumed. My second thought had been kidnapping; Roberto was wealthy, after all. But the guy had clearl
y been about to kill Roberto, not hold him for ransom. I wasn’t too familiar with the profession, but I believed kidnappers generally kept the person they wanted to demand money for alive, not cut their head off, which I was pretty sure Mr. Pale Eyes had been about to do before I stopped him. He had been willing to hurt everyone but me. And what had the Invisible Man called me? My lady. Let’s go, my lady, quickly. As though he’d known me and had expected me to come with him.

  I hadn’t been able to see his eyes but I wondered if Mr. Invisible might have had the same confused and surprised expression on his face as the man in the back of the trunk had when I’d thrown myself in front of Roberto and stopped his killing blow.

  I had assumed Roberto had been their target, if not to kidnap him then to kill him. That seemed to be what Pale Eyes had intended, his death. But if that was their goal, then why try to take me away?

  I was confused—confused and feeling something almost like dread rising within me.

  Roberto ended his phone call.

  “Why did they attack us?” I asked him.

  Did Roberto hesitate a moment or was I just imagining it? And if not imagining it, then reading something more into it than I should?

  “I told you before, querida. Sometimes others come here to try to take what is mine.”

  Reasonable answer. But I wasn’t satisfied. “They were trying to kill you but not me. They did their best, in fact, not to harm me. No one shot at me, not once. And the guy in the trunk pulled his blow, the one he had intended to take off your head with, or it would be my head rolling on the ground right now. Why didn’t they try to hurt me?”

  He must have heard the rising note of agitation in my voice because he put his arm around me and soothed me with a soft shushing sound, gently urging my head to rest against his chest. But I resisted, the first time I’d done that. I pulled away so I could see his face. It was important that I do that, see Roberto’s face when he answered me.

  “You are a woman. I have seen other men like myself but never a woman before,” Roberto said, choosing his words carefully, making me wonder how much English his two bodyguards spoke and understood. “Of course they would wish to kill me and take you for themselves.”