by Sunny
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 clearly 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?
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br /> 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.”
It all sounded true, reasonable, consistent with everything he’d told me. I would have been satisfied if two of our attackers didn’t match the description my landlord had given me of my four “friends” who had helped me move out of my Manhattan apartment.
Had they—bizarre thought here—had they been trying to rescue me? If so, that would imply that they thought Roberto was the bad guy. It would also imply that I was a captive, which I wasn’t. Was I?
“We’ll drop you off at the house first,” Roberto said, interrupting my train of thought.
“No, the police will need my statement. I was a witness. For that matter, why didn’t we wait for the police? Aren’t we supposed to stay at the scene of a crime?”
“Normally we would, but it was too dangerous to remain there. The men who escaped might have returned.”
Roberto and his two bodyguards had tipped the car back onto all four wheels, roughly stowed their captive in the trunk, and taken off like a bat out of hell. Roberto could have straightened the car himself, single-handedly, but he’d asked his bodyguards’ help, likely in case anyone in one of the homes along the street were watching. As if a giant eagle turning into a naked man, and people moving at faster than human speed, able to leap an entire block in a single bound, were not strange enough.
“I will take you to the house first. No need for you to be involved,” Roberto said in a soothing tone. “If the Federales wish to take your statement, they can come to the house to do so.” He dropped me off, leaving the taller bodyguard with me, following me inside like a looming shadow as Maria opened the door.
I escaped upstairs to my room, very aware of the guard’s presence outside my door as I wrestled with my sudden, odd suspicions. Roberto had been nothing but kind to me so far, more so than he needed to be. And they had attacked us, not the other way around. But still, so many things didn’t add up, and my questions would not be answered unless I asked them.
I made my decision and opened the door. “Excuse me,” I said to the guard standing outside my room. “Do you speak English?”
“Sí. A little.”
“Good.” I looked up into his eyes and captured his will. Mesmerism, compulsion—whatever name you wanted to call it. I considered this my most dangerous power; as a nurse, I’d only used it to help people, to provide a momentary balm to soothe sick and injured patients.
“What is your name?” I asked.
“Carlos Hernandez.”
“Come inside, Carlos.”
He entered and I shut the door behind him. He waited for my next command, his face slack, eyes fixed on mine.
“What type of businessman is your boss, Roberto Carderas?”
“A ruthless one,” Carlos said, answering the question, but not in the way I had hoped.
I rephrased it. “What type of business is Roberto in?”
“He is a drug lord.”
My sluggish heart started to pound. “What type of drugs?”
“Crystal meth, cocaine.”
Okay, definitely the illegal stuff. Even though I didn’t feel the strain yet, I knew I couldn’t keep up the compulsion for much longer and asked the next question quickly. “How did I come to be here in Roberto Carderas’s house?”
“He shot you with a tranquilizer dart and brought you here.”
My hand flew to where that red spot on my back had been, an injury caused not by a needle but a dart!
“When he shot me with the dart, was I alone?”
“Sí.”
“So the men we just fought, I do not know them?”
“The big man and the invisible one tried to help you, but Senor Carderas put a knife to your throat. Threatened to kill you if they did not leave.”
“They are my friends!” It was a stunning, devastating realization. “The man they captured . . . I have to rescue him! They’re bringing him to the police.”
“Senor Carderas did not take him to the Federales. He is taking him somewhere to be questioned.”
“And after he questions him?” I asked.
“He will kill him.”
EIGHT
I WAS OPERATING blindly in so many ways, I should have been terrified. And if not terrified, then exhausted and drained, as I usually felt after expending so much energy to compel another’s will. But I was none of those things. I was flying on fear and adrenaline instead of crashed out on the floor in a weak and helpless puddle, not at all tired, even though I’d held the compulsion for more than five minutes—by far the longest I’d ever done so. A lot of things, it seemed, had changed in those six months of lost memory.
I changed back into my own clothes, which Maria had neatly mended and washed. Grabbing my passport and money, I left with Carlos before the additional guards Roberto had called in to protect the house arrived. Moments later, I was in the car, being driven by Carlos to wherever Roberto had taken the prisoner—a friend whose name I didn’t even know yet—to be questioned. Or, in franker terms, to be tortured and then killed.
I looked nervously over at the swarthy bodyguard behind the wheel.
With a final flexing of will, I had implanted in Carlos the false impression that we were fleeing an attack on the house. Things seemed to be going well so far—no suspicious glances at me yet. I didn’t know how long the compulsion would last. In the hospital in New York, I’d used my ability only in short spurts, to provide quick comfort. Not for anything as elaborate as what I was doing now.
“How much farther?” I asked.
“Just ahead.” He seemed to mean it literally as he turned into a driveway and pulled in front of an old house that would have looked quite ordinary were it not for the two men posted outside armed with small machine pistols. A rapid flurry of Spanish was exchanged between Carlos and one of the guards, the other bodyguard who had been in the shoot-out, and I wondered for the umpteenth time if what I planned to do wasn’t just crazy but maybe sheer suicide. Then I was inside, with Roberto walking toward me, frowning fiercely. Two other armed men, new guys, followed behind him wielding more of those nasty-looking weapons.
“Thank God!” I cried, throwing myself into Roberto’s very surprised arms. “The big bandit attacked the house and may have followed us here.”
At Roberto’s sharp command, the two guards rushed outside.
“This is not acceptable,” I said, words that at my implanted suggestion caused Carlos to slump to the ground sound asleep. In a flash of speed and strength, I slammed the silver bullet I was holding into Roberto’s back, embedding it deep in his flesh, somewhere he would have a hard time reaching.
The silver rendered Roberto weak and slow, just as it had done to his captive. I
stuffed a handkerchief in his mouth and secured it with Roberto’s own silk tie, all done in the blink of an eye. In the next ticking second, both of his arms were cuffed behind his back, the handcuffs borrowed from the sleeping Carlos.
“That should do it for you,” I said, satisfied. Not bothering to secure him further, I pulled Roberto’s gun from its holster and dashed outside. It was almost unfair how easy it was to knock out the two guards with careful, restrained blows to the backs of their heads. A quick hunt for the other two men, who were checking the perimeter, and it was over by the time Roberto stumbled outside, enraged sounds coming from his gagged mouth. I threw the automatic pistols, one after the other, into the surrounding forest.
“Join me,” I said, pulling Roberto back inside. He struggled but in his weakened state was no match against greater strength. I followed the smell of blood and the sound of a slow heartbeat, even slower than mine, to the basement.
I ended up carrying Roberto down the stairs with me—easier to do that than get him to voluntarily walk down them—and set him back on his feet at the bottom of the steps. Tugging him behind me, I threw open the door to the room where that single slow heartbeat thudded.
NINE
THE PHYSICAL PAIN was agony, the silver bullets burning like fiery brands lodged within Dante’s flesh. But the mental agony was greater. She had betrayed him. In what explicit words, Dante could not say or express coherently in his current haze of rage and pain, only that she had betrayed him and caused injury to all but his father.
It had been many lifetimes since Dante had been a captive, bound, gagged, and helpless. Yet in this current cycle of life, this was his second time in such a state, in as many months. The first time, Mona Lisa had saved him. Now she was the reason he had been captured, his body writhing in silver-ridden pain . . . because she cared more for a handsome stranger than she did him or her own people.
