by Sunny
“I do?”
“You can draw metal objects to you with these.” Taking my hands, he stroked the moles embedded in my palms.
I blinked down at my hands. “How?”
His lips twisted wryly. “I don’t know. That’s why I hesitated to bring it up, but I’ve seen you do it. Watched you pull two swords out of their sheaths from a distance of over ten meters away and fly them into your hands.”
It seemed fantastical, what he was saying, almost unbelievable were it not for the fact that I had seen other fantastical, unbelievable things happen tonight.
Okay. I took another deep, steadying breath. He could make claws sprout out of his hands, and I could apparently draw metal things into mine. “All right,” I said, deciding there was nothing to lose by the effort. “Let’s give it a try.”
With odd reluctance, he turned around, presenting his back once more. As I laid my palm over the second bullet wound, the muscles in his back and arms bunched and tightened. “Think of pulling it out,” he said in a voice that sounded terse and strained. “Call it into your hand.”
“Relax,” I muttered. “You seem even more nervous about this than I am.” Focusing on that part of myself, I felt my palm begin to thrum, felt it stroke his surface skin and start to reach deeper into his injured flesh. I stopped it there, holding the power, keeping it leashed close to its origin.
Not in, I told myself. Don’t go in to it. Make it come out to you.
I concentrated and fought against the pulling need of the power to seep down and in, mapping out the injury as it had before. Visualizing the hole made through his flesh, I fixed the image of the silver bullet in my mind, and the mole in my palm heated, grew physically hot against his skin.
Without warning, Dante yanked away and swung around to face me, his pale eyes glittering, his face damp with perspiration, chest moving in deep breaths.
“Did I hurt you?” I asked, worried.
“No,” he said, but he looked totally spooked. “I felt your palm grow hot.” Snatching up the knife, he slapped it into my hand. “Here, use this. It’ll be faster.”
“And much more painful. Not to mention gory and bloody. I think I almost had it. Let me try again—”
“No!”
The loudness of his voice startled me.
“No,” he repeated in a more restrained tone. “Please, just do it this way. Cut it out. Do it fast.”
Too late. The sound of a car turning off the highway. “There’s a car coming.”
“Get in the car,” Dante said, grabbing his shirt. “Drive!”
The car peeled out, spewing dirt and gravel behind us. “Is it Roberto?”
“You tell me. My senses are crap with that silver slug still inside me.”
I quieted my pounding heart and listened. Words spoken in Spanish. A voice that sounded like Roberto’s. A heartbeat that was slower than the others, like mine.
“Yeah, it’s Roberto with some of his men.”
“Shit, they’re closing in on us,” Dante said, glancing behind. “Speed up.”
“I’m already going past the speed limit.”
“Doesn’t matter. Floor it.”
Twisting awkwardly, he positioned the knife behind him, blindly probing his back with the other hand.
“What are you doing?” I asked as I zipped around slower-moving cars. Settling onto an open stretch of road, I pushed the gas down until it hit the floor. Until we were going over a hundred miles per hour.
“I’m getting the bullet out of my back. Keep it nice and steady for a minute.”
A minute, at this speed, was a very long time. With a quick, horrified glance, I saw him stab the knife deep into his back. When he pulled the blade out, fresh blood gushed out.
“What did you just do?”
He scooted over and presented his bleeding back to me. “Stick your finger in and fish out the bullet.”
“You’re crazy, absolutely crazy! You could have killed yourself!”
“I can’t die, Mona Lisa. I’m Monère. We only die in certain ways: if you cut off the head or rip out the heart, poison us with silver, or expose us to the sun for several hours. But you and Roberto are part human—you’re probably easier to kill.”
“Good to know,” I said tightly. “I still say you’re crazy!”
“Dig the bullet out before they catch up to us.”
“It’s unbelievable what you’re asking me to do! Completely unbelievable.”
“Do it—please. Trust me.”
With a curse, I eased up on the gas pedal.
“You’re slowing down.”
“Yes, I know,” I snapped back. “If you want me to grope around in your back for a bullet, I’m not doing it while going a hundred and ten miles per hour. I’m not Wonder Woman, you know.”
Amazingly, he turned his head and grinned. “You’re better than her,” he said, humor lightening the grim lines for a moment. “But don’t tell Linda Carter I said that.”
I laughed and shook my head. “I can’t believe you just made me laugh. We’re being chased by bad guys with guns, and you make a joke.”
“Do it quickly,” Dante urged, growing sober. “If I didn’t cut deep enough, just push through with your fingers—you’re strong enough. Doesn’t matter if you tear up my flesh. Just get the damn slug out of me.”
Without thinking about it, because if I did, I would scream, I stuck two fingers into his wound and pushed my way slowly down. Blood squished out, sliming my fingers and hand.
Shots sounded, thudding into the rear window. Bulletproof glass apparently. My hand on the wheel jerked in surprise, causing the car to swerve. I had to put both hands back on the steering wheel to regain control as I sped up.
Lowering his window, Dante leaned out and fired back. After several seconds of return fire, our car suddenly dropped a few inches on the passenger’s side, pulling the steering violently to the right. I knew in an instant our back rear tire had been shot out. Our smooth ride turned bumpy as we rode the metal rim of the hub.
“Good news and bad news,” Dante said, sticking his head back inside. “I shot out his front tires, but he blew out our rear wheel.”
“I can tell,” I grunted, fighting to keep our car straight without overcompensating so much that I accidentally ripped out the steering wheel. Despite the lost tire, the car was still drivable, though at a much slower speed. But with two of their tires out, our pursuers weren’t going any faster.
“Pull over,” Dante said.
“What?”
“Pull over and get out!”
I started to ask why but then glimpsed the reason in the rearview mirror. Roberto and his men had abandoned their car and were coming after us on foot. And Roberto was running with superfast speed, faster than our car was going, apparently no longer hindered by the silver bullet I’d jammed in his back, though Dante did his best to remedy that by shooting at him. But he missed. Didn’t even come close to hitting Roberto, moving as fast as he was, and with Dante slowed down to sluggish human reflexes and speed.
I jerked the car to a halt and sprang out, gun in hand. Roberto’s men were firing at Dante—not me, just Dante. Some of the hail of bullets struck our car, others Dante managed to deflect with his wrist bracelets—a pretty miraculous feat considering how much the silver slowed him. He slid back into the protection of the car, but Roberto had come close enough that he now had a clear shot at him. They drew on each other, but it was an unfair match. Roberto was much faster.
I fired before I gave myself a chance to think and watched blood blossom on Roberto’s right shoulder. He cried out, dropping his weapon.
I turned and emptied my gun, laying out a round of fire that hit the asphalt in front of the four bodyguards, making them scramble back to their car for cover. Before Dante had time to lift his gun and fire at Roberto, I yanked him out through the driver’s seat door and took off, carrying him. A quick sprint and we reached the cover of trees. I heard Roberto yelling orders at his men. No gu
nshots followed us, but I didn’t bother slowing down, just kept moving deeper into the forest.
“You missed his heart,” Dante said after ten minutes of running through the woods.
“Surprisingly, I hit exactly what I was aiming for—his shoulder. I guess you’re right: I do know how to shoot a gun.”
He closed his eyes, shook his head. “You can put me down now. Are they following us?”
I listened and heard only the quiet life-sounds of the jungle, no sound of pursuit. “Not at the moment.”
“Roberto will want to get that silver bullet out of his shoulder before coming after us again. He’ll go to a hospital,” I said, setting Dante on his feet, dropping down to the ground to rest for a few moments. “Several hours at least.”
He eased down to sit beside me. “You’re amazing, you know.”
“No, you are. You must be hurting terribly—you were shot twice, stabbed once by me, a second time by yourself!—and yet you can still smile.” More softly, “You should do that more, you know. Smile.”
“As you wish, milady.” He took my hand, kissed it unexpectedly. “One more thing I must ask of you.”
“Your back,” I groaned. “God, you have a one-track mind.”
“Hard not to. The silver burns my flesh unpleasantly.”
I sighed. “Do you have the knife?”
“Sorry, left it on the floor. I was fortunate to hang on to the gun, not that it will do us much good,” he said as he popped the magazine out and counted. “Only three bullets left. One of them was aimed quite nicely at Roberto’s heart before you jerked me out of the car.”
“Would it have killed him?”
“Maybe. He’s a three-quarters Mixed Blood like you.”
“You’re too bloodthirsty, Dante.”
“And, surprisingly . . . you are not.”
“Why is that surprising? Was I different before?”
He gave me another one of those small, fleeting smiles and turned, presenting his bloody back to me.
“All right, all right! You want the damn bullet out, I’ll get it out.” I pushed and squeezed my fingers down to the end of the cut he had made. “You were off by an inch,” I muttered, feeling viciously angry, at him, at myself.
“Hard to aim when you can’t see a bloody thing,” he returned through a tightly clenched jaw.
“Goddammit, I hate this. I really, really hate this.” No help for it. As he said, I was strong enough to tear through his flesh with my fingers, and almost puked as I did so.
I finally came to the bullet, curved my fingers around it, and pushed the troublesome thing back out the hole. Then I proceeded to throw up.
ELEVEN
I SHOULDN’T BE So happy, Dante thought with remorse. Not when the lady I love is heaving up her stomach contents. But the truth of the matter was, it was more than he had expected, to be with her again like this—the ease and trust between them.
“Gee, that was fun,” Mona Lisa muttered when her stomach finished its violent heaving. “You really know how to show a girl a good time.”
His lips quirked. “My pleasure, to be alive and here with you.”
“Even with me torturing you and getting you caught and injured? Why the hell are you smiling?”
He smoothed her hair back in a gentle gesture. “You.”
“But I’m not the you that you knew. I’m different, aren’t I? Because I can’t remember.”
“You’re still the same person at your core. And I like seeing the core you—someone who’s upset enough after inflicting deliberate, unwanted pain on someone she cares about to become physically ill.”
“Cares about?” She aimed a mean, narrow-eyed glance at him. “Honey, I don’t even know you.”
His small smile grew broader. “You will.”
Funny, she thought. He doesn’t look so fierce or frightening when he smiles.
The smile evaporated as resonant energy swept across them. Monère—more than a half dozen.
“Your friends?” she asked.
“No.” One word, icily sure.
“Roberto’s men?”
“They’re coming from the opposite direction.” Grabbing her hand, Dante sprung them forward in large, bounding leaps that took them sailing over the eight-foot-tall brush in graceful arcs, the fastest way of traveling through the jungle-like forest, heading back where they’d come from.
He jerked to a halt that had Mona Lisa stumbling into him as they both felt another wave of men closing in on them from that direction. Not Roberto and his thugs, unfortunately. These were all entirely Monère.
“Organized group,” Mona Lisa noted in a soft whisper.
“This way,” Dante said, heading north.
“What if they’re deliberately herding us this way?” Mona Lisa asked as they went sailing over the thick brush again like human kangaroos.
“No choice.”
Behind them they felt the hot energy signatures of their Monère pursuers and heard the sound of swift movement, many of them. They weren’t even trying to muffle the sounds of pursuit. Indeed, a primitive, undulating hunting cry sliced the air like a sharp blade, quickly taken up by others. The excitement in the raised cries raised the hair on the back of Mona Lisa’s neck. “What the hell is that?” she asked.
“The sounding of the hunt.”
Something whizzed by them during one of their leaps.
Dante cursed. “Stay on the ground.” Holding her hand in a tight grip, he began bulling his way through the dense foliage.
“Was that bullets?” she asked. “I didn’t hear any gunshots.”
“Silver darts.”
No one was trying to be quiet, at this point. The loud, undulating cries reminded her of baying dogs. Whatever was hunting them seemed more animal than human.
“Let go of my hand,” Mona Lisa said. “I’ll keep up.”
He released his grip. “Stay with me.”
“No problem.”
Each time Dante tried to veer east or west, they were herded back, more of those silver darts flying their way. Then suddenly the end of their path loomed up: a cliff. A sheer drop-off that was so steep and high that looking down into the deep gorge below made her feel sick and dizzy.
Their pursuers emerged from the thick brush and they saw their hunters clearly for the first time: savage, half-naked men whose faces, arms, and bare chests had been painted in primitive patterns of black and brown swirls. They were barefoot, their long, dark hair braided down their backs.
They were the darkest-skinned Monères Mona Lisa had seen, all lean and hungry looking, like starved wild beasts, every ounce of their flesh strappy muscle.
An image shimmered and condensed in her mind.
A young boy with the same starved musculature, tangled hair matted into an Afro, his chest and feet bare and the only thing he wore, pants, torn and ragged. A boy snarling like a wild animal as he strained against his chains, the heavy smell of urine mixing with the scent of dirty, unwashed skin.
The image broke and dissolved back into current reality, and faced against that sudden, sharp memory, the men closing in on them didn’t look so bad anymore; at least they were clean. But they still looked pretty darn scary.
Their leader had the figure of a red eye painted on his forehead, the only one among them with a splash of color. He looked at Dante and bared his teeth, not in a smile but in a look of menace. “Smãileden,” he said with fierce satisfaction. The look in his eyes when he turned them to Mona Lisa wasn’t any kinder.
“What do we do now?” Mona Lisa asked in a small voice.
Dante gave her no warning. Grabbing her, he turned and leaped off the cliff, and then they were hurtling through the air. For a moment, she thought he would transform into a bird, like the eagle-man she had seen, but they began to fall rapidly.
“You can fly,” Dante shouted. “Transform now!”
“Into what?” she yelped.
“A vulture!”
As soon as Dante said the word, a
picture formed in her mind and she felt energy start to surge and prickle along her skin.
“Good girl,” Dante whispered, releasing her. Just letting her go.
In a slow and painful outburst of power, she transformed in a puff of feathers, clothes tearing, shredding. A human scream turned into a vulture’s snarling shriek. And still she continued to plummet.
“Open your wings,” Dante cried below her, in freefall. “Dammit, open your wings!”
Her wings snapped open, and Mona Lisa’s hurtling descent slowed into a veering, teetering spiral. You’d think she’d know how to fly, being a bird and all, but nope, wasn’t something that came naturally to her. If she’d ever flown before, she couldn’t remember it. After a few awkward, experimental shifts of her wings, she got herself angled down after Dante, but the gap between them had grown substantial. Why wasn’t he shifting?
Mona Lisa opened her mouth to yell at him and found a hissing sound emerging from her beak instead of words. A hissing sound that grew louder and more distressed as the bottom of the rugged gorge loomed alarmingly closer, and still he just fell, making no effort to change, his pale blue eyes glittering, lifted up to her.
She tucked in her long span of wings and dived, but it was too late; there was too much distance between them. He hit the ground feetfirst with bone-crunching impact and slammed into the dirt, landing on his side. Blood sprayed the air with metallic scent.
She hissed and snarled, misjudged the landing distance, and hit the ground harder than she had intended. Dante was still conscious, a broken, bleeding mess. His eyes, only his eyes shifted to her, his head and neck unmoving. Blood, mixed with clear sanguineous fluid, seeped out like in a tiered halo around his head, reddening the ground.
“Take us away,” he croaked in a barely understandable rasp.
She wanted to yell and scream at him, tell him he was too injured to move, but a vulture had no vocal cords, no way of speaking. Only her eyes flashed her ire and sick worry as she hopped agitatedly around him.
He smiled, goddamn him, seeming to understand her distress. “Won’t kill me . . . but they will.” He shifted his eyes to look up. Turning, Mona Lisa saw them in the far distance, scaling their way rapidly down the cliff like giant spiders.
