“Queen Mona Lisa will be happy to meet with your Queen,” Gryphon said, “out here in the open.”
“Will the park bench meet with your approval?” Kyle inquired.
The bench he spoke of was situated midway between us and the Town Cars. It was occupied at the present moment by a young couple, wrapped up in kisses and each other’s arms.
“Yes,” Gryphon said, nodding. “That will be fine.”
Francois walked back to the waiting cars while we followed Kyle to the agreed meeting spot.
Kyle cleared it by the simple matter of planting himself in front of the kissing couple. He was a small tank of a man. With his thick arms crossed in front of his barreled chest and a scowl darkening his face, he looked frankly intimidating.
“Go…[ ]somewhere…[ ]else,” he growled when the young lovers finally became aware of his presence and looked up.
They departed without a word of protest, smart couple. I arched a brow and took a seat on the left side, still warm from where they had sat. Amber, Gryphon, and Chami were silent presences beside me.
“Does that work in getting a taxi?” I wondered out loud.
Humor wasn’t something Mona Sera apparently encouraged in her men. Kyle didn’t bother answering me. Forget smiling. With a slight bow, he departed to wait by the second car.
Francois opened the rear door of the first car. Head bowed, eyes cast down, he assisted his Queen out of the car. Mona Sera stepped out.
The first time I’d seen her, she had been filled with power and naked. Well, half-naked. The lower part of her had been a serpentine flow of smooth rippling muscles covered by glistening scales. She’d had no legs, just the body of a snake. Mona Sera was a lamia in her other form. As first impressions went, it had been…[ ]let’s say, impressive.
Even now, fully clothed, she packed the same punch. Not so much because she was beautiful—more striking. Her hair fell long and unbound in a silky wash down to her hips, a true, pure black, so dark that blue highlights reflected from it beneath the crescent moon’s silvery light. Her lips were thinner than mine, but the cheekbones, the strong line of jaw[ ]…I could see her stamp in my own face, and in that of Thaddeus’s. What made me want to keep the two of them far, far apart was the coldness radiating from that icy, handsome face. She had eyes like a doll. No, that wasn’t right. She had eyes like a snake. Like the reptile that she was—cold and calculating. No warmth, no compassion. Nothing human in those eyes.
Mona Sera stepped out of the car without a glance at the man whose hand she’d taken, treating it—him—like he didn’t exist. Only there for her convenience, to serve her. Francois remained subserviently bowing until she swept past him. I sensed another male, but he remained unseen in the front seat of the first car. The driver.
Mona Sera took a seat beside me on the bench, as far away as the wooden planks allowed. “You are still here in my territory,” she said by way of greeting.
“We are leaving in few days,” I said.
“The sooner you depart, the better.” She cast me a very unfriendly look, her black eyes glittering coldly. “Trouble follows you like a dark cloud.”
See. Real warm, my mother.
Her comment made me wonder if she knew about Lucinda’s recent visit.
“Not just one demon dead, but two now have sought you out here in my city.”
Yup. She knew. And she wasn’t happy about it. Didn’t blame her. Neither was I.
At a snap of her fingers, Kyle opened the second car’s door. The odor hit me—hit us all—strongly. A pungent, rotting stench that reached our sensitive nostrils and made us instinctively cringe. The smell of death and disease. Foreign to a Monère. Our bodies were able to heal just about anything almost miraculously fast. The only time before I had smelled something like this was when Gryphon had been dying of silver poisoning.
My heart gave a little extra beat when I saw whom Kyle helped out of the car. Beldar, one of Mona Sera’s stronger remaining warriors. His hair was white, though that wasn’t completely accurate. He was actually blond, but it was a shade so light, so pale, that it appeared white. Beldar looked up and his eyes met mine.
He had green eyes. Not the mixed brown-green of hazel, but pure emerald green like what you would see in a tropical rainforest. Vibrant, stunning. Even ill and weak he was still beautiful, perhaps more so because his fragility allowed me to really see the pure beauty of his features for the first time—the full line of his lips, the lovely flaring arch of his brows, the straight aquiline nose. Features you normally didn’t notice when his face was laughing and mobile beneath the shine of his forceful personality. His charm, then, sparkled at you, blinding you to all else. But now he wasn’t smiling, he wasn’t being charming. He was barely walking.
Supported by Kyle, he shuffled forward until he fell heavily onto his knees before us. Gently Kyle released him and stepped back to join Francois, standing to Mona Sera’s right. Our two groups were split neatly down the middle of the bench, with Beldar between us like a sacrificial victim.
People glanced curiously at our little group but kept on walking. It was Manhattan. People were allowed to be odd here. A man kneeling on the cold cement before two women was nothing.
“Still cleaning house, Mona Sera?” I asked. “Another strong warrior you decided to poison with silver?”
Mona Sera smiled. It was not a pleasant expression. “Oh, no. This I did not do. The blame for this rests on you.”
I arched a brow. “Me?”
“You brought a demon dead here among us. It is not running silver that sickens his body. He was bitten.”
“Bitten?” My heart suddenly racing, I turned my head to look up at Chami. He stood beside me, strong and healthy, his power and presence untainted by sickness. The tiny marks on his neck were clean, healing, not rotting. I turned my gaze back to Beldar, swaying weakly before us on his knees, but could see nothing obvious. His wound was not visible to our eyes, only discernible by our acute sense of smell.
“Lucinda’s bite did this to Beldar?” I asked.
“Not Lucinda.” Mona Sera’s lips curled. “Her hellhound.”
Chills feathered down my spine like an icy hand. “A hell-[ ]hound? Here? What is one doing here?”
“That is what I wished to ask you,” Mona Sera said coldly. I saw something in her eyes then that I’d never seen before. Fear. A trembling dark shimmer of it.
She leaned toward me, and the abrasiveness of her nearness scraped rawly against my nerves like tiny claws. “Your presence brought it here. This”—she swept a hand toward Beldar—“is your fault. You are costing me yet another warrior, daughter mine. And I do not like it,” she spat, her eyes glinting like black onyx stone. “Fix him. And return him.”
I had a bad feeling where she was going with this. I was the only healer of sorts within the area. No healer, apparently, had wished to swear into Mona’s Sera’s service. “You want me to heal him?” I said, just to be sure.
“Yes. If Beldar dies, I will take one of your men in his stead.” Mona Sera’s eyes flicked past me to the other half of our group, watching and waiting in the distance. “Or perhaps your woman.”
She meant Rosemary, a Full Blood Monère female. Tersa, a Mixed Blood, didn’t even exist in her eyes. I watched as Mona Sera’s eyes flicked dismissingly over Jamie and Thaddeus. Had she seen the likeness? Guessed that Thaddeus was her son? Would she even care?
“No,” I said, shaking my head, feeling panic welling within me. “You cannot blame this on me.”
“Oh, but I do.” She turned those black moribund eyes back to me. “Heal him or forfeit one of your own for what you will have cost me.”
“I-I don’t know if I can heal him. What about the healers at High Court? Would they be able to help him?”
“You may try that if you wish, if he lasts that long. He was bitten but two hours ago and already the decay spreads across him like a living eating thing. If you wish to bring him to High Court, do not tarry long. But as to
whether the healers there can cure him, even they will not be able to tell you. No Monère has even been bitten by a hellhound.”
I was feeling more and more faint. “Never?”
“No, because no hellhound has ever been seen in this realm before.” Her hard eyes drilled into mine. “Do what you wish. I shall return tomorrow. For Beldar or another. It matters not to me.”
She stood and with a swirl of her long black coat, disappeared into the backseat of the first car. Kyle and Francois stepped into the second car and they drove away.
Gently, Amber went to Beldar’s side. Kneeling, he wrapped an arm about the smaller man’s waist.
Beldar gasped with pain. “No! Let me…[ ]let me hold on to you instead, old friend.” Braced against Amber, he pulled himself to his feet and allowed Amber to guide him onto the bench.
Aquila, Tomas, and the others joined us.
“Who was that?” Thaddeus asked.
I looked into my brother’s eyes. “That was our mother, Mona Sera.” I’d never told him about her before and he’d never asked. He’d been smart enough to realize that had there been anything good to say about her, I would have told him.
“No,” Thaddeus said, his voice soft but firm. “The woman I just buried was my real mother. The one who loved me and raised me. Not the one who gave me away.”
I caught his hand in mine and squeezed. “She did us a favor by giving us away.”
Thaddeus squeezed back, smiled slightly. “Yes, it would seem that she did.” Worry came into his eyes as he looked at Beldar. Worry mixed with pity. “Can you heal him?”
“You heard?” I asked.
Thaddeus nodded.
“I don’t know,” I whispered. God help me, I did not know if I could heal him.
God help us all if I couldn’t.
CHAPTER 5
Before I became a Monère Queen, I was a nurse. But my nursing skills, good though they were, was not why Mona Sera had brought Beldar to me.
As we rode in a taxi back to my apartment, I turned my hands over to gaze at my palms. Embedded in them was the reason why she had sought me out—my Goddess’s Tears. They were moles the size and color of pearls. Two moles buried deep in the heart of my palms, one in each hand. I’d had them all my life. And all my life, I’d been able to sense injury and sickness with them and ease pain. But not heal, though I had sensed the power within me to do so. That had remained dormant until I had come into contact with others of my kind and had entered the Monère’s secret society, a violent and dangerous world. There, I had used these moles—marks the Monère had only heard about in their lore and legends but had not seen since the time of their great exodus from the Moon, their dying planet that they had abandoned four million years ago. I’d used the Goddess’s Tears to heal and to hurt. And the injury I was capable of inflicting had been enough to have the rogue bandits who’d kidnapped me consider cutting off my hands. My mother had spoken true…trouble did seem to follow me like a dark cloud. But if there had been peril, there had also been grace. I rubbed those pearly moles now, felt the tiny bumps, and wondered if they could save Beldar. If they could save us.
The taxi came to a halt in front of my Greenwich Village apartment, and we got out. Braced between Amber and Gryphon, Beldar managed to hobble to the elevator. Chami and I followed behind. I’d sent the others back to the Pierre. If I was going to have sex, I wanted to have it in relative privacy, away from the acute senses of the others.
Why was I thinking about sex? Because that was the way I healed.
Yeah, I know. Not the most convenient gift, mine.
The elevator doors pinged open and we stepped onto the seventh floor. Though Beldar’s harsh panting and choked groans sounded loud in our ears, a human would have barely heard them. Nor would they have smelled anything. Had anyone seen him, he would have appeared drunk, listing and unsteady, having to be supported by others. But there were no eyes to watch him in the empty corridor other than our own.
I opened the door and he staggered in, leaning heavily against Amber. He sank down—collapsed, really—onto my small love seat. My apartment, like most apartments in Manhattan, was small. It was essentially only two main rooms; the tiny kitchen and even tinier bathroom did not count. The main space had a small dining area near the front door. The rest of the oblong space was the living room, a sitting area comprised of a rust-colored love seat and a green-patterned armchair. The remaining room was my bedroom, which was even smaller than the living room space. Basically just my queen-[ ]sized bed—which I’d gotten, incidentally, before I’d known I was a Queen, in case you’re wondering—and a crammed-in dresser. Hip-wide walking space only in there.
I really didn’t know where to put Beldar, wouldn’t know until I’d seen how badly injured he was. And something in me shied away from doing that because I knew it was going to be something horrible, something I’d want to run screaming from instead of embrace.
I shut the door behind me, and the locks snicked loudly into place. Bracing myself, I turned back to look at him. Beldar’s eyes were closed, his head tilted back, resting against the love seat. His skin was pale and clammy, and his heart was beating fast for a Monère, sixty beats per minute instead of the usual thirty, pounding like a fierce drum in my ears.
The smell was even worse in the enclosed room, and the putrid stench of rotting flesh rolled my stomach. Fighting not to gag, I walked over to the windows and opened them, gasping in a few breaths of fresh air. But that didn’t really help because my own fear was bitter and metallic in my mouth. I didn’t know if I could do this. Even if I could find pleasure, make myself shine, make him shine, I didn’t know if I could heal him.
Gryphon came up silently behind me. “What’s wrong, Mona Lisa?”
“I don’t know if I can do this,” I said softly.
His arms came around me and I leaned back into the comfort of his embrace, gazing blindly out the window into the blackness of night.
“You sound fearful,” he said with surprise. “You have never been afraid before.”
I laughed, but it was not a happy sound. “I have always been afraid, Gryphon. Always.”
“Then I had not seen it before. I have only seen your fearlessness, your great heart.” He turned me in his arms, peered deep into me with his sharp falcon’s eyes. He was a gyrfalcon in his other form, and keenness of sight all the way down into another’s soul was one of his gifts.
“You doubt yourself,” he said with soft amazement, “when you never have before.”
“I’d never failed before. But I failed with you. I couldn’t heal you when you were dying. And Beldar smells much worse than you did even near the end, weeks later, when you were rotting away from the silver poisoning you from within. What happens if I fail with him, too?”
“You did not fail with me,” Gryphon said softly. “You simply found another way to save me. If you cannot heal him with your power, we will find another way with him as well.”
His trust humbled me. But his words made me think, gave me an idea. One I didn’t like but had no choice but to pursue. Looking into Gryphon’s beautiful eyes, this man, this miracle whom I loved so much…it was the hardest thing to be the Queen that they called me, and ask what I asked next of him.
I took a deep choking breath and made myself do it. “Gryphon, you’ve interacted the most with the demon dead. Are the most knowledgeable about them among us. I…I must ask you to search for Lucinda. Perhaps the demon dead princess will know how to heal Beldar. I’ll do my best to heal him, but in case I can’t[ ]…Take Chami with you and try to find her, please. For me. For all of us.”
Gryphon brought my hand up, and pressed a gentle kiss to the back of my fingers. “Of course. I shall go do as you ask.” He strode to the door, Chami beside him, and I watched them, feeling a terrible knot of worry and fear twist my stomach as I sent them out into danger.
“Be careful,” I called out to them because I could not stop myself. “If you cannot…if the hellhound is wi
th her…Don’t let yourselves be hurt. Come back to me safe and whole, and as you said, we will find another way.”
Gryphon smiled, a tender curve of his lips. “As my Queen commands.” And then he and Chami were gone. Only Amber remained. Amber, me, and a dying Monère warrior bitten by a beast from Hell.
I took one last deep breath of cool night air and walked over to Beldar, eased him out of his long coat. Then, kneeling before him, I began unbuttoning his shirt. It was stained on the right side by a dark wet substance—the source of the foul stench.
“I’ve dreamed of this,” Beldar said, his mouth quirked up in a weak smile. “You kneeling in front of me, your hands touching me. Of course, I hadn’t imagined myself in quite this much pain.”
“I, no doubt, was the one in pain,” I said tartly, a hard glint entering my eyes.
“Ouch.” He gave me a rueful smile. “Still don’t forgive me for when we first met.”
“When we first met, Beldar, you were going to rape me. No, I do not forgive you. You would have taken me without a qualm, wearing that pleasant smile that even now graces your lips.”
“Ah, but I would have thanked you afterward,” he said like the charming bastard he was, grinning with a shadow of his old charisma.
While it was true I hadn’t forgotten, would never forget, I also wasn’t as mad as I pretended to be. We’d been intruders, Gryphon and I, stealing into Mona Sera’s dwelling. And when Beldar had pounced on me, it had actually been in an attempt to save Amber from their Queen’s wrath. Amber had refused to rape me, so Beldar was going to do so in his stead. Twisted, and yet still gallant in a perverse way.
And so, even though my fear of that time was still a sharp memory within me, my hands were gentle as I pushed open his shirt[ ]…and gasped. Not a smart thing to do because it drew more of that terrible smell into my lungs.
He’d been bitten on the right side, just below the ribs. Terrible ripping tears that had turned his flesh into jagged raw meat with deep gouging grooves. And yet that wasn’t what made me gasp. It was the color of his skin surrounding that awful bite that filled me with such revulsion.
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