Mona Lisa Eclipsing

by Sunny

  “Did you mean it?” Nolan asked, looking up to meet my gaze.

  “About Edmond being able to come back here?”

  “No. About waiting for your lovers to come back to you. About wanting them to.”

  Our relationship abruptly shifted from student and teacher to the more complicated relationship of a woman facing the father of one of the men she loved. “Do you mean Dante?” I asked softly.

  Nolan nodded.

  “Yes . . . if he can forgive me.”

  “Goddess bless us. I believe it’s the other way around, as does he, likely: whether you could forgive him.”

  “I would hope that we could forgive each other.” There was quite a lot to forgive, on both our parts. “I keep expecting him to return, but he hasn’t. It’s been three months since he left.” Truth—since I kicked him out. “Have you heard anything from him?”

  “No, he hasn’t contacted us.” A flicker of worry, quickly concealed. “But he will soon, eventually.”

  “Do you think . . . he wouldn’t try to end his life, would he?” That was my greatest fear. That he would die and this time not come back—be reborn. That was his curse, you see, laid down upon him by none other than yours truly, or who I had been anyway, this fierce Warrior Queen from long, long ago: a curse of dying and being reborn into an ever-diminishing bloodline until his family line finally ended. The number of his descendents was down to a trickle now, just him, his twin brother, Quentin, and his father and mother. But that wasn’t really the part of the curse I worried about—Quentin was even now enthusiastically sowing his seed, and Nolan and his wife, Hannah, might still yet bear more children. What worried me most was the possibility that the curse I had laid upon Dante so long ago might have been broken by the life we had created, the child that had lived so briefly within me before I lost it in a traumatic miscarriage.

  It had almost destroyed Dante when I’d lost the baby. He’d taken out his grief by slaughtering all of Mona Teresa’s warriors, the Monère Queen who had injured me and deliberately caused the loss of our child. Last I’d heard, Mona Teresa still hadn’t recovered yet; few warriors had been brave or desperate enough to swear themselves into her service. If Dante had not been legendary enough before, slaying the first great Warrior Queen . . . well, he was certainly infamous now after he had single-handedly sliced and diced, and viciously torn apart Mona Teresa’s thirty warriors with exceptionally cold and bloodthirsty proficiency.

  Dante and I had a real complicated history, you might say. We had been enemies long ago, then lovers in my second cycle of life in a most ironic twist of fate. The wonder was not that I had pushed him away: it was why I wanted him back.

  The answer to that lay in his eyes—what I had seen in them as I had cramped and bled and lost our child, his hope for ending the curse. The way he had touched me and held me with a tenderness and concern that had fractured and broken my heart even more.

  I had saved him, started to love him until my memory of him, of my first life, of being killed by him, returned. Then I had feared him and pushed him away, ordered him gone. And I was afraid now that he might be gone forever.

  I know. I was one really messed-up gal. I pushed the men I loved away from me, and then when they left, I wanted them back. But I was aware of my issues and I was trying to change. Fate had given me a second chance with Dante, and though I had managed to screw up the first part of it, this second opportunity was not yet over. Please, Goddess, I prayed. If you give me another chance, I promise I’ll do my best to make it right this time.

  The door opened and Hannah Morell rushed into the room. She glanced quickly at me, then fixed her gaze intently on her husband. “Dante has been seen on the island of Cozumel.”

  And I discovered, to my surprise, that sometimes prayers really do work.

  TWO

  “COZUMEL?” I DON’T know why, but when I’d imagined Dante alone and suffering somewhere, I hadn’t pictured him in a tropical island paradise. “Are you sure?”

  “It makes sense,” Nolan said, “if he took a boat from New Orleans.”

  Leaving on a boat, and not just any boat but a cruise ship? I hadn’t imagined that either. After killing Mona Teresa’s warriors, had he traveled back to my territory, watched us and made sure we were doing well before going off into exile?

  “Who saw him?” I asked.

  “A group of tourists on horseback came upon him in the jungle,” Hannah said.

  “Tourists?” I felt my eyebrows climb up my forehead. “Not a Monère Queen or one of her men?”

  “No, milady.”

  “Then how do you know it was Dante they saw?”

  “They saw a saber-toothed tiger; that is his other form. It’s creating quite a stir since more than one witness saw him.”

  “A saber-toothed tiger? For real? Aren’t they supposed to be extinct?”

  “They became extinct over eleven thousand years ago,” Nolan answered quietly. “When they died out, so did the animal form in Monère shifters.”

  Which meant that Dante had lived and died and been reborn for at least that long. Over eleven thousand years . . . Sweet Goddess! I’d laid one whammy of a curse of him. One whose painful depths I hadn’t fully comprehended until now. The wonder was that Dante hadn’t torn me apart, murdered me painfully and slowly the moment he had seen my Goddess’s Tears, the pearly trademark moles embedded in my palms, and realized who I was: that I was Mona Lyra reincarnated. It was a wonder he was capable of having feelings other than sheer loathing hatred for me after what I had done to him.

  When I’d asked him once if he remembered his previous lives, his answer had been, My memories are most clear of my last incarnation and of my first life. That, I never forget. I get random flashes of other lives, occasionally. I think it’s my mind’s natural defense, that selective memory. Remembering everything would probably be too much for one single mind to handle.

  The last sentence had been a vast understatement.

  “I’m going after him,” Nolan said.

  “Good,” I said, nodding. “I’m coming with you.” But leaving wasn’t quite as easy as that.

  My men threw a hissy fit. It might not be the best words to apply to a collection of fierce Monère warriors and former rogues, but that’s essentially what they did. They didn’t want me to go, too dangerous. Not just where I was going but who I was going after. When that didn’t dissuade me, then they all wanted to come along to guard me. I had no problem with that.

  “Whoever can be ready to leave in an hour can come with us,” I said agreeably. “Be sure to bring your passports. We’re catching a six forty a.m. commercial flight that leaves in”—I glanced at my watch—“four hours.”

  The relief on my men’s faces turned back into fierce scowls.

  “I do not have a passport,” said Tomas, one of my guards, his usual smooth-as-butter Southern drawl completely absent from his voice.

  “Neither do the rest of us,” said Chami. All of my inner-circle guards were old, but Chami was probably the oldest among them. His full name was Chameleo, for his chameleon’s gift of blending in with his surroundings. He could virtually disappear in front of your eyes. “But that won’t be a problem for me,” he said, smiling.

  “And I can fly,” Aquila said, stroking his neat Vandyke beard. “It’ll just take me a little bit longer to get there.” A former rogue, he now served as my steward, handling all of my territory’s vast business concerns. He was the only one among my guards with wings; the other form he shifted into was that of an eagle.

  “Wait.” I held up a hand. “None of you have passports?”

  “I do,” Nolan said. “But that is because my family and I lived so long among humans.” They had had to flee from an evil Queen.

  Hearing Nolan had a passport didn’t surprise me. I had expected him to have one since he was the one who had suggested taking a commercial flight in the first place, and had called and booked our reservations using his credit card; I had promised to p
ay him back. It was just easier to let Nolan handle things. Good thing, because Aquila, who handled all my financial matters, likely wouldn’t have done it so quickly or easily, not without a great deal of argument and compromise first. Among my people, Nolan and his family were the only ones financially independent. The rest lived the traditional, old-fashioned—and backward, in my eyes—Monère way. They relied on their Queen to supply everything for them, which was a great way for Queens to control their people: keep them needy and dependent on you and make it hard for them to venture out and survive on their own.

  I’d grown up thinking myself human and had only recently discovered that I was part Monère, part of a race of supernatural beings descended from the moon. I thought I was making great progress in learning about my new territory and people—then I was smacked in the face with something like this and realized how very little I still knew.

  “None of you have a passport?” I repeated, unable to get over that fact.

  “Few of us have any form of human identification,” Dontaine said, entering the room. Someone must have called him, in the hopes of talking some reason into me, being my lover and all. “A false human identity is very hard and expensive to come by,” he said, seating himself near me. “I’m one of the few here who have a driver’s license, and that is because I was trusted by my former Queen to oversee her New Orleans businesses.”

  Well, that answered why so few Monères here knew how to drive. Wow, I had far more work cut out for me than I knew, but that was for another time.

  “What is this I hear about you flying out of the country?” Dontaine asked. He had the most beautiful eyes, a riveting pure shade of green, as if his maker had decided he had not graced the physical form enough and had to give him this added touch of splendor.

  I had to deliberately shake myself loose from his gaze and focus on his words. “What? Oh, um, Dante’s been seen down in Mexico, on the island of Cozumel. Nolan and I are catching a flight leaving in four hours. When everyone raised a hue and cry about me going off alone, I invited others to come along. No one, however, seems to have a passport. Do you?”

  “No,” said Dontaine. His frown didn’t detract at all from his stunning good looks, which I found quite unfair. “I have never had to leave the country before. Why not take the private jet?”

  Being Queen of my own territory had some nice perks. One of them was access to a private jet authorized for my use by the High Queen’s Council.

  I shook my head. “High Court doesn’t know anything about this, nor does anyone else, and his family and I want to keep it that way. The plan is to go in quietly, find Dante, and bring him back home.”

  “With only Nolan, one guard, accompanying you, a valuable and vulnerable Monère Queen?” Dontaine inquired with false calm. His emerald eyes had darkened to jade, a sure sign to those who knew him that he was upset.

  “I shall also accompany them,” said Chami, my chameleon guard. “Getting on the plane unseen won’t be a problem for me.”

  “But my brother—” I started to protest. Chami’s main duty was to watch over my brother Thaddeus.

  “Tomas will watch over him while I’m gone,” Chami said, looking over at the other guard.

  Tomas nodded his silent agreement.

  “And I can fly there in my eagle form,” said Aquila.

  “Across the ocean?” I asked.

  Aquila nodded and said, “That is the shortest route, milady.”

  “No, not that way,” I said. “There’s nothing but water, no place to land if a storm comes up or you need to rest. How many miles is that anyway? Never mind—no way can you fly all that distance in one stretch.”

  “But—”

  “Absolutely not,” I said, cutting off his protest. “I’ll have Nolan and Chami with me. There’s no need to risk yourself like that.”

  “Actually,” Dontaine said, inserting a calm voice of reason, “if you insist on going, it would be safer if Aquila went as well.” He turned to Aquila. “How long would it take to reach Cozumel if you flew along the Gulf Coast, skirting along land?”

  “I would need to see a map,” Aquila said.

  We all trooped into the study that Aquila had officially turned into his office, and looked at the world map he rolled out over the top of the desk.

  “I estimate it would take a little over twenty-four hours, flying that route,” he said after doing some calculations.

  “By then, we might be on a flight back home with Dante already,” I grumbled.

  “Or you might not yet have found Dante and would be quite happy to have Aquila’s eagle eyes and wings to help you search,” countered Dontaine. As my master at arms, he was responsible for my safety. He continued with quiet authority, “I would prefer that you take as many men with you as possible. Two guards, no matter how strong or skilled, are not enough to guard a Queen. Three is barely acceptable and only so because of how powerful these warriors are. The most ideal would be if you allowed Nolan to go alone to fetch his son.”

  “Are you speaking as my lover or as my captain?” I asked. Dontaine was my newest lover and the least secure in my affections. Was he saying this out of jealousy of another rival?

  “I speak as your captain, purely in terms of your safety,” he said, returning my gaze calmly. “Cozumel, as an island, should be neutral ground, but Mexico is quite different—it has very few Queens or established territories, and most of the country is roamed freely by rogues.”

  “I can’t,” I said, biting my lip. “I have to go look for him, speak to him myself. Dante might not come back otherwise, no matter what his father tells him.”

  Dontaine nodded and said, “Then I would ask that you allow Aquila to fly out to join you in this safer, more roundabout route.”

  “All right.” I nodded agreement.

  “Thank you,” he said, gratified by my willingness to compromise, his manner growing warmer, more relaxed. Making him even more irresistible.

  “You’re welcome.” Giving in to temptation, I lifted a hand to that altogether too-attractive face, shifting our interaction to a more intimate level. We had a lot of hats to juggle in our relationship, but so far, things seemed to be working.

  THREE

  THE FLIGHT WAS Smooth and uneventful. Sitting in the window seat next to Nolan, I kept the shade pulled down the entire flight for Nolan’s sake rather than mine. Being a Mixed Blood, I did not suffer the effects of the sun to the extent other Monère did. If you wanted to punish a Monère warrior, all you had to do was expose him to sunlight. It burned their skin, not quickly but surely and steadily. One hour under the sun and their white skin turned lobster red. Four hours of direct sunlight and they had sun poisoning the likes of which those who had ever witnessed such a thing would never be unable to forget—oozing blisters, putrid boils, and sloughing-off skin.

  Nolan had built up more immunity to sunlight than most Monères, having raised his children among humans. He was one of the few warriors, in fact, who had a light tan. But still, no need to tempt fate; I kept the shade firmly drawn. We’d be getting plenty of hot sun on the Island of the Swallows—what Cozumel translated to in the Mayan language. I wondered for a moment how Chami was faring and where in the hell he was keeping himself. There was little free space in the main cabin; just because he was invisible didn’t mean people couldn’t bump into him. But no incident occurred, making me wonder if he had stowed away in the baggage compartment. No danger from the sun there. The chilling temperature might even be refreshing to a Monère; if the lack of oxygen was uncomfortable to a Full Blood, it certainly wasn’t fatal. Only sun or silver poisoning, cutting off the head, or ripping out the heart killed a Monère. That hardiness, of course, didn’t apply to me, being a mongrel Mixed Blood. But hey, I had some great compensation. Silver didn’t weaken or poison me, and I could walk in the sun without being toasted into a gooey, overdone, dying mess.

  After a stopover and change of plane, we landed and stepped out onto Cozumel’s runway at four t
hirty in the afternoon. The sunlight was bright and fierce. I hadn’t thought of that when I had okayed Aquila’s coastline-hugging flight. Had Aquila taken sunlight into consideration when he had quoted that “a-little-over-twenty-four-hours” time estimate? Was he still flying during the day? Did his feathers protect him to some degree?

  Crap, I wish I had thought to ask him all this before. I turned to Nolan and asked him instead, “How are you doing? Is the sun bothering you?”

  “Nothing intolerable,” was his answer. But I noticed he walked quickly off the hot tarmac into the more welcoming shade of the island-style terminal.

  I felt Chami’s presence as soon as our luggage came into sight on the conveyor belt. Most Monère had a definitive presence you could feel when in close enough range. Chami, however, had the rare ability to mute his energy so that you didn’t feel or sense him, allowing him to get within deadly striking distance of another Monère before they were aware of the danger. The perfect assassin. That Chami hadn’t bothered to mask his presence meant he either felt no reason to or was too weak to waste energy doing so. I squelched the alarm that flared at that thought, reminding myself that all my guys were big boys. Powerful ones, too. They could take care of themselves.

  Only when our luggage was safely claimed and we had passed through customs, which was no more than a quick stamp in our passports, did I speak to air beside me. “I was wondering where you were, Chami. Have a nice flight with our luggage?”

  “Nothing that I would recommend,” Chami said, dropping his camouflage to become just another guy walking out of a nearby men’s restroom. He joined us with a boyish smirk, looking all of twenty-five, tall and wiry thin with adorable curly brown hair. “Lousy seating and no service, but it got the job done. You wouldn’t believe how roughly they handle our luggage, though. Not that we have anything useful in them.” Flying commercial meant no weapons, nothing that would draw attention to us. I felt almost naked going without a blade.