Mona Lisa Craving

TWELVE

I HAD MY first dream of that long-ago time when I lay down to sleep that day. We were in the midst of battle. So much blood, I thought. And even worse than what coated my hands…so many lives I’d taken. Mostly innocent in the fact that they were merely following orders, their Queen’s. And therein lay the most guilt—with the ones who had decided this war, been eager for it. Blood had been spilled, but not theirs. Not yet. Their blood, now…I would not feel so guilty about theirs. Only then would this madness stop. And only then would the healing begin. But the healer part of me wondered if the lives I saved before and after would ever balance out the blood-drenched scales of now.

A cry drew my attention, a voice that I knew. I cut down the one I was battling and turned, bloody blade in hand, to see Shel, one of my last few remaining strong warriors, run through by a sword. A heart wound, I saw, as the blade was pulled from him and he toppled to the ground almost gently. Incapacitating, but not fatal. Not yet.

As the one who had bested my warrior lifted his sword for the killing blow, the beheading one, I lifted my hand and threw a punch of power from where I stood, making him stagger back away from Shel.

He turned and looked at me, and I recognized him through the feel of his powerful presence and from his red-brown warrior bracelets that gleamed darkly against his wrists. Barrabus. Mona Ella’s warlord general himself. A warrior of great renown who had killed two dear to me in the last battle—Ewart and Trey, my strongest fighters. It was odd seeing his features in this dream, and recognizing the same likeness in his son, Dante, whom I’d come to know intimately in another lifetime.

“Here, Barrabus. To me!” I called.

With a fierce smile, he plowed his way toward me, sending those who tried to stop him hurtling away. Our blades met and I fought him as he deserved. With sword, with skill. With brute strength. He was a fearsome fighter, a most gifted swordsman who moved with swift, cutting grace.

“Draw your dagger,” I commanded as the sword blades caught and held for a moment, interlocked. I tangled my foot behind him and shoved. He rolled backward, surprised at my strength, and sprang to his feet with the dagger I’d asked him to draw clutched in hand. He waited there, poised, ready.

“You do not draw yours,” he said.

I held up my left hand. The Goddess Tear in the center of my palm pulsed and thrummed with power. “I have something much deadlier than a dagger. But that you ask and wait for me to draw my weapon speaks of the warrior you are. An honorable one. You are on the wrong side, Barrabus, serving a Queen who has no honor.”

Something passed in his eyes. Silent acknowledgment of what I said. “She is my Queen.”

“Because you gave me a chance, I will give you one in return. I ask you to join me. Serve me instead.”

“I have sworn my oath to Mona Ella. I cannot switch allegiance here on this field of battle.” Regret filled his dark blue eyes and was reflected in my own, I knew, because in another time, a peaceful one, we would have likely been friends.

“Then do not hold yourself back because you do not think me as equally armed as yourself. Because I will not hold myself back.”

“As you say, milady.”

Our swords clashed together again, and his dagger came at me. With a thought, a pulse of power, I blocked it, stopping his knife with my invisible energy shield emitting from my pearly mole. We held there for a moment, at an impasse. Then with a grunt, using his greater height and weight, he pushed against me. Feeling myself start to slowly give beneath his denser, heavier mass, I spun to the side. His sword struck me a glancing blow as he went sailing past me, slicing open my left arm. I lunged after him, my own blade stabbing forward in turn. In an unexpected maneuver, one I’d heard about but had never seen, he turned and deflected my thrusting sword with his wrist bracelet, using it as I had used the pulsing power in my left hand—as a shield. Then he used it as an offensive weapon, striking a side blow with the hard metal into my right side, knocking the breath from me. Caught unawares, with my shielding hand down, his dagger plunged into my chest and pierced my heart.

What I did next was without thought, just instinct. The sword dropped from my hand and I lifted my palm against his chest. I had a moment to feel his heart beat once, a thud of life. Then my Goddess Tear flared. Obliterating power shot from my hand and took out his heart in an aching, throbbing burst of heat. A moment to feel pain even sharper than that caused by his plunging knife—a healer’s pain when she turned the use of her gift to take lives instead of saving them—and Barrabus was gone in a flash of light. A puff of ashes.

I woke up gasping, my hands clutching my chest where the knife had stabbed me. I felt a presence besides me and rolled away with a startled cry.

“Mona Lisa, it’s just a dream.” It was Dontaine, I realized, looking into his handsome, worried face. Dontaine. Not Barrabus. I glanced down at myself and lifted my hands away from my chest, expecting to see blood. No liquid redness, though, gushed out, and the flesh beneath was unmarred, uncut. But my palms, my Goddess’s Tears…I looked down at them with horror and felt them throb in aching remembrance.

My eyes shot to Dontaine’s bare chest, searched it frantically, a visual inspection only. I dared not touch him. “Are you okay? Did I hurt you?”

“I’m fine. You were just dreaming,” he said. Drawing me into his arms, he held me close. His heart beat reassuringly beneath my ear.

“Oh God, Dontaine. I remembered…”

“What?”

“I remember killing Barrabus.”

The fierce son of Barrarus slew our heart, our hope, our Warrior Queen.

I’d killed Barrabus, Dante’s ancestral father, in a past that suddenly seemed not so distant. A past that felt as if it had only just happened.

Dontaine drew back to look at me, his eyes shuttered. “You were saying his name.”

“Whose?”

“Barrabus’s.”

“I took out his heart with my Goddess’s Tears,” I said and hugged myself, more to keep my dangerous hands away from Dontaine than because of the sudden cold filling me.

“So it’s true. Those stories of Barrabus, of Mona Lyra. You are her, returned,” Dontaine said softly.

“I don’t know. It’s the first time I’ve ever dreamed”—or more accurately, remembered—“something from that time.”

“So Dante truly is this Damian. Cursed for killing you long ago.”

“I don’t know.” A shiver ran through my body. “I just know that I recognize him somehow, that we’ve met before.” Not in this lifetime, but another. A concept I had a hard time wrapping my mind around, even though my heart believed it to be true.

The woman in my dreams had felt older, harder, her soul much darker than mine. So heart sore and body weary. Was that me? Was I her? Or were we different people now? Different people capable of making different choices? In another time, a peaceful one, we would have likely been friends, had been my thought of Barrabus. Might it be true now for his descendant, for Dante? Or were we destined to be enemies once more?

So many chances we’d already had of being that again—enemies. But I had saved Dante, brought him back from the brink of madness. He’d drunk down my life-giving light and had spilled his seed into me in turn.

We had not been lovers before, that I instinctively knew. Already so much was different from the past now. We’d shared our bodies generously with each other before we’d known who we were, who we had been. I remember his gaze falling on my palms as I’d held up my hands to ward him off after I had fled outside after making love, fleeing from what I’d done and had allowed him to do. I remembered the stunned look in his eyes, his distracted manner. That odd way he had looked at me when I had asked him: Do I know you? He’d known who I was, had had a chance to kill me then, to harm me again, but he hadn’t. In turn, I had held back my men’s swords, stopped them from killing him and his family.

Blood, once shed, was a hard stain to ever wash clean again. I’d learned that long, long ago.

God, I’d killed his father! And his father had killed those who had meant much to me, would have killed Shel had I not intervened. Innocent lives lost on both sides, caught up in a war not of their making. We had a second chance now. A fragile peace.

No more bloodshed, I prayed. Please. No more of that senseless wasting of lives.

Dontaine murmured my name, drawing me away from my thoughts. “Mona Lisa. You’re shivering. Come here, let me hold you.” The same thing he’d said to me when he’d asked to share my bed and I had hesitated, too upset, too distracted to want sex. Let me hold you. I just want to give you comfort…and to receive it, he’d said with an open and vulnerable smile on his first day here in this house as resident, not guest. I’d let him join me in bed, fallen asleep held by him, and had awoken with my Goddess’s Tears throbbing after dreaming of using them in a most horrible manner.

I looked at them now, those pearly moles. I glanced from them to Dontaine’s beautiful unmarred chest, remembered the throbbing power that had ached in my hands when I had awoken, the energy I had felt there waiting to be released…and felt a wave of nausea rise up in me.

“I’m sorry, Dontaine, could you go back to your room? I need to be alone right now.” So I don’t accidentally hurt you. Or kill you. And because my thoughts were on another man, on Dante. Not on the man beside me in bed.

Guilt churned with worry and a fresh dose of horror upon this newest revelation…what those innocent-looking moles in my hands were capable of. Death. Destruction.

Dontaine slid out of the bed and picked up his clothes, not bothering to put them on. “If you need me, you know where I am,” he said with a smile that was gesture only. A thin shield to cover the hurt I had inflicted by asking him to leave. Of all my lovers, he was the one I rejected the most.

Another apology formed on my lips. But what could you say, over and over again, besides sorry? Perhaps a suggestion to look for love elsewhere? “Dontaine…”

“Hush,” he said, stopping the words from being said. “Try to go back to sleep.” With that quiet urging, he left.

Sleep, however, was the last thing I wanted to do now. As I’d told Dante before, I’d really rather not remember. So instead of risking another dream, another memory, I lay there in that big bed staring up at the ceiling, trapped by Dontaine’s knowing presence next door. If I got up and slipped out of the house, he would know and follow me, and I did not want to see him, talk to him so soon while I still felt so raw. I might have been better protected, but my freedom was curtailed, and it felt stifling.

So I lay there, still and alone, and despite myself, played and replayed that little snippet of memory endlessly. Truth or mere dream, a fabrication of my mind? Only one person could tell me. And with that thought, my mind circled back to Dante.

I had believed myself unarmed when I had walked up to him. No sword, my dagger sheathed. But in Dante’s eyes, I had been armed in the deadliest of manners. And he’d let me touch him.

Who are you? Who am I? And why have we come together again?

Last time we had, it had ended with my death. And as I had just discovered, I did not want to die yet. So soon, so young, with no afterlife ahead of me…triggering another thought. Was I really young, merely twenty-one years old? Or did my previous life, and the long stretch in between, make me an ancient hag? And regarding that long stretch of time in between, had I lived other lives before and not remembered them?

I gazed down at my moles as if they could provide me with an answer. And in their fashion, they did. The Goddess’s Tears and their incumbent gifts had not been seen since the time of the Great Exodus when the Monère had fled their dying planet. So, no. Chances were that I hadn’t lived other unremembered lives in between. Just before…and now.

Dante. His name was a soft whisper in my mind. I have a lot of questions to ask you. I wondered briefly if he would answer them. If he could? Or would it be better if he did not?

You may feel differently when you remember.

My flesh prickled with goose bumps and I shivered again.

For the next several long hours, as sunset inched slowly closer, the most tantalizing, morbid question of all teased my mind.

How did you kill me? How did I die?