Mona Lisa Darkening

CHAPTER TWO

I didn't lose consciousness, although that might have been kinder. Nope, I had to stay awake and aware throughout the entire experience of… well, I guess, dying. Because what else do you call it when your heart suddenly shudders into echoing silence and no longer beats?

The stillness of sound, the absence of it, was more noticeable to me because I was trapped somewhere inside my own body. I saw, I experienced sensations — the blistering heat, the gray reddening of predawn light — but they came to me filtered, through a thick and muffled layer, as if someone else was using my eyes and in control of my body and I was just along for an unwilling ride.

My taken-over body was lying on the ground. The very hard, very hot scorching ground. Get up! I screamed. But whoever was in charge now ignored me and just reveled for a moment in simply being back. Her thoughts. Her words.

Whoever she was, she was in no hurry to move in case it was all just a dream. I called it more of a nightmare.

She gazed up at the sky, all she allowed me to take inventory of. But it was worthy of note, actually. It was a scarlet, fractured sky, like it had been broken apart and put back together. And the impression wasn't just from the uneven layers of red firmament that transitioned one piece into another abruptly, but the twin suns themselves, shaped like the Chinese yin and yang symbols. As if a giant hand had plucked down a single sun, torn it apart, and cast the broken pieces back into the sky.

The light was abruptly blocked as a man, a mean-looking stranger, stood over us. No one I recognized. I just knew that he wasn't one of my people. The orange prison garb he wore was a really big hint.

Prison garb? I heard that other me wonder. She hadn't recognized the attire.

So he's human, flashed her thought within me, and the momentary alarm that had flared up over that rough and menacing face subsided beneath her smug superiority. Humans were inferior in strength and speed, she thought.

It was that familiar sneer in her voice that rang a bell in me. That made me think: Mona Louisa?

Of course. Who else did you think it was? came the contemptuous answer. Sounding exactly like that blond bitch of a Monère Queen whose essence and light I had sucked down into me.

But you're dead, I thought. Blaec, the High Lord of Hell, had killed her after I had done my unsuccessful best.

And now so are you. Her answer, and the rich, malicious satisfaction she oozed in imparting that news, froze me for a second. It had been my first thought, that I was dead, but still I had hoped for another answer. Hearing the words, feeling her absolute belief, totally flipped me out. I panicked completely. Started thrashing and trying to claw my way out of the thick void that surrounded me. My goal was up, toward the shimmering surface so seemingly far above, glimmering with faint, sparkling light. If I could just reach that surface, I knew that I would somehow be back in control.

Don't count on it, mongrel bitch, thought Mona Louisa smugly. You're weaker than I am now.

Which totally exasperated me. That's what got you killed before — underestimating people. Pay attention to what's happening around you! I told her.

Her attention snapped back on the strange human man as he crouched over her, his shaggy hair greasy and unkempt. "Now aren't you a purty thing," he purred. "I ain't had me a real woman for years, penned up the way I was like an animal. Another man just ain't the same thing as a woman, you know." His eyes, sweeping over me… her… us… glittered hard with lust.

Mona Louisa tried to move then, to sit up. But he stopped her easily with a hand on the shoulder. "No need gettin' up. I want you on your back the first time." His lips curled back in a cruel and eager smile as Mona Louisa raised a hand to push him… and couldn't. She — we — moved slowly, sluggishly. Even more alarmingly, his strength was greater than hers.

He nodded knowingly. "Took me a little while to gain back my strength. Should be a while for you, too. 'Nuff time for me to have my fill of you," he said, and began to open his pants.

"No!" she cried.

No! I screamed inside also, her fear spiraling and echoing through our body. Without her strength, she didn't know what to do, how to stop him from raping her.

"Yes, sirree. Plenty of time to slake some of my thirst on your sweet body. Go ahead," he urged, "fight me. I like it that way better." Flipping up her long dress, he yanked her underwear off with a happy grunt and crawled on top of her. Using his weight to keep her pinned down, he roughly spread her legs open. "The others ran off. And the two other guys here are like you, still weak. No one's gonna stop me. Hell, if I'd known this was what waited for me, I'd a gone willingly to the electric chair years ago."

Both Mona Louisa and I gagged as we felt his hard male organ push against us, probing for entrance as we lay there, exposed, our lower body naked, completely vulnerable to him.

I know how to fight, I screamed. Let me out!

With an abruptness that took me by surprise, she yielded to my demand and I felt myself propelled up that vast syrupy distance to the shimmering surface. With a gasp, I surfaced and found myself once more in control of my body. My hands that had been futilely trying to push him off me abruptly stopped pushing and went instead for his eyes. It was a clumsy attempt, with my limbs moving slow as molasses, but my nails scraped across his face and one nail managed to poke his sensitive eye. He rolled off me with an angry yelp of pain. Then just stared at me in confusion and the beginning of fear.

"What the fuck? Your hair, eyes… your entire face and body… how the fuck did you change it like that?"

"I can do many things," I said, anger — rage — emanating from me. "Did you think Hell was going to be so easy?" My body shook as I forced myself to stand. Stand and not fall over as I spat my next words at him. "Unending pain awaits you for the crimes you have committed in life and would have continued in this afterlife. You will not find pleasure here, only pain. An eternity of suffering."

Terror filled his eyes, and ugly guilt twisted his face. Without a word, he turned and ran from me as if the demons of Hell chased after him. If only that were true. Two particular demons I would have welcomed gladly at the moment.

"Is that true? Are we dead? Are we… damned?"

I turned and saw a man lying a dozen yards away on the ground, turned toward me on his side. He wore a business suit and tie. A human, somewhere in his fifties or sixties. A second guy, young like me in his early twenties, Hispanic, with jet-black hair slicked back in a ponytail, lay a short distance behind him. He had made further progress, pushing himself up onto his hands and knees. The sleeveless T-shirt he wore revealed muscular, tattooed arms. Everything about him screamed gang member.

Two men from diverse backgrounds, about as far apart on the social and economic scale as possible, and both looking to me for answers. But I had none to give them.

"I don't know," I said.

"Last thing I knew, I was in a car accident. A head-on collision," said the guy in the suit. "I think I died."

"I was shot three times in the chest," Mr. Tattoo said. He pushed up his shirt, rang a hand over his smooth brown chest. No blood, no bullet holes.

My knees wanted to buckle but I stiffened them. Stayed standing by sheer dint of will.

Can't afford to appear weak, Mona Louisa thought inside me. I agreed with her.

"What about you?" asked the older man.

"A black light came down from the moon and brought me here."

"We told you the truth," the young guy said, scowling.

"So did I," I returned evenly. Then I said flatly, "I don't have a pulse or a heartbeat."

Both men took a moment to assess themselves.

"Nothing here." Tattoo guy.

"Me, either," said Mr. Corporate Type. "Are we in Hell?"

Tattoo guy looked around at the bleak landscape, his disdain not quite masking the fear underneath. "Sure don't look like heaven, does it?"

I was as confused as they were. Maybe even more so, and even more shaken up inside. Am I dead? Really dead? If so, then why am I here? As a Damanten, a living demon, I was not supposed to have an afterlife. And humans rarely had enough psychic energy to transition to Hell. And yet here I was with three humans, two of them having obviously lived and died violently. And none of them seemed terribly upset or surprised to find themselves dead. To find themselves here.

"What did you do?" I asked the guy in the suit.

He took a moment to push himself onto his knees. "What do you mean, what did I do?"

"We have a death-row inmate and a gang member who died in a shoot-out, if I'm not mistaken."

Tattoo guy nodded confirmation.

"You don't seem particularly surprised to find yourself in this human version of Hell," I noted.

"Human version?" the older man said with lifted brows.

"Just answer the question. You didn't, by any chance, happen to steal millions of dollars from your stockholders or something like that, did you?"

He stared at me with eyes that were suddenly hard and shrewd. "Something like that."

His answer made my heart sink.

Sinners. We were all sinners here.

Like an eerie reflection of my thoughts, Mr. Corporate Fraud asked, "And you? What was your sin?"

"Me?" I reflected over my life, the violence of it. "I killed three men."

"And your ability to change your body and appearance like that? Become two different women?"

"I tried to murder another woman. Ended up possessing her inside of me instead."

Making the sign of the cross, the young gang member muttered in Spanish, "La Madre de Dios nos ayuda" Mother of God help us.

Unfortunately, it looked like it was too late for that.

My hand lifted to the necklace given to me by my demon mate.

Halcyon, where are you? And where in heaven or Hell am I?