Mona Lisa Eclipsing

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.

Mentally cursing, she hopped onto his chest, surprised a little at how big she was. Grabbing each arm with a claw, she spread out her long-spanned wings and flapped hard. Taking off with deadweight wasn’t easy. She ended up dragging his body more than ten feet on the ground before she finally gained air. Flying with him was more strenuous than she had expected, and to think that eagle had flipped a car onto its side with four heavy people inside it. What did the guy eat? Wheaties? Well, if he could do that, she could do this, but it sure wasn’t pretty or easy. Her flight had absolutely no grace or finesse. It was jerky and erratic and rough, real rough. And all the while she worried about dropping Dante and seeing him falling . . . falling like before, that endless plummet, the brutal landing, the crack of bones and spray of blood, the pooling of it around his head in a growing splash of red.

She flew for what felt like forever, with the heavy, dragging weight of Dante clutched in her talons, and still she flew on, until her wings ached so badly she was sure they’d crack and fall off—was surprised they hadn’t done so already.

During all this time, he didn’t make a single sound—not one grunt or moan of pain during the jerky flight. Just the harsh noise of his breathing.

Following the sound of water, Mona Lisa eventually came to a river and landed, laying him as gently as she could on the bank, which was not gentle at all; it was as rough and clumsy as her first landing, maybe even worse. It took two tries before her tightly clenched talons—could talons cramp?—finally got the message and released him. A slight lift and hop away from him and she staggered, let herself fall over, wings folded.

Human, she thought, and pictured it in her mind: her normal self.

A faint, weak shimmer of energy, a swirling and morphing of reality, and she found herself gazing at her bare arm, followed it down to see the skin of her chest, stomach, and legs. “I’m naked,” she slurred, pushing up onto her elbow.

“Tore your clothes . . . during transformation,” Dante said with painful effort.

He was conscious.

Oddly, ridiculously shy, she crept over to where he lay. “You okay?” she asked, wishing for longer hair—something, anything to cover herself with.

“Could be better,” he rasped. “You can use my shirt . . . quickly. Don’t have much time.”

“You think they’re following us?”

“Yes . . . hunting me.”

“You?” Carefully she unbuttoned his shirt and eased it down his left arm. “I’m going to have to lift you a little.”

“Do it.”

The entire left side of his face was grotesquely swollen and matted with blood. She couldn’t tell if his temple and the back of his skull were fractured. His cheekbone was definitely broken, as were both his legs, she noted as she slipped the shirt off his other arm. Blood soaked the left collar and almost the entire back, but it was still a relief to slip it on over herself and button it up. She had lost everything, not just her money, credit card, and passport, which had been in her pocket, but her socks and shoes as well. All but the necklace she still wore around her neck. Only that hadn’t slipped or torn off when she had transformed into a bird . . . a vulture, of all things!

“Build a raft,” he told her. “We’ll float down the river.”