Mona Lisa Eclipsing

THIRTEEN

WHEN I CAME to, it was not with a simple and easy drift-to-wake consciousness. No, it was much cruder than that. Pain first, a rough shaking of shoulder, then even rougher slaps across my face. Two voices yelling, angry. One of them was familiar—someone I knew, if only I could wake up. Then a cold, wet splash of water—a bowlful dumped across my face, I saw as I blinked the heavy lids of my eyes open. A dark, frightening face, painted black and brown, with a red eye drawn crudely on the forehead, looked down on me.

Ah, yes. It was all coming back to me: silver nets, a drugging dart, capture by these heathenish Monère. My impression of the race so far wasn’t that great. First a drug lord. Then what I had thought were bandits. Now this half-naked primitive bunch.

I turned my head and saw a familiar face belonging to the familiar voice. Dante. My poor comrade-in-arms. Me, I just hit my head and spilled out some memories, and, oh yeah, turned into a vulture. He was, however, by far getting the worst of things. Atop of his old injuries, now his right eye was swollen shut, with new bruises adorning his chest and arms in garish disarray. Couldn’t tell if his poor legs had been rebroken or not because he was lashed to a pole, arms and legs tied. His single unswollen eye glittered like a hard, pale diamond.

For all that he was bound, he looked more scary than scared.

At a woman’s command, I was pulled to my feet and secured to a similar pole, my wrists bound together with silver ties similar to the material used in the nets that had captured us. My arms were lifted up, tied, and my legs bound in likewise manner below. I was helpless to stop them—my limbs felt leaden and my wits just as heavy and slow. What the hell had they drugged me with?

A woman sauntered into view. The woman who had given the command, no doubt. She had black lustrous hair. True black, not the shade mine had been before, a brown so dark that some had mistakenly called it black before a talented stylist had skillfully lightened the color.

She had threads of gray streaking through the black strands—odd to see against an unlined face. Without those betraying gray hairs marking her age, she could otherwise have passed for thirty. How old was she now, midforties maybe?

She was lighter skinned than her men. Would have been the fairest one here but for myself. Even with my newly acquired tan, my skin was almost white compared to the brown pigment clearly marking her Latino ancestry. There was a curved roundness to the pretty features of her face and a softness to her small and shapely build, all but the eyes. Her eyes, the color of dark soot, fringed with long, fanning lashes, were hard and frightening, with not a smudge of softness in them.

“You have caused my men much trouble,” she said in lightly accented English. Her voice, like her eyes, was hard and authoritative. It was a bit disorienting. Like hearing a soldier’s voice coming out of a pretty doll’s mouth. Did she command all these hundred-odd poorly clad people surrounding us? Most of them were men, less than a handful were women, and even fewer, children. She seemed way overdressed standing next to her people in the long black gown she wore.

“Sorry,” I replied. “Wasn’t my intention. We weren’t trying to bother them. Quite the opposite.”

She assessed me coolly. “They said you broke our silver nets as easily as ripping through paper.”

“I’ll be happy to repay you their cost,” I offered.

She sneered. Not the answer she was looking for apparently. “And yet you are held by them now.”

Because you drugged me! I wanted to say, but kept my mouth shut. No need to give the enemy any more knowledge or advantage than they already held. But it seemed they had already figured out the reason for my weakness.

“Our venom affects you oddly,” she said in chill observation.

“Venom?”

“Viper venom.” She gave me a most unpleasant smile. “It kills humans but acts only as a brief sedative to those of our kind. It affected you more than him.” By him, I assume she meant Dante. Had he been knocked out by it also?

“You have the faint smell of human in your blood, and yet you feel as powerful as a Full Blood Monère.”

I didn’t respond. She hadn’t asked a question, after all.

Her voice suddenly dropped down into an ugly snarl. “What are you doing here, another Queen in my territory?”

Her territory? Had that leisurely drift down the river brought us closer to danger instead of taking us farther away from it? And here was that Queen stuff again. If it was confusing to me before, it was even more so now with a thick head and dulled wits. I bypassed it and stuck with what I knew. “We were running away from your men. They were the ones who drove us here; it was not our intent to trespass. We will be happy to depart as soon as you release us.”

Her cold smile told me it would not be that easy. “Of even more interest, what are you doing in his company, this Queen killer?”

Huh? “What Queen killer?”

“Him!” Her finger speared at Dante.

“Dante? He’s not a Queen killer.” Was he?

“Dante . . . is that what he calls himself now?” An alarming mixture of hatred and vicious satisfaction glittered her obsidian dark eyes. “He is the most legendary Queen killer in our history. And not just merely for the death of my mother.”

I swallowed sickly. Oh, crap.

“She deserved killing,” Dante said clearly, heard by all. “I spared your life, an innocent child, but that seems to have been a mistake.”

A child, I thought in confusion? How old had Dante been when he had killed her mother? Five? Had he lied to me about his age, or was this angry Queen younger than she looked?

She whirled to face him like a rabid badger. Small and mean—something that could tear your limbs off. “So you admit it,” she growled.

“Yes. I am who you seek.”

Triumph and an almost sick ecstasy filled her face, as though she had just gotten the confession she had expected to take hours to beat out of him. She sucked in a harsh breath in delight. “Queen killer. I have waited a lifetime to meet you again.”

“I dispensed justice. Evil deed for evil deed. Your mother was one of the most vicious I have ever met in my long existence,” Dante said with a calmness I sure wasn’t feeling. “Is what I did any less foul than you do, murdering other Queens?”

“It is not forbidden for a Queen to slay another Queen who challenges her.”

“Whereas if a male does the same, it breaks our most sacred law.” Dante’s lips tautened with cynicism. “You have twisted our law into gross turpitude, Mona Sierra. If I am guilty, you are guilty ten times more so. Even from far away, I have heard of your slaughter of other Queens.”

A kind of panic was fast clearing my mind. My body, on the other hand, still felt weak, my muscles unable to obey the urgent command I sent to break free of these bonds.

“This Queen with me is different from the others,” Dante said.

“Yes, she tried to help you.” Mona Sierra made it sound like the most heinous crime ever committed.

“This Queen is the one who started my legend.” He addressed his next words to me. “Show them your palms.”

With my hands tied above my head, all it took to do so was uncurling my hands. I opened my palms, wondering all the while what Dante was up to. Nothing to see there but my moles. They were unusual, yes, but not so unsightly as to cause the vastly startled reaction that ran like bolts of lightning among those gathered. More than a few choked out a name. Mona Lyra.

Mona Sierra strode over to me, stopping a foot away to stare intently at my hands. “Who are you?” she asked.

“Lisa Hamilton,” I answered, wetting my lips.

“She is Mona Lyra reincarnated,” Dante said, his voice ringing out.

Mona Sierra whirled like a scalded cat. “Then why was she helping you? If she is Mona Lyra, why would she help the one who killed her?”

It was more than confusing now. It was becoming surreal. And I had absolutely no idea what was going on, or what Dante was trying to accomplish with this fantastic claim of his.

“She does not know or remember,” he said.

“That may explain her actions, but not yours. Why would you try to help the one who killed your father and laid this curse upon you? No,” she said, shaking her head, “you lie.”

“You see with your own eyes the Goddess’s Tears embedded in the heart of her palms. The mark of favor from our Mother Moon never seen in any other.”

The feeling of unease was palpable now among the crowd. I could even see it subtly affecting Mona Sierra. She shook it off. “Pah! Nothing but lies. She is tainted with human blood.”

She made that sound akin to a butt-ugly mongrel dog.

“This Queen is not one you should toy with,” Dante said with calm reason. “Let her go. You have me—I’m the one you seek.”

Things became clearer then why he was making all these outrageous claims. He was trying to free me. A variation on the old take-me-but-let-her-go ploy.

“You bargain with nothing in your possession,” Mona Sierra spat back at him. “Nothing but false claims to try to trick us.”

“If you do not believe the mark of favor everyone sees plainly embedded in her palms, then believe this. The woman before you is the High Prince of Hell’s chosen mate. Kill her and you will bring down Hell’s wrath upon you.”

“Another lie. You grow desperate trying to save your little Queen.”

“She wears his necklace,” Dante stated.

Mona Sierra faced me again, eyes narrowed into slits. “That should be easy enough to disprove,” she sneered, reaching down my collar to lift out my necklace.

There was a flash of blinding light and the sharp smell of burning flesh. Mona Sierra’s scream shrilled the air. I blinked, momentarily blinded by the light. When I was able to see again, I saw the other Queen fallen in front of me, clutching her hand. Black burn marks were visible on her seared fingertips. Six hunters ran to her, pulling her away from me, eyeing me warily as if I had been the one responsible for hurting their Queen.

Not me. I didn’t do that, I wanted to babble but was not stupid enough to do so. If they wanted to account me powers I didn’t possess, far be it for me to correct their false assumptions. I wondered, though, how Dante had pulled off that impressive bit of magic. If he could do that, why the hell didn’t he free himself?

“What did you do?” Mona Sierra hissed from behind the wall of her men.

I didn’t have a clue and didn’t know what to tell her. It was Dante who answered. “It was the necklace you touched. It reacts against those who intend harm against her.”

She rapped out a command in Spanish, and a hunter with the red mark on his forehead advanced with knife drawn.

“Uh, Dante . . .” I said uneasily.

“Be still,” Mona Sierra snapped, pushing her men aside. “We only wish to see your necklace.”

I swallowed as the hunter carefully inserted the tip of his knife down my shirtfront and drew out the necklace with his naked blade. “The chain is silver,” he murmured in heavily accented English. It was odd hearing words come out of his mouth. Like hearing a wolfhound unexpectedly talk.

Another murmur of unease rippled through the crowd.

“She has many differences—a special Queen,” Dante said loudly. “Even if you cannot read the script, you can see the likeness of the Demon Prince clearly on the necklace”—I startled over that pronouncement—“declaring his protection over her. Beware, lest you make yourself an enemy you cannot afford.”

Mona Sierra drew near enough to peer at the necklace, as did the other hunters surrounding her. Even I craned my neck down to catch a glimpse. Demon Prince? Was that whose likeness was carved on the cameo? Was there even such a person, or was Dante making it all up?

“Prince Halcyon felt that touch, Mona Sierra,” Dante said, “when you grabbed the necklace just now. He will know that someone with ill intent came in contact with his beloved, and may even now be on his way here.”

He was spooking them with a bogeyman and it was apparently working. Two young children in the crowd started crying and were quickly shushed by their mothers.

“You are trying too hard to convince me to let her go,” Mona Sierra said warily.

“How about this?” Dante offered. “If you release her and allow her to go on her way, you have my word that I will not seek reprisal upon you or your people when I am reborn again. Otherwise you have my promise of vengeance.”

More mad claims atop other mad claims, of reincarnation and curses, Hell and Demon Princes, and now rebirth. Rebirth after they killed him, I presumed. And yet, no one was laughing. I didn’t know whether just Dante was mad or all of them.

The knife eased away and the necklace dropped down, clearly visible to everyone. They eyed it with fascinated revulsion, as if it were a viper about to strike them.

“Enough,” Mona Sierra proclaimed. “I will not allow you to distract us with your baseless, futile claims. Shave off his beard,” she said, gesturing to Dante. “I wish to see his face and remember what it looks like.”

Her words broke the still silence, and people moved once again, murmuring among themselves as Mona Sierra and her men left.

A woman came to tend to Dante. First the beard and mustache was trimmed with scissors, then the stubble was shaved off with a disposable razor—odd signs of civilized living dispersed among the, if not quite squalor, then clearly not wealthy, living conditions here. She fussed with his hair, braiding it back in the fashion the men here wore their hair, and then stepped away.

My breath puffed out in surprise at the first clear sight of Dante’s face. He was indeed twenty years old, a young man’s face atop a grown man’s body.

I thought he had looked wild before with all that hair covering him, but now, clean shaven and unadorned, he was even more dangerous looking. He wasn’t handsome so much as striking, with a proud nose, a clean, chiseled jawline, and those queer eyes . . . so old and cold. Silver-blue. As distinctive as his saber-toothed tiger form would be. Looking into those eyes, you could almost believe that he had lived many lifetimes, dying and being reborn again and again.

Madness. I was starting to become affected by all the other craziness going on here.

When Mona Sierra returned, sooner than I would have liked, her fingertips were healed. Unblemished, unscarred skin. The people that had been milling around gathered into attention once again.

Pulling a knife from the sheath at her waist, Mona Sierra walked up to Dante and without ceremony sliced him across the abdomen. It seemed like a small cut until the blood started streaming, a crimson tide flowing out in a line that slowly widened into a wash of blood as his tissues opened up. I glimpsed a deeper layer of fat and cut muscle as she made a second slice, chillingly silent. No sound. No cries from Dante, or even me—I was too shocked. It didn’t seem real to me until the loops of his bowel spilled out of him. Then it was all too real.

I screamed and twisted against my ties so that they creaked and strained. The silver ropes binding my arms broke. I was dropping forward, my upper body free, when a dart pierced my neck. I yanked it out, tried to aim it at a hunter—there were so goddamn many of them—but already lethargy was assailing me. A tingling numbness spread outward from the tiny wound in a rapid wash of weakness, and I sprawled limp, elbows on the ground. A haze of darkness and sparkly lights filled my vision, but I didn’t pass out. I clung to consciousness, barely. After a second or two, my vision cleared and returned.

“The diluted venom seems to work. Good,” Mona Sierra said with satisfaction. “I want you to see this.”

“Why?” I mumbled—it felt like marbles filled my mouth.

“Because your distress will pain him even more.” She nodded to a man who was clothed more than the others, wearing shirt and shoes as well as pants. He stepped before Dante and pulled the edges of his eviscerated abdomen together, with the intestinal loops still trailing out of him. Even in my dulled state, I felt the wash of energy coming from his hands. When he drew his hands away, the gaping wound was sealed back together, all but a central area, an inch-and-a-half-wide hole, where Dante’s intestines spilled out of him.

“It will get even tighter as your own body heals,” Mona Sierra said, trailing her fingers over the intestinal loops, smearing Dante’s blood on them as though she were finger painting. “They tell me it’s quite painful, feeling your guts being sucked back into you as you heal, which should take several long hours.” She wrapped a small hand around the bunched loops, pulling gently. No sound came from Dante, but his face grew more ashen. “Quite a skill to eviscerate without cutting into the loops themselves. A nasty smell, I’ve found, when you perforate the bowels. This way is much better, cleaner.” She smiled up at him with quiet ecstasy, drinking in his stoic pain. Sticking her finger into the hole, she stroked inside him.

I gagged, watching her, as two hunters bound me again to the pole.

This was one sick chick!

She glanced from me back to Dante. Her scary smile grew even wider as she purred, “Oh, how much fun this will be.”

She tortured him like this throughout the night. Watching his entrails squeeze slowly, painfully back in, pulling them back out. When the last small loop finally slithered back inside him, it was almost anticlimactic. I kept expecting the crazy bitch to slice him back open and spill them out again. I think Dante did also, because his face remained as expressionless as mine was wildly expressive, as blank as mine was by turns sickened, angry, then pitiful, and always, always frightened. For both him and me.

So far Mona Sierra had limited her interactions to having Raúl—the guy with the red eye painted on his forehead—shoot me with a dart me every two hours with attenuated venom. It left me in a groggy, limp state. Alert but helpless to do anything. I had a strong feeling that had it not been for the necklace I wore, the necklace that had burned her fingertips black, Mona Sierra would have tortured me as well, just to get a response out of Dante—he had shown far more interest for my well-being than his own. For himself, he had bargained not at all, opened his mouth not once on his own behalf. Just kept his slitted eyes—the swollen eye had finally healed—focused on Mona Sierra with his last words lingering in the air: his promise to seek vengeance if she did not let me go.

I think all of us were waiting to see which way she would go on that, including Mona Sierra herself. Would she let me go or kill me?

Dawn was just beginning to creep over the horizon when they finally untied Dante from his pole. Two men unwound my bindings as well, though they kept our hands tied. No matter, as long as they were through for the night. Couldn’t torture us while they were sleeping, right? Which I presumed they would be, since they’d been up all night. Only, it seemed they could.

It didn’t occur to me what they were doing until I was standing over the pit. One of the men hefted me over his shoulder and walked a fair distance before setting me back on my feet. I had a moment to see the deep, crater-sized hole before I collapsed in a jellied mass on the ground, unable to stand, not even able to lift up my head. The multiple doses had accumulated within me. I was doped up to my gills at this point.

“Carry her down,” Mona Sierra ordered Dante.

It seemed an innocuous thing to ask of him, but Dante reacted as if she had just told him to stab me in the heart. The expression on his face grew frightening and his body seemed to swell larger, even though he didn’t move a single muscle. It wasn’t my drugged imagination either, because the six men surrounding him stepped back and drew their machetes.

“You will regret this,” Dante promised, icy rage flashing from his pale eyes.

“Not as much as you will,” Mona Sierra said smugly, “and that is all I care about. Maybe if you had given me a better show, I might have spared her, but you were such poor entertainment.”

“Lies,” I managed to slur out. “Bitch jus wansa torment you.”

Mona Sierra cast a venomous glance at me. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. He’ll never know. And that will indeed torment him as you and he boil under the sun. As he watches your skin blister and peel away.”

Oh, so that’s what she had planned. I blinked and kept my mouth shut. Sunlight didn’t bother me. Sunlight, in this case, was my dear, dear friend. It would give me time for the venom to wear off and let me recover my full strength, after which I’d break us out of this creepyville of horror.

“You can carry her down, or I will have her thrown down,” Mona Sierra said indifferently. “Your choice.”

Dante scooped me up and set me over his shoulder much more gently and carefully than the other man had. I hung over him like a limp rag as he descended the ladder, two men in front of him, another two behind. We went down twenty-eight rungs before hitting the bottom, and it was a tricky bit of work for Dante because his hands were tied together in front and he couldn’t hold me as he climbed down. I couldn’t even help. Another treacherous mind game Mona Sierra played with Dante—more guilt to heap upon him if I slipped off his shoulder and fell. But we made it down without mishap.

“Over there,” Raúl said, pointing.

Dante moved to the indicated spot and set me down on the cool cement floor. Dante’s eyes, the brief glimpse I had of them, were wild with anguish, turmoil, and rage. More emotion than he had shown throughout the entire night of tug-of-war Mona Sierra had played with his intestines.

“Step back away from her,” Raúl commanded.

I think Raúl and I were both surprised when Dante obeyed without putting up a fight. I watched as he let Raúl’s men untie his hands, only to retie them behind his back. They attached a long silver rope to his bound wrists and then secured the other end to a metal rung anchored into the concrete.

They did the same to me, and then the four of them climbed back up, pulled the ladder up and over the side, and drew an enormous silver netting, the ropes twice as thick as what they had used to capture us, over the top of the pit.

“Think of me as you burn,” Mona Sierra said in parting. But they didn’t leave just yet. Not until two darts, accurately thrown by hand, came sailing through the net to stab me in the thigh. Already I could tell that they had used full-strength venom. It would knock me out for hours. Hours during which Dante might die.

No, I wailed inside as consciousness dimmed. Noooo . . . Dante!