Mona Lisa Eclipsing

EPILOGUE

THAT NIGHT, WE Started returning the messages that various members of the media had left with McManus. Most weren’t available so late in the evening, but a surprising number were and took our phone calls. Quentin played secretary, using a newly purchased notebook to begin scheduling interviews.

The next morning, we sat and talked with Harry and five other attorneys from his law firm. We spent the first half hour of the meeting discussing exactly what the Monère were, which was, technically, a nonhuman alien species, even though Monère had lived here on this continent before the word America was even coined. But aside from the messy legal issues of proof backing up our earlier settlement on this land, which we did not have as far as I knew, and the even trickier question of biology, our legal experts decided that the best approach was to seek American citizenship. Even a monkey would be granted basic human rights once it became a citizen, they said.

And McManus was right. These guys were far more expensive than he was, to the collective tune of two hundred thousand dollars for their services, which would include finding a senator or congressman who would be willing to sponsor and initiate a bill in Congress, on behalf of the Monère.

If and when the bill was passed in Congress, it would then go to the Senate floor. If and when that bill was passed in the Senate, the President would then have to sign off on it before it became official law. Lots of ifs and whens and other tricky steps involved, not the least of which was a congressional hearing that I and the others would likely have to testify at. Wagner and his politically savvy team of lawyers and experts would shepherd us through this entire complicated process. Oh, and the price he quoted was only an estimate; it might go as high as three hundred thousand dollars, depending on how much money they needed to grease the wheels to win the support of key people.

Politics, I discovered, was a very high-priced business.

I called the two other law firms on my list, with a much clearer understanding of what services I needed, and browbeat them into giving me a rough quote over the telephone. They gave close to the same figure. We signed with Wagner’s law firm. They were supposed to be the best, something I comforted myself with as I forked over a hundred thousand dollars to them, the first chunk of their payment. I remembered to get a receipt.

Barbara Walters wanted us to fly out to New York for an interview on her show, The View. So did Diane Sawyer for Good Morning America, Matt Lauer for the Today Show, and Regis and Kelly. On the west coast, Jay Leno and Ellen DeGeneres were also eager to get us on their shows. I told Quentin that we were staying put, and asked to have them come to us instead. The west coast shows ended up interviewing us via satellite out of a local DC studio, as did Regis and Kelly. Barbara Walters, Matt Lauer, and Diane Sawyer, however, flew out to DC to interview us in person. But, hey, if it only takes an hour flight from New York to DC, why not, right?

There was more chatter about us being angels, what with Jarvis’s winged appearance and the doctors’ and nurses’ description of me glowing when I healed Jarvis’s burns. But that died down when Barbara Walters asked me during her interview who my sweetie was. Was it Dontaine or someone else?

My answer was that it was several someone elses. That I was in committed relationships with Amber, Dante, and Dontaine.

As the big studio cameras zoomed in on each of my men as I pointed them out, I could almost feel the collective pulse of watching America skitter in appalled and scandalized titillation.

That pretty much cut down the talk about us being angels.

The interviews that followed focused almost entirely on the sexual relationship of Monère Queens and their warriors. I might have answered the questions with maybe a little too much frankness. Our interviewers couldn’t seem to get away from the sex part of it and the fact that three lovers was considered uncommonly chaste for a Monère Queen.

All in all, the people who flew out to meet us and interview us in person considered it well worth their effort, with record ratings for their shows.

The location of our hotel was discovered on the third day. Frankly, I was surprised it had taken that long.

I saw FBI Agent Jim Carmichael again when he and his men showed up with some local police to keep the crowd of reporters and gawkers under control. Agent Carmichael and I agreed that staying at the hotel would no longer be possible. Just as well, it was getting pricey at seven hundred bucks a day for two suites.

Money was leaving our briefcase at a very steady and alarming rate.

We bought a used van with sixty-one thousand miles for a little over half the price a new one would have cost. After all, why pay for something brand new when there was still no guarantee we’d be sticking around?

So far, so good. The U.S. government and I had an unspoken understanding. We would play nice as long as they did. Why rock the boat? They were getting tons of information about the Monère from us, freely and willingly given. But I didn’t know how long I could trust that to last.

Quentin found a furnished six-bedroom home for us to rent an hour away from DC. It ended up being a third less than what staying at the hotel would have cost us. That it was in a gated community was even better. Still, even with the added distance, reporters kept climbing up the side of the hills where it wasn’t fenced, and hiking in. We had to hire a private security company recommended by our law firm to not only patrol around outside the house and escort trespassing reporters back out the front gates, but also to sweep the house on a daily basis for bugs. We’d found quite a few of them.

We had taken the first step. People knew about us now.

Those same people were still clueless that the same supernatural race that had generated their tales of angels and werewolves were the same ones spawning their mythology about demons and Hell. And I wanted to keep it that way for as long as I could. Preferably until the Monère gained legal rights.

Was it reasonable to expect humans to live alongside people who could crush their skulls with a simple flexing of their fingers? That was an argument already being aired.

My rebuttal back was: Wouldn’t you want to know who and what we really were instead of living next to us in ignorance, as many were doing even now? To have us not only protected by the same rights but also restricted by those very same rules?

There was also talk about how our talents and abilities could benefit everyone. A huge untapped resource, people were saying.

It was a start. A good start even.

Now we had to see if we could finish it without screwing it up.