Sunny: Mona Lisa Craving

Contact with him lanced me for a sharp, electric second before he brought his forceful presence back under control.

“Please, Dontaine. I love you. I want to keep you safe. All of you—Jamie, Tersa, Rosemary, Thaddeus, Chami, Tomas, Aquila, and Amber. You are my family. The most important beings to me in this world. Please, help me keep you all safe. I could not bear it if I lost someone else I loved.”

His hands cupped my face, lifted it up to his so that I saw his brilliant, gleaming eyes, the chiseled lines of his face fierce and raw with emotion. Perhaps he would have kissed me then. Perhaps I would have let him. A foolish thing to do when it was infinitely safer to push him away. Safer for him.

I don’t know if I would have given in to that momentary folly. I don’t know what would have happened afterward. All I suddenly knew was that my gums were burning as if fire had set them aflame. That my teeth were aching. That I had a sudden thirsting urge for blood, to feel it sliding hot and sweet down my throat.

This was what had happened to me at High Court—the promise of fangs. That promise suddenly became reality. My teeth elongated and pushed upward and outward through my gums like small mountains erupting. I gasped because it hurt like hell. Then gasped again when I felt a sharp sting and looked down to see blood welling from the hand I’d drawn up to my mouth and pricked. I’d accidentally cut myself on the sharpness of my own teeth…on my fangs .

“Dear Goddess,” Dontaine whispered. Cold fear skimmed the surface of those two words.

I pushed away from him and stumbled out the door. Away. I had to get away from him. I fled outside into the cool night, and in the breeze that glided over my skin, I felt him—the demon presence outside that had brought forth the demon presence within me. And not just any demon, but one I knew intimately. “Halcyon.”

He came to me out of the darkness, my elegant Demon Prince. I sensed him as I’d never sensed him before, like a heartbeat. Only his heart did not beat, he did not breathe. He—like the other demons—was dead, demon dead, and we were not supposed to be able to sense them this strongly. That was what made them so dangerous—that they could approach us almost undetected. That and their far greater strength, both mental and physical.

The last time I’d seen Halcyon, he’d been weak and bloodied, his chest ripped to shreds by a whip. He was not weak now. Others would have looked upon him and seen an average man in looks, height, and build. He was only a bare head-tilt taller than I, slender and trim, with dark hair, dark eyes, just like me. He had a quiet presence rather than a shouting one. A reserved air. An air of loneliness. An apartness from others that had pulled me to him since the very first time I became aware of him in a sun-dappled meadow.

A Monère warrior who did not know the Demon Prince would have seen him and dismissed him in strength and power. Never would have guessed that before him stood the ruler of Hell, someone far stronger than our greatest Warrior Lord.

I’d never feared Halcyon as others did—his great strength, those lethal nails. He’d been kind to me from the very first, and not just kind but a friend…and then a lover in a dream or a vision—you might call it a dream reality. Whatever it had been, the feelings between us had certainly been real.

Even when I’d seen Halcyon shift into his alternate demon form—huge, monstrous, ugly—and kill another demon in battle over me, even then I had not really feared him. But now I did. Because I didn’t just feel Halcyon’s presence, I felt his emotions. He ached with sadness. Almost overwhelming grief.

The cabin door opened. Dontaine stepped out, a silver dagger gleaming with naked threat in his hand, and I felt Halcyon’s grieving sadness flash into anger.

“Dontaine, leave us,” I said, my voice carefully calm.

My master of arms, my lover, did not obey me. Instead he came to stand beside me. “I’m sorry, I can’t.”

“I’m sorry, too.” With a blow that took Dontaine unaware, I struck him, careful with my strength because I was more than just Monère strong now. I caught his unconscious body as it went lax, and carried him inside to the cabin, laid him gently down on the bed.

One last secret touch of that sun-bright hair. Then I straightened and stepped out to meet my fate.

“I SMELL HISscent on you,” were Halcyon’s words upon my return. I didn’t know how to answer him. Amber and Gryphon had shared me without jealousy. I’d have said that Monère men did not know the meaning of the word, but that was not true. The one person they had been jealous of had been Halcyon. The Demon Prince’s interest in me had driven them crazy with resentment and fear. I had no inkling of what Halcyon’s reaction might be to my sleeping with another man, even if it had been to save us both. Since I wanted to keep Dontaine alive, I said nothing.

Halcyon gave a little smile, and again that wave of sadness flowed over me, through me. “I will not harm him,” he said, and held out his hand to me.

I walked to him, took his hand without hesitation, felt the faintest brush of those sharp nails across my skin—lethal nails that could cut off a demon’s head with one deadly swipe—and didn’t flinch. Why should I? If I was to die, I knew he would make it as quick and as painless as possible. But before I died, I wanted to know one thing. “How is Gryphon?”

I know. Contradicting myself here, asking him about another lover. But Gryphon and Amber had come before Halcyon. He did not seem to resent them. Dontaine, on the other hand, had come after Halcyon. Therein might lie a very big difference.

“He is well, adjusting to his new existence.” There seemed to be more he wanted to say but didn’t. He led me instead farther into the forest, away from the cabin, and I went with him willingly. We walked for a time, no words, but a wealth of emotion, his emotion, flooded the silence until I could no longer bear it. “Don’t be sad, Halcyon.”

He led me to a toppled tree fallen long ago, and urged me to sit there on the trunk. “Hell-cat,” he whispered, his endearment for me, and again I felt that welling, immense sorrow. “I’m not going to kill you.”

His words were a surprise and a relief to me. “Then why are you grieving?”

“Grieving—how appropriately stated. Oh, Mona Lisa.” He closed his eyes for a moment as if it pained him to look at me. When his lashes lifted, he looked into me with more than just his eyes as he feathered the back of his fingers across the tip of my fangs in a whisper-light caress. “All that my sister said is true. You have become Damanôen .”

“It sounds pretty,” I said, for a condition that was not. But after the initial bloodlust that had come welling up with the bursting of my fangs, the hunger had faded. I felt it still, but only like a faint, nibbling urge. “If you’re not going to kill me then why are you so sad?” I asked.

“What you feel is what you called it—grief. I’m grieving for what we have lost.”

“What have we lost?”

“Time,” Halcyon said. “An afterlife of togetherness. You have such great mental strength, you would have existed for a long time in my realm.” After Monères died, those with enough psychic power transitioned to Hell and became demon dead, living there for as long as their mental energy sustained them. Some of them existed for hundreds of years, like Halcyon.

Something stirred in me, prickled my calm. “Have I lost my afterlife?”

Halcyon gazed at me sadly with eyes the color of dark chocolate. “You are Damanôen , demon living now. You cannot become demon dead afterward.”