Sunny: Mona Lisa Craving

THE CRESCENT MOONgleamed bright in the star-studded sky, a beacon of light in the darkness. Not chasing it away. No, darkness was fine. Darkness was our domain, the time when we roamed and played and hunted. We slept the days and roamed the evening twilight. And when the sun fell over the edge of the Earth, that was when we rose. The lunar rays didn’t chase darkness away, so much as crown it. Make it glisten and glow with shadows and light.

We weren’t vampires. We were something older, much older than those legends. We were what begat those first whispers that eventually wound their way into folklore: The Monère, children of the moon, a people who had fled their dying planet over four million years ago. Supernatural creatures faster, stronger, more beautiful than mere humans.

I was the exception to that. The beauty part, that is. I was the pigeon among all the peacocks. Plain, with straight dark hair and shadow-danced eyes. The exotic almond tilt of my eyes was my only attractive feature. At five feet eight, I stood as tall as the shortest of my men, and was built more like a long-distance runner—lean, pared down like an athlete, with a light, modest bosom. I hadn’t inherited my mother’s lushness, which was fine by me. It was a body I was comfortable with. And my simple looks…well, the plainness was not so surprising. Not in a Mixed Blood, which is what I am. A quarter of me is human, the other three-quarters of me is Monère, a people I’d only just come to know existed. And the reason for that? My mother, Mona Sera, a Full Blood Monère Queen, had tossed my mongrel self away at birth, like garbage. I’d been raised among the humans. Grew up thinking of myself as such until puberty hit and the moon’s gifts of greater strength and sharper senses, far more acute than any human’s could ever be, made it clear that I was more.

I was more than even what I had first suspected. I was a Monère Queen, the newest one crowned. The first Mixed Blood Queen to ever exist in their long and bloody history. Unfortunately, I was doing more than my share of adding to the bloodiness of that history. I’d just returned from High Queen’s Court, called before the Council to explain my role in Mona Louisa’s death, the Queen who’d ruled here before me in Louisiana.

Mona Louisa of Louisiana. Had a ring to it now that I rolled the words together, didn’t it? No longer. She was dead. Not by my hand, though I’d done my best to kill her after she’d torn my lover’s heart out from his chest and killed him. When Gryphon died, I had wanted to die, too. But not before ensuring that Mona Louisa departed this Earth first. After I’d seen that goal accomplished, I’d been grief-maddened and had submersed myself in my Bengal tiger form—something I’d suppressed, ran from all my life, that dark, dangerous beast chained inside me. In my grief-storm of pain and loss, I’d finally embraced that animal part of me. Lost myself wholly, mindlessly, in my other self, roaming the forests for a fortnight until my human and animal minds had merged, come one into the other, and I found myself once more aware of who and what I am—a part-human Monère Queen who had abandoned her people for half a month.

One of my people ran beside me now. An enormous wolf with a beautiful, lush pelt of silver-gray, and autumn brown eyes that gleamed as if a light shone within him. And it did. Lunar light. He was not a true wolf but a Full Blood Monère warrior shifted into his animal form. He romped with me now in joy of the night, and I ran with him in celebration of our time, of our strength, of our being, lithe and light in my human form, springing ahead of him, veering sharply aside so that he leaped in front. I followed then, chasing after him. We danced like that for a time, like children playing, or in our case, like living creatures who still had life, who should celebrate that life while it yet remained in them.

Life and death were fickle, sometimes bleeding one into the other. Gryphon, my first love, had died but he’d made the transition to demon dead. He resided now in another realm. In Hell. I would see him again one day. Mona Louisa, the bitch Queen I’d tried so hard to kill and had failed to, was also dead but not entirely gone. She’d drank demon blood and had become more than Monère…and I had sucked her light and essence into me. That part of her, that demon-tainted part, resided in me now.

I ran in human form because, now that it was triggered, that demon essence within me partially blocked my tiger self, preventing it from coming out fully. I wondered if the opposite were true, if my animal self prevented the full manifestation of that demon sliver that lurked within me like a dark, insidious shadow.

Others thought I ran the night in my animal form with my master at arms by my side to keep me safe. But I’d really come here, away from the others’ keen ears, to speak to him privately.

Deep in the midst of the forest, we came upon a small clearing. Nestled there was a small hut. The west cottage, it was called. I’d never been here before and looked upon the charming little structure with pleasure. It was a tiny thing with yellow siding, a green sloping roof, and matching green trim. The door was unlocked. I pushed it open and stepped within. It was a simply furnished but comfortable abode, used as a hunter’s cabin. A place where Monère warriors shifted back into their upright forms. A place to clean up and wash off the blood after hunting in their animal selves. There were several other cabins like this spread out among our vast acreage.

Nails scraped the wooden floor as the wolf entered the cabin and crossed over to me. A natural wolf, canis lupus , stood thirty inches tall at the shoulders and weighed 150 pounds. Canis Monère , on the other hand, was much bigger. Or at least the one before me was. His weight was closer to 250 pounds. And his shoulders topped a natural wolf’s height by more than half a foot. No wonder the timber wolf that I’d encountered at High Court, a wolf that had looked upon me as food, had backed away beneath Dontaine’s growling threat.

A shimmer of light, a pulse of power, and Dontaine stood before me naked and unadorned, breathtakingly handsome with hair as blindingly bright as sunshine, and eyes a lush and deep verdant green in his human form. He was tall, and what I would have called of average build. But average was not a word you used with Dontaine. With broad shoulders, arms roped with sinewy strength, a chest sculpted with rippling muscles that flowed like flesh-silk beneath his pale, flawless skin, he was more heavily muscled than Gryphon, my beautiful, dark, departed angel, and much less massive than my towering Amber, my Warrior Lord, my other love.

Dontaine’s hand reached out and I felt that electric, jolting dance upon my skin, a sensation that came from him alone. He touched me. And his touch was not like that of a guard but of a new lover—my new lover.

“Mona Lisa.” He whispered my name and title both. The emotions that crossed my face when I looked at him, truly looked at him and saw him—not just the surface beauty but the generous, valiant heart that lay beneath it—made his eyes swirl a deeper green.

He was achingly handsome with bold and noble features, like a blond sun god. And like most men blessed with fair face and exquisite form, he had the confidence, the touch of arrogance that usually came with the looks. And he wasn’t just beautiful but powerful, even for a Full Blood Monère warrior. He had been Mona Louisa’s favorite, before she had tried to kill me, her territory forfeited to me as punishment. She’d tried to regain it, and one of the means she had used was the tall, sumptuously handsome man who stood before me now, looking at me with soft wonder in his eyes. He’d been left behind to spy and betray me, but he hadn’t. He’d saved me instead. Not just once, but again at High Court when I had been questioned there for Mona Louisa’s death.