Sunny - Mona Lisa Eclipsing

“How old are you?” I finally asked.

“Twenty.”

Twenty to my twenty-one. Jesus Christ, I’d thought him ten years older. He was one year younger than I was but only in physical years. His eyes were those of a much older soul. That of a hardened soldier’s.

I eyed him warily as he slumped back against the seat. “You’re injured,” I said, feeling silly stating the obvious, but in the midst of all the fighting he’d acted with such competence and menacing purpose I had completely forgotten the fact that he had been shot twice.

“Yeah, the bullets are still in me,” he said, eyes closed. “You have to get them out.”

“I’ll take you to the hospital.”

“No, too long. You’ll have to take them out.”

“With what? My fingernails? Unfortunately, they don’t grow out long like yours do.”

He grinned, actually grinned. A slight, brief upward tug at the corners of his mouth. “You can dig them out with the knife.” The knife he had held to Roberto’s neck.

I didn’t know whether to believe him or consider it a joke. It didn’t sound like the latter despite that brief grin. I drove blindly, wondering if my companion was a madman.

I made random choices whenever the road forked or intersected, but some deity must have been watching over us because after several minutes of blind driving, we somehow found our way back onto the highway. Ten miles later, smelling the ocean, I exited onto a smaller road, following the briny scent.

“What are you doing?” Dante asked, opening his eyes.

“Getting rid of the guns.” Nodding to the blue ocean looming up before us, I parked and popped open the trunk.

Dante silently watched as I grabbed the guns and tossed them one after the other into the crystal blue seawater.

“Keep one for yourself,” Dante instructed.

“I’m not too familiar with guns,” I said, watching as he pulled out his own automatic pistol and competently popped the clip to check the ammo.

“My father trained you. You can shoot a gun.”

“I can? Well, that’s certainly news to me.” Gingerly, I took the gun he handed to me.

“How much memory did you lose?” he asked.

“Six months. The last thing I remember is being a nurse working in Manhattan.”

“You were a nurse? I didn’t know that.” The gun was shoved back into his waistband.

I stopped fiddling with my gun and glanced at him. “So you weren’t in Manhattan? You didn’t help me move out of my apartment.”

“No, I met you in Texas near the border of your Louisiana territory.”

“Louisiana? What, I own property there?”

“Yes. Quite substantial property.”

“I do?” This was getting more and more bizarre. “Where did I get the money to buy property? First you tell me I know how to shoot a gun. Now you tell me that I’m apparently quite wealthy, too. Are you sure you haven’t mistaken me for someone else?”

Or maybe the answer was even simpler than that. Maybe he was crazy. Out of his mind.

“You’re a Queen. A Monère Queen.”

I was getting an awful feeling in the pit of my stomach.

“Monère?” I tested the word carefully. “Is that one of those small countries somewhere in Europe?”

“Nope.” He looked at me as if I were the unhinged one. “It’s not a country. It’s a race of people descended from the moon.”

With blurring speed, I snatched his automatic weapon away from him. Pointing the gun at him, the gun he had assured me I knew how to handle, I backed carefully away. “I’m sorry but I don’t know you, and the only memory I have of you is chained up in this wild, crazed state.”

“You think I’m crazy.”

“In a word—yes.”

“You saved me from that. From going crazy.”

“How?”

“By sharing the moon’s light with me.”

His words halted my retreat as I recalled that other memory fragment I’d had. Of moonlight filling me up with indescribable energy, and, more recently, of my skin glowing, illuminated, along with Roberto’s.

“How much do you remember of me like that, in that wild state?” he asked.

“Just that you were shackled . . .”

“. . . with fleece-lined cuffs around the wrists and ankles.”

“Yes,” I whispered. Licking my lips, I asked, “How did I share the moon’s light with you?”

“By having sex with me,” he said plainly, pale eyes locked with mine. “Your skin filled with light and you shared it with me.”

The gun dropped limply to my side.

A part of my brain still screamed denial of everything he told me. Another part of my brain told me he was telling the god-awful, appalling truth. “So we’re . . .”

“Lovers.”

It was hard looking at a complete stranger who’d just announced that he had been intimate with me.

“My skin didn’t glow before when I had sex,” I said, grabbing onto something concrete, something that I knew for certain.

“Did you feel pleasure?”

“No.”

“Then your partners were human.”

“Yes,” I said hesitantly. “I’m still trying to wrap my mind around the idea that I’m not human.”

“But you are. You’re a Mixed Blood—one-fourth human, three-quarters Monère. The first Mixed Blood Queen in Monère history.”

There he went throwing that queen stuff at me, but I stayed on track, sticking to one thing at a time. “My skin glowed just from kissing Roberto, even though we didn’t have sex.”

Dante’s hands, I couldn’t help noticing, curled into fists. “We glow only with pleasure, and only at the touch of another with Monère blood.”

“I didn’t know Roberto was a bad guy when he kissed me,” I offered lamely, driven, for some reason, to explain that to him.

“Do you believe me now?”

“Yeah I guess . . . though I still have a lot of questions.”

“They’ll have to wait. Can you get the knife from the car? It’s on the front dash.”

“Why?”

“To dig the bullets out of my back.”

“I thought you were kidding.”

“I wasn’t.”

“I’m a nurse, not a doctor,” I felt compelled to point out.

“I know. Don’t shoot me,” he warned, going to the passenger seat. I watched carefully as he retrieved the knife. Gesturing me over, he handed the blade to me, hilt first, then, unbuttoning and removing his shirt, he presented me with his bare back, hands braced against the side of the car.

I cast an appalled glance at him, which he didn’t see. “I don’t have anything to sterilize the knife with.”

“I’m a Full Blood Monère. We don’t get infections. If you don’t cut it out now, the wound will heal over and make it even harder to get the bullets out.”

It had been less than an hour since he had been shot, but the wounds were already starting to knit together at the edges.

“Mona Lisa, you have to do it now. We don’t have much time.”

“Why? You think Roberto will still come after us after the way you threatened him?”

“He’s a wealthy and powerful, arrogant drug lord who grew up faster and stronger than anybody else. This is probably the first time he’s ever been humbled, so, yes, I think he’ll come after us. You should have let me kill him.”

“You know, you’re pretty bloodthirsty for a twenty-year-old.” More than a little ticked off at him and the situation, I stomped around the car and rummaged inside. Nothing but a box of tissues, but at least we had that.

“Okay, brace yourself.” I felt him tense as I laid my hand over the first bullet hole and let my senses sink down into the wound. When I had ascertained the depth of injury, I moved to the second hole. “The bullets are in pretty deep,” I muttered. “Here goes.”

I prodded gently with the sharp tip of the knife and cursed when the wider part of the blade started cutting into his flesh as I inserted it deeper. “Goddammit, the knife is too wide.”