Sunny - Mona Lisa Eclipsing

“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.