Angela Knight - Over The Moon

She leaned toward me, and the abrasiveness of her nearness scraped rawly against my nerves like tiny claws. "Your presence brought it here. This"—she swept a hand toward Beldar—"is your fault. You are costing me yet another warrior, daughter mine. And I do not like it," she spat, her eyes glinting like black onyx stone. "Fix him. And return him."

I had a bad feeling where she was going with this. I was the only healer of sorts within the area. No healer, apparently, had wished to swear into Mona's Sera's service. "You want me to heal him?" I said, just to be sure.

"Yes. If Beldar dies, I will take one of your men in his stead." Mona Sera's eyes flicked past me to the other half of our group, watching and waiting in the distance. "Or perhaps your woman."

She meant Rosemary, a Full Blood Monère female. Tersa, a Mixed Blood, didn't even exist in her eyes. I watched as Mona Sera's eyes flicked dismissingly over Jamie and Thaddeus. Had she seen the likeness? Guessed that Thaddeus was her son? Would she even care?

"No," I said, shaking my head, feeling panic welling within me. "You cannot blame this on me."

"Oh, but I do." She turned those black moribund eyes back to me. "Heal him or forfeit one of your own for what you will have cost me."

"I-I don't know if I can heal him. What about the healers at High Court? Would they be able to help him?"

"You may try that if you wish, if he lasts that long. He was bitten but two hours ago and already the decay spreads across him like a living eating thing. If you wish to bring him to High Court, do not tarry long. But as to whether the healers there can cure him, even they will not be able to tell you. No Monère has even been bitten by a hellhound."

I was feeling more and more faint. "Never?"

"No, because no hellhound has ever been seen in this realm before." Her hard eyes drilled into mine. "Do what you wish. I shall return tomorrow. For Beldar or another. It matters not to me."

She stood and with a swirl of her long black coat, disappeared into the backseat of the first car. Kyle and Frangois stepped into the second car and they drove away.

Gently, Amber went to Beldar's side. Kneeling, he wrapped an arm about the smaller man's waist.

Beldar gasped with pain. "No! Let me… let me hold on to you instead, old friend." Braced against Amber, he pulled himself to his feet and allowed Amber to guide him onto the bench.

Aquila, Tomas, and the others joined us.

"Who was that?" Thaddeus asked.

I looked into my brother's eyes. "That was our mother, Mona Sera." I'd never told him about her before and he'd never asked. He'd been smart enough to realize that had there been anything good to say about her, I would have told him.

"No," Thaddeus said, his voice soft but firm. "The woman I just buried was my real mother. The one who loved me and raised me. Not the one who gave me away."

I caught his hand in mine and squeezed. "She did us a favor by giving us away."

Thaddeus squeezed back, smiled slightly. "Yes, it would seem that she did." Worry came into his eyes as he looked at Beldar. Worry mixed with pity. "Can you heal him?"

"You heard?" I asked.

Thaddeus nodded.

"I don't know," I whispered. God help me, I did not know if I could heal him.

God help us all if I couldn't.

Before I became a Monère Queen, I was a nurse. But my nursing skills, good though they were, was not why Mona Sera had brought Beldar to me.

As we rode in a taxi back to my apartment, I turned my hands over to gaze at my palms. Embedded in them was the reason why she had sought me out—my Goddess's Tears. They were moles the size and color of pearls. Two moles buried deep in the heart of my palms, one in each hand. I'd had them all my life. And all my life, I'd been able to sense injury and sickness with them and ease pain. But not heal, though I had sensed the power within me to do so. That had remained dormant until I had come into contact with others of my kind and had entered the Monère's secret society, a violent and dangerous world. There, I had used these molesmarks the Monère had only heard about in their lore and legends but had not seen since the time of their great exodus from the Moon, their dying planet that they had abandoned four million years ago. I'd used the Goddess's Tears to heal and to hurt. And the injury I was capable of inflicting had been enough to have the rogue bandits who'd kidnapped me consider cutting off my hands. My mother had spoken true… trouble did seem to follow me like a dark cloud. But if there had been peril, there had also been grace. I rubbed those pearly moles now, felt the tiny bumps, and wondered if they could save Beldar. If they could save us.

The taxi came to a halt in front of my Greenwich Village apartment, and we got out. Braced between Amber and Gryphon, Beldar managed to hobble to the elevator. Chami and I followed behind. I'd sent the others back to the Pierre. If I was going to have sex, I wanted to have it in relative privacy, away from the acute senses of the others.

Why was I thinking about sex? Because that was the way I healed.

Yeah, I know. Not the most convenient gift, mine.

The elevator doors pinged open and we stepped onto the seventh floor. Though Beldar's harsh panting and choked groans sounded loud in our ears, a human would have barely heard them. Nor would they have smelled anything. Had anyone seen him, he would have appeared drunk, listing and unsteady, having to be supported by others. But there were no eyes to watch him in the empty corridor other than our own.

I opened the door and he staggered in, leaning heavily against Amber. He sank down—collapsed, really—onto my small love seat. My apartment, like most apartments in Manhattan, was small. It was essentially only two main rooms; the tiny kitchen and even tinier bathroom did not count. The main space had a small dining area near the front door. The rest of the oblong space was the living room, a sitting area comprised of a rust-colored love seat and a green-patterned armchair.

The remaining room was my bedroom, which was even smaller than the living room space. Basically just my queen-sized bed—which I'd gotten, incidentally, before I'd known I was a Queen, in case you're wondering—and a crammed-in dresser. Hip-wide walking space only in there.

I really didn't know where to put Beldar, wouldn't know until I'd seen how badly injured he was. And something in me shied away from doing that because I knew it was going to be something horrible, something I'd want to run screaming from instead of embrace.

I shut the door behind me, and the locks snicked loudly into place. Bracing myself, I turned back to look at him. Beldar's eyes were closed, his head tilted back, resting against the love seat. His skin was pale and clammy, and his heart was beating fast for a Monère, sixty beats per minute instead of the usual thirty, pounding like a fierce drum in my ears.

The smell was even worse in the enclosed room, and the putrid stench of rotting flesh rolled my stomach. Fighting not to gag, I walked over to the windows and opened them, gasping in a few breaths of fresh air. But that didn't really help because my own fear was bitter and metallic in my mouth. I didn't know if I could do this. Even if I could find pleasure, make myself shine, make him shine, I didn't know if I could heal him.

Gryphon came up silently behind me. "What's wrong, Mona Lisa?"

"I don't know if I can do this," I said softly.

His arms came around me and I leaned back into the comfort of his embrace, gazing blindly out the window into the blackness of night.

"You sound fearful," he said with surprise. "You have never been afraid before."

I laughed, but it was not a happy sound. "I have always been afraid, Gryphon. Always."