“Roberto will want to get that silver bullet out of his shoulder before coming after us again. He’ll go to a hospital,” I said, setting Dante on his feet, dropping down to the ground to rest for a few moments. “Several hours at least.”
He eased down to sit beside me. “You’re amazing, you know.”
“No, you are. You must be hurting terribly—you were shot twice, stabbed once by me, a second time by yourself!—and yet you can still smile.” More softly, “You should do that more, you know. Smile.”
“As you wish, milady.” He took my hand, kissed it unexpectedly. “One more thing I must ask of you.”
“Your back,” I groaned. “God, you have a one-track mind.”
“Hard not to. The silver burns my flesh unpleasantly.”
I sighed. “Do you have the knife?”
“Sorry, left it on the floor. I was fortunate to hang on to the gun, not that it will do us much good,” he said as he popped the magazine out and counted. “Only three bullets left. One of them was aimed quite nicely at Roberto’s heart before you jerked me out of the car.”
“Would it have killed him?”
“Maybe. He’s a three-quarters Mixed Blood like you.”
“You’re too bloodthirsty, Dante.”
“And, surprisingly . . . you are not.”
“Why is that surprising? Was I different before?”
He gave me another one of those small, fleeting smiles and turned, presenting his bloody back to me.
“All right, all right! You want the damn bullet out, I’ll get it out.” I pushed and squeezed my fingers down to the end of the cut he had made. “You were off by an inch,” I muttered, feeling viciously angry, at him, at myself.
“Hard to aim when you can’t see a bloody thing,” he returned through a tightly clenched jaw.
“Goddammit, I hate this. I really, really hate this.” No help for it. As he said, I was strong enough to tear through his flesh with my fingers, and almost puked as I did so.
I finally came to the bullet, curved my fingers around it, and pushed the troublesome thing back out the hole. Then I proceeded to throw up.
ELEVEN
I SHOULDN’T BE So happy, Dante thought with remorse. Not when the lady I love is heaving up her stomach contents. But the truth of the matter was, it was more than he had expected, to be with her again like this—the ease and trust between them.
“Gee, that was fun,” Mona Lisa muttered when her stomach finished its violent heaving. “You really know how to show a girl a good time.”
His lips quirked. “My pleasure, to be alive and here with you.”
“Even with me torturing you and getting you caught and injured? Why the hell are you smiling?”
He smoothed her hair back in a gentle gesture. “You.”
“But I’m not the you that you knew. I’m different, aren’t I? Because I can’t remember.”
“You’re still the same person at your core. And I like seeing the core you—someone who’s upset enough after inflicting deliberate, unwanted pain on someone she cares about to become physically ill.”
“Cares about?” She aimed a mean, narrow-eyed glance at him. “Honey, I don’t even know you.”
His small smile grew broader. “You will.”
Funny, she thought. He doesn’t look so fierce or frightening when he smiles.
The smile evaporated as resonant energy swept across them. Monère—more than a half dozen.
“Your friends?” she asked.
“No.” One word, icily sure.
“Roberto’s men?”
“They’re coming from the opposite direction.” Grabbing her hand, Dante sprung them forward in large, bounding leaps that took them sailing over the eight-foot-tall brush in graceful arcs, the fastest way of traveling through the jungle-like forest, heading back where they’d come from.
He jerked to a halt that had Mona Lisa stumbling into him as they both felt another wave of men closing in on them from that direction. Not Roberto and his thugs, unfortunately. These were all entirely Monère.
“Organized group,” Mona Lisa noted in a soft whisper.
“This way,” Dante said, heading north.
“What if they’re deliberately herding us this way?” Mona Lisa asked as they went sailing over the thick brush again like human kangaroos.
“No choice.”
Behind them they felt the hot energy signatures of their Monère pursuers and heard the sound of swift movement, many of them. They weren’t even trying to muffle the sounds of pursuit. Indeed, a primitive, undulating hunting cry sliced the air like a sharp blade, quickly taken up by others. The excitement in the raised cries raised the hair on the back of Mona Lisa’s neck. “What the hell is that?” she asked.
“The sounding of the hunt.”
Something whizzed by them during one of their leaps.
Dante cursed. “Stay on the ground.” Holding her hand in a tight grip, he began bulling his way through the dense foliage.
“Was that bullets?” she asked. “I didn’t hear any gunshots.”
“Silver darts.”
No one was trying to be quiet, at this point. The loud, undulating cries reminded her of baying dogs. Whatever was hunting them seemed more animal than human.
“Let go of my hand,” Mona Lisa said. “I’ll keep up.”
He released his grip. “Stay with me.”
“No problem.”
Each time Dante tried to veer east or west, they were herded back, more of those silver darts flying their way. Then suddenly the end of their path loomed up: a cliff. A sheer drop-off that was so steep and high that looking down into the deep gorge below made her feel sick and dizzy.
Their pursuers emerged from the thick brush and they saw their hunters clearly for the first time: savage, half-naked men whose faces, arms, and bare chests had been painted in primitive patterns of black and brown swirls. They were barefoot, their long, dark hair braided down their backs.
They were the darkest-skinned Monères Mona Lisa had seen, all lean and hungry looking, like starved wild beasts, every ounce of their flesh strappy muscle.
An image shimmered and condensed in her mind.
A young boy with the same starved musculature, tangled hair matted into an Afro, his chest and feet bare and the only thing he wore, pants, torn and ragged. A boy snarling like a wild animal as he strained against his chains, the heavy smell of urine mixing with the scent of dirty, unwashed skin.
The image broke and dissolved back into current reality, and faced against that sudden, sharp memory, the men closing in on them didn’t look so bad anymore; at least they were clean. But they still looked pretty darn scary.
Their leader had the figure of a red eye painted on his forehead, the only one among them with a splash of color. He looked at Dante and bared his teeth, not in a smile but in a look of menace. “Smãileden,” he said with fierce satisfaction. The look in his eyes when he turned them to Mona Lisa wasn’t any kinder.
“What do we do now?” Mona Lisa asked in a small voice.
Dante gave her no warning. Grabbing her, he turned and leaped off the cliff, and then they were hurtling through the air. For a moment, she thought he would transform into a bird, like the eagle-man she had seen, but they began to fall rapidly.
“You can fly,” Dante shouted. “Transform now!”
“Into what?” she yelped.
“A vulture!”
As soon as Dante said the word, a picture formed in her mind and she felt energy start to surge and prickle along her skin.
“Good girl,” Dante whispered, releasing her. Just letting her go.
In a slow and painful outburst of power, she transformed in a puff of feathers, clothes tearing, shredding. A human scream turned into a vulture’s snarling shriek. And still she continued to plummet.
“Open your wings,” Dante cried below her, in freefall. “Dammit, open your wings!”
Her wings snapped open, and Mona Lisa’s hurtling descent slowed into a veering, teetering spiral. You’d think she’d know how to fly, being a bird and all, but nope, wasn’t something that came naturally to her. If she’d ever flown before, she couldn’t remember it. After a few awkward, experimental shifts of her wings, she got herself angled down after Dante, but the gap between them had grown substantial. Why wasn’t he shifting?