Mona Lisa Craving

by Sunny

  PRAISE FOR

  MONA LISA AWAKENING

  “Darkly erotic, wickedly clever, and very original!”

  —Bertrice Small, author of Sudden Pleasures

  “A terrific debut sure to appeal to fans of Anne Bishop or Laurell K. Hamilton…Sunny’s characters stayed with me long after I finished the book.”

  —USA Today bestselling author Patricia Briggs

  “A spellbinding tale full of erotic sensuality and deliciously fascinating characters.”

  —Lori Foster

  “A refreshing, contemporary urban erotic horror thriller that grips the audience.”

  —TheBestReviews.com

  “Oh my! What a fabulous story! I absolutely adore this awesome book…I could not put [it] down. Sunny has created a new and unique race of people that is sure to fascinate readers. I highly recommend this unusual and exhilarating story to anyone who enjoys tales of fantasy and the paranormal. I love this book so much that I am not above begging for more children of the moon, please!”

  —CoffeeTimeRomance.com (5 cups—highest rating)

  Titles by Sunny

  The Monère Novels

  MONA LISA CRAVING

  MONA LISA BLOSSOMING

  MONA LISA AWAKENING

  Anthologies

  ON THE PROWL

  OVER THE MOON

  The Demon Princess Chronicles

  LUCINDA, DARKLY

  MONA LISA CRAVING

  A NOVEL OF THE MONÈRE

  SUNNY

  BERKLEY BOOKS,NEW YORK

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2008 by DS Studios Inc.

  Tree Silhouette by Jeremy Woodhouse/Getty Image.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic

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  violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “B” design is a trademark belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sunny, 1965–

  Mona Lisa craving: a novel of the Monère / Sunny.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-1012-0763-5

  I. Title

  PS3619.U564M68 2008

  813'.6—dc22

  2007036291

  To Cindy Hwang,

  who nurtures and grows her garden of authors well.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  MONA LISA CRAVING

  ONE

  THE CRESCENT MOON gleamed 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.

  I’d taken him not just into my body but into my heart. In the midst of sadness and loss, I’d found love again, unexpectedly. It was because I loved Dontaine that I needed to talk to him now. So that he did not continue to look at me that way—with love and happiness.

  It had only been one day since we’d returned from my testimony at High Queen’s Council. And we’d spent most of it reassuring my people here that I would not be blamed or punished for Mona Louisa’s death, that everything was okay. But that was a lie. While things may be okay Council-wise—or as much as it could be after a stir like that—I wasn’t okay. And only Dontaine knew the truth of this.

  I stepped back from my lover’s touch. Dropped my eyes from his compelling male beauty, from the tempting loveliness of his form, from the raw and tender heart he offered up to me with those expressive green eyes. I took a hard step back from it all and said, “We need to talk, Dontaine.”

  A beat of silence. When he spoke, it was with quiet tension thrumming in his voice. “That never bodes well.”

  I guess that was a rule that held true not only for humans but for the Monère also.

  “I will dress,” he said quietly, and I retreated to a corner chair as he opened the armoire and began to pull on clothes. I would have stared out the window had there been one, but there was none in this simple cabin. I passed the time instead with an intricate study of the wood-planked floor.

  I felt his presence as he neared and sat by my feet. There were no other chairs. I would have felt better had he stood instead of seating himself on the floor below me, a gesture that placed him lower than I, made him even more vulnerable to me.

  My eyes lifted from my perusal of the floor, met his, and flicked away. I couldn’t say what I had to say to him while looking into those unshielded eyes.

  “Dontaine.” Just his name for a moment, so lovely upon my lips. Then came the blow. “We cannot be lovers.”

  He didn’t say anything, so I rushed to fill in the pregnant silence. “I care for you. You know that.” It was a truth that he’d seen in my eyes. “But you also know that there is something very, very wrong with me. You’ve asked no questions.”

  “There has been no time. No opportunity.”

  “There is now. Do you have any questions for me?”

  A strained silence. Then he asked not what I would have asked after all that confused madness that had occurred two nights ago, but what was most important to him. “Why can we not be lovers?”

  His hands, long-fingered and elegant, an aristocrat’s hands, were folded neatly around his bended knees as he sat there on the wooden floor. I focused on those hands, remembered how they had felt on me, in me, caressing me, and looked blindly away.

  “You and I know that it was not my beast’s hunger that almost overwhelmed me at High Court.” Though that was what we’d told everyone else. Even Tomas, my other guard who’d been there that night, believed it to be true. “It was bloodlust, Dontaine. Demon bloodlust.”

  “It is because of Halcyon, the Demon Prince. When you accompanied him.” Dontaine’s words, more of a statement than a real question, referred to the time when I had returned with Halcyon to Hell. When my Demon Prince had been so severely injured because of me…always because of me, it seemed…that he could not make the trip safely home by himself. Hell was a dangerous place, even for its ruler.

  I closed my eyes, picking my answer carefully, tiptoeing among all the lies to pick a truth that I could tell him. “Not in the way you think. I wasn’t infected then.
But you’re right, it does involve Halcyon.” It certainly involved his blood, which Mona Louisa had taken from him against his will, breaking one of their greatest taboos—drinking a demon’s blood. She’d blood-raped Halcyon. And I, in turn, had light-raped her. Now both of their essences dwelled within me. And all of this had to remain a secret. Unknown.

  Blaec, the High Lord of Hell, Halcyon’s father, had killed a score of Monère warriors and their Queen—Mona Louisa, the demon blood violator—to keep this secret: that drinking their blood can multiply a Monère’s power, endowing them with demon dead strength. I did not want the next blood bath to be that of my men.

  “It involves Mona Louisa, too,” I said, and told Dontaine nothing he did not already know. He’d seen my brown eyes turn blue, turn into Mona Louisa’s eyes. “How, I cannot say. Only that it was the reason why the High Lord of Hell killed her.”

  “But he spared you. Does he know that you have some of their essence in you?”

  A good question. The High Lord had seen me drain Mona Louisa of her light, her energy. He had spared me, believing that keeping my Monère secret—my extremely rare, extremely dangerous gift of Mortal Draining, that light-drinking thing I had done—would ensure the keeping of his demon secret. But the real reason he had spared me was because his son, Halcyon, had named me as his mate. Because after six hundred years alone, he had found love.

  Still…that was before Blaec knew that his demon secret dwelled as a living presence within me. That it had infected me. That it evidenced within me everything they tried to keep hidden from the Monères. Would he still have spared me had he known this? I would know soon enough. Lucinda, Halcyon’s sister, had been at High Court, and her presence there had brought out the demon taint in me. There’d been no hiding it from her. She knew what existed within me—what was changing me—and would have reported that to the High Lord and to Halcyon. Death resided within me, most likely lay before me.