Midnight 01 - Luisa's Desire

dark avenging angel. One sweep of his arm tossed my husband against the wall. He plucked me up and away before I could think to resist. He said he wanted to fan the spark in my eyes to life. Said I deserved to be showered with jewels and draped in silk. I knew he must be a madman but I let him do as he wished because his words were food to me and because, by that point, I did not care what it might cost. My children were grown. I had nothing left to lose."
     
    "Your husband had beaten you before."
     
    "Yes," she said calmly. "To his mind, I was no different from a dog who had misbehaved."
     
    To her surprise, this—rather than her confession of adultery—roused Martin's ire. "He should not have done that. That is not the proper way between man and wife."
     
    Luisa spread her hands. "My husband suffered for his abuse, though he knew it not. I could have been more to him than I was. But that was long ago. Another life, as you would say." Her mouth curved in a grin. "Now I do not even wish him to roast in hell."

     
    "You are wise to let your resentment go," Martin said. "Strong emotion can bind people together for many incarnations. Perhaps you will not have to meet him on earth again."
     
    Luisa began to laugh, the idea striking her as funny. What would her husband say if he saw her now? Probably fall to his knees and pray. Get thee behind me, spawn of Satan… but please seduce me before you go!
     
    The room rocked sideways with her laughter. Her head was so light she thought it might float away.
     
    Martin smiled at her hilarity. "Yes," he said, "the herbs have begun their work. Just remember, you must focus your mind on what you fear."
     
    But her mind was beyond her control, cut loose from its moorings like an oarless boat swept down a river. A landscape of images rolled by on the bank. The day her father sold her to her husband to clear a debt. The dirty clay of the hovel floor. One of her sons a wriggling bundle at her breast. So sweet they'd been, a tiny ray of love in her loveless life… until they'd grown into smaller versions of their father.
     
    She'd tried to prevent it—how she'd tried!—but their world, or perhaps their natures, stopped their ears to the pleadings of a woman. Kindness was weakness to them; respect the reward for brutish force. She watched her youngest steal a toy from a neighbor's child. When she paddled his bottom, her husband beat her. Let him learn, he had roared, how to live in a heartless world. Her cheek stung from the blow, a tooth spit bloody into her hand. Suddenly, with the muddled logic of a dream, Auriclus held her close with his face in her golden hair, her only beauty that remained.
     
    Come to me, he'd crooned. Let me bring you to life again.
     
    His bite had all the tenderness of death, lancing the stored-up bitterness from her soul. She was nothing then, only pleasure, clinging to his shoulders until the rising, throbbing silence swept her under, into oblivion and forgetting. When she woke she was alive as she never had been before. Strong, healthy, beautiful. So beautiful. Without merit or justice, the power of attraction was simply hers.
     
    For that alone she would have adored him, but her master had not let her. Little Luisa, he'd teased, adore what you can be, not what you think I am. Sometimes she thought he was sorry he'd made her. He would watch her at her books or her correspondence as if he could not fathom who she was. Clever little monkey, he'd call her then, though he might as well have said clever monster.
     
    Fourteen years later he was gone, driven out of Florence—so he claimed—by the rise of one infamous book-burning monk. Savonarola had seduced the masses, taught them to hate their bodies and their minds. I will kill him, her sire explained. If I do not leave, I will spray his maddened blood across the square.
     
    Auriclus did not care that his abandonment broke her heart, that she had a growing business she could not leave. But at least he taught her not to kill. Charm the humans, he always said. Charm them and set them free.
     
    But it was not the humans who tested her adherence to his rule. That honor went to the upyr she met on a trip to London. Until she surprised them hunting for sailors by the docks, she had not known her kind were there. She guessed at once that Auriclus had not made them. They had a sleeker look than he, a darker, more urbane smell.
     
    Mindful of his warnings about Nim Wei's brood, she had approached