Midnight 01 - Luisa's Desire

pounding, sun drunk still, but at least it did not ache. Giddy with relief, she threw back her veil and grinned.
     
    It was a mistake she would not have made had her mind been clear.
     
    Two of the monks cried out and the larger of them rushed her. She barely had time to brace before his weight crashed her over into the floor.
     
    "Towo!" he cried as she struggled to free herself. "Tsem shes tsem!"
     
    Luisa realized she must have bared her fangs. He had taken her for a demon.
     
    "I pilgrim," she protested in her limited Tibetan. "I come pray."
     
    Unimpressed, the monk took her head in both hands and smashed it against the floor. He must have been very strong. Like the crackle of early winter ice, she felt a tiny fracture in her skull.
     
    The break healed almost as soon as it formed but, however ineffective, the injury snapped her control. Instinct took over, the remorseless drive for survival that marked her kind.
     
    Taking his head in the same splay-fingered grip, she stunned the monk by coshing his brow against her own. Then, before he could recover, before she herself could think better of it, she rolled him beneath her and drove her teeth through the wind-roughened skin of his neck.
     
    His blood filled her mouth, hot, rich, a feast for her starving veins. Her head cleared at the first swallow. The second was just for greed. But she had to stop. She could not kill within arm's reach of her goal. When he moaned, she shoved off him and got up.
     
    She might not be sated but she was sane.
     
    "I am not a demon," she said, even as she drew her fine Spanish glove across her mouth. "Not towo."
     
    The monk who had attacked her was on his knees, too shaken to rise. "No," he agreed, his eyes wide and locked to hers. "You are not a demon."
     
    He sounded almost normal, almost, but she knew her bite had thralled him. He was hers to command, for an hour or a day, though she could not see what good that would do. The rest of the monks had closed around her, many of them as big as the one she'd bitten. She knew she could not overpower them all.
     
    "I have come to learn your ways," she said, switching to her more fluent Mandarin. Pray God, someone here would speak it. "I beg the favor of studying with your abbot." Silence met her plea as she turned from one implacable visage to the next. "Look." Careful to move slowly, she reached into the folds of her fur-lined cloak. "I bring a gift for him, for Geshe Rinpoche, the holy lama of Shisharovar."
     
    She held out her offering, wrapped as Dorje had advised in a white silk scarf. A rustle moved through the crowd, which suddenly parted to reveal another monk.
     
    Everything seemed to hush as he approached—breath, heart, thought—as if the world itself had stopped turning on its axis. Even the terrible emptiness inside her stilled. Sun-drunk nonsense, she scoffed, but the sensation did not fade.
     
    Here was a man to weaken knees.
     
    Though young, the monk carried himself like a leader: upright, assured, with the grace of a creature whose body is completely in his control. He must be the lama she had come to see. His head had been shaved but not recently and new growth bristled out in a glossy brush. He looked healthy, smelled healthy. Helpless to quell the reaction, her pulse beat faster in her throat.
     
    Swallowing, she tried not to stare at the way his stride moved the drapery of his deep red robe. Lifting her gaze did not help. The long, toga-like wrap bared one beautifully molded arm. As she watched, his hand settled on the shoulder of the kneeling monk. Without looking away from her, the lama gave the monk an order. Luisa could not suppress a shiver. His voice was as deep as the rumbling trumpets on the roof.
     
    Whatever the lama's authority, Luisa knew her victim could not obey until she released her mental hold. She stepped forward to do so. Unfortunately, watching a woman wipe blood from her mouth did not elicit trust. The lama barked a word and extended his second hand.
     
    As soon as he did, something pushed her belly, something she could not see. It felt like a wall not precisely of wind, but not unlike. Under its influence, she slid backward, slowly at first, then gathering speed, her heels dragging on the stone, her arms wheeling for balance until she hit the plastered wall. The force of the collision drove the air from her lungs. Beside her, on a lighted altar, a heap of barley spilled from an offering bowl.
     
    Luisa could barely