Midnight 01 - Luisa's Desire

icy air. A dusting of snow swirled in eddies along the floor. She pulled her cloak closer but Martin, like Dorje, did not seem to mind the cold.
     
    She thought longingly of her palazzo, so marvelously snug after living out her mortal life with wind whistling through unglazed windows, a wind that had too often blown her nothing better than the stink of her husband's fish. Resistance to the cold, she sometimes thought, was worth the price of turning upyr by itself.
     
    Not that her homeland had ever seen cold like this. This was beyond even the winter she'd spent at sea with Sir Francis Drake.
     
    Ahead of her, Martin pushed open a heavy door and held it for her to enter. Irked by his seeming indifference, she paused on the threshold, not touching him but close enough to mark the subtle pulsing of his heat. To her gratification, a trace of color crept up his neck. So. Monk or not, he was not immune to her appeal. The discovery restored a portion of her confidence.
     
    "I felt you touch my aura before," she said. "You were trying to look inside me like your teacher."
     
    "Yes," he admitted. She thought he would say no more, but then his mouth quirked slightly to the left. "Studying someone's aura is not like a boy peeking under a woman's skirts, if that is what you were thinking."
     
    Whatever riposte she might have made was lost when his gaze settled onto hers. Her spine tingled strongly. Again she had that sense of time held in suspension. She must have imagined the hint of teasing. He seemed the most serious man in the world.
     
    How beautiful he is, she thought. How utterly male and comely. The admiration itself was pleasurable, though she knew it would not satisfy her long. Luisa was a creature who reveled in possession: a painting, a book, a perfect length of brocaded silk. Like her countrymen, she knew an object gained value by being owned: real value. In Italy, as in the rest of Renaissance Europe, a man was judged by what he had. Appearance was power. Illusion became reality. Luisa had survived and thrived by knowing that.
     
    "You are big for a woman," commented the object of her lust.
     
    She choked on a startled laugh. "Not much for flattery, are you?"
     
    He did her the grace of flushing. "I meant you are tall. And you are stronger than our females. You fought that monk as if you were a man."
     
    She was not sure how to respond. It didn't seem wise to confess her strength had been at its lowest ebb. But Martin did not expect an answer. Without asking permission, he pushed her hood back to her shoulders. As if pulled by an unknown force, his hand slid into her golden waves. He seemed as bewitched as she.
     
    "I have never seen a woman with hair like yours. It does not even tangle." His fingers spread gently behind her ear, his thumb stroking the shadowed contours of her cheek. "Your skin is as smooth as satin. Are all upyr like you?"
     
    His touch sent a heated shiver to her sex. She had to clear her throat before she could speak. "In some ways. When we are changed, we become what we would have been had we achieved our full potential. Our perfect age. Our perfect height and weight. As a mortal, I was plain and dull."
     
    And bruised, often as not—first by her husband and then, more sadly, by her sons. She shook off the memory with a frown. That life was over. In any case, she had darker sins on her conscience than any that stained those of the foolish brutes who, for better or worse, had been her mortal family.
     
    They were dead now, those strapping boys. Sometimes she regretted her failure to save them from their father's sway. Sometimes she was grateful they were gone. She could pray for them if she wished, and forgive the blows they had no more power to strike.
     
    Martin was watching her face as if he could follow the passage of her thoughts. When he spoke, though, he did not ask about her former life. "Why do your kind 'change' humans? Can they not have children of their own?"
     
    She shook her head. "My master believed the sun kills upyr seed. But we have compensations. We are strong, as you said, and can influence human thought. I have heard some upyr are able to take the form of beasts, though I have not seen it done."
     
    "How many of you are there?"
     
    "That is difficult to say. Many of the old ones died by human vengeance. Some simply grew tired. It is not easy to make new upyr. And we are wary of one another. Territorial. I knew of a dozen in London and heard there were