Luisa could barely contain a gasp. In all her years she’d never seen anyone perform such magic, neither upyr nor human. This, it seemed, was the power of a terrible naljorpa. She should have been frightened but her skin was tingling strongly with excitement. She could learn from this man. She could finally achieve her goal.
Pinned to the wall by the lama’s mysterious force, she watched him help the other monk to his feet. Her victim left the hall with no more than a reluctant glance in her direction. Amazing, she thought. No one but she should have been able to direct him in any way.
The lama continued his approach. Her body tensed, half with wariness and half with anticipation. Oh, she could happily have tied this one to her bed. He was staring directly at her, into her. The effect was eerie but oddly sensual, as if his gaze were touching places she had not known she had. His eyes themselves were lovely, the fold beneath slightly broader than the delicate one above. They did not slant so much as narrow at the ends.
When he stopped a foot away from her, she received another shock. In the light from the butter lamps’ floating wicks she saw that his eyes were gentian blue. The back of her neck prickled. This man, this Tibetan sorcerer, had European blood.
His gaze dropped to the package she clutched before her breast.
“You should kneel when you offer that,” he said.
She blinked at him. “You speak English.”
His expression did not change. “As do you.”
He must have assumed from her appearance that she would, a natural assumption and one that should not have unnerved her after all she’d seen him do. Nonetheless, she was unnerved. Though she was more gifted at putting thoughts into people’s heads than taking them out, she was not accustomed to finding anyone such a blank.
If the lama was unnerved, he did not show it. He was close to her, the tiny spikes of his lashes shadowing his angled cheeks. Luisa was tall but he was taller, tall for any race, even hers. A warm soft scent rose from his robes, incense and yak butter and something sweeter: the scent that was his essence. She wanted to drag it into her lungs but knew she could not afford to, not now and maybe never. Already her attraction to him was stronger than she liked.
“You drank that man’s blood,” he said, “and you clouded his mind. If you are not a demon, what manner of creature are you?”
“I could ask you the same.”
His lips twitched with what might have been a smile. Then, as if this lapse were somehow shameful, he sobered and stepped back. Luisa sensed she was losing ground.
“Forgive me,” she said, doing her best to hide her consternation. “I did not mean to hurt that man. His attack surprised me. And I am not familiar with your customs.” Dropping to her knees, she bowed her head and held her guest gift up before her. “Please, holy lama, accept this humble token of my esteem.”
Someone giggled, a boy from the sound of it, quickly hushed.
“I am not Geshe Rinpoche,” said the man with an edge of stiffness, “nor a holy lama. I am, however, honored to be the precious one’s student. I will bring him to you when the service ends. If your request is sincere, I am sure he will honor it.”
She was not certain, but his final statement seemed to hold a hint of drollness. The possibility did not reassure her. Nor was she happy when he led her down a corridor to a little room. A set of iron chains hung from the raw stone wall. Luisa took one look and wanted to run away. Instead, she let her escort guide her to them. What sort of monastery kept such devices so close to hand? The room wasn’t even a dungeon! It had an ornate tea table and an extra cushion for a guest.
“You do not need to do this,” she said, fighting panic as he closed the manacles around her sleeves. “I am not a threat.”
The glance he shot her was sardonic. She had to admit he had cause to doubt her. But did he know iron was the only metal she could not break? Or had she simply imagined he had seen straight to her core? Either way, she could not fight. She needed these people’s help. She could not afford to hurt them.
But then he bent and chained her ankles like her wrists. His soft bristled hair brushed the front of her thigh, an inadvertent intimacy she was sure. Despite the sensual distraction, her panic rose.
“I do not like being restrained,” she said. She meant it to be a warning, but her voice shook, betraying her sincerity more clearly than she wished.
He seemed to hear it. He straightened and stared at her with his extraordinary eyes. His pupils gleamed like ink, large in the dimness, or perhaps he also was aroused. Her beauty was not, after all, of the common run. Given his show of control, she was surprised when he cupped her cheek. His palm was warm, his fingers calloused. The comfort they brought made her want to clench her jaw. Too easily she could imagine those careful fingers between her legs. She frowned to herself. His pull was as dangerous as her instinct to fight the chains.
As if he, too, mistrusted the contact, his touch fell away. A second later, so did his gaze.
“It is not a long service,” he said without his previous irony. “As soon as it is over, I will bring my teacher here.”
His teacher, she thought, rolling the back of her head against the stone. If a mere student could do what he did, what did she need to fear from the man who’d taught him?
2
“So,” said the abbot, his Mandarin even more elegant than hers, “Martin says you are interested in our ways.”
Geshe Rinpoche was older than his pupil and, at first glance, less imposing. He was shorter, for one thing, with a peasant’s solidity and bright black eyes that seemed an inch away from a smile. His robe was humble and the only badge of office he wore was the yellow stole around his neck. Martin stood guard at his side, stern and protective. His teacher, by contrast, did not behave as if she posed a threat.
And perhaps she didn’t. Perhaps the magic Geshe Rinpoche commanded turned her own into the useless huffing of the wind. It was a strange possibility, one she had not faced since her first encounters with her kind. True, the smattering of upyr at Queen Elizabeth’s court were more experienced than Luisa, but none of those backstabbers could take her without a fight—and certainly not by force of mind!
Knowing she must tread carefully, she bowed her head before she spoke. “I have heard much of Shisharovar, your holiness, and of your awe-inspiring power.”
“Indeed,” said the abbot. “How flattering.”
“Perhaps you would allow me to introduce myself?” When she ventured to look up, a grin had creased the old lama’s face, the lines fanning merrily outward from his eyes. He spread his hands in permission. Luisa composed herself. “Thank you, your holiness. My name is Luisa del Fiore and I am a prosperous Florentine merchant. My business takes me all over the world and also brings the world to me.”
“You travel all over the world? A woman alone?”
“Usually I have companions but sometimes I go alone, sometimes in disguise as a man. It depends on the prejudices of those with whom I deal, and on which appearance will tend to my best advantage.”
“Your skill at subterfuge must be great,” said the abbot with a wry enjoyment that warned her not to underestimate his wit. “But surely you are not here to trade.”
“No, your holiness. I am here because of a trader I met, one who traveled these regions long ago. His name was John Moore and he was rescued by your lamas when a snowstorm caught him in the pass. He remained some months and witnessed many wonders, one of which was a monk who had himself walled in a cave where he survived for three whole weeks on water and meditation. When he emerged, he was as strong as the day he’d left. That monk was, I believe, yourself.”
For some reason, the abbot glanced at his student, then at her. “You come here to learn to fast? All this way, to learn a trick any hermit can perform?”
“Self-denial is one of the paths to enlightenment, is it not? I believe in learning from the best.”
He furrowed his brow at her. The intensity of his concentration caught her unprepared.
His gaze was even keener than his student’s. It lapped at her skin like water, crawling over and under until the hairs on her arms stood up in waves. She gasped, abruptly unable to catch her breath. Then, with no more warning than he’d given when he began, the abbot released her.
“You have a strange energy,” he said in a musing tone. “I see from the disposition of your subtle bodies that your thoughts and desires are very much concerned with your physical being. Our medical lamas claim such attachment leads to illness and yet your material self is very strong. I have never met a demon of your description, much less one who would enter a holy place. I confess, though, I cannot imagine what you are.”
He waited then, a picture of Oriental patience. More than anything he seemed curious. No one who suspected she was not human had ever reacted in this way. Then again, in this country, demons and ghosts were treated as little more than inconvenient neighbors. Tibetans bought an amulet or a spell and continued on their way. Luisa sensed that even if she admitted to being a monster, this holy man would not condemn her.
Of course, a failure to condemn was not the same as giving aid.
At a loss, she looked to Martin. He was watching her just as calmly. She wondered if his composure were a pretense or if, like his teacher, he was prepared to accept her as she was.
“We can see this request is important to you,” Martin said. “We would be interested to know why.”
Luisa hesitated. Could she tell them? Should she? Would they help her if she did not? She fisted her hands within the iron shackles. The slow, draining chill pulled at her through her clothes. The metal would not kill her unless someone thrust it through her heart. Eventually, though, it would weaken her enough to be killed. By sunlight. Or fire. Or the severing of her spine. She supposed she could take her choice.
As if sensing her fears, the abbot lifted a key from a ring on the belt that tied his robe.
“No,” she said before he could use it. “Let me answer before you decide to free me.” Uncurling her fingers, she forced herself to relax. “I was born as human as you. One hundred twenty years ago, on the fortieth anniversary of my birth, my master changed me to the creature I am today. He was the descendant of an ancient race who came from a distant star. They lived in peace here once, until a few took to killing humans. We…feed off them, you see. It is the only sustenance we can take.” She straightened her shoulders. “I am what the people of Russia call upyr, a blood-drinker, an immortal.”
“An immortal.” The abbot’s head was cocked birdlike to the side. He seemed not so much shocked as fascinated. “An immortal who is neither ghost nor god. An immortal in human form.” Suddenly he laughed. “You know, we of Tibet aspire to leave the world of illusion behind. To us, this earth is a kind of hell—a schoolroom, if you will—where we are repeatedly reborn in order to perfect our true, nonmaterial being. You, Luisa del Fiore, seem to have enrolled for a very long term!”
His humor discomposed her. “I do not wish to give up my life,” she said, wanting to be clear. “I simply wish to live more ethically. I wish to live without drinking blood.”
“Ah,” said the abbot, “now I begin to see. You must realize that may not be possible.”
“Yes, your holiness, but surely if anyone can teach me it is you.”
“Perhaps.” His dark eyes narrowed in consideration. “I will have to meditate carefully before I act. It will not be easy to instruct you, who have not been raised in our system, and it may not be wise to try. We shall see.” He turned to Martin, his expression warming with a father’s fondness. “I leave it to you to make our visitor comfortable. Perhaps she would like a quiet room in the old east wing.”
Martin looked as if he longed to forgo this duty, but he bowed instead, his steepled hands moving smoothly from brow to throat to heart. “As you wish, rinpoche.”
From his tone, Luisa gathered “rinpoche” was as much a term of honor as a name.
To her relief, Martin unshackled her and led her in a new direction down the stony, torchlit hall. Apart from instructing her to follow and shooting her the occasional measuring glance, he did not speak. Luisa was no stranger to solitude, but for some reason his taciturnity frayed her nerves. They climbed a set of ancient stairs.
“Have you taken a vow of silence?” she asked.
“No,” was his short, basso response.
“Might I ask then why your abbot keeps a set of chains in his reception chamber?”
“They are for interrogating criminals. The neighboring villages sometimes bring their accused here. My teacher reads their auras to see if they speak true.”
“Their auras.”
“The aura is a second body. It is a match for the physical body, inhabiting the same space and extending slightly beyond it, but composed of life force instead of matter. The life force of the earth is what a hermit survives on while he fasts.”
Luisa considered this as they turned down another corridor, apparently uninhabited and lit by narrow windows. The slits were open to the 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 similar circles in Paris and Seville. At least one more upyr lived in Florence, but we rarely did more than nod in passing. He was different, that one, dangerous. I suspect he was an elder.”
“An elder?”
“One of the old ones who knows how to perform the change. My master claimed there were only two—himself and his student, Nim Wei—but I think he may have been wrong.”
His thumb smoothed the orbit around her eye. “And you do not age once you are made?”
She shook her head. “Not physically.”
He leaned so close she thought he meant to examine her cell by cell. Knowing her passivity would increase his trust, she allowed him the inquisition. Remaining still was not easy. His scent curled around her while his breath brushed her mouth like velvet. An inch would have brought them to a kiss.
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