The Nightlife: Paris (The Nightlife Series) (10 page)

Chapter 15

I awoke to a dull throb in my head, and sickness in my soul. 
Loss, pain, loneliness.  I had nothing, no one, and no direction.  If not for
the need to feed, I would stay there in the darkness, wrapped in a ball,
shivering, alone.  My hunger drove me out into a world in which I had no place.

I roamed the streets, slinking through shadows, a wraith on
the rooftops.  And then I smelled them: sauerkraut, sausages, cigarettes, the
acrid scents of their sweaty bodies.  I heard the strange barking and yapping,
loud outbursts of foreign language.  Germans speaking German.

The enemy.

Hated, despised, they had no right to be here.  They do not
belong.  Usurpers.  Thieves.  They must all die.  Kill them all, every last one
of them, and bathe in their blood.

I stalked a group of soldiers loading into troop transport
trucks.  Two of them walked away from the group.  I snatched out their throats,
and dragged their twitching bodies into the alley to drain them both.

Scaling the wall to the rooftop, I moved in on the men, a
group of twenty or more.  Seated in the back of the truck, they drove away. 
They could not escape me.  I was too strong, too fast, too hungry, and very
angry.  They didn’t deserve to live.  They didn’t deserve to breed and make
more of their hated scents.  I followed them.

My hate gave me purpose, direction, motivation.  I existed
to hunt them down.  They drove on and on.  I followed from the rooftops, from
the streets nearby and later from the rolling hills of the countryside.  I
maintained pace with them.  Their machine was not fast enough to escape my
wrath.

I pursued them over hills and through the small towns of the
coastline, almost to the point of sunrise.  The sun interrupted my hunt, and
the countryside offered nowhere to hide and sleep.  I did the only thing I
could.  I frantically dug a hole in the ground and buried myself.  I hoped the
shade of the forest would offer some additional protection.  I fell asleep, seething
with hate.  The damned sun had let them escape.  But I vowed I would find them
again in the night.

Crawling from my hole at sunset, I set off in the direction
of the long-gone troop transport.  I followed the road they traveled.  I soon
reached a small village where a group of five German soldiers camped at an old stone
and timber bridge, barely wide enough for a single car to pass.  I slipped in
without a sound and slaughtered three of them before the other two knew I was
there.  One rattled off a burst of shots from his rifle before I sliced his
neck open.  I moved so fast, the bullets whizzed past through the air, missing
me by a hair’s width.  The last of them screamed as I disemboweled him.  I
stood and watched with a grin as he died slowly, crying and barking in his
foreign language.

And then I feasted.

I moved on, following the same road in the same direction. 
Somewhere down the road a whole truck full of Germans awaited me.  I traveled again
until just before sunrise.  This time I hid in a wine cellar below an abandoned
country home on the outskirts of another village.

I woke the next night to gunfire and explosions.  A battle
raged in the village.  I smelled it on the wind as I scrambled to the rooftops,
adrenaline, fear, blood, death, sulfur and acrid gun smoke.  Germans.  And Others. 
Other men who smelled different, but bled the same.

I slinked across the rooftops building to building, working
my way to the battlefront.  I found a dozen Germans fighting a smaller group of
Others.  Four German soldiers circled around the building to strike from behind. 
The battle would soon be decided.  I patiently waited my turn.

I watched an olive-skinned, dark-haired man in green clothing
and helmet.  He fired his weapon and ran back behind the corner.  He tossed a
few grenades and backed up some more, repeatedly called out to his troop, “Retreat!”

It was too late.

The Others were caught in the pincer of the two attacking German
forces.  The man evaded the battle, but his entire troop died in the crossfire. 
The man escaped, alone.

I watched and waited.  Four German soldiers entered the
building under my feet, looking for more to kill.  Always killing, taking what
is not theirs, they do not belong here.  I went down to meet them.

After killing this small group, I walked out into the night
to find more.  They milled together, smoking cigarettes stolen from the dead,
barking and yapping at each other.  I walked right up to them.  They gestured,
inviting me over.  One man took off his jacket and snickered to his comrades as
he approached me.

He died first.

In a blur of furious claws and teeth I slaughtered the rest
of them.  Eight soldiers lay screaming, twitching and dying.

I feasted.

It began to rain, washing away the filth and blood from my
face and hands.  In the summer heat the rain brought a cool, cleansing feeling,
a lifting of my spirits.  I thought to find the olive-skinned man.  He was not from
this place, but he fought the Germans I hated so much.  Very interesting.

I found him an hour later, hiding behind a three foot wall
of brick and mortar.  I watched him from the rooftop as he lay there, unaware
he’d been found.  There were no other scents on the wind, no guns, no troops,
just this one hiding.  I slipped off the side of the building and landed ten
feet from him.

“Holy shit!  Get down!  What are you doing?”  He shuffled
back, startled, dragging his rifle with him.

I advanced, his fear held a powerful attraction.  They
always tasted sweeter with fear.  Then I heard the sound of a rifle shot behind
me, and tried to dodge.  Something slammed into the side of my head and all
faded to black.

* * * *

I smelled the musty scents of concrete walls and packed
earth, a basement.  He sat next to me in the dark, wiping the blood from my
head.  I watched him and knew he couldn’t see my eyes had opened.

He wiped my head and neck with a wet washcloth.  “Fuckin’
snipers.  You gotta watch for ‘em.  They hide out up in the buildings and
wait.  You just never know.  Couldn’t you see I was keepin’ down?  They’re
nasty buggers.” 

Jabbering on in his foreign language, he seemed to be
talking more to himself than me.  I didn’t understand a word of it.

“What the hell are you doing, Aldocino?  Whole damn troop’s
dead, what are you doing?  Should be out there.”

He rinsed out the cloth in a basin of water and continued
gently washing my face and neck.  My head pounded, but the pain was receding,
the wound sealing, healing.  It must have been a close shave.

This man fascinated me.  His strong, warm hands washed me
with such care as he talked to himself.  He smelled different, he sounded
different, and like me, he was alone in this world.

“Damn Krauts.  What the hell do they want with France
anyway?  What the hell am I doing here?  If Pops could see me now, Corporal
Joseph Aldocino, hiding in a basement with a sweet little Frenchy who’s
probably gonna die on me.”

His fingers brushed across the wound on the side of my head. 
“You are one lucky girl.”  He shook his head.  “This place ain’t nothin’ but
death.”

His warm hands moved lower to clean the blood from my chest
and breasts, lingering there with a soft touch.  He made me hungry, yearning
for more.

“Holy shit!”  He started as I grabbed his hand.  “Damn!  I
thought you was dying for sure.”

He peered through the darkness, trying to see me better.  I
wrapped around him, pulling him tight into an embrace as I bit down and tasted
his warm blood.  He didn’t fight.

He held on, whispering assurances, as if I was the one who
should be afraid.  “It’s gonna be alright, honey.  Don’t you worry none.”

He soothed me with his hands on my back and shoulders, and
his smooth voice.  I liked this man, he was nice.  I had not known many nice men. 
I decided to keep him.

He quickly succumbed to my bite, and I fed deeply, but not
enough to hurt him.  I remembered my nights with the bloodslaves, the control I
had acquired.

“Damn girl!  Darlin’, I don’t know what you done, but it
sure felt good.”

He had a lazy, drugged smile, his hand rubbed his crotch.  I
recognized the smile of a bloodslave.  I had claimed him for my own,
permanently.

“Don’t suppose you speak any English?  Eeenglish?”

I smiled and licked his blood off my lips.

“I ain’t lucky ‘nough to find me a Frenchy I can talk to.” 
He shook his head.

I shook my head.

“Get all that blood off your face and you sure are a pretty
little thing.”  He wiped the tip of my nose with his washcloth.  I wanted his
hands on me again, to touch me softly, with kindness.

“Here.  Let’s get some rest.  Them Krauts ain’t gonna find
us down here.”

He pulled me close and wrapped his arms tightly around me. 
It was a loving, protective embrace.  I loved my new pet, so warm, so kind.  I
loved his smile, his scent, and his aura.  I knew he was a good man, and I
would never let him go.

I watched him sleep, and stroked his olive-skinned face, his
dark eyebrows.  I loved the strange scent of his skin, and the taste of his
blood, a slightly foreign flavor.  I stayed in his arms, watching him sleep,
until I slept with the rising sun.

* * * *

I awoke alone.  His scent lingered on my arms, and I
followed it up the stairs and into the house.  The grinding clank of a tank
drifted through the broken window.  More Germans.  My pet had gone out to meet
them.

I tracked him.

Through the streets and alleys, through broken buildings
half-standing, and into the scene of the battle, I tracked him.  I scaled to
the roof of a three-story building to survey the battle.

The Germans had arrayed themselves on both sides of the
street.  Their tank rolled down the center, blasting away at the Others farther
down the street.  They fell in behind the tank, using its advance to cover
their own.  And then a small grenade flew out the window of a nearby building
and landed in the center of the men.  The explosion blasted them all away from
the tank.  Several Germans went down, but more survived and fired on the window
with their rifles.

I felt him then, his anxiety.  He ran away.  My crafty pet. 
Across the rooftops, I tracked him out the other side of the building, and down
the street.

I heard the explosions and yells of battle.  And then I
smelled them on the wind.  The Others had swarmed over the Germans who ran in
retreat.

I continued stalking my pet, but then the Germans fled in
the same direction on foot.  Leaping and bounding, I raced across the roof as
fast as possible to overtake him, my Joseph.  He could not see me, or the trap
that lay in wait.

From on high I saw the filthy Boche scattered across both sides
of the road, a classic ambush.  My pet would be cut down in moments.  I tensed,
ready to pounce, but he sensed something wrong and ducked down low next to a
pile of broken rubble.  He didn’t move, didn’t make a sound.  My clever pet.  I
heard his racing heart beat as he realized his predicament.

I paced across the rooftops, watching as the retreating
Germans unwittingly advanced on my pet.  He would be discovered at any moment. 
I watched as they moved in, and those farther down the street crept forward,
both groups positioned to converge on my pet.  My olive-skinned man checked his
rifle cartridge and his pistol, and then checked his bayonet.

He was preparing to fight.

I leapt up high into the air, spinning and twisting for
proper alignment.  Like an angel of death fallen from the heavens, I descended
upon them, slicing through all that juicy flesh and organs.  Deadly silent, I
cut through two of them as I touched down.  Across, back and forth, up-down and
at all angles, I slashed, cut, rent, and tore their feeble flesh to shreds. 
Sprays of blood and viscera flew in my wake while their screams echoed off the
barren streets as I danced my pirouette of death.

The Germans farther down stood up in plain view, no longer
hidden behind their barricades.  They stared in horror and fascination, barking
exclamations and curses, fingers pointing at me.

“Valkyrie!  Valkyrie!”  Some of them called to one another
in fear.  Some were brave enough to shoot.

They raised their guns to fire, and I knew I would have to
run, there were too many.  A bellow of rage cut through the night and my pet
flew from his hiding spot and charged into the center of ten men.  His rifle
never stopped firing, and he never stopped moving until he ran straight through
a German officer’s chest with his bayonet.

My courageous pet.

In a flash I fought beside him, slicing through all within
reach to keep my pet safe.  Spinning, slashing, I tried to carve a path to
safety through German flesh.  Bullets whizzed past my head, firing from all
sides.  One burned across my shoulder, just a slight tear.  Screaming in rage,
I cut through more of them.

My pet fought with one of them, wrestling to take the rifle
from his hands.  I snatched the man’s throat out in my razor grip, only to be
shot in the back by another filthy Boche while distracted.  Staggering in
agony, I turned to attack, but my pet had already shot him in the head.

My wonderful pet.

I set aside the pain and focused all four years of my hatred
on the enemy.  We killed them all, together, side by side.  The last one tried
to run, screaming “Valkyrie” at the top of his lungs.  I caught up to him
quickly and put an end to his screams.

My pet walked up to stand at my side.  His aura swirled with
apprehension, awe, fear, and respect.  He nodded his head in acknowledgement
for saving his life.

“Woman … you’re some kinda wicked.”  Breathing heavily, he
rubbed a shaking hand over his stubbly jaw.  “But I’ll take the devil I know
over them damn Krauts any day of the week.”