The Nightlife: Paris (The Nightlife Series) (13 page)

Chapter 18

It had been a long day for Michael Jamison, longer than some
of his days spent roasting under the hot sun in Iraq, looking for non-existent
weapons of mass destruction.  Although it had seemed too much to accomplish
before sunset, he had pulled it off with a couple hours to spare.

First, the property management company jacked him around for
several hours, before giving him the keys.  The a-holes charged him double the
usual rental rate, taking full advantage of his urgency.  He didn’t really give
a shit.  He got what he needed and headed straight back to the hotel.

He expected to use a card hacker device to get through the
electronic locks on her Michelle’s hotel door.  Then he noticed the door had a
regular key lock for use in the event of a power outage.  On a hunch, he slid
his key gun into the lock and jigged it for a few seconds.  Click, pop, it
opened right up.

“Hey, whaddya know.”

The door stopped moving two inches in.  She had used the
security hasp on the inside.  “Fucking paranoid vampires.”  He shook his head
snickering.  “Afraid somebody might do this?”

He shoved his cordless reciprocating saw into the gap and
cut through the cheap Chinese pot metal like an electric steak-knife carving
rump roast.

The hasp popped and he walked right into her room.  His
breath caught in his throat at the sight of her.  She lay in bed, the covers
partway off her magnificent, flawless, half-naked body.  The vampire reminded
him it had been two months since he’d last bedded an escort back in Vegas. 
Michelle gave him an instant hard-on, and she wasn’t even awake to focus those
damned freaky eyes on him.

He fought against the urge to feel her fabulous body while
he fit her into a six foot sea trunk.  She didn’t stir, didn’t even look like
she breathed.  He watched her for several minutes, putting his hand by her
mouth to detect the faint movement of air.  He checked her pulse.  Barely
there, ultra-light.  It seemed that vampires had suppressed biorhythms
throughout daylight.  Now he understood how easily they could be mistaken for
dead, or undead.  He focused on priorities, and snatched his hands away from
her – so vulnerable, so entrancing in her beauty, yet easily taken advantage of.

From there things moved along fairly quickly.  With a
luggage rack, he hauled the sea trunk down to his rented pickup truck in the
parking garage and sped off to the warehouse.  Inside the vacant building,
while chaining her to the sturdy oak table, he fought off that same urge to
touch Michelle, to fondle all her beautiful pale flesh.  The rape of a comatose
woman didn’t do it for him.  Though he planned to steal some of her blood,
anything else just seemed
wrong
.

With Michelle secured, he extracted an entire half-liter of
her blood using four different syringes.  His coffee mug filled with her wicked
elixir, he paused to make a toast.  “Here’s to new beginnings, and the end of a
lifetime of catering to bullshit and ignorance.”  He tossed back the whole mug. 
He almost gagged, but managed to keep it down.

“Oh that’s nasty.”  He shivered with revulsion at the flavor
and thick gooey texture coating his throat.  “I guess I better get used to it
now.”

In no time at all, he felt her blood working its
inexplicable magic, a tingling sensation all through his body.  What began as a
tingle became a tickle, an itch.  And then he started sweating.  Even though
the A/C was on, and the thermometer showed a cool seventy degrees in the
warehouse, he felt hotter by the minute.

He took off his button down shirt, wearing only the T-shirt
underneath.  “Damn it’s hot!”

In the warehouse bathroom, he splashed water on his head and
stared in the mirror.  A pale sweaty face and bloodshot eyes stared back at
him.  He looked like he’d been on a three day bender.

His fever gradually climbed till he thought for sure his
blood must be boiling.  He looked at the skin on his arm, expecting to see it
bubble up at any time. 
I’m frying from the inside out
.  He retained
enough clarity of thought to slap on a 50mg Fentanyl patch painkiller.  The gel
on the patch absorbed straight through the skin, a nice little punch.  The drug
helped some, but his burning fever continued cranking up the heat.

By sunset he was in so much pain he had put on a second
patch, sporting one on each shoulder.  The strong opiates made him rummy, sick
to his stomach, but they barely took the edge off his intense scorching fever.

“She never said it would be like this!  I’m burning up!”  He
cursed and flailed as he tried to relax on a foldout cot, a few feet away from
the comatose vampire.

* * * *

Michelle awoke to cold chains, shackles, and her arms
handcuffed above her head, the cuffs attached to the heavy wooden table underneath
her.  It felt eerily similar to the way Julian had tied her in his basement
just before he’d staked and whipped her to a bloody pulp.

She smelled a man in distress, acrid sweat, and heard his
thrashing and moaning.  She found him down on the concrete floor to her right. 
He looked half delirious, very sick.  She had seen this once before.  Aaron had
been plagued by the same symptoms after she fed him her blood.  Then she
noticed it in his scent, the change.  He didn’t smell precisely human anymore.

She reached out with her mind, sensing the tentative
beginnings of a psychic bond.  Michael Jamison was his name, and the idiot had
stolen her blood!

She sneered down at him.  She felt his fear, his
vulnerability, the moment he realized she awakened.

She ordered him, “Come to me and undo my chains.”  His eyes
popped in surprise as he understood the power he had given her over his body.

He jerked and whined as her authority yanked on his
pain-wracked body, forcing him to stand and walk to her table.  Every move elicited
a gasp from his lips.

He shook and begged as he unlocked her cuffs and shackles,
her will forcing his hands to work.  “Please help me.  I didn’t know it would
be this bad.  It burns, I’m on fire!”

She spit in his face.
 “Brule
en enfer!”
 
Burn in hell!

She sensed his dread as her hate-filled eyes stared him
down.  She growled in his face baring her teeth and he shuffled back in fear.  “You
thought to take my blood and kill me?  You thought to have my power without
consequence?  You are a fool.  And now you’re my fool.”

She smacked him hard, sending him flying back through the
air to thud onto his back on the concrete floor.

“What a nice gift, a new toy.  A slave.  You may have my
blood, but you have given me your life in exchange. 
Tu es complétement débile!
” 
You’re a
complete moron.

* * * *

Mike tried to blink away the haze of drug and pain.  He
hadn’t been hit that hard since he was in a bar fight in Hawaii and this big
nasty Samoan laid into him.  Michelle’s jarring, whip-like smack packed the
same wallop as a man three times her size.

He regained his senses enough to know she would never help
him.  The opiates had fuzzed his head up too much.  It had been pointless to
ask for help from a creature like her.

He was royally fucked.

His father, an ex-marine, had always told him, “Son, the
devil is in the details.  It’s the little things that count.  You get them
right and everything else falls into place.”

He thought he had planned for everything, made all the
preparations.  But this was way out of control.  This she-devil had overcome
every detail of his plans with her irresistible compulsion.  And she stood
there mugging him with a look of intense hatred.  Check-mated in one move, she
was now free and capable of ordering him around like a dog.

Time for plan B.

Mike could hardly stand, let alone walk.  But he could reach
into the waist of his pants to retrieve the black market Glock he bought the
day before, and he could still aim and shoot, mostly.

“You think you own me bitch?  Own this!” he screamed as he
fired at her four times.

Normally, Mike was a damn good shot, but he wasn’t exactly
in top shape, and she moved like a lightning bolt straight for him.  His first
shot missed.  Second one nailed her in the leg, flipping her over into a tumble
on the concrete.  The third shot missed, but as she regained her feet, his
fourth shot slammed her dead center in the chest, dropping her almost on top of
him.

He scrambled back away as fast as he could move in a
military ‘monkey crawl’ – all those boot camp drills finally proved useful.  He
made it several yards when she latched onto his left calf with her nasty
talons, digging in to the bone.

Screaming and flailing, he tried to dislodge her from his
body, but she had him in a wicked strong death grip and wouldn’t let go.  She
whipped out with another clawed hand and sank into his thigh, working her way
up onto him.

So much stronger than any woman her size should ever be, she
flipped him over onto his back as if he was a child.  And then she did what
she’d done to the Nazis all those years ago, digging her razor claws into his
soft belly to pull his guts out.  Screaming in agony and shock, knowing he
would soon die, he resolved to take this monster with him on a ride to hell.

He unloaded the remaining eleven shots of his fifteen shot
Glock into Michelle’s torso at point blank range.

* * * *

Aaron awoke disoriented.  He didn’t recognize his
surroundings.  Where the hell was Michelle?  It all came back in a crush of
remembrance, her tale, their argument, everything.  Some uneasiness lurked at
the edge of his awareness.  He had a sense of something seriously wrong.

He reached down his psychic connection to Michelle.  He
found her in some commercial building about twenty miles away in extreme agony,
a burning, searing pain.  He felt her agony as his own, his leg and chest torn apart.
 High screaming wails deafened his ears.  She needed him!

Screaming with her pain and rage, he threw open the internal
blocks barring the Predator’s access to his higher functions and released the
beast.  Extreme levels of adrenaline flooded his body, ratcheting up his
aggression.  He embraced the beast’s primal elements.  He rocketed out the
mansion, a growling blur of movement.

As he took to the rooftops gaining speed and momentum he
felt a series of punches to his chest and tumbled-scrabbled-scraped across the
roof trying to regain his footing.  Feeling his chest, he realized it wasn’t
him who’d been shot all those times, but Michelle.  She was hurt bad, dying.

Reaching down through his bond to her, he filled her mind
with the assurance that he would be there momentarily, longer.>

She responded with a soul-shaking scream of compulsion born
of desperation and suffering. 

And he did.

He streaked across the rooftops, no longer visible to the
human eye.  Accelerating with every ounce of strength and power, Aaron Pilan
broke the world’s record for the fastest animal on land.

He burst the warehouse door off its hinges with his entry. 
Skidding to a halt, he absorbed a nauseating scene of carnage.  The images hit
him in flashes, like crime scene snapshots from a gruesome horror film.  A
heavy dark-wood table complete with handcuffs, chains and shackles stood to one
side, something used for torture.  Michelle lie on the floor, her upper body
shredded, bloody raw meat.  She floated in a sea of her own blood.

Nearby was a man Aaron had never seen before, his condition
seemingly worse than Michelle’s.  His intestines and internal organs trailed
out onto the concrete.  Shiny tendon held shredded muscle to bone on his
forearms and legs.  He was dead meat.

Convinced the man presented no threat, Aaron dipped into the
pool of blood to scoop his master into his arms, cradling her close.

“Oh my god, Michelle, I’m so sorry.  I should have been with
you.  I should have been there.”  He babbled, crying, panicked.

She needed a doctor, a hospital, a blood transfusion.  Driven
by the need to do something, anything, he raced out into the street with her in
his arms.  He didn’t know where to find the nearest hospital or even what
emergency number to call.

And he had no cell phone.

Standing in the street helpless, he felt a tug on his mind.  Michelle’s
devastated heart faltered and skipped.  She was dying in his arms, and nothing
he could do would stop it from happening.

Blood, she needed blood.  He kneeled down to rest her on his
knee with one arm, and tore open his wrist with his teeth.

He held his wrist to her mouth begging her.  “Come on,
Michelle, bite down.  You need this, take it!  Come on!  Take it!”

For the first time since he was sixteen years old sitting at
his father’s death bed, Aaron prayed to God.  He wasn’t sure if God existed,
but he prayed.  “Please God, help her, she needs you.  I can’t lose her like this,
God, please!  I don’t know what to do!”

His prayers were answered.  She bit down on his wrist,
sucking down his blood with a weak slurp.  He heard sirens in the distance,
coming nearer, they would arrive soon.  Someone must have heard the shots and
called the police.

“Help is on the way, Michelle, just hang on.”

Miraculously, she opened her eyes.  Her beautiful emerald-green
eyes looked directly at him, and held his gaze intensely.  He felt her single
overpowering emotion washing over him.

Love.  Unconditional love.

All was forgiven. She loved him with all her heart and soul.

Aaron couldn’t even recall why they argued.  It didn’t
matter.  Facing the loss of his lover and companion, all priorities had been
suddenly rearranged.  Hope flared.  She loved him.  She fed from his wrist.