The Nightlife: Paris (The Nightlife Series) (14 page)

“Thank you, God, she’s gonna make it.  Thank you.”  He poured
out his gratitude.

And then God betrayed him.  Michelle sagged in his arms, her
ravaged heart faltered and quit.  As the life evaporated from her body, she
released his wrist and exhaled a last sigh.  Crying tears of blood, in shock,
he could scarce believe what his senses told him.

He followed her mind as she drifted off into the peace of
oblivion.  As she winked out, head-splitting pain slammed through his skull.  The
psionic ties binding him to Michelle tore from the roots of his psyche.  His
mind unraveled.  Like an intricately supported suspension bridge, his mind
twisted, shattered, and collapsed violently from the backlash of the severed
connections.

Aaron Pilan’s world ended, not with a bang, but a whimper.

* * * *

Chapter 19

The Predator sat in the street with Michelle in his arms,
rocking, keening, wailing, an inhuman expression of grief and suffering.  The Paris
police finally arrived, too late.  They surrounded him, guns drawn, yelling in
French.

He looked to them, read their minds, saw how they saw him. 
His shirt and slacks covered in her blood, he looked an awful lot like her
murderer.  And he howled like an animal in pain.  The sounds of either grief or
homicidal madness, who could know for sure?

The Predator surveyed the area, squinting past the blinding
pain and flashing lights on the police cars.  The threats were everywhere, too
many to be neutralized.  He would have to run.  He set his master on the street
with care, and then moved in a blur, smashing past the nearest officer to race
down the street.

He took to the rooftops, evading the compact Citroen police
cars that zigzagged through the streets looking for him.  He traveled the
rooftops until he could no longer hear sirens of pursuit.  And then he stopped,
no idea of where he was or where to go.

He stayed there for a time, his head in his hands, mewling
through the intense agony pounding in his skull.  He needed sanctuary, and to
feed.  Too weary.  Apathetic.  Lost.  He had lost his mind.  Lost his way.  Lost
the will to act.

* * * *

Eugene Marcel, Gene to those who knew him, took one look at
the blonde woman he was supposed to scrape off the street and cursed, “
Merde!
”

He had extensive experience as a paramedic over the past ten
years, and he didn’t think there was much he could do that would make a
difference for her.  Didn’t mean he wouldn’t try.  He always tried.  There were
a few miracles still left in this world.

It would take one hell of a miracle to save this woman. 
Nevertheless, he charged the defibrillator and zapped her chest.  And nothing
happened.  His partner Martin continued the cycle of fifteen chest compressions
and one puff of the AMBU bag air mask.  Gene charged it back up and zapped her again. 
Blood spit at him from all the little holes in her chest as her muscles
contracted in electric shock.  Nothing.

He repeated the cycle a total of four times, and still
nothing.

Martin sat back on his heels looking to Gene with the
infamous Gallic shoulder shrug. 
“
C’est
fini.
”
 
It’s over
.

Gene glanced back down at the woman’s angelic face, wiped
the blood from her cheek, and knew he couldn’t stand to give up, not with this
one.  He had once read a magazine article that said beautiful people tend to
get better medical attention, and in this instance that proved true.  He
fluffed the AMBU bag twice more, forcing air into her lungs, and charged the defibrillator
for one more go.

“You know we cannot do it more than four times,” Martin
lectured him.

The training guidelines teach that more than four attempts
to defibrillate causes sufficient damage to the heart that it will never
function properly, even if it does restart.  Gene had bent the rules before,
but never with any success.

“What?  Are you paying the electric bill?”  He snickered at
Martin.

Gene’s wife Emily was fond of saying, ‘an idiot is one who
continues to do the same thing repeatedly, expecting a different outcome each
time.’ 
Perhaps I am an idiot
.  Oh well, so be it.

He zapped her one last time.

To the surprise of both idiot and his assistant, her heart
restarted with an erratic spasm of beats, a rock band drum solo.  Its rhythm
normalized seconds later.

Martin hurriedly puffed the AMBU bag while he helped Gene
address the seemingly impossible task of staunching the flow of blood leaking
from all those little holes in her chest.  The hands of both skilled paramedics
worked together frantically, making the impossible possible.  They reduced her
blood loss from a gushing mess to a slow drip.

The two of them lifted her onto the stretcher, hauled her
into the back of the truck where Martin attached two IV’s, one plasma, and one saline-glucose. 
They sat with her, puffing the AMBU bag as the driver raced against time and
traffic to reach the trauma ward at the Hôpital Supérieur.  Many small medical
miracles awaited her arrival, and she needed every single one of them.

Gene stared at this beautiful woman with a smile.  She
represented the anomaly in his own personal statistic.  The fifth zap had never
worked with anyone before her.  He suspected it may never work again with
anyone else, but that would not stop him from trying.

* * * *

The Predator crept through the dark alleys, seeking prey. 
He slinked up on a pair of men using hypodermic needles to administer heroin in
the cold October night, hidden to all but the Predator.  He leaped down from
his perch on the roof two stories above and fed from one and then chased down
the other.  He left them dazed and stupid, but alive.

He roamed aimlessly for hours until he found an abandoned
building that showed no signs of recent occupancy.  The place should have been
condemned, but instead offered a much needed shelter in the lower level of the
windowless basement.

He awoke alone and cold, nothing but hunger to guide him. 
He took to the rooftops to roam the city, cruising in search of prey.  He found
one of the older districts, something about it seemed familiar.  The name came
to him, the Maraise.  The area had once been the Jewish quarter, the ghetto in
Michelle’s WWII.  He vaguely recalled shadowy memories of hunting these
streets, cutting down Nazis and French cops in the back alleys.

It looked somewhat different now.  The area had evolved into
a chic bohemian cultural center, ripe with tourists.  The tightly wound streets
and alleys were loaded with people enjoying the nightlife.  A target-rich
environment.

He had no concerns or worries, no plans for the future.  He
existed in the moment, a creature of pure instinct, seeking only to feed.  All
that remained of Aaron’s mind were fragments, splinters, and a lingering shadow
of grief for his dead master.

He spotted two women and a man.  They spoke English with an
accent.  It floated to the surface of his broken mind, a snippet of memory.  British
people with British accents.  Strangers in a strange land, much like him.  They
seemed oblivious to his presence as he stalked them from above.

He followed for a time, gliding along silently, awaiting the
right opportunity.  Soon enough they walked into an area devoid of street
lights.  Drifting through shadow, the Predator made his move.  Like a great cat
sliding through the tall grasses of the savannah, he blended with the darkness,
moving in on his targets unnoticed.

Reading their minds, they did not see him until he stepped
up a mere three feet away.  To them he appeared to materialize from the
darkness, born into the world at that moment.

“Bloody hell!  Where’d he come from?”  The startled man
looked to the women for answers.

They saw his dark blue shirt stained with darker patches of
reddish-black blood.  His eyes held the feral gleam of a carnivore stalking
prey.  In their minds he was a fearsome sight.  Their hearts raced and their
eyes bulged.

He loved the scents of their adrenaline, the noise of their
pounding heartbeats.  The man presented a problem, but he carried no weapons,
no scents of steel or gunmetal.  The Predator ignored him for the women. 
Walking right into their midst, he snared the tall, willowy blonde woman’s eyes
and struck in a flash.  She gasped and squirmed, but couldn’t escape his grip.

The man made the mistake of trying to grab him.  Without
ceasing his feed, he whipped out, shoving the man off to land in the street on
his ass.  As he fed, he recalled a splinter of caution in his broken mind,
not
too much, not for too long
.  He released her and went for the other woman
who stood cringing against the wall, watching with macabre fascination.

A few years older, wiser, she had been so absorbed in
watching his assault on her sister, she forgot to run.  He embraced her, took
what he wanted, and left her heaving against the wall.

The man regained his feet and his nerve.  His cell phone in
hand, he started dialing.  “You had better leave now, I’m calling the police!”

As the Predator moved in to slice the man open, neutralize
the threat, he sensed a familiar presence.  It caught his attention. 
The Watcher
,
the one who had followed him around the city the other night.  The nondescript
presence had a strange indefinable quality, different from anyone else he had
ever known.

It spoke directly into his mind.  child
.
>

The Predator abandoned the Brits for the enticement of the
Watcher.  The Brits argued over his assault as he drifted off into the night to
pursue the invitation.

“Jenny, Sarah, are you hurt?  Fucking wanker!  I think he
broke my nose!”

“Serves you right.  Shouldn’t have got involved.  Oh my GOD! 
That was … amazing!  I love Paris!”

“Jenny?”

“Mmm … Yes, that was … nice.”

* * * *

Chapter 20

Michelle drifted through a drugged haze, listening to a man’s
voice.  “Eight 9mm slugs, a collapsed lung, shattered collar bone, perforations
to the liver, kidneys, stomach, and large intestine, and 42 staples holding her
ass together.”

Opening her eyes, she could barely see through foggy vision. 
A man stood just outside the window to her room.   He shook his head and flipped
through a chart, pointing something out to a woman in a white smock.

“She’s already taken a liter and a half of plasma, and I’m
thinking she needs at least a half-liter blood transfusion.  She should be in
the morgue.  Somebody killed her three times over.”

The exhaustion and heavy drugs dragged her back into
darkness.

She awoke sometime later to the beeping sounds of her heart
monitor.  Trying to sit up, she struggled against the wires and lines
entrapping her in a web of monitoring apparatus.  Following the lines, they led
to two different IV units standing on a tier beside her bed.  Her chest and arms
looked like a patchwork quilt, with all the blood soaked bandages.  As soon as
her drugged-fuzzy mind registered the contents of the IV bag dripping into her
system, she hurriedly jerked off all the IV inserts.  She feared what things
they might be injecting into her body.

Pulling off the last of the monitoring cables, the nausea
hit her.  They had been giving her some kind of clear fluids, a major no-no for
vampires.  The only thing her body required was blood, hot and fresh, pumped
directly from the heart.  She leaned over and wretched off the side of the bed,
vomiting a nasty clear goo until she was dry heaving.   Her body worked
overtime to evacuate the unwelcome fluids by any and all means possible.  She
pissed right there in the bed, first time ever since 1940.  She couldn’t
imagine how horrible it must be to live with the constant need to urinate and defecate. 
How revolting!  Her skin felt coated in a slimy residue as she sweated out the
last of it.

“
C'est
dégueulasse!
” 
This is disgusting
.

Then she sensed the sunrise coming on.  She had to move, and
now.  Slinking through corridors, she narrowly avoided detection by night shift
nurses.  She forced her aching, exhausted body to descend the stairwell.  The
lethargy of the coming daylight threatened to put her asleep right there on the
stairs.

Running on sheer willpower and instinct she found the
basement.  She located a seldom used storage room, everything covered in dust. 
She collapsed at the back of the room behind the old broken laundry bins as the
sun’s first rays hit the hospital.

* * * *

The Predator grasped an intuitive sense of the cloaked
creature he pursued.  It liked to play games, delighting in the chase.  It
giggled at him.  He bounded across the rooftops of Paris, moving at breakneck
speed to close the distance.

It taunted him with laughter, its billowing cloak just out
of reach.  How could it move so fast?  It leaped high into the air, almost
flying, and then glided down over a hundred yards away.  Landing gracefully,
like a dancer, it stood atop a dome ringed with pillars, waiting for him to
catch up.  The Predator vowed to make this creature pay for its mockery. 
Leaping and bounding he reached it a moment later.  Then it disappeared in a
flash.

“Think you are the fastest?  Think you are stronger than me,
child?”

It had flitted around to the other side of the dome.  Racing
between the pillars in chase, he realized where he stood – the Pantheon.  He
recalled a cab ride through the city, his lover and master holding his hand. 
Pain.  Grief.  Loneliness.  This was the place Michelle had promised to bring
him.

He whined under the burden of grief, slumping down to bury
his head in his hands.  He missed her
sooo
much.  His heart twisted into
a tight, burning knot of pain.

“Is this what you want?”

She stood ten feet away, half-obscured by the pillar. 
Golden blonde curls of hair slipped out into the moonlight from beneath her
black-hooded cloak.  “You miss your blonde leech?  You miss taking her petty
orders?”  She came to him, speaking in a melodic woman’s voice, bearing the
face of his dead lover.  It was not Michelle’s voice.

He knew this could not be.  A trick.  An illusion.  She had
died.

“I can tell you what to do.  Would you follow my orders?” 
She advanced.  He growled a warning and crouched, ready to attack.

The Not-Michelle came closer, smiling, hand extended.  He
unhinged his jaw, teeth bared, claws out.  Not-Michelle took another step, hand
out, palm up, a peace offering.

It looked like her, so gorgeous, the most beautiful woman he
had ever known.  His heart ached to look at her flawless pale skin, remembering
snatches of her wonderful body wrapped around him, her soft cheek nestled
against his chest.

She smelled wrong.  Not-Michelle.

He refused her hand.  There could be no substitute for his
lover.  The sense of loss crushed him back down to the ground to sit with his
head in his hands, mewling and crying.

“Fine.  If you won’t follow your precious leech, follow me.” 
Then she changed.

Right before his eyes the flesh and bones of her face flowed
like gelatinous ooze recast into a new mold.  Pale skin turned golden.  Curly blonde
hair darkened to straight glossy black with a slight inward curl at the tips. 
Emerald eyes elongated and stretched into dark brown tear drops at a slight
angle, a Persian slant.

A name floated to the surface of his mind, a celebrity.  Kim
Kardashian.  But Not-Kim.  She had stolen this face too.  A thief of
identities, a mimic shape-shifter.  He wondered what she really looked like. 
Or perhaps she had been stealing the lives of others for so long she no longer
had an identity of her own.

The Not-Kim grabbed his hand.  “Come, I promise not to hurt
you.”

She gripped him strongly, unnaturally strong.  She pulled him
up off the stone floor to his feet.

With her touch came an overwhelming tidal wave of images,
feelings, memories, information overload.  She had known kings, queens,
emperors, heads of state, presidents, all manner of men and women of power and
authority.  Grand and majestic palaces flitted past his eyes.  Palaces so
fabulous, so otherworldly, they must be constructs of heaven.  Surely such
beauty had never been made by human hands.  Within the maelstrom of images he
recognized several structures he’d seen in films and magazines: Taj Mahal,
Hagia Sophia, and the Kremlin.

He grasped a sense of time stretching out before him,
decades, centuries, millenniums.  All filled with religions, intrigue,
politics, love, hate, desire, greed, and always the endless wars and death.  Wars,
old and new.  Wars fought in deserts with chariots, brass swords and spears, in
jungles with cavalry and elephants.  On the shorelines of every land stood
fortresses under siege, burnt and razed to the ground only to be remade in
homage to the new regimes.  Thousands of battles at sea with ships of all sizes
and styles, Asian ships, Greek ships, Roman ships, vessels filled with grunting
Norsemen at the oars, and the galleons of the Spanish, English, French, and
Portuguese.  And then came the floating fortresses, great battleships of steel,
aircraft carriers, marvels of modern engineering.

She had been there, watching, behind the scenes, an
ever-present observer of the folly of man.  Millenniums past, in the Far East,
she had acquired the name Urvashi, and they revered her as a fallen angel, an
Apsara.  She liked this name, this incarnation, her Persian princess persona.

She had fulfilled many roles throughout the ages: advisor,
consort, lover, wife, queen, empress, diviner, priestess, magician, sorceress,
and even goddess.  At times she had been considered angelic, divine, or demonic
by various different societies and religious factions.  She had carried the
title Apsara for centuries, traveling throughout the Persian empires, counselor
to Darius and Xerxes, favored by the Imperial Court.

In the Middle East, her exploits spawned legends of the
demonic djinn, a genie.  In Greek mythology she was immortalized as the siren,
the muse, the nymph or on occasion, even the goddess Aphrodite.  In ancient
African tribal myths she had been known as Asherah, the moon goddess who rose
from the forest to seduce men.  Throughout the Roman Empire, both Eastern
Byzantium and Western Rome, she had been considered either angelic or demonic
in accordance with the religious flavor of the day.  In Norse myths she was the
Valkyrie, revered as a divine member of Odin’s entourage.  Through the dark
ages she was again demonic, a witch, a succubus.  With the ideological shifts
of the renaissance she returned to the muse and nymph, painted as a temptress
inspiring mankind to new heights of achievement in the arts.

Tons and tons of details buried him, an overlapping in a
crush of information flooding in so fast it filled his mind to overflowing.  Her
hand placed in his seemed to carry an electric shock, a path to ground for the
endless data stream of her very, very long life.  Shuddering under the weight
of discovery, he moaned, his eyes rolled back in his head.

Seeing his reaction, his shock, she finally realized what
was happening.  She gasped and snatched her hand away as though burned by the
contact.  He read it in her eyes and her last fleeting thoughts.  She had
revealed far too much, more than she had ever told anyone.

Her walls of privacy slammed back into place, severing their
connection.  He stood before her, eyes wide in revelation, but she had returned
to the non-descript blank slate.

One tiny detail that he’d registered in the barrage of
information stood out in his mind.  Somewhere in her past, this creature had a
link to him.  This woman-fallen angel-creature had played some strange and
twisted part in the vampiric family lineage.

“You are a different sort aren’t you?  Yes, very unique.” 
Chagrin and appreciation blended into her features.  “Remind me never to do
that again.”  She shook her head and looked down at her traitorous hand that
had bled out untold secrets of human history with a mere touch.

He felt her then, in his mind, rummaging through his
thoughts to learn what she had mistakenly revealed.  “This will not do.  You
can never speak of these things, to anyone.”

Her words carried a weight of power, not unlike the feeling
he had experienced when Michelle used her force of compulsion.  Her will
wrapped around him, massaging its way through his temples, into his mind.  He
shook his head to break the spell squeezing his skull.

“Promise me you will never speak of what you have learned!”

The force of her speech dropped him to his knees in
submission.  As ancient as recorded time, she held power beyond his measure. 
Empress, goddess, fallen angel, who was he to stand before her?

She smiled sweetly. The crushing pressure lifted and his
anguish drifted away.  “Here, child, I feel your pain.  Let me help.”

She held out her hands again, offering an embrace. 
Luxurious waves of her sweet empathy called to him.  She would make the pain go
away.  She was a friend, his only friend.  He moved into her embrace without
hesitation.  He needed her comfort badly.

She consoled him in her arms, her mental shield blocked him
out, but her warmth infused his being.  She felt like a lazy hot summer day at
the beach, sun kissing his body from head to toe, lulling him into calm
happiness.  Her empathy absorbed all his pain, grief, and loneliness, all that
ailed him.

After a time, his emotions spent, tears shed, she spoke
again directly into his mind. 

In close pursuit, he followed her through the night.  They
sailed across the roofs of Paris, moving gradually towards the outskirts of the
city.  They arrived at a four story building, all granite slabs and heavy stone. 
Massive gargoyles perched on the corners of the roof leered down at him.  This
place had to be centuries old.  Dropping down from above, they landed at a
broad balcony of white stone off the upper floor.  She led him through a
sliding glass door into a monstrous bedroom decorated in an ancient Roman style
– huge chaise lounges, large pieces of hardwood furniture, heavy, stylish, and
very expensive.  Glancing at a long, detailed bas-relief, it reminded him of
Cesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, but more like he imagined the real thing would
look.  In one corner of the room a giant four-poster bed stood shrouded in
cream-colored, semi-transparent fabric.

She disrobed without a word, zero modesty.  And then she
proceeded to remove his filthy blood-stained clothes.  Both nude, she led him
by the hand into another room, a bathroom of sorts.  Covered in ceramic mosaic
tiles, the massive bathing pool looked like something built centuries past, a
relic stolen from a monument to the god of bathing.  The bright lights and creamy
tones of swirling patterned tile matched this golden-skinned goddess perfectly.

Apart from Michelle, she was the most beautiful woman he had
ever seen.  Her luscious curves and exotic beauty spoke to him of foreign
tongues, strange cultures, and pleasures of the Kama Sutra.  He had an urge to
grab her, throw her against the tiled walls and fuck her till her screams
echoed out into the street.  Her caramel curves and knowing smile made him rock
hard, so hard it hurt.

She crinkled her nose at him with a mischievous grin.  “Bathe
first.  You smell like death.”

Death.  His master Michelle had died.  This woman could
never replace Michelle.  The word brought a painful stab into his heart, a
squeezing knot of grief.  And then she took his hand again and stole his pain. 
All grief and anxiety flowed out into her golden fingers as she led him into
the lukewarm water of the bathing pool.