The Nightlife: London (Urban Fantasy Romance) (The Nightlife Series) (13 page)

“I tried.  I really tried.”  Janette’s bloody, shaking hands
smeared blood on her forehead as she pulled a stray hair away from her face.

Digging through her mind, he realized she was totally faded,
high on cocaine.  She and Lola, the dead woman, had been
servicing
the
men.  And she hadn’t tried very hard to run or hide.  She had taken a job
dancing in another strip club over on Parker Street in Covent Garden.

“You didn’t leave London.”  God, he hated himself for what
he had to do.

“I know … I should have.  Bresnik found me …”  Her boss had
found her all too easily.  The deal Bresnik offered her was simple – a lifetime
of sex slavery, or death.  She chose the former.

“Bresnik’s dead.”  How ironic, he had freed her now, twice
over, but he couldn’t let her go.

She looked at him, still afraid, but not of Bresnik.  “Why are
your eyes bleeding?”  She shuffled back away from him till she hit the back
wall of the bathroom.

No matter how many different angles he looked at the
situation, Aaron could see no way out of the unavoidable conclusion.  Janette
knew far too much, an unmanageable liability.

Tears of blood ran down his face.  “I’m so sorry.”  He
closed the distance and reached down to pull her warm, half-naked body up into
his arms.  She trembled in his embrace, perhaps sensing what was to come.

Aaron considered the ugly truth: there are some people that
cannot be saved, no matter what you do.  Aching sadness filled him as he whispered
gently in her ear.  “Please forgive me.”

Then he bit down hard into her neck.

She squirmed and fought, trying to push him away, but her
weak arms could not break his unnaturally powerful grip.  Soon she succumbed to
his venom and began to convulse in ecstatic orgasm.  He dug deep into her mind
and soul, learning all there was to know of Janette, drinking in her blood and
essence.

Born into poverty, she had known hardship living in the
ghettos of Brixton.  Raised by a single mom who changed boyfriends monthly,
Janette grew into an insecure, obnoxious teenage mess.  Spreading her legs for
the wrong kind of boys, her late-teen pregnancy led to an abortion and a
downward spiral into sex, drugs, and prostitution.

Janette was damaged goods from the word go.  But none of
that made Aaron feel any better when he drained her till her heart seized in
cardiac arrest.

He gave her the most beautiful death; the euphoria and
ecstasy of his venom coursing through her veins and the firm grip of his
supporting arms.  Probably more beautiful than the life she would have known
working endlessly for Albanian slave traders.

But that still didn’t justify her murder.  Aaron knew this
moment would haunt him for the rest of his life.

Wiping the tears from his face, he laid Janette’s limp body
on the floor next to the other woman.  “If there had been any other way, I
would have done it.  I hope you find the peace in death that you never had in
life.”  His lips brushed her still-warm cheek.

He closed the bathroom door and looked to Michelle and
Katya.  The girls were laid out in pools of blood.  Dawn’s grey twilight
streaked through the windows.

He kneeled down next to Michelle, more tears of blood
welling in his eyes at her condition.  She was still alive, barely.  “Oh god,
Michelle, just hold on.  Please hold on.”

She needed blood.  There was blood everywhere.  Jamison’s
headless corpse lay in a spreading red pool barely three feet away.  Aaron
shoved Jamison’s lifeless arm into Michelle’s mouth.  “Bite down.  Please bite
down.  Please Michelle.”

She wasn’t taking it.  He looked at all that wasted blood on
the floor, and then reconsidered.  That was just plain dirty.  Wincing, he
reached inside his wool pea coat and scooped his own blood off his left
shoulder and smeared it over her lips.  “Come on, Michelle.”

Finally, her tongue crept out and licked.  Aaron pushed the
dead arm into Michelle’s mouth and her teeth did their job instinctively.  Her
soft sucking sounds were an encouragement.

“I think she’s gonna make it.”

He looked up to the encroaching light of dawn.  “Shit.”  Michelle
couldn’t handle the sun.  He rushed over and stripped the curtain off the
window and wrapped her in it.  Might keep the direct sun off of her.

Now Katya.

He knelt down beside the pale, topless woman on the floor,
admiring her frail beauty.  Seeing her like this was such a contrast to her
fiery temper.  Her aura flickered, the tiniest of flames, so weak he could
barely see it.  He leaned down close.  Still breathing, still alive.  But she
had lost way too much blood.  He didn’t know what to do for her.

Michelle would heal like Lazarus rising from the dead, but
who knew what the wolves were like.  He suspected their constitutions were more
robust than normal people.

So he wrapped her in another curtain, just to keep her warm,
and maybe help stop the bleeding.  Grunting against the agony every time he
moved his left arm, he picked Katya’s bundled body off the floor and threw her
over his right shoulder.  He staggered over to Michelle and managed to squat
down without dumping Katya on the floor.  Michelle was lighter that Katya, so
he pulled her up and scooted her onto his injured shoulder.

“God, that fucking hurts!”

Growling, teeth gritted against the pain, he stood with both
women in his arms.

Their weight wasn’t much of a burden for his preternatural
strength, but the pain of Michelle bouncing on his wound forced a whimper from
his lips.  A girl over each shoulder, he faced the beast sitting in its den of
carnage, across the path to the stairs.

The animal watched him, and he wondered how much of Ivan was
still in there.  Hopefully enough to walk away from the creature without
problems.  As he approached, it growled in menace.

“Ivan, it’s me, Aaron.  Stop it!  Look, I have Katya.”  He
leaned Katya’s face down to show her to the wolf.  It stood up and licked her
nose affectionately.  It whined, a soulful sound, and then looked Aaron
directly in the eyes, an unspoken reminder of his promise.

He couldn’t read any thoughts from the beast.  His telepathy
didn’t extend to animals.

It licked a few drops of blood off Katya and whined at him
again.  “I’ll do my best.  I need to get her out of here before the cops show
up.  You’d better take off too.”

The wolf watched Aaron walk past, slipping in the red goo of
entrails and body parts.  “This is so gross.  I can’t believe you eat this
shit, Ivan.  Gonna take a lot of vodka to wash that taste out of your mouth.”

Aaron kept going, grunting in pain with each creaking step as
he descended the stairway.  He walked out the busted back door of The Rocking
Horse at 4:30 a.m. in the morning, fighting hard to stay on his feet, as the
sound of sirens approached the front of the building.  His sharp hearing
detected the sound of booted feet making their way towards the end of the alley
behind him.  Using every last ounce of his strength reserves, he ran as fast as
his feet would carry him and the girls.  He ran till his heart slammed so hard
it would surely burst.  He ran until he couldn’t run anymore.

He thought he knew the way back to Katya’s Soho apartment,
but he wasn’t so sure now.  Grunting and growling with the exertion, he
staggered on.  The cold cut into him, sapping his strength and stealing his
resolve to keep moving forward.  He just wanted to sleep, the lethargy of the
coming daylight added extra pounds to the girls’ weight on his shoulders.

After an hour of torturous trudging through back alleys,
blood dripping from his forehead into his eyes, he found a street corner he
recognized, just down the block from the apartment.

He damn near dropped both girls when he kicked open the
downstairs door.  All but limp with exhaustion, he battled his way up the steps
into Katya’s apartment just as the fingers of sunrise reached above the
horizon.

* * * *

Aaron laid the cocooned girls on Katya’s queen-size bed.  He
squinted at the sunlight.  No matter the fact that it didn’t hurt him, he still
hated the sun.  He tossed a blanket over Michelle to further insulate her.  The
sun would fry her skin like a hot iron if he wasn’t careful.  He staggered into
the kitchen and rummaged through drawers to find duct tape and black trash bags. 
“This is as good as it gets.”

He taped the windows taped off in no time, then closed the
bathroom door to shut out the light from the small bathroom window.  As close
to pitch black as he could get it.  Only took a few seconds for his eyes to
adjust to night vision.

His limbs felt like limp noodles, and he could barely keep
his eyes from closing.  But the girls needed him to do the right thing.

He scooped more blood off his left shoulder for Michelle and
bit back a groan of pain as he milked his wound.  Several times he smeared his
blood over Michelle’s lips and her tongue darted out to clean it off.

“That’ll have to do for now.”  He turned his attention to
Katya.

Aaron unwrapped Katya’s bloody curtain to assess the damage. 
She had been shot in the right thigh, stomach, and upper chest.  He stripped
off her bloody jeans and panties.  She was every bit as beautiful as he
imagined, even with the nasty wounds.

At a complete loss as to what to do for her, he did the only
thing he knew, a vampire’s first aid.  Aaron began licking her wounds. 
Starting at her chest, he meticulously cleaned out all the blood from the
puncture.  She moaned beneath him, perhaps dreaming, or in pain.  She felt cold
to the touch.  He recalled all those CSI shows where they talked about people
going into shock from trauma.  Shock makes people cold, right?

Aaron stripped off his clothes and huddled up against Katya
beneath her blankets, holding her tight, trying to warm her body with his.  Her
skin warmed to him, and he continued cleaning her wounds.

Her blood did taste different, a bit of a spicy tang.  He
liked it.  She moaned and squirmed under his weight, his venom’s euphoria
working through her unconscious body.

Licking her, he tried to penetrate her mind.  He caught only
snatches of strange dreams involving pain and bloodshed, and the sensual
tinglings of her body’s reaction to his venom.  She dreamt of hunting, killing,
fighting and fucking, all rolled into one.  Then the pain of her wounds would
darken her dreams, until he found where it hurt and licked it clean, replacing
pain with pleasure.  She had never let him into her mind before, but asleep,
she couldn’t maintain her mental shields.  He sensed other tentative
connections, like little threads tying to others, to her wolf pack.

In his exhaustion, it was so tempting to curl up and sleep
on top of her.  Her warm naked skin and the stench of blood had given him a
hard-on.  If not for her near-death condition, he could easily spread her legs
and take what he had wanted for several nights.  Then she shuddered, and grew
clammy-cold.  Her breathing became shallow, the flutter of her heartbeat so
weak he thought for one moment it had stopped altogether.

He was losing her, so he called for help.  {{Urvashi!  I
don’t know what to do.  Katya is dying!}}

Suddenly he felt his master’s presence in his mind, flowing
through his memories of the night’s carnage, seeing through his eyes into the
darkness.  {{I told you not to go tonight.}}

{{I know, but it’s done, please help me.}}  He sensed
Urvashi’s concern for the wolves.  She did care for them, in her own strange
way.

{{Katya will die if you don’t stop the bleeding.  She could
die from shock.}}

{{I’m taking her to a hospital.}}

{{NO!  The secrets of her blood cannot be revealed.  And the
British police would imprison you both for this massacre.}}

{{Tell me what to do.}}  He sensed Urvashi’s reticence.  She
knew something that might help, but she was trying to avoid it.  {{I promised
Ivan I would take care of her.  You want the pack to hunt me down because I got
her killed?  If you know something, you must tell me.  You brought them into
this.  It’s on your shoulders too.}}

{{Merde!  Do not speak of this to anyone.  This is for you
and I alone to know.}}

{{Yes, yes, hurry, I can feel her dying!}}

{{Make love to her.}}

{{What?}}

{{I … we … we can exchange energy through sexual intercourse. 
In the dark ages, the superstitious call it a succubus, in your case, incubus. 
You probably have this capacity and don’t know it yet.  Which is probably why
you leave Michelle so drained after sex, and why you feel so alive from it. 
You have been feeding off Michelle when you make love to her.}}

The little details started sliding into place, arranging
into a bigger picture.  He recalled carrying Michelle’s exhausted body back to
his suite after several hours spent with him and Urvashi draining Michelle.  He
hadn’t even known he was doing it.  {{That’s what you have been doing to me? 
What we did to Michelle the other night?}}

{{Yes.}}

{{You bitch!  How long were you going to let me drain
Michelle without telling me?}}

{{You’re not hurting her, not really, and it makes you very
strong.}}

{{And how will that help Katya?}}

{{You don’t have to take, you can give.  Give her your
Qi
,
give her
life
.}}

{{I don’t know how.}}

{{Make love to her, and I will teach you.}}

He looked down at the bloody, pale woman shivering beneath
him and found it hard to believe that having sex with her unconscious body would
help in any way.  But what if she was ready for him?  Maybe if he warmed her up
first.

He started licking her wounds again, but Urvashi
interrupted.

{{That will not save her.  Make love to her now!}}

Aaron growled low in his throat, looking down at his
treacherous erection, and the near-dead woman.  Her little pubic curls were
blood stained from the mess of her right thigh.  He could hardly figure out
where to hold onto her that wouldn’t cause more pain.

Urvashi sent a psychic kick down the line. {{Just do it.}}

{{Fine.}}

He felt her smug smile when he spread Katya’s legs and
dipped his fingers inside her.  She felt silky warm and moist, probably from
the magic of his venom.  Katya murmured something.  He’d rather not hear her
say no.  He couldn’t go through with it if she was consciously fighting him.

He slipped his fingers out, rubbing her wetness around,
encircling her juicy clit.  She murmured again.  Careful not to hurt her, he
slipped the head of his cock into her moist entry.  She murmured again.

“Damn she’s tight.”

{{Stop messing around.}}  Urvashi nudged again, and he
pushed inside Katya further.

She was slick, mostly ready, but
so
damn tight.  He
doubted he could fit all the way in her, but she felt so good, a warm wet
glove, he probably didn’t need to.

Aaron pushed a little harder and Katya’s head leaned back as
she grunted.  She would have been so wonderful as a lover, awake.  She would probably
hate him for doing this, but he couldn’t stop.  The pressure was building with
each sliding thrust that shoved her head up into the pillow.  He tried not to
hurt her, not to be rough, but she was so wonderfully tight.  Her little
sighing noises drove him mad.  Deep in her mind, her unconscious thoughts
bloomed with waves of pleasure and then spiked with pain from her wounds.  Her
mind cried out for more pleasure, deeper, harder, faster.  He sunk his teeth
into her shoulder, just to let his venom kill the pain.  When her pain was
washed away in the effects of his bite, he let go and focused on making love to
her while she was still floating high on venom.

She liked it.  She liked the painkilling euphoria and the
thrusting slide of his cock.

{{Think about how you feel toward her.  She wants this.  She
wants you.  You want her.  You want Katya to be strong and well.  You want her
to heal.  Focus your will!}}

He tried to think of these things, of his desire to heal
her, of his strong feelings for her, but her warm bleeding body awoke another
hunger.  He wanted to fuck and bite her non-stop, to claim her, permanently.  He
could do it right now, bond her to him, and wear her tight glove every night.

{{Stop trying to claim her!  She needs to heal!  Focus your
mind and say the words with me. 
Vitae essentia est amor
. 
Vitae
essentia est amor
.  Live Katya live!}}

He chanted the foreign words aloud with Urvashi in his mind,
thrusting deep and hard into Katya.  She began to move in time with him,
curving her hips to meet him.  Focused intently on the words and the act, he
hit the magic moment.  Aaron growled and cried out, “
Vitae essentia est
amor!
”

As he came, the most exquisite ecstasy flowed out of him
into Katya.  Life, energy, come,
Qi
, whatever, it all poured straight
into her.  Her back arched up and she tossed her head in a mighty roar.  Her
hands and legs clamped around him, and she rode his cock, growling and grinding
her hot wet pussy hard and deep.  She took all he had to give, milked him dry
as she humped his wave of power to her own climax.

Snarling like an animal, her hot wet cunt squirted all over
his groin as she came in a full bodied spasm.  Her feral, amber eyes opened
wide and locked with his.  Shock, fear, betrayal, pain, clouded by ecstasy and
desire, her eyes held an entire world of conflicting emotions.  As she cursed
something in a foreign language and rose up to meet his cock buried all the way
inside her, he felt a massive drain of strength and energy flowing out his
groin into her.  She took it all, every last ounce he had to give, and more. 
Clamped onto him, fucking him like a mad woman, Katya screamed in ecstasy.

Then Urvashi screamed in his mind.  {{You must stop!  No
more!}}

In a blinding flash of light, Urvashi broke their connection
and Aaron collapsed in exhaustion.  His limp arms wouldn’t move to lift his
weight off of Katya.  His world faded to black.

* * * *