The Nightlife: London (Urban Fantasy Romance) (The Nightlife Series) (14 page)

Michelle awoke to the fresh smell of blood calling her to
feed.  Her heart labored with a dull thud, her senses faded and then sharpened
acutely.  Her throat burned with a scratchy dry ache that only blood could quench. 
She had been here before, this close to death, and she need to feed
immediately.  She fought with the curtain wrapping that restrained her arms and
worked her way free to track the blood scent.  She found two warm, naked bodies
pressed together, reeking of spilt blood.  There was so much blood everywhere. 
She didn’t know where to start.

Licking, suckling, lapping away, she took every last bit of
blood she could find.  And when the wounds were clean, she bit down and took
more.

“Michelle stop!  She’s lost too much blood already!”  Strong
hands pried her away from the warm bloody flesh.  “Here, Michelle, here.”

He replaced the lost meal with his own arm, and she bit
down.  She recognized the unique taste of her lover, Aaron.  She fed until he
murmured against her ear, “Please stop Michelle.  That’s enough.”

Though she desperately wanted more, needed more, she stopped
at his insistence.  Exhaustion and pain dragged her back down to sleep, curled
around the warm bodies under the covers.

* * * *

By the time Aaron convinced Michelle to stop feeding, he’d
gone dizzy and sick to his stomach.  He sighed in relief when she finally fell
back asleep.  It was always touch and go in dealing with a vampire who needs
blood that bad.

Untangling her arms and legs from his body, he looked over
Katya.  With all the blood and gore gone, she was even more beautiful in her
naked vulnerability.  She murmured something and reached around him to pull him
back down on top of her – totally subconscious – but still adorable.  Her wounds
were raw, but Michelle had done a thorough job of cleaning.  The difference was
phenomenal.  Dark blotches encircled Katya’s eyes, and each of the gunshot
wounds had purplish bruising, not exactly
great
, but for a woman who had
been on the edge of death, she looked pretty damn good.

As he sat up, slipping out of her weak embrace, something
hard rolled under his hip.  He looked down to find three bloody spent slugs on
the bed.  But how?  It must have happened during the
sexual healing
episode.  That goofy seventies tune went off in his head,
“Sexual healing
baby, oohhh!”

“I must be losing my mind.”  He laughed:  a haggard rough
sound.

Then he realized Katya was mostly human, and she probably
needed fluids,
now
.  He grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge and
coaxed her to drink some, little by little.  He poured tiny bits into her mouth
and whispered, “Drink, please drink.  You need water.  Drink it, Katya.”  Her
eyes crept open, only partially lucid, but they had returned to that blue-grey
color.  The amber-gold of the wolf was gone.

Exhausted and drained, starving for fresh blood, Aaron
staggered to the shower and cleaned up.  His shoulder had mostly healed.  The
wound was still visible, but it had scabbed over, and he knew it would be fully
healed very soon.

Clothing options were limited.  His shirt and pea coat were
caked in blood.  He scrubbed up the coat as best he could, but the shirt was a
lost cause.  Aaron rummaged through Katya’s drawers and found a white t-shirt
that fit kinda snug, and buttoned up his coat to go hunting.

On his way out the door, he dialed up his master who he
hadn’t heard from since the sexual healing episode where she cut him off so
abruptly.  {{Hey, Urvashi, are you okay?  Where are you, what’s going on?}}

She took her time coming back to him.  He sensed fatigue and
anxiety.  {{I am still in Moscow, and yes I am okay, but things here are not
okay.}}

{{I remember you were hurt, what happened?}}

{{I am recovered now.  I will return for you soon.  We can
talk then.}}

No answers, no insights, nothing.  She cut him off and that
was that.

Urvashi was a big girl.  She could certainly take care of
herself.  Heading straight for the nearest pub, Aaron planned to gorge himself
on any woman in the building.  He had to focus on taking care of his own, Michelle
and Katya.  The girls needed him, and he needed to feed.

* * * *

Katya dreamt of Aaron making love to her, his hard pale body
thrusting between her legs, her hands gripping his ass, biting his shoulder
when the ridges of his cock rubbed against her sore pussy.  Though it hurt, it
was the right kind of hurt, something she had gone without for too long.

Her dreams of delicious sliding, humping, grinding, grunting
sex continued endlessly, broken only by periods of pain and soreness.  Always
it was Aaron who took her pain.  He knew where it hurt, and then his warm, wet
love slathered all over her pain and washed it away with blissful euphoria.

She floated in a half-life, a purgatory of burning pain and
decadent pleasure, vacillating between heaven and hell.  Many times over, Aaron
quenched the fires of her agony, murmuring foreign words, and soothing her body
with sex and pleasure.  Wet slippery tongues slid over her painful wounds,
cleansing away the pain.  She had learned that whenever it hurt, a tongue would
make it better.

It seemed Aaron had been making love to her for days on end. 
She knew the contours of his back, his ass, and those hard-toned shoulders. 
She had grown to desire the strength of his thighs bearing down into her with
powerful thrusts, hitting her very core.  She was familiar with the way his
erection slid in and hit that spot, how she popped her hips to help him.

And always Aaron stared at her with such intensely focused
concentration.  Like now, as his thighs pounded his cock into her sopping wet
cunt and her head squished into the pillow.  She convulsed around him, wishing
he’d never stop, angling to help his thrust hit where she liked it most.  Holding
his shoulders, whimpering with the sensations of hardness buried in her, she
realized
this wasn’t a dream at all
.  Somehow, this creature she once
abhorred had worked his way into her bed, into her very soul.  Then he thrust
in painfully hard, the way he had been doing it all along, carrying her over
her peak.

“Oye! 
Lyubit’ menya sil’neye!
” 
Love me harder
. 
She wanted it, hard, fast, deep, just like she knew he was capable of giving it
to her.

As she clenched around him, spasming in joyous climax, her arms
and legs holding him tight, he spoke the same words she remembered hearing many
times over.  “
Vitae essentia est amor
.”

The essence of life is love? 
Since when did this
pale vampire love her?  And why did the idea seem so appealing?

She had learned some Italian while traveling Europe, and the
Latin counterpart sounded very similar.  Her hands flowed over ass and thighs
that she already knew intimately.  When did this happen?  How did she end up
with a vampire between her legs?  Why was she enjoying him so damn much?

A feeling of wondrous euphoria and well-being infused her
from head to toe, warming her whole body, like roasting in a tanning bed.  This
was what she had been striving for, this feeling he had given her so many times. 
She remembered this feeling.

No man had ever given her this kind of joy with his cock.

She thought back, trying to trace this incredible turn of
events.  She recalled arguing and wrestling with Aaron, Ivan kicking in the
door, she left the apartment for some fresh air … the Colombians!  The
Albanians!  Bastard Colombians took her back to that fucking strip bar.  And
then that fucker Luis tried to rape her.

She gutted the greasy wankers, and then she was out of the
room, fighting, shooting, Ivan was there …

Then death, grief, and pain, the explosive backlash of her
packmate’s demise had been so overwhelming, and it was hitting her now, anew.  “Abram,
Vitaly!  My brothers are dead!”  She cried out, tears streaming down her face. 
Her packmates were gone.

She had been bound to her brothers in the pack for decades. 
She had once talked of mating with Vitaly, had even tried, though they were not
compatible.  She loved Vitaly as a man and a friend, a brother in the pack, a
comrade in arms.  They had run together in the forests, hunted together, made
love countless times.  And Abram, he was like the younger brother she never
had.  He was the newest of the pack, joined barely twenty years ago.  Abram had
not embraced the life immediately.  It was only after Katya spent many hours
teaching him control, how to tap into the strength of the wolf, how to hunt,
the freedom and joys of the change, and showed him the benefits of having the
pack as your family for guidance and support.  She had been so proud of Abram
once he found his place in the pack and in his new life.  The sudden pain of
their loss twisted in her chest as if it had just happened.  A sob choked from
her throat.

Aaron watched her, concern etched into his beautiful, pale
face.  He laid his weight into her and hugged her tight.  “Shhh, it’s okay.  It’ll
be alright.”  Then he did what he had been doing for who knows how long –
he
bit her
.

The momentary sting was quickly replaced with a wholly
different kind of joy and sensation.  A feeling like no other, but she
remembered this too.  Holding her, his teeth in her neck, he brought her to a
second climax in seconds.  All her pain and grief washed away.  There was only
this wonderful hard body wrapped around her, buried inside her, and the
heavenly sensations assaulting her senses.

She quieted in his arms, absorbing all the comfort she could
take.  She’d rather not think about the horrifying ramifications.  Katya needed
Aaron in this moment, and facing harsh reality was the last thing she wanted to
do.

Crying through her grief, content in Aaron’s arms, a second
set of pale limbs snaked around her and Aaron to join their intimate embrace.  Beautiful
pale breasts pressed up against Katya’s arm.  Blonde hair and emerald eyes
assessed her with a quiet intensity and then Michelle kissed her on the cheek.

“Je suis désolée.”  I am sorry
. 
Then Michelle petted her hair, as if they were friends … or
lovers.

A fucking sandwich.  She was the bloody meat in their
god-damned vampire’s sandwich.

As the unpleasant truth of her situation became apparent,
the question came to mind.  “Where’s Ivan?  What happened to Ivan?”

Aaron lifted his head from her neck, licked her blood off
his lips and assessed her seriously.  “We haven’t seen him for three nights. 
He had been shot, but … he changed.  I left him as a wolf at The Rocking Horse.”

“Shit!”  She scrambled away to sit up against the pillows
and headboard, suddenly embarrassed at her nudity.  The naked vampires watched
her as she covered her breasts and pulled her hair behind her ear nervously. 
“He should be back by now.  He didn’t have clothes … It wasn’t planned.  Oh god,
it’s all fucked up!”

“He did take off his coat and shirt beforehand, but, it was
real mess, and who knows where he went from there.”

“On the streets?  We never change in the city.  To be loose
on the streets, all the innocent people …”  The thought of Ivan killing
innocents and being hunted by authorities terrified her.

“Well, aren’t you connected to him?  Can’t you like … check
on him or something?”  Aaron pulled up the blanket for her, respecting her modesty.

“I know he’s okay, but I don’t know if I can find him, not
if he’s gone native.  Ivan has always been able to find the pack, no matter
where we go, it’s one of his gifts.  And the pack has done this before, sending
me out into enemy hands so Ivan can track me, but I can’t track him like that. 
We’re not all the same.”

They just watched her, unblinking.  She began to understand
how small animals feel under the watchful gaze of predators.  “So, what’s … why
are we …”  She held out her hands at them and the bed.  “I don’t remember how
we ended up … like this.”

Aaron cracked a smile, and Michelle smiled along with him,
all their sharp teeth grinning at her.  He ran his hands through his hair, and
looked at Michelle, and then back at Katya, and she suddenly realized he was
embarrassed.  “I didn’t know what to do for you.  It was bad.  You’d been shot
several times, and I couldn’t stop the bleeding.”

Katya nodded, and waited for Aaron to get to the part about
going balls deep in her like a ruddy Mardi gras orgy.

“So, I asked Urvashi, and she sort of coached me.  I didn’t
even know it was possible.  She’s very … gifted, and somehow because of my
connection to her, that means I’m also … gifted.”

Surprised, but still waiting, she nodded.  “And what does
this have to do with you fucking my brains out?”

“It turns out there is a way to help you heal, very fast. 
Urvashi showed me how.”

“By banging me till my toes curl up?”

“Basically, yes.”

“How many times?”

If vampires could blush, then Aaron was blushing.  “I
promised Ivan I would take care of you.  This whole mess was my
responsibility.  I had to make sure you healed as quickly as possible.  I’m not
a doctor, I don’t know jack about wounds or infections or any of that shit. 
Urvashi thought you had gone into shock.  So I did the only thing I knew for
sure would help.  And I did it a lot.”

“How many times?”

“I think I lost count yesterday.”  The bastard was grinning
again.

“And the biting?  How was that helping me to bury your teeth
in my neck?”

“Our bite is a potent pain killer, and it helps to get
things going, to warm you up.  I didn’t want to hurt you.”

“One good chomp to lube me up, eh?  A smashing time for all.”

Michelle’s tongue slid out, reaching down below her chin,
the very tip curled up towards Katya and then slurped back into her mouth.  “If
you prefer, I can warm you up.”