The Nightlife Moscow

by Travis Luedke

  Urvashi’s eyes rolled back in her head, and she snatched Aaron’s hand. The push of her aura into Michelle now reversed to a pull from Aaron. She was taking from him, sucking his energy. He gave it to her gladly. Once he understood what she was doing, he focused his will, exactly as she had taught him, and he pushed out to Urvashi, giving her all that she could take.

  Strength drained from him, and Michelle’s weight dragged on his arms.

  Urvashi released Aaron’s hand and opened her eyes to pin him in place with the depth of her gaze. She breathed in deeply through her nose and exhaled through her mouth. “Thank you.”

  Aaron nodded, woozy from the experience. He looked to Nikolay, and Urvashi’s eyes tracked his gaze.

  “Yes. I will help him. Let me catch my breath.”

  “There’s no time. Do it now.”

  For a second he thought he was going to catch a psychic backhand as his master squinted at him with a watch-your-mouth-or-I’ll-smack-it-off scowl. Instead, she leaned forward over the seat and reached past Katya to lay her hand over the wound on Nikolay’s chest.

  Katya looked at her with undisguised malice. “What are you doing to him?”

  “I’m trying to help, if you let me.”

  Katya watched her suspiciously as Urvashi closed her eyes in stern concentration. Again, her aura flared and the subtle light flowed down through her arm and into Nikolay. Urvashi held him for a minute, breathing hard and heavy. Her face started to … move – shift. In her intense focus on healing, her mask of humanity slipped. Aaron caught a hazy vision that super-imposed over the top of Urvashi’s face, a feminine creature with sharply angled cheek bones, larger feline-slanted eyes and darker, coarser skin. Almost a hint of something scaly there, slight ridges accented by dark lines.

  She met his stare directly and the dark brown Persian orbs he’d come to know were gone. Instead an alien gaze looked back at him, something almost reptilian, with gold and yellow flecks in a strange pattern across her pupils. She let go of Nikolay and the tanned Persian princess returned.

  {{You really are not human at all … are you?}}

  She was breathing hard, swaying with the movement of the vehicle. Pale with exertion, she grabbed Aaron’s hand again. “I need your blood.” She opened her mouth to bare needle-point fangs and bit hard into his wrist.

  “Son of a bitch!” He gritted his teeth through the pain. The creature had zero finesse, nothing like Michelle.

  Ivan stared at Urvashi with fascinated disgust.

  Urvashi’s venom struck Aaron with a heady euphoria, so strong his vision blurred. She hadn’t bitten him since the first time they met, and he wasn’t exactly in his right mind back then. This time, on top of the powerful rush, he could actually feel her stealing his energy as she recovered what she had given to Nikolay and Michelle.

  Katya stroked Nikolay’s hair and murmured something to him. She looked to Anatoly. “I think he’s doing better. Whatever she did its working.”

  Urvashi finally released Aaron’s hand and licked her lips. She had a satisfied glaze to her eyes and a small grin. “You taste better with age.”

  Aaron was still seeing double, damn near slobbering from the high she’d given him. “You betcha. Anytime you’re feeling thirsty, just say the word.” He had no problem giving her a taste, not when she gave so much back in return.

  Anatoly grunted as he cranked the steering wheel and pulled in front of the bay door of a nineteen fifties warehouse in a dilapidated industrial area. Ivan stepped out his door as the car slowed to a stop and headed around to the front of the vehicle. Aaron thought he reached into his pocket for a key, but a pistol emerged in Ivan’s hand. He shot the heavy steel padlock three times. The wolf jerked away the busted pieces of the lock and yanked hard to send the ancient rollup door screeching up out of the way.

  As soon as Ivan stepped aside, Anatoly guided the Mercedes forward into the warehouse. Ivan shut the rusty old door from the inside and followed the car on foot. The Mercedes crept forward into an open bay that was mostly-vacant, windows boarded up long ago. In the illumination of the headlights, dusty old manufacturing equipment stood to the left, and to the right side were pallets with several boxes stacked high and other boxes torn open. Farther down, a series of free-standing partition walls were arranged into make-shift rooms without ceilings, office cubicles. The place had obviously been a combination of offices and manufacturing facility, many, many years ago.

  The car brakes squeaked to a stop in front of the central open area and Urvashi scrambled to exit the vehicle. She looked around in irritation as her breath poured out in a fog. The building was ice-cold. “Really? This is our base of operations?”

  Ivan walked past and grunted as if Urvashi’s question didn’t merit an answer.

  Anatoly stepped out from the driver’s side and caught Urvashi glaring at him. “What? It’s as good as any other place in Moscow. Dmitri will never find us here.”

  She rolled her eyes and muttered something about wolves shitting in the woods under her breath. “If this is it, then I need to make preparations.” She walked off into the warehouse with her cell phone to her ear. “Renault, track my GPS and take notes. I want a list of items brought to me no later than tomorrow night. You will need to call our friends …”

  Aaron looked down to the serenely sleeping blonde goddess in his arms, hoping she would be okay after all. He trusted Urvashi’s abilities – to a point – and Michelle had phenomenal healing capacity, much like his own, but, he’d only been a vampire a few months and still had much to learn about this strange new life.

  One thing was certain, Michelle would need to feed. A lot. This industrial warehouse didn’t have much in the way of feeding prospects – except for the wolves.

  * * * *

  Chapter 6

  “So who’s up first?” Aaron stood in the middle of the room with Michelle in his arms, eyeballing each of the wolves in turn. “She needs blood, now. Urvashi’s off limits and Katya’s already given her share. That leaves Anatoly and Ivan, unless there’s someone else hiding in this rat trap.”

  Katya cradled Nikolay’s head in her lap, with the rest of his body sprawled out on a couch that was probably older than Aaron. She stroked the hair off her brother’s forehead and watched Aaron with a squint of suspicion. He already knew she hated sharing with Michelle, but she wanted another bite all the same. She always wanted another bite.

  Ivan shrugged. “What about Nikolay? He’s bleeding.”

  Ivan ducked when Katya threw an empty vodka bottle at his head. “Asshole! You want her to suck him dry?” The bottle sailed past Ivan and shattered on a piece of equipment across the room.

  Aaron grinned wide. “That’s a start. But that won’t be nearly enough.” He eyed everyone once more, accusingly. “You’ve been starving her for a week.”

  Anatoly stood up abruptly from a steel fold-out chair beside the couch and paced back and forth across the dusty concrete. “Why do we need these leeches? We have never needed their help before. I say send them off to find their meals elsewhere, and we’ll take out Dmitri ourselves.” He slipped his pistol from his shoulder holster, checked the clip and safety, and shoved it back in the holster.

  Finger pointed at Aaron and Michelle, Anatoly growled. “We have guns and gear right here, we don’t need them.” He walked over to a rectangular crate atop a pallet, pulled the lid off and reached both hands inside. His left hand came out with an AK-47, complete with banana clip and his right hand held a fifth of red label vodka. “Kalashnikov and Smirnoff – everything a wolf needs.”

  “Wouldn’t hurt if you had some brains to go with it.” Katya spit on the floor at Anatoly’s feet. “We’re outnumbered, out-gunned, and running for our bloody lives. We need all the help we can get. Now give the leech some fucking blood.”

  Ivan strolled over to Anatoly and gently removed the rifle and vodka from his hands. “You’re not afraid of the little woman, are you?” Ivan set the rifle back in the crate and cr
acked open the bottle of vodka to tilt it back into his mouth for a huge slug of liquor.

  Anatoly shook his head and grabbed the vodka bottle from Ivan for his turn at a full-throated chug. Grimacing with a growl, he wiped his lips. “Have the decades dulled your minds?” He looked at Katya and then again at Ivan. “She killed Andrei!” His finger pointed at Michelle. “As far as I’m concerned, she’s the most dangerous vampire I’ve ever seen. I remember what she did to us, to all of us.”

  Katya closed her eyes with a sigh. For a moment she looked frail, exhausted. Then her eyes popped open with a golden wolf glare, and the fiery woman had returned. “Haven’t you heard the phrase, If you can’t beat them, join them? She’s here to help us. The least you can do is donate a spot of your precious blood. Stop being a wanker, put down the vodka, and take off your shirt and jacket.”

  Ivan snickered, and it was all Aaron could do to keep from laughing at Anatoly’s worried expression. Michelle had torn through the wolf pack when they found her roaming the hills of Normandy during the Allied invasion of WWII. The woman they met back then was a different creature from the woman cradled in Aaron’s arms. During the war, Michelle had gone feral, like a wild animal. Those nights were a lifetime ago. Michelle had since learned to respect life.

  “You have my word I won’t let her hurt anyone.” Aaron watched Anatoly with a neutral expression, trying his best not to laugh in his face and make him more nervous. The wolf looked skittish enough to bolt at the idea of baring his flesh to Michelle.

  “Fine.” Anatoly set the vodka on top of the crate and rolled up his jacket sleeve on his left arm. “But I’m not giving her my neck. I’m not that stupid.” He stepped up with his left wrist bared.

  Ivan’s laughter rumbled in his chest as he snagged the vodka and directed traffic with an arm around Aaron and Anatoly’s shoulders. “There’s a room over here boys. No need to put on a show.”

  Ivan led them to a room that was once an office, complete with rusty, cast-iron steam radiators. The grizzled wolf yanked the dusty blankets off of a mattress so old that Stalin himself had probably slept on it. “Here. This will work.”

  Aaron laid Michelle out, ever so gently.

  Ivan sucked another swig off the vodka, handed the bottle to Anatoly and bared his left wrist first. “Do I put it to her mouth?”

  Aaron lashed out with a sleight of hand and scored a red line across Ivan’s wrist. The big man stepped back with a hiss of pain. “Mudak!” Though Aaron didn’t understand Russian, he knew when he was being called an asshole.

  “Now put it to her mouth.” Aaron grinned at Ivan and licked the blood off his claws.

  Ivan didn’t hesitate to shove his bloody wrist at Michelle’s lips. The man had more spine than anyone Aaron had ever met. Almost instantly Michelle latched onto him with her teeth and bit down.

  Ivan gasped, but held his ground without flinching. After a few seconds of Michelle’s suction, the wolf’s eyes closed and he started to sway.

  Shit. Michelle had fed from Ivan in the car, just before the shooting. “Stop! No more!” Aaron yanked Ivan’s wrist out of Michelle’s mouth and licked the wound one time to seal it. “You’ve given her plenty tonight.”

  Ivan shook his head. A sloppy grin split his face. His eyes were the brilliant hazel of his wolf. The guy was toasted on venom. Please god, not another bloodslave. Please.

  Anatoly took another drink from the bottle and set it aside. Like a school boy facing a shot of penicillin from the doctor, Anatoly stepped up, head turned away, arm held out. Aaron chuckled, slashed a small nick in his skin and guided Anatoly’s wrist to Michelle’s mouth. As soon as the warm bloody skin hit her lips, her teeth sunk into the new meal. The Russian would have yanked his arm away if not for Aaron’s firm grip holding him in place. Gritting his teeth at the sting of her bite, and his fear of being torn to pieces, Anatoly’s face gradually morphed from oh-god-I’m-dying to hey-this-isn’t-so-bad.

  Aaron let it go on for a count of one minute, and then pulled Anatoly’s arm away from Michelle’s teeth and sealed his wound with a quick lick. The Russian’s lazy eyes had also gone full-on golden wolf with huge dilated pupils. A bit of slobber trailed down the side of Anatoly’s mouth as he giggled and rubbed the wet lump in his pants. The wolf was happy, but he’d probably have to change his clothes.

  Aaron slid his jacket sleeve up and slashed his wrist to place it against Michelle’s mouth. As she sucked from his flesh for two minutes straight, Aaron hoped it would be enough for her. Though grinning and sighing from the wondrous high of her venom, he wondered where she’d catch her next meal. The list of donors had just run out.

  * * * *

  Chapter 7

  Aaron sat in his chair and watched Michelle. He stroked the hair from her forehead and wished there was some way he could leave this godforsaken frozen city and enjoy his life with the amazing, psychotic, yet wonderful women he’d managed to surround himself with. He imagined what it might be like to travel the world in class with Michelle and Katya at his side, even Urvashi–when she felt like it. No worries, no wolf packs, no Russian vampires hunting them at every turn.

  He sighed and let the anxiety flow away as Urvashi had taught him. Find your center. She had coached him through numerous sessions of meditation, and he needed that sense of calm badly. He tried to block out the scuffling noises, gruff voices speaking Russian, and the rank smell of old blood on Michelle’s wounds. Little by little the stress drained away. Only Aaron existed, sitting in his chair. All concerns disappeared as he found his well of inner strength and tapped into that mystical place inside his mind.

  Click, slap, bang. “Hold the bloody door would you?”

  Katya’s voice broke his meditation and he slowly opened his eyes to see her and Ivan shouldering Nikolay’s unconscious weight between them. Veins and tendons popped out of Ivan’s neck from the strain of lifting over two hundred pounds of dead weight. He grunted with each step. “On the bed.”

  Katya lined up beside the bed. She pegged Aaron with a look. “You better be right about this. I don’t want her to hurt him. He’s already a mess.” They settled Nikolay on the mattress next to Michelle, like a slab of beef waiting for her to wake up and snack on.

  Aaron’s stomach growled at the scent of the fresh blood. He hadn’t fed to satisfaction for days. And the wolves were already over-tapped, especially Katya. She looked at him with dark rings around her eyes, the need for another bite ever present.

  It was becoming difficult to bite her without feeding, but he would do it for her.

  She leaned down and sniffed at Nikolay, then glanced at Ivan. “He’s going to be fine. We just need to get him eating, so he can change.” Ivan nodded at her and settled into the chair on the other side of Michelle’s bed.

  His eyes flicked to Aaron and back to Katya. “You should get some rest. I will watch them. They aren’t going anywhere soon.”

  Katya patted the older wolf on the shoulder. “Thank you.” With barely restrained need, she came straight for Aaron and grabbed his hand to pull him towards the door.

  Ivan nodded as Aaron silently followed his bloodslave to find a private place to give her what she craved so badly.

  * * * *

  Michelle woke to the weight of a warm body squishing the mattress at her side. The strong scent of blood and dust assaulted her senses. She snuggled up against the warmth, though it smelled vaguely of dog. She opened her eyes to a series of partition walls arranged into the shape of a cubicle room, and a high corrugated steel ceiling with open steel support girders that crisscrossed every which way. On the mattress next to her lay Nikolay, the russet-haired Russian wolf. Shirtless and unconscious, his chest still bled from bullet wounds. Seemed as though he’d been arranged at her side – just for her.

  How thoughtful. The wolves weren’t usually so forthcoming.

  “Breakfast in bed?” Ivan snickered from the other side of the room, sitting on a chair watching her. She looked down to find herself comple
tely nude. The blanket covering her slid down as she sat up. She looked back up to Ivan. He didn’t even blink as he stared at her bare breasts, a cheesy grin stuck to his stubbly face. “Go ahead. Aaron tells us it will be good for Nikolay if you clean his wounds.”

  Michelle watched Ivan for a moment, adjusting to the strange new paradigm of feeding from the wolves. She knew the wolves didn’t trust her enough to turn their backs on her, but, for whatever reason, something had changed. She turned back to the meal beckoning her attention. The man didn’t wake, but his chest rose and fell with his breathing, and his heart beat was stable. Without delay, she began meticulously cleaning away the blood from his chest. As she leaned forward, she let the blanket slide down further, showing her bare back and the top of her ass to Ivan as she lapped up every last drop she could get from Nikolay.

  She lacked at the wound, wishing for more, when a warm, callused hand squeezed her butt cheek. “I think he’s good now.”

  She turned to find Ivan leaning over her, an expectant look in his eyes. His hand was still on her ass, and she kind of liked it there. The big man reminded her of her lover so many years ago in France, a large Norseman who’d given his life bringing Michelle back to sanity. Both men had powerful physiques and a subtle, confident humor.

  Almost nose to nose with the wolf, she licked her lips. “What can I do for you?”

  Ivan’s gaze trailed down her body, to the edge of the blanket that had fallen to expose her full nudity. “If there is any way I can help you recover, I am at your service.” His hand still hadn’t left her ass.