Gritting his teeth through the pain, he focused hard, listening to the sounds of meaty death coming from the wolf’s snapping jaws. Soon, the shooting stopped.
Aaron lay there, exhausted, in pain, knowing he needed to get up and get the girls out of this blood-soaked den of death before the police surrounded the place. “Move Aaron. Move fast.”
He stood up. Michael Jamison was crouched near Michelle, not ten feet away. Mike caught the movement and stared directly at Aaron, unflinching.
Vampire to vampire.
Mike put a little black pistol up against Michelle’s skull. He glanced at the wolf tearing it up at the entrance to the room, and whispered to Aaron. “She will probably recover from these wounds in a couple days. But she won’t survive if I blow her brains all over the floor.”
Aaron read it crystal clear in Mike’s thoughts. The man really wanted to kill Michelle, badly. She had ripped out his intestines, shredded half his body, left him for dead. The memory of it still traumatized him. Michelle was Mike’s own personal demon.
Aaron looked at the gun, and then at Jamison’s eyes. “If you kill her, you’re dead.”
“Perhaps. But you can still save her. Drop your blades and walk away from this massacre. No one else needs to die tonight.”
Aaron wanted it so bad, to just drop his swords and walk out the door with the women.
But Mike didn’t mean a word of it.
No matter what Aaron did, Mike would kill Michelle, one way or another. Mike couldn’t stand the thought of her alive, hunting him down, haunting him night after night. He needed to kill her for his sanity.
Aaron sighed. “Okay. I am putting my swords down now. Put your gun down.”
Jamison stared at him, assessing the risk. “You first.”
“We’ll do it together, same time.”
Jamison eyes flicked to the swords, then to his own pistol, measuring the odds. He nodded. Aaron nodded back. They both set their weapons down.
As soon as Aaron’s swords clinked to the hardwood floor, Mike snatched up his pistol and fired at him. Aaron shot Jamison six times in the chest with Ivan’s pistol through his jacket pocket.
Jamison’s single shot aimed true, straight through Aaron’s left shoulder.
“Motherfucker!”
He staggered, but kept to his feet. Blood streaked down his arm and dripped off his elbow. “God dammit!”
He walked over to Jamison and kicked him. “Why did you make me do this? Asshole!” He reached down to Michelle’s hand and wrapped her fingers around the pistol grip. “This one’s yours, love. He pulled Michelle’s unconscious trigger finger over and over, unloading Ivan’s pistol into Jamison.
Searching the vampire’s mind, he found a spark of life still flickering. “Fucking vampires are hard to kill.”
He snatched his swords off the floor and separated Jamison’s head in one clean stroke. “Idiot. Should have taken your own advice and walked away.” He wiped his blades on Jamison’s jacket and sheathed his swords.
Looking around, Aaron found himself standing in a slaughterhouse. The wolf was gnawing on meaty bones, crushing them in its powerful jaw. It looked at him for a moment, licked blood off its chops, and growled.
“Bad dog!” Aaron pointed his finger at the animal, and it ignored him in favor of continuing its meal.
A whimpering sound issued from behind a doorway at the back of the room. “What now?”
Swords in hand, Aaron slinked over to the door and yanked it open. He dodged to the side to avoid any gunfire. A woman’s squeal of terror was all he heard.
“No, no, no.” He shook his head, dreading what he would find hiding in the bathroom. Peeking in the doorway, he saw Janette on the floor in black lingerie beside another woman in nothing but black thong panties. The woman was dead, shot in her left breast.
Janette was alive and well, untouched, shaking in terror, crying like a baby.
Aaron took a deep steadying breath as the horrible weight of responsibility pressed him down. “I told you to leave town. I told you to run. Why didn’t you fucking listen?”
* * * *
Chapter 20
“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 i
nstinctively. 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.
* * * *
Chapter 21
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.
The Nightlife: London (Urban Fantasy Romance) (The Nightlife Series) Page 12