Could he be right? Had she been lying to herself all these years? Could they really find a way to live with bloodslaves, as lovers and friends, without hurting them?
Maybe it was possible. They could provide them with venom for the daylight hours, or perhaps medicine could help. And when they became too weak, why not give them blood transfusions? Maybe with some caution and planning it could be done.
Julian’s whole existence had been a lie to cover up the truth. He enjoyed sadism and murderer, hurting people by choice, not necessity. Aaron never hurt Anastasia, not like Julian hurt the bloodslaves. None of those women had to die. Lucas didn’t have to die. Arnaud didn’t have to die.
She sat down hard on a chair in the hotel lobby, reeling in shock from the gravity of this life-changing realization. “I killed them. They loved me and I killed them like cattle.”
She was so absorbed, she didn’t notice Maximillian Sinclair, the night manager, until he set his hand on her shoulder. “Madam, excusez-moi. Madam, I must speak with Monsieur Pilan. He is not with you at the moment?”
“Non.” She snapped at him curtly.
“Is there something wrong?”
“Non, I am fine.” Everything was wrong. Her entire life for the past seventy years was wrong.
“Please inform Monsieur Pilan we have received his wire transfer. Do you expect him to return soon?”
His question hurt. Her heart squeezed painfully, wondering when Aaron might return to her. She should go find him, first thing after sunset she would find him.
Max seemed sensitive to her pain. “I am certaine he will return soon.” He patted her on the shoulder, but she looked away, uncomfortable with the placation. “If he does not return, he is the stupidest américaine in all of France. It would be his loss, Madam.”
She smiled quickly, appreciative of his kindness, but feeling the anxiety of the coming sun. “I must go now.” She rushed to the room and hurriedly secured the curtains against the coming sunrise.
Lying in bed, in the sheets that still held the scents of their lovemaking, she felt more alone than ever.
* * * *
Michael Jamison paced his hotel room just after sunrise, a caged animal planning an escape. This had been the best night of his investigative career. The revelations of this night were so intensely gratifying, he was beside himself with wonder and excitement. The audio bugs he had planted in Aaron and Michelle’s hotel room had proven useless so far, but the CIA model bugging maser gun he carried as he followed them to Michelle’s family mansion was worth its weight in gold.
He had setup the maser on its tripod while huddled on the roof across the street, Rue des Rosiers, aiming the laser eye directly at the bedroom window where Aaron and Michelle sat on the little red velvet couch for their heart to heart talk. The maser bounced its beam off the glass, detecting the most miniscule vibrations of sound waves against the glass. The ultrasensitive microphone picked up even the slightest whisper loud and clear. He had listened in on Michelle’s staggering confessions. He heard everything, the whole grisly tale. He knew about their weaknesses, their extremely long lifespans, and the issues related to bloodslaves that led to their foolish argument.
“How horrible is that? To argue over whether or not you should have friends? Whether or not it’s OK to feed from us. Humans. Fuckin’ lame. They’re like gods, but they squabble like children.” He shook his head, laughing.
In general, Mike could care less what the sheeple did with their lives. Most of humanity provided absolute zero useful contribution to the world or the human genome. What difference did it make if a few of them died once in a while to feed such sublime creatures? Shit, everyone knew the world was headed toward catastrophic overpopulation. Might do the Earth good to see a few less people on the planet.
He considered their argument ridiculous and shortsighted.
And he now knew the most important thing of all, what it took to become one of them. It was all in the blood. More specifically, Michelle’s blood. She may have feared the potential her blood holds, but Mike saw it differently. Opportunity, waiting to be seized, taken, realized for its fullest potential.
His mind raced feverishly through all the necessary preparations. He had eleven hours till sunset at 7:29 p.m. to take ahold of his destiny, to change everything he had ever known for the better.
“Carpe Diem, motherfuckers!” He pumped his fist in the air.
While they slept like the dead, he would make his move. By the time they awoke at sunset, Mike would have everything he wanted, and there’d be absolutely nothing they could do to stop him.
* * * *
Chapter 18
It had been a long day for Michael Jamison, longer than some of his days spent roasting under the hot sun in Iraq, looking for non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Although it had seemed too much to accomplish before sunset, he had pulled it off with a couple hours to spare.
First, the property management company jacked him around for several hours, before giving him the keys. The a-holes charged him double the usual rental rate, taking full advantage of his urgency. He didn’t really give a shit. He got what he needed and headed straight back to the hotel.
He expected to use a card hacker device to get through the electronic locks on her Michelle’s hotel door. Then he noticed the door had a regular key lock for use in the event of a power outage. On a hunch, he slid his key gun into the lock and jigged it for a few seconds. Click, pop, it opened right up.
“Hey, whaddya know.”
The door stopped moving two inches in. She had used the security hasp on the inside. “Fucking paranoid vampires.” He shook his head snickering. “Afraid somebody might do this?”
He shoved his cordless reciprocating saw into the gap and cut through the cheap Chinese pot metal like an electric steak-knife carving rump roast.
The hasp popped and he walked right into her room. His breath caught in his throat at the sight of her. She lay in bed, the covers partway off her magnificent, flawless, half-naked body. The vampire reminded him it had been two months since he’d last bedded an escort back in Vegas. Michelle gave him an instant hard-on, and she wasn’t even awake to focus those damned freaky eyes on him.
He fought against the urge to feel her fabulous body while he fit her into a six foot sea trunk. She didn’t stir, didn’t even look like she breathed. He watched her for several minutes, putting his hand by her mouth to detect the faint movement of air. He checked her pulse. Barely there, ultra-light. It seemed that vampires had suppressed biorhythms throughout daylight. Now he understood how easily they could be mistaken for dead, or undead. He focused on priorities, and snatched his hands away from her – so vulnerable, so entrancing in her beauty, yet easily taken advantage of.
From there things moved along fairly quickly. With a luggage rack, he hauled the sea trunk down to his rented pickup truck in the parking garage and sped off to the warehouse. Inside the vacant building, while chaining her to the sturdy oak table, he fought off that same urge to touch Michelle, to fondle all her beautiful pale flesh. The rape of a comatose woman didn’t do it for him. Though he planned to steal some of her blood, anything else just seemed wrong.
With Michelle secured, he extracted an entire half-liter of her blood using four different syringes. His coffee mug filled with her wicked elixir, he paused to make a toast. “Here’s to new beginnings, and the end of a lifetime of catering to bullshit and ignorance.” He tossed back the whole mug. He almost gagged, but managed to keep it down.
“Oh that’s nasty.” He shivered with revulsion at the flavor and thick gooey texture coating his throat. “I guess I better get used to it now.”
In no time at all, he felt her blood working its inexplicable magic, a tingling sensation all through his body. What began as a tingle became a tickle, an itch. And then he started sweating. Even though the A/C was on, and the thermometer showed a cool seventy degrees in the warehouse, he felt hotter by the minute.
He took off his
button down shirt, wearing only the T-shirt underneath. “Damn it’s hot!”
In the warehouse bathroom, he splashed water on his head and stared in the mirror. A pale sweaty face and bloodshot eyes stared back at him. He looked like he’d been on a three day bender.
His fever gradually climbed till he thought for sure his blood must be boiling. He looked at the skin on his arm, expecting to see it bubble up at any time. I’m frying from the inside out. He retained enough clarity of thought to slap on a 50mg Fentanyl patch painkiller. The gel on the patch absorbed straight through the skin, a nice little punch. The drug helped some, but his burning fever continued cranking up the heat.
By sunset he was in so much pain he had put on a second patch, sporting one on each shoulder. The strong opiates made him rummy, sick to his stomach, but they barely took the edge off his intense scorching fever.
“She never said it would be like this! I’m burning up!” He cursed and flailed as he tried to relax on a foldout cot, a few feet away from the comatose vampire.
* * * *
Michelle awoke to cold chains, shackles, and her arms handcuffed above her head, the cuffs attached to the heavy wooden table underneath her. It felt eerily similar to the way Julian had tied her in his basement just before he’d staked and whipped her to a bloody pulp.
She smelled a man in distress, acrid sweat, and heard his thrashing and moaning. She found him down on the concrete floor to her right. He looked half delirious, very sick. She had seen this once before. Aaron had been plagued by the same symptoms after she fed him her blood. Then she noticed it in his scent, the change. He didn’t smell precisely human anymore.
She reached out with her mind, sensing the tentative beginnings of a psychic bond. Michael Jamison was his name, and the idiot had stolen her blood!
She sneered down at him. She felt his fear, his vulnerability, the moment he realized she awakened.
She ordered him, “Come to me and undo my chains.” His eyes popped in surprise as he understood the power he had given her over his body.
He jerked and whined as her authority yanked on his pain-wracked body, forcing him to stand and walk to her table. Every move elicited a gasp from his lips.
He shook and begged as he unlocked her cuffs and shackles, her will forcing his hands to work. “Please help me. I didn’t know it would be this bad. It burns, I’m on fire!”
She spit in his face. “Brule en enfer!” Burn in hell!
She sensed his dread as her hate-filled eyes stared him down. She growled in his face baring her teeth and he shuffled back in fear. “You thought to take my blood and kill me? You thought to have my power without consequence? You are a fool. And now you’re my fool.”
She smacked him hard, sending him flying back through the air to thud onto his back on the concrete floor.
“What a nice gift, a new toy. A slave. You may have my blood, but you have given me your life in exchange. Tu es complétement débile!” You’re a complete moron.
* * * *
Mike tried to blink away the haze of drug and pain. He hadn’t been hit that hard since he was in a bar fight in Hawaii and this big nasty Samoan laid into him. Michelle’s jarring, whip-like smack packed the same wallop as a man three times her size.
He regained his senses enough to know she would never help him. The opiates had fuzzed his head up too much. It had been pointless to ask for help from a creature like her.
He was royally fucked.
His father, an ex-marine, had always told him, “Son, the devil is in the details. It’s the little things that count. You get them right and everything else falls into place.”
He thought he had planned for everything, made all the preparations. But this was way out of control. This she-devil had overcome every detail of his plans with her irresistible compulsion. And she stood there mugging him with a look of intense hatred. Check-mated in one move, she was now free and capable of ordering him around like a dog.
Time for plan B.
Mike could hardly stand, let alone walk. But he could reach into the waist of his pants to retrieve the black market Glock he bought the day before, and he could still aim and shoot, mostly.
“You think you own me bitch? Own this!” he screamed as he fired at her four times.
Normally, Mike was a damn good shot, but he wasn’t exactly in top shape, and she moved like a lightning bolt straight for him. His first shot missed. Second one nailed her in the leg, flipping her over into a tumble on the concrete. The third shot missed, but as she regained her feet, his fourth shot slammed her dead center in the chest, dropping her almost on top of him.
He scrambled back away as fast as he could move in a military ‘monkey crawl’ – all those boot camp drills finally proved useful. He made it several yards when she latched onto his left calf with her nasty talons, digging in to the bone.
Screaming and flailing, he tried to dislodge her from his body, but she had him in a wicked strong death grip and wouldn’t let go. She whipped out with another clawed hand and sank into his thigh, working her way up onto him.
So much stronger than any woman her size should ever be, she flipped him over onto his back as if he was a child. And then she did what she’d done to the Nazis all those years ago, digging her razor claws into his soft belly to pull his guts out. Screaming in agony and shock, knowing he would soon die, he resolved to take this monster with him on a ride to hell.
He unloaded the remaining eleven shots of his fifteen shot Glock into Michelle’s torso at point blank range.
* * * *
Aaron awoke disoriented. He didn’t recognize his surroundings. Where the hell was Michelle? It all came back in a crush of remembrance, her tale, their argument, everything. Some uneasiness lurked at the edge of his awareness. He had a sense of something seriously wrong.
He reached down his psychic connection to Michelle. He found her in some commercial building about twenty miles away in extreme agony, a burning, searing pain. He felt her agony as his own, his leg and chest torn apart. High screaming wails deafened his ears. She needed him!
Screaming with her pain and rage, he threw open the internal blocks barring the Predator’s access to his higher functions and released the beast. Extreme levels of adrenaline flooded his body, ratcheting up his aggression. He embraced the beast’s primal elements. He rocketed out the mansion, a growling blur of movement.
As he took to the rooftops gaining speed and momentum he felt a series of punches to his chest and tumbled-scrabbled-scraped across the roof trying to regain his footing. Feeling his chest, he realized it wasn’t him who’d been shot all those times, but Michelle. She was hurt bad, dying.
Reaching down through his bond to her, he filled her mind with the assurance that he would be there momentarily,
She responded with a soul-shaking scream of compulsion born of desperation and suffering.
And he did.
He streaked across the rooftops, no longer visible to the human eye. Accelerating with every ounce of strength and power, Aaron Pilan broke the world’s record for the fastest animal on land.
He burst the warehouse door off its hinges with his entry. Skidding to a halt, he absorbed a nauseating scene of carnage. The images hit him in flashes, like crime scene snapshots from a gruesome horror film. A heavy dark-wood table complete with handcuffs, chains and shackles stood to one side, something used for torture. Michelle lie on the floor, her upper body shredded, bloody raw meat. She floated in a sea of her own blood.
Nearby was a man Aaron had never seen before, his condition seemingly worse than Michelle’s. His intestines and internal organs trailed out onto the concrete. Shiny tendon held shredded muscle to bone on his forearms and legs. He was dead meat.
Convinced the man presented no threat, Aaron dipped into the pool of blood to scoop his master into his arms, cradling her close.
“Oh my god, Michelle, I’m so sorry. I should have been with you. I should have be
en there.” He babbled, crying, panicked.
She needed a doctor, a hospital, a blood transfusion. Driven by the need to do something, anything, he raced out into the street with her in his arms. He didn’t know where to find the nearest hospital or even what emergency number to call.
And he had no cell phone.
Standing in the street helpless, he felt a tug on his mind. Michelle’s devastated heart faltered and skipped. She was dying in his arms, and nothing he could do would stop it from happening.
Blood, she needed blood. He kneeled down to rest her on his knee with one arm, and tore open his wrist with his teeth.
He held his wrist to her mouth begging her. “Come on, Michelle, bite down. You need this, take it! Come on! Take it!”
For the first time since he was sixteen years old sitting at his father’s death bed, Aaron prayed to God. He wasn’t sure if God existed, but he prayed. “Please God, help her, she needs you. I can’t lose her like this, God, please! I don’t know what to do!”
His prayers were answered. She bit down on his wrist, sucking down his blood with a weak slurp. He heard sirens in the distance, coming nearer, they would arrive soon. Someone must have heard the shots and called the police.
“Help is on the way, Michelle, just hang on.”
Miraculously, she opened her eyes. Her beautiful emerald-green eyes looked directly at him, and held his gaze intensely. He felt her single overpowering emotion washing over him.
Love. Unconditional love.
All was forgiven. She loved him with all her heart and soul.
Aaron couldn’t even recall why they argued. It didn’t matter. Facing the loss of his lover and companion, all priorities had been suddenly rearranged. Hope flared. She loved him. She fed from his wrist.
“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.
The Nightlife: Paris (The Nightlife Series) Page 12
