The Nightlife: Paris (The Nightlife Series)

by Travis Luedke

  He followed her mind as she drifted off into the peace of oblivion. As she winked out, head-splitting pain slammed through his skull. The psionic ties binding him to Michelle tore from the roots of his psyche. His mind unraveled. Like an intricately supported suspension bridge, his mind twisted, shattered, and collapsed violently from the backlash of the severed connections.

  Aaron Pilan’s world ended, not with a bang, but a whimper.

  * * * *

  Chapter 19

  The Predator sat in the street with Michelle in his arms, rocking, keening, wailing, an inhuman expression of grief and suffering. The Paris police finally arrived, too late. They surrounded him, guns drawn, yelling in French.

  He looked to them, read their minds, saw how they saw him. His shirt and slacks covered in her blood, he looked an awful lot like her murderer. And he howled like an animal in pain. The sounds of either grief or homicidal madness, who could know for sure?

  The Predator surveyed the area, squinting past the blinding pain and flashing lights on the police cars. The threats were everywhere, too many to be neutralized. He would have to run. He set his master on the street with care, and then moved in a blur, smashing past the nearest officer to race down the street.

  He took to the rooftops, evading the compact Citroen police cars that zigzagged through the streets looking for him. He traveled the rooftops until he could no longer hear sirens of pursuit. And then he stopped, no idea of where he was or where to go.

  He stayed there for a time, his head in his hands, mewling through the intense agony pounding in his skull. He needed sanctuary, and to feed. Too weary. Apathetic. Lost. He had lost his mind. Lost his way. Lost the will to act.

  * * * *

  Eugene Marcel, Gene to those who knew him, took one look at the blonde woman he was supposed to scrape off the street and cursed, “Merde!”

  He had extensive experience as a paramedic over the past ten years, and he didn’t think there was much he could do that would make a difference for her. Didn’t mean he wouldn’t try. He always tried. There were a few miracles still left in this world.

  It would take one hell of a miracle to save this woman. Nevertheless, he charged the defibrillator and zapped her chest. And nothing happened. His partner Martin continued the cycle of fifteen chest compressions and one puff of the AMBU bag air mask. Gene charged it back up and zapped her again. Blood spit at him from all the little holes in her chest as her muscles contracted in electric shock. Nothing.

  He repeated the cycle a total of four times, and still nothing.

  Martin sat back on his heels looking to Gene with the infamous Gallic shoulder shrug. “C’est fini.” It’s over.

  Gene glanced back down at the woman’s angelic face, wiped the blood from her cheek, and knew he couldn’t stand to give up, not with this one. He had once read a magazine article that said beautiful people tend to get better medical attention, and in this instance that proved true. He fluffed the AMBU bag twice more, forcing air into her lungs, and charged the defibrillator for one more go.

  “You know we cannot do it more than four times,” Martin lectured him.

  The training guidelines teach that more than four attempts to defibrillate causes sufficient damage to the heart that it will never function properly, even if it does restart. Gene had bent the rules before, but never with any success.

  “What? Are you paying the electric bill?” He snickered at Martin.

  Gene’s wife Emily was fond of saying, ‘an idiot is one who continues to do the same thing repeatedly, expecting a different outcome each time.’ Perhaps I am an idiot. Oh well, so be it.

  He zapped her one last time.

  To the surprise of both idiot and his assistant, her heart restarted with an erratic spasm of beats, a rock band drum solo. Its rhythm normalized seconds later.

  Martin hurriedly puffed the AMBU bag while he helped Gene address the seemingly impossible task of staunching the flow of blood leaking from all those little holes in her chest. The hands of both skilled paramedics worked together frantically, making the impossible possible. They reduced her blood loss from a gushing mess to a slow drip.

  The two of them lifted her onto the stretcher, hauled her into the back of the truck where Martin attached two IV’s, one plasma, and one saline-glucose. They sat with her, puffing the AMBU bag as the driver raced against time and traffic to reach the trauma ward at the Hôpital Supérieur. Many small medical miracles awaited her arrival, and she needed every single one of them.

  Gene stared at this beautiful woman with a smile. She represented the anomaly in his own personal statistic. The fifth zap had never worked with anyone before her. He suspected it may never work again with anyone else, but that would not stop him from trying.

  * * * *

  The Predator crept through the dark alleys, seeking prey. He slinked up on a pair of men using hypodermic needles to administer heroin in the cold October night, hidden to all but the Predator. He leaped down from his perch on the roof two stories above and fed from one and then chased down the other. He left them dazed and stupid, but alive.

  He roamed aimlessly for hours until he found an abandoned building that showed no signs of recent occupancy. The place should have been condemned, but instead offered a much needed shelter in the lower level of the windowless basement.

  He awoke alone and cold, nothing but hunger to guide him. He took to the rooftops to roam the city, cruising in search of prey. He found one of the older districts, something about it seemed familiar. The name came to him, the Maraise. The area had once been the Jewish quarter, the ghetto in Michelle’s WWII. He vaguely recalled shadowy memories of hunting these streets, cutting down Nazis and French cops in the back alleys.

  It looked somewhat different now. The area had evolved into a chic bohemian cultural center, ripe with tourists. The tightly wound streets and alleys were loaded with people enjoying the nightlife. A target-rich environment.

  He had no concerns or worries, no plans for the future. He existed in the moment, a creature of pure instinct, seeking only to feed. All that remained of Aaron’s mind were fragments, splinters, and a lingering shadow of grief for his dead master.

  He spotted two women and a man. They spoke English with an accent. It floated to the surface of his broken mind, a snippet of memory. British people with British accents. Strangers in a strange land, much like him. They seemed oblivious to his presence as he stalked them from above.

  He followed for a time, gliding along silently, awaiting the right opportunity. Soon enough they walked into an area devoid of street lights. Drifting through shadow, the Predator made his move. Like a great cat sliding through the tall grasses of the savannah, he blended with the darkness, moving in on his targets unnoticed.

  Reading their minds, they did not see him until he stepped up a mere three feet away. To them he appeared to materialize from the darkness, born into the world at that moment.

  “Bloody hell! Where’d he come from?” The startled man looked to the women for answers.

  They saw his dark blue shirt stained with darker patches of reddish-black blood. His eyes held the feral gleam of a carnivore stalking prey. In their minds he was a fearsome sight. Their hearts raced and their eyes bulged.

  He loved the scents of their adrenaline, the noise of their pounding heartbeats. The man presented a problem, but he carried no weapons, no scents of steel or gunmetal. The Predator ignored him for the women. Walking right into their midst, he snared the tall, willowy blonde woman’s eyes and struck in a flash. She gasped and squirmed, but couldn’t escape his grip.

  The man made the mistake of trying to grab him. Without ceasing his feed, he whipped out, shoving the man off to land in the street on his ass. As he fed, he recalled a splinter of caution in his broken mind, not too much, not for too long. He released her and went for the other woman who stood cringing against the wall, watching with macabre fascination.

  A few years older, wiser, she had been so absorbed in watc
hing his assault on her sister, she forgot to run. He embraced her, took what he wanted, and left her heaving against the wall.

  The man regained his feet and his nerve. His cell phone in hand, he started dialing. “You had better leave now, I’m calling the police!”

  As the Predator moved in to slice the man open, neutralize the threat, he sensed a familiar presence. It caught his attention. The Watcher, the one who had followed him around the city the other night. The nondescript presence had a strange indefinable quality, different from anyone else he had ever known.

  It spoke directly into his mind.

  The Predator abandoned the Brits for the enticement of the Watcher. The Brits argued over his assault as he drifted off into the night to pursue the invitation.

  “Jenny, Sarah, are you hurt? Fucking wanker! I think he broke my nose!”

  “Serves you right. Shouldn’t have got involved. Oh my GOD! That was … amazing! I love Paris!”

  “Jenny?”

  “Mmm … Yes, that was … nice.”

  * * * *

  Chapter 20

  Michelle drifted through a drugged haze, listening to a man’s voice. “Eight 9mm slugs, a collapsed lung, shattered collar bone, perforations to the liver, kidneys, stomach, and large intestine, and 42 staples holding her ass together.”

  Opening her eyes, she could barely see through foggy vision. A man stood just outside the window to her room. He shook his head and flipped through a chart, pointing something out to a woman in a white smock.

  “She’s already taken a liter and a half of plasma, and I’m thinking she needs at least a half-liter blood transfusion. She should be in the morgue. Somebody killed her three times over.”

  The exhaustion and heavy drugs dragged her back into darkness.

  She awoke sometime later to the beeping sounds of her heart monitor. Trying to sit up, she struggled against the wires and lines entrapping her in a web of monitoring apparatus. Following the lines, they led to two different IV units standing on a tier beside her bed. Her chest and arms looked like a patchwork quilt, with all the blood soaked bandages. As soon as her drugged-fuzzy mind registered the contents of the IV bag dripping into her system, she hurriedly jerked off all the IV inserts. She feared what things they might be injecting into her body.

  Pulling off the last of the monitoring cables, the nausea hit her. They had been giving her some kind of clear fluids, a major no-no for vampires. The only thing her body required was blood, hot and fresh, pumped directly from the heart. She leaned over and wretched off the side of the bed, vomiting a nasty clear goo until she was dry heaving. Her body worked overtime to evacuate the unwelcome fluids by any and all means possible. She pissed right there in the bed, first time ever since 1940. She couldn’t imagine how horrible it must be to live with the constant need to urinate and defecate. How revolting! Her skin felt coated in a slimy residue as she sweated out the last of it.

  “C'est dégueulasse!” This is disgusting.

  Then she sensed the sunrise coming on. She had to move, and now. Slinking through corridors, she narrowly avoided detection by night shift nurses. She forced her aching, exhausted body to descend the stairwell. The lethargy of the coming daylight threatened to put her asleep right there on the stairs.

  Running on sheer willpower and instinct she found the basement. She located a seldom used storage room, everything covered in dust. She collapsed at the back of the room behind the old broken laundry bins as the sun’s first rays hit the hospital.

  * * * *

  The Predator grasped an intuitive sense of the cloaked creature he pursued. It liked to play games, delighting in the chase. It giggled at him. He bounded across the rooftops of Paris, moving at breakneck speed to close the distance.

  It taunted him with laughter, its billowing cloak just out of reach. How could it move so fast? It leaped high into the air, almost flying, and then glided down over a hundred yards away. Landing gracefully, like a dancer, it stood atop a dome ringed with pillars, waiting for him to catch up. The Predator vowed to make this creature pay for its mockery. Leaping and bounding he reached it a moment later. Then it disappeared in a flash.

  “Think you are the fastest? Think you are stronger than me, child?”

  It had flitted around to the other side of the dome. Racing between the pillars in chase, he realized where he stood – the Pantheon. He recalled a cab ride through the city, his lover and master holding his hand. Pain. Grief. Loneliness. This was the place Michelle had promised to bring him.

  He whined under the burden of grief, slumping down to bury his head in his hands. He missed her sooo much. His heart twisted into a tight, burning knot of pain.

  “Is this what you want?”

  She stood ten feet away, half-obscured by the pillar. Golden blonde curls of hair slipped out into the moonlight from beneath her black-hooded cloak. “You miss your blonde leech? You miss taking her petty orders?” She came to him, speaking in a melodic woman’s voice, bearing the face of his dead lover. It was not Michelle’s voice.

  He knew this could not be. A trick. An illusion. She had died.

  “I can tell you what to do. Would you follow my orders?” She advanced. He growled a warning and crouched, ready to attack.

  The Not-Michelle came closer, smiling, hand extended. He unhinged his jaw, teeth bared, claws out. Not-Michelle took another step, hand out, palm up, a peace offering.

  It looked like her, so gorgeous, the most beautiful woman he had ever known. His heart ached to look at her flawless pale skin, remembering snatches of her wonderful body wrapped around him, her soft cheek nestled against his chest.

  She smelled wrong. Not-Michelle.

  He refused her hand. There could be no substitute for his lover. The sense of loss crushed him back down to the ground to sit with his head in his hands, mewling and crying.

  “Fine. If you won’t follow your precious leech, follow me.” Then she changed.

  Right before his eyes the flesh and bones of her face flowed like gelatinous ooze recast into a new mold. Pale skin turned golden. Curly blonde hair darkened to straight glossy black with a slight inward curl at the tips. Emerald eyes elongated and stretched into dark brown tear drops at a slight angle, a Persian slant.

  A name floated to the surface of his mind, a celebrity. Kim Kardashian. But Not-Kim. She had stolen this face too. A thief of identities, a mimic shape-shifter. He wondered what she really looked like. Or perhaps she had been stealing the lives of others for so long she no longer had an identity of her own.

  The Not-Kim grabbed his hand. “Come, I promise not to hurt you.”

  She gripped him strongly, unnaturally strong. She pulled him up off the stone floor to his feet.

  With her touch came an overwhelming tidal wave of images, feelings, memories, information overload. She had known kings, queens, emperors, heads of state, presidents, all manner of men and women of power and authority. Grand and majestic palaces flitted past his eyes. Palaces so fabulous, so otherworldly, they must be constructs of heaven. Surely such beauty had never been made by human hands. Within the maelstrom of images he recognized several structures he’d seen in films and magazines: Taj Mahal, Hagia Sophia, and the Kremlin.

  He grasped a sense of time stretching out before him, decades, centuries, millenniums. All filled with religions, intrigue, politics, love, hate, desire, greed, and always the endless wars and death. Wars, old and new. Wars fought in deserts with chariots, brass swords and spears, in jungles with cavalry and elephants. On the shorelines of every land stood fortresses under siege, burnt and razed to the ground only to be remade in homage to the new regimes. Thousands of battles at sea with ships of all sizes and styles, Asian ships, Greek ships, Roman ships, vessels filled with grunting Norsemen at the oars, and the galleons of the Spanish, English, French, and Portuguese. And then came the floating fortresses, great battleships of steel, aircraft carriers, marvels of modern engineering.

  She had been there,
watching, behind the scenes, an ever-present observer of the folly of man. Millenniums past, in the Far East, she had acquired the name Urvashi, and they revered her as a fallen angel, an Apsara. She liked this name, this incarnation, her Persian princess persona.

  She had fulfilled many roles throughout the ages: advisor, consort, lover, wife, queen, empress, diviner, priestess, magician, sorceress, and even goddess. At times she had been considered angelic, divine, or demonic by various different societies and religious factions. She had carried the title Apsara for centuries, traveling throughout the Persian empires, counselor to Darius and Xerxes, favored by the Imperial Court.

  In the Middle East, her exploits spawned legends of the demonic djinn, a genie. In Greek mythology she was immortalized as the siren, the muse, the nymph or on occasion, even the goddess Aphrodite. In ancient African tribal myths she had been known as Asherah, the moon goddess who rose from the forest to seduce men. Throughout the Roman Empire, both Eastern Byzantium and Western Rome, she had been considered either angelic or demonic in accordance with the religious flavor of the day. In Norse myths she was the Valkyrie, revered as a divine member of Odin’s entourage. Through the dark ages she was again demonic, a witch, a succubus. With the ideological shifts of the renaissance she returned to the muse and nymph, painted as a temptress inspiring mankind to new heights of achievement in the arts.

  Tons and tons of details buried him, an overlapping in a crush of information flooding in so fast it filled his mind to overflowing. Her hand placed in his seemed to carry an electric shock, a path to ground for the endless data stream of her very, very long life. Shuddering under the weight of discovery, he moaned, his eyes rolled back in his head.