The Nightlife Moscow (Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Suspense) (The Nightlife Series Book 5) (4 page)

Aaron leaned over to take Michelle from Ivan, but the car
zig-zagged left, then right, knocking him back into his seat. Tires squealed.
Wolves growled. Gunshots flew everywhere. One shot sliced across Aaron’s cheek
and he barely turned away in time as the bullet blew out another window of the vehicle.
Anatoly fired a few rounds at the drive-by shooters, but abandoned the effort
to focus on speeding through the icy streets to escape.

Katya had dropped low into Anatoly’s lap, but then popped her
blood-splattered face up with her eyes wild and a pistol in each hand. She
scanned side to side, looking for someone or something to shoot at. She sighted
in on the black SUV trailing behind and unloaded both guns out the open rear
window. Her barrage of gunfire barely missed Urvashi. Their pursuer rolled off
the road to grind into a parked car. Katya must have nailed the driver.

Aaron lost patience with Ivan’s possessive hold on Michelle’s
limp body. “Give her to me!”  He reached over the top of Urvashi and pulled
Michelle into his arms. Looking shell-shocked, Ivan handed the vampire over
carefully, like precious cargo. The question was in his eyes before he spoke. “Is
she…?”

Michelle whimpered in Aaron’s arms, but didn’t stir as he
cradled her like a baby.

Nikolay pulled his blood-covered hand away from his chest,
and looked at it with disgust. He reached past Katya and slammed his fist on
the dashboard. “Fucking, Dmitri!”

“Of course it was Dmitri! It’s always fucking Dmitri!” Katya
screamed in Nikolay’s face as if she couldn’t stand to hear the obvious. Then she
wiped the blood off her cheeks and looked more closely at her brother.
Realization dawned in her eyes as Nikolay slumped against her shoulder. “Nikolay?”
She turned his face towards her. “No, no, no! Damn it, Kolya! Kolen’ka, stay
with me.”

Tears running down her cheeks, Katya pulled his head up and
smacked him, trying to wake him. He was limp weight in her hands. She turned on
Anatoly and screamed, “Drive faster! We’re losing him!”

All Aaron could do for the moment was hold Michelle close as
he frantically probed her mind. He found only black unconsciousness, though
still alive. Blood from a scalp wound at her temple poured down her face and
onto his fingers. He knew Michelle had survived multiple gunshot wounds before,
but a head wound?

Fear gripped his chest.
Not again
.
Please God,
don’t let me lose her again
.

Ivan’s eyes flicked back and forth from Michelle to Urvashi
to Aaron to Katya in the front seat. Though the wolves usually held a solid
block on their minds, Aaron caught a hint of that same rare emotion from Ivan –
fear.
How odd
. Beyond his fear for Nikolay and concern for the other
wolves, the big man actually gave a shit if Michelle lived or died.

Ivan wiped Michelle’s blood off his hand onto his jeans and
looked away from Aaron’s searching gaze. He barked orders at Anatoly. “Take us
to the warehouse. No more hiding games!”

Anatoly glanced back at Ivan. “Now? But …”

“Now. We take the fight to Dmitri.”

Watching Ivan with a dour look Urvashi held Michelle’s legs
in her lap, stroking her pale white skin absentmindedly. His master, the fallen
angel, had barely flinched through the shooting. Her unblinking stare leveled
on Ivan. “We’re not prepared to take on Dmitri yet.”

Ivan glared at her. “Dmitri’s hired guns just tried to kill
us, again. Almost finished the job this time. If we wait any longer no one will
be left alive to move against him.” The inner fire of his wolf had faded from
his eyes, replaced by the steely blue-grey. His gaze settled on Michelle and
Aaron’s hand stroking her blood-splattered hair from her forehead.

Another sharp pang of fear spiked in Aaron’s gut. He didn’t
know what he’d do without Michelle in his life. He thought he’d lost her back
in Paris, and for a time he had. He looked to his master for answers, a fallen
angel with abilities that bordered on the miraculous.

Ivan finally asked the question that had been on his face
for several minutes. “She’ll be okay ... right?”

Aaron projected all his fear and intense love for Michelle
through his bond with Urvashi, speaking directly into her mind. {{You must heal
her.}}

{{This is no place for such things. Wait until we get down
from the car.}}

{{No. Do it now!}}

Ivan watched the silent exchange between Aaron and his
master, and Aaron suspected he knew what was happening.

Urvashi spoke low. “I can’t focus like this.”

{{I don’t give a fuck. Heal her now. And him too.}}Aaron
leaned his head in the direction of Nikolay.

Spurred on by Aaron’s silent gesture, Ivan snagged a t-shirt
from the duffle bag at his feet and leaned over Nikolay in the front seat to
place the fabric over his chest. He looked to Katya, and the gold tint of wolf
flared in his eyes. “Hold pressure on his wounds. We have to stop the bleeding.”

Katya pressed the shirt against Nikolay’s chest and sat
there eyeing everyone with a tight-lipped glare that betrayed only the slightest
edge of her hysteria. Since the shooting, her mental shields had wavered on and
off, and Aaron caught a glimpse of her desperation. She couldn’t handle losing
another of her brothers. She was barely holding onto her sanity. Only the
warmth and continued fall and rise of Nikolay’s chest kept her from screaming.

Aaron narrowed his gaze on his powerful master, a well of
intensity building within him. The bitch had all that fucking power, yet she
just sat there doing nothing. What good is the power of angels if it can’t save
a life? “You will help them. You will help Michelle.” His voice came out in a
pure growl. He was close to losing it.

“She’ll be fine, Aaron. You know she has survived worse.”
Her calm words spoke of reason, but Aaron wasn’t buying the bullshit.

“Whatever you want from me, whatever secret agenda you’ve
been hiding, I’ll do it. I’ll owe you. Just help her, now.”

“Despite what you think, my ‘agendas’ are not always about
you. But I will help, as the situation allows.” Urvashi closed her eyes for a
few seconds and placed her palm against Michelle’s bloody temple. Aaron felt a
vibrating hum and thought he could actually see the flow of Urvashi’s powerful
aura as it trickled through her into Michelle. The fallen angel spoke under her
breath, some kind of Latin incantation. The words were meaningless to Aaron.
All that mattered was Michelle, and the life force he felt pouring off of
Urvashi.

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.

* * * *

“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 cracked 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.

* * * *