Overbite
Meg Cabot
The sequel to Meg Cabot’s bestselling paranormal romance with bite - InsatiableMeena Harper has bitten off more than she can chew . . .Meena has a special gift, but only now does anyone appreciate it. Her ability to predict how everyone she meets will die has impressed the Palatine Guard—a powerful secret demon-hunting unit of the Vatican—and they’ve hired her to work at their new branch in Lower Manhattan. Sure, Meena’s ex-boyfriend was Lucien Antonescu, son of Dracula. But that was before he (and their relationship) went up in flames, and now she’s sworn off vampires for good—even though she firmly believes that just because they’ve lost their souls, it doesn’t mean they can’t love.Convincing her new partner, Über-demon-hunter Alaric Wulf, that vampires can be redeemed won’t be easy . . . especially when a deadly new threat arises, endangering not only the Palatine, but Meena’s friends and family as well. As she unravels the truth, Meena will find her loyalties tested, her true feelings laid bare . . . and temptations she never even imagined before nearly impossible to resist.
OVERBITE
MEG CABOT
Table of Contents
Title Page (#uaa926c28-cdd8-596e-bc35-6e199ca82a66)
Part One: Friday, September 17 (#u70a3ca11-3206-5936-9b0d-6303b869fd2f)
Chapter One (#u0708d63a-db14-5be7-82ac-d5cbc6ef114d)
Chapter Two (#u894e3cc6-8e74-55e1-a08d-bc5d80d97886)
Chapter Three (#u7fb565c1-2a3f-5d55-81b8-2af426ec1498)
Chapter Four (#uc9fadc9b-543c-5324-880f-1f2ec48e2396)
Chapter Five (#u31684228-13f8-531b-9670-af56ae27d1ad)
Chapter Six (#u00e685d2-f9f8-5a5f-b020-3a1597e0dac3)
Part Two: Saturday, September 18 (#ue197e8cf-aa31-5ad2-8145-44469a5b8085)
Chapter Seven (#u0f766aaf-eb11-5490-9750-c68c85f195b1)
Chapter Eight (#ua429bc6a-cd2e-51fd-bd8f-07162bf6dacc)
Chapter Nine (#ub3b814d6-016d-593b-87bf-6dffba9911a7)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-four (#litres_trial_promo)
Part 3: Sunday, September 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourty-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourty-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Part 4: Saturday, October 2 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By Meg Cabot (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Part One (#ulink_0379d13d-dc68-5f4a-bb24-76f20e10843d)
Chapter One (#ulink_f3b74f8d-33c8-51fd-a4a1-b77869264b17)
Meena Harper knew things, things no one else knew … things no one could know.
One of those things was that the man sitting in the car beside her was going to die.
There were also many things Meena Harper did not know.
One of those was how she was going to break the news of this man’s impending death to him.
“Meena,” he said, gazing at her profile. “You have no idea how happy I am to see you. It’s funny that you called. I was just thinking of you.”
“It’s great to see you, too,” she said.
This was a lie. It wasn’t great seeing him. How was she going to tell him? Especially when he looked so terrible. He smelled terrible. Or maybe it was the inside of his car. She couldn’t figure out what the smell was.
“I was thinking of you, too,” she lied some more. “Thanks for meeting me.”
She looked around the dark, narrow street. She felt guilty for telling him all these lies, including that this was the street where she lived, then saying he couldn’t come up because her roommate’s parents were visiting.
“Are you sure you don’t want to get a cup of coffee?” she asked. “There’s a place right around the corner. It would be much nicer than sitting in your car.”
Especially considering the smell. And what she had to tell him.
“I’m sure,” he said, smiling. “You have no idea how much I’ve missed you.”
This was news to Meena. She hadn’t heard from him in more than a year. Their split had been relatively amicable—though at the time, she’d been convinced that her heart was broken. She was a dialogue-writer who’d been trying to make a living scratching out scripts for a now-canceled soap opera. He was a dentist specializing in veneers who’d wanted to move out to the suburbs and start a family.
Naturally, things hadn’t worked out.
“I thought you and Brianna were really happy,” she said. “What with the new practice and the baby and all.”
Which made it even worse. How was she going to break the news about his impending death when he had so much to live for?
He let out a bitter laugh. “Brianna,” he said. “She means nothing to me.”
“Of course she does,” Meena said, surprised. “What are you talking about?”
Now Meena was really worried about him. David had dumped her for Brianna. Brianna meant the world to him.
It had to be a brain tumor. That’s what had almost killed him the first time. But she’d sensed it and warned him, and the doctors had been able to find it in time to save his life.
Too bad the fact that she’d known about it had freaked him out so much that he’d run from her, straight into the arms of his radiology nurse.
But it was all right. Meena had built a new life for herself now. Sure, that life had been destroyed by Lucien Antonescu, the man who’d taught her what a broken heart really felt like.
But she managed never to think about him anymore.
Almost never.
It was only that lately, she’d been having such horrible dreams about David. In them, he was dead. It wasn’t that she could see his corpse. In the dream, she could see David’s future.
And he didn’t have one. Just darkness.
When she’d woken from the dream for a third morning in a row, breathless from feeling as if the darkness was closing in on her, she knew she had no choice but to call him.
But she also knew she couldn’t deliver news like this over the phone. They had to meet in person.
David had been surprisingly eager, offering to stop by on his way back to New Jersey after lunch and some dental meeting he had in the city.
But since Meena knew better than to give out her new address to anyone—even old boyfriends with whom she’d once lived—she’d automatically rattled off a fake one, and then met his car as he pulled up in front of the building.
Now, however, she was starting to regret this arrangement. Because David was acting so peculiarly. And what was that smell?
“You,” he said. “You were always the one, Meena.”
“David.” Meena was confused. “You dumped me for Brianna. You said you wanted to be with someone who gave people life, not someone who predicted their death. Remember?”
“I should’ve stayed with you,” David said. “I should’ve. We were so much better together, you and me, than me ’n Brianna. Why didn’t I stay with you, Meena? Why didn’t I? You were magical, with your … magic.”
Finally, comprehension dawned. At least now she knew what was causing the funny smell. It made her job a lot simpler.
“Okay,” she said, looking around on the floor of the car for the bottle. Or maybe he was just still soused from his lunch? How many martinis did dentists drink when they got together in the city for lunch meetings, anyway?
“Remember when you used your magic on me before,” he said, “and made me all better? Do it again. I’m begging you.”
“That’s not really how it works,” Meena said, still looking for the bottle. “I’m not saying I can’t help you. Because I think I can. You’re just going to have to meet me halfway and tell me where the bottle is.”
That’s when he lunged across the seat to kiss her. And she found the bottle. It was actually a flask, and it was pressing aggressively against her thigh through his pants pocket.
Oh, well, Meena thought. That’s what I get, I guess, for trying to play the rescuer. Why do I always do that, again?
Oh, right. Because it was her job.
Which was a good thing, since she didn’t think she could live with the guilt of another soul dying on her watch. It had happened more than once, especially since she’d hooked up with Lucien Antonescu, who’d unfortunately turned out to be one of the demons the Palatine—the organization by whom she’d been hired, after her unceremonious firing from the soap opera (before its cancellation)—was hunting.
Not just any demon either. The ruler of all demons on earth, the prince of darkness.
Meena had never really had much luck in the boyfriend department.
And since most people didn’t believe her when she told them they were about to die, she’d never really had much luck in that area either.
She wasn’t entirely sure what had ever made her think her ex, David Delmonico, was worth saving. As far as she could tell, the earth wouldn’t be that much worse off if he simply disappeared from it.
But there was his new baby, she supposed. The baby deserved a father.
“Meena,” David kept groaning. Mercifully, his lips had moved away from hers, and were now clamped to her neck. Thank God, because his breath smelled even worse than the inside of his car.
Except that now he was trying to slip his hands down the front of the sweetheart neckline of her dress … the dress she’d hemmed herself—well, with a little help from Yalena at the thrift shop. Because though Meena’s new job paid well, she’d had to replace her entire wardrobe, thanks to her last one having been destroyed by a bunch of Lucien Antonescu’s relatives, the Dracul. So thrifting had become a new hobby.
“David,” she said, using an elbow to jab him in the shoulder. Although not too hard, because she felt a little sorry for him. He was a dying man, after all. “This isn’t why I called you.”
“Yes,” he said with another groan. “Oh yes, it is. Beautiful Meena. What a fool I was …”
“David.” She yanked up his head by his hair and looked into his eyes. They were drunken slits.
“Wha …?” he asked blearily.
“I’m sorry that you are having problems in your personal life right now,” she said. “But you chose Brianna over me, remember? And I moved on.”
“But …” His eyes started to focus a little more. “You said on the phone you weren’t seeing anyone.”
She continued to hold up his head by his hair. “I’m not.” Nice of him to rub in the fact that she was single. Like it was her fault her last boyfriend had tried to burn down half of the Upper East Side. “But why would you think that means I’m up for a fling with you?”
He wagged a finger at her. “Face it, Meena,” he said. “The fact that you’re still single means that you’ve never really gotten over me.”
“Or maybe,” Meena said, “it means that there’s a guy who I dated after you that I’ve never really gotten over. Or did that possibility never occur to you? No, I didn’t think so.” She let go of his head to lean over and pluck the car keys from his ignition. “David, go home and sober up.”
She wasn’t going to tell him. Not this way. Not while he was so drunk, and behaving so badly. For one thing, he might not remember it once he sobered up.
And for another, he might not handle the information well. Who knows what he could do? Jump off the George Washington Bridge, maybe.
And there was always a chance, Meena had learned, that things could get better. Our destinies weren’t set in stone. Look at David. She’d warned him once that he was dying, and he’d taken a proactive approach to his health, and now he was …
Well, maybe David wasn’t a good example. But she could think of lots of others. Alaric Wulf, for instance, one of the Palatine Guards with whom she worked. She warned him every day, practically, of some new threat he was walking into somewhere, and because he listened, he didn’t die.
It was just too bad he wouldn’t listen to her about anything else.
“Appreciate what you have, David,” Meena said, instead of warning him that his number was up. Again. “Because it’s a lot, and the truth is … you might not have it for long.”
“But,” he said, looking confused, “I want you.”
“No,” Meena said firmly. “Dumping me for Brianna was actually the smartest move you ever made. Trust me. You and I were not meant to be. You can grab a cab to Penn Station and take the train back to your nice, safe house in New Jersey. I’ll mail these to you.” She jingled the keys in front of him. “You’ll thank me for this one day, I promise.”
Just probably not until after he’d sobered up and she’d called him to deliver the bad news, and he’d had a chance to make an appointment for a complete physical.
She started to open the door so she could get out of the car and head back to her new apartment, back to her new life, the one she was so sure that David, if he knew anything about it, would flee from in a nanosecond.
Because there were many things Meena Harper knew that her ex-boyfriend didn’t. Not only how people were going to die, or that demons and demon hunters weren’t just the stuff of fiction, but that there was, in every creature on earth, demon or not, a capacity for good and evil.
And that all it took to send any one of them over the edge was the tiniest of pushes.
It was just too bad her precognition didn’t tell her when one of those pushes might be necessary, or in which direction … or when someone other than herself was going to die.
That information might have been useful for her now, as she eased out of David’s car, and his hand shot out and wrapped around her wrist, entrapping it in a grip of iron.
The worst part of it was that he didn’t say anything. He just kept one hand clamped around her wrist, his gaze a dead-eyed stare.
Then he opened his mouth wide to reveal a set of pointed fangs.
Chapter Two (#ulink_2b1b8910-d203-5122-ad21-f6522ac1903e)
Meena’s reaction was purely instinctual. She sent the tips of his car keys, which she still had clutched in her free hand, plunging into his face.
But—with reflexes surprisingly sharp for someone so inebriated—he caught her hand in his, well before the keys could come anywhere near his skin.
Then he calmly lifted her arm up over her head, until he was pressing both her wrists against the headrest of the seat with one hand.
A second later, he’d pulled a lever so that her seat collapsed backward, and she was lying almost fully supine in his car.
The next thing she knew, her ex-boyfriend was on top of her.
She stared up at him with mingled feelings of fear, outrage, humiliation, and surprise. How had this happened? And how could she have been so stupid? How could she not have seen that all those dreams about David had been a warning, not a prophecy? His brain tumor hadn’t come back.
He’d been turned into a vampire.
Only how? And by whom? The Palatine, the organization by which Meena was currently employed, had spent the past six months hunting down and destroying every demonic life-form in the tristate area that it could find, with a systematic brutality that had caused even Meena, who had every reason in the world to detest them, to feel a little bit sorry for the poor things. It wasn’t their fault, after all, they’d been infected.
This could not be happening.
Especially to her. She’d been trained to defend herself against exactly this kind of thing.
“David.” She grunted as she tried to wrestle her hands free from his grip. If she could just grab her purse, she’d pull out the sharpened stake she always carried with her, and plunge it into his heart.
Then she remembered she hadn’t bothered to bring a purse with her. She’d dashed out of her apartment with nothing more than her cell phone and keys tucked inside the pocket of the light wool cardigan she’d thrown on as she was leaving. She hadn’t expected their meeting to take that long. She was, after all, only going to tell him that he was dying.
He wasn’t, though. He was already dead.
Which was why she couldn’t pull her hands from his grip. Because he had inhuman strength.
“Who did this to you?” she demanded. “How did this happen? And what do you want?”
“What do you think I want?” he said, slurring his words. His dead eyes still weren’t even open all the way. He outweighed her significantly. His torso was practically dead weight on top of her. And he was so, so strong. And his breath still reeked.
“Do you know who I work for now?” she asked from between gritted teeth. “You had better let go, or you have no idea of the world of trouble that you’re going to be in.”
“No,” he said simply, and dipped his face back toward her neck.
Her dress was full-skirted and a little on the short side. She should easily have been able to lift a knee to get him where it mattered.
But it was difficult with the dashboard in the way, not to mention the weight of David’s body pressing down on her. It was also hard to breathe, and he was holding her wrists so tightly, cutting off the circulation to her hands.
Meena’s panic grew. Not just because of the fangs she hadn’t yet felt pierce her skin, but because she realized the hard thing pressing against her through his pants wasn’t just a flask. Not anymore.
When David started fumbling with his zipper with his free hand, Meena’s desire to escape crowded out all rational thought.
Filling her lungs with the foul-smelling, fetid air, she let out an ear-splitting shriek that caused David, whose ear was beside her mouth, to lift his lips from her neck and curse.
That was when the door to the driver’s side of David’s Volvo was not so much flung open as torn off its hinges.
And a second later, David disappeared entirely.
He seemed simply to vanish. One minute he was there on top of her.
And the next, he was gone.
Disoriented from shock, Meena lay there, panting as she attempted to catch her breath and get the blood circulating back in her hands, then trying to figure out what had just happened. Had she dreamed it? The part where she’d been trying to do the right thing, and rescue David Delmonico—who quite clearly had never deserved rescuing in the first place—and he’d turned out to be a vampire?
But no. Because when she turned her head, she saw that the door to the driver’s side of David’s car was gone.
It was quiet on the deserted street, except for the usual sounds of the city … somewhere off in the distance, a siren wailed. She could hear traffic on the avenue. Not so far away, music played from someone’s open window.
Then, from out of nowhere, a body slammed onto the hood of David’s car, causing the entire vehicle to bounce like a children’s amusement-park ride. The windshield caved in, splintering.
Meena screamed again, her voice echoing up and down the deserted street.
David lay there completely still—not unlike one dead.
She didn’t realize what had happened to David—that he hadn’t been seized by flying monkeys, then dropped lifeless to the hood of his own car, where he now lay sprawled, unseeing and unmoving—until the man who’d done all this tapped politely on the still-closed window of her own car door.
She screamed again before she recognized who was looking at her through the glass.
“Meena?” His dark eyes were filled with concern. “Are you all right?”
It was Lucien Antonescu.
Chapter Three (#ulink_01240f9e-429f-5658-ae96-0856c55d7eec)
I’m fine,” she said automatically.
She unlocked and opened the door, then climbed—a little shakily, but with all the dignity she could muster—from the car. Lucien held the door open for her, because he was the kind of man who always remembered to hold the door open for women.
He was also the kind of man who had, before Meena’s eyes, once destroyed a church and nearly killed her, along with a number of her friends. So, there was that to be considered.
“You’re sure you’re all right?” he asked her again.
Truthfully, she felt as if she were going to pass out, but she lied and repeated, “I’m fine.” It wasn’t quite a lie. Now that she was out of the car, the night air—delightfully fresh smelling after the inside of David’s Volvo, despite the garbage piled in the cans along the street nearby—had revived her a little.
“Is he …?” She looked over at David, who was still sprawled across his own car’s hood with his head tilted in a most unnatural position. She looked quickly away. “Is he …?”
Lucien was frowning. “Technically, he was dead before I arrived. But no, he’s merely recovering from a broken neck at the moment. Here. You’re bleeding.”
He handed her a handkerchief. Meena, startled, looked down at herself. There were drops of blood splashed across the front of her dress.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Where …?”
Lucien gestured in the general vicinity of his throat.
“He bit me?” Too late, she remembered how David had pressed his lips to her neck, and how relieved she’d been that she hadn’t had to taste his rank-smelling breath anymore. “But I didn’t feel anything—”
She broke off. She hadn’t felt anything the other times she’d been bitten in the past either.
By the man standing beside her.
“No. You aren’t meant to feel it.” It was apparent Lucien was remembering those times, as well. But he looked discreetly away from her and toward David. “Who is he? A friend of yours?”
He said the word friend with distaste, though he was tactfully trying not to show it.
“He’s just someone I used to go out with,” she said. She pressed the handkerchief to her throat, staring at Lucien, thinking the exact same thing could be said about him.
He, however, appeared to be in considerably better shape than David was at the moment. Intimidatingly tall and broad-shouldered, his dark hair thick and lustrous, Lucien appeared as handsome and put together in his dark Brioni suit and crisp white shirt as always. It was as if no time at all had passed since she’d last seen him.
But it had actually been six months.
Six months during which the people with whom she worked—Alaric Wulf in particular—had combed every inch of the city as well as its outer boroughs, looking for him, without success.
And yet here he was, standing right in front of her as if he’d never left.
“I’ve been having bad dreams about him,” Meena went on slowly. She still felt a little bit dazed. “I wanted to let him know he was in danger …”
“Of course you did,” Lucien said. The corners of his mouth curled up a little, as if he found something amusing. “I assume he’s the one who chose the location for your rendezvous?”
“No. I did. But …” She stood there, her wrists still throbbing from where David had gripped them with such fierce violence. “How could this have happened?”
“Apparently he’s been keeping different company since you knew him,” Lucien said. He’d stopped smiling. “Very few people can resist immortality when offered, you know. Vampirism is an extremely tempting and exciting lifestyle choice.”
Meena looked at the ground. She was one of the “very few people” who’d resisted the lifestyle “choice” of vampirism when offered. It was why she and Lucien were no longer together.
Well, one of the reasons.
“I just can’t believe he’d be one of those people,” she said. “He had a wife. And a baby.”
“Well, he hasn’t got anything now,” Lucien said. “Except a ravenous appetite for blood. Oh, and alcohol, apparently. He smells like a distillery.”
“I took his keys away,” Meena said, holding them up. “I thought I’d be protecting him from drinking and driving. I didn’t think it was safe for him to be out on the roads in his condition.”
“It isn’t safe for him to be out on the roads in his condition,” Lucien agreed. “But not because of his driving.”
Meena felt depressed, and not just because of David. This wasn’t how she’d pictured running into Lucien again.
And she had pictured running into him again, more times than she’d like to admit.
But she knew this was wrong, and not just because he was the most wanted man in the entire demon-fighting world—black-and-white photos of him papered nearly every wall of Palatine headquarters. She had to pass them every day in the hallways at work—but because of the other dreams she’d been having. The ones that she’d been having ever since she and Lucien had parted—long before the ones she’d started having lately about David.
These were the dreams that had driven her to make an unorthodox request from a highly restricted area—to the public, anyway—belonging to her employer.
Meena wasn’t even a hundred percent certain what she wanted was there. But if it was, it could hold the key to everything.
The answer, so far, had been a resounding No Response.
“How could I have not noticed right away that he was already dead?” she asked bleakly, staring at David’s body. If this was how things were going to go from now on, she might as well just quit. It was possible she’d be better off working back in scriptwriting.
Then again, no one she knew in that field could find jobs anymore, thanks to the success of reality shows, like the one about the housewives of New York City.
“I wouldn’t be too hard on yourself,” Lucien said, smiling again. “He’s very freshly turned, no more than a day or two at the most. And not handling it well, judging by the alcohol intake. And of course, had he gone home, he’d have killed the baby and its mother. So you did save two lives tonight.”
“You saved two lives tonight,” she said, glancing at him. This was definitely something she was going to tell Alaric Wulf, who often swore that Lucien Antonescu was evil incarnate. But why would someone evil be interested in saving lives? And, of course, she couldn’t tell Alaric, because he’d just hunt Lucien down and decapitate him. “Three, if you include mine.”
“I don’t think so,” Lucien said coolly. “He didn’t want to kill you.” He waved a hand, indicating her throat. “Would you mind? I’m finding that a bit … distracting.”
“Oh.” Flushing, she pressed his handkerchief against the wound in her neck. “Sorry.”
This, she thought grimly, didn’t exactly help bolster her theory that Lucien wasn’t like other vampires. He obviously wasn’t immune to the sight of blood.
Not even her blood.
“Might I ask,” Lucien was saying as he abruptly crossed the street toward some old furniture piled by the garbage cans near a front stoop, “why you agreed to meet with him in his vehicle? I would have thought you’d know by now to be more cautious than that.”
Meena tied the handkerchief around her neck. She watched as he tipped over an abandoned armchair and gave a vicious kick to one of its legs.
“Especially”—he took the jagged piece of chair and handed it to her, then approached David, who was starting to come around, despite his hideously contorted neck—“considering your new place of employment. Or haven’t they trained you better?”
She stuck out her chin indignantly.
“Certainly,” she said. “They have. But this was different. I know him.”
“Knew him,” Lucien corrected her.
“I meant that we’re old friends,” Meena said. “We used to live together. Even so, I was careful. It wasn’t like I told him where I live, or anything.”
He looked wry. “No. You do a good job of keeping that information private.”
She glanced at him sharply. What did he mean by that? Had he been looking for her, the same way the Palatine had been looking for him?
Well, he’d obviously found her. Probably some time ago, too. She wondered why he’d waited until someone was attacking her before attempting to speak to her.
“I guess it just never occurred to me,” she said dejectedly as David began to rub his neck and moan, “that someone I once loved might actually want to kill me.”
Although Lucien had once tried to do precisely the same thing … for slightly different reasons.
“But he didn’t want to kill you, did he?” Lucien asked. “I thought you understood that. What was it you once told me about the daughter of the Trojan king?”
Meena’s eyes suddenly filled with tears … not at the reproach, but at the fact that he remembered. It had been a conversation during a happier time. She was fairly certain now that she’d never know such happiness again. Not unless she was able somehow to prove to everyone—including Lucien himself—that he was not the monster he seemed.
“That she was given the gift of prophecy,” she said, keeping her gaze on the ground in the hope that Lucien wouldn’t notice her brimming eyelids. “And because she did not return a god’s love, that gift was turned by that god into a curse, so that her prophecies, though true, would never be believed.”
“Well,” Lucien said, “your prophecies are believed. By them.” His tone was bitter as he thrust his chin in David’s direction. “As you know, any demon who drinks your blood temporarily possesses your gift of prophecy. That’s an irresistible temptation to most of them. And they’re apparently not above resorting to turning your friends and family members into one of themselves in order to lure you out into the open to get it. I once offered you protection from this, but you turned it down.”
Meena lifted a wrist to swipe at her moist eyes.
“You’re right,” she said, looking at David as he twisted on the hood of the car, trying to get his head back into a normal position. “I did turn down your offer of protection, because it came with a price that was too high for me. And I should never have agreed to meet him. I should never have come out of my apartment, except to go to work. Why should I expect to have a normal life, considering what I am?”
Lucien looked at her, his expression remorseful.
“Meena,” he said, apparently regretting his harsh words. “I didn’t mean—”
“No.” She cut him off with a shrug. “It’s true. Except for one thing.” There were no tears in her eyes as she lifted her gaze to look back at him. “You’re not a god, Lucien.”
“No.” His mouth twisted painfully. “I know I’m not. If I were, I’d—”
But he didn’t have a chance to finish, because it was at this point that David, his head pushed back into something like its normal position, sat up and looked at them. “Who are you?” he demanded of Lucien.
The sky, which had been cloudless, grew dark. The moon disappeared behind a bank of storm clouds. The music playing in the nearby window had long since gone dead. A cool wind stirred, whipping up dead leaves and abandoned plastic bags, and ruffling Meena’s hair and the hem of her skirt.
“You should know me.” Lucien’s voice was so deep and commanding, it seemed to reverberate through her chest. It also held an undercurrent of ice that caused goose bumps to rise on the back of her arms. “I am the unholy one, ruler of all demon life on the mortal side of hell, evil in human form. I am, in fact, the dark prince, son of Vlad the Impaler, also known as Dracula.”
As he said the name Dracula, another wind swept the street, this time from a different direction, sending all the leaves and plastic bags that had been stirred up before whipping the other way. Meena shivered and held her cardigan closed with one hand. David seemed to notice her for the first time since waking up.
“Oh,” he said, in a slightly less truculent voice. He began to lean away from Lucien and toward her. “I remember now. I think someone did mention you. But they said you were dead—”
“As you can see,” Lucien said, reaching out to grab the front of David’s shirt and pull him closer, “they were misinformed. Now who is they?”
David’s gaze darted back toward Meena. “Hey,” he said to her. “Aren’t you going to help me out here?”
She used the piece of wood Lucien had handed her to point at the handkerchief wrapped around her neck.
“Excuse me,” she said. “Remember this? You did this. Among other things I could mention but won’t.”
David, to her surprise, burst into tears.
“I’m sorry,” he cried. “I didn’t want to. I swear I didn’t. I couldn’t stop myself. I don’t know what’s come over me lately. I think I’m sick or something. Meena, could you feel my head? I think I’m running a fever.”
Meena raised her eyebrows. “Uh,” she said. “I’m pretty sure it’s not a fever.”
Lucien wasn’t tolerating any of David’s theatrics. He lifted the smaller man by his shirtfront from the hood of his car.
“Tell me who turned you,” he said, “and who sent you to this girl, or this time, I’ll rip your head off.”
“I don’t know,” David insisted with a sob. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please put me down. I’m sorry for what I did to Meena. I told you I couldn’t help it—”
Lucien squeezed David’s throat, choking off the rest of his words. Though of course vampires couldn’t breathe, the noises David began to make were unbearable to Meena. He was obviously suffering terribly.
“Lucien,” she said, her heart aching. “Stop it. You’re hurting him. He said he doesn’t know anything.”
“He’s lying,” Lucien said emotionlessly. He didn’t even glance in her direction. “He’s a vicious, evil fiend.”
“There are people I know who’d say the same thing about you,” she said. “How am I going to convince them they’re mistaken, and to give you a second chance, when you won’t do the slightest thing to prove them wrong?”
Lucien hurled a startled glance at her over his shoulder. “What are you talking about?”
“I know there’s good in you, Lucien,” she said. “And I’m trying to persuade the people I work with that I’m right. But you make it really hard when you go around torturing people. Even people who might deserve it.”
He stared at her as if she were insane.
“How can you, of all people, ask me to show him mercy?” he asked. “Especially after what he tried to do to you? How can you possibly pity him? There is no vestige of humanity left in him.”
“That might be true of David,” Meena said. “But I refuse to believe it about you. How can I, after what we’ve been through together? But if that’s what you really believe,” she went on, reaching into her pocket, “fine.”
“What are you doing?” he asked, looking astonished as she pulled out her cell phone.
“My job,” she said. She didn’t know any other way to make him understand. “You’re a vicious, evil fiend. So is he. I’m calling the Palatine to report having spotted you both.”
Their gazes met as she brought the phone to her ear.
And for a moment, it all seemed to disappear … the dark, deserted street; the whimpering vampire; the shattered windshield; the broken car. Everything. It was just the two of them, the way it had been before—before she’d discovered he was a vampire, before he had discovered she was cursed with her horrible gift—when they had been so in love, and filled with so much hope for the future.
A future that had been dashed when Alaric Wulf had arrived at Meena’s door with the news of Lucien’s true identity.
It was at that exact moment—when she and Lucien were distracted, lost in each other’s dark-eyed gaze—that David proved he really was without any vestige of humanity, and the demon inside him had completely taken over. He lashed out at Lucien, striking him so forcefully that Lucien staggered back a few steps in surprise, releasing his hold on him entirely.
Which gave David just enough time … not to get away, as any other demon might have, but to lunge directly toward Meena, his face contorted in a mask of rage and hate, his mouth spread wide open, razor-sharp fangs ready to sink into her throat.
Lucien sprang after him, but it was too late. Unfortunately for David.
Because Meena was more than ready for him this time. She merely held out the jagged piece of chair leg Lucien had given to her. It was David’s own momentum—and her steady hold—that drove it into the center of his chest.
He looked down at it in wonder.
“Meena,” he said, in a slightly wounded voice.
A second later, he was gone, in a cloud of exploding bone and dust.
Chapter Four (#ulink_8d5a56f3-2b6a-5029-8655-0ab844147a1c)
Meena stared at the space where, a second before, David had stood.
Then she looked down at the wooden stake she held in one hand, and the cell phone she held in the other. She hadn’t actually pressed send.
She glanced at Lucien. He was standing just a few feet away from her, an expression she didn’t recognize on his face … or at least wasn’t sure she remembered ever having seen him wear before, anyway. What was it? Alarm, certainly. Concern for her, yes.
But there was something else there, too. What was it? Was it … pain?
But it couldn’t possibly be. Because he was the prince of darkness. He wasn’t capable of feeling pain.
That’s what everyone back at the Palatine, especially Alaric Wulf, kept telling her, anyway.
“Are you all right?” he asked her. “I’m sorry, he surprised me. I’m not … I shouldn’t have allowed that to happen.”
She opened her mouth to reply …
But before she had a chance, she became aware of sounds—footsteps, approaching rapidly—behind them.
People were coming. But who? She hadn’t dialed.
And David hadn’t made a sound as he’d imploded.
She squinted into the darkness, trying to see. But some of the bulbs in the streetlights overhead were burned out, leaving large sections of the block in darkness. She hadn’t known this when she’d chosen this address as a meeting spot, or noticed it when she arrived.
Now she wondered if someone—or something—had broken the bulbs on purpose, knowing she was coming.
“Meena,” Lucien said, his tone anxious. He’d heard the footsteps, too.
Meena wasn’t normally called upon to make lightning-fast decisions in her new position at the Palatine. This was her first time in the field, since she was considered too valuable an asset to be allowed anywhere near actual demon activity. She’d always been confined to Palatine headquarters during working hours, where she stuck to determining who among her colleagues was most likely to run into fatal danger while on assignment.
And when demon activity was slow in North America, Meena spent her days Skyping with units overseas … or researching the online sections of the incredibly large Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, to which she had unlimited access as an employee of the Palatine, the military branch of the Vatican. This meant she was allowed to enter the Vatican Library’s secret archives, as well, which were restricted to members of the public. She was supposed to be looking for anything that might help in the Palatine’s battle against paranormal beings.
But of course what she was actually looking for was much more personal. Recently, she thought she’d found it.
Now, her heart hammering against the back of her ribs, she realized she had to act fast, or everything for which she’d been working so hard these past six months—especially the last two—would be ruined.
So she dropped her cell phone back into the pocket of her cardigan, where earlier, she’d slipped David’s car keys. Then instinctively, she dropped the stake …
But before it could strike the pavement, Lucien snatched it in midair. He slipped it into the pocket of his suit jacket.
“Let’s go,” he said, putting an arm around her shoulders and spinning her toward the closest busy street.
“Why—” Then comprehension dawned. “Oh, of course,” she said. She’d killed vampires before, but never quite like that. “Evidence. My fingerprints are all over it.” But there was no body. She would never get used to any of this.
She kept walking, panic mounting as the footsteps behind them seemed to increase in speed. Who could it be? Surely not the Palatine, since she hadn’t called them … although her cell phone had a built-in GPS tracker. But who could have alerted them? Surely not the police, or there’d be sirens …
“It’s all right,” Lucien was saying. He, too, seemed concerned about the footsteps. She saw him glance behind them several times.
He possessed strength and powers considered by the Palatine to be superior to those of any other paranormal entity. She herself had witnessed him do things that no living being ought to have been able to do, including transform himself into a creature twelve times the size of a normal man. That breathed fire. Just a quarter of an hour earlier, he’d ripped the locked door off a Volvo station wagon and hurled a man so far into the air, he hadn’t fallen back to earth until many seconds later.
But maybe these things, coupled with David’s sucker punch, had taken more out of him than he’d realized, since for some reason Lucien didn’t snatch her up and fly off, or dissipate into thin air, both of which she knew he was perfectly capable of doing. He didn’t even pick up the pace, really, though she could tell he was as anxious as she was to get out of there.
What was wrong with him? she wondered He almost seemed …
“Are you all right?” she asked, putting an arm around him. “Here, lean on me.”
“Meena,” he growled. “I’m fine.”
“Of course you are,” she said. “We both are.”
She didn’t sound convincing even to herself.
They turned onto a better-lighted, much more highly trafficked street. There were couples out walking their dogs, and families standing at every corner, waiting for the light to turn so they could cross, eager to get to the Feast of San Gennaro, which had recently started in Little Italy, a few blocks away. Everyone was laughing, enjoying the late-summer air.
No one paid the slightest bit of attention to the man with his arm around the shoulders of the girl with the white kerchief encircling her neck. No one seemed to notice that her arm was around his waist beneath the jacket of his suit, or that they were possibly being pursued.
“Are they still behind us?” he asked her tersely.
She peeked over her shoulder.
“I can’t tell,” she said. “I didn’t get a good look at them. Did you?”
He shook his head. “It was probably whoever turned your friend, then sent him after you.”
“Then …” she said, looking around at all the smiling people, enjoying the first night of their weekend, “Vampires.”
It seemed hard to believe that on such a warm, pretty evening, something so evil could exist.
But she had just killed one. And she had her arm around the waist of another.
“It isn’t anyone from my clan, I can tell you that much,” he said. “Your friends at your new job have done excellent work annihilating almost every single one of them.”
“You told David you rule over all demon life on this side of hell,” Meena said, ignoring his sarcasm. “So how can any of them do something like this without your knowing about it?”
Lucien’s dark eyes flashed menacingly.
“I haven’t been very … available lately,” he replied.
She wasn’t sure if his curtness was due to her having touched upon a sensitive subject, or to their having reached an intersection, and the light was warning them to wait. A bus roared by, followed by a dozen taxis, making it impossible to cross.
She could feel the tension in Lucien’s body, and saw the way he was scanning the crowds of weekend revelers around them.
She also saw, for the first time, the faint purple shadows beneath those dark eyes of his, now easily visible in the much brighter lights along this street.
Meena wasn’t quite sure what it meant for a vampire to have shadows beneath his eyes. At no time during her training with the Palatine had this subject ever come up.
But she was beginning to suspect that despite the impeccable suit and lustrous hair, Lucien had not spent the months since she’d last seen him in some kind of vampire resort, relaxing in a lounge chair in the shade. He had obviously been suffering in some way.
“Lucien, are you all right?” she asked him. “I mean … are you sick, or something?”
He looked down at her, clearly offended by the question. “I told you,” he said. “I’m fine.”
“Well,” she said, “it’s just that you don’t seem like your old self … not in a bad way,” she hastened to add.
“How unfortunate,” he said. “I try so hard to be bad.”
He smiled down at her then. She instantly wished he hadn’t.
Because Lucien Antonescu’s smile did things to her, things that the smile of a vampire had no business doing to a girl who had joined an organization dedicated to eradicating his kind.
But there was still a part of him that was human. Or maybe—as she’d recently begun trying to prove—even better than human.
“You shouldn’t joke about that,” she said, nervously pushing some of her hair from her eyes. “I was serious when I said before that I think—”
That’s when someone—a kid, walking shoulder to shoulder with a group of his college friends down the sidewalk—slammed right into Meena, as if he hadn’t seen her at all.
“Oof,” she said as Lucien pulled her protectively against him.
The kid spun, then landed on the sidewalk. “What the hell?” he complained good-naturedly as his friends laughed at him. He obviously wasn’t hurt, just a little buzzed on beer, and confused.
“I’m so sorry,” Meena said to him, even though technically, he’d been the one who’d walked into her.
The kid said nothing, just continued to laugh as his friends pulled him back to his feet, calling him rude names. Lucien, meanwhile, had already steered Meena away from the group, navigating her quickly back down the crowded sidewalk.
“That was weird,” Meena said. “It was like he didn’t even see me.”
“He couldn’t see you,” Lucien said.
“Couldn’t see me?” Meena looked up at him in shock. “What do you mean? How could he not see me?”
“No one can see us right now,” Lucien said, his face devoid of expression. “It’s called a glamour. I’m afraid I can’t keep it up for long. But it should last us until I can get you back to your apartment. You should be safe there, providing you’ve taken the usual precautions against unwanted demon entry.”
She stared up at him, feeling a sudden mix of emotions. Especially when she realized they were turning onto her street.
“Lucien,” she said, freezing suddenly in her tracks. “How do you know where I live?”
She had been so careful, leaving the rectory at the Shrine of St. Clare’s—where she’d moved after his minions had gutted her last apartment—as soon as she’d realized he knew she was there. She’d had all her mail forwarded to a post office box, canceled her old cell phone, her gym membership, even her library card. She’d sold her old apartment and now shared a sublet with her brother in which even the cable bill was under the original owner’s name.
How could he possibly have known?
Then again … how could he not have?
She wasn’t afraid, necessarily. Not as afraid as she’d been just minutes before. And she certainly wasn’t afraid for her life. All she had to do was press a button on her phone, and the entire Manhattan unit of the Palatine would be there within a few minutes.
Of course, by that time, she could easily be dead.
But dying wasn’t what she was most afraid of. Not anymore.
“Meena,” he said. The smile was long gone. “What you were saying, about my not seeming like my old self …”
The effort it was causing him to form the words was obvious. And now she recognized what it was she hadn’t been able to identify in his face before. It was pain. It was deeply etched in the hollows beneath his eyes.
“I suppose,” he said, “that’s part of my problem.”
She cocked her head, confused.
“What is?” she asked.
He took another step, but this time it was more of a stumble. Only not a drunken one, like the boy they’d seen down the block. His body weight began to sag against hers.
“That in spite of your choice last spring,” he said, his voice a ragged whisper, “my feelings for you are unchanged. I’m still as in love with you as ever.”
Chapter Five (#ulink_68217cb9-f212-558a-8216-bfea7b558df5)
Everything was a disaster.
Now, in one night, Meena had not only slain one ex-boyfriend who’d turned out to be a vampire, but she had another one in her bed.
She couldn’t imagine how things could possibly get worse, unless her brother walked into the apartment, found Lucien Antonescu there, and called Alaric Wulf, who would undoubtedly launch an all-out military assault on the place that would include smoke grenades and possibly tear gas.
But she’d already phoned Jon and learned that he was working his normal Friday-night shift at the Beanery, where he’d found employment as a barista. He wasn’t planning to be home until after eleven.
This gave Meena exactly one hour to get Lucien out of the apartment.
The question was, how was she going to do this?
She had no idea what was wrong with Lucien. But his announcing that he was still in love with her certainly hadn’t made things any better. The admission had, in fact, only seemed to cause him to grow weaker. She’d had to half support him as she staggered the rest of the way to her building.
She hadn’t wanted to bring him inside. But he seemed so ill, she didn’t know what else to do. She couldn’t leave him outside, even though this was what he asked of her.
But that was ludicrous. He’d already admitted he was so weak, he couldn’t maintain his glamour, or whatever it was, much longer. She certainly wasn’t going to abandon him in this condition, defenseless. She wasn’t just concerned about whoever—or whatever—had been following them, but about anyone who might happen to stumble across him. Alaric Wulf, for instance. True, Alaric lived in a completely different neighborhood, but she wasn’t taking any chances.
Fortunately, her building had an elevator, even though it was ancient, barely had room for two people and a laundry basket, and was so slow it was usually simpler to take the stairs. She was able to prop Lucien up inside, though, and get him safely to her floor.
From there things got more complicated. She’d grown so used to them, she’d forgotten the radical lengths to which she and the Palatine had gone to vampire-proof the apartment. There was a crucifix hanging over every window and doorway. Strands of garlic hung across her bed. Father Bernard, who led the parish of the Shrine of St. Clare’s, had blessed the place when she’d moved in, sprinkling every corner of it with holy water. Sister Gertrude had lately taken to dropping by with patron-saint devotional candles.
Lucien had groaned upon entering.
“It’s not that bad,” Meena had said defensively.
“That’s your opinion,” he replied.
But then there was her dog. Even before she’d known they existed, Meena had had a secret weapon in the fight against vampires. Because somehow she’d managed to pick the one Pomeranian mix in the entire Manhattan animal-shelter system that was particularly sensitive to—and infuriated by—the scent of the undead. Or perhaps the dog had picked her. One of them, in any case, had picked the other, maybe with some idea of what the future held in store.
Jack Bauer—so named because his anxiety level was exceeded only by his determination to save the world from all evil—leaped from his basket the minute Lucien entered the apartment, curled back his lips, and began to snarl as if the Apocalypse were occurring in the living room right in front of him.
Which was why Meena had had to pick him up and lock him in the bathroom, with a bowl of water and his favorite chew toy. He immediately began to whimper, sad to be missing out on all the fun.
When she returned to her bedroom, where Lucien had retreated to escape the vicious mini-assault, she saw that he had collapsed onto her light blue duvet. He had one arm over his eyes to shield them from the garlic overhead. The rest of her walls—also light blue—were bare, because Meena had been so busy, she still had not gotten around to decorating, beyond what Sister Gertrude had dropped by and the apartment’s owner had chosen, which was the minimum of furnishings.
She took a deep breath and sank down onto the bed beside him. The flouncy red skirt of her dress, now looking a little worse for wear after her battle with David, swirled out around them both.
“Lucien, you’ve got to tell me. What’s wrong?” she asked. “Are you hurt? Is there anything I can bring you?”
It was a stupid question. She didn’t have any spare pints of blood lying around the apartment. And she wasn’t about to offer up her own neck.
But she didn’t have the slightest idea what else to say.
“I don’t believe so,” he said. He lowered his arm. His dark-eyed gaze latched onto hers, and he managed another one of those heart-wrenching smiles. “Being this close to you again is enough. For now. Although I’ll admit in my weaker moments I question the wisdom of being in love with a woman who chooses to work for an organization intent on exterminating my people. Believe me, if I could, I would prefer not to be.”
She felt as if she couldn’t breathe. She’d forgotten what it was like to have a man say that he loved her.
Oh, sure, guys occasionally indicated that they wanted to sleep with her. And sometimes—like with David—it even seemed like the relationship might actually go somewhere.
But it never did. Take her relationship with Alaric Wulf. He had kissed her—quite passionately—once.
But he had been semiconscious from blood loss at the time. Since then, he had not tried to kiss her again. He had, in fact, been seriously standoffish, except for asking her to dinner once, in his apartment.
Which had so obviously been an invitation for casual sex, Meena had been insulted. She’d thought she’d meant a little more to him than that. He could get that from any silly girl he met at any nightclub in Manhattan. If he wasn’t going to do anything to indicate that she meant something more to him than that, she wasn’t going to bother with him.
On the other hand, it was Alaric Wulf who’d more or less raised himself. So it was possible he hadn’t known any better. Instead of telling him to go to hell, she’d just politely refused the invitation.
But with Lucien, everything was different. Because Lucien had always gotten the love thing down perfectly.
True, he had no soul. True, he was the five-hundred-year-old son of one of the most prolific serial killers in history, who had made an unholy pact with Satan in order to achieve immortality, and so needed to consume human blood to survive.
And true, their relationship had gone from amazing to unmitigated disaster in record time because he’d kept biting her. And then the members of his family kept trying to do the same. And now vampires all over the world seemed to think of Meena’s blood as a refreshing pick-me-up, like Dr Pepper.
Still. He’d never stopped loving her.
“I really don’t think,” Meena said, aware that the lighting in the room was far too low—it could almost have been called romantic—because she had no overhead light, just a small bedside lamp, “this is the time or place to be talking about this.” Even though, truthfully, she never wanted to stop talking about it. “There’s obviously something really wrong with you. I think you should tell me what it is so I can try to help you.”
But Lucien just shook his head.
“I told you I would love you until the end of time,” he said, the corners of that irresistible mouth of his turned up. But not like he actually thought the situation was funny. More like he was sad … but in an amused way. “Coming from someone who, in all likelihood, will live until then, those aren’t words to be spoken lightly. I’ve been in love with you ever since that horrible dinner party at my cousin’s apartment, and we went to the Metropolitan Museum afterward, and you showed me the painting you love, the one of Joan of Arc. You look even more like her now, with your hair like that. Although I’m not entirely sure what color that’s supposed to be …”
She reached up instinctively to tug on a lock of her hair. Her best friend, Leisha, the highest-paid stylist at the B.A.O. (By Appointment Only) Salon, had given her permission to grow out her pixie cut, on the condition that Leisha be allowed to experiment with color. Meena now had different-colored hair each month.
But underneath it, she was still the exact same person she’d been the day she’d met Lucien.
She knew that no one else believed he could possibly have changed his colors as easily.
No one but her. Because she’d always been able to see his true colors.
“You’re not like any other woman I’ve ever met,” he was saying, his gaze intent on hers. “I didn’t think you did, but you seemed really to mean it when you said you were going to save mankind from creatures like myself. Nothing was going to stand in your way. And nothing has. You’re amazing. You know that, don’t you?”
Amazing? She was amazing? No one had ever called her amazing before. Weird, yes. A flake, often. Crazy, lots of times.
But never amazing. She couldn’t believe Lucien even remembered that conversation at the museum in front of the Joan of Arc painting … her favorite painting, because Joan of Arc, like her, made predictions that at first no one believed. But soon she convinced enough people that she was telling the truth that she was given an audience with the king, and eventually her own army to command.
Still, this was hardly the kind of discussion you’d expect someone who’d been around for half a millennium to remember.
But he had.
Lucien seemed to realize she’d been rendered speechless by his revelation, and laid a hand over hers.
“You have every reason to despise me,” he said. He was still smiling ruefully to himself. “As you’ve so aptly pointed out, I didn’t just endanger your life—and the lives of all the people you love—when I came into it, I ruined it. Not a moment goes by that I’m not still fully aware of this fact. More than anything in this world, I wish I could take that back—even more than I wish I could bring back the lives my father and half brother took before they were eventually stopped. But I can’t. And the last thing I want to do now is put you in jeopardy again. But I feel like I already have. So all I can do instead is take this opportunity to make sure you know how I feel …” The strong hand tightened over hers. “How I’ll always feel. Not that I expect you to feel the same way, or that I have any hope at all that it will make a difference.”
“Lucien …”
If she could have thrown herself into his arms and started kissing him wildly then and there, she would have.
If she could have said, “I love you, too,” forgotten all about the vampire thing—the fact that he was dead and she was alive and she had family and friends and, oh yes, an entire species who was depending on her—she would have.
But she couldn’t.
Because considering his weakness—and what she’d been dreaming lately—it seemed more vital than ever that one of them, at least, keep their head.
“Lucien,” she said again. “Remember that night we were in the museum, and you showed me the woodcut of the castle where you grew up, and told me about your mother?”
His grip on her hand loosened slightly.
“I remember,” he said, flinching a little. “But it’s hardly a good idea to bring up a man’s mother at moments like this, Meena …”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But it can’t be helped. You told me she was your father’s first wife, and that she was very beautiful and innocent, and that he loved her very much. You said after her death, people used to whisper that she might have been an angel …”
Now he pulled his hand from hers entirely.
“And now definitely,” he said, sitting up, “isn’t the time to be bringing up angels.” He threw a speculative glance at the window, which was nailed shut, and had the largest crucifix of all hanging over it. “Although I could see how it might be difficult for you not to around here.”
“Lucien, you have to listen to this,” Meena said urgently. “I keep having this dream. It’s been the same one every night. And I think it’s about you and your mother. I don’t know who else it could be. It takes place in that castle in the woodcut. I went online to research where you grew up—Poenari Castle—and it looks like the same place. In the dream, this woman is sitting on a seat by a window, reading a book with a little boy. The little boy looks exactly like you, and so does the woman. She has long black hair and big dark eyes and is wearing a blue dress—”
“I don’t understand why you’re telling me this.” Lucien’s voice was curt. “So you keep having this dream. So what? I thought your gift was that you could see into the future, not the past.”
“It is,” Meena said, a little hurt by his harsh tone. “I mean, it was. It always has been. But lately, I don’t know. I think it’s been changing. Getting stronger, or something. Because, Lucien, in this dream, the part from this book that the woman is reading to this little boy—who I think is you—is about good and evil. I don’t know how I can understand what she’s saying, because she’s speaking in a language I’ve never heard before. But somehow I can. She’s talking about how none of us is completely good or completely evil, and all of God’s creatures—she stresses this part, all of them—have the ability to choose. How evil can’t exist without good, and how even some of God’s angels—”
Lucien started to get up from the bed, clearly eager to get away from her.
Only he couldn’t, because whatever was wrong with him, it seemed to knock him back, and off his feet. He sank down again onto the mattress, kneading his forehead and muttering a curse.
“Lucien.” Meena crawled toward him and laid her hands upon his shoulders. “What? What is it? What is the matter with you?”
“Nothing.” He barked the word with such surprising savagery, she dropped her hands.
Now, finally, she felt afraid.
Of him.
What had she done? What had she said? She’d thought he’d be glad to hear about her dream. It wasn’t a sad dream. To her, it was a hopeful dream … even if no one else in the Palatine agreed with her that it meant demons had within them the capacity to be good.
At the very least, she’d argued—particularly with Alaric Wulf, who disliked her mentioning the dream so much, he almost always left the room in a rage whenever she brought it up—it meant that whatever his father might have done, Lucien Antonescu had had a mother who’d loved him, and taught him right from wrong … at least until she’d killed herself by throwing herself into the river that ran beneath Poenari Castle … the river that came to be known, forever after, as the Princess River.
Maybe it was this painful memory of his mother that caused Lucien to swing suddenly in her direction, seize her by both shoulders, and bring her roughly toward him.
There was no sign of weakness in him now. Whatever it was Meena had said to upset him, it seemed to have rid him of that, at least.
“What?” she cried, her heart jackhammering. “What is it?”
He didn’t say a word. He just looked down at her, his dark-eyed gaze seeming to rake her with a need she couldn’t understand. For a moment, she could see in the lamplight that there was a muscle or a nerve twitching in his cheekbone, just above his jaw. It was almost as if he was trying to keep something contained, and not quite mastering it. She stared at that muscle fearfully, watching it jump, asking herself what it was he so badly wanted to do or say that he couldn’t quite seem to bring himself to. She wondered if she needed to run for her cell phone, which she’d left in the next room …
But before she had a chance, he’d lowered his mouth to hers.
And then nothing else seemed to matter. All that mattered was the roughness of his slight five o’clock shadow as it grazed her and the way his arms slid around her, cradling her as gently as if he were afraid she might break if he held her as tightly as he wished to …
… then the growing urgency with which he deepened the kiss, the fierceness with which he grasped her to his long-dead heart when he realized she wasn’t going to crumble beneath his touch.
She lifted her arms to wrap them around his neck, even as he was crushing her against him, making her feel things just with his lips and tongue that she hadn’t felt since … well, since the last time he’d held her in his arms this way.
It couldn’t last, of course.
Because a second later he broke the kiss—literally tore his face from hers just as certain parts of herself had started to turn to liquid—and let go of her, so suddenly that her eyelids fluttered open and she actually had to put a hand out to catch herself from falling back against the mattress without his arms to support her anymore. Because, suddenly, he’d disappeared.
She was so taken aback by the abrupt end to their kiss, she wanted to ask him what he thought he was doing, and drag his mouth back down to hers again.
But then she saw that he’d flung himself a few feet away, and was in a darkened corner of her room, just looking at her from the shadows, his eyes no longer deep pools of ebony, but twin spots of red …
The same red his eyes had always turned when he was at his angriest.
Or hungriest.
Oh God.
She stared back at him. It had never occurred to her to ask what he was living on these days.
Now, as she looked into those bloodred eyes, it was all she could think about.
“The Palatine have frozen all your financial assets,” she said quietly.
“The ones they could trace back to the name I used to use,” he replied, his voice like liquid smoke, drifting from the shadows and curling around her in burning tendrils.
“Still,” Meena said, shivering. She felt as if she were sitting in a cool, dense fog. “It must be difficult to find human blood to purchase on such restricted resources.” She gripped her duvet, white-knuckled, as she waited for his reply.
“Are you worried I’m not eating enough, Meena?” She heard a hint of mockery in his tone. “Or worried I’m resorting to murder for my meals? Let me put your mind at rest on both counts.” She heard a rustle of cloth. He was reaching into his coat pocket. “Here.” He tossed something onto the bed. She reached instinctively to catch it.
It was the impromptu stake he’d given her, and that she’d used to kill David.
“You have my permission to kill me if I ever try to bite you again,” he said. “Against your will, anyway. I should hope there’s still enough man in me to keep me from ever hurting you. But should an occasion ever arise to prove otherwise … well, you’ve more than amply proved this evening that you know what to do with one of those.”
Meena stared down at the chair leg. She had to swallow before she felt able to speak.
“Lucien,” she said. “I told you six months ago: I don’t ever want to hurt you. I’ll always do everything in my power to try to help you … even help you despite yourself. That’s why I told you about the dream. I think I can prove—”
He stepped from the shadows then. His eyes had gone back to their normal color, but a million different emotions played upon his face.
“You know what I want from you, Meena,” he said, in a rasping voice. “As soon as you’re ready to give it—and admit that’s what you want, as well—come find me. You won’t have to look far. I’ll be close. I always have been.”
Then he opened the bedroom door and walked out. A second later, she heard the apartment door slam.
Chapter Six (#ulink_1249a3b5-7f9a-5699-9ab6-0003cd446c57)
Alaric Wulf was not having a good day. Technically, he wasn’t having a good week.
This streak of misfortune had started when his supervisor, Abraham Holtzman, called him into his office, saying he had something he wished to discuss in private.
“I already know,” Alaric announced the minute he arrived.
“You do?” Holtzman looked up from his computer screen, surprised. “How?”
Alaric shrugged. “You’re kidding, right? She told me. She’s been telling anyone who’ll listen. You should hear her in the commissary at lunch. ‘What if there is good in Lucien Antonescu, and in all demons? And our job isn’t to destroy them, but to restore the good in them?’”
He felt like his imitation of Meena Harper was dead-on. Sometimes he found himself mimicking her when he was alone. Not on purpose, which was faintly disheartening. He couldn’t seem to get her voice out of his head.
“Oh.” Holtzman lowered his scraggly gray eyebrows. “That.”
“Yes, that,” Alaric said, annoyed. “What else? I certainly hope you put a freeze on that request she made to the Secret Archives.”
Now Holtzman’s eyebrows went up. “I did no such thing,” he said, looking offended. “If any of my staff members wants to request material the Vatican Library might have on file—even material from the Secret Archives—that might in any way help us in our efforts to better understand our enemies, why on earth would I stand in their way?”
“You must be joking.” Alaric could hardly believe what he was hearing. “You don’t believe this dream she’s been having has any sort of merit, do you?”
“I don’t know that it doesn’t,” Holtzman said. “And I don’t see why you feel it doesn’t. In any case, Meena Harper is not why I asked you in here today.”
Alaric’s frown deepened. “Are you saying you actually believe that there’s a chance that Lucien Antonescu—the anointed one, listed in the Palatine Guide to Otherworldly Creatures as he who performs the devil’s work on earth—may have a choice in whether or not he commits good or evil?”
“I’m saying,” Holtzman said, “I like to keep myself open to all possibilities.” When Alaric openly balked at this, Holtzman lifted a hand and said, “I understand that certain prejudices exist about Antonescu, and rightly so. Sometimes old memories die hard, and the fact that so many of us, including yourself, are still recovering from injuries sustained fighting him and the Dracul last spring certainly hasn’t exactly fostered a spirit of goodwill toward Meena’s theory. I, however, am willing to give it a chance … if she can prove it, which is a big if. Now, if I may get to the reason I asked you to step in here this evening, which, as I said, has nothing to do with Meena Harper … I know you aren’t going to like this, but there’s no getting around it. I’m sure you’re aware of the Church’s efforts to …”
Alaric instantly switched off his attention and turned to stare out of one of Holtzman’s office—formerly a principal’s office—windows facing Mulberry Street. The moment he heard the words church and efforts to, he knew that whatever was being discussed was going to bore him. It might possibly have something to do with his being in trouble for killing something in too public or violent a manner.
But that, too, was boring.
He reflected, instead, on Meena Harper, and her theory.
“Saint Thomas said it,” she insisted almost daily in the commissary. “Not me. He believed there is no positive source of evil, or even evil beings, but rather an absence of good in some beings.”
“Which,” Alaric had pointed out, “is why we are employed, and will continue to be so for many years to come.”
This always provoked a great deal of laughter from his fellow guards.
But then Meena would come in with some quote from Saint Thomas like, “‘Fire could not exist without the corruption of what it consumes; the lion must slay the ass in order to live. And if there were no wrongdoing, there would be no sphere for patience and justice.’ True,” she’d go on, “without evil we’d be out of a job. But maybe our job is to provide better fireproofing and protection for the asses, rather than kill all the lions.”
None of this made Alaric feel any better about this book Meena had requested from the Vatican Secret Archives, which she swore—if it was the book from her dream, and what were the chances of that?—was going to prove her theory correct. The still-healing scars that he and many of his fellow guards bore from their battle last spring with Lucien Antonescu and his clan was all the proof Alaric needed of just how wrong she was …
… as was the feeling he and so many of them had in their guts since the fire that had ripped through and destroyed St. George’s Cathedral, the site of that battle.
It was a belief every guard—but especially one who had put in as many years as Alaric had on the force—shared, honed from sheer experience:
True evil did indeed exist, and it was out there, waiting.
Like the quiet just before a storm, they could feel it. It had the hairs on the back of all their necks standing up. Maybe they couldn’t see the clouds rolling in, and maybe they couldn’t hear the thunder …
But that didn’t mean there wasn’t something on its way.
Maybe that something wasn’t Lucien Antonescu. Meena swore up and down that he hadn’t been in contact with her in months.
And there was no reason not to believe her. While they’d had plenty of reports of other paranormal phenomena—succubi, werewolves, and more ghosts than he could count—there’d been no reports from anywhere in the tristate area of attacks by members of Antonescu’s clan, the Dracul. In fact, there’d been no reports of any attacks at all that could be attributed to vampires.
This was frustrating, because the entire reason the Manhattan unit had been created was to root out and destroy the prince of darkness. If they killed him, it was theorized, the demonic beings over which he ruled would be weakened. Demoralized and disorganized without their leader, they’d be that much easier to slay.
Alaric wasn’t certain how much credence he put into this theory. But he did know Antonescu had to be close by. Because what kind of man—even a half man, half beast like that bloodsucking son of all that was evil, Antonescu—would simply fade into the night with a girl like Meena around? Every time Alaric glanced at her, he felt an almost magnetic pull in her direction.
And he hadn’t risked half a millennium of anonymity to be with her, the way Antonescu had.
It didn’t make sense to believe that the vampire would give up now, even if she’d rejected him. He was only biding his time, Alaric knew. Biding it a little too well, unfortunately.
Because everything between Alaric and Meena had gone wrong as well. Not as spectacularly wrong as it had between her and the vampire because, well, for one thing, he wasn’t a vampire. And for another, he and Meena had never actually gone out.
But he’d at least considered them friends. Now he wasn’t sure they were even that anymore.
It seemed to have started not long after he’d been released from the hospital for the wound he’d sustained protecting her from what undoubtedly would have been certain death at St. George’s Cathedral, when he’d asked Meena if she’d like to have dinner with him.
When she’d looked up at him with those big dark eyes and asked, “Where would you like to eat?” he’d replied, “Well, my apartment, of course. I’ll cook for you.” His culinary skills were excellent.
And why should they go to a stuck-up Manhattan restaurant where some customer was bound to do something to annoy him—such as talk too loudly on a cell phone, Alaric’s number one pet peeve—causing him to have to get into a fight, when he could make something just as good in his own apartment, where no one would annoy him?
She’d instantly looked wary. He had no idea why.
“Do you really think that’s such a good idea?” she’d asked.
“Why would that be a problem?” he’d inquired, genuinely confused.
“Maybe we should just keep it professional,” she’d said, giving him what he supposed she considered a “professional” pat on the shoulder.
That had been weeks and weeks ago, and she was still treating him like he had the plague and leprosy combined. He couldn’t understand it. What had he done that was so wrong? He’d asked Carolina de Silva, a fellow guard with whom Meena had become friendly, and she’d only smiled and told him he should have gone for the restaurant after all.
This information only made him more confused.
Now she wouldn’t shut up about her damned dream.
Why did he get “Maybe we should just keep it professional” when that soulless creature of the night got to be in her dreams?
“Wulf!” Holtzman barked the name. It echoed throughout the high-ceilinged room. The new headquarters for the Manhattan unit of the Palatine Guard had, just six months earlier, been a Catholic elementary school.
A cataclysmic decline in enrollment—no one who could afford to live in such a trendy neighborhood of Manhattan had children … or if they did, they were certainly not choosing to send them to Catholic school—and the building’s general state of disrepair had caused the Church to shut down St. Bernadette’s, with zero protest from the community, at exactly the same time as the Palatine had put in their request for a similar-size space in New York City.
Abraham Holtzman had been pleased … until he’d stepped inside and seen its dismal state, and the tiny desks still littering its hallways. It had taken weeks to clear them all out. The fountain in the courtyard—of Saint Bernadette kneeling before the Virgin Mary at Lourdes—still didn’t work. Apparently, it had been dry for almost a hundred years.
“What?” Alaric blurted, startled from his private thoughts.
“I was saying,” Holtzman snapped, “since I’m aware of your previous, er, dealings with Father Henrique Mauricio from the archdiocese of São Sebastio do Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, that I thought I ought to mention to you privately, before you heard it from anyone else, that the Vatican has been very impressed with him, and the way he handled himself during the outbreaks of the Lamir in the favelas, and he’s being transferred to America …”
Alaric sank backward into the seat closest to Holtzman’s desk. Unfortunately, it turned out to be some kind of secretarial chair dating from World War II. It squeaked in what sounded like terror and protest as Alaric’s muscular weight hit it. Apparently it was used to the significantly softer backsides of nuns.
“Tell me you’re joking.” Alaric tried to keep his tone neutral and failed.
“Honestly, Alaric, I’ve never understood what your problem is with the man. He’s had, after all, close to a hundred kills. And considering his age—he’s just a bit younger than you, barely thirty-three or -four, I believe—and profession—he’s a priest, after all, not a Vatican-trained demon hunter—that’s thoroughly impressive.”
Alaric stared at his boss. “Is it?” he asked impassively.
“Yes,” Holtzman cried. “It is! You know the Lamir are the most mysterious vampire clan in the entire world. We know very little about them because they’re relatively new, and they come from the heart of the Amazon. Really, Alaric, I know he may not be your favorite person in the world—I’ll never understand what happened between the two of you during that exorcism in Vidigal a few years back—but can’t you give Father Henrique a second chance?”
“No,” Alaric said, leaning precariously back in the office chair. As he did so, he casually lifted some files that were lying on top of a still-unpacked box near his boss’s desk. The files were marked Missing Persons. “I don’t think I can, actually.”
“Well,” Holtzman said drily, “you’d better try. There’s a gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art tomorrow night for the opening of the new exhibit of Vatican treasures, and all the high-ups from the archdiocese are expected to attend, which means we’ll be pulling security. Since he’s been appointed the new pastor at St. George’s Cathedral, Father Henrique will be a guest of honor, so I don’t want you—”
Alaric was so startled he would have fallen out of the chair if he hadn’t dropped his feet with a crash to the wood floor in order to regain his balance. The stack of files toppled over.
“What?” he cried. “Padre Caliente? Here?”
“I’ve asked you before,” Holtzman said exasperatedly, “not to call him that. He is a man of the cloth who has taken a lifelong vow of chastity. It’s both inappropriate and disrespectful to refer to him as Padre Caliente. Which isn’t even Portuguese, by the way. I asked Carolina, who you might recall is from São Paulo. So it only shows your ignorance. And pick those up.”
“We don’t need him here,” Alaric said. “What’s he coming here for?”
“If you’d listened to a word I’d said, you’d have heard that Father Henrique hasn’t been assigned to work here, for our unit. He’s the new pastor at St. George’s, now that the reconstruction is nearing completion—”
“Right,” Alaric said sarcastically. “You honestly think I’m that stupid?” He was doing a poor job of restacking the files. “Hasn’t this city got any of its own priests? What’s wrong with the old priest from St. George’s?”
“Considering he had a massive coronary after he heard his parish was nearly burned to the ground by the prince of darkness, and died, quite a lot.” Holtzman regarded Alaric impatiently. “You were in the hospital at the time, so I suppose it’s only natural you might not have heard, but must you be so insensitive? Is it the leg that’s bothering you so much? My understanding is that you came through your physical therapy with flying colors and are as good as new. It’s the sessions with your Palatine-assigned psychiatrist that you haven’t quite completed, because you keep walking out of them—”
Alaric straightened up and glared at him. “Fiske is giving me a discharge due to my not passing my psych eval?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Alaric,” Holtzman said. “Dr. Fiske seems to be impressed with your progress … when you show up. You just need to show up more often.” He held out his hand for the files Alaric was holding. “One thing you might want to consider discussing with him is the hostility you feel toward Father Henrique. Have you ever considered that it might be rooted in jealousy?”
Alaric rolled his eyes, surrendering the files. “Yes, Abraham. That’s exactly it. I’m jealous of a pretentious blowhard who’s so in love with himself that it doesn’t bother him at all that one of the requirements for his job is that he’s not allowed to have sex.”
“The Church is expecting to get quite a lot of press—and some sizable donations—out of this show at the museum,” Holtzman said, ignoring Alaric’s crudeness as he neatly restacked the files. “That’s why they worked so hard to time it to coincide with the Feast of San Gennaro, which is one of the largest, longest-running, and most revered outdoor festivals in the United States. This opening tomorrow night at the Met is expected to be one of the premier social events in the city. Transferring Padre Cali—I mean, Father Henrique—here in time for it was a deliberate move on the part of our superiors—”
“I’m certain it was,” Alaric muttered. “The padre definitely isn’t camera shy.”
“You may consider him a preening prima donna,” Holtzman continued, “but I assure you, the rest of us have the utmost admiration and respect for him. And I’m going to expect you to treat him accordingly. I will no longer tolerate your complete lack of respect for proper procedure. If you have a problem with him, you’re to go through established channels. You will not mock or humiliate him. And that includes pranks and physical displays of aggression. Do you understand?”
Alaric ignored him. “Why do we have so many missing-persons files? No one’s mentioned them to me.”
“Oh.” Holtzman shrugged and set the files aside. “There’s always an uptick in missing people—especially in the Manhattan area—in the fall, I’m told.”
When Alaric continued to stare at him, Holtzman elaborated. “The fall is the beginning of the new school year and often students starting college in the city drop out and don’t tell their parents because they’re embarrassed over their poor grades or experimentation with drugs or their sexuality and whatnot. So there’s nothing nefarious behind it. Our contact with the NYPD sent the files over anyway because this year there’s a larger than usual number of reports, but I couldn’t find anything unusual, so I’m sending them back—”
Alaric leaned forward to take the stack away from his boss again, then began to shuffle through them.
“I said,” Holtzman repeated irritably, “I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary.”
Alaric only grunted as he opened first one, then another file from the stack, then tossed them onto Holtzman’s desk.
“There’s nothing there, Wulf,” his supervisor said tiredly. “You know, Dr. Fiske’s quite positive about many areas of your recovery. You’re one of our finest guards—impressive number of kills, splendid record at interrogation, and all of that. But there’s one area in which the doctor says he’s yet to see any difference at all, and I must say, I’ve got to agree. Your interpersonal communication skills have always been sadly lacking.” Another file hit the top of Holtzman’s desk. “You still haven’t gotten over what happened to your partner in Berlin, even though he’s perfectly fine now—”
“Except for missing his face,” Alaric said, with a grunt. Another file hit Holtzman’s desk.
“This resentment you feel toward Father Henrique is another example,” Holtzman said. “What did the man ever do to you? Nothing. So he botched that exorcism. It was his first one. He was young. Do you know what I did at my first exorcism?”
“Ran,” Alaric said, at the same time as his boss.
“That’s exactly right,” Holtzman went on. “It’s extremely frightening to look into the face of evil for the first time.”
“Not,” Alaric said, “as frightening as looking into the face of a man who has willingly taken a vow of chastity.”
“That is a bad habit of yours,” Holtzman commented. “Expecting everyone to conform to your standards of behavior.”
Alaric stared at him. The man was clearly growing senile … or had he been hit over the head so many times by escaping yeti that he didn’t know what he was saying.
“I do not expect Henrique Mauricio to conform to my standards of behavior,” Alaric said. “I expect him not to do things that make me want to pound his face into a bloody pulp. Sadly, every time I meet him, he fails to live up to this expectation.”
“I understand,” Holtzman said kindly. “And given the circumstances of your upbringing, it sometimes surprises me that you don’t beat more people that you don’t like into bloody pulps. It took me quite some time to dissuade you from indulging in such behavior after I plucked you from the streets as a teenager, if you’ll recall. But there’s still a part of you that becomes quite angry when others don’t conform to your beliefs. I believe that’s why you’re so angry with Meena Harper.”
Alaric’s head came up with a snap. “I am not angry with Meena Harper.”
“That is a lie,” Holtzman said. “Why else are you so outraged about a theory she has that, for all we know, could be completely valid? Do you know what I was thinking the other day?”
“That this building still smells like vomit and school paste? Because it’s true.”
“If you like Meena so much, you should ask her out on a date.”
Alaric ducked his head back into the files. “I do not date. And besides, I did ask her over to dinner once. She said no, that it wouldn’t be pro—”
“What do you mean, you don’t date?” Holtzman looked annoyed. “All single people date. And of course she said no to dinner at your apartment. I wouldn’t come to dinner at your apartment if I was a woman. That’s like the spider asking the fly to step into his web. You truly are an imbe—” Another file landed on the older man’s desk. He snatched it up and said, “Would you stop? I told you, I’ve been through these. There’s nothing there. No commonality whatsoever.”
“There is,” Alaric said, laying down two more files. “All of them are from out of town.”
“What do you mean?” Holtzman looked more annoyed than ever.
“Each of the people in those files was a tourist on vacation in this city when he or she disappeared,” Alaric said. “All of those reports were filed in the missing person’s home state, though the victim actually disappeared here in Manhattan within the last few months. You said you were looking for a commonality. I found it for you.”
“I beg your pardon,” Holtzman said, his gaze dipping to all the files spread across his desk. “But are you seriously suggesting to me that there is someone out there killing tourists?”
“It looks like it,” Alaric said. He thumbed through one file. “Here’s an entire family. The O’Brians from Illinois, a family of five. Last seen by the concierge at their midtown hotel when they asked directions to M&M World. They never checked out. No one seems to have thought anything about it until Mr. O’Brian never showed back up at his job and the kids never returned to school. That’s when Grandma contacted the police in Illinois, and they, in turn, contacted the hotel, who assumed the family had simply flaked out—”
“Give me that.” Holtzman snatched the file away from him. “This can’t be possible. It would have been all over the local media. Someone snatching tourists from Manhattan? Just as the Feast of San Gennaro is starting up?”
“Not someone,” Alaric said. “Something.” He laid the rest of the files down with a thump. “Because where are all the bodies? You’d think by now they’d have started to turn a little ripe.”
Holtzman looked slightly sick to his stomach, but Alaric only looked thoughtful. Then he brightened. “I know. Let’s ask Padre Caliente tomorrow night at the Vatican treasures show. He’ll know what to do. He knows everything.”
Holtzman had already picked up the phone. He pointed at the door. “Out. Get out of my office. Now.”
Alaric was no more than a few steps out of the building and down the block before he began to reflect on the news his supervisor had imparted about Henrique Mauricio, and its implications for him personally and the unit as a whole. None of them, he concluded, was good.
His Palatine-appointed therapist, Dr. Fiske, was always encouraging Alaric to picture the worst-case scenario. It was healthy, the doctor said. Pessimists apparently lived longer than optimists.
“Because reality,” the doctor liked to say, “is never anywhere near as bad as what we imagine might happen.”
“I don’t know, Doc,” Alaric had said the last time they’d met. “Can you imagine anything worse than demons turning out to have a choice between being good and being evil?”
“Oh yes,” Dr. Fiske had replied cheerfully. “There are lots of things worse than that. After all, they could choose to be good.”
It was at this point during the session that Alaric had stood up and walked out. If he hadn’t, he imagined he probably would have stuck his fist through the doctor’s drywall. Or through the doctor’s face.
Alaric spent the evening after his meeting with Abraham Holtzman trying to imagine every worst-case scenario that Father Henrique’s being transferred to Manhattan could entail.
This was how he found himself working over the punching bag in his apartment until after midnight. Exhausted, he eventually showered and went to bed, only to be tortured by dreams in which Lucien Antonescu had chosen to be good. In one dream, he was lying in the bright sunshine in the grass in Central Park, with his head in Meena Harper’s lap … which was impossible, of course, because the prince of darkness would turn to ash if he stepped into sunlight.
Meena was laughing. Lucien Antonescu kept kissing her hair, which was long and dark and, for some reason, was continually falling into Lucien’s face.
It was a great relief when Alaric’s cell phone woke him early the next morning.
At least until he answered it and heard his boss’s voice saying, “Meena Harper is in some kind of trouble.”
Then something seemed to tighten in his chest. He knew it was not a pulled muscle from overworking the bag.
It was hard to think things could possibly get worse than that until he heard the words New Jersey and I’ll drive from Holtzman’s mouth.
But when he actually saw Meena Harper emerge from a taxi in front of the Freewell, New Jersey, Police Department, wearing one of those too-tight-in-the-chest dresses—this one black with little pink roses on it—she seemed to favor, the morning sun glinting on her newly auburn hair, he realized that all the worst-case scenarios he’d been imagining came nowhere close to the horror of this one:
There was a pink scarf tied around her throat.
Part Two (#ulink_c8ea5f97-908a-5d74-bc92-defd2996009a)
Chapter Seven (#ulink_3d829264-c431-5e64-a5e1-32bc28cd49ea)
Meena woke to the shrill vibration of her cell phone and glanced at the digital clock by the side of her bed. It was only six o’clock in the morning, two hours before she usually had to wake, because she lived so close to work. No one would call this early unless something was wrong.
Something, it turned out, was very wrong. She knew it the minute she picked up her phone and saw the New Jersey area code.
Meena didn’t know anyone who lived in New Jersey anymore. Not since her parents had retired to Florida.
Her pulse slowed almost to a standstill.
“Who the hell is that?” her brother demanded, stumbling shirtless from his room to stand in her doorway, blinking down at her sleepily. Jack Bauer had also scrambled from his basket in the corner and was now eagerly bouncing around beside her bed, thinking it was time to get up.
“Work,” she lied. “Can you take Jack out?”
“What the hell,” Jonathan said, but without rancor. “Come on, Jack,” he said to the dog, and went to go find his shoes and the dog’s leash.
Meena answered the phone.
“Hello,” said a woman’s voice, familiar, but older and more quavering than Meena had been expecting. “This is Olivia Delmonico. To whom am I speaking?”
Meena had thought she might eventually hear from the woman in David’s life.
But not this one.
“Um,” she said. She wasn’t ready. She—
“Hello?” Mrs. Delmonico said. “Is anyone there?”
“Yes,” Meena said. “Yes, Mrs. Delmonico. It’s me, Meena Harper.”
“Meena Harper?”
Mrs. Delmonico formed the words with obvious distaste. David’s parents had never liked Meena. Though neither they nor David had ever come right out and said so, Meena had always gotten the feeling they hadn’t approved of their son moving in with her after college, and not just because they didn’t believe in couples living together without the benefit of marriage, but because …
Well, they just hadn’t liked Meena. Maybe they’d felt like an aspiring writer wasn’t good enough for their ambitious son …
Or maybe it had had something to do with Meena mentioning, during her first dinner out with them, a celebration of David’s graduation from dental school, that Mr. Delmonico didn’t have to order any wine on her account, especially considering his “health concerns.”
Mr. Delmonico’s ongoing struggle with alcoholism had turned out to be a secret his parents had managed to keep from David his whole life. Up until that night, that is, when she’d blown it.
Oops.
“Well,” Mrs. Delmonico said. “This is … I don’t know what to say. I just found your number on a notepad by the side of David’s kitchen phone. I wasn’t aware the two of you were still … in touch.”
“Oh,” Meena said. She thought fast. “That. Well, you know I moved out of our old apartment recently, and I found I still had some boxes of his, so I got in touch with him about picking them up—”
“Oh yes,” Mrs. Delmonico said coldly. “Of course. Well, I apologize for calling so early. But I’m actually at David and Brianna’s right now. I’m going through every number I can find, trying to see if I can track down anyone who might have heard from David. He didn’t come home last night, you see.”
“He didn’t?” Meena tried to sound genuinely surprised. “That’s strange.”
“It’s very strange,” Mrs. Delmonico said. “Not like him at all.” Then, her voice dripping with ill-disguised dislike, she asked, “I don’t suppose you know where he is, do you, Meena?”
A picture of Mrs. Delmonico sitting in her pearls and Chanel suit in David and Brianna’s contemporary four-bedroom home—with its open kitchen and great room, three-car garage, and heated pool—flashed through Meena’s mind. Meena had never actually been to David’s home in Freewell, a fancy suburb about an hour’s drive from the city.
But somehow she could picture Mrs. Delmonico in it, all the same.
She could tell from the woman’s tone that she suspected that her son was right there in bed next to Meena, and that Meena was covering up for him.
Maybe in an alternate universe—one in which vampires, and therefore Lucien Antonescu, did not exist—this might have been true. Because then David would never have gotten bitten, and then Meena might actually have had the low self-esteem to have brought him home with her. Because she wouldn’t have known that something better existed out there.
But in this universe?
Never.
“No,” Meena said. “I do not know where David is.”
It wasn’t a lie. She didn’t know where David was. She hoped he was in heaven, but she wasn’t going to bet on it.
“Oh. Well, then.” Mrs. Delmonico’s voice sounded suddenly defeated. “I just don’t know what to do. I’ve called every number in his address book, and no one else has heard from him either. This number … well, it was my last hope. His cell phone goes straight to voice mail, just like Brianna’s. David Junior was up all night crying. He’s never spent a night before without his mother and his father, and he’s just hysterical—”
Meena sat bolt upright in bed. Her pulse, which had been racing before, now felt as if it had stopped.
“Wait,” she said. “Are you saying that you don’t know where David’s wife is either?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Delmonico said. She was sobbing openly now. The picture of her sitting in her pearls and Chanel suit vanished from Meena’s head. Now she heard only the voice of a frantic grandmother. “No one’s heard from her since she went to pick up some formula. And that was at six o’clock last night. I’ve called all the hospitals, but no one fitting David or Brianna’s description was brought in—”
Meena swung her legs from her bed. This wasn’t possible. Because she’d killed David. She’d killed him. There was no way Brianna could be gone, too. Meena had saved Brianna. Last night, she’d saved her.
“I just don’t know what to do,” Mrs. Delmonico was babbling, in a shaking voice. “Just now a New York City policeman called. David’s car has been found—its registration was still inside—near Little Italy. Why would David have been there? He never goes into the city. Maybe he and Brianna decided at the last minute to go to the Feast of San Gennaro? But why wouldn’t they have called?”
“Mrs. Delmonico,” Meena said, her throat very dry. “I want you to listen to me. This is very important. Are you in David’s house right now?”
“Of course,” Mrs. Delmonico said. “Someone has to stay with David Junior. My husband is here, too. He’s on the other line with the impound people, trying to figure out how we can get David’s car back—”
“Mrs. Delmonico,” Meena said. “Is there anywhere else you can take the baby? Just for a little while?”
“Well, I suppose we could take him to my daughter’s house.” Mrs. Delmonico sounded confused. “David’s sister lives a few miles away. But what does Naomi have to do with any of this? I already spoke to her and she hasn’t heard from David or Brianna—”
“I just think it would be best if you and your husband packed up some of the baby’s things and took him over to Naomi’s. Right away.”
“But when we spoke to that police officer from New York, he said the best thing to do was sit by the phone and wait for David to call. Or if we wanted to formally report that David and Brianna were missing, we could go over to the police station here in Freewell, which I thought was rude since I had him right on the phone, and you would have thought he could have taken the information. But he said we’ve got to do it in the jurisdiction in which they live.”
Meena took a deep, steadying breath. She realized now that just like Cassandra, she really was cursed.
Because Cassandra—poor, clairvoyant Cassandra, who’d denied the love of a god—had taken up with Agamemnon, only to end up murdered by his vengeful wife, Clytemnestra.
“Mrs. Delmonico,” she said, her mouth gone dry as sand, “have you reported them missing yet?”
“Well,” Mrs. Delmonico said, “no. The officer said we’d have to do it in person, and we can’t just leave the baby here by himself—”
“Exactly,” Meena said. “Drop the baby off at David’s sister’s, and then go to the Freewell Police Department as soon as you can. Do you hear me, Mrs. Delmonico? It’s very important that you report David and Brianna missing right away.”
Mrs. Delmonico sounded even more surprised. “Oh,” she said. “Well, the police officer didn’t say that. I don’t know how Naomi is going to feel about us leaving David Junior with her. She’s got the triplets now, you know. But I suppose under these circumstances, it would be all right. I just don’t know what we’re going to do about David’s car. Apparently, the impound people are being difficult. The police are searching it, or something—”
“Look,” Meena said, finally, in desperation. “Why don’t I just meet you? At the police station in Freewell. I might be able to help.”
Now Mrs. Delmonico sounded more than just surprised. She sounded stunned. “Help? How?”
“I might have some information,” Meena said. “About David. Information that the police may find useful. It’ll take me a little while to get there, because I’ll have to shower, then take the train. But I’ll be there no later than nine o’clock. You’ll meet me there, right? You and Mr. Delmonico? And you’ll leave the baby at David’s sister’s house?”
“Well,” Mrs. Delmonico said, clearly flabbergasted, “I … yes. Thank you, Meena. That’s very … kind.”
Meena said it was no problem and hung up, feeling guilty.
Because she wasn’t being kind. She had no other choice. She was the last person to have seen David Delmonico alive.
She was also the person who’d tried to save his wife’s life.
And apparently, she’d failed. She couldn’t understand how … except for the part where she’d made out with the guy who’d provided her with the weapon with which she’d murdered Brianna’s husband.
Now she had the lives of David’s parents, and his baby, to worry about. Who knew where Brianna Delmonico was?
But Meena wasn’t taking any chances that Brianna might be looking for breakfast in her own house. She had to make sure the Delmonicos got out of there, just in case.
She could see she had a lot of work to do if she was going to rectify all the wrongs she’d committed the night before.
But when she got to the station house where she’d promised to meet Mrs. Delmonico, she could see that her karmic punishment was going to be even worse than she’d anticipated.
That’s because the last person in the world she wanted to see was waiting for her on the station-house steps:
Alaric Wulf.
Chapter Eight (#ulink_94f814c2-785b-59b9-8f05-e1a72155fac0)
Why are you here?” she demanded.
He thrust a cup of coffee at her. “I thought you might need this.”
The truth, however, was that he needed it. Especially now that he’d seen the scarf.
“I called Abraham, not you,” she said rudely.
“I noticed,” he said. “Do you want the coffee or not?”
She looked down at the cup. “Light?”
She had on sunglasses, so he couldn’t see her eyes. But he guessed from the throatiness in her voice that she’d been crying.
“I think I know by now how you take your coffee,” he said stiffly.
She took it from him. “Thanks,” she grumbled.
They stood outside the station house in silence, drinking coffee and watching the good people of Freewell drive by on their way to work … or wherever they were going so early on a Saturday morning.
The police department was a fairly new building, on a grassy embankment attractively landscaped with new trees. Birds sang prettily in the treetops, oblivious to the impending doom. Alaric reflected that, if they had been in front of a station house in the city, police officers would have been hauling transvestite hookers past them. Instead, a squirrel, foraging for nuts for the winter, hopped nearby.
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on,” Alaric asked, “or am I supposed to guess?”
“It’s not what you think,” Meena said.
“I thought you could only tell how people are going to die, not what they’re thinking.”
“You’re not exactly hard to read, Alaric,” she said.
This stung. He said, “Well, as it happens, neither are you. The last time you wore a scarf like that around your neck, it nearly cost me a leg. So I’d appreciate a little heads-up this time, since I happen to enjoy being able to walk.”
Her cheeks went almost the same color pink of the scarf.
“All right,” she said, reaching up to remove the sunglasses. Beneath them her dark eyes, which she’d carefully made up, were nevertheless red-rimmed from crying. “Yes. I did get bitten last night. But it wasn’t by Lucien, Alaric. Not this time, I swear.”
He felt the sidewalk sway beneath him. He didn’t understand this, because despite his protests that they should get to Freewell as quickly as possible, Abraham had pulled into a fast-food drive-through in the Prius (Alaric would never get over the indignity of having been forced to ride in such a vehicle) along the way, insisting that breakfast was the most important meal of the day, and they’d need the protein.
Now Alaric was glad, even if the alleged “McMuffin” he had eaten was sitting like a rock in his stomach.
“Impossible,” he said to her. “We haven’t had a vampire sighting in the city—in North America—in six months. We killed all the Dracul. You know that. You were there.”
“This wasn’t a Dracul,” she said.
Alaric shook his head, confused. “But there’s never been another clan reported in—”
“Well,” Meena said, “then someone needs to alert Homeland Security. Because last night I had a close encounter with an illegal immigrant of the very fanged kind.”
“Why didn’t you call it in until this morning?” Alaric demanded. “What’s going on, exactly, Meena? Abraham wouldn’t tell me anything. He said you’d tell me. If you chose to.” He didn’t mention how angry this information had made him. What had Holtzman meant, if Meena chose to tell him?
And why had Meena chosen to tell Holtzman anything instead of him? He was the one who’d saved her life at St. George’s, not Holtzman. Was this all because he refused to believe her theory about Antonescu?
But who could? It was crazy. Demons were inherently evil. They were not capable of free will. He didn’t care what Saint Thomas Aquinas had written eight hundred years ago.
“Look, I appreciate the coffee, but can we just go inside?” Meena said, suddenly looking less mulish, and more tired. “It took me forever to get a cab from the train station, and now I’m late, and I’m sure everyone is wondering where I am.”
“Abraham’s already inside,” Alaric said. “He’s told everyone he’s your lawyer.”
Meena rolled her eyes and tossed her coffee cup into a nearby trash can. “Great. My lawyer. Now it looks like I did something wrong.”
Alaric caught her by the wrist as she started to walk past him and into the building. Her bones felt as small and fine as a bird’s.
“Did you do something wrong?” he asked, his gaze burning down into hers. He didn’t want to ask it. He knew it was wrong of him, and he probably shouldn’t have.
But he couldn’t help it.
She reached up with her free hand to push some bright copper hair from her eyes. Eyes that, he saw, were suddenly brimming with tears. “I guess that depends from whose point of view you’re looking at it. Yours? No. My own? Yeah. Yeah, I definitely did.”
He felt a sudden wave of tenderness toward her that, had it been anyone else, he’d have ignored. He tried to ignore it. She’d violated every rule in the book.
Then again, so had he, at one time or another.
But this was different. She’d also put herself in danger. And then she hadn’t called him. It hurt his feelings … even though he’d go to his grave before he’d admit it.
But now she was shaken and upset about something. And she’d called Holtzman. He wanted to be the person she turned to when she was shaken and upset. Not Holtzman.
How could he have let everything go so wrong? And how could he possibly fix it?
She looked pointedly down at the wrist he was holding. Instantly, he released it. She turned away and started to walk past him, into the building.
He should have let it end there. But he couldn’t.
So instead, he reached out and wrapped an arm around her shoulders, pulling her toward him in an embrace that was awkward as much because she wasn’t expecting it as because Alaric Wulf was not used to hugging people, and wasn’t very good at it.
“It’s all right,” he said, in what he hoped was a soothing voice. He stroked her hair. The fine threads, a little coarse from all the dye her friend Leisha had been using on them lately, were hot from the sun. “Whatever it is. It’s going to be fine.”
She finally seemed to realize what he was doing and stopped trying to pull away. To his surprise, he actually felt her relax in his arms. Something warm and wet touched his neck, and he realized, with a shock, that it was her tears.
“I don’t think so, Alaric,” she whispered. “I really don’t. Not this time.”
He didn’t know what to do. He’d gotten so accustomed to her giving him the cold shoulder that for her to completely drop all her defenses and melt against him like this was a little unnerving. He almost preferred the hostile glances and sarcasm. It was certainly better than tears. Hundreds of women had cried in front of him before, and it had never bothered him.
But this was awful.
He tightened his grip and said, lamely, “It can’t be that bad.” Then he wanted to kick himself. Actually, it really could be that bad. What did he know?
A squad car pulled up beside them. A Freewell police officer got out from behind the wheel, then walked around to haul a surprisingly tall and colorfully dressed—for suburban New Jersey—drag queen from the backseat.
“Honey,” the drag queen said to Meena as the officer escorted her into the building, “you save me a piece of that boy’s ass. I will be right out to get it.”
Alaric looked skyward, thankful he had taken Holtzman’s advice not to bring his sword.
“I think we should go inside and find Abraham,” Meena said in a small voice, stepping away from him.
“I think that’s an excellent idea,” Alaric said, and hurried to open the door for her. He didn’t understand the look Meena gave him when he did this, one that seemed to be of mingled shock, gratitude, and something else that he could not identify.
But it did not make him feel any better.
Chapter Nine (#ulink_c32ac98c-e1d0-5278-bc98-2ae0e5afb8f9)
Meena, followed closely by Alaric, walked into the impeccably clean, high-tech Freewell Police Department. She wondered why every head in the room did not swivel toward her as she came in. That’s how loudly her heartbeat was slamming inside her ears. She felt as if everyone in the whole world must be able to hear it.
But apparently, she was the only one who could.
She could see Abraham Holtzman sitting in the conference room the polite receptionist led them to, speaking to a sleepy-looking woman in a beige suit, and to David’s parents, who appeared decades older than they had the last time Meena had seen them.
Of course they did. Because their son was dead. Although they didn’t know it yet.
Meena swallowed and tried to plaster a warm smile of greeting on her face.
It was difficult to do so, however, when she was so hyperaware of Alaric Wulf behind her. She’d never forget the look in his eyes when he’d seen the scarf she’d tied around her neck to hide the ugly bruise David’s bite mark had left behind. She’d thought he was going to throw the coffee he was holding right into her face.
That he was only half wrong about how the bite had been acquired—since she had seen Lucien last night—caused her cheeks to burn. She wondered if he noticed.
“Ah, here’s Ms. Harper now, along with one of my associates, Mr. Wulf.” That gaze of Abraham’s was like a pair of lasers beneath the overhang of those shaggy eyebrows, so unkempt that they gave the appearance of a disordered mind.
And yet Meena knew better than anyone that Dr. Holtzman’s mind was very ordered indeed.
And that meant she was in big trouble. Because though she’d finally done her duty and reported last night’s “vampire-related incident,” she’d only reported one of them. She was determined to keep Lucien’s name out of it for as long as she could.
But between Abraham Holtzman and Alaric Wulf, both of whom were the most stubborn men—in their different ways—she’d ever encountered, she wasn’t certain how long she was going to be able to.
“Sorry I’m late,” Meena said, nervously, looking around. This was just like a scene from a TV crime show where they interviewed murder suspects.
But there were no two-way mirrors in the Freewell Police Department’s conference room, just a bank of windows looking out over the pleasantly landscaped lawn in front of the station house, and some photos scattered across the table … photos of David and Brianna that Meena presumed the Delmonicos had brought along with them.
They were recent studio portraits in which the baby was only a few months old. The attractive couple looked blissfully happy, beaming into the camera without a hair—or tooth—out of place.
David’s specialty was veneers. He’d always wanted to put some over Meena’s slightly crooked front teeth, but when he’d explained that to do so, he’d actually have to cut into her gums, she’d declined the offer.
“I’m still not sure,” Mrs. Delmonico was saying in a querulous voice, “why she had to bring so many lawyers along when all she said was that she just wanted to meet us here to—”
“We’re all just here to help, Mrs. Delmonico,” Abraham interrupted, in a soothing voice. “Ms. Harper, meet Detective Rogerson—” Abraham gestured to the tired-looking woman, who gave the impression of wishing she’d rather be anywhere but sitting with all of them. Meena didn’t blame her. “And of course you remember the Delmonicos.”
As David’s parents’ gazes landed on her, bruised and bewildered, Meena lost all ability to control her mouth. Her smile vanished, and she could only mutter, “Hello,” softly as she lowered herself onto the hard plastic chair Abraham offered her. She barely managed to keep herself from murmuring Sorry for your loss.
Because of course the Delmonicos didn’t yet know they’d had a loss … perhaps two.
And she certainly wasn’t going to be the one to tell them.
“So, Ms. Harper,” the detective said in a businesslike tone. She flicked a glance at Alaric, who, rather than taking a seat at the conference table, perched himself on the windowsill, where he could best take in the view. He then whipped out his cell phone to check his text messages, appearing not in the least interested in the proceedings.
The detective looked away, then flipped open a notepad in front of her. “Mrs. Delmonico here says you might have some information about her son, who didn’t come home last night. What can you tell us about that?”
Meena glanced quickly at Abraham.
“Um,” she said. “I thought … on TV, they always interview the suspects in separate rooms.”
Detective Rogerson stared at her unsmilingly, her pen poised over her notepad. “This isn’t TV, and you aren’t suspected of anything, Ms. Harper, because at this time, no crime has been committed. Unless you’re the one who vandalized Mr. Delmonico’s car in the city last night.”
“Well, that is hardly likely,” Abraham said, “given my client’s small stature and the extreme strength it would have taken to do the sort of damage—”
Detective Rogerson shot Abraham a look. He smiled at her pleasantly.
“Well,” Meena said hastily, “that’s true. I had nothing to do with what happened to David’s car.”
Realizing she’d already made a strategic mistake, Meena was careful to look Detective Rogerson in the eye the whole time she was speaking so that she could not be accused of lying. She’d read this was one way the police could detect if you were telling the truth.
Then she explained how she and David had arranged to meet the night before so that she could give him the “belongings” of his that she’d found, and that afterward she had sat in David’s parked car for a few moments, just to “talk.” It was then, she said, that she’d noticed David was a little intoxicated. She’d felt it best that David not drive home, and he’d agreed.
Mrs. Delmonico inhaled sharply at this, even though Meena avoided mentioning the rest of it—what David had done to her in his car. No way was she bringing that up … not ever. Especially not in front of Mrs. Delmonico, who really was wearing her pearls, exactly the way Meena had pictured. She was twisting them so tightly as she listened to Meena that her fingertips had turned purple. Meena half expected the strand to break at any moment.
Then there was David’s dad, who looked close to tears, his nose redder with broken capillaries (from drinking, Meena suspected) than ever. The couple looked upset enough at her mentioning David’s drinking—even though she’d significantly downplayed it.
There was no way she was going to make things worse by saying he’d attacked her, too. They’d never have believed it, for one thing.
And for another, now that she was employed by the Palatine—a secret demon-hunting branch of the Vatican—she couldn’t. She was forbidden by her employers from ever admitting in front of civilians the existence of vampires.
So even if she’d wanted to, she could not say that David had not only been drunk, but had apparently been turned into a member of the undead, and that he had attacked her.
But of course she didn’t want to.
Because what Meena wanted, above all, was to keep from dragging Lucien into any of this. Not only was none of it his fault—it was her screwup, after all—but he’d risked his own neck by coming out of hiding after so many months just to rescue her from David, when he apparently—for reasons he would not reveal to her, but it seemed obvious enough—was not even well.
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