by Meg Cabot
“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
Saturday, September 18
Chapter Seven
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 bitte
n, 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
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.
“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?