Overbite

by Meg Cabot

  Because if it were, that would mean . . .

  She didn’t want to think what that would mean. She just had to look for herself. She had to be sure, before she did—or said—anything rash.

  The manuscript—quite a small one, just as Mary Lou had said—stood upright in a glass cube. One exquisitely illustrated page had been separated from the others, and was backlit so that it glowed with an almost otherworldly light.

  Meena knew from her research that this was because actual gold had been melted down into liquid and laid in paper-thin sheets on the vellum—that’s what the manuscript pages were made of—all around the beautifully drawn illustration, which was of a dark-haired young woman wearing a long, royal-blue gown, and holding a lamb in her arms.

  Meena stared at the woman inside the gleaming layer of gold, which had also been decorated with whimsical drawings of butterflies and flowers, gorgeously colored with red, yellow, green, blue, and white. According to her research, these paints would have been made by mixing lead, mercuric sulfide, arsenic, and lapis lazuli to give them their vibrant and lasting tones.

  It wasn’t the image she’d seen in her dream, the one the woman and the little boy had been looking at. But there was definitely something about it that . . .

  “Lovely, is it not?”

  Meena jumped about a foot. Then she glanced across the glass cube and realized it was only Father Henrique. He, too, was admiring the manuscript.

  “Er,” she said. “Yes.”

  She looked around. The party was still going strong, even though it was getting late. She could see Alaric across the room, deep in conversation with the reporter from New York’s own twenty-four-hour news channel, Genevieve Fox. It appeared that he hadn’t yet noticed that Meena had come out of the ladies’ room.

  “I do not know as much as I should about these books,” Father Henrique was saying modestly, “but I once read that it was common when they were commissioned—as this one was said to be, by the owner’s betrothed—that the artist would place, somewhere in the work, a portrait of the bride. Since this book was said to belong to a beautiful princess, I would think this woman, here, was she.”

  He pointed at the illuminated picture of the girl holding the lamb.

  “She has no halo, you see?” Father Henrique was saying. “So she is not the Virgin Mary, or a saint. And she is very attractive and richly dressed.”

  Meena glanced back at the woman in the illustration. Was this Lucien’s mother?

  The portrait she’d once seen of Lucien’s father—in this very museum—hadn’t looked a thing like Lucien.

  But the closer she bent to examine the portrait of the young woman in the illuminated illustration, the more she thought she saw a likeness to the woman in her dream . . . and to Lucien. It wasn’t just in the flowing black hair, the darkness of the features, or the litheness in the figure.

  There was the gentleness to the eyes that she recognized, and a certain humor—and kindness—about the small mouth that she would not have mistaken anywhere.

  She didn’t think she was seeing it because she wanted to either. She didn’t want to see it. Because if this was the book from her dream, the same one she’d requested from the catalog, the fact that the Vatican had put it on display like this, and not sent it to her, the way she’d asked, could only mean . . .

  Well, exactly what Lucien—and even Alaric—had been suggesting:

  That this show had been put together for a single purpose . . . to lure the prince of darkness from hiding so that the Palatine could capture him.

  She had to let Alaric know about this. This was exactly what he’d been suspecting all along.

  But she couldn’t. Because she couldn’t put Lucien in any more danger than he already was in.

  Besides, Alaric seemed to be completely engrossed in his conversation with Genevieve Fox. Or rather, Genevieve was completely engrossed in her conversation with him. She had even removed something from her evening bag, and was—

  Good God. It was her BlackBerry.

  Genevieve Fox was putting Alaric Wulf’s phone number into her BlackBerry.

  Wulf. Fox. And they actually made an attractive couple. They were both so tall and blond.

  Meena wondered why this realization caused her insides to give a convulsive twist.

  She didn’t have time to think about that, however. She had to go warn Lucien, and without Alaric noticing she’d left the room. Actually, she could put his conversation with Genevieve Fox to good use.

  But first, she had to get rid of Father Henrique, who was still speaking.

  “These little books were extremely popular in the fifteenth century,” he was explaining, “and their contents were generally uniform. Excerpts from the Gospels, the hours of the cross, the seven penitential psalms, a calendar of the church feasts, and various devotionals. This one, however, is a bit unusual. It also has the astrological signs and the different phases of the moon.”

  “That’s very interesting,” she murmured.

  Meena couldn’t deny it. The longer she gazed at it, the more strongly she believed the woman in the picture was the woman from her dream . . . the woman who’d thrown herself into what was now known as Princess River rather than be taken captive by her husband’s enemies. And so had driven Vlad Tepes mad with grief, and turned him into Vlad the Impaler.

  This was the woman who’d created Dracula, and given birth to his son, Lucien.

  And because Meena had drawn so much attention to her book of hours, she was the woman who—albeit inadvertently—would soon contribute to the capture, and ultimate demise of that son.

  She had to go. She had to go warn Lucien to get out of the museum as soon as possible . . .

  “Forgive me for saying so,” Father Henrique said. He startled her by reaching out to touch her arm. His smile had vanished. He wore an expression of gentle concern. “But you seem unwell. May I get you something? A glass of wine, perhaps? Or some water?”

  “I . . . I’m fine,” Meena said. Was it her imagination, or had his English seemed to have improved since the last time she’d spoken to him? “I just remembered I have to go make a quick phone call. So if you’ll excuse me—”

  “I hope you don’t mind me mentioning it,” Father Henrique said. “But you seem like an unhappy person. And I don’t blame you. I don’t think I could be happy either, knowing how everyone around me is going to die.”

  “I try to help keep them from dying,” Meena replied automatically. She had to get out of the room before Alaric finished his conversation with Genevieve Fox. “No one’s future is certain. It depends on the choices they make. I like to think that with my help, maybe they can make better ones. I try to make things right. Now, if you’ll just . . .”

  Father Henrique nodded solemnly. “That is what devotionals like this were for.” He indicated the book of hours. “To help the women who owned them make better choices, and stay upon the correct path. Back when this was made, there were very few books. Most people would go their entire lives never learning how to read, much less own or even see a book. There were so few enlightened people—like you and me—to help guide the uninformed, and show them the true way. It was so easy, even then, to slip into the darkness. Now it’s even easier and”—he looked across the room at Genevieve Fox and sighed—“people look to women like her for their enlightenment. Well. What can we do but, as you say, keep trying?”

  She stared at him. What did he know, she wondered, about slipping into the darkness? He’d run away from the darkness that night of the exorcism with Alaric. He’d admitted it himself. Maybe he was taking strides to fight it now.

  But putting down Genevieve, who’d given him such a nice interview, didn’t seem like the best way to go about doing that.

  “Ready to go?” a deep voice asked.

  Meena, startled, whipped around to see Alaric standing beside
her. Where had he come from? The last time she’d looked, he’d been all the way across the room . . . and looking as if he were going to be there awhile.

  “Uh . . . ” Meena couldn’t believe it. How was she going to get away now? “I’m not quite ready—”

  She broke off. Mary Lou was striding toward them from across the room.

  “What?” Alaric asked impatiently. He seemed annoyed, but whether it was with her, or with seeing that Father Henrique was standing right there, didn’t really matter. Mary Lou was coming straight at them, a big smile on her ruby-red lips. “If you need to go back to the bathroom before we leave, just say so. I’ll wait. You think I’m not used to it? You spend half your life in the bathroom.”

  “I—” Meena’s eyes widened as Mary Lou reached out, grasped Alaric by both shoulders, then spun him around.

  “Alaric,” Mary Lou said happily. “Darling, there you are. I’ve missed you. It’s been too long.”

  Then she kissed him, full on the mouth.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Meena had long suspected Alaric of having a soft spot for Mary Lou Antonescu.

  But she’d never known the real reason why until she saw the way Mary Lou kissed. The woman was like a Dyson vacuum cleaner. A hundred years from now, Meena doubted Mary Lou would have lost any of her sucking action.

  The second Mary Lou released Alaric, the alert seemed to go out:

  Vampire!

  Meena wasn’t certain who said it first. Definitely not Alaric. He looked stunned, but pleasantly so.

  In fact, as Mary Lou pulled her face away from his, Alaric—who, Carolina had once told Meena, was famous among his colleagues for having ordered a field full of teenagers, enjoying an outdoor festival featuring their favorite horror-core bands, crop-dusted with holy water; it was pure luck, Carolina insisted, that the members of that band all turned out to have been vampires, and the worst the teenagers endured was a dousing—murmured, “Oh, hello. How have you been?”

  Alaric was the only one in the room—besides Meena, Genevieve Fox, and the murderous athlete—who didn’t pull out a weapon the minute the cry went up.

  Vampire!

  That’s when Mary Lou did a back handspring, knocking over the pedestal containing Lucien’s mother’s book of hours. It spilled to the carpet without suffering any apparent harm. Mary Lou snatched it up and tucked it neatly into her pagoda bag.

  Then, with a wink in Alaric’s direction, she darted off toward where the caterers had been coming and going all night with the trays of salmon.

  Most of the party guests and all of the museum’s security guards took off after her, including Father Henrique and Alaric, the latter shouting at Meena, “Don’t move.” Then he disappeared.

  So it ended up being quite easy for Meena to slip out the main door unseen, and walk down the museum’s corridors until she found an elevator. She pressed the button, then, when the doors slid open, got inside.

  She took the car to the floor where Mary Lou had said Lucien was waiting.

  She didn’t know what she was going to say to him when she saw him—except that he needed to leave. Forever this time. No amount of kissing on his part was going to change her mind. He needed to go his way, and she needed to go hers, and the two of them needed to stay apart forever, start over, make different choices . . . like Father Henrique had said the book of hours had offered its readers.

  Maybe if she closed her eyes and prayed hard enough, when the elevator doors slid open, she would magically have the strength to make this happen. Why not? For a long time, she had not known there was such a thing as vampires and demons in the world. Why couldn’t it turn out that there was such a thing as magic?

  But when the elevator doors slid open, there was the gallery to the nineteenth-century wing, just as it always had been. There was the painting of Saint Joan that she knew so well, looking beatifically off into the distance in her peasant clothes, as saints whispered urgently into her ear of her important destiny.

  And there was Lucien Antonescu, standing in front of the painting, waiting for her.

  And a wave of desire for him slammed into her, so hard that it nearly knocked her off her feet.

  “Meena,” he said. His voice wasn’t quite steady. His eyes, so dark, so luminous, were exactly like the eyes of the woman she’d seen in his mother’s manuscript downstairs. “I knew you’d come.”

  He was wearing a charcoal-gray sweater in some kind of soft material that clung to every curve of his muscular chest, the sleeves casually pushed up so that she could see the smooth, bare skin of his forearms.

  And he was looking at her with those dark eyes, and they were filled with so much love. Love for her.

  She closed her eyes. No.

  There was no magic. And this wasn’t a dream. This was real. There was no way she could turn back the hours, or undo the damage their relationship had done to so many others.

  She could only do what she’d told Father Henrique she always did: try to make it right.

  But she couldn’t do that if Lucien touched her. She knew that. If he touched her, she’d fall apart, the way she always did.

  She punched the down button, then shrank back against the far wall of the elevator—it was imperative that she put as much distance between her and Lucien Antonescu as she possibly could—and said, as the doors were closing, “I’m sorry, Lucien. This was a mistake. It’s a trap. They’re waiting for you. I have to go.”

  But he had other ideas. Moving so rapidly he was a blur, his arms shot through the opening between the closing doors. A second later, his large hands had wrapped around her upper arms, dragging her out of the elevator and into the gallery . . .

  . . . and to him, until she collided with the rock-hard muscle wall of his chest.

  Now she was the trapped one. She heard the elevators close behind her, with a ding.

  The sound might well have signaled the closing of what was left of the rational world.

  Lifting her head to throw an anguished glance up at him, she saw that he was looking down at her with sheer agony on his face, those dark eyes stormy with emotion, that mouth, every bit as sensitive as she remembered it, grimly set.

  “Meena,” he said, grinding out the words, “what do you think you’re doing?”

  “Lucien,” she said, breathless as if she’d been running, “you’ve got to listen to me. It isn’t safe—”

  But he didn’t let her finish. His mouth started to come down to crush hers, and she knew, with a sense of inevitability that was as sickeningly disappointing as it was exciting, that the minute their lips met, she wouldn’t be able to resist him. She didn’t want to resist him. She was powerless in his embrace. She closed her eyes, letting her head drop back against his strong arm.

  Except . . . as the seconds ticked by, his lips never touched hers. Instead . . .

  Nothing.

  When she opened her eyes to see what was happening, she saw that he was looking down at her curiously. Not at her mouth either, or into her eyes, but gazing at her neck.

  She also saw—or thought she saw—a hint of red in the center of each one of those dark brown eyes of his.

  “What’s this?” he asked, running a finger along the black cord that held in place the silver cross Alaric had given her.

  She was jolted back to reality as quickly as if someone had slapped her. What was she doing?

  “Lucien,” she said, dropping her arms from around his neck, where she’d instinctively wrapped them. “Y-you can’t stay here. It’s much too dangerous. They’re already after Mary Lou. You’ve got to go—”

  He still hadn’t lifted his gaze from the cross. She couldn’t be sure in the dim glow of the security lights along the floor of the gallery—the only light, besides the gleam from the display bulbs on the paintings . . .

  . . . But she thought she could still see
that red blaze there. Very faintly.

  “Where did you get it?” he asked, pulling on the choker. He kept his finger well away from the silver cross. “All your jewelry was destroyed by my clan. That’s an expensive piece. I’ve never seen you wear it before.”

  “Great,” she said. “Now you’ve been spying on me?”

  Lucien didn’t smile.

  “Not spying,” he said. “Watching over you. I told you I would. How else do you think I saw the attack on you last night? And I’ve never seen you wear that bef—”

  She put her hand over his mouth. She didn’t want him talking about how well he knew her wardrobe, especially from observing her since they’d broken up.

  And she definitely didn’t want him asking about the necklace. This line of questioning was causing her heart to thump way too hard, and she was certain, since he was still holding her so closely, he would be able to feel it through the thin, clingy material of her dress.

  “Focus on what’s important here,” she said. “Your mother’s book, the one Mary Lou just stole?” She tried to keep her voice firm and steady. Except that she didn’t feel firm. Or very steady. But she had to act that way. For both of them. “It’s the one from my dreams, the one I tried to tell you about last night. It’s the one I requested from the Vatican library a few months ago, Lucien. And that means something really creepy is going on . . . besides the normal, demon-variety creepy that always seems to be going on wherever you’re concerned. First David got turned into a vampire, and now my boss, who went to go look for David’s wife, is missing. And so are a bunch of other people. And yet there haven’t been any vampire sightings reported here for months. And there are no bodies. Where are all the bodies?”

  Lucien pulled her hand from his mouth . . . but kept an iron grip on her wrist.

  “I have to be honest with you,” he said, looking down into her face very intently. “I don’t like that necklace very much. I would feel much more comfortable if you would take it off.”

  “Well, I have to be honest with you,” she said, pulling her wrist from his grasp. “The only reason I’m wearing this necklace is because members of your species keep trying to bite me. So if you don’t mind, I’m going to keep it on.”