by Meg Cabot
Chapter Twenty-eight
Alaric Wulf was not in Rome.
He had not been entirely sure where he was when he first lifted his head after regaining consciousness. But slowly he was getting his bearings. He had been in this room before, though only once, when he’d first toured the building.
What he could not figure out was why he was in this room now . . . and hanging by his wrists from a thick pipe in the middle of the ceiling. He had no way of telling how long he’d been there, since they had taken away all of his belongings, including his watch, his cell phone, his belt, his sword, his shoes, his socks, and, for some reason, his shirt, all of which it was presumably believed he could use as deadly weapons.
Alaric thought this was interesting, both because his feet—and his bare hands, if he could just get them loose—would more than suffice as deadly weapons.
Someone evidently had something to fear from him.
Someone was right.
Alaric didn’t know why it was that he’d been struck over the head, then strung up in the boiler room of St. Bernadette’s. He imagined no one at the Palatine was too happy with him for discussing the missing tourists with Genevieve Fox.
He’d expected a disciplinary letter, at most. Possibly probation. This seemed to be taking matters too far.
The last thing he could remember was being hauled from the van that had taken him from the Met. He had been understandably—in his opinion, anyway—upset at that turn of events. Where had that squadron of uniformed idiots, led by Henrique Mauricio, come from, anyway?
Had that net they’d tried to use to capture Lucien Antonescu just as Alaric had been about to slice his head been Caliente’s idea? Probably. The whole thing had been handled ham-fistedly enough.
And Alaric had had every intention of saying so to whomever he could get to listen . . . though his first priority had been trying to make them aware of the phone call he’d received from Abraham. They needed to know that the team was alive, and in jeopardy. Someone needed to get in touch with Johanna and see how she was progressing with the satellite tracking, and then send a recon team to wherever Holtzman and the others were—
No sooner were the words out of his mouth than the blow had struck the back of his head. After that, there’d been only darkness. He’d woken up in this sorry state.
Apparently, he’d struck a nerve. Someone—and he had a fairly good idea who—didn’t want him talking about the phone call he’d received from Holtzman. It was a call he apparently wasn’t supposed to have received and might be why he was in his current position.
Interesting. But also aggravating.
Because how could he help Holtzman when he was in this position?
Gravity had long since pulled the blood from his hands and arms, and he’d lost all feeling in them. He was thirsty, and his head hurt where he’d been coldcocked.
He’d been strung up in such a manner before, of course, but never by his own employer . . . and he knew it was his employer who’d done it because the restraints around his wrists were the soft leather ones they used on recalcitrant humans who would not give up the location of their vampire lovers. They did not leave marks on the skin, no matter how much the prisoner struggled, but were incredibly secure, and impossible to break free from . . .
. . . unless, of course, one had worked with them as often as Alaric had, and knew their weaknesses.
He needed to get out of there, and as soon as possible. It wasn’t only the situation with Holtzman and the rest of the team in New Jersey that was worrying him. He was worried about Meena, as well. He’d heard the way Caliente had been speaking to her outside the museum. If they had Alaric hanging by his arms in a boiler room—and only because they mistrusted and disliked him—what were they doing to her in order to get her to reveal the whereabouts of Lucien Antonescu?
Alaric knew. He knew perfectly well. He also knew that he had to stop it, because last night in the museum, he’d looked in Antonescu’s eyes and—despite Meena’s assertions to the contrary—seen nothing there but demon.
It was possible, of course, that Meena was right, and at one time Lucien Antonescu hadn’t been a complete monster.
Alaric didn’t believe that was true anymore. Meena was only seeing what she wanted to see.
Alaric, meanwhile, was going to concentrate his efforts on saving the people worth saving—Meena, and the rest of his friends.
So he went to work.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Meena snatched up the gun as soon as Jon dropped it, which he did when Brianna’s body weight hit him. Then she aimed, and pressed down on the trigger.
Not knowing how the gun worked, Meena had no idea what to expect. Certainly not what happened, which was that fire burst from the center of Brianna’s chest. That’s because Meena had kept holding down the trigger. Brianna immediately leaped up from Jon and screamed. Yalena, running down the steps from the back of the thrift shop toward Jon, also screamed. Jack Bauer barked madly.
Then Brianna darted away, down the alley and toward the low basement window of a building opposite the thrift shop. The window was broken, and had once been boarded up, but it was clear someone had kicked—or clawed—the board away.
Brianna dove back through the opening now, disappearing into the darkness, escaping from the harsh glare of the SuperStaker.
“Jon!” Yalena sank down onto the pavement beside Meena’s brother. “Are you all right? Oh no!”
Meena turned away from the window through which Brianna had vanished and looked down. Jon was already sitting up, one hand pressed to his shoulder.
“I’m okay,” he assured them. “I’m fine. Look, barely a scratch on me.”
Jon had no idea, because he couldn’t see himself. Blood had already begun to stain his white Beanery apron scarlet.
“Come on,” he said, starting to get up. “Let’s go. We can’t let her get away.”
“No, Jon,” Yalena cried. She pulled him back to the ground. “You’re hurt!”
“I’m fine,” Jon kept saying. He obviously couldn’t feel the pain of the wound because of the anesthetic in Brianna’s fangs. “I’m good, really.”
Meena remembered the hooded sweatshirt she’d tied around her waist. She pulled it off and handed it to Yalena.
“Here,” she said. “Use this.”
Yalena grabbed it and shoved the cotton material against Jon’s wound, attempting to stop the bleeding.
It was right then that the two police officers stepped out the back door of the thrift shop. For a second or two they just stood there, staring, trying to take it all in.
Then Yalena looked up at them and screamed, “Call an ambulance!”
One of the officers snapped to attention, pulling out his radio and murmuring into it urgently. The second jumped down to help Yalena apply pressure to the wound.
“What happened?” he asked them. His gaze darted toward the corpse by the Dumpster, then back to Jon’s wound. “What’s that over there?”
“We just walked out and found him like that,” Meena told him. She’d shoved the SuperStaker into her purse. “The killer, the one they’ve been talking about on the news. It has to be him. We must have interrupted him. So he attacked my brother. He bit him.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” the police officer said, looking shaken. He reached for his own radio. “Did you see which way he went?”
“Yes,” Meena said, nodding. “That way.” She pointed in the opposite direction from the one in which Brianna had fled.
The officer began speaking rapidly into his radio. Meena looked across her brother’s body at Yalena. The younger girl’s eyes were wide and frightened.
“Listen to me, Yalena,” Meena said, in a low, serious voice. “I want you to go with Jon to the hospital. Do not leave his side. If anyone asks you, you’re family. Tell them you’re his sister, what
ever you have to do.”
Yalena nodded. “I will.”
“She’s not my sister,” Jon said, giggling. “That would be gross.”
He was clearly becoming disoriented from blood loss.
“Shut up, Jon,” Meena said. To Yalena, she said, “Call Sister Gertrude and Father Bernard. No one else. They’re the only ones we can trust.”
Yalena’s eyes grew huge, but she nodded. “I just saw them both this morning. They were talking about how things seemed . . . strange last night at the museum.”
“That’s a good sign,” Meena said. “Tell them I can’t find Alaric.”
“Tell Alaric about the SuperStaker,” Jon said. “It’s going to take vampire killing to a new level.”
Meena laid a finger over Jon’s lips. “Call Adam Weinberg, too,” she said to Yalena, handing her Jack Bauer’s leash. “That’s Jon’s friend. You’ll find his number on Jon’s phone. He’ll come take Jack.”
Yalena had looked frightened before.
Now she looked terrified.
“Wait,” she said. “Jack? Jack Bauer? You’re not taking him? But . . . you take him everywhere.”
“Not where I’m going,” Meena said. “It’s too dangerous for him.”
“Meena.” Yalena reached out and grasped Meena’s wrist just as she was getting up. “Where are you going?”
Meena looked toward the window through which Brianna had disappeared.
“To do my job,” she said.
Chapter Thirty
Once, when Meena had been researching a story line she’d wanted to pitch to the producers of Insatiable, the soap opera she used to write for, she’d read that beneath New York City ran many underground caverns, tunnels, and subbasements built so far in the past that no one even remembered they were there. It was a wonder the entire place hadn’t caved in years ago.
And considering that the city sat on top of an active fault line, the chances were it probably would, someday.
When she slipped through the window Brianna had used to make her getaway minutes before—the police officers had been distracted by the three men Jon had so aggravated in the café, who had come out into the alley through the thrift shop to see what was taking so long and had instantly become sickened at the sight of both his wounds and the dead man by the Dumpster—she realized she was in one of those subbasements. It seemed to stretch almost the entire block, interrupted only by metal support pillars and metal cages containing the belongings of some resident from above.
A perfect place for a vampire to nest, since the only sunlight was the occasional beam that spilled in from a mostly boarded-up window at street level.
Even though it was dark, it wasn’t difficult to track the path Brianna had taken. The SuperStaker had singed her badly enough that she left behind a faintly burned odor.
Meena quickly lost her bearings, however, moving through the enormous, dark maze of subbasements. She could hear—and even feel—the subway rumbling close by, but she had no idea what street she was beneath, or even what building. Goose bumps had broken out on her flesh, but she couldn’t do anything about it, because she’d left her sweatshirt with Jon.
Her heart thumping, she drew out the SuperStaker, beginning to question the sanity of what she was doing. What was she going to do if she found Brianna, interrogate her? Even if Brianna had the answers Meena was seeking about who had turned her and David and why, Meena was probably going to have to torture her to get them. And in the end, she was still going to have to kill her.
And Meena wasn’t sure she could stomach torturing and then killing another Delmonico this weekend, even one as savage as Brianna.
This was not how she’d pictured things going when she’d signed on to work for the Palatine. She thought she’d be saving lives and making the world a better place. Instead, people she’d thought were her friends were proving to be her enemies, and the people she loved were either getting hurt or disappearing.
And nothing she did or said seemed to make a difference. It was almost the opposite of what the woman in her dream had been trying to assure her little boy. All of God’s creatures may indeed have had the ability to choose between good and evil, but so far, Meena had encountered very few who were choosing to be good . . .
Sometimes she wished she could have had the normal, boring life her parents had always envisioned for her, like the lives of those people she could hear walking around up there, above her head, enjoying themselves at the street festival.
They didn’t have prophetic dreams (that turned out not to be so prophetic, after all, apparently).
They didn’t adopt dogs that turned out to be able to scent vampires.
They didn’t get fired from their jobs (twice) because the guy they’d started dating turned out to be the prince of darkness.
They didn’t have their apartments trashed, their friends and family terrorized, and their lives destroyed, and basically have to go into hiding because of their poor romantic choices.
Then again, they didn’t have the ability to predict how everyone they met was going to die . . . which might actually have been a bit more useful of a skill if it had extended to herself.
Because as she crept around that particularly dark corner, she suddenly felt sure she was walking into some kind of a trap. She could almost sense someone’s gaze on her . . . and with an intensity that was all too familiar.
Which could mean only one thing.
When she felt a sudden whoosh of air against her right side that was colder than any wind, she didn’t even have to turn her head to look. She knew who it was.
“Lucien,” she started to say. “Don’t even—”
She ought to have looked.
The last thing she saw before something struck her hard, first in the chest, then in the head, when everything went dark, was Brianna Delmonico’s bloodied face, rushing at her, fangs first.
Chapter Thirty-one
Meena wasn’t sure which she found more disturbing: that she’d been hunting her ex-boyfriend’s murderous wife with a hair dryer beneath the streets of Manhattan, or that when she opened her eyes after having been knocked unconscious by this person, she realized she’d been rescued by another one of her ex-boyfriends.
She thought it might actually be the latter.
“Lucien,” she heard herself say in a voice that didn’t sound at all like her own. “What happened?”
“It was my fault,” he said, his dark gaze locked on her. “But you’re safe now.”
She tried to sit up, then fell back against something soft when a wave of pain hit her.
“Shhh,” he said, pressing a cool cloth to her forehead. “You hit your head against the concrete when that woman attacked you. Don’t worry, though. She shan’t be troubling anyone again.”
Meena didn’t want to ask. She did manage to sit up this time without pain . . .
. . . but when she got a good look at her surroundings, she nearly lost consciousness again. Only this time it was from shock.
She could not believe it. She was in a cave. A cave.
With Lucien.
She’d thought secret subterranean hideouts of billionaires existed only in fiction. It appeared, however, that Lucien had created one of his own, right beneath the streets of downtown Manhattan, and furnished it the way only a five-hundred-year-old European vampire would. Everything was leather or antique, with the exception of Lucien himself, who was gazing down at her with concern as she lay stretched out on a couch that was both leather and antique . . . or at least had been artfully crafted to look that way.
If a butler had come in and offered her tea, she wouldn’t have been surprised.
“What is this place?” she demanded, eyeing him suspiciously.
They had better still be in Manhattan—and she thought they were, because she could dimly hear, off in the distance, the gr
umble of the subway—or she was going to . . .
Panicking, she looked around for the SuperStaker.
She relaxed a little after seeing it sticking out of her purse, which sat next to the side of the couch, on a stone floor that sloped down toward an interior water feature . . . some kind of trickling brown stream.
“So suspicious,” Lucien said with a grin, having noticed her frantic glance at her bag. Of course, he didn’t know what the bag contained. He probably really did think the SuperStaker was a hair dryer.
“Honestly, Lucien, after what you tried to do to me last night, I think I have a right to be suspicious,” Meena said in a tired voice.
He was sitting on top of a leather trunk beside the couch. He looked outrageously handsome, as always. Whatever burns he might have sustained from the incident the night before had already healed. One of his superpowers was the ability to heal instantaneously.
Meanwhile, her head was pounding so hard she could barely hear anything else . . . not the distant sound of the traffic from high above them, or the farther-off growling of the subway, or the trickling of water from the stream, or anything at all, really, except her own pulse.
“Meena,” he said, in a tone that was half pleading, half penitent. “You know it was only because I lo—”
“No,” she said firmly. “There’s no excuse. This isn’t the 1400s, and I’m not some sultan’s daughter you can just sweep up and ride off with into the sunset. You know better. How could you?”
He reached out as if to take her in his arms . . .
But before he could touch her, she had the SuperStaker out of her bag and in both hands, pointed at the center of his chest.
“Really,” she said. Her hands might have been trembling, but her voice wasn’t. “I mean it. Don’t.”
He let his arms fall, his expression perplexed . . . but cautious.
“Meena,” he said, “what is that?”
“It’s called the SuperStaker,” she said. “My brother invented it. Do you see this button?” She pointed to a red button on top of the gun.