by Meg Cabot
“This is chancing fate a bit, though, isn’t it, my lord?” Emil nodded toward the building across the street. “All any of them have to do is step outside, and they could very easily see you sitting here. They do know what you look like.”
Lucien stirred sugar into his coffee. The café used genuine cubes, which he found rather charming, but he knew others thought unhygienic, since the sugar cubes weren’t sealed in individual packets.
“They know I’m coming,” he said. “Surprise is not an element I’m going for in this battle.”
Emil raised his eyebrows. “Like with your father in Targoviste?”
“Exactly like with my father in Targoviste,” Lucien said. “Only I shan’t be impaling anyone. At least”—he paused with his coffee cup halfway to his lips to signal the heavily tattooed waitress to bring another cup for his cousin—“not any members of my own royal court, and not merely to get the attention of my enemies. Sitting in a café across the street from them will do. For now, anyway.”
Emil looked relieved. “That’s good to know, sire,” he said.
The waitress arrived, and set a cup in front of Emil. He thanked her politely—after admiring the tattooed sleeve of roses, complete with thorns, crawling up both her arms—then added cream and two lumps of sugar as she hurried to collect the bill from the customer at the next table, who was leaving. Outside, the sky only seemed to be growing darker, and everyone was anxious to get home before the storm got worse . . .
. . . and from the looks being darted in the direction of Lucien, the storm they were concerned about wasn’t just the one gathering overhead.
“If I might ask, my lord,” Emil said, after a sip, “when, exactly, will we be making our move?”
“Oh,” Lucien said. “You’ll know when the time is right. You always had a good head for that kind of thing.”
“Well—” Emil began, then broke off in astonishment.
Because at that moment his wife appeared from the back of the café, her bright red lipstick newly reapplied and a black beret tugged down over her sleek bob. She’d evidently been in the ladies’ room, where she’d changed into what she considered battle wear: a cheetah-patterned trench coat and black patent-leather stiletto boots.
“Hello, darling,” she said, giving Emil a peck on the cheek as she slipped back into her chair. “Oh, yuck, you’re all wet. Lucien, this rain is just too much. Can’t you turn it off?”
“It suits my mood,” Lucien said to Mary Lou. To Emil, he said, “You were saying?”
“B-but . . .” Emil looked dumbfounded. “What’s she doing here?”
“Oh, don’t be stupid, darling,” Mary Lou said. “I’ve been here all day, scouting the territory. You know that. I just changed into something a little more conspicuous, so they’ll remember me.”
“But she can’t be here now,” Emil said to Lucien. “We’re going in. It’s too dangerous.”
“For them, you mean.” Mary Lou rested her chin in her hands and stared out the window, at the school across the street. “I know. I feel sorry for them, too. Poor lambs.”
“I don’t mean to sound completely fifteenth century,” Emil complained. “But is a battle between the prince of darkness and the Palatine, on Palatine territory, really a place for a woman?”
“Well, the prince seems to think so, since he brought her,” Mary Lou said, pointing to Meena, who was standing by the bar, speaking urgently into the café’s pay phone.
Emil’s eyes widened. “What’s she doing here?” he sputtered. He turned toward the prince with an astonished expression. “Begging your pardon, my lord, but she’s one of them. And a mortal.”
“Not for long,” Lucien said, and calmly took a sip of coffee.
“Oh.” Emil closed his mouth, then exchanged a nervous glance with his wife. Mary Lou looked tactfully down and away.
Lucien glanced out the window, pretending not to have noticed the couple’s discomfort. They would, he knew, adjust to the new situation . . . as would Meena. True, she might be upset, at first, but she would soon come to see that his way was best. Especially when her only other option was death.
She’d been correct when she’d stated that only by biting her a third time, then forcing her to drink his own blood, could he make her one of his kind.
There was, however, another way. If she were to die, he had the power to bring her back to life as one of them. That was what his father had done to him, and what he, as prince of darkness, had the power to do to others.
She would be unhappy for a while, of course, as he had been. But she really only protested against being one of them because she had not yet experienced it. Humans were notoriously afraid of the unknown.
They were also fragile, and easily led. It was why they were such easy marks for charlatans who promised them all means of redemption, usually in exchange for their money.
This was why he had to save Meena . . . from herself. Because she was committed to a fool’s errand that was only going to conclude in heartache and misery, where so many of her kind had ended before. He’d tried to warn her—she’d spoken of the futility of her quest herself, by mentioning so often what had happened to Joan of Arc—but she wouldn’t listen.
So he felt fully justified in what he was about to do.
The only possible glitch Lucien foresaw in his plan was that Meena had insisted on embarking on this mission to “save” Alaric.
But of course he had no intention whatsoever of “saving” Alaric.
The difficulty was going to be—once he’d gotten the book from Wulf—how to murder him without Meena seeing him do it.
Meena was going to have far more important things to worry about in the near future than Alaric, of course. But Lucien had faith that her generally sweet temper would cause her to forgive him for her own murder quickly enough.
A sudden downpour began to lash the wide glass pane, momentarily obscuring his view of the courtyard across street.
Emil tilted his head toward Meena. “Who is she talking to?” he wanted to know. “Them?”
“Of course not,” Lucien said. “Her brother.”
“Saying good-bye,” Mary Lou said. “How sweet.”
Emil looked uncomfortable. “Mary Lou,” he said, “please. Use your head. How can she be saying good-bye? She doesn’t know she’s going anywhere.”
Mary Lou frowned. “Oh, right. Well, I still think it’s sweet. And romantic,” she added, with a smile in Lucien’s direction.
“I don’t,” Emil said firmly. “As your closest—and, I feel I must add, only—adviser, my lord, I am stating right now that I do not like the odds in this fight. Alaric Wulf plays rough.”
“Just the way I like it,” Mary Lou purred.
Both Lucien and her husband shot her astonished looks.
“What do you know,” Emil asked, “about how Alaric Wulf plays?”
“Nothing,” Mary Lou said quickly. “Where is that waitress? I asked her for a latte ages ago . . .” She caught the waitress’s eye, and waved.
The waitress—who seemed in a rush to see them leave—set a large latte down in front of Mary Lou. Mary Lou tossed her a dazzling smile. “Oh, thank you, aren’t you the sweetest thing?”
“I’ll bring your check whenever you’re ready,” the waitress said, darting a nervous glance at Lucien. Then she hurried away.
Outside, the sky had grown even darker, though the rain had fallen off. Lights had begun to come on in some of the windows in nearby buildings. The crowds had diminished. There was hardly anyone to be seen on the street. Even all the cabs seemed to have mysteriously disappeared, as they always did when it rained.
It was right then that Meena, who’d finally finished her phone call, joined them, her eyes very bright. There were rosy spots of color on her high cheekbones.
“Sorry about that,” she said to them. “Jon�
��s on a lot of pain medication, so it was sort of hard to have a conversation with him. They’re keeping him overnight. But he’s doing very well, considering.” She glanced at Emil, and said, “Oh, hello. I haven’t seen you since—well, it’s been a long time.” She kissed him on the cheek before she sat down in the empty chair between him and Lucien.
Emil looked flustered. “Hello,” he said.
Meena, Lucien noticed, seemed nervous. But then, she believed they were about to storm her former place of work to rescue the man she—he was beginning to suspect—loved.
So it was only natural she’d be a bit jittery. She could not possibly suspect anything else. She had stated numerous times that she could only predict the deaths of others, not her own.
“I’m sorry, darling, but what exactly happened to your brother again?” Mary Lou asked. “Kitchen accident?”
“Meena believes he was attacked by a Lamir,” Lucien said smoothly.
“Oh no,” Mary Lou said. “Not them. We met some Lamir the last time we were in Rio, remember, Emil? Nasty things. Such kind, lovely people, too, the Brazilians. The human ones, I mean. How they got cursed with such terrible vampires, I will never understand. I didn’t know they’d already gotten here. Too bad. New York is doomed.”
“Why?” Meena asked, sounding alarmed.
“Well,” Mary Lou said, “there were such enormous numbers of them back then—the Lamir, I mean—and no one was stopping them.” She seemed to notice her husband’s nervous glance at Lucien and added, “You never allowed the Dracul to kill, sire, and you were careful about how large our population was allowed to grow. But the Lamir weren’t your minions. Nobody seemed to be giving them any rules, and the Palatine had virtually no presence—”
“Father Henrique is from there and claims to have staked over a hundred of them,” Meena said.
Mary Lou raised her eyebrows. “Well, it wasn’t enough. I couldn’t imagine, even back then, how they were going to be able to sustain themselves. They were killing off most of their food source before it had a chance to repopulate itself. Eventually something was going to have to give. So I’m not surprised they finally decided to move up here. I’m just shocked it took them this long. The Lamir are flesh-eaters, you know.” She scrunched her face with distaste. “Disgusting habit.”
Meena shook her head. “Brianna Delmonico was infected by a Lamir, then,” she said. She looked at Lucien. “All those missing tourists were eaten by them . . . Alaric was right.”
If Lucien heard the name Alaric one more time, he might have to lift up the table and toss it through the plate-glass window.
“They waited until we were gone to make the move,” Emil remarked. “Which makes sense, I suppose. What doesn’t is that they timed it to coincide with the priest’s relocation to the city. If he has been slaying the Lamir at the rate he claims, why would they travel to the place where he is currently living? Wouldn’t they fear him?”
“Not if he is the one who planned the trap for me last night,” Lucien said. “Because he is obviously an inept fool who has never killed anyone.”
“So.” Meena blinked a few times. “You think he’s been lying about killing all those Lamir? Because that’s what Alaric thinks.”
She reached up to finger the necklace that had burned Lucien nearly to the bone earlier that afternoon. Though she had never positively confirmed that Alaric Wulf had given it to her, every time she mentioned his name, she reached up to touch the silver talisman.
He ought, Lucien reflected, to have killed her when he’d had the chance, while she’d been unconscious that afternoon. Then he could have blamed her death on Brianna Delmonico, and played the noble gentleman by bringing her back to life.
He could also have ripped the necklace off before reviving her, then told her it must have been lost in the tunnels during her struggle. Stupidly, he’d been too consumed with rage at the vampire who’d dared to attack her to think of doing any of these things until after she’d awoken. Now she was not only still alive, she was still wearing it.
Sometimes he wondered if his transformation had really been complete after all.
That was when a thunderclap—but much, much louder—struck.
Only it wasn’t a thunderclap, because it hadn’t been preceded by any lightning.
And it was so loud it caused the entire building—and possibly every building on the entire block—to shake. Lucien seized Meena’s hand, as well as the tabletop, to keep his coffee cup from tumbling off it.
“What was that?” she cried.
They had only to turn their heads for the answer. Thick white smoke had already begun to pour from the windows of St. Bernadette’s that had been blown out by the force of the blast.
“What happened?” the waitress was crying as she picked up the phone to call 911. “What caused that?”
Lucien knew. Lucien knew exactly what had happened to cause that.
Two words, and two words only.
Alaric Wulf.
Chapter Thirty-six
Smoke.
Everyone knew the best way to eradicate any hostile infestation—bees, ants, termites, protesters, squatters, war criminals, flesh-eating vampires, or other unsavory types—was to provoke discomfort sufficient to drive them into the open, where they could then be dealt with properly.
The easiest way was to smoke them out. No one could stand the heat and fumes of smoke for long . . . unless of course they did not breathe oxygen.
Where there was smoke, there was usually fire. And Alaric had yet to see any creature, living or dead, stand firm against the threat of fire.
With a boiler as old and as poorly maintained as the one in the building the Palatine had chosen for their new Manhattan headquarters, it was actually quite easy to cause the kind of disruption Alaric hoped for, even in the middle of an unseasonably warm September, when the heat wasn’t turned on. Hot water was being conducted into the structure. People were turning it on in the locker rooms for their showers, and in the washrooms to wash their hands, and in the commissary, for cooking and washing up.
And that meant all he had to do to cause the series of catastrophic events that led to the explosion that rocked Spring Street was to disconnect the feed water valve, then bypass the low-water cutoff. He’d made sure any emergency safety measures the machine itself might be programmed to take were avoided after shutting off the boiler’s main release valve, then closing the return.
And despite wrapping one of the leather cuffs around it, he ended up injuring his foot (aggravating his old leg wound) quite badly while kicking off one of the valves, a measure to which he’d had to resort in the unlikely event anyone with some know-how both happened to be in the building on a Sunday and attempted to repair the damage Alaric had done.
His only concern was not to blow up himself, along with his friends, though he knew the boiler would give off plenty of warning before it erupted. The thing was as big as a UPS truck. It wasn’t going to go out without a fight.
Twenty. Nineteen. Eighteen.
The boiler let out a series of groans that sounded like a yeti in heat. He was certain that they could be heard—and felt—all over the building.
He found a small chair in one corner of the room, pulled it to the center, then sat down in it, careful to keep the weight off his injured leg. He folded his hands behind his head and thought about what he’d like to have for breakfast, although he was sure it was probably closer to dinnertime by now.
Scrambled eggs. And bacon. Real bacon, not the turkey kind he generally only allowed himself.
Seventeen. Sixteen.
The boiler let out a sound like a pistol shot.
He heard the lock to the boiler room door being undone. Then it was flung open. Padre Caliente himself stepped onto the grated metal staircase that led down into the room in which Alaric was sitting.
The padre hadn
’t come alone, of course. He was much too cowardly for that. He was flanked by several men dressed in black whom Alaric recognized from the disastrous attempt to capture Antonescu the night before. They were holding crossbows—the exact same aluminum-stock crossbows (with fiber-optic sights) that Holtzman had assured him last month were too expensive (and unrealistic for urban usage) for the Manhattan unit’s tight budget.
Mauricio was dressed in flowing priest’s robes—white with green and gold trim. He looked especially handsome and trustworthy. Alaric wondered if he’d come straight from performing a Mass . . . or possibly from another television interview.
Padre Caliente looked down at Alaric the way the pope looked down at the faithful when they gathered outside the Vatican on Sunday morning.
“What,” he said, in a tired-sounding voice, “did you do, Wulf?”
Alaric tried to look innocent. “Me? I didn’t do anything,” he said. “I’m sure it’s nothing. But I’d start evacuating the building, just to be on the safe side. You can never be too sure about these old units.”
“I see,” Mauricio said, calling his bluff. “How fortuitous that this happened today, of all days. I guess Heavenly Father wanted to spare me the sin of having to order these men to split your brain in two with a hardwood arrow.”
Alaric tipped back in his chair, keeping his injured foot balanced on his knee. Mauricio had evidently decided to drop the pretense. Even the accent was mostly gone.
“So why haven’t you done it already?” Alaric asked.
Mauricio glared down at him. “One more word out of you,” he said, “and I will.”
“No, you won’t,” Alaric said. “And I know why. Why you didn’t have the guts to kill Holtzman or any of his team back at the Barrens either. If you’d have touched a hair on any of our heads—if you’d even have thought about doing so—Meena Harper would have known. And she’d have brought him here. And that’d be your worst nightmare, wouldn’t it? Because you’re terrified of Lucien Antonescu.”
Mauricio’s gaze darted away from Alaric and toward the guards posted on either side of the balcony on which he stood.