by Meg Cabot
“Oh, pooh,” Mary Lou said. She sat down in front of the large mirror behind her dressing table and began removing her makeup. “You’re being melodramatic. No one wants to destroy us anymore. The prince has the Dracul under control. The Palatine Guard don’t know where we are, and the humans love us! Look at how popular we are in books and on the TV. Why, if everyone found out, I’m sure I’d be invited onto Oprah as a special guest.”
“Mary Lou!” Emil stared at her reflection in astonishment. “Someone is killing women! All over town! No one is going to be inviting you onto Oprah while women are being killed by a member of our brethren. And the prince isn’t going to want a dinner party in his honor. He’s going to prefer to keep a low profile while he’s in town, trying to find that killer.”
“I have so many beautiful, intelligent female friends,” Mary Lou said, gazing thoughtfully at herself. “Why shouldn’t I show them off? The prince has been alone too long.”
“Lucien’s not here,” Emil said, feeling as if he were drowning, “to find a wife. He’s here on business. The murders-”
“And if he should happen to meet a nice girl,” Mary Lou said, interrupting, “while he’s here, would that be so terrible? Apparently he hasn’t had any luck in his own country. But you know we have the most amazing women in the world right here in the good old U.S. of A-”
“Mary Lou.” Emil stared uncomfortably at his wife’s bare shoulders. “You understand that you’re putting me in a terribly awkward position. Lucien asked that I not mention his arrival to anyone, and here you are sending out e-mails to everyone on your cc list, an e-mail that could be traced back-”
“Not everyone,” Mary Lou said indignantly. “Just my best single girlfriends, and a few of the married ones so as not to make it look obvious he’s being set up. None of them is employed by the Vatican, for goodness sake, or members of the Dracul. I just asked Linda and Tom, and Faith and Frank, and Carol from your office, and Becca and Ashley, and Meena from across the hall.”
“Meena?” Emil was confused. Many things about his wife confused him. He was certain that even if they spent an eternity together-and it already felt like they had-he’d never fully understand her. “The prince…and Meena Harper? But she’s-”
“Why not?” Mary Lou gave her naturally curly-and still naturally blond-hair a flip. “At first glance she may not seem like his type, but I like her. She’s got that cute little figure, and a pixie cut suits her. Most women can’t pull it off, you know, but she works it. And if the prince likes her, just think how grateful he’ll be to us. Besides,” she added with a shrug, “all she does is work to keep her and that no-good brother of hers financially afloat. I think she needs a break.”
“She likes her job,” Emil said, thinking of all the times he’d seen his neighbor in her pajamas barefoot in their floor’s trash room, disgruntledly stuffing heavily crossed-out script pages down the chute to the incinerator.
Well, maybe she didn’t always like her job.
“Oh, sure,” Mary Lou said. “The soap opera thing. But do you think she’d work if she didn’t have to?”
Emil thought about this. “Yes,” he said.
“Well, that shows what you know about women, which is nothing. Look at those ladies she writes about on Insatiable, Victoria Worthington Stone and her daughter, Tabby. Victoria’s never had a job in her life, except for that time she was a model. Oh, and a fashion designer. Oh, and when she was a race car driver, but that was only for a week before she crashed and lost the baby and was in that coma. Those aren’t even real jobs. They say you write about what you wish would happen to you. So, obviously Meena wishes she didn’t have a job.”
“Or,” Emil said, “she wishes she were a race car driver.”
“And Prince Lucien would be able to provide for her.” Mary Lou went on, ignoring him. “And since the prince likes writing, the two of them already have something in common.”
“It’s a very different kind of writing,” Emil said. “Lucien writes historical nonfiction. And anyway, he made it very clear when I spoke to him that he wanted to keep his visit under the radar. We’re at a very critical time with the Dracul. These murders-”
“Oh, stop being such a worrywart,” Mary Lou said. “No man wouldn’t want to have dinner with a lot of pretty ladies.” She laughed and turned to poke her husband in his belly, which stuck out ever so slightly over the waistband of his trousers. “Don’t tell me you wouldn’t enjoy being the center of attention of me and all my friends. Not that you aren’t…”
“Well.” Emil felt the pressure in his gut receding slightly. “Maybe he won’t mind so much. A man has to eat, after all.”
“Exactly,” Mary Lou exclaimed. “And so why not do it in the company of a lot of lovely, accomplished ladies?”
“Why not?” Emil asked.
Maybe, he thought, his wife was right:
The man did have to eat, after all.
Chapter Fourteen
3:45 A.M. EST, Wednesday, April 14
910 Park Avenue, Apt. 11B
New York, New York
Meena stared at the bright red numbers on the digital clock in her bedroom. Three forty-five. She had five hours before she had to leave for the office. Four more to sleep before she had to get up to start getting ready.
Except that she couldn’t sleep. She lay there, staring at the ceiling, grinding her teeth, and thinking about Yalena-all she could see was a picture of the girl’s body, battered almost beyond recognition-and Cheryl and CDI and the job she hadn’t gotten and Jon and her parents and David and the countess and Leisha and Adam and the baby.
Now she’d never get to sleep.
There was only one answer to Meena’s problem, and it lay in a little orange prescription bottle in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. She hated resorting to pills, but lately she’d been relying on them more and more.
She was just about to reach for her secret stash of pills in the medicine cabinet when she heard it:
The clickety-clack of Jack Bauer’s claws on the hardwood floor behind her.
Seeing her up and around, Jack Bauer thought it was morning and time for his first walk of the day.
“Okay, Jack,” Meena whispered to him. “Okay. We’ll go.”
She spat out her mouth guard, leaving it in the sink, then slipped as quietly as she could into her coat and a pair of sneakers and got Jack Bauer’s leash from its hook.
She’d just take him on a short walk, she decided, then go back to bed. She’d be home in less than fifteen minutes. With half a pill, she could still get a full four hours of restorative sleep before work. Everything would be okay.
In the lobby of Meena’s building, Pradip, the night doorman, had dozed off with his head resting on one of his textbooks. He was studying to be a masseur, which Meena thought was a fine career option for him, since people were having multiple careers nowadays well into their eighties, and his death didn’t appear to be imminent.
Meena crept past him, careful not to disturb him-all the staff in her building worked so hard-and slipped out the automatic doors to the sidewalk, where Jack Bauer hurried to relieve himself against the potted palm just beside the red carpet by the building’s entrance, as was his ritual. Meena waited beside him, inhaling the fresh morning air. Or was it still night? She wasn’t sure. The sky above was a dark blue wash, a paler blue at the edges, where it disappeared behind the tall buildings.
Meena gave Jack Bauer’s leash a tug, and he obediently began trotting beside her. They had a route they always took this time of night-down Park Avenue to Seventy-eighth; past St. George’s Cathedral, currently closed for badly needed renovations; then back down Eightieth, and to the apartment.
But for some reason that night-or that morning-Jack was feeling jumpy. Meena could tell, because he ignored some of the places he usually liked to take an inordinately long time sniffing and just kept trotting forward, nervously snuffling the air, almost as if…well, as if he were anticipating something.<
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But because this was the way he often behaved-his name was, after all, Jack Bauer: he was a jumble of nerves, always expecting the worst, barking at their front door when it was only the countess and her husband coming home from a party-Meena thought nothing of it.
She let Jack Bauer pull her along, thinking idly about work. How was she going to fit a prince for Cheryl into Shoshona’s vampire story line?
And Yalena-should Meena have followed her to her meeting with the boyfriend? She was wondering whether she could have said something to him, given him a look, done something to let him know she was onto him, when she noticed the first other person she’d seen on foot since leaving her building, coming toward her on the same side of the street, but from the opposite direction.
It was a man.
But he was a very tall man, dressed in a long black trench coat that flapped behind him almost like a cape.
Meena tightened her grip on Jack Bauer’s leash, and not just because the dog had begun growling. She was alone on a dark street approaching a large man she didn’t know. What on earth was he doing out at four in the morning without a dog if he wasn’t drunk?
She didn’t blame Jack Bauer for being suspicious. She was suspicious, too.
But as they approached the wide steps to St. George’s Cathedral, surrounded by scaffolding, Meena saw from the security lights shining down from the church spires that the man was unusually good looking-maybe in his mid to late thirties-and was in no way giving off signs that he didn’t belong in the ritzy neighborhood. His clothes were impeccably tailored and in good taste; his dark hair, brushed back from his temples without a hint of gray, immaculately groomed. Even his sideburns were the perfect length.
She was the one, she belatedly realized, who probably looked suspicious, given the fact that her short hair was doubtlessly pointing up in spikes (as it was wont to do when she’d just gotten up), she was without makeup, and her blue flannel pajama legs-with white puffy clouds on them-were sticking out of the bottom of her own trench coat, above her well-worn sneakers.
When she raised her gaze to meet his as he walked past her-Jack Bauer was practically snarling by this time-she was smiling apologetically, both for her appearance and for her dog’s behavior.
He smiled back, his eyes dark and as full of mystery as the windows peering down around them.
And she relaxed.
She had no bad feelings about this man. Not a single twinge about how or when he was going to die. Amazingly enough she felt nothing…
…nothing at all about him.
“Shhh,” Meena said to Jack Bauer, embarrassed over the dog’s antics.
It was right then that the sky collapsed.
Chapter Fifteen
4:00 A.M. EST, Wednesday, April 14
St. George’s Cathedral
180 East Seventy-eighth Street
New York, New York
The sky didn’t really collapse, of course.
It only seemed that way, because a huge section of it came swooping down at Meena from one of the spires of the cathedral.
She screamed and ducked, covering Jack Bauer with her body and arms, trying to protect them both from what looked like an ink-dark swath of material that came hurtling down at her head.
Except that she could see glimpses of the misty yellow glare from the street and security lights between the objects that were propelling themselves toward her at such an unbelievably fast speed.
Which was when Meena realized this wasn’t a single solid piece of St. George’s Cathedral, crumbling at last.
It was, unbelievably, bats. Hundreds, maybe thousands of black, shrieking bats, all headed straight at her, their pink mouths open, razor-sharp claws extended, beady yellow eyes bulging as they swept down from the cathedral’s spires, blocking out most of the night sky and available lamplight with their foot-wide wingspan, their only target Meena Harper and her Pomeranian-chow mix.
At first Meena froze. She wasn’t paralyzed with fear so much as with shock. All she could think was, this was how she was going to die? Being chewed to death by rats with wings?
Meena had been envisioning other people’s deaths for so long, it had never occurred to her that she might one day be experiencing her own.
And now, faced by her own imminent destruction, all she was able to think was that she’d never, not even for a second, seen it coming.
Then, her heart stuck in her throat, too terrified to let out a second scream as she stood at the bottom of the steps of the cathedral, she pulled Jack Bauer into her arms-those bats were nearly as big as he was-then dropped to the pavement to protect her dog, her face, and her eyes. Burying her nose in Jack’s fur, she began frantically to pray, though she’d never been a particularly religious person before that moment. Oh, please, oh, please, oh, please, she prayed, to no deity in particular, as every second the bats’ shrieks sounded more and more loudly in her ears.
And then, just as it seemed the first of those claws had to sink into her scalp, the back of her neck, her unprotected spine, she felt something-or rather someone-drop on top of her, envelop her, blocking out the light and sound almost completely.
And she realized, risking a brief upward glance, that it was the man who’d been standing next to her…the tall, good-looking man with the nice hair, in the expensive coat. The man about whose future she’d felt exactly nothing.
Except that that was impossible. Because he’d thrown himself over her, in order to protect her from the bats.
And now he, not she, was being torn apart by bat claws and pummeled by the impact of their careening bodies. She could feel the force of them as they struck him, one after another, reverberating all the way through his body to hers, as the two of them crouched on the cathedral steps, bombarded by keening winged missiles.
Why he wasn’t crying out with the pain he had to feel as each talon struck him, Meena didn’t know. He wasn’t even trying to shield his face and neck from the bats as they continued to tear at him. Meena couldn’t quite see his face beneath the dark protective folds of his coat, which had formed a sort of canopy over her, shielding her from the menacing attack.
But she thought she caught a glimpse of his eyes once as she glanced out, trying to see what was happening, and she could have sworn…
Well, she could have sworn they flashed as red as the brake lights she’d seen all up and down Park Avenue.
But that, of course, would have been impossible.
As impossible as the fact that she hadn’t sensed he was going to die tonight the minute she’d seen him coming toward her.
And die protecting her.
But that had to be what was happening. Because no human being could go through an attack like this and live.
Meena couldn’t believe any of this was happening. It was four in the morning, and she was on Seventy-eighth Street in front of a church she’d walked by a hundred-maybe even a thousand-times before, and she was being attacked by killer bats, while a man-a total stranger-had thrown himself over her, voluntarily giving his own life for hers.
And then, just when Meena was certain she couldn’t take it a moment longer-when she was convinced the attack would never stop and that they would eat right through the man’s body and down to hers-as suddenly as the bats had appeared, they were gone.
Just vanished into the night sky, disappearing as mysteriously as they’d come.
And the street was silent again, save for the distant sound of traffic over on Park Avenue. There wasn’t a noise to be heard, except for Jack Bauer’s whines and her own ragged breathing. She hadn’t realized until then that she was crying.
She couldn’t hear the man’s breathing. Was he dead already? How could he be dead without her having felt his death approaching? Even though he was a stranger to her, she ought to have known. Her power to predict death-unwanted as it had always been-had never once failed her before.
“Oh!” She found that she couldn’t catch her breath. She was trying to take in large gulps
of air, but no oxygen seemed to be reaching her lungs. And it wasn’t because her protector was dead weight on top of her, either. “Oh, my God.”
That was when the man rolled off Meena and, in a deep voice tinged with an accent that sounded to her like a mixture of British and a hint of something else, asked, “Are you all right, miss?”
Chapter Sixteen
4:10 A.M. EST, Wednesday, April 14
St. George’s Cathedral
180 East Seventy-eighth Street
New York, New York
None of it was the slightest bit possible, of course.
That he should be completely unhurt and conversing with her as politely as if she’d just tripped over Jack Bauer’s leash and fallen across the sidewalk and he was a passerby who’d stooped to help her back up.
That she was looking into the eyes of the charming stranger kneeling beside her and saw that they weren’t red at all, but a perfectly ordinary dark brown.
“I-I’m fine,” Meena stammered in response to his inquiry after her health. She’d let Jack Bauer go because she could no longer hold on to his wildly wiggling body. He darted as far as the end of his leash would allow him to, then stood there growling, all the fur on his back raised. Meena couldn’t believe how horribly behaved he was being.
“Are you all right?” she asked her rescuer in a trembling voice.
“I’m very well, thank you.” The man had risen to his feet and now reached down to take Meena’s hands in his, to help her up. “I’d heard, of course, that New York City was dangerous. But I’d no idea it was quite as dangerous as that.”
Was he…? He was.
He was making a little joke.
His grip on her hands was steady. Meena felt oddly reassured by it. And by the little joke.
“I-it’s not,” Meena stammered.
Meena needed, she decided, to sit down. His grip on her hands was the only thing keeping her on her feet.