by Meg Cabot
By the time Jon had the door unlocked and was standing in the entranceway, Alaric had Meena thrust behind him and his blade pointed just inches from Jon’s throat.
“Shit!” Jon said, and dropped the bag of Chinese food he’d been holding, along with a DVD.
Jack Bauer immediately darted forward and began eagerly to lick up the spilled liquid from the bag, completely oblivious to the fact that there was an armed man threatening his mistress a few feet away.
But Lucien Antonescu, Meena thought cynically, he’d barked at all night. Great guard dog she’d selected. Just great.
Alaric lowered the sword when he saw who it was that had come in.
“Jonathan Harper,” he said, his broad shoulders losing some of their tension. “Age thirty-two. Former systems analyst for Webber and Stern. Unemployed for the past seven months. Arrested once for public intoxication and indecent exposure for urinating against a parking meter in Miami Beach, Florida, while visiting his parents four years ago.”
Meena’s jaw draw dropped. “Jonathan!” she cried.
She’d always thought it was strange Jon had kept having to go back to Miami “for business.” He’d said he’d been thinking about investing his share of the inheritance from Great-Aunt Wilhelmina in a vacation condo near their parents’ in Boca, which was weird in and of itself.
But then nothing had ever come of it.
“Shit,” Jon said again in a different tone, quickly closing, then locking, the front door behind him, as if he was afraid the Antonescus might overhear. “It was four o’clock in the morning! Outside of a Subway. That was closed. No one was around! I really had to go.”
Meena shook her head. “Still…”
“And I paid all that money to those lawyers to get my record expunged,” Jon said mournfully.
“Lawyers,” Alaric said, shrugging. He turned back to Meena. She didn’t like the glint in his ice-blue eyes. “We need to talk,” he said, and pulled her, not very gently, over to the sage green couch. “Sit down,” he said, and pushed her down onto the cushions with a single large, commanding paw.
Meena, her anger having reached a boiling point, popped right back up to her bare feet.
“No,” she said. She didn’t have to put up with his manhandling. “I will not sit down. I still don’t know who you are or what you’re doing here. I’m calling the police. Jon.” She turned toward her brother. “Please call the police. This man forced his way in here against my will, and then he-”
“Sit down,” Alaric said again, and shoved her back onto the couch, this time by spreading his mammoth fingers across her face and pushing down.
Meena, completely stunned by this barbaric treatment, just sat there, staring at the kitchen pass-through in astonishment. Who even did that?
“What exactly is going on here?” Jon asked, looking down at the destroyed bouquet of roses and the broken pieces of Meena’s BlackBerry scattered across the floor. Jack Bauer, in the middle of it all, was still licking up liquid from the overturned Chinese food cartons. When he glanced up at Alaric, his tail wagged happily in greeting. Her dog. Her own dog!
“Your sister did that,” Alaric Wulf said to Jon about the mess. “She’s being very uncooperative.”
Meena made a noise that was half whimper, half protest. What? She was the one who was being uncooperative?
“Meena Harper,” Alaric went on in a completely deadpan voice, ignoring her, “is in grave danger. Lucien Antonescu is a soulless monster. It is imperative that I find and destroy him and that you do exactly what I say if you want her to live.”
Jon stared at the man with the sword standing in the middle of Meena’s living room. Then he looked down at Meena, who mimed dialing a cell phone. Then she mouthed, Call the police.
“Uh,” Jon said to Alaric. “Sure. Right.”
“Meena Harper,” Alaric said, even though he wasn’t looking in her direction. “I see what you’re doing. If you don’t stop, I will have no problem handcuffing you to something. In fact, I will enjoy it.”
Meena, furious, said, “Lucien isn’t a monster! Okay, he might have tricked me and said he wasn’t married, but I assure you, no one is in any danger from-”
“He isn’t married,” Alaric said. “He has never been married. No one knows why. Some say it is because he witnessed his own mother’s suicide and never got over it. Others say it is because he has never met his soul mate. I have the feeling that might have changed recently.” He threw Meena a piercing glance, then went on. “That’s why it is vital for your survival that you tell me where he is. Also, you need to stop talking, because I find your voice very annoying.”
“Uh”-Jon raised his hand-“sorry. I know I came in late, but no one’s answered my question. What the hell is going on here?”
“It is simple, really,” Alaric Wulf said. “Lucien Antonescu is the prince of darkness.”
Jon nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “We know. He’s got a castle and stuff.”
“No,” Alaric said again, shaking his head. “The prince of darkness.”
Jon glanced at Meena, then back at Alaric, then back at Meena again. “The prince of…did he say what I think he said?”
Meena rolled her eyes. “Sorry to be annoying,” she said, as sweetly as possible, to Alaric. “But Lucien’s not the devil.”
“I did not say he was the devil,” Alaric said. He shrugged out of his trench coat, then brushed it carefully with his hand before going to hang it neatly on one of the decorative hooks by the door. Then he unbuckled his sword and leaned that, too, by the door. Then, after stepping over the scattered roses and pieces of BlackBerry, not to mention the Chinese food containers, leaned down to pat an appreciative Jack Bauer on the head, before saying, “He is the dark prince. The all-powerful one. The leader of the creatures of the night.”
Meena and Jon exchanged glances. Then Meena said, again trying to keep her tone devoid of waspishness-since he apparently found her voice so annoying-“I’m confused then. I thought the prince of darkness was the devil.”
“The devil is the personification of evil and the enemy of God and humankind,” Alaric said. He crossed the room and sat in the armchair Meena had spent an hour or so not writing in, after first giving it a disparaging glance-he didn’t seem to much appreciate Meena’s taste in home furnishings. “The prince of darkness is the anointed one, who performs the devil’s work on this, the mortal side of hell.”
“Wait,” Meena said, blinking. “Are you saying…”
“Yes,” Alaric said. “That is exactly what I’m saying.”
Jon looked blank. “I don’t understand. Is he the devil or not?”
“Lucien Antonescu,” Alaric said, “is a vampire. Not just any vampire, but ruler of all the vampires.”
Chapter Thirty-seven
8:00 P.M. EST, Friday, April 16
910 Park Avenue, Apt. 11B
New York, New York
Alaric Wulf was staring at her. His eyes really were very blue. Alarmingly blue. If he’d been anybody else-if Meena had met him anywhere else-she’d have said, “What a nice-looking man.”
But since he’d attacked her in her own apartment with a sword and was now accusing her boyfriend of being a vampire, she was just going to have to say it was a shame such good looks were wasted on someone so…whatever he was.
“Brother Jon,” he said. His gaze was so intense, it seemed to pierce her to the couch, much in the way his body weight had pierced her to the floor. “Get your sister something to drink now. Something sugary. She doesn’t know it yet. But she’s going to need it in a few minutes.”
“Uh,” Jon said, “okay.” And he got up to go to the kitchen.
“Excuse me,” Meena said. What was wrong with this guy? “But I can actually get my own drinks.”
“No,” Alaric said. “You stay where you are. You are not to be trusted.”
Meena held up both palms in protest. “What?” she said. She couldn’t help bursting out laughing, even though it was all
so…sad. “Why? Because I date an alleged vampire?”
“He is not alleged,” Alaric said. “And, yes. You are his minion now.”
“A minion!” Now Meena had heard everything. “What? I’m infected because I went out with Lucien?”
“You can put it like that, yes,” Alaric said. “It is certainly a form of infection. Are you getting that soda or not, Brother Jon?”
“Soda on its way,” he called from the kitchen.
“Jon,” Meena called from the sofa. “While you’re in there, put a little-”
“Do not listen to her,” Alaric said. “She is going to tell you in some kind of code only the two of you will understand, because you are siblings, to call the police on your cell phone. But if you do that, I will kill you and dispose of your body in a place where no one will find it. The river, I think. Your doorman is so stupid, he won’t notice if I leave this building carrying a body in a rolled-up carpet.”
Jon poked his head out of the pass-through to look at Meena.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m just going to get a couple of Cokes and avoid the whole being-rolled-up-in-a-carpet thing, ’kay, Meen?”
She glared at him. “Yeah, real great, Jon.” She looked at Alaric. She could handle this. It was no different than one of Taylor’s I’m-so-fat tantrums. Well, maybe a little different. “Look, Mr., uh, Wulf. I appreciate your trying to warn me about this. I really do. But there’s no such thing as vampires. They’re made-up. We writers made them up. I’m sorry we did such a good job that we made the whole world paranoid, but it’s true. They’re fictional. Blame Bram Stoker. He started it.”
“No, he did not, actually,” Alaric said. “They existed long before Stoker was ever even born, in almost every culture and on almost every continent on this planet. They are like mosquitoes…they feed off the blood of others. They cannot exist without a host.”
“And how do you,” Meena asked, playing along, “know so much about them?”
“I battle vampires almost daily in my profession,” he said in a bored voice. “They are loathsome and brutal creatures. A group of them almost killed my partner some months ago.”
“Oh, really,” Meena said. She’d crossed her legs and was now jiggling one bare foot up and down. Vampires! Seriously?
Get over it, Harper, Shoshona had said. They’re everywhere. You can’t escape them.
It wasn’t fair. Why couldn’t she escape stupid vampires? Work, TV, Leisha’s salon, and now here, at home.
They really were everywhere. Even handsome-but obviously deranged-strangers who broke into her apartment, trying to kill her, were raving about them.
“They cornered us in a warehouse outside of Berlin,” he went on, looking far away. “It was partly my fault. I got cocky. I thought there were not so many of them and that we could take them. But there were more than I thought, and they caught us by surprise. Here.” He reached into the inside pocket of the dark, close-fitting sports coat he wore. “This is a picture of how my partner looks now. His name is Martin.”
What Meena saw when he handed her the photo sent a physical shock wave through her. She wasn’t expecting…that. It was a picture of a man with half a face. Where his features should have been on the lower half was only skull. It had clearly been shredded by fangs.
Meena could only stare.
Alaric took the photo from her limp fingers and said, putting it away, “But a photo, I know, doesn’t prove anything. Next you will say what happened to his face could have happened in a car accident.”
Meena stammered, “I…I wasn’t going to say that.”
She didn’t know what she was going to say. She looked over at Jon. He was still busy in the kitchen with the sodas. She wished he would hurry up. She was feeling less and less certain that Alaric Wulf was actually deranged with every passing second.
Why that should be more unnerving to her than the alternative, Meena wasn’t sure.
“Here,” Alaric said. “These are photos of the four girls who’ve been recently murdered in your city, their bodies found in city parks the next morning, naked and drained of all their blood.”
He scattered four photos onto the coffee table in front of Meena. They were pictures of the women, taken from the chest up. The one thing they all had in common was the multiple bite marks they had not just on their throats, surrounded by ugly purple and green bruising, but all over, as if they’d been savagely attacked by someone…
Or something.
Meena gazed down at the photos. Jon, coming back from the kitchen holding three glasses of soda, joined her on the couch and stared down at the photos as well.
“These are the girls they’ve been reporting about on the news?” he asked.
“Yes,” Alaric said.
“But it didn’t say anything about them having died from being bitten,” Jon said. “It said they died from being strangled.”
“Because the mayor’s office doesn’t want to start a panic,” Alaric said.
“But you’re not saying Lucien did this,” Meena said in a faint voice, still unable to tear her gaze away from the photos. She worked in a world where photos like these were faked every day…a world where duping viewers into believing something this incredible could happen was what she and her fellow writers strived for. She was trying desperately to find some sign that these photos had been faked, that they’d been an invention of someone like herself or Shoshona.
But the images looked heartbreakingly real. She recognized the girls’ faces from photos she’d seen on the news. Photos that had carefully shown nothing below the chin.
“No,” Alaric said, taking a sip of his soda. “The prince is not behind these murders…insofar as he himself did not commit them. But one of his kind did. One of his minions.”
“Minions?” She stared at him. “You said I’m a minion.”
He shrugged his broad shoulders. “Different kind of minion. To become a vampire, one must be bitten three times, then drink the blood of one’s host. I take it that you didn’t do that last night, did you?”
Meena’s eyes widened with horror. Jon, sitting back on the ottoman, raised his eyebrows to their limits.
“Whoa,” he said. “I’ve heard of some kinky stuff, but that’s-”
Meena interrupted him.
Because, really, she’d heard about as much as she could.
“Excuse me,” she said, knowing she was lashing out because suddenly, she was frightened…frightened of the photos she’d just seen but had no rational way to explain. But more than that, frightened of some things she’d suddenly begun to piece together in her mind. “But you can’t just come in here and expect us to believe that there’s this gigantic vampire conspiracy out there that the rest of humanity knows nothing about but that my boyfriend is the head of, and that you, somehow, have been privy to. I mean, what are you, anyway? Some kind of vampire hunter?”
“Yes,” Alaric said simply.
Meena sagged against the back of the couch. “Oh,” she said. “Right. Of course you are.”
Because after the week she’d had, what else was he going to be?
“Seriously?” Jon asked. He looked excited. “How do you get a job like that? Are there benefits?”
“You have to begin training very young,” Alaric said, not taking his gaze off Meena. “And there’s a hiring freeze right now.”
“Yeah,” said Jon. “Of course. There are hiring freezes everywhere. But the thing is, I think I would be exemplary in a position like that. Because you know, I’m very good with my hands, and I’ve always really, really hated vampires. I mean, Dracula was like my favorite movie when I was a kid. Tell him, Meen. The part where they stake him-”
“Decapitation is more effective,” Alaric said, still not taking his gaze off Meena.
“Now, see,” Jon said, “I’d be even better at that. I was on my high school baseball team. I could really swing a bat. Meena, seriously. Tell him.”
Meena didn’t say anything. She was watching Alari
c. He’d reached into his inside pocket again. This time he pulled out a small gold medal, which he flung down onto the center of the coffee table as casually as if it were a coin. Jon snatched it up and held it toward the light from the lamp beside the couch.
“Cool,” he said, squinting at it. “What is this? I recognize this. On one side…isn’t this…?”
“The papal seal,” Alaric said in the same bored voice he seemed to use habitually.
“The Pope?” Jon glanced at him. “No way.”
“That is my employer.” Alaric continued to stare at Meena. She stared right back at him. She noticed in a detached part of her brain that his mouth was too small for the rest of his face.
The rest of her brain was screaming that it couldn’t be true. It wasn’t true. She and Lucien had had that whole long conversation about vampires, back at his apartment…
Oh. God.
“And what’s this on the back?” Jon asked. “Meena, here, you look at it.”
Meena took the medallion from him. She could clearly see the image on the back.
It was of a mounted knight. Slaying a dragon.
She caught her breath.
“St. George?” Her heart twisted.
“The patron saint of the Palatine Guard,” Alaric said. “My order. St. George and St. Joan are the patron saints of soldiers. St. George slayed the dragon-”
“I know,” Meena said quickly. Suddenly, it was hard to breathe.
“Hey,” Jon said excitedly. “Didn’t Lucien say something about dragons in that note he wrote to you, Meena? That you’d slain the dragon?”
“Yes,” Meena said. Why wouldn’t Jon just shut up for once? Her heart was pounding so hard, she could barely breathe.
Alaric, she noticed, had raised a single light brown eyebrow. “He wrote to you?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Jon said, getting up and crossing over to the dining table where Lucien’s letter rested alongside the bag he had sent her. “The note’s right over-”
“No,” Meena said, her heart pounding even harder as she darted up from the couch. “Jon, don’t give it to-”