by Meg Cabot
Meena blinked up at him. This couldn’t be happening to her. Lucien had bitten her? The man who’d protected her from the bats outside St. George’s Cathedral? The man who’d given her his coat at Mary Lou’s? He’d bitten her?
And what’s more…she was under the distinct impression she’d liked it.
“I said yes,” she murmured to her lap. She could feel her cheeks turning scarlet. “Oh, my God. I think I said yes.”
In the silence that followed, Jack Bauer gave a sneeze. He jumped to his feet, yawned, then stretched delicately. Then he walked over to the couch, leapt up onto it, gave Alaric Wulf a cursory sniff, then curled up into Meena’s lap, rolling over onto his back to have his belly scratched.
“I don’t understand this,” Jon said, beginning to pace the room. “If these…these vampires are roaming around all over the place, just hiding in the general populace, feeding off innocent women like my sister, why do people like you keep it such a big secret? Shouldn’t there be public service announcements so girls like Meena don’t get themselves into this situation? Huh?”
Meena stared at her brother. Jon had always been slow to anger.
But once he got there, he was almost impossible to calm again.
“You think it would be better if things were like they were back in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds,” Alaric Wulf asked mildly, “when thousands of innocent human beings were falsely accused of vampirism and murdered by their neighbors because people like you, who were upset because their sister had been bitten, pointed fingers at the wrong people? No. I don’t think so. Better for them to think such things don’t exist and for professionals like myself quietly to take care of the problem.”
“Okay,” Jon said, still pacing. “Fine. Then how do we do this? Holy water? Wooden stakes? You got any extra? Because I am totally coming with you. I want to pound a stake into this guy’s chest. Let’s go. I’m ready. Come on.”
Alaric stayed where he was, sitting beside Meena. “No,” he said calmly.
“I mean it,” Jon said. “I’m not scared. Prince of darkness? Doesn’t scare me. Nobody bites my sister and then sends her a tote and gets away with it. Come on. Let’s go. Meena, tell us where the guy is staying. We’re wasting time here.”
Meena, rubbing Jack’s stomach, glanced from Jon to Alaric and back again. She wasn’t quite sure what she was going to do. There was a sudden roaring sound in her ears. It felt as if the bottom of her stomach had dropped out.
No. Not her stomach.
Her soul.
“He already said you’re not going, Jon,” she said, reminding her brother.
“I’m totally going,” Jon said. “Just tell us where he is.”
“No,” Meena said, her fingers tightening on Jack Bauer’s silky fur.
Alaric, taking up so much space on her couch, turned toward her. “Meena,” he said. “I know that this man, the prince, told you things that maybe made you feel…things for him. Feelings of love or even pity. But despite what he might have told you, he’s a bad man who does bad things.”
“I don’t believe that,” Meena said. “You just told me yourself Lucien didn’t murder those girls.”
A muscle in Alaric’s jaw twitched. His already small mouth seemed to shrink even smaller in frustration.
“What is he even doing here if he didn’t kill them?” she demanded. “Tell me. He’s here to find the person who did it, isn’t he?”
“Ye-es,” Alaric said slowly. “But that doesn’t make him a good man. He’s not even a man. He’s a monster. Look what he did to you. And you did not even know it. What he is…it’s a dead thing. It’s not natural. And he’s created others like himself…That’s what the Dracul are. His minions. And they’ve gone on to create their own minions. You see how it never ends? And it is one of those others that’s killing those girls. That’s why my colleagues and I have to stop him. Before things get even worse. So, please, just tell me where he is, and I will leave here. You will never have to see me again.”
Meena shook her head. Her grip on Jack Bauer’s ear was hard enough that he jerked his head, annoyed. Her fingers felt like ice.
But she still didn’t let go.
“I…can’t,” she said.
“You can’t?” Alaric asked her, raising both his eyebrows. “Or you won’t?”
“I won’t,” she said. Even her voice had begun to shake.
But what, exactly, was she supposed to do? She’d never liked vampires.
And now he had brought them to her door.
Well, she supposed he hadn’t been the one to do it. That, she supposed, she’d brought upon herself, that night she’d put the leash on Jack and gone on that walk outside St. George’s…
“Come on, Meena!” Jon shouted at her. “What are you doing? You aren’t that girl! Protecting your abusive boyfriend? Are you kidding me?”
“I’m not protecting him,” she said through frozen lips. She was visibly trembling now. She couldn’t help it. She had never felt this cold, not even during the most brutal of New York’s winters, when the wind whipped down Madison Avenue in front of the ABN building. “I’m p-protecting the two of you,” she said quietly, fighting back tears. “You d-don’t understand. He’s going to kill you. For trying to keep me from him. He’s going to kill you both.”
Alaric had turned toward her, one arm draped along the back of the couch. “What,” he asked Jon, “is she saying?”
Jon’s face had gone a little green. “She knows,” was all he said in a faint voice.
“She knows what?” Alaric demanded.
“How everyone is going to die.” Jon flung him a dazed look. “She’s always known. It’s what she does. She just knows. If Meena says he’s going to kill us…we’re going to die.”
Chapter Thirty-nine
10:00 P.M. EST, Friday, April 16
910 Park Avenue, Apt. 11B
New York, New York
Alaric knew he might have overreacted just a little. Especially when the girl had thrown the phone at him. A phone!
But Meena Harper had shown a great deal more spirit than he had expected.
Of course he’d leapt on her. To immobilize her. That was all. What other choice had he had?
He didn’t know why he’d been unable to keep his hands off her. That had been a surprise.
It was just that she had such nice skin. So soft and smooth…like the wax he used to polish his skis when he went to Kitzbühel every year between Christmas and New Year’s.
It had been virtually impossible for him not to touch her…and to keep on touching her, even though it clearly annoyed her.
Well, she annoyed him. He didn’t want to touch her. He wanted to find out where the prince was, go there, destroy him, then go back to his hotel room and have a nice hot bath.
What Alaric did not want was to be stuck in a New York City apartment crammed with cheap-albeit fairly comfortable-Ikea furniture with the big-eyed, silky-skinned current lover of the prince of darkness, who apparently had the psychic ability to predict how people were going to die.
“She knows all this?” Alaric asked the brother skeptically.
“She’s never wrong,” Jon said to Alaric. “She knows. She just…knows. Since she was a kid.”
Alaric stared at Meena Harper. He had encountered a lot of things in his time since joining the Palatine: a succubus that had detached itself from the body of its evening’s plaything with a discontented shriek because Alaric had hurled holy water at it.
Chupacabras-often mistaken for mangy coyotes but actually a vampiric species all their own, sucking the life from grazing sheep in Texas.
But when they couldn’t find sheep, they’d suck the life from sleeping children happily enough, when they could get at them through an open window.
Demons, flying at him with mouths agape, as a local priest attempted to exorcise them from possessed villagers in the mountains of Colombia.
And of course more vampires than he cared to recall, all with blo
od streaming down their chins and scarlet-stained shirtfronts, rushing at him from the darkness, screaming obscenities.
Vampires, while romanticized on film and in literature, were generally quite foulmouthed in reality. Only the Dracul made any pretense at civility.
But Alaric could not recall ever once encountering a psychic-not one who actually had anything valuable to say. Why all psychics, if their powers were bona fide, did not immediately go and predict the winning numbers for the lottery, then take their earnings and move to Antigua, Alaric could never understand.
The Vatican didn’t believe in them either-probably for the same reasons as Alaric-and didn’t have a single one on its payroll.
But Alaric could tell by the frightened-yet resolute-look on Meena Harper’s brother’s face that he believed in his sister’s abilities.
And he could tell by the misery on Meena Harper’s face that she, too, believed.
Meena had shooed the dog off her lap and now sat with her elbows on her knees and her face hidden in her hands. With her petite build, short dark hair, and slender limbs and neck, dressed in nothing but the black silk slip, she looked like a ballet dancer.
A ballet dancer having a nervous breakdown.
In another place, in another lifetime, Alaric thought they might have had quite a pleasant time together, because she was not unattractive.
But this was not going to happen now. Because she quite clearly hated him.
Alaric knew what he had to do, of course: call for backup. Let Holtzman deal with these two. He just wanted the address. Señor Sticky would take care of the rest.
He would dispatch Emil and Mary Lou Antonescu, too, on his way out. It was going to be a very satisfactory evening, it turned out.
“Look,” Meena said, lifting her tear-stained face from her hands and glaring at him. Her eyes were very large and dark in her face. “I know you don’t believe me. No one ever does. But I’m not making this up. I didn’t believe it myself until…well, until you said you were going to kill him and showed me that bite mark. And then I knew. And the fact…well, that he’s already dead. Which is why I could never tell-never mind. But he’s going to kill you. Both of you. You’ve got to believe me.”
Her voice, which had irritated him before, had taken on a throaty sweetness now that she was worried. One that he found irresistibly sexy.
What was wrong with him? He was not going to fall for the charms of this…whatever she was. No way. He had some vampires to kill. Then some delicious room service waiting.
“Hold that thought, will you?” he said, and took out his cell phone, pressing Holtzman’s number. “I just have to make a quick call. It will only take a second. Do you want another Coke? You’re shivering. Maybe some tea. Your brother can make you some tea.”
“He’s going to find you first,” she said, a single tear trickling down one of her smooth, gently rounded cheeks. Her eyes were closed, like she was observing something on the back of her eyelids. “Somewhere…a room made out of glass. An atrium. There’s water everywhere. Like a pool. Yes. A hotel pool. But in the air. That makes no sense… Maybe…on a roof. Are you staying in a hotel with an enclosed rooftop pool?”
Alaric’s thumb froze as he was about to hit Send.
“Because that’s where he’s going to find you,” she said. Was she actually seeing this vision, behind her closed eyelids? “Do you like to swim or something?”
Alaric stared down at her. “How in the hell would you know that?” he demanded before he could stop himself.
It took a lot to spook Alaric Wulf.
And that included the creepy way those chupacabras had lifted their heads from the sheep they’d been gorging on when he’d accidentally stepped on a twig while approaching them.
And the way the sheep’s blood had dripped from their pointy little teeth as they’d cocked their heads at him questioningly.
She wasn’t crying anymore.
“I just know things,” she said with a shrug. “Believe me, I never asked for this…gift. And if I could, I’d give it back in a second. Do you think I like knowing my boyfriend is going to reach down into the water and grab you by your hair while you’re swimming laps tomorrow, then lift you out of the water and gouge out your-”
“He’s not,” Alaric said quickly, putting his cell phone away and coming back toward the couch to sit down beside her. “He’s not. Because now that you’ve told me this, that changes everything. Right? Is that how it works?”
Alaric Wulf wasn’t a praying man.
But he was spooked. He was genuinely spooked.
And he was praying that was how it worked.
Because just as he knew he had made a believer out of her about the vampires, she had made a believer out of him about her powers.
“Your warning me that he’s going to be there, that will cause me to change my plans,” he said. “Doesn’t it work that way? Now I’ll be looking out for him. Maybe I won’t even go swimming.”
Alaric’s heart was beating quickly.
And it took a lot these days to get his pulse jumping.
But the image she’d described of the prince of darkness grabbing him by the hair from the water and gouging something out while he was innocently swimming his laps at the Peninsula?
That had done it, all right.
Because there was no way this girl could have known that was where he was staying.
So she couldn’t possibly have been making this up.
“Look again,” he said to her. He was still speaking gently, because there was something about Meena Harper’s body language-the way she’d curled in on herself ever since he’d shown her that bite mark on her thigh-that told him that she was a little bit broken and needed careful handling if she was going to heal.
But it was difficult for him to keep the urgency from his tone.
“What do you see?” he asked. He reached for a blanket on the end of the couch and wrapped it around her slender shoulders. “When you look now?”
Meena shook her head. “It’s no good,” she said. “He’s still going to kill you both.”
“Why me?” the brother whined. “What’d I do?”
“But where?” Alaric asked, ignoring Jon. “Where now?”
Meena was still going on. “Not the pool…Somewhere dark. But…something is on fire.” Her eyelids flew open, and she stared at Alaric accusingly. Her voice had some of its old asperity back. “You can’t blame him. He’s only trying to defend himself. You tried to kill him first. You’re the one who started it.”
“Me?” Alaric jabbed a thumb at himself. “Oh, right, I’m the prince of darkness, anointer of all that is unholy, guardian of the infernal. Right. It’s my fault.”
“He didn’t pick who his father is,” Meena said hotly, “any more than you did.”
Alaric reflected briefly to himself that it would have been nice to know who his own father was, if only so he could give the old man a well-deserved kick in the pants for deserting him.
“Meena,” Jon said. “Don’t you think you should just tell us where he is, so we can kill him before he finds and kills us? That’s the way they always do it in the movies. They kill Dracula in his coffin during the day while he’s defenseless sleeping.”
“Vampires don’t actually do the coffin thing,” Alaric remarked.
“Really?” Jon looked stunned. “But-”
“Stoker just added that to amp up the drama,” Alaric said. “Or who knows. Maybe Dracula told him it was true as some kind of sick joke. The guy was pretty twisted. It would make it a lot easier if it were true.”
“You.” Meena glared at Alaric. “You’ve delivered your horrible news. Okay. My boyfriend’s the son of Dracula. Thanks. You can go now.”
“Uh,” Alaric said, “I’m afraid I can’t do that. I’ve got a job to do. Slay the dragon and all of that. I thought I’d made that clear.”
“Oh,” Meena said, nodding. “Like your little medal.”
“Right,” he said with a w
ink. “Just like St. George.”
“I see the resemblance,” Meena said sarcastically. “Well, good luck with all of that. Now get out of my home before I call the police.”
Alaric looked around the room. Then, spying the telephone sitting on a small table at the end of the couch, he lifted the receiver from its cradle, dropped it on the floor, then stomped on it with one of his massive steel-toed boots.
When he lifted his foot, the receiver lay in many individual parts beneath it.
Meena’s eyes widened to their limits.
“I believe your cell is out of order as well,” Alaric said, looking pointedly at the bits and pieces of her BlackBerry on the floor.
“You can’t hold me a prisoner in my own home,” Meena said…with considerable spirit, he felt, for one who had so recently served as a human blood bank for the son of the dark lord.
“If you want me to go,” Alaric said politely, “I’ll be more than happy to. Just tell me where I can find Lucien Antonescu, and I’ll leave. And as an added bonus, you’ll never have to see me again.”
“But you’ll give me your e-mail, right?” Jon asked Alaric. “Because I’m serious about trying out for this Palatine thing. I know about the hiring freeze, but I think I’d be awesome at-”
“Oh, never mind,” Meena said, interrupting. “You’re both giving me a headache. Go ahead, stay. Stay all night, for all I care. I’m going to bed.”
And with that, she turned and stomped barefoot down the hall, the blanket trailing behind her. She slammed her bedroom door, directly in the face of Jack Bauer, who’d trotted after her.
“There’s no phone in that room, is there?” Alaric asked the brother.
“Of course there is,” Jon replied.
Moving with lightning speed, Alaric leapt across the coffee table and the debris littering the foyer, then flung open the door to Meena’s tastefully decorated-Pottery Barn this time, Alaric had time to observe critically-bedroom just as she was lifting the phone to dial. He snatched the receiver from her hand with a stern, “Tsk tsk tsk. What did we say about using the phone?”
“I wasn’t calling Lucien,” Meena said. “I’m not stupid. I don’t want to get you two killed. I was calling my friend Leisha. I need to talk to someone who isn’t male.”