by Meg Cabot
…then turned back into the shape of the brother he knew so well.
“Damn you, Lucien,” Dimitri said, rising to his feet while brushing off his suit. He looked furious. “You know how I hate it when you do that!”
Lucien smiled to himself. Now who had gotten soft?
He turned and knocked on the emergency exit. Marvin, ever accommodating, opened the door to let him back in. While his brother’s method of egress had been quicker, Lucien generally preferred to take the stairs.
Chapter Forty-one
1:00 A.M. EST, Saturday, April 17
910 Park Avenue, Apt. 11B
New York, New York
Meena lay in the dark of her bedroom, blinking up at the ceiling, Jack Bauer resting his head on her shoulder.
She was trying hard not to think about anything, because every time she remembered what was actually going on-why, for instance, she could hear the faint sounds of two men talking in her living room, along with The Fast and the Furious DVD Jon was playing-she wanted to start crying.
The muffled sounds from the other room seemed harmless enough: two grown men enjoying a film about cars and guns. They’d somehow managed to scrape together the Chinese food that hadn’t spilled out of its cartons and were enjoying it, so she could smell that, too, the mingled odors of moo shu and fried dumplings. Just a typical Friday night at her place, while outside a thunderstorm was brewing. She could hear the wind stirring in the treetops below and the far-off rumble of thunder, and see the occasional flash of lightning against her wall through the slits in the shades over her window and the gauze curtains that covered the panes in the French doors to her balcony.
But she knew perfectly well what was really going on. Alaric Wulf was guarding her front door to keep her from sneaking out to go see Lucien. He was doing it for the same reason he’d smashed all her phones. (She hoped he hadn’t thought of e-mail. If he smashed her laptop, she’d find a way to sue. She didn’t care if his boss was the Pope.)
But Alaric needn’t have worried about her trying to sneak out. She wasn’t particularly anxious to have a confrontation with Lucien. She’d even taken a weapon into bed with her: a single wooden knitting needle left over from a brief and ill-fated attempt at crafting she and Leisha had once embarked upon.
She held the knitting needle tight in one hand while with the other, she absently stroked Jack Bauer’s head, watching the shadows dance against her ceiling, as the occasional slice of moonlight shone through the clouds.
What exactly she planned on doing with the knitting needle, she wasn’t sure.
But stabbing it through the heart of any man who came into her bedroom-human or vampire-seemed to be a good plan. Meena wasn’t feeling too warmly toward any members of the opposite sex at that moment.
She still hadn’t exactly come to terms with everything that she had discovered during the course of the evening. She wasn’t sure she’d ever really be able to understand-much less believe-it all.
All she knew for sure was that, after everything she’d seen and all she’d been through that night, she was feeling quite tired, and she wanted to rest.
But-even after changing into her softest white nightgown-the minute she’d lain down and pulled her comforter up to her chin, sleep became impossible. She felt wide awake, and not because of the thunder or the muted noises she could hear coming from the living room.
All she could think about was the fact that the man of her dreams-the guy she’d thought was so perfect…the guy whom, if she were really being totally honest with herself, she’d been idly considering moving to Romania for-was a vampire.
A vampire! Those creatures of fiction that she despised so much!
Only not. Because real-life vampires were nothing like the vampires of fiction. Real-life vampires did things-way more horrible things than vampires on film, the images of which Meena was convinced would forever be burned into the backs of her retinas-to people that no script-writer could ever in a million years have imagined.
Not only that, but Lucien was the supreme ruler of the vampires.
And he was the son of Vlad the Impaler. Of Dracula.
After locking herself into her bedroom, Meena dug out her old, battered copy of the novel-which she’d bought during her death-obsessed goth stage in high school-and made the mistake of trying to read it again.
Then it all came flooding back to her. Not just the gory details about the creatures against whom Alaric Wulf had pledged to fight, but Mina! There was actually a character in the book named Mina! This was a character who, Meena remembered right away, fell in love with Dracula and actually drank some of his blood…then had, like so many women in horror novels and films, to be rescued.
And all right, in the book the name was spelled differently than hers.
But still.
How did these kinds of things keep happening to her? Like it wasn’t bad enough she had to know how everyone she met was going to die and then feel morally obligated to warn them about it.
Then she had to go and fall in love with-and get bitten by-the son of the most despised character in all of gothic literature? Who turned out actually to be real?
When she got through all this (and she would, indeed, get through all this-she had to; what other choice did she have?), she was going to write a book.
Of course she was. Someone had to get the word out there. It was the only way to save other women from what she was going through now.
Women Are from Venus, Vampires Are from Hell.
Meena lay there thinking about her book, watching as the shadows on her ceiling danced. She was so deeply engrossed in what she was going to say when Oprah asked why Meena had let Lucien do the things he had done to her, she didn’t even notice when Jack Bauer lifted his head and, his gaze on the French doors, tilted his ears forward.
The Palatine, Meena was certain, would try to stop her from going on Oprah. Alaric Wulf had been adamant that word of the existence of vampires could not get out to the public.
But why, when they caused so much pain and heartache?
And those were just the ones who weren’t murdering young girls.
And all right, she had pretty much given Lucien her full consent to do what he’d done. And she’d certainly enjoyed it.
But that didn’t make it all right-
Beside her, Jack Bauer’s body started to vibrate. He was growling, his foxlike face pointed toward the French doors. Meena looked at him, then glanced at the doors. She thought she saw something black flutter past the curtained windows.
A pigeon, more than likely. Or a plastic bag, tossed around by the growing storm.
“What is it, little man?” Meena whispered. “A bird? Are you going to go kill that bird?”
Jack Bauer rose onto his four paws, and standing in the middle of the bed with the fur on his back fully extended, he growled more loudly. All his attention was focused on the French doors, his small body quivering like a wire.
Meena felt her own skin prickle at his reaction to whatever he sensed outside her balcony doors.
This was no bird.
Who-or, more accurately, what-was out there?
“Okay, boy,” Meena said quietly, swinging her legs from the bed. She clutched the knitting needle tightly in one hand. “Stay.”
She should, she knew, go and get Alaric Wulf. This was what he was there for. To protect her.
Except that he wasn’t. He was there to try to wrest from her the address of her lover.
So that he could kill him.
And, in turn, be killed by him. Along with Jon.
Meena couldn’t let that happen, any more than she could let Lucien be killed, whatever he might be, whatever he might have done to her…however much he might have lied.
Lightning flashed. Thunder rumbled a second or two later, sounding much closer now than it had before. The storm had crossed the river. It would be upon them in a few minutes.
She couldn’t run for Alaric. If she did, he’d die at Lucien�
��s hands, and Jon would quickly follow…if she wasn’t losing her mind and Lucien was, in fact, beyond those glass doors. Not, of course, that that was even possible, because she lived eleven stories up and there wasn’t a fire escape he could have climbed (she refused to think about bats, or the way Count Dracula, in Bram Stoker’s book, had been able to climb buildings like a lizard).
Raising the knitting needle shoulder-high in her fist, she moved cautiously toward the French doors, the gauzy white curtains obscuring her view of what was on the balcony. Behind her, Jack Bauer jumped off the bed and followed along, still growling, even though Meena hissed, “Jack! Bad dog! Stay!”
Jack, as usual, paid absolutely no attention to her whatsoever.
Laying a hand on the door handle, Meena took a deep breath and pulled.
A sudden gust of wind helped push the door toward her, and Jack, excited, ran out onto the balcony. Meena, her heart in her throat, whispered, “Jack! No!” and tore out onto the terrace to stop him before he got hurt.
Except that there was no one-nothing-there.
Meena, shivering, stood in the rising wind. Above her head, the sky was a wildly patterned mosaic of dark clouds, behind which lightning continued to flash every few seconds. She could barely see the moon anymore. Thunder sounded, so loudly she seemed to feel it reverberating inside her chest.
Maybe that’s why she didn’t hear her name at first. The voice calling it was as wild and as deep as the thunder.
But then she noticed that Jack was growling again, his head turned in the direction of the Antonescus’ terrace, his nose poking through the wrought iron rails as he bared his teeth.
And when Meena turned, she saw it.
Chapter Forty-two
1:15 A.M. EST, Saturday, April 17
910 Park Avenue, Apt. 11B
New York, New York
Lucien.
He was there, standing on his cousin Emil’s terrace, his long black trench coat whipping around him in the wind like a cape…
What was he doing standing there, staring at her like that?
It was the middle of the night. The clouds overhead fairly throbbed with rain.
She laid a hand to her thumping heart.
“Meena.”
His voice was like liquid silk. She could almost feel it, licking her skin like the smooth white cotton of her nightgown.
He was calling to her. Calling to her the way the lightning was calling to the thunder.
What was she going to do? What was she going to say to him?
Meena moved to the terrace wall and, leaning against it, said, across the eight-foot-wide plunge that separated them, “I can’t really talk right now, Lucien.”
Her voice was shaking as much as her fingers, but she still managed to clutch her wooden knitting needle. She hoped he didn’t notice.
“Why not, Meena?” Lucien asked, the concern in his voice a caress. “Are you upset because I had to cancel our evening together? Didn’t you get my note?”
His voice curled and coiled along her heartstrings, the way his trench coat was wrapping against his legs every time the wind blew.
“I got your note,” she said. “Thank you very much for the bag. But now just isn’t a very good time.”
“Perhaps I could come over,” he said. “I tried calling earlier, but you didn’t seem to be picking up the phone.”
“I know,” Meena said, swallowing hard. If he truly was the prince of darkness, he was going to find out sometime. So she might as well tell the truth. “I couldn’t pick up my phone. There’s a Palatine Guard in my living room. He destroyed all my phones.”
Lucien grew very still. In fact, it seemed to Meena as if everything grew still. The sky above their heads froze. The lightning, the thunder, her heartbeat…even the wind died down. The clouds, which had been moving so swiftly overhead just seconds before, seemed to pile up on top of one another. The thick black storm clouds shut out the glow from the moon, concealing Lucien’s expression.
“Meena,” she heard him say.
The word-just those two syllables-told her everything she needed to know, as if the sudden meteorological display hadn’t been enough to convince her. They held a world of pathos.
And danger.
Some small part of her-the romantic in her, she supposed-had been holding out hope that Lucien would deny it. A vampire? Of course not! How ridiculous. Everyone knew there was no such thing as vampires.
But she’d heard the truth of it just now in his voice.
“I tried to tell you,” he said. His voice sounded as broken as her heart. “In the museum…”
“Go away.” She was whispering so that they wouldn’t be overheard by anyone in her living room. But it was as hard to keep the horror from her tone as it was the pain. “Go away, Lucien. And never come back.”
“Meena.” The moon was still lost behind the skidding clouds.
But now she could hear that he sounded less wounded and more impatient. Like he had any right to be impatient with her.
“I can’t believe what an idiot I was.” Meena felt as if she were choking. She was clutching the knitting needle to her chest like some kind of talisman to ward off evil. “Here I thought we had this incredible bond. Don’t ask me why. Maybe it was the part where you saved my life in front of that cathedral. Except I didn’t know it was you those bats were attacking! I didn’t know you were a…a…”
She couldn’t even say the word.
“Meena,” he said. “I can explain.”
Was he serious? He could explain? “Who were they, Lucien?” she demanded. “You knew them, didn’t you?”
Lucien’s tone was rueful. “In a way…”
“And the whole time”-Meena’s voice sounded ragged, even to her own ears-“you were just reading my mind, weren’t you? That’s how you knew where I lived! And that purse!” She shook her head. “That stupid purse! I should have told him to throw it out the window instead of my phone. You have slain the dragon. God, I can’t believe I ever fell for that! Have you ever considered writing dialogue for an American soap opera, Lucien? Because I could get you a job where I work.”
“Meena,” Lucien said. Now his tone was sharp…as sharp as his teeth, she thought, which she’d never even felt sinking into her skin. “Is he still there? The guard from the Palatine?”
“Oh, what’s wrong?” She knew she probably sounded more hysterical than sarcastic. “Can’t you read my mind to find out?”
An extremely strong gust of wind that seemed to appear from nowhere suddenly swept across her terrace and would have knocked her off her feet if she hadn’t dropped the knitting needle and reached out to grab the balcony railing with one hand while shielding her eyes with the other.
For a few seconds she couldn’t see, there was so much dust and debris-some of it was the dried petals from the dead geraniums on her balcony, swirling in a sudden springtime tornado, from out of nowhere.
But she was quite sure she saw the blurry outline of a large, bat-like object hovering between her terrace and the Antonescus’, blocking out what little light still shone from the night sky and the windows of the apartments around hers. It was like the time the bats had swooped down to attack her and Jack Bauer…
Except that now she knew they hadn’t been coming after her at all. It had been Lucien they’d wanted.
And the reason they’d had no effect on him whatsoever was that he wasn’t human. Their teeth and claws couldn’t harm him because nothing could. Nothing except chopping off his head with a sword-at least according to Alaric Wulf-or stabbing a pointed piece of wood into his heart.
And she had foolishly just dropped the single piece of pointed wood she owned.
When the wind died down and Meena was able to open her eyes, she saw Lucien standing in front of her, on her own balcony, just a foot or two away from her.
Meena, her heart now feeling as if it might slam out of her chest, tilted her chin to look into his face-that incredibly sensitive, handsome face-an
d saw that he was wearing an expression of extreme displeasure.
For the first time, she recognized the surging of her pulse for what it really was: fear.
And not just for Jon and that Palatine Guard inside her apartment: fear for her own life.
“Frankly,” Lucien said calmly, “I’ve never been able to read your mind, Meena. Your thoughts have always been a bit…jumbled.”
Meena, her fingers shaking convulsively, tightened her grip on the balcony railing. What had she done? What was happening? What was he doing there? Was he going to kill her?
“I thought vampires c-couldn’t enter a home unless invited,” she stammered through teeth that had begun to chatter. Was it her imagination, or did his dark eyes have a flicker of red in them, deep inside the pupils?
“That used to be true,” he said. The thunder had started up again, so loud it shook the metal railing beneath her fingers. The storm over their heads was beginning to crest. “At least in the days when people cared enough about their homes to have them blessed by their priests or rabbis. These days, when no one seems to bother anymore? It’s not really such a problem for us.”
“Oh,” Meena said. “Right.” Her gaze was fixed on his, though she fumbled surreptitiously with her bare foot along the balcony floor, searching for the knitting needle she’d dropped. If she found it, would she really have the courage-and the strength-to plunge it into his heart (or the place where his heart had once been)?
Maybe she should just jump. Death had to be preferable to this.
“But when we do encounter a sacred threshold,” Lucien said, continuing in the same detached, almost conversational tone, “we can find ways around it. We can use mind control to get the less…strong-willed to invite us inside. Some of us can even turn into mist and go through a keyhole, if we don’t care to be seen by others afterwards.”