by Meg Cabot
It was exactly the last resting place he’d pictured for all of them when he’d met them at the burlesque club.
Only he’d thought they’d be dying in a parking garage, in some sort of car accident. He’d never imagined he’d be the instrument of their death.
Except, he told himself, that he hadn’t been.
His brother was.
Dimitri knew the rules. What was he doing, turning humans and leaving them in a nightclub basement to awaken alone, then throwing them weakened human girls on which to feed?
At least now Lucien had a good idea where the bodies in the parks had been coming from.
“Reginald,” he called as he came up the basement stairs.
Reginald was waiting for him in the bar. He’d given all the girls cans of soda and little bowls of nuts, as if they were VIP guests of the club. Reginald had also, Lucien saw, raided the lost and found on the girls’ behalf. All of them were now fully, if somewhat whimsically, clothed.
“Yes, boss?” Reginald asked. He’d been wiping the bar as if the club was open for business and he was tending it.
“Where does Mr. Dimitri keep his safe?” Lucien asked.
“In his office,” Reginald responded promptly. “Here, I’ll show you.”
Reginald no longer needed the slightest mental push to do Lucien’s bidding. Having found a nest of soon-to-be vampires in his employer’s basement, alongside their next meal, Reginald’s loyalty to Mr. Dimitri seemed to have ended.
“Ladies,” Lucien called to the girls. “This way, please.”
The girls, chattering softly in their native languages, brought their sodas and nuts along as they followed Lucien and Reginald up the stairs to Dimitri’s plush office.
“It’s there,” Reginald said, pointing to a mirror that hung above a large art deco desk. “Behind the mirror. He keeps loads of cash in it. In case he has to make a quick getaway.”
“How fortuitous for us,” Lucien said. “Stand out of the way, ladies.”
He lifted a paperweight shaped like a greyhound and smashed the mirror to pieces with it.
“Dude really likes smashing shit,” Reginald remarked to the girls, who looked impressed.
Lucien took hold of the door to the safe and peeled it away, dropping it to the floor with a thump.
“Whoa,” he heard Reginald say. The young ladies gasped.
Lucien ignored them. He had work to do. As Reginald had stated, the safe was filled with a great deal of cash. There were also a lot of passports. Lucien reached for these and flung them to Dimitri’s desk.
“Look through these,” he said. “Perhaps the girls will find their own.”
There was a flutter of excitement behind him as the girls did just that. Lucien continued to rifle through the safe but found nothing else that would be of any use, to him or anyone else he could think of, except a set of keys and the title and registration papers to a car.
“Reginald,” he said. “What are these?”
“Oh,” the young man said. “Those are to Mr. Dimitri’s Lincoln Continental. He keeps it parked in a garage downtown. He lets me drive him in it sometimes. It’s a black ’69 Mark III. Sweet ride.”
Lucien nodded. “Consider it yours,” he said, and flung the keys and papers toward Reginald, who caught them expertly.
“Are you kidding me?” Reginald looked down at the keys in his hands. “But what’s Mr. Dimitri going to say?”
“Not much,” Lucien said, “when I get through with him. Ladies, come here, please.”
When the girls had gathered around the desk, Lucien gave them each several stacks of the neat piles of hundred-dollar bills.
“Take this money,” he instructed them, “and your passports, and start a new life, somewhere far away from here. Or go back to your old lives, if that’s what you think will make you happy. Just forget all about what happened here. I’ll take care of the people who hurt you. They won’t harm anyone else again. I promise. You have nothing more to fear. Go, and be healthy and happy.”
The girls, whose grasp of English was shaky, smiled-first down at the money in their hands, then at each other, and then at him.
They didn’t need to know English to understand what he’d said to them.
Because he hadn’t even spoken out loud. He’d said all he had to say in their minds, giving them each a gentle memory wipe.
It would be a long time before they were completely healed. Even he couldn’t do that for them.
But this, he knew, was a beginning.
The money would do nothing to bring back the lives that had been lost due to his failure to control his brother’s barbarism.
But for now, this was the only penance he could make.
“Reginald,” he said aloud. “Take the women outside, and make sure they get safely into cabs. Have the drivers take them to JFK. They can decide from there where they want to head next.”
“You got it,” Reginald said.
“Then,” Lucien said, “you’re going to take the car and drive it to Georgia to live with your brother.”
“My brother,” Reginald said, looking pleased. “That’s a good idea!”
“I thought so. Don’t forget anything here at the club. If you do, you won’t be able to come back for it. It’s just going to burn.”
“Burn, sir?” Reginald looked confused. “How?”
“In the fire,” Lucien explained patiently. “Go now. And don’t worry. No one will be left to point a finger at you, I assure you.”
Reginald turned, his arms open wide, and shepherded the girls away. They all left, smiling back at Lucien gratefully…and a little bit worshipfully.
He looked away. Gratitude was the last thing he deserved, much less worship.
He was dousing the bodies in the basement with rum from the bar-he’d always found that 151 burned quickest and most efficiently, leaving very little tissue residue-when his cell phone buzzed.
He pulled it out and saw the name on the screen he’d been longing to see all day.
Meena Harper.
Chapter Fifty-one
9:15 P.M. EST, Saturday, April 17
Shrine of St. Clare
154 Sullivan Street
New York, New York
Lucien?” Meena cried when someone finally picked up at the other end. “Is that you?”
She had to stick a finger in her other ear in order to hear him.
That was because of all the screaming coming from the ground below her.
She supposed it was her own fault, though: she’d just lobbed a water balloon filled with holy water at a pack of vampires who’d been trying to climb the churchyard fence in order to get into the rectory.
“Meena,” he said. “Are you all right?”
“Oh,” she said. “I’m fine. But I’m sorry. I can barely hear you. Where are you? This is a horrible connection.”
“No, I’m sorry,” Lucien said. He sounded impossibly far away. “I’m not in a very good location for cell phone reception right now. Let me just…there. Can you hear me now?”
“Oh,” Meena said. A wave of warmth washed over her at the sound of his voice. Suddenly, she felt as if everything was going to be okay.
Which was ridiculous, because one man couldn’t possibly fix all the things that had gone wrong in the past few hours.
Even Lucien, who was no ordinary man.
“That’s much better,” she said. “You sounded like you were in some kind of tunnel before. So you’re not at the apartment?”
“No,” Lucien said. “Meena, where are you? Is that…screaming?”
“Oh,” Meena said. She glanced down at the vampires beyond the churchyard fence, feeling a twinge of fear…and loathing.
Then she instantly felt guilty about the loathing. She couldn’t quite believe how quickly she’d gone from feeling pity for these creatures who couldn’t help what they were, and insisting there were surely some redeeming qualities in them, just as there were in Lucien, to callously hurling water
balloons filled with a liquid that was as corrosive to them as battery acid from the rectory rooftop.
What was happening to her? What was she turning into?
She was just as much a monster as they were.
Then again, she supposed being nearly murdered tended to bring out the monster in everyone.
“Never mind about that,” she said to Lucien. “They’ll be all right again in a few minutes.” Her brother had been right about vampiric healing powers. They were amazing. Nothing killed these things. Well, except a stake to the heart, apparently, but Meena, up on the rectory roof, hadn’t been close enough to one to test this theory. Yet.
“Meena.” Lucien’s deep voice sounded like heaven to her ears. Especially when he said her name like that, so filled with pure, masculine love…and longing. “What are you talking about? Who’ll be all right?”
“No one,” she said. She didn’t want to spoil things by having to admit that she’d just spent the past quarter of an hour dousing his kind with holy water so she could get a few minutes alone to call him. “It’s good to hear your voice.”
“It’s good to hear you, too,” he said. “You can’t know what I’ve been going through, not knowing where you’ve been all this time. I’ve been torturing myself, thinking of all the things that might have happened to you and how I haven’t been there to protect you.”
“Oh,” Meena said, flattening a hand to her chest. Tears filled her eyes. “Lucien, you have to stop saying that kind of stuff. You know we can’t be together. It’s impossible.”
“You keep saying it’s impossible,” Lucien said. “But if there’s anything I’ve learned in my five centuries on earth, Meena, it’s that nothing is impossible. Especially to a man as much in love as I am with you.”
A hand appeared over the edge of the rooftop beside Meena’s foot-a vampire, trying to claw his way up the building toward her. Stifling a startled gasp, Meena pulled a squirt gun from the back pocket of her jeans, aimed, and launched a steady stream of holy water at him. He shrieked as his fingers caught fire, lost his footing, and fell fifty feet to the pavement below. Horrified, Meena turned away.
“Meena,” Lucien said. “What was that?”
“That? Oh, nothing. Look, I want you to know I did get your messages. I would have called sooner, but I had to steal my phone back from my brother. He doesn’t know I have it-”
As if right on cue, she heard her brother shouting from a second-story window below, “You want a piece of this? You want a piece of this? Well, then come and get it, you sick vampire pusswad!” This was followed by a small explosion.
“Meena,” Lucien said. There was renewed urgency in his tone. He’d definitely, she realized, heard the explosion. “Where are you?”
“Oh,” she said, “it doesn’t matter.”
A part of her just wanted to keep hearing him tell her how much he loved and missed her. Which was wrong, because she knew he was still going to kill Jon and Alaric.
“It does matter.” He insisted. “Meena, you’ve got to listen to me. I think you’re in serious danger.”
“Really?” She tried to ignore the smell of smoke still drifting up from the rectory kitchen. Father Bernard had already called the fire department and assured them (in case any of St. Clare’s neighbors happened to dial 911, he didn’t want to worry about the NYFD being attacked by vampires) that the only trouble was the “broken water pipe” that had caused them to cancel evening mass in the first place. The smoke? Oh, the smoke was just from a batch of Sister Gertrude’s cookies that had been left in the oven too long.
“It’s funny,” Meena said over the phone, “because I think you’re in very grave danger.”
“I’m serious, Meena,” Lucien said. She could hear him moving on the other end of the line. It sounded, oddly enough, like he was pouring something. “I’d prefer to have this discussion in person, but with things the way they are right now…well, I’m just going to say it: let’s go away together.”
“What? You mean like…on a trip?”
“Yes,” he said with an odd hesitancy. “Exactly. Like on a trip. Well, maybe a bit longer than the average trip. And I know what you’re going to say about my killing your brother and the guard. But I won’t be able to do that if we’re nowhere near them, will I?”
“No.” Meena had to agree. “That’s true.”
“And I know how you feel about your job. But surely you have some vacation time coming to you.”
“Well,” Meena said. She chewed her lower lip, thinking about Stefan Dominic, still tied up in the basement. The Dracul had already managed to infiltrate where she worked and, according to Alaric, where she lived, as well. Taking a vacation until things died down a little wouldn’t be such a bad idea. “A couple weeks off might not hurt, now that I think about it…”
“Well,” he said, sounding surprised. And a lot more cheerful. “That was easy. I thought you’d be more resistant to the idea, to be honest. Can you leave now, tonight, Meena? I can be uptown in a few minutes. Do you think you can get away from the Palatine Guard? And meet me out on your little balcony? You needn’t be afraid. I’ll help you get across, onto Emil’s terrace. Then we can leave from there.”
He sounded so sure of himself. That was one of the things she loved about him. He always seemed to know exactly what he was doing, and on the few occasions when he didn’t, well, that vulnerability only made her love him all the more fiercely.
“Um,” she said, “meeting you on my balcony might be a bit of a problem, actually, Lucien.”
“Why?”
She hadn’t wanted to tell him this way. But now she had no choice. “Well, because right now I’m actually on the roof of the rectory of the Shrine of St. Clare on Sullivan Street in downtown Manhattan, just off Houston,” she said into the phone. “We’re not totally sure what’s going on, but it seems like your brother got Stefan Dominic-the guy we hired to play the vampire on Insatiable, only it turns out he really is a vampire-to kidnap me-”
“Did he hurt you?” Lucien demanded in a voice as hard as stone.
“What?” Meena asked. “No. Well, I mean, he tried. He had a gun. But Alaric stopped him. Now we’re keeping him hostage here and currently experiencing just a little bit of difficulty because a few dozen Dracul really seem to want to come inside and kill us or something-”
“What?”
She winced and had to hold the phone away from her face.
That’s how loudly he’d erupted into her ear.
“Lucien,” she said when the volume of what she supposed was his swearing-it was in Romanian, so she couldn’t understand a word of it-got back to a decibel level she could bear, “I knew you were going to freak out like this, which is why I didn’t-”
“Meena,” he thundered. She had to hold the phone away from her face again. “Stay exactly where you are. I’ll be right there to get you.”
“No,” she yelled into the phone before he could hang up. “Think about it, Lucien. It’s a trap. Alaric says they’ll be waiting for you at the apartment, too.” Which was why she wasn’t going to say a word to him about Jack Bauer. She didn’t need two men risking their lives over her dog. “It’s all just a trap to lure you out so your brother can kill you-”
“Oh, Alaric says that, does he?” Lucien roared. “Well, I don’t care what Alaric says. Do you know who Stefan Dominic is, Meena? He’s my nephew. He’s Dimitri’s son.”
“Oh,” Meena said, taken aback. “So…you’re saying you think we should let him go?”
“I’m saying I’m coming down there to get you, and you and I are leaving-”
“You mean running away,” she said quietly. “Don’t you?”
Lucien’s voice was like ice. “We’re not running away, Meena,” he said. “I’m going to keep you safe. That is my first-my only-priority.”
“Well,” she said, lifting a hand and running it raggedly through her hair. Her voice caught on a sob she hadn’t been expecting.
She thought
she’d been doing a pretty good job of keeping it together. At least for the past half hour or so.
But now everything was starting to unravel again.
“What about Jon, Lucien?” she asked, her voice breaking. “Because he’s here, too. What if we leave, and then your brother captures him? Do you think I could live with myself if something happened to my brother? Are you going to protect Jon, Lucien, for the rest of his life, too? Because I don’t think you are. In fact,” she said, and now her voice rose a little hysterically, “I still think you’re going to kill him, and Alaric, too.”
“Meena.” Lucien sounded calm now. The storm was over. He seemed to be choosing his words with deliberate care, the way a jeweler would choose pearls to string a necklace. “I’m not going to kill anyone. Except my own brother. Not to mention my nephew. Then Jon will be safe. And so will you.”
She desperately wanted to believe him. “Do you really think so?” she asked.
“Of course I do, Meena,” he said. “All of this will be over very soon. Now, start thinking about where you want to go. I’ve always dreamed about having a place in Thailand, myself.”
“Thailand,” Meena said. She liked the sound of the word on his lips. “I’ve never been to Thailand.”
“Neither have I,” Lucien said. “We can discover it together.”
Even as she was dreaming of sharing a thatched hut on the beach with Lucien-on stilts, like she always saw in magazines-she heard a scuttling sound. Whirling around, she saw a bat landing on the rooftop just a few feet away from her and beginning to transmogrify into its vampire host.
“Oh, no,” she said with a groan, her heart booming in her chest. She raced toward it, giving the bat the most vicious kick she could, sending it shrieking off the roof…
…just as it changed into a young woman wearing jeans and a leather jacket. The girl screamed as she tumbled through the air, not changing back into a bat quickly enough to save her from falling onto the spikes of the churchyard fence below, which pierced her body in several places.