by Meg Cabot
Meena flung out both arms-even the sore one-against the sides of the stairwell up which Dimitri was carrying her, grabbing the stone walls.
Dimitri wasn’t expecting his formerly semicomatose victim to suddenly come to life. That was the only way Meena managed to propel herself out of his powerful grip and down from his broad shoulders, a physical maneuver that required both the element of surprise and a complete lack of fear of pain on her part…especially since it ended with her falling down the last few steps and landing on her tailbone.
Dimitri spun around, looking flabbergasted. She’d gone from completely limp to human projectile in a matter of seconds.
“Get away from me,” Meena warned him, crab-walking as fast as she could from the bottom of the steps.
But Dimitri was already thundering down the stairs after her, his eyes glowing red as twin stoplights. Meena scrambled to her feet and whirled around to make a run for it…
…only to careen directly into Alaric Wulf’s wide, solid chest. He’d managed to shake off his new vampire buddies and had come running over with his sword drawn to help her.
“You’re very popular with the Dracula boys,” Alaric remarked drily. “They all seem to want to have you for dinner.”
“Less joking,” she said. Dimitri had his dagger out, the blade gleaming in the candlelight. “More head chopping. And please don’t miss this time.”
“Isn’t this nice?” Dimitri asked Alaric as he tossed the dagger from hand to hand. “We finally get to finish what we started in Berlin. You ran off with your partner that day before we were done. It wasn’t at all sporting.”
“Yes,” Alaric said. “Well, I had more important things to do than stick around to kill you. My partner was bleeding to death, as you might recall.”
Dimitri’s grin broadened.
“I know,” he said. “He was delicious. I’m looking forward to another bite someday.”
Alaric, his face darkening, lifted his sword.
Uh-oh, Meena thought. This isn’t good. Should he be fighting angry? “Alaric,” she said urgently. “Don’t-”
That’s when they all heard it: a sound like no other-certainly nothing human. But it wasn’t anything vampire, either.
It came from the apse at the front of the church, where the altar sat. It was so loud it shook the building to the foundations. So loud dust floated down from the choir loft and the low ceiling that hung over Alaric’s and Meena’s heads.
Turning slowly, Meena was afraid of what she was about to see-but knew full well what it was. Of course it was. She was in St. George’s. All her visions had been of fire. And there were crude drawings of it all over the walls.
She still couldn’t believe her eyes.
But there it was.
A dragon.
On the Upper East Side.
Chapter Fifty-eight
12:15 A.M. EST, Sunday, April 18
St. George’s Cathedral
180 East Seventy-eighth Street
New York, New York
It was crouched in the apse, its huge body and enormous wingspan filling the entire space, while its serpentine head perched on a neck that was stretched nearly the height of the thirty-foot ceiling.
Its claws made obscene scratching noises on the marble floor.
Its scales were ruby red.
Smoke poured from its nostrils.
Out of one of its shoulders poked a tiny wooden stake.
Lucien, Meena thought, feeling as if her heart had turned to ice in her chest. My God. Lucien.
What’s happened to you? What have they done to you?
“Oh…my God,” said Dimitri, dropping the dagger he held when he saw it.
Hearing Dimitri’s voice-and then the noisy clatter of the falling knife-the dragon’s head whipped in their direction…then dipped low to peer at them where they stood beneath the choir loft.
Meena’s frozen heart gave a convulsive double beat. Oh, God. Oh, God. The dragon was looking at them.
A mixture of steam and what smelled like sulfur shot straight at them as the beast exhaled hot air with enough force to douse all the candles in their area.
Suddenly they were plunged into semidarkness.
But Meena could still see, thanks to the fiery glow coming from the dragon’s nostrils, which loomed closer and closer to them…and from which she could hear a strange snuffling sound.
“Whatever you do,” Alaric whispered in the dark, startling her, as he slowly reached out to lay a warm, steadying hand on the back of Meena’s neck, “don’t move.”
“I wasn’t going to,” Meena whispered back. “But what’s…happening?”
It wasn’t what she wanted to ask. What she wanted to ask was, Where is Lucien? Can he really be in there, beneath all those scales? Is that really him?
“I don’t know,” Alaric replied. “I’ve never seen this before. But I think he’s-”
Suddenly, the dragon’s head reared up right next to Meena. She froze, every muscle in her body tensing. She couldn’t remember ever being that paralyzed with fear in her life-not even when she’d realized Lucien was actually a vampire-as she found herself being examined by a huge, double-lidded, foot-wide eye, its many facets, each the color of a blood-red sun, casting her own terrified reflection back at her.
Calm down, she tried to tell herself. This is Lucien’s eye. It’s going to be all right.
But she wasn’t sure that was really true since she could see no hint at all of the man she had known and loved in there. What she found herself gazing at wasn’t a man at all. It was completely, entirely beast.
A giant lid slid sideways over the pupil staring at her, then opened again as the dragon peered at her-and then at Alaric, standing behind her.
Then came that huge snuffling sound again, so loud that Meena would have jumped out of her skin entirely if Alaric hadn’t been keeping such a firm grip on the back of her neck.
Did he just… smell me? Meena asked herself, stunned.
Alaric squeezed the back of her neck.
She got the message. Don’t talk. Don’t move. Don’t even breathe.
It was good advice.
Too bad Dimitri couldn’t seem to follow it.
He’d found the knife somehow where he’d dropped it.
And now he made a running lunge out of the darkness at the beast, going for its giant blinking eye with a scream of pure, unadulterated hate.
This, it turned out, was a mistake. A big mistake.
“…pissed,” Alaric said, finishing his thought about Lucien’s state of mind. He shoved Meena to the floor, then threw himself on top of her. “Stay down.”
The fire that came bellowing out of the dragon’s nose and throat in Dimitri’s direction was white-hot.
It was the searing heat of the sun. It was the brimstone-filled heat from the fiery pits of hell, and it was aimed at a single target. It went shooting over their heads and bodies.
Meena had never felt heat like that before in her life and hoped she never would again.
Meena wasn’t sure if Dimitri ever even knew what hit him. One minute he was there, and the next, there was only fire…
And then there was only thick black smoke.
Where Dimitri had been standing was a charred, smoldering spot.
“Oh, my God,” Meena heard someone saying. And then she realized it was herself. She was saying it, over and over. “Oh, my God, oh, my God.”
“Stay down.” She heard Alaric’s deep voice in her ear. “Just stay down.”
Meena caught her breath as the dragon’s head dipped toward them once more. Lucien swept his gleaming red snout just inches above them, making that snuffling sound again.
He was smelling them. She was certain of it.
Then the head disappeared.
Lucien was turning his attention-and his breath of fire-to the people and vampires in the rest of the church.
Alaric must have realized it, too. That’s why he sprang up from Meena and ran after Lucie
n’s departing head.
She knew instantly where he was going.
And why. “No!” she screamed.
And she tore off after him.
She lost him in the chaos that was ensuing outside of the sheltering roof of the choir loft.
Yes, there might have been a seventy-foot-long dragon breathing fire in one part of the church.
But in the rest of the building, there was still a vampire-versus-human war being waged. She saw the Dracul sinking their fangs into the necks of novices…Sister Gertrude stabbing a Dracul with a piece of pew…Jon firing his crossbow at point-blank range at a Dracul (and missing). Fran and Stan flipping friars over with a superhuman strength amazing for people Meena had never before seen lift anything heavier than a knish. Abraham Holtzman and Emil and Mary Lou Antonescu had formed some kind of bizarre partnership and seemed to be trying to kill as many Dracul as they could with whatever they could…which appeared to be not many with very little.
Meena, appalled, knew she couldn’t just stand there. She had to do something to help…even if there was a dragon lumbering around, incinerating people with its breath.
Scooping up a jagged chunk of crushed pew, she grabbed the hair of the nearest vampire, who happened to be trying to sink its teeth into the throat of a hapless novice…
…and was shocked to find herself face-to-face again with Shoshona.
“Oh, right,” Shoshona said, smirking at her and at the pointed chunk of wood Meena held in her fist. “Like you have the guts.”
“Oh,” Meena assured her, “I have the guts.”
There was no way she had the guts.
This was Shoshona. Sure, Meena had never liked her very much. She had told herself, nearly every day for a year, that today was the day she was finally going to warn her coworker that if she didn’t stop working out so much, she was going to die.
Now Meena realized that it was never the gym Shoshona had to fear.
It was Stefan Dominic, the man she’d met in it.
Still, Meena had always had every intention of saving Shoshona’s life.
So was she really going to put a stake through her heart and end it? Here, now?
No. Of course not.
“Yeah.” Shoshona smirked some more. “I knew it. By the way, I took something else from your apartment, besides this bag.”
Shoshona unzipped the top of the red Marc Jacobs bag she still wore slung across her chest and showed Meena a glimpse of something inside.
“Thanks for all the great story ideas,” she said, smirking. “Have a nice time on unemployment.”
Then she turned around to look for the novice, who’d run off, crying.
Meena stared at Shoshona’s slender back.
Her laptop? Shoshona had stolen her laptop?
Meena didn’t have backup files of anything she’d kept on that laptop. Not on her work computer. Not online. Not anywhere.
Meena stalked forward, grabbed the back of Shoshona’s two-hundred-dollar shirt, and spun her around to face her…
…then plunged the broken piece of pew into her chest.
Shoshona turned into a pile of dust before Meena’s eyes.
On top of the dust lay the ruby red jewel-encrusted dragon tote Lucien had given to her, tangled in Shoshona’s clothes. Meena picked it up, dusted it off, and slung it across her own chest.
The weight of her laptop inside it felt reassuring.
When Meena lifted her gaze again, it was to see the last person she’d ever expected: Leisha, carefully holding her belly and picking her way toward Meena through the smoke and rubble.
“Oh, my God,” Meena cried. “Leish?”
All of Meena’s worst nightmares seemed suddenly to be coming true. Her boyfriend was a vampire. She’d just killed her own boss.
And her pregnant best friend was wandering around a live battlefield with no regard for her own safety or that of her unborn child.
Meena rushed to Leisha’s side.
“What are you still doing here?” Meena demanded anxiously. “I thought Mary Lou Antonescu got you out!”
“Oh, was that who that was?” Leisha looked dazed. “Well, yeah, she did. But then after she broke Adam out of those handcuffs and told him what was going on, he decided he wanted to stay to see the end of the play.”
Meena raised her eyebrows. “Play?”
“Yeah,” Leisha said. “I was kind of cool with it at first, but now I don’t know, there’s that thing-”
She pointed over Meena’s shoulder. Meena turned around and there, behind her, was Lucien, his dragon head weaving back and forth as if he were looking for something-or someone-his long serpent’s tongue darting in and out of his mouth. Every once in a while he opened his mouth and let out an eardrum-splitting roar.
“Now see? That just seems like overkill to me,” Leisha said.
Meena’s gaze slid back toward her friend. Leisha, she was pretty certain, had had her mind scrambled by a combination of shock and some kind of Dracul brainwashing. Her normally alert brown eyes looked glazed over.
“I realize it’s all in good fun,” Leisha complained, “but I’m pretty sure the smoke isn’t good for the baby. I’m actually not feeling so hot-”
Meena reached out and grabbed her friend by both arms.
“Leisha, this isn’t a play,” she said, urgently. “You have to get out of here. The baby is coming early. And it’s not a boy. It’s a girl. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. I knew, but-”
“What?” Leisha cried, flinging both her hands away. Whatever they had done to Leisha’s memory, it hadn’t affected her concern for her unborn child. “You knew and you didn’t tell me? Meena, what’s wrong with you? How early?”
“Early enough that Adam should have started on that baby room a long time ago,” Meena said. Suddenly spying her brother over Leisha’s shoulder, she cried, “Jon! Jon! Get over here.”
Jon staggered over. Blood was streaming from a cut on his forehead; Gregory Bane had split it open with a fist. Jon was dirty and sweaty and looked like he was having the time of his life.
“What?” he demanded. “Oh, my God. Leisha, what are you still doing here?”
Over in the sanctuary, the dragon let out another roar.
The walls shook.
Outside the church, sirens were wailing. The NYFD and New York City police were on their way. It had only taken a vampire war and a seventy-foot dragon to get some of St. George’s neighbors to call 911.
“Oh, thank God,” Leisha said when she heard the sirens. “Someone needs to shoot that thing.”
“No!” Meena cried. Then, seeing the expressions on the faces of her brother and friend, she said, more calmly, “Jon, I think Leisha is in labor. You need to find Adam and get them both out of here.”
“What?” Leisha and Jon exclaimed together.
“Yes,” Meena said firmly. “Leisha, I think you’re having your baby now. Jon, you’ve got to get her and Adam into the first ambulance you see and get her away from here. Far away from here. Do it now, Jon. I want you to go with them. It’s all your fault they’re even here in the first place.”
“How is it my fault?” Jon demanded indignantly.
“Remember that note I left down at St. Clare’s?” Meena asked. “The one in which I specifically stated that anyone who followed me up here was going to die tonight?”
Jon rolled his eyes. “Oh, right. Yeah, we all saw that. But what were we supposed to do, Meen? Just let you come up here and fight these guys on your own? It looked like you were doing a real terrific job when we got here.”
“You shot my boyfriend,” Meena reminded him. “He was handling it fine, and then you shot him. And now look what’s happening. The police are here, and the fire department, and innocent people are going to get hurt. And by the way, I’m pretty sure it’s you he’s looking for.”
The dragon let out another one of its roars. It sounded much closer than the previous one. Jon jumped and seemed to realize Meena was right: Lu
cien was coming for him. Those huge, blood-red eyes seemed to be searching the apse for someone…
Jon hastily surrendered his cocked and loaded crossbow to Meena.
“Yeah,” he said guiltily. “I really am sorry about that. I was actually aiming for his brother.” He took Leisha by the arm. “Relax, Leish,” he said to her. “I’ll have you out of here in no time. I’m pretty sure I saw Adam over by the doors. He must have been looking for you.”
Leisha threw a frantic look over her shoulder at Meena as Jon led her away.
“Aren’t you coming with us?” she asked.
Meena smiled and waved at her. “I want to stay to see the end of the play,” she said. “Call me later and let me know where you are.” She held an imaginary cell phone to her face.
Leisha nodded, then looked concerned. “The baby’s really a girl? We never even talked about any girls’ names.”
“I’ve always been partial to the name Joan,” Meena called after her…
…just as a Dracul spotted her standing there and began racing her way. While Jon hurried to get Leisha to safety, Meena spun to face the vampire…
…who turned out to be none other than Gregory Bane.
“Hello, Meena Harper,” he said, giving her the same slow, deliberate smile that had sent so many thousands of women in the eighteen-to-forty-nine demographic into screaming fits.
Meena rolled her eyes, lifted Jon’s crossbow, and shot him directly in the chest.
Then she stepped through the crumbling dust of his remains. That’s when yet another projectile went hissing through the air, missing Meena’s cheek by mere inches.
A second later, the dragon let out a bellow-this one of pain-that was loud enough to shake the building’s foundation. Meena, confused, looked up to see a stake sticking out of its long neck.
A stake. Another stake.
Someone else, other than her brother, was shooting at Lucien. Meena spun around, trying to see who it was.
She spotted Abraham Holtzman in the center of the smoke-filled apse, a crossbow to one shoulder, reloading.
She threw down her own crossbow and flew toward him.
“Stop,” she yelled at him. “You’ve got to stop. You’re hurting him!”