Insatiable (12 page)

“These dead girls,” Lucien said, ignoring his brother. “What do you know about them?”

“I told you,” Dimitri said. “I don’t know anything about them.”

A stainless steel countertop that lay abandoned to one side of the Dumpster suddenly rose several feet into the air and dangled threateningly above Dimitri’s head.

“Wait,” Dimitri cried, throwing an arm over his face to protect his handsome features from destruction. “All right, all right. Yes, I’ve heard talk—”

Lucien let the countertop fall harmlessly to one side. The clatter it made was deafeningly loud, and the two men could hear rats squeak and scurry away. Dimitri, still seated in the muck on the alley floor, made a face.

“But you can’t think I know who’s doing it, Lucien,” he said. “Obviously if I did, I’d put a stop to it. I don’t even know why you’d think it’s one of us. It’s clearly some sick pervert.”

“Who drinks human blood,” Lucien said calmly.

“Well, lots of people do,” Dimitri said. “It’s quite stylish to be a vampire these days. Or act like one, anyway.”

Lucien studied his younger brother. He would have liked to have believed Dimitri was as innocent as he claimed.

But Lucien had made the mistake of believing in his brother’s innocence in times past.

And it had nearly cost him his life.

He wouldn’t make that same mistake again, especially when it might now involve human lives.

“If I find out you know anything about these murders,” Lucien said, “and you didn’t tell me or do anything to stop the killer—or happen to
be behind the killings yourself—I will destroy you, and everything and everyone you care about, Dimitri. Do you understand?”

Dimitri, trying to struggle to his feet and out of the garbage and slime, said, “Brother! We’ve obviously gotten off on the wrong foot again. I’m sorry about that little misunderstanding back there. Can’t we—”

But Lucien wasn’t done. He placed a hand on his half brother’s shoulder and shoved him back down into the muck from which he’d just been attempting to climb.

Then Lucien leaned over him and whispered into his ear, “No. We can’t. You know the agreement. Everyone can drink. But no one can—”

“For the love of God, Lucien!” Dimitri cried. “Do you think I don’t know, after all these years? No one may kill a human, no matter how much he might thirst. To do so will bring swift and absolute retribution from the prince. The Dracul have lived under your orders for more than a century. Do you think we might have somehow forgotten them?”

“Yes,” Lucien said grimly. “Because you have before. And you will again.”

It was right then that the back door to the club opened and Reginald and his partner appeared.

“Mr. Dimitri?” Reginald asked in some alarm, seeing his boss lying on the alley floor.

Lucien straightened.

“Give him a hand, will you, Reginald?” Lucien asked over his shoulder as he turned to stride swiftly past him and into the dark night. “Mr. Dimitri is going to need all the help he can get.”

7:00
P.M
. EST, Thursday, April 15
St. George’s Cathedral
180 East Seventy-eighth Street
New York, New York

M
eena stared at the cathedral. In the fading daylight, it looked beautiful, with its twin spires straining toward the spring sky and elegant stained glass, even if some of the windows were broken in places. Who would throw rocks at a church window, anyway?

Sure, it was surrounded with the familiar blue plywood that always went up around a building in Manhattan when construction was taking place.

But the plywood was nowhere near high enough to hide the large and lovely cathedral behind it.

A cathedral that, just two nights before, had been the scene of an inexplicable, brutal attack.

Or had it?

Meena stood with Jack Bauer on his leash at the bottom of the cathedral steps, exactly where they had been the night before last when the bats had come swooping down out of nowhere.

At first she’d been worried that Jack wouldn’t want to go anywhere near the church because of what had happened last time they’d been there.

But he showed no sign of any reluctance, trotting right up and lifting a leg on a parked car in front of it.

He obviously didn’t harbor any ill memories of the incident.

But though at first her own had been a bit fuzzy, she remembered it all now, as clearly as if it had just happened a few minutes, and not nearly forty-eight hours, ago. There was the place on the sidewalk where she’d crouched, her heart in her throat, for so long while the bats had flung themselves over and over at Lucien’s face and body, trying—she’d been certain at the time—to rip him apart.

Except that he’d been fine, his face without a mark on it.

And true, there were no
actual
drops of blood or anything like that on the ground to show that there’d been any attack at all.

But she recognized the crack in the pavement; how could she forget it? Her face had been almost right up against it as Lucien had lain across her, keeping her safe.

It was strange, Meena thought as she stood gazing up at the church spires, wondering if the bats were in there now and when they might awaken—and attack—again. She didn’t get a feeling of evil from the cathedral, even though the exact spot where she stood had very nearly been the site of a savage mauling.

Meena didn’t flatter herself that as a dialogue writer for a show of
Insatiable
’s quality she was particularly gifted. She didn’t put on airs that she was a creative genius.

Nor did she think of herself as any more creative than the artists she sometimes saw outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the ones who painted amateur sunsets and landscapes and then sold them to tourists who happened to be walking by.

Meena felt her scripts for
Insatiable
were much the same thing: a reflection of what was happening daily in front of the average American, just like a sunset…only maybe a little more dramatic, to keep people interested.

But she’d always been aware of being a tiny bit more sensitive to mood than other people, possibly because of her ability to tell when something horrible was going to happen to someone.

Maybe there just wasn’t anything horrible about St. George’s to sense. Because a tragedy at St. George’s had been
averted
…thanks to Lucien, whoever he was. He’d saved her life. She didn’t know how or why, but he had.

Did Lucien, Meena wondered, ever think about what had happened outside the church and how strange it had been? Perhaps he too had come to stand outside St. George’s and asked himself the very same questions she was. Maybe he’d posted a Craigslist Missed Connections ad about
her
(she’d been too shy to post one about him). She’d better remember to check….

“Meena?”

Meena jumped nearly out of her skin. She whirled around, half expecting to find Lucien himself staring down at her.

But it was only Jon, looking extremely surprised to find her standing in front of St. George’s Cathedral on a Thursday evening, staring at nothing.

“What are you doing here?” Jon asked. “I thought you were taking Jack Bauer for a walk.”

“I was,” Meena said, tugging on Jack’s leash. Jack Bauer was actually lying on the sidewalk, licking his hind leg, and ignored her. “I mean, I am. I was just…thinking about something.”

“I can tell.” Jon stood next to her and looked up at the church spires. He was dressed up in pressed khakis and a nice shirt, and was, for some reason, wearing a tie. In his right hand was a brown paper bag. “Are you still freaking out about that flock of bats?”

“It was a colony,” Meena corrected him. “I looked it up on Wikipedia. Bats live in colonies. And I found out they don’t normally attack something—or someone—as a group the way they did the other night. That had to have been a total fluke. They’re really more solitary hunters. You know, because they use high-frequency sonar.”

Jon looked down at her like she was crazy. “Okay,” he said. “Good to know. Are you going to come home and get ready? Because we have the Antonescus’ dinner party in half an hour.”

She blinked. “What?”

“The countess’s dinner party,” he said. “Remember? For her cousin, the prince. It’s Thursday night. You said we’d go.”

Meena rolled her eyes. “Oh,” she said. “That. Yeah. We can’t go. I didn’t RSVP.”

“Meena,” Jon said, shaking his head. “We talked about this. We said we’d go.”

“Well,” Meena said, “I never told her we’d go. So, I guess we can’t go. Too bad. Let’s watch a marathon of
The Office
instead.”

“No,” Jon said. “Free food. Remember? Besides, I already saw Mary Lou in the elevator today and she asked if we were coming and I said yes. So we have to go. Look, I bought them a bottle of wine.” He held up the paper bag. “It cost me six bucks. I’m not wasting it.”

Meena’s shoulders sagged. “Oh, my God,” she said. “I don’t think I can handle a party at the countess’s tonight. It’s been a really bad week.”

“I know,” Jon said, taking her by the elbow and turning her away from the church. “But you want to meet this prince guy, right? Isn’t he the guy you want to use as a model for the vampire slayer in your spec script? The one for Cheryl?”

“Actually,” Meena admitted as they started walking toward 910 Park, “I think I met someone who would be a better model for the prince.”

“Really?” Jon said. “Who?”

“Oh, just a guy,” Meena said, knowing what Jon would have to say about her adventure with Lucien outside the cathedral the night before last.

And if she told him, he’d only deliver a big-brotherly lecture about her leaving the apartment late at night, something she knew she ought not to have done. In their gender-unequal society, it still wasn’t totally safe for American women to wander the streets of New York City unescorted late at night. (Although to be fair, it wasn’t safe for
anyone
to do this, really. There were rampaging colonies of bats lurking everywhere.)

“Well, the guy we’re meeting tonight is supposed to be a
prince,
” Jon said. “Where else are you going to meet one of those?”

“Nowhere,” Meena admitted, realizing Jon had actually been looking forward to this dinner party. He didn’t get a chance to go out very often, since he was…well, broke and unemployed. And most of his friends were as well. Entertainment was the last thing on which any of them could afford to splurge. She ought to have known that to her brother, any chance to leave the apartment was a welcome one…even if it was just to go to the neighbors’ place across the hall.

She glanced over her shoulder at the spires of the church shooting up toward the lavender evening sky, the clouds pink in the setting sun, as Jon steered her away from it.
Churches,
she thought idly.
What are they even for?

To worship in, obviously. But to worship
what,
exactly? A god who gave you gifts you never even asked for, that were basically just a curse?

On the other hand, what else did people have, exactly?

Nothing.

Nothing but hope that things might get better someday.

The kind of hope that Meena, on her TV show, and the priests at St. George’s tried to give people.

“You’re right,” Meena said with a sigh, turning around.

“We don’t have to stay all night,” Jon said as they rounded the corner. “If it’s bogus, we’ll leave.”

“Sure,” Meena said. “And who knows? It might even be fun.”

Even though, of course, she didn’t for one second actually believe this.

7:30
P.M
. EST, Thursday, April 15
910 Park Avenue, Apt. 11A
New York, New York

L
ucien was quite certain his cousin had lost his mind.

“A dinner party?” he echoed as he handed his overcoat to the maid, who took it to hang in the hall closet.

“It’s just…,” Emil explained quietly, so that his wife, busy with the caterer in the dining room, couldn’t overhear, “she seems to have this fantasy that you’re in need of a bride and that New York is the place where you’re going to find one. I can’t tell you how sorry I am. If you want to smite me, my lord, I perfectly understand.”

Lucien, instead of being furious—which he knew was the reaction Emil was expecting from him—felt only amusement. Although he’d made it clear he wanted no one to know of his arrival in New York, that, of course, was a moot point. The damage was done. Clearly, his enemies already knew where he was: an attempt had been made on his life. The information had simply traveled.

Much in the way Lucien expected that news of how he’d treated his own brother would get around. He didn’t regret this. He
counted
on it. If everyone heard Dimitri had picked a battle with him and Lucien had won, they’d be even less inclined to stage a second attack of the sort that had occurred the other night, which he’d clearly survived.

The prince of darkness was in town and indomitable as ever.

But a dinner party? With humans?

The idea made Lucien smile.

“Your wife,” he said to Emil, “is a bold woman.”

“That’s one way of putting it,” Emil said with a queasy smile. “But, honestly, my lord, if you wish to go back to the penthouse—”

“It’s all right, Emil,” Lucien said soothingly. Sometimes he thought Emil would self-implode, he was wound so tightly. “I’m assuming you have some decent wines to serve.”

Emil brightened considerably. “Of course, my lord,” he said. “Some lovely amarones I purchased just for you. Come, let me open them.”

Emil followed Lucien to his library, where he opened a fine Italian red. After a while, from the darkened, comfortable room, they could hear the first guests arriving and Mary Lou’s vivacious voice as she greeted them.

“I suppose,” Emil said reluctantly, “we should go out there.”

“It will be fine,” Lucien reassured his cousin. “I quite enjoy humans. I used to be one, remember? And I teach them.”

The two men emerged into the living room, where Mary Lou shrieked with delight.

“Well, there they are!” she screamed. She had on a long turquoise dress with quite a lot of gold jewelry and matching gold shoes. Her eye shadow was the same color as the dress. Her long blond hair had been perfectly curled and coifed. “Where have you two been hiding? Prince Lucien, I want you to meet our friends Linda and Tom Bradford, and this is Faith and Frank Herrera, and Carol Priestley and Becca Evans and Ashley Menendez from Emil’s office. Everyone, this is Prince Lucien Antonescu….”

The women were attractive, the men jovial. Lucien shook hands with all of them, then joined in the small talk about New York City and the shows and restaurants he was to be sure not to miss while he was there.

It was a beautiful spring evening, and the Antonescus had opened all the French doors to their large wraparound terrace. The sun had already sunk into the west, and the sky was a lovely shade of pink and lavender. Lucien strolled out onto the terrace, joined by several of the
women, all holding glasses of champagne and talking excitedly about an art opening they’d been to the week before.

Mary Lou had not chosen poorly. Her guests were beautiful, intelligent women.

When Lucien heard the doorbell to the apartment ring, he didn’t look to see who was arriving next because he didn’t want to seem rude. (And he could tell it wasn’t a member of the Dracul or the Palatine Guard there to assassinate him. They would never bother using the bell.)

But then he did look, because something told him he needed to.

And the sound of the women’s conversation around him died away. Not because they’d ceased speaking.

But because he was no longer listening.

It was the woman who’d been walking her dog the night of his attack, the one who’d nearly been killed herself. Meena Harper, her name had been.

He saw that Mary Lou was kissing her hello and taking a cheap bottle of wine from her tall, male companion.

Of course she was there at Emil’s. Of course she was. What had he been expecting? Deep down, he must have known. Otherwise he’d have left, walked out an hour ago. He wasn’t in New York to socialize with Emil’s wife’s human friends. He’d never wanted for female companionship when he needed it and was perfectly capable of finding it without Mary Lou’s help.

And now the last woman in the world with whom he should have been consorting—because he could feel for himself the magnetic pull she had on him—had walked into the room. And he was just standing there, staring at her, in her inexpensive black dress and boyishly short hair.

And it was clear from the single glance she threw him that the memory wipe had
not
worked. No, she recognized him instantly. The way her large brown eyes widened and her jaw dropped, it was obvious she remembered their encounter with perfect clarity.

What’s more, just the tiniest touch of her mind—which he threw across the room only to see if she was pleased to see him or repulsed;
it was pure vanity, and he supposed he deserved the shock he got in response to it—revealed something startling, something almost horrifying that Lucien couldn’t, for the life of him, understand:

Vampire.

It was on the very tip of her brain. It was all she was thinking about. Vampires.

Also, almost as upsettingly,
death
.

He recoiled from her mind immediately…but not before he caught his own name.

Lucien.

She knew. She
knew
.

How,
though? What had happened? What had gone wrong? Why hadn’t the memory wipe succeeded? How could she possibly have put it all together?

Who was she?
What
was she? What was going on with this girl and her electrically charged, hyperactive brain?

He needed to figure it out before the evening—and his entire mission to New York—went swiftly and disastrously awry.

“Meena Harper,” Mary Lou was crowing as he approached. He realized he’d left the women with whom he’d been chatting so amiably without a word. But the situation had turned dire. It had nothing, he told himself, to do with the darkness of Meena Harper’s eyes and hair, or the slenderness of her waist in that cheap black cotton dress. Nothing at all. This was a matter of life and death, for all of vampire kind. “I want you to meet Emil’s cousin Prince Lucien Antonescu.”

“Oh,” Meena said, smiling. Her two front teeth were slightly crooked. How had he missed this the other night? “I know. We’ve—”

“How charming to make your acquaintance,” Lucien said, interrupting. He took Meena’s hand even as her astonished expression was turning to one of confusion.
The prince!
her brain was crying.
It’s
him!

What in God’s name did this mean? Who
was
she?

“Right,” was all she said out loud, though, in a voice that was considerably less excited than the circus-like atmosphere of her mind. “Nice to meet you, too.”

Her hand was slim and warm. His, he knew, was anything but.

“And this is her brother, Jonathan Harper,” Mary Lou said, her tone one of barely disguised disapproval.

“Jon.” The dark-haired man standing beside Meena corrected Mary Lou, holding out his hand. “I’m Jon.”

“Of course,” Lucien said. He gave the brother’s hand a quick shake, careful not to squeeze it too hard. Still, he saw the younger man wince.

He turned his attention back to the girl, who hadn’t taken her gaze off him once since coming into the apartment. He tried reaching tentatively into her mind once again—

vampire death prince priest dragon

—then just as quickly withdrew.

No wonder he hadn’t been able to wipe away the memory of him: She was clearly disturbed. It was complete bedlam in there.

“Jonathan,” Mary Lou was saying to the brother, “I know you’re good with electronics. My friend Becca just got an iPhone and she’s having a dickens of a time downloading some of the, what do you call them? Oh, right, apps. Do you think you could help her?”

The brother looked at Becca, a large-bosomed young lady wearing a snug-fitting red sheath dress, and said, “Absolutely.”

The girl watched her brother go without comment.

Vampire,
Lucien couldn’t help overhearing her mind screaming.
Lucien, prince, slayer, dragon, death.

An image of a red tote bag with a jewel-encrusted dragon slithering down one side of it flashed into Lucien’s mind, an image he could make no sense of whatsoever.

Not that he’d understood any of it.

“So it turns out,” the girl spun around to say to him as soon as the brother was gone, “you’re the prince I’ve been hearing so much about?”

He smiled at her politely—he was perfectly well aware of the devastating effect his smile had on human females—then took her by the arm and pulled her gently to an unoccupied corner of the terrace, saying something about what a shame it would be for her to miss the view.

He thought perhaps he could reason with her, even psychotic as she was.

“I haven’t told my cousin’s wife about what happened outside the
church,” he explained to her quickly in a low voice when they were well away from everyone else. “I didn’t want to alarm her. No woman wants to hear about a colony of bats loose in the neighborhood….”

Of course he wasn’t going to mention the Dracul.

“I haven’t told Jon, either,” she said in a perfectly reasonable tone of voice, surprising him. “Well, at least…not the part about you.”

“That was probably wise,” he said. “We don’t want to worry our loved ones.”

She lowered her dusky gaze and appeared to be looking into the windows of the apartments below them instead of into his eyes. He had to admit he found her quite charming and had to warn himself to be careful. She was human and, judging by the cacophony in her mind, mad.

Which was a shame, since she was so lovely.

“Especially,” she said, “since no one got hurt.”

“Then we agree,” Lucien said, “we won’t mention it. To anyone.”

“I told my best friend about it,” she said, finally looking up at him. “She doesn’t believe me. She thinks I dreamed it.”

Maybe the situation, he thought, wasn’t as dire as he’d initially supposed.

“Who can blame her?” he said. “The whole thing is a little hard to believe, don’t you think? Bats on the Upper East Side. Absurd.”

“Not as hard to believe as the only explanation I’ve been able to come up with for why you weren’t hurt,” she said, leaning on the brick wall of the terrace. “Since I know I didn’t dream it.”

Vampires,
he knew she was going to say. He wasn’t certain how he was going to proceed when she did say it. It had been so long since a human had found them out…a human who wished them harm. Other than the Palatine, of course.

That this disturbingly pretty, but unfortunately insane, girl should have done so was a little upsetting.

Even more upsetting was what he was going to have to do to her, by his own decree, if it was true that she knew.

“And what’s that?” he asked, trying to sound casual.

“I think you’re an angel,” she said, smiling up at him sunnily. “And there was a miracle outside of St. George’s that night.”