Insatiable (46 page)

He stared down at her, uncomprehending. “Yes? What about them?”

“I think they’re what I’m supposed to be helping protect people from,” she said. She hoped the tears that had begun to stream down her face again didn’t make him think she was regretting what she was saying.

Because she wasn’t. Not at all.

“I don’t know for certain,” she went on. “But I do know that whenever I
don’t
help people…well, bad things happen. So…that’s what I’m going to go do.”

He shook his head. Now she was
sure
that there were flickers of flame in those dark eyes, twin embers, burning bright. Outside the apartment building, the rain, which had been falling gently before, suddenly began to pour. Thunder rumbled off in the not-so-far distance.

“Meena,” he said. The embers were glowing a deep, steady red, exactly the way the dragon’s eyes had. “I don’t understand. What are you saying?”

“I’m saying,” she said, unable to hold back a sob, “that I’m going to go work for the Palatine.”

He stared down at her for a second or two.

Then he threw back his head and laughed.

When he looked at her again, the embers had turned to flames, flaring high.

“Oh, Meena,” he said. “You’re joking.”

“I’m not joking,” she said. She reached up and wiped her tears with her uninjured wrist. “The Palatine offered me a job. And I’ve decided that I’m taking it.”

His eyes were entirely red now. The brown was gone. The dragon was taking over.

“It’s not like I would ever do anything to help them go after you, Lucien.” She rushed to explain. “You know that. I’ll always try to do everything I can to help you. Because I love you, too. I always will. But I just can’t be with you. Not if it means my friends are going to get hurt. And this job…it means I can finally do what I think I’ve always been meant to do.”

“You don’t
need
a job,” he said with sudden savagery. He reached out and grabbed her by the waist, pulling her hard against him. Outside, lightning flared as thunder caused the building to shudder. The storm was directly overhead. “I told you that I’d take care of you.”

Meena lifted her chin to look him in the eye. Those fierce dragon eyes.

“But not without killing me,” she said quietly.

He looked down at her as the rain and wind outside lashed the balcony, his volatile gaze smoldering in its intensity. She thought it might consume her in its wrath and wipe her off the face of the planet entirely, the way his dragon fire had wiped out the Dracul that night.

And no one would know. No one would ever know what had become of Meena Harper.

He could do it. There was nothing to stop him.

Except her courage.

“You know,” she said, swallowing hard, “when you told me the story of St. George and the dragon that night we were in the museum, Lucien, there was one thing you left out.”

“What is that?”

He was keeping himself under control with an effort. She could feel his arms shaking almost as badly as her knees were as he tried valiantly not to drop his lips to her neck and do what he so badly wanted to.

“You never told me that you were the dragon,” she whispered. Thunder—or maybe it was his voice—rocked the walls of the apartment, so hard that Meena would have clapped her hands over her ears if she hadn’t already thrown them defensively over her face, certain the next thing she was going to see were his fangs coming at her throat.

“I’m the prince of darkness.” His voice was like a sonic boom in her ears. “What did you think that meant, Meena? Did you think that meant that…I…was…a…
saint
?”

And, just as she thought that it was going to be all over for her…

…he let her go.

She lowered her arms and stood there, shaking, just staring at him.

She had never seen such sadness in anyone’s eyes.

“No, Meena,” he said in his normal voice. “
You’re
the saint.”

What did this mean? Why had he let go of her?

“Go,” he said curtly, nodding toward the bedroom door.

She jumped.

“If you’re going to go,” he said, his voice rising, “go
now
. Before I change my mind. I think you know what will happen then.”

She turned and ran from the apartment, not stopping to lock the door behind her. She ignored the elevator, not willing to wait for it, and ran down all eleven flights of stairs, unable to believe he wasn’t coming after her—in bat or dragon or even man form.

She didn’t slow down. Like he’d said, he could still change his mind.

She tore through the lobby, not stopping to say good-bye to Pradip. She ran out into the rain, which immediately soaked her, flagging down the first available taxi that she saw. She fell into the backseat, gasping out the address to St. Clare’s to the driver.

She didn’t look back.

She didn’t dare.

10:00
P.M
., Friday, April 23
Shrine of St. Clare
154 Sullivan Street
New York, New York

I
t wasn’t until they were more than halfway there that Meena stopped shaking and began to believe that she’d done it.

She’d told him no.

And she was still alive.

She’d survived.

She didn’t know what was going to happen next.

But she did know that the horrible empty feeling in her chest was gone. She could think about him and still breathe. She was safe.

And what’s more, she had a plan. More than a plan…she had a
purpose,
for the first time in her life.

Maybe everything was going to be all right, just like Alaric had said. Maybe she didn’t need to sleep in a windowless room anymore.

By the time the taxi pulled up in front of the rectory, it had stopped raining. The sudden storm had disappeared. She paid the driver and got out of the car, running up the steps to the front door. For once, she didn’t look all around her, frightened that
he
might be waiting for her, watching, from the shadows.

Everything was dripping slightly, but Meena didn’t mind. It was as if the world had been baptized, washed new, just for her. It seemed like
a lovely spring evening all of a sudden. Maybe she’d even corral Jon and Yalena into going out for a drink with her. Why not?

There was nothing to be afraid of anymore.

She pressed the buzzer.

Jon was the one who let her in, his clothes covered in drywall dust from all the work he’d been doing over at Adam and Leisha’s apartment.

“Hey, what took you so long?” he asked. “I thought you were just going to go see Leisha. Visiting hours ended a long time ago.”

Jack Bauer—sensing, as he always did, that Meena was home—leapt off the lap of Yalena, who’d been sitting on the couch in the living room watching TV, and raced toward her, barking happily.

“How’s my little man?” Meena knelt down to pet him, letting him lick her face. “Who’s been a good boy? Who saved the world today?”

“Well, he didn’t,” Jon said bluntly. “He took a dump in Sister Gertrude’s roses. She was not happy. I told her it was good fertilizer, but she was still none too pleased. Seriously, though. Where were you?”

“Did you take a dump in Sister Gertrude’s roses?” Meena asked her dog, picking him up and letting him lick her face some more. She ignored her brother’s question about where she’d been. “Who’s the worst boy? Who’s the worst boy in the whole world?”

Yalena, watching them over the back of the couch, giggled. Meena had been noticing lately that Yalena watched her brother, Jon. A
lot
. Meena wasn’t sure how aware Jon was of this, though.

But she did note that tonight Jon had rolled his thrift-shop T-shirt’s sleeves up very high. He usually did this, she’d learned from long experience, in order to show off his “guns,” of which he was inordinately proud, whenever there was an attractive female around he wanted to impress.

And he didn’t do it for just any girl.

It had to be Yalena he was trying to impress with his biceps. Who else could it have been around St. Clare’s? Every other female was a novice or nun.

Meena was pleased he’d transferred his affections from Taylor Mackenzie to someone a bit more attainable.

“Fine, don’t tell me where you’ve been,” Jon was saying to Meena in
a voice about an octave deeper than the one he usually used. “Abraham is looking for you. He says there’s been some kind of, I don’t know, disturbance in Vienna. Whatever that means. And he needs to talk to you about it.” He looked at her strangely as she put Jack Bauer down, then removed her jacket and hung it on the coatrack. “Why would he need to talk to
you
about that?”

“Because,” Meena said. She’d been wondering how she was going to explain this to Jon. And when. Now seemed like as good a time as any. “I’m going to start working for the Palatine.”

Jon, who was drinking a soda, immediately spat out the mouthful that he’d been about to swallow. This caused Yalena, still watching them both, to giggle some more.

“Wait,” he said. “
What?
What about
Insatiable
?”

“Well,” Meena said with a shrug. “I’m going to quit. I think it’s time I moved on. I need to start helping to make the world a safer place.”

“But you already do that,” Jon said. “You tell people all the time how they’re going to die. Not that anyone ever believes you. What makes you think this is going to be any different?”

“Uh,” Meena said, starting up the stairs with Jack Bauer at her heels, “because they’re paying me? So they might actually be inclined to listen.”

“Is not true no one believes her,” Yalena said from the couch. “I believe her.”

Jon gave Yalena a sour look. “Don’t encourage her,” he said. “Do you have any idea what she’s put me through my whole life, practically? You know they called her You’re Gonna Die Girl in high school? Try being siblings with
that
.”

Yalena just giggled yet again at that remark.

Laughing, Meena hurried the rest of the way up the stairs. She wanted to put a sweater on before going to see what Abraham needed to speak to her about. It was a little drafty in the rectory.

She opened the door to her windowless little room—she’d speak to Sister Gertrude tomorrow about moving to a new room, one
with
windows—and headed straight to the small, neatly folded stack of thrift-shop clothes on the chair by her bed.

She took the sweater off the top of the pile and was heading back out the door when she caught sight of something out of the corner of her eye. Something on the bed. It hadn’t been there when she’d left for the hospital earlier. She came back into the room to see what it was, Jack Bauer trotting after her.

A letter.

There was a letter sitting tucked beneath the edge of her pillow on the bed.

Meena sat down on the bed and reached for the letter, Jack Bauer bounding up onto the mattress to lay down beside her.

Meena’s fingers froze, however, when she saw the envelope’s color and size.

Silver. The exact same color as the note that had been in the box Lucien had sent her. The box that had contained the tote bag with the ruby dragon slinking down the side.

The tote bag that was now, along with her laptop, in ashes up at St. George’s.

Her blood seeming to freeze inside her veins, Meena looked quickly around the tiny bedroom with its bare white walls—bare except for the crucifix hanging over her bed.

No. It wasn’t possible. How had he even gotten in there? It was a windowless room. The front door to the rectory—definitely a sacred threshold, the kind over which he’d assured her vampires couldn’t cross unless invited—was always, always locked. And they’d repaired all the windows damaged from last week’s attack….

Maybe, she told herself, even as her heart began to drum so loudly in her ears that its beat was all she could hear, he’d had the note messengered, and someone—Yalena, maybe—had dropped it off in her room….

But as she ripped the envelope open with shaking fingers and read his elegant, old-fashioned script, she saw that this was not what had happened. Not at all.

Meena, my darling,
he’d written.

Stunned, Meena stared down at the ivory notecard, on which the ink was still not quite dry. She knew this because she’d already managed to smear it in one tiny place with her thumb.

How had he done it? How had he managed to deliver it to her so quickly, before, she was certain, she herself had even stepped out of her cab?

Meena didn’t know.

And she wasn’t sure she
wanted
to know. All she knew for certain was that it really had been his gaze she’d felt on her every night while she’d been doing the dishes in the rectory kitchen. Those really had been his eyes, watching her from the darkness.

Had he just never approached her before now because he’d suspected she wasn’t ready to see him again after what had happened, and had wanted her to have at least this one place to call her own, in which to feel safe?

Or had he just been waiting for her to be ready, finally, to stop being frightened and to come to him?

Of course. Of course that was what had happened.

Only instead of agreeing to become his wife when she’d finally come to him, the way he’d expected her to, she’d done the unthinkable:

She’d crossed sides and joined the enemy.

And now he wanted her to know that wherever she went, whatever she did for the rest of her life, she couldn’t escape. Not that easily.

He would always be there in the darkness. Watching. Waiting.

To protect her, was how he would probably think of it.

And Meena didn’t have the slightest doubt in her mind that he
would
protect her. He’d protect her to within an inch of her life.

She looked down at the graceful, slightly antiquated handwriting.

A truce, he was calling it.

She smiled.

Then she slid the note back beneath her pillow, called to her dog, and headed downstairs to join Abraham and the others.

She wasn’t afraid. Not anymore.

All she could think was that Lucien had been wrong in his first note.

She hadn’t slain the dragon. Not at all.

She hoped no one ever would.