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Authors: Meg Cabot

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BOOK: Overbite
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Chapter Two

M
eena’s reaction was purely instinctual. She sent the tips of his car keys, which she still had clutched in her free hand, plunging into his face.

But—with reflexes surprisingly sharp for someone so inebriated—he caught her hand in his, well before the keys could come anywhere near his skin.

Then he calmly lifted her arm up over her head, until he was pressing both her wrists against the headrest of the seat with one hand.

A second later, he’d pulled a lever so that her seat collapsed backward, and she was lying almost fully supine in his car.

The next thing she knew, her ex-boyfriend was on top of her.

She stared up at him with mingled feelings of fear, outrage, humiliation, and surprise. How had this happened? And how could she have been so stupid? How could she not have seen that all those dreams about David had been a
warning,
not a prophecy? His brain tumor hadn’t come back.

He’d been turned into a vampire.

Only how? And by whom? The Palatine, the organization by which Meena was currently employed, had spent the past six months hunting down and destroying every demonic life-form in the tristate area that it could find, with a systematic brutality that had caused even Meena, who had every reason in the world to detest them, to feel a little bit sorry for the poor things. It wasn’t their fault, after all, they’d been infected.

This could
not
be happening.

Especially to her. She’d been trained to defend herself against exactly this kind of thing.

“David.” She grunted as she tried to wrestle her hands free from his grip. If she could just grab her purse, she’d pull out the sharpened stake she always carried with her, and plunge it into his heart.

Then she remembered she hadn’t bothered to bring a purse with her. She’d dashed out of her apartment with nothing more than her cell phone and keys tucked inside the pocket of the light wool cardigan she’d thrown on as she was leaving. She hadn’t expected their meeting to take that long. She was, after all, only going to tell him that he was dying.

He wasn’t, though. He was already dead.

Which was why she couldn’t pull her hands from his grip. Because he had inhuman strength.

“Who did this to you?” she demanded. “How did this happen? And what do you want?”

“What do you
think
I want?” he said, slurring his words. His dead eyes still weren’t even open all the way. He outweighed her significantly. His torso was practically dead weight on top of her. And he was so, so strong. And his breath still reeked.

“Do you know who I work for now?” she asked from between gritted teeth. “You had better let go, or you have no idea of the world of trouble that you’re going to be in.”

“No,” he said simply, and dipped his face back toward her neck.

Her dress was full-skirted and a little on the short side. She should easily have been able to lift a knee to get him where it mattered.

But it was difficult with the dashboard in the way, not to mention the weight of David’s body pressing down on her. It was also hard to breathe, and he was holding her wrists so tightly, cutting off the circulation to her hands.

Meena’s panic grew. Not just because of the fangs she hadn’t yet felt pierce her skin, but because she realized the hard thing pressing against her through his pants wasn’t just a flask. Not anymore.

When David started fumbling with his zipper with his free hand, Meena’s desire to escape crowded out all rational thought.

Filling her lungs with the foul-smelling, fetid air, she let out an earsplitting shriek that caused David, whose ear was beside her mouth, to lift his lips from her neck and curse.

That was when the door to the driver’s side of David’s Volvo was not so much flung open as torn off its hinges.

And a second later, David disappeared entirely.

He seemed simply to vanish. One minute he was there on top of her.

And the next, he was gone.

Disoriented from shock, Meena lay there, panting as she attempted to catch her breath and get the blood circulating back in her hands, then trying to figure out what had just happened. Had she dreamed it? The part where she’d been trying to do the right thing, and rescue David Delmonico—who quite clearly had never deserved rescuing in the first place—and he’d turned out to be a vampire?

But no. Because when she turned her head, she saw that the door to the driver’s side of David’s car was gone.

It was quiet on the deserted street, except for the usual sounds of the city . . . somewhere off in the distance, a siren wailed. She could hear traffic on the avenue. Not so far away, music played from someone’s open window.

Then, from out of nowhere, a body slammed onto the hood of David’s car, causing the entire vehicle to bounce like a children’s amusement-park ride. The windshield caved in, splintering.

Meena screamed again, her voice echoing up and down the deserted street.

David lay there completely still—not unlike one dead.

She didn’t realize what had happened to David—that he hadn’t been seized by flying monkeys, then dropped lifeless to the hood of his own car, where he now lay sprawled, unseeing and unmoving—until the man who’d done all this tapped politely on the still-closed window of her own car door.

She screamed again before she recognized who was looking at her through the glass.

“Meena?” His dark eyes were filled with concern. “Are you all right?”

It was Lucien Antonescu.

Chapter Three

I
’m fine,” she said automatically.

She unlocked and opened the door, then climbed—a little shakily, but with all the dignity she could muster—from the car. Lucien held the door open for her, because he was the kind of man who always remembered to hold the door open for women.

He was also the kind of man who had, before Meena’s eyes, once destroyed a church and nearly killed her, along with a number of her friends. So, there was that to be considered.

“You’re sure you’re all right?” he asked her again.

Truthfully, she felt as if she were going to pass out, but she lied and repeated, “I’m fine.” It wasn’t quite a lie. Now that she was out of the car, the night air—delightfully fresh smelling after the inside of David’s Volvo, despite the garbage piled in the cans along the street nearby—had revived her a little.

“Is he . . . ?” She looked over at David, who was still sprawled across his own car’s hood with his head tilted in a most unnatural position. She looked quickly away. “Is he . . . ?”

Lucien was frowning. “Technically, he was dead before I arrived. But no, he’s merely recovering from a broken neck at the moment. Here. You’re bleeding.”

He handed her a handkerchief. Meena, startled, looked down at herself. There were drops of blood splashed across the front of her dress.

“Oh my God,” she said. “Where . . . ?”

Lucien gestured in the general vicinity of his throat.

“He
bit
me?” Too late, she remembered how David had pressed his lips to her neck, and how relieved she’d been that she hadn’t had to taste his rank-smelling breath anymore. “But I didn’t feel anything—”

She broke off. She hadn’t felt anything the other times she’d been bitten in the past either.

By the man standing beside her.

“No. You aren’t meant to feel it.” It was apparent Lucien was remembering those times, as well. But he looked discreetly away from her and toward David. “Who is he? A friend of yours?”

He said the word
friend
with distaste, though he was tactfully trying not to show it.

“He’s just someone I used to go out with,” she said. She pressed the handkerchief to her throat, staring at Lucien, thinking the exact same thing could be said about him.

He, however, appeared to be in considerably better shape than David was at the moment. Intimidatingly tall and broad-shouldered, his dark hair thick and lustrous, Lucien appeared as handsome and put together in his dark Brioni suit and crisp white shirt as always. It was as if no time at all had passed since she’d last seen him.

But it had actually been six months.

Six months during which the people with whom she worked—Alaric Wulf in particular—had combed every inch of the city as well as its outer boroughs, looking for him, without success.

And yet here he was, standing right in front of her as if he’d never left.

“I’ve been having bad dreams about him,” Meena went on slowly. She still felt a little bit dazed. “I wanted to let him know he was in danger . . .”

“Of course you did,” Lucien said. The corners of his mouth curled up a little, as if he found something amusing. “I assume he’s the one who chose the location for your rendezvous?”

“No. I did. But . . .” She stood there, her wrists still throbbing from where David had gripped them with such fierce violence. “How could this have happened?”

“Apparently he’s been keeping different company since you knew him,” Lucien said. He’d stopped smiling. “Very few people can resist immortality when offered, you know. Vampirism is an extremely tempting and exciting lifestyle choice.”

Meena looked at the ground. She was one of the “very few people” who’d resisted the lifestyle “choice” of vampirism when offered. It was why she and Lucien were no longer together.

Well, one of the reasons.

“I just can’t believe he’d be one of those people,” she said. “He had a wife. And a
baby.

“Well, he hasn’t got anything now,” Lucien said. “Except a ravenous appetite for blood. Oh, and alcohol, apparently. He smells like a distillery.”

“I took his keys away,” Meena said, holding them up. “I thought I’d be protecting him from drinking and driving. I didn’t think it was safe for him to be out on the roads in his condition.”

“It
isn’t
safe for him to be out on the roads in his condition,” Lucien agreed. “But not because of his driving.”

Meena felt depressed, and not just because of David. This wasn’t how she’d pictured running into Lucien again.

And she
had
pictured running into him again, more times than she’d like to admit.

But she knew this was wrong, and not just because he was the most wanted man in the entire demon-fighting world—black-and-white photos of him papered nearly every wall of Palatine headquarters. She had to pass them every day in the hallways at work—but because of the
other
dreams she’d been having. The ones that she’d been having ever since she and Lucien had parted—long before the ones she’d started having lately about David.

These were the dreams that had driven her to make an unorthodox request from a highly restricted area—to the public, anyway—belonging to her employer.

Meena wasn’t even a hundred percent certain what she wanted was there. But if it was, it could hold the key to everything.

The answer, so far, had been a resounding No Response.

“How could I have not noticed right away that he was
already
dead?” she asked bleakly, staring at David’s body. If this was how things were going to go from now on, she might as well just quit. It was possible she’d be better off working back in scriptwriting.

Then again, no one she knew in that field could find jobs anymore, thanks to the success of reality shows, like the one about the housewives of New York City.

“I wouldn’t be too hard on yourself,” Lucien said, smiling again. “He’s very freshly turned, no more than a day or two at the most. And not handling it well, judging by the alcohol intake. And of course, had he gone home, he’d have killed the baby and its mother. So you did save two lives tonight.”


You
saved two lives tonight,” she said, glancing at him. This was definitely something she was going to tell Alaric Wulf, who often swore that Lucien Antonescu was evil incarnate. But why would someone evil be interested in
saving
lives? And, of course, she couldn’t tell Alaric, because he’d just hunt Lucien down and decapitate him. “Three, if you include mine.”

“I don’t think so,” Lucien said coolly. “He didn’t want to kill you.” He waved a hand, indicating her throat. “Would you mind? I’m finding that a bit . . . distracting.”

“Oh.” Flushing, she pressed his handkerchief against the wound in her neck. “Sorry.”

This, she thought grimly, didn’t exactly help bolster her theory that Lucien wasn’t like other vampires. He obviously wasn’t immune to the sight of blood.

Not even her blood.

“Might I ask,” Lucien was saying as he abruptly crossed the street toward some old furniture piled by the garbage cans near a front stoop, “why you agreed to meet with him in his vehicle? I would have thought you’d know by now to be more cautious than that.”

Meena tied the handkerchief around her neck. She watched as he tipped over an abandoned armchair and gave a vicious kick to one of its legs.

“Especially”—he took the jagged piece of chair and handed it to her, then approached David, who was starting to come around, despite his hideously contorted neck—“considering your new place of employment. Or haven’t they trained you better?”

She stuck out her chin indignantly.

“Certainly,” she said. “They have. But this was different. I
know
him.”


Knew
him,” Lucien corrected her.

“I meant that we’re old friends,” Meena said. “We used to live together. Even so, I was careful. It wasn’t like I told him where I live, or anything.”

He looked wry. “No. You do a good job of keeping that information private.”

She glanced at him sharply. What did he mean by that? Had he been looking for her, the same way the Palatine had been looking for him?

Well, he’d obviously found her. Probably some time ago, too. She wondered why he’d waited until someone was attacking her before attempting to speak to her.

“I guess it just never occurred to me,” she said dejectedly as David began to rub his neck and moan, “that someone I once loved might actually want to kill me.”

Although Lucien had once tried to do precisely the same thing . . . for slightly different reasons.

“But he didn’t want to kill you, did he?” Lucien asked. “I thought you understood that. What was it you once told me about the daughter of the Trojan king?”

Meena’s eyes suddenly filled with tears . . . not at the reproach, but at the fact that he remembered. It had been a conversation during a happier time. She was fairly certain now that she’d never know such happiness again. Not unless she was able somehow to prove to everyone—including Lucien himself—that he was not the monster he seemed.

“That she was given the gift of prophecy,” she said, keeping her gaze on the ground in the hope that Lucien wouldn’t notice her brimming eyelids. “And because she did not return a god’s love, that gift was turned by that god into a curse, so that her prophecies, though true, would never be believed.”

“Well,” Lucien said, “your prophecies
are
believed. By
them
.” His tone was bitter as he thrust his chin in David’s direction. “As you know, any demon who drinks your blood temporarily possesses your gift of prophecy. That’s an irresistible temptation to most of them. And they’re apparently not above resorting to turning your friends and family members into one of themselves in order to lure you out into the open to get it. I once offered you protection from this, but you turned it down.”

Meena lifted a wrist to swipe at her moist eyes.

“You’re right,” she said, looking at David as he twisted on the hood of the car, trying to get his head back into a normal position. “I did turn down your offer of protection, because it came with a price that was too high for me. And I should never have agreed to meet him. I should never have come out of my apartment, except to go to work. Why should I expect to have a normal life, considering what I am?”

Lucien looked at her, his expression remorseful.

“Meena,” he said, apparently regretting his harsh words. “I didn’t mean—”

“No.” She cut him off with a shrug. “It’s true. Except for one thing.” There were no tears in her eyes as she lifted her gaze to look back at him. “You’re not a god, Lucien.”

“No.” His mouth twisted painfully. “I know I’m not. If I were, I’d—”

But he didn’t have a chance to finish, because it was at this point that David, his head pushed back into something like its normal position, sat up and looked at them. “Who are you?” he demanded of Lucien.

The sky, which had been cloudless, grew dark. The moon disappeared behind a bank of storm clouds. The music playing in the nearby window had long since gone dead. A cool wind stirred, whipping up dead leaves and abandoned plastic bags, and ruffling Meena’s hair and the hem of her skirt.

“You should know me.” Lucien’s voice was so deep and commanding, it seemed to reverberate through her chest. It also held an undercurrent of ice that caused goose bumps to rise on the back of her arms. “I am the unholy one, ruler of all demon life on the mortal side of hell, evil in human form. I am, in fact, the dark prince, son of Vlad the Impaler, also known as Dracula.”

As he said the name
Dracula,
another wind swept the street, this time from a different direction, sending all the leaves and plastic bags that had been stirred up before whipping the other way. Meena shivered and held her cardigan closed with one hand. David seemed to notice her for the first time since waking up.

“Oh,” he said, in a slightly less truculent voice. He began to lean away from Lucien and toward her. “I remember now. I think someone did mention you. But they said you were dead—”

“As you can see,” Lucien said, reaching out to grab the front of David’s shirt and pull him closer, “they were misinformed. Now who is
they
?”

David’s gaze darted back toward Meena. “Hey,” he said to her. “Aren’t you going to help me out here?”

She used the piece of wood Lucien had handed her to point at the handkerchief wrapped around her neck.

“Excuse me,” she said. “Remember this? You did this. Among other things I could mention but won’t.”

David, to her surprise, burst into tears.

“I’m sorry,” he cried. “I didn’t want to. I swear I didn’t. I couldn’t stop myself. I don’t know what’s come over me lately. I think I’m sick or something. Meena, could you feel my head? I think I’m running a fever.”

Meena raised her eyebrows. “Uh,” she said. “I’m pretty sure it’s not a fever.”

Lucien wasn’t tolerating any of David’s theatrics. He lifted the smaller man by his shirtfront from the hood of his car.

“Tell me who turned you,” he said, “and who sent you to this girl, or this time, I’ll rip your head off.”

“I don’t know,” David insisted with a sob. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please put me down. I’m sorry for what I did to Meena. I told you I couldn’t help it—”

Lucien squeezed David’s throat, choking off the rest of his words. Though of course vampires couldn’t breathe, the noises David began to make were unbearable to Meena. He was obviously suffering terribly.

“Lucien,” she said, her heart aching. “Stop it. You’re hurting him. He said he doesn’t know anything.”

“He’s lying,” Lucien said emotionlessly. He didn’t even glance in her direction. “He’s a vicious, evil fiend.”

“There are people I know who’d say the same thing about you,” she said. “How am I going to convince them they’re mistaken, and to give you a second chance, when you won’t do the slightest thing to prove them wrong?”

Lucien hurled a startled glance at her over his shoulder. “What are you talking about?”

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