Authors: Meg Cabot
Overbite (20 page)
L
ucien pulled away with a blistering curse, then looked down at the triangle of skin framed by the open collar of his white shirt. Emblazoned on his flesh, like a brand, was the image of the cross Alaric had given her, and which still hung at her throat.
Meena gasped . . . but not as loudly as Lucien did.
“I thought I told you to take that damned thing off,” he said furiously.
“It’s saved my life,” she murmured, still staring at his singed skin. It had saved her life several times, actually.
“I wasn’t going to hurt you,” he said. “You know I would never hurt you. Take it off.”
“I don’t want to,” she said. “And previous experience indicates otherwise.”
He threw her a stinging look. The burn on his chest was already starting to heal before her eyes.
The injury she’d just inflicted to his heart would not be as easily soothed.
“That’s not fair,” he said. “I want only what’s best for you . . . to protect you. No one else seems to. You saw what happened today when I wasn’t there—”
Her voice cracked in disbelief. “Lucien, I don’t think you heard me before. My brother’s in the hospital. I don’t know where my boss or Alaric is. And I got
fired.
All because of you. And while you’ve been making yourself a snug little . . .
whatever this is
down here . . . vampires have apparently been running around the streets of Manhattan eating their victims whole—blood, skin, bones, and all—”
“That’s impossible,” Lucien said shortly. “Vampires don’t eat flesh. Only zombies and werewolves do that.”
“No, Lucien,” she said, “it’s not impossible. Because I saw it for myself. Brianna, the vampire you killed? She took a chunk out of my brother, and that was after snacking on some poor tourist she’d caught and dragged behind a Dumpster.” She swung her legs from the couch. “And this new guy at the Palatine, Father Henrique Mauricio, the one who tried to catch you last night, told me about this species of vampires from South America . . . the Lamir. They’re supposed to be descended from some kind of fishing bat that eats the flesh of its prey.”
“The Lamir,” Lucien muttered darkly, staring at the small stream that ran through the middle of his living room. “I know of them.”
“You know of them?” Again Meena’s voice cracked. “Lucien, you’re supposed to be the prince of darkness, the son of Satan. Aren’t you supposed to be a little more in tune with this stuff?”
“I am aware,” Lucien said, in a cold voice, still staring down at the stream, “that in the past I haven’t always shown the full commitment to my position that I should have. And for that, I have been made to suffer.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Although she didn’t feel a hundred percent steady on them yet, Meena managed to climb to her feet and walk to Lucien’s side. Up close, she noticed, the Minetta Stream had a stale odor, like something that had been bottled up for too long. She took a hasty step away from the murky brown water that was about to touch the tip of one of her sneakers. “How have you suffered? How have you not shown the full commitment that you ought to have?”
He swung his dark gaze upon her. “How do you think, Meena?” he asked, his tone bitterly sardonic. “How do you think I have suffered? Open your eyes. You ask why I would
choose
to live here? I didn’t choose to . . . I
must,
if I hope to regain enough strength not to be destroyed by my enemies in my next battle with them. And how have I not shown my commitment? What kind of vampire bids his minions
not
to kill? What kind of dark prince does not know—or even care—the names of those who serve him . . . much less falls in love with a mortal who is convinced she was put on this earth to save it from the likes of him?”
“Lucien,” Meena said anxiously, taking another step away from him . . . and the murky brown stream. She wished she could have moved toward him, to comfort him in some way. The raw anger in his voice—and the foul smell from the water—seemed to be warning her to keep her distance, however.
“You didn’t know,” Lucien said. He stared down into the brackish water, which—it was not Meena’s imagination—had begun to rise. Just a fraction of an inch, but unmistakably. And it was definitely burbling with more vitality. “How could you? But that’s who the prince of darkness is, Meena. That was the pact my father made . . . to become, in exchange for his soul, Lucifer’s son on earth. And when the Palatine killed my father, that title was passed on to me. It’s true I’ve had my struggles accepting it—especially after I met you.”
He turned his head so that the full heat of his dark-eyed gaze fell upon her. Meena wanted to take another step backward, but she forced herself to stay where she was.
“But now I’ve begun to realize that I’ve had the solution to my problems all along,” he said. The anger left his tone, and he even managed a smile . . . although not a very convincing one. “And that was simply to accept my fate, not fight it. Isn’t that what they say on all of those television talk shows? Embrace what you are, and others will embrace you as well? Find what it is that you do well, then do it, and the rest will fall into place?”
Meena shook her head. She didn’t like this. Any of it. It smelled about as badly as the stream.
“Lucien,” she said. “No, that’s not what they mean. Not when it comes to being good at doing evil. Does this have anything to do with why you wanted your mother’s book so badly?”
Lucien glanced at her sharply. “What has my mother’s book to do with any of this?” he asked, sounding stunned.
“Because Father Henrique says possessing your mother’s book of hours will make you all-powerful.”
Meena wasn’t sure, considering everything Lucien had just been saying, that this was information she ought to be revealing to him.
On the other hand, her feelings about the book she’d seen in her dream were the opposite of Father Henrique’s. She was sure that there was nothing terrible in it, and that the reason she’d been having the dream was that someone—or something—wanted to make sure she showed the book to Lucien. She desperately wanted to see what Lucien himself thought . . . and she wanted to see the book itself so she could confirm her beliefs.
“He says it isn’t an ordinary devotional,” Meena went on, “and your getting control of it will mean the end of the world.”
Lucien looked surprised. “
Who
said this?”
“Father Henrique,” she said. “The priest who tried to capture you with the net, and then had me fired. It didn’t make any sense to me either. Because if something like that existed, the Vatican would never be stupid enough to let it out of Rome. Not if they knew what it was.”
Lucien’s dark eyebrows furrowed. “Of course not,” he said. But his gaze suddenly looked far away. “You’re perfectly correct.”
Meena began to feel as if she’d only made matters worse. What
was
it about that book that was making everyone—except her—so nervous?
“So,” she said, “it’s
not
true, then, about your mother’s book? He was just making it up to get me to tell him where you were?”
“Of course,” Lucien said, glancing back toward her with another one of those smiles that didn’t reach his eyes. “There’s nothing like that inside it. How could there be? When my father had that book made for my mother, he was in love. He was happy. He was looking forward to what he thought was going to be many years of domestic bliss. He had no idea of what awaited him . . . or my mother . . . or me.”
His gaze drifted away from her. Meena followed it and saw that he was looking at the stream again. She remembered having read that Minetta Lane was named for a stream that used to run through the center of Fifth Avenue, all the way down Spring Street. It had been covered up because of its tendency to flood local homes, sometimes even killing people. Once it had supposedly provided water for the fountain that had been turned off in the courtyard of St. Bernadette’s School, because of a terrible accident nearly a century earlier. Apparently this brown trickle was all that was left of the stream.
It seemed strange to her that Lucien was so drawn to it. Something about that bothered her.
Mannette
. She was certain she’d heard—or read—that word before.
“Maybe,” she said, trying to stick to the matter at hand, “we should just check the book. Because it’s possible that after your mother’s death, your father did something to it . . . altered it in some way, with an occult element. And that some members of the clergy—like Father Henrique—know about it, and others don’t. And that’s how it ended up in the show. The Catholic Church, I’m figuring out, is a bureaucracy like any other company.” And unjustly fired people, like any other company, she thought but didn’t add. “For every employee to be involved in every detail is sheer impossibility . . . So, where is it?”
Lucien appeared startled by the question. “Where is what?”
“Your mother’s book,” she said patiently. Although she wasn’t feeling very patient anymore. More like frightened. The constant trickling sound of the water was making her want to scream.
“That,” Lucien said, “is exactly what I’d like to know. And why I’d like to find your friend Alaric Wulf.”
“Alaric?” Meena shook her head. A knot had suddenly formed between her shoulder blades. “Why would Alaric know where your book is? Mary Lou stole it. I saw her. Everyone chased after her.”
“Yes,” Lucien said, speaking very carefully. “Everyone did chase after Mary Lou. But only one person caught up to her and snatched her bag away before she managed to escape. The bag containing my mother’s book of hours.”
Meena stared at Lucien in growing horror. She remembered Mary Lou’s bag. It had been shaped like a pagoda.
“You mean . . .” She could barely speak the words.
“Yes,” he said. “Your
friend . . .
Alaric.” He pronounced the word
friend
as if it were a curse.
“Alaric didn’t have the bag when we were arrested,” she said, thinking back to when she’d seen him by the vans.
“No,” Lucien said. “He did not. Emil found his wife’s bag later that night, when he returned to the museum thinking, by some miracle, it had been dropped in all the confusion. It had. It had been stuffed into a wastebasket in a men’s bathroom. The bag was empty.”
“But,” Meena said, “that would mean Alaric had to have had the book on him. Or that he hid it at the museum somewhere—”
“Precisely,” Lucien said. He looked so angry, his eyes were beginning to flare red. It might have been Meena’s imagination, but the trickling of the stream had also begun to sound significantly louder. “Emil has been at the museum all day, looking for it. He’s found nothing. And Mary Lou has been watching Palatine headquarters since last night. She says she saw them drag Alaric Wulf inside just after they brought you there. But so far, she’s yet to see him come out.”
Meena looked at him, her heart flying suddenly in her throat.
“Alaric’s still in there,” she said.
A
laric didn’t have to chew through the cuffs holding his wrists in place after all, which he’d feared he was going to have to do. He was able to undo the buckles with his teeth, although it took some time, and there was nothing at all dignified about the position in which he’d had to contort—and hold—his body to do so.
After dropping to the floor, he had to rest for a while in order to recover. He was bone-tired, dehydrated, hungry, and most of all, furious.
His employers were really slipping. What if they made it this easy for vampires or other demons to escape?
After he could feel his extremities again, he explored the boiler room. There wasn’t much to find, though he did drink liberally from the faucet of the rusty-piped sink he’d discovered in one corner. Then he pondered how next to proceed.
He had no phone, no access to a phone, and no shoes, shirt, or belt. He had no weapon and knew that the door to the boiler was not only locked but probably guarded.
There weren’t any windows or other form of egress from the room except a small locked door he found behind the industrial, freight car–sized boiler that said
NO UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY.
He really had no other choice but to kick this open. Otherwise, he could wait, batlike, in the rafters, for someone to come through the main door, drop upon them, and hope, using the element of surprise, to take them out, then escape.
He was fairly certain they’d be expecting a move like this from him, though, and would be sure only to enter his holding area in large, well-armed groups.
Really, his best option seemed to be the “No Unauthorized Entry” door. Even if it led only to an electrical room, perhaps he could find a way to call Johanna by doing some rewiring of the internal phone system.
He kept his mind carefully blank about what he was going to do after that. As someone who had spent many years of his life in a state of uncertainty about where his next meal was coming from, Alaric had learned that it was usually better not to plan too far ahead. He would take it one step at a time.
First, he needed to leave the boiler room.
He kicked out the small, locked door.
Behind it he found another room, considerably smaller than the boiler room, and much better furnished for human habitation with industrial-grade carpeting, fluorescent lighting, a cot, and even a desk with a computer on it. At the desk sat a man Alaric instantly recognized.
“Oh,” Abraham Holtzman said, seeming unsurprised to see him. “Hello. I couldn’t get that panel open. I wondered why I hadn’t heard from you. What on earth happened to your shirt?”
F
reewell was a disaster,” Holtzman explained. “David Delmonico’s wife was in the house, you know. I’ve never seen anything like it. And you know I thought I’d seen nearly every form of evil under the sun. But when she came leaping out at us from the laundry room . . .” He shuddered. “It was terrible.”
“Abraham.” Although Alaric was happy to see that his boss and friend was alive and well, he was starting to regret having found him. His head was still throbbing, and Holtzman seemed to have a need to process what he’d been through.
Alaric did not. He needed only to concentrate on how he was going to get them all out of the building.
“Brianna Delmonico went for Carolina’s throat,” Holtzman said. “And she would have gotten to it, if Patrick hadn’t been in the way. Patrick Chen, the tech, did you know him?” Holtzman asked. “Very reliable. He does excellent analysis work—used to, I mean.”
“What do you mean, used to?” Alaric asked.
“That woman just”—Holtzman shook his head, his expression haunted by the memory—“
attacked
him. Blood and brain matter everywhere. Then—Alaric, I swear to you this is true—she
ate
it. Not just the blood.
All of it.
”
Alaric stared at his boss, feeling sickened. He hadn’t known Patrick Chen.
But he felt as if nothing could surprise him anymore.
“Where is Carolina now?” Alaric asked. “And the others?”
“Oh,” Holtzman said, tilting his head, “she’s next door. Santiago and Morioka are down the hall. We’ve been put on administrative probation for ineffectively analyzing critical data—can you believe that? We can communicate via e-mail—” He nodded at the computer on the desk. “But they aren’t allowing us any access to outside communications, pending their investigation into what went wrong in Freewell. Morioka thinks he can break through their firewall, but I have my doubts.”
“Who’s
they
?” Alaric demanded, pressing his face to the door.
“If you’re listening for guards, you needn’t waste your time,” Holtzman assured him. “Trust me, they haven’t even bothered to post any. They say we aren’t prisoners. And yet the doors are locked. Spring-latch bolt. Key-code entry. Impossible to bypass.” He shook his head. “Believe me, I’ve tried. They’ve changed all the pass codes—”
“We’ve been ineffectively analyzing the data, all right,” Alaric assured him. He nodded at the computer on Holtzman’s desk. “Does that thing let you go on the Internet?”
Holtzman looked at his computer. “No. I just told you. It’s only for interoffice communication—”
“What about Meena Harper?” Alaric asked. “Can you contact her?”
“Alaric,” Holtzman said. “I just explained that they’ve set them so that we can only contact
one another,
so we can work together on our alleged defense. It’s one of our employee—what are you doing?”
Alaric had begun to open the desk drawers, each one of which he pulled out and tipped over onto the floor.
“Oh, Alaric,” Holtzman said with a sigh. “Now you’re just making a mess. There’s nothing you can use there to open the door. Even the hinges are on the other side.”
“I might notice something you overlooked,” Alaric said. “But go on. Did anyone
do
anything while Chen was being eaten?”
“Of
course,
” Holtzman said, horrified at the suggestion that they’d sat idle while a colleague was being consumed. “Carolina got out that blade of hers—the twelve-inch one. But before she could take a swing, the vampire just bolted. Straight through a plate-glass window. Of course, she grabbed a cashmere throw off the couch before she ran, so that offered her some protection from the daylight. And she didn’t have to go far to reach shade. The back of the house sits along the western edge of the Pine Barrens.”
Alaric raised his eyebrows. “The Barrens? Is that where you were when you called me?”
Holtzman nodded. “Yes. We gave chase, though we weren’t exactly equipped for traipsing through heavily forested coastal plains. As you know, there are over a hundred thousand acres of pinelands there, and the trees can become quite dense . . . and the mobile-phone reception is, quite frankly, terrible. Hardly any cell towers. We tried calling for backup multiple times, and could neither get through nor get an answer, until I reached you. That was after . . .” Holtzman’s face went a shade grayer beneath the fluorescent light. “After we found it, of course.”
Alaric looked up from the pile of paper clips and Post-it notes he’d made on the floor. “Found what?” he asked.
Though, judging from Holtzman’s expression, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
“Its nest,” Abraham said. “It was in the darkest part of the woods I’ve ever been. A sort of swampy area. I don’t know if anyone—anyone human—had ever been there. Certainly not lately, anyway . . . not while they were alive. Brianna Delmonico led us right to it, as if she’d been guided there by some kind of homing beacon. You know I’ve always believed that there are places of great evil, just as there are places of great goodness. Well, this was one of those, Alaric. It was right beside the water. You could smell the stench of death and decay. And there it was, standing there by its nest, its wings folded, gnawing on something.”
“There
what
was?” Alaric asked, feeling a chill. Although he already knew.
“The devil,” Holtzman said simply. “He was exactly the way all those people who live around the Barrens have reported seeing him . . . bipedal, winged, horse-headed. He seemed quite surprised to see us. And disappointed that we weren’t bearing gifts.”
“Gifts?”
“Yes,” Holtzman said. “It appeared that usually when he was visited, it was by someone carrying food. The nest was surrounded by bones. They were piled all around his nest.”
“Bones?”
Alaric repeated. He’d heard of some strange things in his years on the job. But never anything quite like this.
“Yes,” Holtzman said. “Human bones. I believe we found your missing tourists, Alaric.”
Alaric stared at him in shock. “
That’s
how the remains are being disposed of? By giving them to the New Jersey Devil?”
“It appears so,” Holtzman said. “Clever, if you think about it. One demon using another to cover up its crimes.”
Diabolical
was the word Alaric would have chosen, not
clever
. “So what did you do?” he asked.
Holtzman blinked in surprise at the question. “Well, we hit him with everything we had, of course,” he said. “Holy water, stakes, blades. Carolina kicked him a few times in the head. Morioka had a Glock loaded with silver bullets. He shot him in the heart. That seemed to do the trick. Squawked a few times, but that was all. Then he turned to ash. Quite satisfying, as kills go.”
“Nice,” Alaric said admiringly.
“I thought so myself,” Holtzman said. “Surprisingly, however, Father Henrique seemed less than pleased when he arrived—”
Alaric thought he must have spent so much time hanging by his arms that a blood clot had formed in them, traveled into his brain, and popped.
That’s what it felt like, anyway, when Holtzman said the words
Father Henrique
.
“What?”
he almost shouted.
“Yes,” Holtzman said. “I found that curious, too, at first. And I knew you would react that way when I told you about it, because, of course, I assured you that he’d been assigned here only as a pastor, not as part of our unit. That, however, apparently is not the case. He’s been given a position of unprecedented authority, from what I can gather—”
Alaric bit back a colorful stream of curse words so that Holtzman could finish.
“—with some new internal division I’ve never heard of,” Holtzman said. “He and his team seemed quite distressed about the cryptid. He even accused us of excessive force. Apparently they’d have preferred to take it alive. And the helicopter scared off the vampire, who of course was still—”
“They came by
helicopter
?” Alaric could hardly believe what he was hearing.
“Oh yes,” Holtzman said. “I was surprised by that, too. Quite a needless expense. It wasn’t as if we were in mortal peril. I could have understood it if we’d been under attack, but we were not. Then Father Henrique began ordering his team to begin immediate disposal of the remains, the way they did at the house in Freewell, to cover up what had happened to Patrick, poor man. There was no possible way to explain so much carnage to the local authorities. And there are frequent forest fires in the Barrens. Considering the dryness this past summer, it wouldn’t be at all surprising for one to start now, according to Father Henrique.”
Alaric had finally heard enough.
“Did he not take into consideration that if those bodies are the tourists who’ve gone missing over the past few weeks,” he asked, “DNA analysis needs to be done on them so they can be identified, and their families notified of their deaths? I understand that we need to keep the public ignorant of the truth of the existence of supernatural beings in order to avoid worldwide panic. But these were people’s
family
members, Abraham.”
Holtzman looked tired. He sank down onto the cot. It had been neatly made, with hospital corners. Abraham Holtzman had never married. He didn’t think it would be fair to ask a partner to worry at home about him while he was out fighting demons. He’d devoted his entire life to the job.
And now this. He appeared haggard and pale in the fluorescent lights.
“Do you think we didn’t mention that, Alaric?” he asked. “That’s when things began to get a little . . . a little heated. We were all on edge. We’d spent nearly twelve hours in the Barrens, and lost a team member, and in a particularly gruesome manner. True, we killed the New Jersey Devil. But then Henrique shows up in this helicopter, the vampire gets away, and he announces he’s torching the entire place. That’s when Carolina . . . well, you know how she is. She had some words with Father Henrique—in their native tongue, so I’m not entirely certain what was said. Carolina believes Father Henrique might be trying to hide something from us. I don’t think the words exchanged were pleasant.”
“I’m sure they weren’t,” Alaric muttered. He knew Carolina de Silva. She was devoted to her job at the Palatine, and a consummate professional. She’d have seen through Padre Caliente’s phoniness in a red-hot second. “What happened then?”
Holtzman looked uncomfortable. “Father Henrique said we could settle the matter here, during debriefing. But there was no debriefing. We were escorted from the helipad to these rooms, where I received an official reprimand for failing to supervise my staff properly, and we were all put on administrative probation by Dr. Fiske. I don’t mind telling you, Alaric, I’m becoming concerned that Carolina might actually be right.”
Alaric set his jaw, staring at the mess he’d made on the floor without really seeing it. He was relieved to have found Holtzman and the others, since he’d escaped in part to find them.
But their turning out to be locked up with him in the headquarters of their former employer was complicating things. Obviously, Alaric now had to think of a way to get all of them out. Otherwise, like the evidence left behind in Freewell and the Pine Barrens, they were going to be eliminated, neatly and efficiently. They knew too much to be allowed to live. There was only one reason he could think of that they hadn’t been gotten rid of already . . . and that was the other person he needed to rescue, Meena Harper.
If anything bad were to happen to any of them, Meena would know.
Alaric had seen the look on Mauricio’s face when the net had failed to hold Antonescu. It had been an expression of utter terror. Henrique Mauricio needed Lucien Antonescu dead—or locked up tight.
The key to finding Lucien, though, was Meena Harper. Mauricio might try to intimidate Meena, but he wouldn’t dare do anything to risk really upsetting her . . . not yet. She was the queen bee, and Antonescu the honey. Mauricio might stir up the hive, but he wasn’t ready to smash it.
Alaric, on the other hand, didn’t have such reservations.
“You can communicate with Carolina and the others?” he asked his boss. Or former boss, he supposed.
“Yes, of course,” Holtzman replied. “I already told you that.”
Alaric smiled. “Then I want you to send them a message.”
Holtzman looked surprised. But he got up and went to his keyboard.
“Fine,” he said, beginning to type. “What’s the message?”
“Tell them,” Alaric said, “heads up.”
