Insatiable

Chapter Thirteen

10:00 P.M. EST, Tuesday, April 13

910 Park Avenue, Apt. 11A

New York, New York

What is this?” Emil walked into the spacious master bedroom he shared with his vivacious and slender wife, holding a printout of the e-mail he’d found on his desktop.

“Oh, hon,” Mary Lou said as she breezed by on her way to her dressing table. “That’s just a little Evite I sent out to all my girlfriends for the dinner party I’m having in Prince Lucien’s honor on Thursday.”

Emil felt a small but persistent sensation in the center of his belly that was not unlike being poked over and over by someone with very long nails…a sensation with which, as it happened, Emil was not unfamiliar.

“You sent out an e-mail about the prince?” he said. “You do realize that if this message falls into the wrong hands, it could jeopardize everything?”

“Oh, don’t be such a ninny,” Mary Lou said. “I only sent it to my very best friends. Whose hands is it going to fall into?”

Emil fought for inner patience.

“The Dracul, for one?” he said drily when he could speak again. “The Palatine Guard, for another? Not to mention the humans? All the people who’d like to see us, not to mention the prince, destroyed?”

“Oh, pooh,” Mary Lou said. She sat down in front of the large mirror behind her dressing table and began removing her makeup. “You’re being melodramatic. No one wants to destroy us anymore. The prince has the Dracul under control. The Palatine Guard don’t know where we are, and the humans love us! Look at how popular we are in books and on the TV. Why, if everyone found out, I’m sure I’d be invited onto Oprah as a special guest.”

“Mary Lou!” Emil stared at her reflection in astonishment. “Someone is killing women! All over town! No one is going to be inviting you onto Oprah while women are being killed by a member of our brethren. And the prince isn’t going to want a dinner party in his honor. He’s going to prefer to keep a low profile while he’s in town, trying to find that killer.”

“I have so many beautiful, intelligent female friends,” Mary Lou said, gazing thoughtfully at herself. “Why shouldn’t I show them off? The prince has been alone too long.”

“Lucien’s not here,” Emil said, feeling as if he were drowning, “to find a wife. He’s here on business. The murders-”

“And if he should happen to meet a nice girl,” Mary Lou said, interrupting, “while he’s here, would that be so terrible? Apparently he hasn’t had any luck in his own country. But you know we have the most amazing women in the world right here in the good old U.S. of A-”

“Mary Lou.” Emil stared uncomfortably at his wife’s bare shoulders. “You understand that you’re putting me in a terribly awkward position. Lucien asked that I not mention his arrival to anyone, and here you are sending out e-mails to everyone on your cc list, an e-mail that could be traced back-”

“Not everyone,” Mary Lou said indignantly. “Just my best single girlfriends, and a few of the married ones so as not to make it look obvious he’s being set up. None of them is employed by the Vatican, for goodness sake, or members of the Dracul. I just asked Linda and Tom, and Faith and Frank, and Carol from your office, and Becca and Ashley, and Meena from across the hall.”

“Meena?” Emil was confused. Many things about his wife confused him. He was certain that even if they spent an eternity together-and it already felt like they had-he’d never fully understand her. “The prince…and Meena Harper? But she’s-”

“Why not?” Mary Lou gave her naturally curly-and still naturally blond-hair a flip. “At first glance she may not seem like his type, but I like her. She’s got that cute little figure, and a pixie cut suits her. Most women can’t pull it off, you know, but she works it. And if the prince likes her, just think how grateful he’ll be to us. Besides,” she added with a shrug, “all she does is work to keep her and that no-good brother of hers financially afloat. I think she needs a break.”

“She likes her job,” Emil said, thinking of all the times he’d seen his neighbor in her pajamas barefoot in their floor’s trash room, disgruntledly stuffing heavily crossed-out script pages down the chute to the incinerator.

Well, maybe she didn’t always like her job.

“Oh, sure,” Mary Lou said. “The soap opera thing. But do you think she’d work if she didn’t have to?”

Emil thought about this. “Yes,” he said.

“Well, that shows what you know about women, which is nothing. Look at those ladies she writes about on Insatiable, Victoria Worthington Stone and her daughter, Tabby. Victoria’s never had a job in her life, except for that time she was a model. Oh, and a fashion designer. Oh, and when she was a race car driver, but that was only for a week before she crashed and lost the baby and was in that coma. Those aren’t even real jobs. They say you write about what you wish would happen to you. So, obviously Meena wishes she didn’t have a job.”

“Or,” Emil said, “she wishes she were a race car driver.”

“And Prince Lucien would be able to provide for her.” Mary Lou went on, ignoring him. “And since the prince likes writing, the two of them already have something in common.”

“It’s a very different kind of writing,” Emil said. “Lucien writes historical nonfiction. And anyway, he made it very clear when I spoke to him that he wanted to keep his visit under the radar. We’re at a very critical time with the Dracul. These murders-”

“Oh, stop being such a worrywart,” Mary Lou said. “No man wouldn’t want to have dinner with a lot of pretty ladies.” She laughed and turned to poke her husband in his belly, which stuck out ever so slightly over the waistband of his trousers. “Don’t tell me you wouldn’t enjoy being the center of attention of me and all my friends. Not that you aren’t…”

“Well.” Emil felt the pressure in his gut receding slightly. “Maybe he won’t mind so much. A man has to eat, after all.”

“Exactly,” Mary Lou exclaimed. “And so why not do it in the company of a lot of lovely, accomplished ladies?”

“Why not?” Emil asked.

Maybe, he thought, his wife was right:

The man did have to eat, after all.

Chapter Fourteen

3:45 A.M. EST, Wednesday, April 14

910 Park Avenue, Apt. 11B

New York, New York

Meena stared at the bright red numbers on the digital clock in her bedroom. Three forty-five. She had five hours before she had to leave for the office. Four more to sleep before she had to get up to start getting ready.

Except that she couldn’t sleep. She lay there, staring at the ceiling, grinding her teeth, and thinking about Yalena-all she could see was a picture of the girl’s body, battered almost beyond recognition-and Cheryl and CDI and the job she hadn’t gotten and Jon and her parents and David and the countess and Leisha and Adam and the baby.

Now she’d never get to sleep.

There was only one answer to Meena’s problem, and it lay in a little orange prescription bottle in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. She hated resorting to pills, but lately she’d been relying on them more and more.

She was just about to reach for her secret stash of pills in the medicine cabinet when she heard it:

The clickety-clack of Jack Bauer’s claws on the hardwood floor behind her.

Seeing her up and around, Jack Bauer thought it was morning and time for his first walk of the day.

“Okay, Jack,” Meena whispered to him. “Okay. We’ll go.”

She spat out her mouth guard, leaving it in the sink, then slipped as quietly as she could into her coat and a pair of sneakers and got Jack Bauer’s leash from its hook.

She’d just take him on a short walk, she decided, then go back to bed. She’d be home in less than fifteen minutes. With half a pill, she could still get a full four hours of restorative sleep before work. Everything would be okay.

In the lobby of Meena’s building, Pradip, the night doorman, had dozed off with his head resting on one of his textbooks. He was studying to be a masseur, which Meena thought was a fine career option for him, since people were having multiple careers nowadays well into their eighties, and his death didn’t appear to be imminent.

Meena crept past him, careful not to disturb him-all the staff in her building worked so hard-and slipped out the automatic doors to the sidewalk, where Jack Bauer hurried to relieve himself against the potted palm just beside the red carpet by the building’s entrance, as was his ritual. Meena waited beside him, inhaling the fresh morning air. Or was it still night? She wasn’t sure. The sky above was a dark blue wash, a paler blue at the edges, where it disappeared behind the tall buildings.

Meena gave Jack Bauer’s leash a tug, and he obediently began trotting beside her. They had a route they always took this time of night-down Park Avenue to Seventy-eighth; past St. George’s Cathedral, currently closed for badly needed renovations; then back down Eightieth, and to the apartment.

But for some reason that night-or that morning-Jack was feeling jumpy. Meena could tell, because he ignored some of the places he usually liked to take an inordinately long time sniffing and just kept trotting forward, nervously snuffling the air, almost as if…well, as if he were anticipating something.

But because this was the way he often behaved-his name was, after all, Jack Bauer: he was a jumble of nerves, always expecting the worst, barking at their front door when it was only the countess and her husband coming home from a party-Meena thought nothing of it.

She let Jack Bauer pull her along, thinking idly about work. How was she going to fit a prince for Cheryl into Shoshona’s vampire story line?

And Yalena-should Meena have followed her to her meeting with the boyfriend? She was wondering whether she could have said something to him, given him a look, done something to let him know she was onto him, when she noticed the first other person she’d seen on foot since leaving her building, coming toward her on the same side of the street, but from the opposite direction.

It was a man.

But he was a very tall man, dressed in a long black trench coat that flapped behind him almost like a cape.

Meena tightened her grip on Jack Bauer’s leash, and not just because the dog had begun growling. She was alone on a dark street approaching a large man she didn’t know. What on earth was he doing out at four in the morning without a dog if he wasn’t drunk?

She didn’t blame Jack Bauer for being suspicious. She was suspicious, too.

But as they approached the wide steps to St. George’s Cathedral, surrounded by scaffolding, Meena saw from the security lights shining down from the church spires that the man was unusually good looking-maybe in his mid to late thirties-and was in no way giving off signs that he didn’t belong in the ritzy neighborhood. His clothes were impeccably tailored and in good taste; his dark hair, brushed back from his temples without a hint of gray, immaculately groomed. Even his sideburns were the perfect length.

She was the one, she belatedly realized, who probably looked suspicious, given the fact that her short hair was doubtlessly pointing up in spikes (as it was wont to do when she’d just gotten up), she was without makeup, and her blue flannel pajama legs-with white puffy clouds on them-were sticking out of the bottom of her own trench coat, above her well-worn sneakers.

When she raised her gaze to meet his as he walked past her-Jack Bauer was practically snarling by this time-she was smiling apologetically, both for her appearance and for her dog’s behavior.

He smiled back, his eyes dark and as full of mystery as the windows peering down around them.

And she relaxed.

She had no bad feelings about this man. Not a single twinge about how or when he was going to die. Amazingly enough she felt nothing…

…nothing at all about him.

“Shhh,” Meena said to Jack Bauer, embarrassed over the dog’s antics.

It was right then that the sky collapsed.