Insatiable

Chapter Twenty-two

7:30 P.M. EST, Thursday, April 15

910 Park Avenue, Apt. 11A

New York, New York

Lucien 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.”