Insatiable

Chapter Twenty-four

9:00 P.M. EST, Thursday, April 15

Outside of 912 Park Avenue

New York, New York

What are you doing here?” the blue-haired old woman asked as her Pekingese lifted a leg not far from where Alaric Wulf was standing. “And don’t try to lie to me, young man. I’ve been watching you from my window. You’ve been standing out here for an hour.”

“Just waiting for my wife, ma’am,” he said. “She has an appointment with Dr. Rabinowitz.” He nodded toward the brass plate on the building he was leaning against that said Dr. Rubin Rabinowitz, Obstetrics.

The Blue Hair followed his gaze, then turned back toward him. She wasn’t, he saw from her expression, having any of it.

“This late?” the old woman demanded. “And why aren’t you in the waiting room?”

“Claustrophobia,” Alaric said. He glared at the Pekingese. Its little face was scrunched up in a look of disgust that seemed to echo its mistress’s. “And Dr. Rabinowitz is very accommodating of my wife’s busy schedule as a jet-setting supermodel.”

“Hmph,” said the old woman, and she hurried on her way.

Alaric, standing next door to 910 Park Avenue-but out of sight, leaning against the side of the building where he wouldn’t be noticed by anyone but elderly women passing by as they walked their impossibly small dogs and cast disapproving looks at him-felt that he approved.

Not of Blue Hair, although he’d liked her. He liked women with spirit. They reminded him of Betty and Veronica.

What he approved of was 910 Park Avenue itself, and its tenants.

The living ones, anyway.

It was an elegant brick structure, built on a corner and obviously well maintained. The potted plants on either side of the electronic doors looked healthy and lush. There was a spotless red carpet beneath the green awning above the doors, and the doorman standing under it was young and eager to do his job well. Alaric saw him corner and cuff a Chinese food deliveryman before he’d managed to slink by him, determined to slip menus under unsuspecting tenants’ doors.

The doorman also stopped to carefully check the name of each guest arriving to attend the Antonescus’ party off a list they’d given him before allowing them up.

That was how Alaric had discovered that there was no way he could simply crash the party uninvited…unless of course he used force.

And he wasn’t willing to play that card. Yet.

And because the building was twenty stories high, and the Antonescus lived on the eleventh floor with no fire escape, his “feet first through the window from the roof” trick wouldn’t work, either.

Until he figured out a way to sneak inside through the parking garage in the basement-or possibly using the service entrance-he was going to get to know the parked cars outside of 910 Park Avenue pretty well, he suspected.

But that was all right. He had time. All the time in the world to plan his next move.

Alaric had checked into the Peninsula the night before and was very much enjoying the upgrade from his hotel in Chattanooga. There were several premium cable channels for him to enjoy-on a flat-screen TV, no less, while soaking in a big, deep tub with no rubber slide strips in the bathroom-and Frette sheets, not to mention an indoor pool in a glass atrium on the top floor so he could keep up his workouts; a vast and varied room service menu to explore; and several lounges where attractive women of all nationalities could be found after a day of shopping sipping tea and texting their friends. No, Alaric was in no rush to leave Manhattan.

Except for one small, unpleasant fact.

The reason he was there in the first place.

But then, if the e-mail Martin had forwarded him was genuine, the prince was in town for the very same reason: to make sure no more young girls had their life’s blood sucked out of them.

The file containing all their photos had been waiting for Alaric when he’d checked in.

What that file contained had horrified him.

And it took a lot to horrify Alaric, who was convinced he’d seen everything in his twenty years with the Palatine.

There were no names attached to the victims’ photos. The coroner’s office suspected-due to the girls’ dental work-that they were of Eastern European or even Russian birth and in the country illegally…which would explain why not a single person had come forward to identify them.

Alaric had given them American names to go with the American dreams with which he felt sure each of them had traveled to this country:

First was long-haired Aimee, found early one morning just ten days ago in the Ramble at Central Park.

Then red-haired Jennifer, found a few days later by a park employee in Bryant Park.

The final victim he called Hayley. Her photo was perhaps most disturbing of all to Alaric, because she bore more than a passing resemblance to Martin’s daughter, Simone. Both were dark skinned, with black hair that spiraled around their faces in similar tight corkscrew curls.

She had been found just last weekend in Central Park, like Aimee… Alaric, studying the photos in his hotel room, had seen what the general public-and few members of law enforcement, beyond the coroner’s office-had not. There was no question of cause of death and no question, once the photos had been e-mailed to the Vatican, who-or rather what-was responsible for those deaths.

The only question was, would the Palatine be able to exterminate him-or them, because Alaric, upon seeing the photos, became convinced there’d been more than just one attacker-before the prince could?

It still seemed mind-boggling to Alaric that a vampire could actually be in New York on a mission similar to his own. Not just any vampire, but the prince of darkness.

But, Alaric supposed, the prince didn’t care about the dead girls. To him, the murders of those three girls only meant possible exposure to the public of his kind. Discovery by the rest of humankind that vampires were not some invention of Bram Stoker’s feverish imagination-something that, if Alaric was honest, he had to admit the Vatican was at just as great pains to prevent as the vamps. They didn’t need another panic like the one that spread through Eastern Europe during the 1700s, when ignorant villagers, goaded by charlatan “vampire exterminators,” were led to believe their own family members were actually undead and, after being coerced into buying expensive “vampire weapons,” dug them up from their resting places and decapitated them.

It made a certain kind of sense, Alaric supposed, that the prince would be there, trying to stop the killer-or killers-same as the Palatine. He had to be as worried as the Vatican that word could get out about the truth of his species’ existence.

Still. It made Alaric feel livid, the fact that he might have the same goal as the prince.

Of course, Alaric had another goal, in addition to finding, and stopping, whoever or whatever was doing this: he intended to destroy the prince, as well. Whether his bosses at the Palatine approved or not.

He’d spent a lot of time working out his frustrations over his assignment in the hotel pool but had followed it with an excellent lunch at Per Se.

So while he wasn’t happy with his current circumstances, he was at least eating well.

And he certainly wouldn’t starve to death while he stood around staring at the entrance to 910 Park Avenue, waiting to see if the prince actually showed up.

He was even beginning to think he might-grudgingly, of course-approve of the people he’d assigned himself to watch. The Antonescus were rich-stinking, filthy rich. Like him, they seemed to find no shame in enjoying the finer things in life. They had the summer place in Romania-not too shabby, judging by the photos-and appeared to enjoy going to upscale restaurants. Last night they’d dined at the Four Seasons.

Well, “dined” was a relative term. Of course they hadn’t eaten much, being the foul breathless beasts of Satan that they were.

The wife was the head of 910 Park Avenue’s cooperative-some kind of board that chose who would be allowed to live in the building-undoubtedly so that she could keep out the “riffraff” (people like himself, Alaric supposed).

Still, no one to whom Alaric had spoken had anything negative to say about her…and none whatsoever picked up on his hints that she might possibly be a member of the undead. (Not that she’d have needed to sleep in her own coffin or have the earth from her grave near her. These were other old myths Stoker had gotten wrong in his book.) Either she wasn’t a vampire, or she and her husband had assimilated better than any demons he’d ever seen. She even served on several charitable boards, one that helped pay for children with cancer to go to summer camp in the countryside.

Children with cancer. Nice cover, for a bloodsucker.

The husband owned and managed numerous real estate holdings throughout the city and often escorted the wife to benefits, like ones for the cancer camp.

Vampires who attended benefits to raise money for summer camps for children…with cancer! Hilarious. Even more hilarious than Betty and Veronica.

Now, he’d told Martin, he’d seen everything.

Simone had grabbed the phone while Alaric had still been chuckling with her father over the benefit-attending vampires and said, “Uncle Alaric?”

“Yes, sweetheart?”

“Are you going to get the people who ate my daddy’s face?”

“Yes,” he’d said, sobering instantly. “Yes, I am.”

Just like he was going to get whatever had killed Aimee, Jennifer, and Hayley…or whatever the victims’ real names were.

Because that was what it was all about. If these Antonescus really were related to this Lucien Antonescu, and he really was the prince of darkness, Alaric was going to destroy them. All of them. He didn’t care what his superiors at the Vatican wanted or how much money the Antonescus had donated so that children with cancer could go to camp. They were still parasites-like ticks-that had to be exterminated for what they’d done to Martin. To that girl, Sarah, from the Chattanooga Walmart. To those unidentified dead women, lying in the morgue.

And to countless others like them whom Alaric had seen abused and victimized over his years with the Palatine. They had to be destroyed like the vermin that they were. Because they would only create more creatures like themselves, who would in turn victimize more people like Martin and Sarah and those girls.

Vampires were filth. And they spread their filth-and disease-to everything and everyone they touched.

They all had to be eradicated.

There wasn’t much more to it than that.

In the meantime, Alaric would stand there outside of 910 Park Avenue and wait. He didn’t care how many little old ladies walked by him and asked what he thought he was doing. He’d show them the pictures of Aimee, Jennifer, and Hayley if he had to.

And maybe, while he was at it, a photo of where Martin’s face used to be.

That would shut them up.