Insatiable

Chapter Thirty-seven

8:00 P.M. EST, Friday, April 16

910 Park Avenue, Apt. 11B

New York, New York

Alaric Wulf was staring at her. His eyes really were very blue. Alarmingly blue. If he’d been anybody else-if Meena had met him anywhere else-she’d have said, “What a nice-looking man.”

But since he’d attacked her in her own apartment with a sword and was now accusing her boyfriend of being a vampire, she was just going to have to say it was a shame such good looks were wasted on someone so…whatever he was.

“Brother Jon,” he said. His gaze was so intense, it seemed to pierce her to the couch, much in the way his body weight had pierced her to the floor. “Get your sister something to drink now. Something sugary. She doesn’t know it yet. But she’s going to need it in a few minutes.”

“Uh,” Jon said, “okay.” And he got up to go to the kitchen.

“Excuse me,” Meena said. What was wrong with this guy? “But I can actually get my own drinks.”

“No,” Alaric said. “You stay where you are. You are not to be trusted.”

Meena held up both palms in protest. “What?” she said. She couldn’t help bursting out laughing, even though it was all so…sad. “Why? Because I date an alleged vampire?”

“He is not alleged,” Alaric said. “And, yes. You are his minion now.”

“A minion!” Now Meena had heard everything. “What? I’m infected because I went out with Lucien?”

“You can put it like that, yes,” Alaric said. “It is certainly a form of infection. Are you getting that soda or not, Brother Jon?”

“Soda on its way,” he called from the kitchen.

“Jon,” Meena called from the sofa. “While you’re in there, put a little-”

“Do not listen to her,” Alaric said. “She is going to tell you in some kind of code only the two of you will understand, because you are siblings, to call the police on your cell phone. But if you do that, I will kill you and dispose of your body in a place where no one will find it. The river, I think. Your doorman is so stupid, he won’t notice if I leave this building carrying a body in a rolled-up carpet.”

Jon poked his head out of the pass-through to look at Meena.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m just going to get a couple of Cokes and avoid the whole being-rolled-up-in-a-carpet thing, ’kay, Meen?”

She glared at him. “Yeah, real great, Jon.” She looked at Alaric. She could handle this. It was no different than one of Taylor’s I’m-so-fat tantrums. Well, maybe a little different. “Look, Mr., uh, Wulf. I appreciate your trying to warn me about this. I really do. But there’s no such thing as vampires. They’re made-up. We writers made them up. I’m sorry we did such a good job that we made the whole world paranoid, but it’s true. They’re fictional. Blame Bram Stoker. He started it.”

“No, he did not, actually,” Alaric said. “They existed long before Stoker was ever even born, in almost every culture and on almost every continent on this planet. They are like mosquitoes…they feed off the blood of others. They cannot exist without a host.”

“And how do you,” Meena asked, playing along, “know so much about them?”

“I battle vampires almost daily in my profession,” he said in a bored voice. “They are loathsome and brutal creatures. A group of them almost killed my partner some months ago.”

“Oh, really,” Meena said. She’d crossed her legs and was now jiggling one bare foot up and down. Vampires! Seriously?

Get over it, Harper, Shoshona had said. They’re everywhere. You can’t escape them.

It wasn’t fair. Why couldn’t she escape stupid vampires? Work, TV, Leisha’s salon, and now here, at home.

They really were everywhere. Even handsome-but obviously deranged-strangers who broke into her apartment, trying to kill her, were raving about them.

“They cornered us in a warehouse outside of Berlin,” he went on, looking far away. “It was partly my fault. I got cocky. I thought there were not so many of them and that we could take them. But there were more than I thought, and they caught us by surprise. Here.” He reached into the inside pocket of the dark, close-fitting sports coat he wore. “This is a picture of how my partner looks now. His name is Martin.”

What Meena saw when he handed her the photo sent a physical shock wave through her. She wasn’t expecting…that. It was a picture of a man with half a face. Where his features should have been on the lower half was only skull. It had clearly been shredded by fangs.

Meena could only stare.

Alaric took the photo from her limp fingers and said, putting it away, “But a photo, I know, doesn’t prove anything. Next you will say what happened to his face could have happened in a car accident.”

Meena stammered, “I…I wasn’t going to say that.”

She didn’t know what she was going to say. She looked over at Jon. He was still busy in the kitchen with the sodas. She wished he would hurry up. She was feeling less and less certain that Alaric Wulf was actually deranged with every passing second.

Why that should be more unnerving to her than the alternative, Meena wasn’t sure.

“Here,” Alaric said. “These are photos of the four girls who’ve been recently murdered in your city, their bodies found in city parks the next morning, naked and drained of all their blood.”

He scattered four photos onto the coffee table in front of Meena. They were pictures of the women, taken from the chest up. The one thing they all had in common was the multiple bite marks they had not just on their throats, surrounded by ugly purple and green bruising, but all over, as if they’d been savagely attacked by someone…

Or something.

Meena gazed down at the photos. Jon, coming back from the kitchen holding three glasses of soda, joined her on the couch and stared down at the photos as well.

“These are the girls they’ve been reporting about on the news?” he asked.

“Yes,” Alaric said.

“But it didn’t say anything about them having died from being bitten,” Jon said. “It said they died from being strangled.”

“Because the mayor’s office doesn’t want to start a panic,” Alaric said.

“But you’re not saying Lucien did this,” Meena said in a faint voice, still unable to tear her gaze away from the photos. She worked in a world where photos like these were faked every day…a world where duping viewers into believing something this incredible could happen was what she and her fellow writers strived for. She was trying desperately to find some sign that these photos had been faked, that they’d been an invention of someone like herself or Shoshona.

But the images looked heartbreakingly real. She recognized the girls’ faces from photos she’d seen on the news. Photos that had carefully shown nothing below the chin.

“No,” Alaric said, taking a sip of his soda. “The prince is not behind these murders…insofar as he himself did not commit them. But one of his kind did. One of his minions.”

“Minions?” She stared at him. “You said I’m a minion.”

He shrugged his broad shoulders. “Different kind of minion. To become a vampire, one must be bitten three times, then drink the blood of one’s host. I take it that you didn’t do that last night, did you?”

Meena’s eyes widened with horror. Jon, sitting back on the ottoman, raised his eyebrows to their limits.

“Whoa,” he said. “I’ve heard of some kinky stuff, but that’s-”

Meena interrupted him.

Because, really, she’d heard about as much as she could.

“Excuse me,” she said, knowing she was lashing out because suddenly, she was frightened…frightened of the photos she’d just seen but had no rational way to explain. But more than that, frightened of some things she’d suddenly begun to piece together in her mind. “But you can’t just come in here and expect us to believe that there’s this gigantic vampire conspiracy out there that the rest of humanity knows nothing about but that my boyfriend is the head of, and that you, somehow, have been privy to. I mean, what are you, anyway? Some kind of vampire hunter?”

“Yes,” Alaric said simply.

Meena sagged against the back of the couch. “Oh,” she said. “Right. Of course you are.”

Because after the week she’d had, what else was he going to be?

“Seriously?” Jon asked. He looked excited. “How do you get a job like that? Are there benefits?”

“You have to begin training very young,” Alaric said, not taking his gaze off Meena. “And there’s a hiring freeze right now.”

“Yeah,” said Jon. “Of course. There are hiring freezes everywhere. But the thing is, I think I would be exemplary in a position like that. Because you know, I’m very good with my hands, and I’ve always really, really hated vampires. I mean, Dracula was like my favorite movie when I was a kid. Tell him, Meen. The part where they stake him-”

“Decapitation is more effective,” Alaric said, still not taking his gaze off Meena.

“Now, see,” Jon said, “I’d be even better at that. I was on my high school baseball team. I could really swing a bat. Meena, seriously. Tell him.”

Meena didn’t say anything. She was watching Alaric. He’d reached into his inside pocket again. This time he pulled out a small gold medal, which he flung down onto the center of the coffee table as casually as if it were a coin. Jon snatched it up and held it toward the light from the lamp beside the couch.

“Cool,” he said, squinting at it. “What is this? I recognize this. On one side…isn’t this…?”

“The papal seal,” Alaric said in the same bored voice he seemed to use habitually.

“The Pope?” Jon glanced at him. “No way.”

“That is my employer.” Alaric continued to stare at Meena. She stared right back at him. She noticed in a detached part of her brain that his mouth was too small for the rest of his face.

The rest of her brain was screaming that it couldn’t be true. It wasn’t true. She and Lucien had had that whole long conversation about vampires, back at his apartment…

Oh. God.

“And what’s this on the back?” Jon asked. “Meena, here, you look at it.”

Meena took the medallion from him. She could clearly see the image on the back.

It was of a mounted knight. Slaying a dragon.

She caught her breath.

“St. George?” Her heart twisted.

“The patron saint of the Palatine Guard,” Alaric said. “My order. St. George and St. Joan are the patron saints of soldiers. St. George slayed the dragon-”

“I know,” Meena said quickly. Suddenly, it was hard to breathe.

“Hey,” Jon said excitedly. “Didn’t Lucien say something about dragons in that note he wrote to you, Meena? That you’d slain the dragon?”

“Yes,” Meena said. Why wouldn’t Jon just shut up for once? Her heart was pounding so hard, she could barely breathe.

Alaric, she noticed, had raised a single light brown eyebrow. “He wrote to you?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Jon said, getting up and crossing over to the dining table where Lucien’s letter rested alongside the bag he had sent her. “The note’s right over-”

“No,” Meena said, her heart pounding even harder as she darted up from the couch. “Jon, don’t give it to-”

But Alaric was, as usual, too quick for her. He was up from his chair and throwing a rock-hard arm around her waist, swinging her off her feet before she’d gone more than a single step.

“Give me the note,” he said, still holding a struggling Meena as Jon, taken aback by this turn of events, stood there in the space between the living and dining rooms, staring at them, Lucien’s letter in his hand.

“Don’t give him the note, Jon!” Meena yelled hoarsely, lashing at Alaric’s legs with her bare feet.

Which of course he didn’t feel at all.

She didn’t even know why she felt so determined to keep the note from him. It was simply imperative he not see it.

But it was too late. Jon handed the silver envelope over to Alaric, who let go of Meena, opened the note, and scanned the contents. Meena looked unhappily at her brother.

“It’s just a note, Meen,” Jon said with a shrug. “It doesn’t even have his address on it or anything. It’s all right.”

But it wasn’t all right.

Especially when Alaric looked up and said, “Dragon in Romanian is dracul.”

“What?” Meena said. She didn’t understand.

“Dragon,” Alaric said casually. “When he tells you in his note that you slayed the dragon, he means himself. The Romanian word for dragon is dracul. Dracula.”

Meena inhaled sharply. The room had started to sway a little.

“Wait,” Jon said. “So St. George wasn’t really slaying dragons? He was slaying vampires? Are the dragons in all the pictures supposed to be metaphors for vampires or something?”

But on this day, she remembered Lucien saying in the museum, there is no maiden left in the village, save the king’s daughter. She’s bravely gone to the water’s edge, despite her father’s protests, expecting to die. But look who’s appeared…a knight called George who will slay the dragon…

No wonder Lucien hadn’t looked very happy when she’d steered him toward that particular picture.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Meena said. Suddenly, her head was pounding. She thought she might pass out.

“Sit,” Alaric said, pushing her back down onto the couch again. Only this time, even she had to admit, he did it gently.

“No, really,” she said. The room was tilting in front of her. “I have to-”

“Drink the soda,” he said. “The sugar will help.” His hand on her shoulder was warm. It reminded her-with another stomach lurch-that Lucien’s hands had never been warm. They’d always felt cool. Strangely cool.

Even his lips, as they’d slid over her body, had been cool…

“Oh, God,” she said. She gulped some of the soda, then dropped her head between her knees. If she didn’t get some blood back into her temples, she felt certain she was going to pass out.

“But there’s no such thing as vampires,” she said to her bare feet.

“There’s no such thing. There’s no such thing…”

It seemed to Meena as if the more she repeated it, the more likely it was to come true.

But so many things from the night before-including the memory of Lucien’s own voice-came flooding back to her.

But you believe St. Joan heard voices, he’d said.

How can an educated woman like yourself believe this and not in creatures of the night?

Creatures of the night.

Oh, my God.

It was true. It was true.

“Drink your soda.” She heard Alaric’s voice urging her gently. “In the meantime, I want to tell you about a man named Vlad Tepes.”

Meena, her head still between her knees, groaned as soon as she heard the name.

“Oh,” Alaric said, sounding pleasantly surprised. “You’ve heard of this man? Well, I will tell your brother about him, then. Vlad Tepes was a prince from a part of Romania called Wallachia…what is today better known as Transylvania-”

Meena moaned more loudly. Not Transylvania. Anything but Transylvania.

“He was a brutal and cruel man who ruthlessly employed a method of torture you might have heard of called impaling-”

“Wait,” Jon said. “Are you talking about Vlad the Impaler?”

“I am,” Alaric said, brightening some more. “I see you’ve heard of him.”

“Everyone’s heard of Vlad the Impaler,” Jon said. “Impaling was where, as a method of torture, a long stake, usually not particularly sharp, would be driven through the victim’s various orifices-”

“I need something stronger than just a Coke,” Meena sat up and said suddenly. “Whiskey. I need whiskey. Oh, God-”

The room swayed dangerously, and she quickly put her head back down between her knees.

“No whiskey,” Alaric said firmly.

“Why can’t she have whiskey?” Jon asked.

“Then she will drunk-dial the vampire,” Alaric said. “And warn him about me, and I will lose the element of surprise. It’s happened before. Vlad the Impaler,” he went on, “ruled what is now modern Romania from 1456 to 1462. He was known for his exceptionally cruel punishments, both of his enemies and even his own servants, although it is impossible to say how many people he actually killed. He may have impaled a hundred thousand people or more, leaving them to die slowly in excruciating pain, sometimes for days, on long stakes along the road leading to his palace as a way to intimidate visitors to his native land.”

Meena closed her eyes, wishing she could shut out his words.

But she couldn’t, any more than she could wish herself back in time, to the point where the doorman had buzzed, saying she had a delivery.

Alaric Wulf was not a delivery anyone could ever have wanted. Now she knew how everyone must have felt when she’d given them her news about their impending death.

“Vlad himself was said to have been killed in battle against the Turks in 1476. He was decapitated and his head was taken on a pike to the sultan in Istanbul to prove that he was dead.”

Jon sounded disappointed. “So. Not a vampire.”

Meena lifted her head hopefully. “Maybe. Or maybe it wasn’t Vlad Tepes. He was reportedly buried at an island monastery near Bucharest,” Alaric said, continuing, “but when his tomb was recently excavated, it was…”

“What?” Jon asked eagerly.

“…found to be empty,” Alaric said.

Jon looked confused. “So where is he?”

Alaric regarded him and Meena both patiently.

“Vlad Tepes is more commonly known in his native country by his given name, Vlad the Dragon, for his service to the Hungarian Order of the Dragon,” he went on. “Or, if you employ the Romanian for dragon, Vlad Dracul.” He looked at Meena, his blue-eyed gaze unwavering. “Best known to the English-speaking world as the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula.”

Meena sucked in her breath. She both knew and dreaded what was coming next. Knew it as well as she’d ever known anything in her life.

She just dreaded it more than she remembered ever dreading any words she’d ever heard.

“Lucien Antonescu,” Alaric said, “is Vlad Dracula’s son.”