Insatiable

Chapter Forty

12:00 A.M. EST, Saturday, April 17

The Box

189 Chrystie Street

New York, New York

It was easy for Lucien to find his brother, Dimitri.

He was the prince of darkness, after all. He could find anyone he wanted.

Except, of course, whoever was killing girls and dumping their bodies in parks all around Manhattan. The person-or people-doing that seemed to want to keep it a secret from him, for an obvious reason…

They valued their lives.

His brother was said to be entertaining another group of financial analysts at a burlesque club downtown. Lucien did not frequent such places-frankly, if he wanted to see a woman disrobe in front of him, he didn’t have to pay for the privilege.

This particular club was more crowded than any he’d ever seen, and not just with men. There were women there, as well-all ages-waiting for the show to begin, most without seats. The club was standing-room only. Tables were said to be going for a “bottle fee” of a thousand dollars.

That meant patrons would be seated at a table only if they purchased a bottle of champagne or vodka…for a thousand dollars.

It was absurd.

But it was how the club made its money.

Lucien didn’t have time to stop to listen to the grousing of the crowd, though. He was making his way through it and up the stairs to the red plush velvet box seats where his brother was sitting with the investment bankers with whom he was palling around for whatever reason.

Still, it was hard to keep the buzzing out of his head. Not the buzzing of the conversations around him, either, but the buzzing he’d felt ever since he’d left Meena’s side that morning and that seemed to occur now whenever he was around humans.

It was the strangest sensation. He couldn’t really equate it with anything he’d ever felt before. It was like having a tiny bee inside his brain. The sensation faded whenever there wasn’t anyone living around.

But as soon as anyone with a heartbeat was nearby, the vibration started up again.

It wasn’t just buzzing, either. He knew things. Just by looking into the faces of the people he brushed past. Like the waitress holding the tray of empty glasses, wiggling by him in her black satin bustier and lace garter belt. She needed to be careful on this narrow staircase in her precariously high platform heels, or she was going to trip and fall and break her neck.

This wasn’t something he could tell by reading her mind. It was just something he knew, simply by looking into her heavily made-up eyes.

“Watch your step,” he said to her as she sidled past him on the stairs.

“Thanks,” she said, grinning up at him suggestively with her red lacquered lips. “I’d rather watch yours, though.”

And not just her. The boy shouting into his cell phone at the top of the stairs, too.

“You’re not going to believe this place,” he was telling a friend on the other end of the phone. “One of the women onstage smokes! Not with her mouth, either, with her-”

“Son,” Lucien said to him.

“Dude.” The boy turned to him. “I’m not your son. And I don’t know where the bathroom is…” His voice trailed off as he looked into Lucien’s eyes. He swallowed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Can I help you, sir?”

“Yes,” Lucien said, holding out his hand. “Give me your car keys.”

The boy, who couldn’t have been more than nineteen-he’d obviously used a fake ID to enter the club-reached a trembling hand into his coat pocket and withdrew a set of car keys. He placed them in Lucien’s outstretched palm.

Lucien placed the keys in his coat pocket.

“Take a cab home,” he said to the boy, patting him on the shoulder. “I think you’ve had a few too many drinks to drive home safely.”

“But…” The boy looked after him as Lucien moved away, toward the deep-red velvet curtains that closed off the box seats from the standing area on the second-floor mezzanine overlooking the stage. “I came in from Long Island City.”

“Take the train,” Lucien said with a wink. “You’ll thank me one day.”

He found Dimitri in a dark private box with six or seven business-suited corporate types, all lounging on couches and sumptuously decorative pillows around a drink-laden table. There were no women to be seen. They, Lucien knew, would be appearing on the stage below, in various states of undress, doing things with miscellaneous props that would have surprised even his father, who was raised by fifteenth-century Turks.

“Lucien!” Dimitri cried upon spying him. “What a surprise! Gentlemen, meet my brother, Lucien. Lucien, these are some friends of mine from TransCarta.”

Lucien flicked a glance downward at the men beneath him, all of whom were middle-aged, running ever-so-slightly to fat due to sitting too long in front of a computer all day, and all of whom were going to die…

…within the week.

Wait. All of them?

How?

And why? Some kind of corporate plane crash?

But all Lucien could see in the fuzzy snapshot of his mind’s eye was a room…a very dark room. A basement, maybe.

And blood. Quite a lot of blood.

A car crash in an underground parking garage?

That was the only thing that made sense.

Poor bastards.

What was happening to him? How did he know how all these people were going to die?

And why did he know it?

“How do you do?” Lucien said politely to the soon-to-be-dead men. There was no use warning them, of course. What was there to warn them of? “I’m sorry to disturb your…evening out. But I was wondering if I might have a word with my brother alone.”

A look of annoyance passed over Dimitri’s face. Lucien saw it. He was certain he saw it.

But it was gone almost as soon as it appeared.

“Of course,” Dimitri said. “I’ll just be a moment, gentlemen.”

“Take your time,” one of the soon-to-be-dead men said jovially. “Next act’s not for ten more minutes. You should join us, Lucien. Girl apparently smokes out of her-”

“I’ve seen it,” Lucien said quickly. “In Turkey once. But thank you for the invitation.”

Dimitri rose and ducked through the curtain Lucien was holding open for him. “What is this?” he asked grouchily, following Lucien down the side of the balcony, toward a sign marked Exit. “I’m actually here on business, you know. I don’t have time to keep having these not-so-brotherly reunions of yours.”

A bald man with huge biceps, dressed in a black T-shirt and pants, who’d planted himself in front of the door marked Exit said, “Emergency exit only. Take the stairs.”

“That won’t be necessary, Marvin,” Lucien said gently.

“No,” Marvin said, looking confused. Then he stepped aside and pushed the door open for them. “I’m sorry, sir. I don’t know what I was saying. Have a nice evening.”

“We will,” Lucien said.

They stepped out onto a fire escape over a back alley. The evening air was cool. It was much quieter outside than it had been inside the club, where pounding rock music had played. Though Lucien could hear the sound of distant thunder as a storm was brewing over New Jersey.

The bouncer closed the exit door behind them.

“Well?” Dimitri asked irritably, taking out a cigar and lighting it. “What is it? I thought we’d pretty much said all we had to say the last time we met.”

“No,” Lucien said. “Not everything. I’ve been thinking about you.”

“Have you?” Dimitri looked suspicious. “What about me?”

“I was wondering what that little”-Lucien made a twirling motion in the air with his index finger-“was about before, actually.”

Dimitri looked skyward. “I should have known. You think too much, you know. You always did. With you, it was always about books. And the past. Never the future.”

“Have you ever considered that it’s only by studying the mistakes of the past,” Lucien said mildly, “that we can even have a future?”

Dimitri rolled his eyes. “Right. What you’re doing now is so noble, molding little human minds. It’s probably never occurred to you, has it, that our kind is beginning to say you’ve gotten soft…”

Lucien raised an eyebrow. “Really. Do you think I’ve gotten soft, Dimitri?”

“I didn’t say me,” he said. “But I was giving you an opportunity to show them how wrong they are.” He rubbed the back of his neck, as if remembering his hard landing at Lucien’s hands. “You should be thanking me, actually. I think I did an exemplary job of illustrating that you’re still at the top of your game.”

“Interesting,” Lucien said. “Since I was attacked earlier this week as well.”

Dimitri looked up, surprised. Lucien couldn’t tell if his surprise was genuine. Dimitri had always had a flair for the dramatic.

“Here?” he asked. “In the city?”

“Yes,” Lucien said. “And in front of a human.” He wasn’t going to say a word about Meena. Nothing more than what he’d just said. He knew better than to let on that he had a special interest in a woman-particularly a human woman-in front of his half brother. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”

“For God’s sake, Lucien,” Dimitri said. He flicked some ash off the side of the fire escape railing. “Of course not. What do you take me for?”

Lucien reached for the dragon symbol that hung around his half brother’s neck. “Someone who’s tried to kill me in the past so that he could take over the throne himself. I see you’re still wearing this,” he said, letting the iron image dangle between his fingers, the very closeness of his hand to Dimitri’s throat an unspoken threat. “So was your son, and that other boy you were sitting with in your club. Are you telling me that doesn’t mean anything?”

“Of course it means something.” Dimitri spat over the side of the fire escape, into the alleyway fifty feet below. “We’re related to Dracula, for the love of God! Why wouldn’t I use that, and the family coat of arms, to promote my image as a businessman? You know I’ve never understood your reluctance to do the same.”

Lucien’s expression twisted into one of disgust. “Perhaps because I want nothing to do with the Dracul,” he said. “Nor do I see anything admirable about being a direct descendant of someone who killed tens of thousands of innocent women and children in his lifetime, and who was, quite rightly, eventually put to death for it.”

Dimitri looked bored. “Well,” he said, “I suppose if you’re going to put it that way.”

“And you’re telling me that neither you nor your son had anything to do with the Dracul’s attempt on my life in front of St. George’s Cathedral?” Lucien demanded.

“Brother.” Dimitri shook his head, his expression crestfallen. “What did I ever do to you to make you distrust me so?”

“I believe it was when you tried to have me buried alive at Târgovi te,” Lucien remarked.

“Ancient history,” Dimitri said. “You always did hold on to grudges for far too long. Father thought so, too.”

“Strangely, I don’t put much stock into anything Father said,” Lucien remarked. “If he hadn’t been so loose with his lips, the truth about our existence would never have been leaked to that fool Stoker, and we wouldn’t have the Palatine after us and have had to change the family name.”

Dimitri’s brows lowered in an expression Lucien recognized. “There are ways around the Palatine,” Dimitri said. “They aren’t as almighty as they like to think.”

Lucien reached out and, taking hold of his half brother by the throat, lifted him into the air. Not just off his feet, but until he was holding him over the side of the fire escape, fifty feet from the pavement below. Dimitri, panicking, grabbed at Lucien’s sleeves, looking down desperately and gasping. He’d dropped the cigar, which tumbled to the ground and exploded with a shower of red sparks when it hit the cement.

“Father used to brag that the Palatine would never catch him either,” Lucien said. “And look what they did to him. Is that what you want to happen to you?”

“I-I didn’t mean it,” Dimitri gargled. He wasn’t in the most comfortable position, dangling by his neck so many feet above the ground. “Stop fooling around, Lucien. P-put me down.”

Lucien tightened his grip. “You may actually have something to worry about, Dimitri, besides the Palatine…because just this morning I woke up with the strangest feeling that all of this-the dead girls, the attack on my life-somehow points back to…you.”

Dimitri made a gagging noise. He appeared to be saying, No. No, it’s not me…

But Lucien only grinned.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “I’m really quite sure of it, in fact. I can’t prove it…yet. But I will. And when I do, I will do worse than decapitate you, I can assure you…as well as anyone I discover who may have helped you. I’ve turned a blind eye to your instigating rebellion against me in the past because you’re my brother, Dimitri, and family is…well, family. But things have changed now. You don’t need to know how, just that I won’t do it anymore. Not when human lives are being lost and others are at stake. Do you understand me?”

Dimitri nodded. He didn’t look happy about the situation. “Of course,” he said, choking. “My prince.”

“That’s a good boy,” Lucien said.

Then abruptly he opened his hands and let his brother fall.

Dimitri, as Lucien had known he would, tumbled only a few feet before turning into something black and sleek, all wings and teeth and claws, that swooped in a graceful spiral before finally landing on the ground beside the abandoned cigar…

…then turned back into the shape of the brother he knew so well.

“Damn you, Lucien,” Dimitri said, rising to his feet while brushing off his suit. He looked furious. “You know how I hate it when you do that!”

Lucien smiled to himself. Now who had gotten soft?

He turned and knocked on the emergency exit. Marvin, ever accommodating, opened the door to let him back in. While his brother’s method of egress had been quicker, Lucien generally preferred to take the stairs.