Insatiable

Chapter Fifty-one

9:15 P.M. EST, Saturday, April 17

Shrine of St. Clare

154 Sullivan Street

New York, New York

Lucien?” Meena cried when someone finally picked up at the other end. “Is that you?”

She had to stick a finger in her other ear in order to hear him.

That was because of all the screaming coming from the ground below her.

She supposed it was her own fault, though: she’d just lobbed a water balloon filled with holy water at a pack of vampires who’d been trying to climb the churchyard fence in order to get into the rectory.

“Meena,” he said. “Are you all right?”

“Oh,” she said. “I’m fine. But I’m sorry. I can barely hear you. Where are you? This is a horrible connection.”

“No, I’m sorry,” Lucien said. He sounded impossibly far away. “I’m not in a very good location for cell phone reception right now. Let me just…there. Can you hear me now?”

“Oh,” Meena said. A wave of warmth washed over her at the sound of his voice. Suddenly, she felt as if everything was going to be okay.

Which was ridiculous, because one man couldn’t possibly fix all the things that had gone wrong in the past few hours.

Even Lucien, who was no ordinary man.

“That’s much better,” she said. “You sounded like you were in some kind of tunnel before. So you’re not at the apartment?”

“No,” Lucien said. “Meena, where are you? Is that…screaming?”

“Oh,” Meena said. She glanced down at the vampires beyond the churchyard fence, feeling a twinge of fear…and loathing.

Then she instantly felt guilty about the loathing. She couldn’t quite believe how quickly she’d gone from feeling pity for these creatures who couldn’t help what they were, and insisting there were surely some redeeming qualities in them, just as there were in Lucien, to callously hurling water balloons filled with a liquid that was as corrosive to them as battery acid from the rectory rooftop.

What was happening to her? What was she turning into?

She was just as much a monster as they were.

Then again, she supposed being nearly murdered tended to bring out the monster in everyone.

“Never mind about that,” she said to Lucien. “They’ll be all right again in a few minutes.” Her brother had been right about vampiric healing powers. They were amazing. Nothing killed these things. Well, except a stake to the heart, apparently, but Meena, up on the rectory roof, hadn’t been close enough to one to test this theory. Yet.

“Meena.” Lucien’s deep voice sounded like heaven to her ears. Especially when he said her name like that, so filled with pure, masculine love…and longing. “What are you talking about? Who’ll be all right?”

“No one,” she said. She didn’t want to spoil things by having to admit that she’d just spent the past quarter of an hour dousing his kind with holy water so she could get a few minutes alone to call him. “It’s good to hear your voice.”

“It’s good to hear you, too,” he said. “You can’t know what I’ve been going through, not knowing where you’ve been all this time. I’ve been torturing myself, thinking of all the things that might have happened to you and how I haven’t been there to protect you.”

“Oh,” Meena said, flattening a hand to her chest. Tears filled her eyes. “Lucien, you have to stop saying that kind of stuff. You know we can’t be together. It’s impossible.”

“You keep saying it’s impossible,” Lucien said. “But if there’s anything I’ve learned in my five centuries on earth, Meena, it’s that nothing is impossible. Especially to a man as much in love as I am with you.”

A hand appeared over the edge of the rooftop beside Meena’s foot-a vampire, trying to claw his way up the building toward her. Stifling a startled gasp, Meena pulled a squirt gun from the back pocket of her jeans, aimed, and launched a steady stream of holy water at him. He shrieked as his fingers caught fire, lost his footing, and fell fifty feet to the pavement below. Horrified, Meena turned away.

“Meena,” Lucien said. “What was that?”

“That? Oh, nothing. Look, I want you to know I did get your messages. I would have called sooner, but I had to steal my phone back from my brother. He doesn’t know I have it-”

As if right on cue, she heard her brother shouting from a second-story window below, “You want a piece of this? You want a piece of this? Well, then come and get it, you sick vampire pusswad!” This was followed by a small explosion.

“Meena,” Lucien said. There was renewed urgency in his tone. He’d definitely, she realized, heard the explosion. “Where are you?”

“Oh,” she said, “it doesn’t matter.”

A part of her just wanted to keep hearing him tell her how much he loved and missed her. Which was wrong, because she knew he was still going to kill Jon and Alaric.

“It does matter.” He insisted. “Meena, you’ve got to listen to me. I think you’re in serious danger.”

“Really?” She tried to ignore the smell of smoke still drifting up from the rectory kitchen. Father Bernard had already called the fire department and assured them (in case any of St. Clare’s neighbors happened to dial 911, he didn’t want to worry about the NYFD being attacked by vampires) that the only trouble was the “broken water pipe” that had caused them to cancel evening mass in the first place. The smoke? Oh, the smoke was just from a batch of Sister Gertrude’s cookies that had been left in the oven too long.

“It’s funny,” Meena said over the phone, “because I think you’re in very grave danger.”

“I’m serious, Meena,” Lucien said. She could hear him moving on the other end of the line. It sounded, oddly enough, like he was pouring something. “I’d prefer to have this discussion in person, but with things the way they are right now…well, I’m just going to say it: let’s go away together.”

“What? You mean like…on a trip?”

“Yes,” he said with an odd hesitancy. “Exactly. Like on a trip. Well, maybe a bit longer than the average trip. And I know what you’re going to say about my killing your brother and the guard. But I won’t be able to do that if we’re nowhere near them, will I?”

“No.” Meena had to agree. “That’s true.”

“And I know how you feel about your job. But surely you have some vacation time coming to you.”

“Well,” Meena said. She chewed her lower lip, thinking about Stefan Dominic, still tied up in the basement. The Dracul had already managed to infiltrate where she worked and, according to Alaric, where she lived, as well. Taking a vacation until things died down a little wouldn’t be such a bad idea. “A couple weeks off might not hurt, now that I think about it…”

“Well,” he said, sounding surprised. And a lot more cheerful. “That was easy. I thought you’d be more resistant to the idea, to be honest. Can you leave now, tonight, Meena? I can be uptown in a few minutes. Do you think you can get away from the Palatine Guard? And meet me out on your little balcony? You needn’t be afraid. I’ll help you get across, onto Emil’s terrace. Then we can leave from there.”

He sounded so sure of himself. That was one of the things she loved about him. He always seemed to know exactly what he was doing, and on the few occasions when he didn’t, well, that vulnerability only made her love him all the more fiercely.

“Um,” she said, “meeting you on my balcony might be a bit of a problem, actually, Lucien.”

“Why?”

She hadn’t wanted to tell him this way. But now she had no choice. “Well, because right now I’m actually on the roof of the rectory of the Shrine of St. Clare on Sullivan Street in downtown Manhattan, just off Houston,” she said into the phone. “We’re not totally sure what’s going on, but it seems like your brother got Stefan Dominic-the guy we hired to play the vampire on Insatiable, only it turns out he really is a vampire-to kidnap me-”

“Did he hurt you?” Lucien demanded in a voice as hard as stone.

“What?” Meena asked. “No. Well, I mean, he tried. He had a gun. But Alaric stopped him. Now we’re keeping him hostage here and currently experiencing just a little bit of difficulty because a few dozen Dracul really seem to want to come inside and kill us or something-”

“What?”

She winced and had to hold the phone away from her face.

That’s how loudly he’d erupted into her ear.

“Lucien,” she said when the volume of what she supposed was his swearing-it was in Romanian, so she couldn’t understand a word of it-got back to a decibel level she could bear, “I knew you were going to freak out like this, which is why I didn’t-”

“Meena,” he thundered. She had to hold the phone away from her face again. “Stay exactly where you are. I’ll be right there to get you.”

“No,” she yelled into the phone before he could hang up. “Think about it, Lucien. It’s a trap. Alaric says they’ll be waiting for you at the apartment, too.” Which was why she wasn’t going to say a word to him about Jack Bauer. She didn’t need two men risking their lives over her dog. “It’s all just a trap to lure you out so your brother can kill you-”

“Oh, Alaric says that, does he?” Lucien roared. “Well, I don’t care what Alaric says. Do you know who Stefan Dominic is, Meena? He’s my nephew. He’s Dimitri’s son.”

“Oh,” Meena said, taken aback. “So…you’re saying you think we should let him go?”

“I’m saying I’m coming down there to get you, and you and I are leaving-”

“You mean running away,” she said quietly. “Don’t you?”

Lucien’s voice was like ice. “We’re not running away, Meena,” he said. “I’m going to keep you safe. That is my first-my only-priority.”

“Well,” she said, lifting a hand and running it raggedly through her hair. Her voice caught on a sob she hadn’t been expecting.

She thought she’d been doing a pretty good job of keeping it together. At least for the past half hour or so.

But now everything was starting to unravel again.

“What about Jon, Lucien?” she asked, her voice breaking. “Because he’s here, too. What if we leave, and then your brother captures him? Do you think I could live with myself if something happened to my brother? Are you going to protect Jon, Lucien, for the rest of his life, too? Because I don’t think you are. In fact,” she said, and now her voice rose a little hysterically, “I still think you’re going to kill him, and Alaric, too.”

“Meena.” Lucien sounded calm now. The storm was over. He seemed to be choosing his words with deliberate care, the way a jeweler would choose pearls to string a necklace. “I’m not going to kill anyone. Except my own brother. Not to mention my nephew. Then Jon will be safe. And so will you.”

She desperately wanted to believe him. “Do you really think so?” she asked.

“Of course I do, Meena,” he said. “All of this will be over very soon. Now, start thinking about where you want to go. I’ve always dreamed about having a place in Thailand, myself.”

“Thailand,” Meena said. She liked the sound of the word on his lips. “I’ve never been to Thailand.”

“Neither have I,” Lucien said. “We can discover it together.”

Even as she was dreaming of sharing a thatched hut on the beach with Lucien-on stilts, like she always saw in magazines-she heard a scuttling sound. Whirling around, she saw a bat landing on the rooftop just a few feet away from her and beginning to transmogrify into its vampire host.

“Oh, no,” she said with a groan, her heart booming in her chest. She raced toward it, giving the bat the most vicious kick she could, sending it shrieking off the roof…

…just as it changed into a young woman wearing jeans and a leather jacket. The girl screamed as she tumbled through the air, not changing back into a bat quickly enough to save her from falling onto the spikes of the churchyard fence below, which pierced her body in several places.

But since the spikes weren’t made of wood, she just lay there, impaled and twitching, while her friends tried to pull her off.

Meena, watching all this transpire over the side of the roof, made a horrified face and looked away.

“I really hope you’re right, Lucien,” she said, lifting the phone back to her ear. “About all of this being over soon. Because I’m not sure how much more I can take.”

There was no response.

“Lucien?” she said. She held the phone away from her face, looking down at the screen. She still had service.

Lucien, she realized, had hung up on her.

Had she said the wrong thing?

Meena jumped as her phone vibrated in her hand. He was calling back.

“Lucien?” she cried.

“Who?” A familiar voice filled her ear.

“Oh,” Meena said, disappointed. “Hi, Paul. Look, I really can’t talk right now.”

“Whatever,” Paul said. “Sorry to interrupt your Saturday-night mini-Butterfinger orgy. I just wanted to see if you’d gotten Shoshona’s e-mail.”

“What e-mail?” Meena asked. She needed to get downstairs to warn everyone. She understood now why the Dracul were trying so hard to get inside the rectory. It wasn’t just her they wanted.

It was Dimitri Antonescu’s son.

“We’ve been sold,” Paul said.

Meena nearly dropped her phone. “What? What do you mean? The show?” But that made no sense. Shows couldn’t be sold. Could they?

“Not the show,” Paul said. “The network. Consumer Dynamics and everything it owns. This morning. To something called TransCarta.”

“I never heard of it,” Meena said.

“Me neither,” Paul said. “I had to Google it. It’s a private equities firm.”

Meena stood there clutching her BlackBerry to her face. She really didn’t have time to talk, like she’d told him. And yet…“But…what does this mean?”

Fired. Like everything else, she’d now lost her job, too. “Shoshona assures everyone in her e-mail that it doesn’t mean anything, that everything will go on as normal, that TransCarta supports ABN and Insatiable wholeheartedly and looks forward to a profitable future working with us.”

“Shoshona said all this?” Meena asked incredulously. Shoshona could hardly even string together a lunch order.

“I know,” Paul said. “But Fran and Stan cosigned. And here’s the weird thing: Shoshona sent the e-mail an hour before any of this was announced on CNN.”

“So then how did she even know about it?” Meena wondered aloud.

It was right then that the hatch that led to the rooftop was thrown suddenly open, letting out a strip of brilliant yellow light from the rectory’s third floor.

“What are you doing up here?” her brother, Jon, demanded. He climbed up onto the roof, dragging a crossbow after him. “What happened to my holy water brigade? It’s like it suddenly dried up or something.”

“Sorry,” Meena said, hanging up on Paul and slipping her cell phone surreptitiously back into the pocket of her suede jacket. “I got distracted. They’re starting to dive-bomb me.” She looked up, scanning the night sky for winged assassins, but everything seemed quiet…for the moment. “Looks like they’ve backed off for now.”

“Yeah, that’s why I’m here. Abraham thinks they’re repositioning, and that you better come back down. It’s probably not all that safe up here anymore anyway.”

“Okay,” Meena said. “Look, I need to tell Abraham something. That Stefan guy? He’s-”

Jon’s cell phone went off.

“Who the hell could that be?” He fished the phone out of his pocket. “Oh, my God. It’s Weinberg.” To Meena’s astonishment, her brother actually answered the call. “Adam,” Jon crowed. “How the hell are you?”

Meena shook her head. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen Jon in such a good mood. Maybe back when he’d been employed.

It was nice to know someone, at least, was enjoying himself on this, the worst night of her entire life.

Then Meena felt her pocket vibrate. What was going on? Someone was texting her? Now?

Casting a furtive glance at her brother-he was still having his animated conversation with Leisha’s husband-Meena pulled her phone out of her pocket and glanced at the text that had just been left for her.

It was from Lucien.

Stay where you are, he’d written. I’m coming for you.

That was when, over in the distance, on the east side, there was the sound of an extremely large explosion.

“Jesus Christ,” Jon said, glancing up. “What the hell was that?”

“I don’t know,” Meena said, looking in the direction from which the sound had come. “That was too loud to be a car.”

“It sounded like a whole freaking building exploding,” Jon said. “Oh, man, look at that.”

He pointed at a bright orange glow that had begun to fill the sky in the east where the sun would have been, if it had been morning. Meena, looking at it, could think of only one thing.

Lucien. Lucien had something to do with that.

She was as sure of it as she was that she was standing there.

The pouring sound she’d heard in the background when she’d been speaking to him. Had that been gasoline?

It didn’t matter.

This vampire war had just been taken to a whole new level.

“Definitely a building,” Jon was saying. “Some insurance company has gotta be bumming right now.” To Adam, who was still on the phone, he said, “What? Yeah, sorry, no, something on TV. Yeah, Meena and I are just chilling in the apartment right now.” He made a comical face at Meena. “We’re gonna maybe order in some Chinese food… Do we wanna have a drink? Uh, naw, I think we’re just gonna take it easy tonight, right, Meen?”

“Uh, yeah,” Meena said, raising her voice so Leisha could hear her if she was there on the phone with her husband. “We’re just going to stay home and chill.”

“Yeah,” Jon said. “So, we’ll see you guys…” All at once, his face went the color of ash. “Oh. You are?” he asked into the phone.

Meena stared at him. “What?” Suddenly, all her concerns about Leisha and her unborn baby came flooding back, full force. “What’s wrong?”

“They’re in front of your place,” Jon said to her, holding the phone away from his face. He looked as if he were going to be sick. “Nine ten Park. They want to know if they can come up.”

Meena felt as if the roof had suddenly shifted a little under her feet. And not because vampires were making another assault.

No, she thought. Not Leisha and the baby. Not this way.

Except…of course. Of course it was going to be Leisha and the baby.

And of course it was going to happen this way.

And she’d always known it was going to.

She’d just refused to see it, because it was too horrible even to contemplate.

Until now, when it was staring her straight in the face.