Insatiable

Chapter Sixty-one

8:00 P.M., Friday, April 23

910 Park Avenue, Apt. 11B

New York, New York

Meena wasn’t sure what made her go back to her apartment.

Everyone told her not to. Alaric, who’d been there and seen the horrific destruction for himself. Abraham Holtzman, referring to his handbook about post-traumatic stress disorder and how it would only make hers worse. Sister Gertrude, who was practical and kind about these things.

Even Jon, who’d been there, too, to see if he could salvage any of his own things.

“It’s awful,” he’d said with a shudder. “Trust me. You don’t want to know.”

But Meena did want to know. Ever since that night…

She tried not to think about that night. She didn’t want to think about it because every time she started to, the tears came, and with them the conviction that Lucien was dead.

He had to be dead.

And then came the horrible hollow sensation in the middle of her chest…

And then, just as terrible, the fear that he wasn’t dead. What if he wasn’t dead, and still loved her, and wanted them to be together?

Which was worse?

The fact that she didn’t know was what made her decide she couldn’t think about it at all. Just not at all.

Not thinking about it was easier than anyone might have imagined. Every time she started to think about it, she just shoved all thoughts, all memories, anything and everything connected to Lucien Antonescu from her mind and thought firmly about something else.

She kept herself so busy at St. Clare’s that she didn’t really have time to think about Lucien. There were the dishes to do after every meal, the pots and pans and casserole dishes piled high in the in the rectory kitchen sink. Cleaning them was Meena’s penance for the burns everyone had sustained because of her. She scoured them until they gleamed, sometimes late into the night, just her, alone in the kitchen, with the sponge and her rubber gloves and the hot soapy water.

And the darkness beyond the window over the sink.

And the glowing red eyes she was convinced she could see burning through that darkness, watching her every move.

She tried not to think about the eyes, and if they were really there, or if she was just imagining them.

There was the soup kitchen to help run, the donations to the thrift shop to help sort through. (The thrift shop was where she’d found her new black dress, among many other additions to her wardrobe. She understood that the donations were meant to be sold in the store. But helping herself to one or two things as she sorted didn’t seem like the biggest crime. Everything she owned had been either destroyed by the Dracul or soaked in Alaric Wulf’s blood.)

But maybe she’d kept herself a little too busy not thinking about Lucien Antonescu (those eyes, burning through the darkness outside the kitchen windows) and what had happened that night.

Because until Alaric’s speech about how wrong it was for people like them to shut themselves off from the scary things in the world instead of fighting them-and he was right, she knew: she absolutely believed that the two of them were alike, he with his sword, and she with her ability to predict danger and death-Meena had thought she’d been doing the right thing by refusing to let herself think about Lucien.

But after Alaric’s eye-opening speech, she realized this was wrong.

She had a moral obligation not only to think about Lucien but to face him, and what he’d done to her and to her life.

Which was destroy it.

If he was even alive, of course. She still didn’t know whether or not he was (except…those eyes). No one seemed to be able to tell her. Abraham would say only that after that last blast of white-hot fire in the church-which had knocked him and everyone else unconscious for a few seconds-he woke to find the prince gone.

“Gone?” Meena had asked, finding it hard to believe that a thirty-ton, seventy-foot red-winged dragon could simply disappear into thin air, the way Emil and Mary Lou Antonescu had.

“Gone,” Abraham had replied with a nod.

Lucien hadn’t flown off. The cathedral’s roof, it was true, had burned down with the rest of the building, but no one had reported seeing any winged dragons taking flight across Manhattan that night. (The NYPD had put what happened at St. George’s down to teen arsonists, thanks in large part to the vague statements Meena and Alaric had given them. But of course, no teen arsonists had been arrested.)

So where was he?

Maybe, Meena thought as she approached her building that rainy evening after her visit to Alaric Wulf’s hospital room, her keys pressed firmly in her hand, he had simply self-imploded. That last explosion of white-hot fire, from which he had tried so assiduously to protect her, had been Lucien spontaneously combusting.

At least this way, she thought as the automatic doors to her building opened in front of her, she didn’t have to worry anymore about his still loving her. And asking her, as Alaric had suggested back in his hospital room, to go away with him.

And then killing her and making her one of his kind so that they could be together forever.

“Miss Harper!” Pradip cried when he saw her. “You’re back!”

“Yes,” she said. She tried to summon a smile for her favorite doorman, but it wasn’t easy, all things considered. “But I’m just stopping by. I won’t be staying. I’m selling.”

Pradip’s face fell. “You, too? The Antonescus just put their place on the market.” He looked glum. “You heard? They’re gone already. Mr. Antonescu’s business took them to Asia. Or was it India?”

Meena wasn’t exactly surprised to hear this. Emil and Mary Lou might have fought on their side during the vampire war. But she didn’t exactly sense that this was going to take them off the Palatine Guard’s most-wanted list.

“That’s too bad,” she said. Then she brightened. “Maybe some rich rock star will buy my apartment and theirs and knock the wall down between them, and then have the whole eleventh floor.”

Pradip just stared at her. She’d been trying to cheer them both up-having a rich rock star in the building would be a good thing.

And she could use the extra cash from the apartment sale to pay back what she owed David.

But Pradip didn’t seem to find the idea as appealing as she did.

“I don’t think the co-op board would approve a rock star,” he told her.

Why not? Meena wanted to ask. They’d approved a couple of vampires. Instead, she said, “You’re probably right. Well, okay. I’m going up.”

“Good night, Miss Harper,” Pradip said.

Meena managed a smile for him, then went to the elevator.

For the first time in ages, she took the ride to the eleventh floor alone. Mary Lou didn’t stop the doors just as they closed to snag a ride with her, as she always had in the past. No gushing conversation about some guy from Emil’s office who’d be just perfect for her. No suggestions as to how Meena might improve the plotlines of Insatiable…which was sad, since, with Fran, Stan, and Shoshona all missing-Paul had left a message on her cell phone that everyone was presuming they, along with Stefan Dominic, had been in an accident on the way to the Metzenbaums’ Hamptons retreat and that it was only a matter of time until their vehicle was recovered, with their bodies inside it-Meena was probably in line for that promotion to head writer she’d been wanting forever.

Why not? With Shoshona gone, there was no record of her “firing.” Who knew what was going to happen to ABN (and CDI) now that the CEO of its new owner was missing as well?

Then again…who cared?

All the tabloids were abuzz about the fact that Lust star Gregory Bane was missing, too. Half the women in America were in mourning.

Foul play was going to be suspected some time soon, Meena supposed.

Except that no bodies were ever going to turn up.

When the elevator reached the eleventh floor, Meena stepped out and looked around, beginning to feel the first tiny tingles of fear. Why had she thought this was such a good idea, again?

Sure, the Dracul were all supposed to be dead.

The ones who lived in Manhattan, anyway.

But what if a few of them who lived somewhere else had heard about what had happened at St. George’s and had decided to look her up to get revenge? Or had stopped by for a taste of her blood, which by now vampires all over the world must have heard rumors about.

Stop, she told herself. Alaric was right. You can’t spend the rest of your life in a windowless room, Meen.

She glanced around the hallway. Everything looked all right…normal, even.

The door to her apartment seemed okay, too. She swallowed, then walked up to it and inserted the key.

Whatever lay behind it, she told herself, she could take it. She’d been thrown across a church by a dragon, for God’s sake. She’d staked not one but two vampires, one of whom had actually played a vampire on TV.

She could handle whatever lay in store for her in Apt. 11B. She swung open the door, then reached for the light switch…

…and gasped.

She’d expected it to be bad.

But she hadn’t expected this.

Someone had already come through and…cleaned her apartment. Not just cleaned it but converted it…into a different place entirely. The walls had been completely scraped of the Dracul graffiti and repainted a crisp eggshell white. The broken furniture and spoiled electronics had been carted away. Her sodden books, her shredded clothes, her broken dishes…all of that was gone, too.

All new stainless steel appliances had been installed in the kitchen. Her parquet floors had been sanded and gleamed with fresh polish. Even the fireplace’s flues finally opened, though they never had before.

Her apartment looked better than it had at any time when she had ever lived there. It looked better than the day she and David had moved in.

Who had done all this?

Not Jon. She knew that. He had been at Leisha and Adam’s all week, working on the baby’s room, trying to get it done before Leisha and the baby came home from the hospital.

Not Alaric, obviously. How could he have done this while lying in bed with one leg in traction?

And Abraham Holtzman and Father Bernard and the others were missing the first layer of skin off their faces and hands.

Besides which, where would they have gotten the money?

There was only one other explanation.

And even as Meena was thinking to herself that it was impossible-impossible, because he was dead, he had to be dead (except for the fact that she could swear she felt someone’s gaze on her every night through the rectory kitchen window as she did the dishes); she had almost convinced herself she wanted him to be dead-she turned around, and there he was, coming in from the rain through the balcony door.