Insatiable (39 page)

10:30
P.M
. EST, Saturday, April 17
St. George’s Cathedral
180 East Seventy-eighth Street
New York, New York

T
he force of the explosion sent Meena sprawling back against the sidewalk where she’d first lain with Lucien. It also sent razor wire and pieces of plywood flying. Meena flung up her arms to protect her eyes. Around her, car alarms went off.

Then, just as suddenly, they were silenced.

When she put her arms down and opened her eyes, it was just in time to catch one particularly huge chunk of blue painted plywood landing exactly where the young couple from the subway would have been…if she hadn’t scared them from getting off the train.

Instead, the wood landed harmlessly on the sidewalk with a solid clunk.

“What the hell was
that
?” she heard Adam ask from the across the street.

Rising painfully to her scraped hands and knees, Meena found herself looking at the doors to the church, which had now been thrown open. A tall man who looked not unlike Lucien, except that he was a little shorter and a little heavier and wore a light gray suit with a black shirt and tie—which Meena couldn’t imagine Lucien doing—stepped through the cloud of dust left behind by the explosion and peered down at her, a pleased expression on his face.

“Meena Harper, I presume?” he said. Unlike his brother, there wasn’t a trace of anything European in his accent.

Meena nodded. “That’s me,” she said, coughing a little from all the dust. “Are you Dimitri?”

“I am,” he said. He offered her his hand to help her up. Meena, her heart hammering, took it, because what else was she going to do? She had come there for a reason, and that was to free her friend and end this.

The time had come to do both.

“Sorry about that,” he said apologetically. “Oh, look at your poor coat. Here, let me help you.” He brushed dust and bits of plywood off the suede of her jacket. “You know, you’re nothing like I expected.”

“I get that a lot.” she asked, still coughing. “Shorter?”

“Younger,” he said. His gaze on her face was every bit as intense as his brother’s had ever been. But unlike Lucien’s, Dimitri’s brown eyes weren’t sad. No, they didn’t have that kind of depth. They were as shallow as
Insatiable
’s plotlines. “But pretty!” he added gallantly. “Well, I expected that, to be honest. My brother never could resist a pretty face.”

“Thanks,” Meena said sarcastically as she picked her way across the debris.

She noticed that they weren’t alone. Glowing, red-eyed gazes peered out at them from the shadows…gazes belonging, she knew, to the Dracul, Dimitri’s father’s faithful followers. She caught glimpses of them, expecting to see lean, leather-jacketed men who all resembled Gregory Bane and girls who looked like Taylor Mackenzie, in low-rise jeans and halter tops.

And she did spy Gregory Bane, leering at her by Dimitri’s side.

But the majority of the creatures she saw peering at her looked like ordinary people, no different than anyone she would see riding the subway or standing in line at Abdullah’s coffee cart in the morning, neither particularly thin or fat, young or old, fashionable or unfashionable.

And maybe that, Meena thought, her heart pounding harder than ever, was what scared her most of all.

The one thing they did have in common was that they all looked …hungry.

But hungry, Meena wondered, for
what,
exactly?

Dimitri was leading her into the church. Meena had never been
inside St. George’s before. She knew it was fairly large and had always heard it was pretty. She had seen from the outside that it had a lot of stained glass windows. The largest of them hung above the front doors to the church and was supposed to depict St. George mounted on his steed, slaying a serpentlike dragon.

But she had never even been able to tell the glass was stained because it was so badly in need of cleaning. It just looked black. Hardly any light whatsoever got into the church, even from the safety lamps attached to the spires. The only light to see by was thrown by hundreds of candles that had been lit by the Dracul…and these weren’t votive candles, either. They were thick black candles that had been placed, wax dripping, over every available flat surface in the church, including the pews, which looked like they’d been kicked over.

The walls of the church hadn’t fared any better. They’d met with the wrong end of a few dozen cans of spray paint. There were dragon symbols sprayed everywhere, including across the stained glass windows. Meena, looking up at the church’s thirty-foot ceiling, saw that the choir loft had been equally decimated and was also strewn with graffiti. “Wow,” she said. “You’ve really done wonders with the place. Who’s your decorator?”

She heard a tinkly laugh and then an all-too-familiar female voice behind her said, “Me. I am.”

Meena whirled around, her heart exploding in her chest.

“Hey,” Shoshona said with a great big smile. “Surprise!”

Meena felt as if she’d been run over by a steamroller.

Then again, she thought, why was she so surprised? She’d always known something was going to kill Shoshona at the gym.

Why shouldn’t it have been a vampire? Specifically, Dimitri Antonescu’s son, Stefan, who’d only this morning been ramming a gun into Meena’s ribs.

Still, Meena couldn’t stop herself from staring. Shoshona looked fantastic. Her hair had never been shinier…or straighter.

I guess you don’t need a flat-iron when you’re dead,
Meena thought.

“Yeah,” Shoshona said, strolling up to her. “It’s me. Hey…thanks for the bag.”

Meena lowered her gaze and saw that Shoshona was holding a Marc Jacobs jewel-encrusted dragon tote.

In ruby.

Meena’s
ruby red Marc Jacobs jewel-encrusted dragon tote, to be exact. The one Lucien had given her.

Meena didn’t know what to say. A thousand different retorts popped into her head.

But she was too stunned to say any of them out loud.

“By the way,” Shoshona said, leaning in close to lay a long, manicured fingernail in the opening of Meena’s white-collared shirt, just where her pulse was leaping in her throat. “Guess who’s just been appointed the new cochairs of entertainment at Affiliated Broadcast Network?”

Shoshona pointed over her shoulder at a middle-aged couple in business attire, who waved enthusiastically in Meena’s direction.

Shoshona’s aunt and uncle.

Meena’s heart sank. Not Fran and Stan, too.

Everyone Meena knew really
was
turning out to be a vampire.

But cochairs of entertainment at ABN? How was that even
possible
? All they’d ever done was create a
soap opera
.

“Oh,” Shoshona said, tossing her long black silky hair. “And guess who they made president of programming at the network?” She pointed proudly at herself. “And as my first official duty in that capacity, I’m firing you, Meena. Sorry about that.”

“
What?
” Meena cried. She knew she had a few more important things in her life to worry about than her job.

But her job was, in a way, her life. “What can I say?” Shoshona asked with a shrug. “We don’t really appreciate people who are prejudiced against our species. Nor do we need them making disparaging remarks about our so-called misogynistic tendencies.”

“Your
species
?” Meena felt a spurt of white-hot anger dart through her. “Your
species
? Let me tell you something about your species and what I’ve seen you do to women—”

“That’s enough, Shoshona,” Dimitri said in the tone of a disapproving father as he reached out to lay a hand on Meena’s shoulder and steer
her away from the other girl. “I have better uses for Miss Harper’s time now, I think. For instance…”

That’s when Meena finally saw the apse at the front of the church. The sanctuary, debased with graffiti. The altar, up on the dais, broken into pieces. A statue of St. George, pushed to the floor and missing its head.

And Leisha, sitting in the only pew that had been left upright, with her hands tied in front of her and resting in her lap.

“Leish,” Meena cried, relief rushing over her. She jerked her shoulder out from beneath Dimitri’s grip and raced to her friend’s side. “Are you all right?” Meena asked, kneeling down beside her. “Did they hurt you?”

Leisha shook her head. Her cheeks were tear-stained, her eye makeup smudged. But otherwise, she looked fine.

“I just want,” she whispered to Meena, “to get the hell out of here. I hate these people. They’re freaks. That girl, Shoshona, from your office? You always told me she was a total bitch, but I never knew how
much
of a bitch until tonight. And I still really have to pee.”

Meena choked back a sob.
Leisha. Oh, Leisha.

“Okay,” Meena said. She reached for the cords that held Leisha’s wrists and began untying them. “We’ll get you out of here.”

“What are they?” Leisha asked, eyeing Dimitri suspiciously over the top of Meena’s head. “Like meth heads or something? You know that Gregory Bane guy from
Lust
bit Adam, don’t you? He
bit
him.”

Leisha, with her usual common sense, had apparently chosen to ignore the explanation Meena had given her over the phone about what was going on and come up with her own, one that she could process and understand.

“Yes,” Meena said. “Yes, they’re meth heads.” She dropped her head to the knot that was holding her friend’s hands tied together, trying to bite it apart with her teeth. She couldn’t get it undone otherwise.

“Hey,” she said finally, raising her head, realizing the futility of what she was doing. “Could someone give me a hand here and help me untie her? I fulfilled my part of the bargain. I’m here. You said you’d let her go if I showed up. So could someone help me?”

She glanced up at Dimitri, only to find him grinning down at her with an expression on his face that she didn’t like at all.

“Oh,” he said, “I can see why my brother likes you. You’re so…trusting.”

On the word
trusting,
he reached down, grabbed her by the arm, and yanked her back up to her feet, almost in a single motion. The gesture was so violent and jarring, Meena saw stars for a second or two.

“But I think we’re going to keep your little friend here for a while longer,” he said to her. “Because having her around will make you more accommodating to my needs. And I still need a few things from you, some of which I’d like to hurry up and get to before my brother comes along and tries to spoil things, which he’s always had an unfortunate tendency to do.”

Dimitri hauled her, none too gently, into the sanctuary and up onto the dais, beside the altar. Meena did not like the way the Dracul—including Shoshona and her aunt and uncle—had gathered around, as if eager for a show that was about to start.

Nor did she like what she suddenly recognized sitting on the still upright part of the altar.

It was a bowl from Meena’s own apartment. The large antique one made of pewter her great-aunt Wilhelmina had left her and that Meena never used because she was worried about lead poisoning.

First the bag Lucien had given her. Then her job. Now her great-aunt’s bowl. What
else
were the Dracul going to take from her?

“I understand you possess quite the power to predict the future, Meena Harper,” Dimitri said in his deep voice.

Suddenly, Meena had a very bad feeling about what was about to happen.

Especially because of the way all of the Dracul were eyeing the holes Lucien had already put in her neck—which were obvious to everyone because Meena had given Alaric the scarf she’d been wearing to cover them—and then glancing down expectantly toward the large silver-colored bowl. The hungry look in their eyes seemed to increase by a hundredfold.

Dimitri was right about one thing: Meena had always been good at predicting the future.
Other people’s futures.

Never her own.

Until now.

Meena looked up at Dimitri. He was staring down at her with those flat brown eyes, in which she saw more than just a hint of blood red.

Then she glanced up at the enormous dragon symbol someone had spray-painted behind the altar.

Ever since I left you this morning,
Lucien had said to her last night in her bedroom,
I’ve had the oddest sensation that I know how almost every human I’ve come into contact with is…is going to die…. I’ve never, ever experienced anything like this. Not until…well, being with you.

Now, Meena knew exactly what the bowl was for…and why Dimitri had been so intent on getting her to come up to St. George’s. It wasn’t just because he wanted to lure his brother there, to trap and kill him.

Although certainly that would be an added bonus.

No, Dimitri wanted her for something else.

He wanted her blood, for a little precoronation precognition cocktail.

Meena flung a hand to her mouth to avoid letting out a semi-hysterical scream.

And then, before she had a chance to think twice about what she was doing, she reached into her back pocket for Alaric’s stake with one hand, then used the other hand to stabilize herself on the altar while she launched her right foot, as hard as she could, into Dimitri’s face.

Too bad she was only wearing flats and not her platform boots. Still, she seemed to manage to catch him off guard, since he bent at the waist while crying out in pain, clutching his face.

There was a collective gasp from the Dracul.

Yes! She’d done it! She’d caught a vampire off guard!

She came at him with the stake while she had the advantage, determined to plunge it into his heart and end this, all of it, once and for all, forever. Save herself and her brother and her friends.

This was for Yalena and for Leisha and for what they’d done to her apartment and for whatever they intended to do to Cheryl and Taylor and everyone else at
Insatiable
….

Except that Dimitri, still bent over in pain, shot out a lightning-fast hand and seized her wrist—the one holding the stake—in a grip that was like iron.