Insatiable
Meg Cabot
It was a miracle.
Meena hoped she was wrong about Miss Butterfly.
Professor?”
Good morning, Miss Meena. The usual?” Abdullah, the guy in…
Lucien Antonescu was furious, and when he was furious, he…
Meena was wolfing down her bagel when Paul, one of…
Alaric Wulf didn’t consider himself a snob. Far from it.
Meena stared at her computer monitor.
Lucien Antonescu did not like to fly commercially, but not,…
Meena stabbed the Up button, then looked around furtively. She…
Jon, staring at the computer screen, shrugged, took another sip…
Alaric Wulf wasn’t surprised to find that Sarah, like most…
What is this?” Emil walked into the spacious master bedroom…
Meena stared at the bright red numbers on the digital…
The sky didn’t really collapse, of course.
None of it was the slightest bit possible, of course.
It wasn’t to be borne. They’d attacked him, and in…
Alaric, just back from his morning swim, stared down at…
I already know.” Cheryl’s lower lip began to tremble. Just…
The club was dark and the techno music pounding, louder…
Meena stared at the cathedral. In the fading daylight, it…
Lucien was quite certain his cousin had lost his mind.
Prince Lucien Antonescu didn’t like being called an angel.
What are you doing here?” the blue-haired old woman asked…
Mary Lou and her husband did an admirable job of…
Alaric saw them come out of the building together—the tall,…
Meena had spent quite a lot of time in the…
Lucien knew what he was doing was wrong.
Meena woke to the smell of frying bacon.
Alaric swam a hundred laps every morning, freestyle, before breakfast.
Well, look at this,” Leisha said when Meena appeared before…
This is the latest victim,” Emil said, producing a red…
I know who you are,” Tabitha Worthington Stone said in…
Meena, after carefully scoping out the lobby of her building,…
The most amazing thing—to Meena, anyway—was that she never would…
Meena couldn’t exactly escape out the front door, since the…
Alaric Wulf was staring at her. His eyes really were…
Meena could only stare wordlessly at Alaric as he went…
Alaric knew he might have overreacted just a little. Especially…
It was easy for Lucien to find his brother, Dimitri.
Meena lay in the dark of her bedroom, blinking up…
Lucien.
Lucien stared down at her. Her face was a pale,…
Jon looked down at the pancake sizzling away in the…
Alaric didn’t quite understand how he’d come to be sitting…
Emil wasn’t certain how to console his weeping wife. He…
Meena sat at the gleaming kitchen table across from Yalena,…
Oh, my God,” Meena said after Sister Gertrude had taken…
What?” Meena cried. The single word ricocheted around the highly…
Lucien Antonescu had listened as calmly as possible to the…
Lucien?” Meena cried when someone finally picked up at the…
She reached over and snatched the phone away from Jon.
Alaric stared at the disaster area that had once been…
The subway. Of course it had to be the subway.
The force of the explosion sent Meena sprawling back against…
Lucien didn’t even glance in Meena’s direction. Instead, all his…
Meena was never exactly sure what happened after that, because…
It was crouched in the apse, its huge body and…
The tip of the dragon’s long red tail shot forward,…
Alaric was deeply unhappy.
Meena wasn’t sure what made her go back to her…
Hello, Meena,” he said.
It wasn’t until they were more than halfway there that…
9:15
A.M
. EST, Tuesday, April 13
Downtown 6 platform
East Seventy-seventh Street and Lexington Avenue
New York, New York
I
t was a miracle.
Meena hurried onto the subway car and grabbed hold of one of the gleaming silver poles, hardly daring to believe her good fortune.
It was morning rush hour, and she was running late.
She’d expected to have to cram herself into a car packed with hundreds of other commuters who were also running late.
But here she was, still panting a little from having run all the way to the station, stepping into a car that was practically empty.
Maybe,
she thought,
things are going to go my way for a change.
Meena didn’t look around. She kept her gaze fastened on the ad above her head, which declared that she could have beautiful, clear skin if she called a certain Dr. Zizmor right away.
Don’t look,
Meena told herself.
Whatever you do, don’t look, don’t look, don’t look….
With luck, she thought, she might make it all the way to her stop at Fifty-first Street without making eye contact or having any interaction at all with another human being….
It was the butterflies—life-size—that caught Meena’s attention at first. No city girl would wear white pumps with huge plastic insects on
the toes. The romance novel (Meena assumed it was a romance, based on the helpless-looking, doe-eyed young woman on the cover) the girl was reading had Cyrillic writing on it. The giant roller suitcase parked in front of her was an additional clue that the girl was from out of town.
Though none of that—including the fact that she’d pinned her long blond braids onto the top of her head,
Sound of Music
style, and had paired her cheap yellow polyester dress with purple leggings—was as dead a giveaway to her new-in-town status as what the girl did next.
“Oh, I sorry,” she said, looking up at Meena with a smile that changed her whole face and made her go from merely pretty to almost beautiful. “Please, you want sit?”
The girl moved her purse, which she’d left on the seat next to her, so that Meena could sit down beside her. No New Yorker would ever have done such a thing. Not when there were a dozen other empty seats on the train.
Meena’s heart sank.
Because now she knew two things with absolute certainty: One was that, despite the miracle of the nearly empty subway car, things definitely weren’t going to go her way that day.
The other was that the girl with the plastic butterflies on her shoes was going to be dead before the end of the week.
9:30
A.M
. EST, Tuesday, April 13
6 train
New York, New York
M
eena hoped she was wrong about Miss Butterfly.
Except that Meena was never wrong. Not about death. Giving in to the inevitable, Meena let go of the gleaming metal pole and slid into the seat the girl had offered.
“So, is this your first time visiting the city?” Meena asked Miss Butterfly, even though she already knew the answer.
The girl, still smiling, cocked her head. “Yes. New York City!” she cried enthusiastically.
Great. Her English was basically nonexistent.
Miss Butterfly had pulled out a cell phone and was scrolling through some photos on it. She stopped on one and held it up for Meena to see.
“See?” Miss Butterfly said proudly. “Boyfriend. My American boyfriend, Gerald.”
Meena looked at the grainy picture.
Oh, brother,
she thought.
Why?
Meena asked herself.
Why
today,
of all days?
She didn’t have time for this. She had a meeting. And a story to pitch. There was that head writing position, vacant now that Ned had had that very public nervous breakdown in the network dining room during spring sweeps.
Head writer was really where the money was on a show like
Insatiable
.
Meena needed money. And she was sure the pressure wouldn’t
cause
her
to have a nervous breakdown. She hadn’t had one so far, and she had plenty of things to worry about besides
Insatiable
’s ratings.
A woman’s voice came over the subway car’s loudspeakers to warn that the doors were closing. The next stop, she announced, would be Forty-second Street, Grand Central Station.
Meena, having missed her own stop, stayed where she was.
God,
Meena thought.
When will my life stop sucking?
“He looks very nice,” she lied to Miss Butterfly about Gerald. “You’re here to visit him?”
Miss Butterfly nodded energetically.
“He help me get visa,” she said. “And—” She used the cell phone to mimic taking photos of herself.
“Head shots,” Meena said. She worked in the business. She understood exactly what Miss Butterfly was talking about. And her heart sank even more. “So you want to be a model. Or an actress?”
Miss Butterfly beamed and nodded. “Yes, yes. Actress.”
Of course. Of
course
this pretty girl wanted to be an actress.
Fantastic,
Meena thought cynically. So Gerald was her manager, too. That explained a lot about the baseball cap—pulled down so low that Meena couldn’t see his eyes—and the number of gold chains around his neck in the photo.
“What’s your name?” Meena asked.
Miss Butterfly pointed at herself, as if surprised Meena cared to discuss
her
as opposed to the ultra-fantastic Gerald.
“I? I am Yalena.”
“Great,” Meena said. She opened her bag, dug around the mess inside it, and came up with a business card. She always had one handy for exactly this kind of situation, which unfortunately came up all too often…especially when Meena rode the subway. “Yalena, if you need anything—anything at all—I want you to call me. My cell phone number is on there. See it?” She pointed to the number. “You can call me anytime. My name is Meena. If things don’t work out with your boyfriend—if he turns out to be mean to you, or hurts you in any way—I want you to know you can call me. I’ll come get you, wherever you are. Day or night. And listen…,” she added. “Don’t show this card to your
boyfriend. This is a
secret
card. For emergencies. Between girlfriends. Do you understand?”
Yalena just gazed at her, smiling happily.
She didn’t understand. She didn’t understand at all that Meena’s number might literally mean the difference between life and death for her.
They never understood.
The train pulled up to Forty-second Street station. Yalena jumped up.
“Grand Central?” she asked, looking panicky.
“Yes,” Meena said. “This is Grand Central.”
“I meet my boyfriend here,” Yalena said excitedly, grabbing her huge roller bag and giving it a yank. She took Meena’s card in her other hand, beaming. “Thank you! I call.”
She meant she’d call to get together for coffee sometime.
But Meena knew Yalena would call her for something totally different. If she didn’t lose the card…or if Gerald didn’t find it and take it away. Then give her a fist sandwich.
“Remember,” Meena repeated, following her off the train. “Don’t tell your boyfriend you have that. Hide it somewhere.”
“I do,” Yalena said, and scrambled toward the nearest flight of stairs, lugging her suitcase behind her. It was so huge, and Yalena was so small, she could barely drag it. Meena, giving in to the inevitable, picked up the bottom of the girl’s incredibly heavy suitcase and helped her carry it up the steep and crowded staircase. Then she pointed Yalena in the direction the girl needed to go—the boyfriend was meeting her “under the clock” in the “big station.”
Then, with a sigh, Meena turned around and headed for a train back uptown, so she could get to Madison and Fifty-third Street, where her office building was located.
Meena knew Yalena hadn’t understood a word she’d said. Well, maybe one in five.
And even if she had, there wouldn’t have been any point in telling the girl the truth. She wouldn’t have believed Meena, anyway.
Just like there was no point in following her now, seeing the boyfriend for herself, and then saying something to him like, “I know what
you really are and what you do for a living. And I’m going to call the police.”
Because you can’t call the cops on someone for something they’re
going
to do. Any more than you can tell someone that they’re going to die.
Meena had learned this the hard way.
She sighed again. She was going to have to run now if she wanted to catch the next train uptown….
She just prayed there wouldn’t be too many people on it.