Insatiable (36 page)

“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.

9:45
P.M
. EST, Saturday, April 17
Shrine of St. Clare
154 Sullivan Street
New York, New York

S
he reached over and snatched the phone away from Jon.

“Hello, Adam?” she said. Her fingers had gone numb. She couldn’t feel her fingers.

She couldn’t feel anything.

Except fear.

“Oh, hi, Meena, it’s your best friend’s useless, unemployed husband,” Adam said with his customary self-derision. “Leisha got tired of me hanging around the house all day doing nothing, so she said we had to go for a walk because it was such a nice afternoon, and we ended up in Central Park.”

“Hi, Adam,” Meena said. “Can I talk to—”

“Then we crossed the park and had dinner and ended up in your neighborhood,” Adam said. “So Leisha suggested we stop by and see what you were doing, since apparently you don’t answer any of your phones anymore—”

“Meena?” Leisha’s voice, strong and vibrant, rang in Meena’s ear. She’d apparently wrestled the phone away from Adam. “Hey. What is going
on
with you? I’ve left you, like, five messages. How was the concert? That boring, huh, that you can’t even call me back to tell me about
it? Anyway, can you tell Pradip to let us up? I have to pee like crazy. This kid must have taken up residency on my bladder. And don’t give me that excuse about the place being messy, because at this point, I wouldn’t care if you guys had dead bodies piled up on the floor. That’s how bad I have to go. Your buzzer must be broken or something because Pradip says you aren’t answering, but Jon just said you guys are there—”

“Leisha.” Meena took a deep breath. This was a nightmare. She was living an actual nightmare. “You guys have to leave. You guys have to turn around and get away from my building. Please don’t ask any questions. Just go.”

“What?” Leisha was understandably bewildered. “What are you talking about? Stop playing, I really have to pee. And there isn’t a Star-bucks for like two blocks. And believe me, I’m not going to make it.”

“Leisha.”

Meena’s heart was slamming into the wall of her chest. Jon, standing in front of her, was making frantic hand signals to her and whispering, “Tell them I’m running a fever. Tell them you think I have the flu and you don’t want to Leisha to get it. Don’t tell them the truth, Meen. You know what Alaric said about telling people the truth—”

But she didn’t care about preserving the Palatine’s conspiracy of silence about the existence of vampires.

All she cared about was keeping her best friend and her baby from dying.

“Remember Lucien Antonescu?” Meena asked Leisha over the phone.

“Yeah…,” Leisha said. “Mr. Perfect? What about him? Come on, Meena, make this quick.”

“He’s not so perfect,” Meena said. Her voice was trembling.
All
of her was trembling.

Was it her imagination, or were the sounds of the attack on the building dying down? Where was Abraham Holtzman, shouting orders to the friars? Why couldn’t Meena hear Sister Gertrude’s Beretta?

“He’s actually a vampire,” Meena said, ignoring Jon, who’d slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Okay, Leisha? He’s the prince of darkness. And a whole lot of vampires are staking out my apartment
right now so they can kill him. So you and Adam need to get out of there right away in case some of them see you and somehow connect you with me. Okay? So just do it. Just go.”

Leisha didn’t say anything for a minute.

Then she said, sounding more amused than offended, “Meena, honey, if you don’t want Adam and me dropping by without calling first, all you have to do is say so. You don’t have to try out any of your crazy plotlines for
Insatiable
on us like this—”

“Oh, my God, Leisha, this is not a plotline for
Insatiable
!” Meena burst out. How could this be happening to her? And why
now,
when it really mattered? “It’s real! Do you remember Rob Pace, Leish? Do you remember how I told you not to get in his car? This is like that. If you don’t want you and the baby to end up like Angie Harwood, you’ve got to do what I say.”

“But you never said anything.” Leisha sounded stunned. “You never—”

“I’ve known something was going to happen to the baby for a while, Leish,” Meena continued, “but I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to scare you. That was wrong of me. I should have told you. I’m an idiot. This is all my fault. All right? You’ve just got to believe me when I tell you now. Something bad is going to happen to the baby. You’ve got to get out of there.”

She heard her best friend breathing on the other end of the phone. For a few seconds, that was
all
Meena could hear, except for Jon, panting heavily next to her, and the traffic noises over on Houston Street. It was silent around the churchyard. The Dracul, it appeared, had given up and gone home.

All of Meena’s being, all her concentration, was focused on the soft sound of Leisha’s breathing.

Then Leisha said, “Something’s going to happen to the baby?” in the tiniest voice Meena had ever heard her normally loud, self-assured, brassy friend ever use.

“If you don’t get out of there,” Meena said, her heart wrenching in her chest, “yes.”

Then, to her infinite relief, she heard Leisha say to her husband, “Go. Let’s go.”

“What?” Meena heard Adam say, sounding confused. “What’s going on?”

“We’re leaving. Meena says we have to get out of here. Go flag down a cab.” Leisha had apparently forgotten to turn off the phone. She was bossing Adam around, the phone hanging loosely in her hand as she did it. “Don’t just stand there. Get us a cab! There’s one, get it. Get it!”

“I don’t understand,” Meena heard Adam say. “Why don’t they want us to come up?”

“Just get in the damned cab,” Leisha was saying. “I’ll tell you later.”

Meena felt herself beginning to relax. A sort of semi-hysterical bubble of laughter even rose in her throat. Jon, standing in front of her, mouthed, “What’s going on?”

“They’re leaving,” Meena said and he gave her a relieved thumbs-up signal.

It was going to be all right. Leisha was going to be all right. The baby was going to be all right. All those crazy premonitions she’d been having for so long…they were wrong.

It had been close. Too close.

But everything was going to be all right after all.

Thank God.

“Oh, hell,” Meena heard Leisha swear. “Who’s this guy?”

Meena tensed up again, pressing the phone to her ear. “What?” Jon asked, noticing her expression.

She held up a hand to silence him so she could hear. A man’s voice was speaking. It sounded strangely familiar.

“Sorry,” the voice said. “But was that apartment 11B you were just trying to call up to?”

“No,” Leisha said hastily. “Sorry.”

“Yeah,” Adam said. “Actually, it was. Why do you ask?”

“Meena Harper, right?” the voice asked in a friendly way.

Oh, God,
Meena thought in agony.
No. No, no, no, no…this can’t be happening. Get out of there. Get out of there, Leish….

“No,” Leisha said quickly. “We don’t know her.”

“Yeah, we do,” Adam said. “Leish, what’s wrong with you? Meena’s a friend of ours. My wife’s best friend, actually.”

Meena sank to the gravel-strewn rooftop, the ground having suddenly pitched out from under her.

“Meena, what is it?” Jon asked, hurrying to kneel by her side. “What’s going on?”

Wordlessly—she couldn’t have spoken if she’d wanted to; her tongue had turned to lead in her mouth—she laid the cell phone down between them and turned on the speakerphone so that he, too, could listen to their friends being killed.

“No, she’s not,” Leisha was saying loudly. “I don’t know anyone named Meena Harper.”

“I think you do,” the stranger said. He had an oddly mellifluous voice, soothing, almost…hypnotic. Was that what he was doing to get Adam to admit all these things? Hypnotizing him? “I think you know Meena Harper very well.”

“Yes,” Adam said. “Of course we do.”

“Jesus Christ,” Jon exclaimed, looking down at Meena with a stunned expression on his face. “Who
is
that guy? How is he doing that? Adam hates everyone. He thinks everyone in the whole world is a potential serial killer. Adam!” he shouted into the phone. “Adam! Don’t listen to him!”

Meena just shook her head. Tears were streaming down her face. She murmured, “It’s no use. He can’t hear you. It’s already done.”

“What do you mean?” Jon said. He looked angry. “Did you…did you
know
about this?”

“I told you,” she said, reaching up to wipe away some of her tears. “The baby…”

Jon’s face blanched. “
This
is what you saw happening?”

“No, of course not.” Meena covered her face with her hands. “How was I supposed to know it was going to have to do with
vampires
?”

“Maybe because you started sleeping with one?” Jon shouted down into the phone. “Adam! Adam!”

But Adam wasn’t listening.

“Hey…aren’t you that guy?” they could hear him saying in an unnaturally—for Adam—enthusiastic voice. “That guy from that soap opera? Gregory Bane. That’s it! Look, Leish. It’s Gregory Bane.”

A wave of nausea rolled over Meena.
Gregory Bane
.

Of course. Of course Gregory Bane was a Dracul.

“Yes,” the mellifluous voice said. “I’m Gregory Bane. Thanks for watching.”

“What are you doing?” they heard Leisha cry. “Don’t touch me. Get your hands off me. Get away from me!”

“Hey,” Adam said. He sounded dazed. “That’s my wife….”

“Adam!” Jon shouted into the phone. “Adam! Go for his eyes! His eyes, Adam!” He whipped his head around to look at Meena. “What’s wrong with him?”

“They can control people’s minds,” Meena said, dropping her hands away from her face and her head down onto her knees. Her tears made damp spots on the denim of her jeans. “It’s not Adam’s fault.”

Jon was searching his pockets.

“I’m calling Alaric,” he said. “I have his number. If he’s still there getting Jack, maybe he can stop this—”

“It’s too late,” Meena whispered. She’d begun to rock herself, clutching her knees to her chest. “It’s too late.”

There was a scuffling sound from the cell phone, shoes on pavement. Then a sound that pierced Meena’s heart:

Leisha screamed.

Then a clatter, as if the phone had fallen to the ground.

Then…nothing. Meena lifted the cell phone and pressed it to her ear, straining to hear a sound, any sound.

But she heard only the faint, familiar churn of traffic on Park Avenue.

“Hey,” Jon said. He was still going through his pockets. “Where’s your cell phone?”

Meena reached into her own pocket, keeping his phone glued to her ear, and passed her phone to her brother.

“I should have known,” Jon said tensely, pressing numbers into her keypad from a slip of paper he’d fished from the pocket of his jeans. “Who’ve you been calling, huh?
Him?
”

“Shut up, Jon,” Meena said, still pressing his phone to her ear.

“That’s just great,” Jon said sarcastically. “That’s exactly what we need right now, your boyfriend to show up and—”

Meena held up a hand to silence him. Something was happening on the other end of Adam’s phone: a scraping noise like…

The phone was being picked up.

Then beeps, like someone was pressing numbers on the keypad.

“Ow,” Meena cried, jerking the phone away from her face. “Hello? Hello? Who’s there?”

Then Adam’s voice, still sounding dazed, came on. “Meena?” He seemed confused. “Is that you? I was just trying to call you.”

Jon lowered the phone he was holding.

“Adam,” Meena shouted. “Oh my God, Adam, are you all right?”

“Dude,” Jon yelled into the phone. “Where’s your wife? Where’s Leisha?”

“They…they took her,” Adam said. His voice seemed small. And it wasn’t, Meena knew, because he was on a mobile phone.

He wasn’t crying. Not yet.

But he would be. And soon. “I tried to stop them,” he said.

“I tried, but they…they…
bit
me. I’m bleeding.” Adam seemed dumbfounded by this fact. “There’s blood everywhere.”

Meena and Jon exchanged panicked glances.

Call Alaric,
Meena mouthed to her brother.
Now.
“Adam,” Meena said into Jon’s phone, “where are you? Are you still outside our building?”

“Yeah,” Adam said vaguely, like he was surprised to discover this.

“Well, get inside,” Meena said. She tried to sound authoritative, which wasn’t easy, since she was shaking so badly. But she wanted Adam to do as she said. “Go see the doorman, Pradip. He has a first-aid kit at the desk. He’ll call 911 and help you until the EMTs arrive. Go see Pradip, Adam.”

“But I have to find my wife,” Adam said. “They took her.”

“I know they took her,” Meena said, reaching up to pull at her hair in frustration. “Do you know where they took her, Adam?”

“They told me to tell you,” Adam said slowly, speaking like a man under a spell or in profound shock. “They gave me a message for you…”

Meena glanced at her brother, who was speaking rapidly into her phone. She was relieved to see that he’d evidently managed to reach Alaric.

“What?” she asked Adam desperately. “What’s the message they gave you for me, Adam?”

“They said told me to tell you that if you ever want to see Leisha again, you have to come to the church,” Adam said.

“Church?” Meena shook her head, not understanding. “But I’m already
at
the church!”

“St. George’s,” Adam said. “They said to go to St. George’s. That’s where the coronation is going to be.”

“Coronation?” Meena stared down at the cell phone. Now she was completely confused. “Coronation of
who
?”

“The new prince of darkness.”