Insatiable (8 page)

4:00
A.M
. EST, Wednesday, April 14
St. George’s Cathedral
180 East Seventy-eighth Street
New York, New York

T
he sky didn’t really collapse, of course.

It only seemed that way, because a huge section of it came swooping down at Meena from one of the spires of the cathedral.

She screamed and ducked, covering Jack Bauer with her body and arms, trying to protect them both from what looked like an ink-dark swath of material that came hurtling down at her head.

Except that she could see glimpses of the misty yellow glare from the street and security lights between the objects that were propelling themselves toward her at such an unbelievably fast speed.

Which was when Meena realized this wasn’t a single solid piece of St. George’s Cathedral, crumbling at last.

It was, unbelievably, bats. Hundreds, maybe thousands of black, shrieking bats, all headed straight at her, their pink mouths open, razor-sharp claws extended, beady yellow eyes bulging as they swept down from the cathedral’s spires, blocking out most of the night sky and available lamplight with their foot-wide wingspan, their only target Meena Harper and her Pomeranian-chow mix.

At first Meena froze. She wasn’t paralyzed with fear so much as with shock. All she could think was,
this
was how she was going to die? Being chewed to death by rats with wings?

Meena had been envisioning other people’s deaths for so long, it had never occurred to her that she might one day be experiencing her own.

And now, faced by her own imminent destruction, all she was able to think was that she’d never, not even for a second, seen it coming.

Then, her heart stuck in her throat, too terrified to let out a second scream as she stood at the bottom of the steps of the cathedral, she pulled Jack Bauer into her arms—those bats were nearly as big as he was—then dropped to the pavement to protect her dog, her face, and her eyes. Burying her nose in Jack’s fur, she began frantically to pray, though she’d never been a particularly religious person before that moment.
Oh, please, oh, please, oh, please,
she prayed, to no deity in particular, as every second the bats’ shrieks sounded more and more loudly in her ears.

And then, just as it seemed the first of those claws
had
to sink into her scalp, the back of her neck, her unprotected spine, she felt something—or rather some
one
—drop on top of her, envelop her, blocking out the light and sound almost completely.

And she realized, risking a brief upward glance, that it was the man who’d been standing next to her…the tall, good-looking man with the nice hair, in the expensive coat. The man about whose future she’d felt exactly nothing.

Except that that was impossible. Because he’d thrown himself over her, in order to protect her from the bats.

And now he, not she, was being torn apart by bat claws and pummeled by the impact of their careening bodies. She could feel the force of them as they struck him, one after another, reverberating all the way through his body to hers, as the two of them crouched on the cathedral steps, bombarded by keening winged missiles.

Why he wasn’t crying out with the pain he had to feel as each talon struck him, Meena didn’t know. He wasn’t even trying to shield his face and neck from the bats as they continued to tear at him. Meena couldn’t quite see his face beneath the dark protective folds of his coat, which had formed a sort of canopy over her, shielding her from the menacing attack.

But she thought she caught a glimpse of his eyes once as she glanced out, trying to see what was happening, and she could have sworn…

Well, she could have sworn they flashed as red as the brake lights she’d seen all up and down Park Avenue.

But that, of course, would have been impossible.

As impossible as the fact that she hadn’t sensed he was going to die tonight the minute she’d seen him coming toward her.

And die protecting
her
.

But that had to be what was happening. Because no human being could go through an attack like this and live.

Meena couldn’t believe any of this was happening. It was four in the morning, and she was on Seventy-eighth Street in front of a church she’d walked by a hundred—maybe even a thousand—times before, and she was being attacked by killer bats, while a man—a total stranger—had thrown himself over her, voluntarily giving his own life for hers.

And then, just when Meena was certain she couldn’t take it a moment longer—when she was convinced the attack would never stop and that they would eat right through the man’s body and down to hers—as suddenly as the bats had appeared, they were gone.

Just vanished into the night sky, disappearing as mysteriously as they’d come.

And the street was silent again, save for the distant sound of traffic over on Park Avenue. There wasn’t a noise to be heard, except for Jack Bauer’s whines and her own ragged breathing. She hadn’t realized until then that she was crying.

She couldn’t hear the man’s breathing. Was he dead already?
How could he be dead without her having felt his death approaching?
Even though he was a stranger to her, she ought to have known. Her power to predict death—unwanted as it had always been—had never once failed her before.

“Oh!” She found that she couldn’t catch her breath. She was trying to take in large gulps of air, but no oxygen seemed to be reaching her lungs. And it wasn’t because her protector was dead weight on top of her, either. “Oh, my God.”

That was when the man rolled off Meena and, in a deep voice tinged with an accent that sounded to her like a mixture of British and a hint of something else, asked, “Are you all right, miss?”

4:10
A.M
. EST, Wednesday, April 14
St. George’s Cathedral
180 East Seventy-eighth Street
New York, New York

N
one of it was the slightest bit possible, of course.

That he should be completely unhurt and conversing with her as politely as if she’d just tripped over Jack Bauer’s leash and fallen across the sidewalk and he was a passerby who’d stooped to help her back up.

That she was looking into the eyes of the charming stranger kneeling beside her and saw that they weren’t red at all, but a perfectly ordinary dark brown.

“I—I’m fine,” Meena stammered in response to his inquiry after her health. She’d let Jack Bauer go because she could no longer hold on to his wildly wiggling body. He darted as far as the end of his leash would allow him to, then stood there growling, all the fur on his back raised. Meena couldn’t believe how horribly behaved he was being.

“Are
you
all right?” she asked her rescuer in a trembling voice.

“I’m very well, thank you.” The man had risen to his feet and now reached down to take Meena’s hands in his, to help her up. “I’d heard, of course, that New York City was dangerous. But I’d no idea it was quite as dangerous as
that
.”

Was he…? He
was.

He was making a little joke.

His grip on her hands was steady. Meena felt oddly reassured by it. And by the little joke.

“I-it’s not,” Meena stammered.

Meena needed, she decided, to sit down. His grip on her hands was the only thing keeping her on her feet.

“I think we should get you to a hospital,” she heard herself say.

Or me,
she thought.
For a full head CT.

“Not at all,” the man said, putting an arm around her shaking shoulders. His grip seemed to say,
I’m in control. There’s no need to worry about anything. Everything is going to be all right now.
In a distant part of her brain, she hoped he would never, ever let go. “I’m fine. I think we should get you home, though. You seem done in. Where did you say you lived?”

“I didn’t,” Meena said. Her mind was awhirl, she knew. But whose wouldn’t be after such an event? How could he be so calm? Bats, Meena remembered, sometimes carried rabies. “Did any of them bite you? You should go to the ER right away. They can stop rabies if they catch it early enough.”

“None of them bit me,” he said in an amused tone of voice. He had taken the leash from her and was now walking both her and Jack Bauer—though unlike Meena, Jack Bauer wasn’t in the least bit unsteady on his feet and was fighting against his lead, wearing an expression not unlike the one Kiefer Sutherland wore when terrorists kidnapped the president on his show, like he was going to attack anyone and everyone who got in front of him. “But I’ll go to the hospital and get myself checked out as soon as I’ve gotten you home safely.”

“It’s important,” Meena said as they crossed the street. She was babbling. She knew she was babbling, but she couldn’t help it.
What was going on?
Who was this man? How could he be uninjured? Why was Jack Bauer acting like such a maniac? “It’s important you go. Victoria Worthington Stone got rabies once from a rabid bat when she was in a plane crash in South America, and in the ensuing brain fever, she slept with her half brother…although she didn’t know he was her half brother at the time.”

What was she talking about?
Victoria Worthington Stone?
Oh, God. Really?

The man hesitated. “Is this a friend of yours?” he asked.

Cringing with embarrassment, Meena said, “Well, I mean, Cheryl is. She plays Victoria Worthington Stone on
Insatiable
. I write her dialogue. But it’s true about the bats and rabies. We may be just a soap opera, but we strive for authenticity in our plotlines….”

Or at least we used to, before Shoshona made head writer and caved to the demands of the sponsor,
she just managed to stop herself from adding.

“I understand,” he said, gently leading her past the grocery store where Jon had said the chicken delivery hadn’t been made. There was a delivery truck outside the store now, though, the motor running noisily.
Oh, so there’ll be chicken today,
Meena thought disconnectedly. Yeah. She was losing it.

“So you’re a writer.”

“Dialogue writer.” Meena felt the need to correct him. “I’ve never written a scene like
that,
” meaning what had just happened outside St. George’s.

She couldn’t get it out of her head: the sound of all those wings flapping. And the smell of them—so foul, the way she’d always imagined death would smell, had she ever smelled death, which, thankfully, she hadn’t. She’d known so many people for whom death had come so near, some of whom it had even touched, because she hadn’t been able to save them….

But death had never, ever come that close to her.

And the shrieking…that sound they’d made as they’d come tearing down from the sky, and then as their bodies had thudded into his…

And those eyes. Those red eyes.

Surely she’d only imagined those.

Meena had now come as near, personally, to death—to hell on earth—as she ever wanted to.

And she didn’t understand how she’d escaped it. She didn’t understand it at all.

“I’m sorry,” she said, pulling to a stop in front of him and lifting her chin to look him in the face. She didn’t care about the tears anymore, or the way she must have looked and sounded. She had to know. She
had
to know what was going on. “But I don’t understand. How can you not be hurt? I
saw
them. There were hundreds of them, coming right at us.
I
felt
them hitting your body. You should be torn apart. But there’s not a scratch on you.”

He was so handsome, so…nice. How could she ever have thought anything about him, except that he was what he was? A tall, wonderful stranger who’d saved her life?

“D-don’t get me wrong,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m eternally grateful. What you did…that was so incredible. I’ll never be able to thank you enough. But…
how
did you do that?”

“They were only a few little bats,” he said with a smile.

Only a few little bats.

But…no. It had been more…much more than that. She was sure of it.

As sure as she could be of anything so late at night, after something so traumatic.

“You’re home now,” he said, and nodded toward the automatic brass doors a few feet away. “I’m sorry for what happened. I’m afraid it was my fault. But you should be quite safe for the night.”

Meena’s gaze focused, and she realized that, indeed, they’d arrived at 910 Park Avenue. The familiar green awning stretched over their heads. Through the glass of the doors, she could see Pradip, still dozing at the reception desk with his face on his textbook.

“But…” She looked back up at her rescuer, confused. “I didn’t tell you where I live. I never even told you my na—”

Jack Bauer whined, tugging on his leash, anxious to get away from the man who had saved their lives.

“Of course you did. It was wonderful to meet you, Meena,” the man said, letting go of her shoulders. “But it would be better for you if you forgot all about this and went inside now.”

Jack Bauer pulled her toward the doors, which opened automatically with a quiet whooshing sound. Pradip, behind the desk, stirred and began to raise his head. Meena’s feet, as if of their own accord, began to move toward 910 Park Avenue.

But at the threshold, she turned to look back.

“I don’t even know your name,” she said to the tall stranger, who stood waiting with his hands in his coat pockets, as if to be certain she made it safely inside before he went on his way.

“It’s Lucien,” he said.

“Lucien,” she repeated, so she would remember it. Not that it was likely she’d forget anything about this night. “Well. Thank you so much, Lucien.”

“Good night, Meena,” he said.

And then Jack Bauer pulled her the rest of the way inside, and the automatic doors closed with a gentle whoosh behind her.

When she turned to see if she could catch one last glimpse of him, he was gone. She wasn’t entirely certain he had ever been there at all.

Except for the fact that, when she got safely inside her apartment again, she saw that the knees of her pajamas were dirty from where she’d scraped them diving for the sidewalk.

Proof that what had happened hadn’t been a dream—or a nightmare—after all.