Overbite. Meg Cabot
Читать онлайн.
Meena screamed again, her voice echoing up and down the deserted street.
David lay there completely still—not unlike one dead.
She didn’t realize what had happened to David—that he hadn’t been seized by flying monkeys, then dropped lifeless to the hood of his own car, where he now lay sprawled, unseeing and unmoving—until the man who’d done all this tapped politely on the still-closed window of her own car door.
She screamed again before she recognized who was looking at her through the glass.
“Meena?” His dark eyes were filled with concern. “Are you all right?”
It was Lucien Antonescu.
I’m fine,” she said automatically.
She unlocked and opened the door, then climbed—a little shakily, but with all the dignity she could muster—from the car. Lucien held the door open for her, because he was the kind of man who always remembered to hold the door open for women.
He was also the kind of man who had, before Meena’s eyes, once destroyed a church and nearly killed her, along with a number of her friends. So, there was that to be considered.
“You’re sure you’re all right?” he asked her again.
Truthfully, she felt as if she were going to pass out, but she lied and repeated, “I’m fine.” It wasn’t quite a lie. Now that she was out of the car, the night air—delightfully fresh smelling after the inside of David’s Volvo, despite the garbage piled in the cans along the street nearby—had revived her a little.
“Is he …?” She looked over at David, who was still sprawled across his own car’s hood with his head tilted in a most unnatural position. She looked quickly away. “Is he …?”
Lucien was frowning. “Technically, he was dead before I arrived. But no, he’s merely recovering from a broken neck at the moment. Here. You’re bleeding.”
He handed her a handkerchief. Meena, startled, looked down at herself. There were drops of blood splashed across the front of her dress.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Where …?”
Lucien gestured in the general vicinity of his throat.
“He bit me?” Too late, she remembered how David had pressed his lips to her neck, and how relieved she’d been that she hadn’t had to taste his rank-smelling breath anymore. “But I didn’t feel anything—”
She broke off. She hadn’t felt anything the other times she’d been bitten in the past either.
By the man standing beside her.
“No. You aren’t meant to feel it.” It was apparent Lucien was remembering those times, as well. But he looked discreetly away from her and toward David. “Who is he? A friend of yours?”
He said the word friend with distaste, though he was tactfully trying not to show it.
“He’s just someone I used to go out with,” she said. She pressed the handkerchief to her throat, staring at Lucien, thinking the exact same thing could be said about him.
He, however, appeared to be in considerably better shape than David was at the moment. Intimidatingly tall and broad-shouldered, his dark hair thick and lustrous, Lucien appeared as handsome and put together in his dark Brioni suit and crisp white shirt as always. It was as if no time at all had passed since she’d last seen him.
But it had actually been six months.
Six months during which the people with whom she worked—Alaric Wulf in particular—had combed every inch of the city as well as its outer boroughs, looking for him, without success.
And yet here he was, standing right in front of her as if he’d never left.
“I’ve been having bad dreams about him,” Meena went on slowly. She still felt a little bit dazed. “I wanted to let him know he was in danger …”
“Of course you did,” Lucien said. The corners of his mouth curled up a little, as if he found something amusing. “I assume he’s the one who chose the location for your rendezvous?”
“No. I did. But …” She stood there, her wrists still throbbing from where David had gripped them with such fierce violence. “How could this have happened?”
“Apparently he’s been keeping different company since you knew him,” Lucien said. He’d stopped smiling. “Very few people can resist immortality when offered, you know. Vampirism is an extremely tempting and exciting lifestyle choice.”
Meena looked at the ground. She was one of the “very few people” who’d resisted the lifestyle “choice” of vampirism when offered. It was why she and Lucien were no longer together.
Well, one of the reasons.
“I just can’t believe he’d be one of those people,” she said. “He had a wife. And a baby.”
“Well, he hasn’t got anything now,” Lucien said. “Except a ravenous appetite for blood. Oh, and alcohol, apparently. He smells like a distillery.”
“I took his keys away,” Meena said, holding them up. “I thought I’d be protecting him from drinking and driving. I didn’t think it was safe for him to be out on the roads in his condition.”
“It isn’t safe for him to be out on the roads in his condition,” Lucien agreed. “But not because of his driving.”
Meena felt depressed, and not just because of David. This wasn’t how she’d pictured running into Lucien again.
And she had pictured running into him again, more times than she’d like to admit.
But she knew this was wrong, and not just because he was the most wanted man in the entire demon-fighting world—black-and-white photos of him papered nearly every wall of Palatine headquarters. She had to pass them every day in the hallways at work—but because of the other dreams she’d been having. The ones that she’d been having ever since she and Lucien had parted—long before the ones she’d started having lately about David.
These were the dreams that had driven her to make an unorthodox request from a highly restricted area—to the public, anyway—belonging to her employer.
Meena wasn’t even a hundred percent certain what she wanted was there. But if it was, it could hold the key to everything.
The answer, so far, had been a resounding No Response.
“How could I have not noticed right away that he was already dead?” she asked bleakly, staring at David’s body. If this was how things were going to go from now on, she might as well just quit. It was possible she’d be better off working back in scriptwriting.
Then again, no one she knew in that field could find jobs anymore, thanks to the success of reality shows, like the one about the housewives of New York City.
“I wouldn’t be too hard on yourself,” Lucien said, smiling again. “He’s very freshly turned, no more than a day or two at the most. And not handling it well, judging by the alcohol intake. And of course, had he gone home, he’d have killed the baby and its mother. So you did save two lives tonight.”
“You saved two lives tonight,” she said, glancing at him. This was definitely something she was going to tell Alaric Wulf, who often swore that Lucien Antonescu was evil incarnate. But why would someone evil be interested in saving lives? And, of course,