Insatiable

“Rio,” Lucien said, raising his eyebrows. “Still treading dangerously.”

“What danger? It’s a nightclub,” Dimitri said, emphasizing the word night. “Only we call them lounges now. You would love Rio. The humidity! Very good for the skin. Come, you must meet my new friends from TransCarta. You must have heard of it, the private equity firm? They’re brokering a rather large deal at the moment and are in need of some stress relief. So of course they’ve come here. Everyone who works in finance has such a bad reputation these days. Negative publicity. That’s something you and I know a bit about, don’t we, brother?”

Dimitri laughed at his own joke as he took Lucien’s arm, attempting to steer him toward the booth of middle-aged men being nuzzled by the reed-thin young girls.

“Maybe later for that, Dimitri,” Lucien said. “I’d rather speak privately to you for a moment first. We have much business to discuss, I think, you and I.”

“Nonsense,” Dimitri said. “Pleasure before business! I know what you’re talking about … and why you’re here.” He slapped an arm around Lucien’s shoulder and began steering him toward the booth he’d just vacated. “An unfortunate thing, about these young dead girls. And I’ve asked around—believe me, it’s not good for the club, having a maniac like this loose—and I can assure you, no one knows a thing about it. If they did, don’t you think I’d have taken care of it already? You know me, Lucien. Anything to improve the bottom line!”

Lucien tilted his head toward the girl who’d approached him as he’d come in, the one in the metal halter top. She was now gyrating by herself on the dance floor, off in her own little drug-induced stupor.

“And her? You aren’t doing a very good job of keeping hard drugs out of the place,” he remarked. “Surely that can’t be helping to improve the bottom line.”

Dimitri followed his half brother’s gaze.

“Oh, drugs,” he said, and rolled his eyes. “Well, what are you going to do? They’re everywhere. The government should legalize them already, then tax them and use the money to pay off the deficit and get the addicts the help they need. But why are we talking about such a depressing topic? Come, you haven’t seen Stefan in ages. And you have to meet my very latest project.”

“Your latest project?” Lucien raised an eyebrow. “It isn’t this … lounge?”

“Not at all!” Dimitri guided him toward a table at which sat a somewhat seedy-looking young man and his even seedier companion, both of whom were wearing extraordinarily tight trousers and shirts open to mid-chest beneath leather motorcycle jackets. They were flanked on either side by pencil-slim young women who did not appear to be wearing much in the way of clothing at all but had exceptionally flat chests and very straight hair.

“A new business venture,” Dimitri announced enthusiastically. “Gregory Bane, meet my brother, visiting all the way from Romania, Lucien Antonescu.”

“Hello, sir.” The thinner of the two young men stood to shake Lucien’s hand. Lucien knew why he was being so obsequious even before he felt Gregory Bane’s skin … or saw the slim dragon tattoo that decorated the inside of his pale wrist.

“A pleasure,” Lucien said unsmilingly.

“It’s all mine,” Gregory Bane said, his eyelids fluttering nervously.

Lucien wondered how long it had been since the boy had turned and who’d turned him. Not Dimitri, surely. His brother was many things … but not that. More than likely he’d seen an opportunity and had one of his many paramours do it. The boy was, Lucien supposed, good looking by the standard set by his current crop of female students, who tended to be slim and unwashed.

The other boy, who wore his dragon like Dimitri’s, in the form of an iron symbol on a leather wristband, stood and extended his right hand. …

“Uncle Lucien,” Stefan said a little diffidently.

But then again, the boy had never been all there, Lucien thought as he shook his nephew’s hand.

Whether that was because he’d seen his father murder his mother before his very eyes—it had been a different time and place, when uxoricide hadn’t been all that uncommon, but still, Lucien hadn’t approved—or because he’d been turned too young, Lucien had never been sure.

The young man was a definite disappointment. Dimitri was forever formulating some scheme or another to give him some direction. But he’d never even allowed the boy to use his last name. How could he expect Stefan to exercise any sort of career initiative?

What game was Dimitri playing at now? Lucien wondered. And what did the paunchy financial analysts from TransCarta have to do with it, if anything? Was it all really just part of his half brother’s new “business venture”?

Or something more insidious?

Oh, Dimitri acted the part of welcoming family, all open arms. … He even ordered bottles of Veuve for the table, though champagne was never Lucien’s favorite. He’d never been fond of bubbles, which vanished immediately on the tongue. He preferred heavier, meatier wines that coated the mouth like … well, a meal.

But it all seemed a little like the champagne, or the young human women who’d draped themselves over Gregory Bane and the hapless Stefan—not to mention over the hedge fund managers in the booth next door—who said nothing but disappeared often to go to the ladies’ room, then came back wiping their noses, their minds as empty as that of the girl who’d tried to get him to dance with her.

Too showy. Not enough substance. Just a lot of air.

After a while, Lucien felt he had seen enough. If there were answers at his half brother’s club, he wasn’t going to get them this way.

He excused himself, saying that he had to go.

Dimitri showed him out through a back exit, since the front was now too crowded with drug-addled partygoers for him to leave without having to push his way through.

“Where are you staying while you’re here?” Dimitri asked—too casually—blowing smoke from his cigar toward the starry night sky, which was just visible from the dark alley in which they stood.

“Emil found me a place,” Lucien said. The less said about where, Lucien figured, the better. He trusted his brother. …

But only to a point.

Dimitri gave a chuckle. “Emil,” he said. “Is he still with that idiotic wife of his?”

“He is,” Lucien said.

“Marriage,” Dimitri said. “Now that is the one thing you and I do have in common. No need to get tangled up in that. Well. Again.”

“It’s never seemed prudent,” Lucien carefully agreed.

Dimitri stared at him for a second or two before bursting into surprised laughter.

“Prudent,” he cried. “Listen to you! You haven’t changed, have you? Not in all this time.”

Lucien shot him an appraising look.

“No,” he said. “I don’t suppose either of us has.”

Dimitri stopped laughing abruptly and pointed at Lucien.

“I don’t like the sound of that,” he said in a deep voice. “I hope you didn’t come here to stir up trouble, Lucien. Because we’ve been doing perfectly fine on this side of the Atlantic without even a hint of trouble from the Palatine … and without any interference from you.”

His eyes, normally every bit as dark as his half brother’s, glowed as red as his cigar as he said the word interference.

A second later, a layer of the trash, dirt, gravel, and broken glass lining the alley floor just in front of Lucien began to rise into the air, then swirl more and more rapidly together until it was a towering, violently destructive tornado headed straight at him.

Lucien threw an arm up to guard his face from the debris.

That was when Dimitri found himself thrown back against the side of a Dumpster, as if an unseen wind had lifted him and blown him there. His fall was broken by some empty liquor boxes someone had flattened and stacked before the Dumpster for recycling. Otherwise, he would have slammed against the steel receptacle with as much force as if he’d been shot from a nail gun.

As he lay there, stunned, the vortex Dimitri had created died as abruptly as he’d crumbled, all the pieces of glass and trash falling back to the alley floor.

Lucien strolled up to where his brother lay, pausing on his way to carefully stamp out the cigar Dimitri had dropped, then lift it and deposit it in the Dumpster behind him.

Lucien was furious … but even when furious, he was still conscientious about litter.

“I have no idea what kind of game you’re playing here, Dimitri,” Lucien said, leaning an elbow on the side of the Dumpster and speaking down to his brother in a voice that was almost eerie in its calmness after the violence that had erupted just seconds before. “Nightclubs filled with investment bankers and drug-addicted young women. That’s your business, and I agreed long ago I’d stay out of Dracul business, so long as there weren’t any human deaths from loss of blood. But now … it’s not the Palatine you need to fear … it’s me.”

Dimitri, slumped against the side of the Dumpster like a piece of garbage waiting to be picked up, winced up at his brother.

“I know that,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. “I’ve always known that. You didn’t have to hit me so hard, you know.”

“These dead girls,” Lucien said, ignoring his brother. “What do you know about them?”

“I told you,” Dimitri said. “I don’t know anything about them.”

A stainless steel countertop that lay abandoned to one side of the Dumpster suddenly rose several feet into the air and dangled threateningly above Dimitri’s head.

“Wait,” Dimitri cried, throwing an arm over his face to protect his handsome features from destruction. “All right, all right. Yes, I’ve heard talk—”

Lucien let the countertop fall harmlessly to one side. The clatter it made was deafeningly loud, and the two men could hear rats squeak and scurry away. Dimitri, still seated in the muck on the alley floor, made a face.

“But you can’t think I know who’s doing it, Lucien,” he said. “Obviously if I did, I’d put a stop to it. I don’t even know why you’d think it’s one of us. It’s clearly some sick pervert.”

“Who drinks human blood,” Lucien said calmly.

“Well, lots of people do,” Dimitri said. “It’s quite stylish to be a vampire these days. Or act like one, anyway.”

Lucien studied his younger brother. He would have liked to have believed Dimitri was as innocent as he claimed.

But Lucien had made the mistake of believing in his brother’s innocence in times past.

And it had nearly cost him his life.

He wouldn’t make that same mistake again, especially when it might now involve human lives.

“If I find out you know anything about these murders,” Lucien said, “and you didn’t tell me or do anything to stop the killer—or happen to be behind the killings yourself—I will destroy you, and everything and everyone you care about, Dimitri. Do you understand?”

Dimitri, trying to struggle to his feet and out of the garbage and slime, said, “Brother! We’ve obviously gotten off on the wrong foot again. I’m sorry about that little misunderstanding back there. Can’t we—”

But Lucien wasn’t done. He placed a hand on his half brother’s shoulder and shoved him back down into the muck from which he’d just been attempting to climb.

Then Lucien leaned over him and whispered into his ear, “No. We can’t. You know the agreement. Everyone can drink. But no one can—”

“For the love of God, Lucien!” Dimitri cried. “Do you think I don’t know, after all these years? No one may kill a human, no matter how much he might thirst. To do so will bring swift and absolute retribution from the prince. The Dracul have lived under your orders for more than a century. Do you think we might have somehow forgotten them?”

“Yes,” Lucien said grimly. “Because you have before. And you will again.”

It was right then that the back door to the club opened and Reginald and his partner appeared.

“Mr. Dimitri?” Reginald asked in some alarm, seeing his boss lying on the alley floor.

Lucien straightened.

“Give him a hand, will you, Reginald?” Lucien asked over his shoulder as he turned to stride swiftly past him and into the dark night. “Mr. Dimitri is going to need all the help he can get.”

Chapter Twenty-one

7:00 P.M. EST, Thursday, April 15

St. George’s Cathedral

180 East Seventy-eighth Street

New York, New York

Meena stared at the cathedral. In the fading daylight, it looked beautiful, with its twin spires straining toward the spring sky and elegant stained glass, even if some of the windows were broken in places. Who would throw rocks at a church window, anyway?

Sure, it was surrounded with the familiar blue plywood that always went up around a building in Manhattan when construction was taking place.

But the plywood was nowhere near high enough to hide the large and lovely cathedral behind it.

A cathedral that, just two nights before, had been the scene of an inexplicable, brutal attack.

Or had it?

Meena stood with Jack Bauer on his leash at the bottom of the cathedral steps, exactly where they had been the night before last when the bats had come swooping down out of nowhere.

At first she’d been worried that Jack wouldn’t want to go anywhere near the church because of what had happened last time they’d been there.

But he showed no sign of any reluctance, trotting right up and lifting a leg on a parked car in front of it.

He obviously didn’t harbor any ill memories of the incident.

But though at first her own had been a bit fuzzy, she remembered it all now, as clearly as if it had just happened a few minutes, and not nearly forty-eight hours, ago. There was the place on the sidewalk where she’d crouched, her heart in her throat, for so long while the bats had flung themselves over and over at Lucien’s face and body, trying—she’d been certain at the time—to rip him apart.

Except that he’d been fine, his face without a mark on it.

And true, there were no actual drops of blood or anything like that on the ground to show that there’d been any attack at all.

But she recognized the crack in the pavement; how could she forget it? Her face had been almost right up against it as Lucien had lain across her, keeping her safe.

It was strange, Meena thought as she stood gazing up at the church spires, wondering if the bats were in there now and when they might awaken—and attack—again. She didn’t get a feeling of evil from the cathedral, even though the exact spot where she stood had very nearly been the site of a savage mauling.

Meena didn’t flatter herself that as a dialogue writer for a show of Insatiable’s quality she was particularly gifted. She didn’t put on airs that she was a creative genius.

Nor did she think of herself as any more creative than the artists she sometimes saw outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the ones who painted amateur sunsets and landscapes and then sold them to tourists who happened to be walking by.

Meena felt her scripts for Insatiable were much the same thing: a reflection of what was happening daily in front of the average American, just like a sunset … only maybe a little more dramatic, to keep people interested.

But she’d always been aware of being a tiny bit more sensitive to mood than other people, possibly because of her ability to tell when something horrible was going to happen to someone.

Maybe there just wasn’t anything horrible about St. George’s to sense. Because a tragedy at St. George’s had been averted … thanks to Lucien, whoever he was. He’d saved her life. She didn’t know how or why, but he had.

Did Lucien, Meena wondered, ever think about what had happened outside the church and how strange it had been? Perhaps he too had come to stand outside St. George’s and asked himself the very same questions she was. Maybe he’d posted a Craigslist Missed Connections ad about her (she’d been too shy to post one about him). She’d better remember to check. …

“Meena?”

Meena jumped nearly out of her skin. She whirled around, half expecting to find Lucien himself staring down at her.

But it was only Jon, looking extremely surprised to find her standing in front of St. George’s Cathedral on a Thursday evening, staring at nothing.

“What are you doing here?” Jon asked. “I thought you were taking Jack Bauer for a walk.”

“I was,” Meena said, tugging on Jack’s leash. Jack Bauer was actually lying on the sidewalk, licking his hind leg, and ignored her. “I mean, I am. I was just … thinking about something.”

“I can tell.” Jon stood next to her and looked up at the church spires. He was dressed up in pressed khakis and a nice shirt, and was, for some reason, wearing a tie. In his right hand was a brown paper bag. “Are you still freaking out about that flock of bats?”

“It was a colony,” Meena corrected him. “I looked it up on Wikipedia. Bats live in colonies. And I found out they don’t normally attack something—or someone—as a group the way they did the other night. That had to have been a total fluke. They’re really more solitary hunters. You know, because they use high-frequency sonar.”

Jon looked down at her like she was crazy.

“Okay,” he said. “Good to know. Are you going to come home and get ready? Because we have the Antonescus’ dinner party in half an hour.”

She blinked. “What?”

“The countess’s dinner party,” he said. “Remember? For her cousin, the prince. It’s Thursday night. You said we’d go.”

Meena rolled her eyes. “Oh,” she said. “That. Yeah. We can’t go. I didn’t RSVP.”

“Meena,” Jon said, shaking his head. “We talked about this. We said we’d go.”

“Well,” Meena said, “I never told her we’d go. So, I guess we can’t go. Too bad. Let’s watch a marathon of The Office instead.”

“No,” Jon said. “Free food. Remember? Besides, I already saw Mary Lou in the elevator today and she asked if we were coming and I said yes. So we have to go. Look, I bought them a bottle of wine.” He held up the paper bag. “It cost me six bucks. I’m not wasting it.”

Meena’s shoulders sagged. “Oh, my God,” she said. “I don’t think I can handle a party at the countess’s tonight. It’s been a really bad week.”

“I know,” Jon said, taking her by the elbow and turning her away from the church. “But you want to meet this prince guy, right? Isn’t he the guy you want to use as a model for the vampire slayer in your spec script? The one for Cheryl?”

“Actually,” Meena admitted as they started walking toward 910 Park, “I think I met someone who would be a better model for the prince.”

“Really?” Jon said. “Who?”

“Oh, just a guy,” Meena said, knowing what Jon would have to say about her adventure with Lucien outside the cathedral the night before last.

And if she told him, he’d only deliver a big-brotherly lecture about her leaving the apartment late at night, something she knew she ought not to have done. In their gender-unequal society, it still wasn’t totally safe for American women to wander the streets of New York City unescorted late at night. (Although to be fair, it wasn’t safe for anyone to do this, really. There were rampaging colonies of bats lurking everywhere.)

“Well, the guy we’re meeting tonight is supposed to be a prince,” Jon said. “Where else are you going to meet one of those?”

“Nowhere,” Meena admitted, realizing Jon had actually been looking forward to this dinner party. He didn’t get a chance to go out very often, since he was … well, broke and unemployed. And most of his friends were as well. Entertainment was the last thing on which any of them could afford to splurge. She ought to have known that to her brother, any chance to leave the apartment was a welcome one … even if it was just to go to the neighbors’ place across the hall.

She glanced over her shoulder at the spires of the church shooting up toward the lavender evening sky, the clouds pink in the setting sun, as Jon steered her away from it. Churches, she thought idly. What are they even for?

To worship in, obviously. But to worship what, exactly? A god who gave you gifts you never even asked for, that were basically just a curse?

On the other hand, what else did people have, exactly?

Nothing.

Nothing but hope that things might get better someday.

The kind of hope that Meena, on her TV show, and the priests at St. George’s tried to give people.

“You’re right,” Meena said with a sigh, turning around.

“We don’t have to stay all night,” Jon said as they rounded the corner. “If it’s bogus, we’ll leave.”

“Sure,” Meena said. “And who knows? It might even be fun.”

Even though, of course, she didn’t for one second actually believe this.

Chapter Twenty-two

7:30 P.M. EST, Thursday, April 15

910 Park Avenue, Apt. 11A

New York, New York

Lucien was quite certain his cousin had lost his mind.

“A dinner party?” he echoed as he handed his overcoat to the maid, who took it to hang in the hall closet.

“It’s just …,” Emil explained quietly, so that his wife, busy with the caterer in the dining room, couldn’t overhear, “she seems to have this fantasy that you’re in need of a bride and that New York is the place where you’re going to find one. I can’t tell you how sorry I am. If you want to smite me, my lord, I perfectly understand.”

Lucien, instead of being furious—which he knew was the reaction Emil was expecting from him—felt only amusement. Although he’d made it clear he wanted no one to know of his arrival in New York, that, of course, was a moot point. The damage was done. Clearly, his enemies already knew where he was: an attempt had been made on his life. The information had simply traveled.

Much in the way Lucien expected that news of how he’d treated his own brother would get around. He didn’t regret this. He counted on it. If everyone heard Dimitri had picked a battle with him and Lucien had won, they’d be even less inclined to stage a second attack of the sort that had occurred the other night, which he’d clearly survived.

The prince of darkness was in town and indomitable as ever.

But a dinner party? With humans?

The idea made Lucien smile.

“Your wife,” he said to Emil, “is a bold woman.”

“That’s one way of putting it,” Emil said with a queasy smile. “But, honestly, my lord, if you wish to go back to the penthouse—”

“It’s all right, Emil,” Lucien said soothingly. Sometimes he thought Emil would self-implode, he was wound so tightly. “I’m assuming you have some decent wines to serve.”

Emil brightened considerably. “Of course, my lord,” he said. “Some lovely amarones I purchased just for you. Come, let me open them.”

Emil followed Lucien to his library, where he opened a fine Italian red. After a while, from the darkened, comfortable room, they could hear the first guests arriving and Mary Lou’s vivacious voice as she greeted them.

“I suppose,” Emil said reluctantly, “we should go out there.”

“It will be fine,” Lucien reassured his cousin. “I quite enjoy humans. I used to be one, remember? And I teach them.”

The two men emerged into the living room, where Mary Lou shrieked with delight.

“Well, there they are!” she screamed. She had on a long turquoise dress with quite a lot of gold jewelry and matching gold shoes. Her eye shadow was the same color as the dress. Her long blond hair had been perfectly curled and coifed. “Where have you two been hiding? Prince Lucien, I want you to meet our friends Linda and Tom Bradford, and this is Faith and Frank Herrera, and Carol Priestley and Becca Evans and Ashley Menendez from Emil’s office. Everyone, this is Prince Lucien Antonescu. …”

The women were attractive, the men jovial. Lucien shook hands with all of them, then joined in the small talk about New York City and the shows and restaurants he was to be sure not to miss while he was there.