He pulled it out and saw the name on the screen he’d been longing to see all day.
Meena Harper.
Chapter Fifty-one
9:15 P.M. EST, Saturday, April 17
Shrine of St. Clare
154 Sullivan Street
New York, New York
Lucien?” Meena cried when someone finally picked up at the other end. “Is that you?”
She had to stick a finger in her other ear in order to hear him.
That was because of all the screaming coming from the ground below her.
She supposed it was her own fault, though: she’d just lobbed a water balloon filled with holy water at a pack of vampires who’d been trying to climb the churchyard fence in order to get into the rectory.
“Meena,” he said. “Are you all right?”
“Oh,” she said. “I’m fine. But I’m sorry. I can barely hear you. Where are you? This is a horrible connection.”
“No, I’m sorry,” Lucien said. He sounded impossibly far away. “I’m not in a very good location for cell phone reception right now. Let me just…there. Can you hear me now?”
“Oh,” Meena said. A wave of warmth washed over her at the sound of his voice. Suddenly, she felt as if everything was going to be okay.
Which was ridiculous, because one man couldn’t possibly fix all the things that had gone wrong in the past few hours.
Even Lucien, who was no ordinary man.
“That’s much better,” she said. “You sounded like you were in some kind of tunnel before. So you’re not at the apartment?”
“No,” Lucien said. “Meena, where are you? Is that…screaming?”
“Oh,” Meena said. She glanced down at the vampires beyond the churchyard fence, feeling a twinge of fear…and loathing.
Then she instantly felt guilty about the loathing. She couldn’t quite believe how quickly she’d gone from feeling pity for these creatures who couldn’t help what they were, and insisting there were surely some redeeming qualities in them, just as there were in Lucien, to callously hurling water balloons filled with a liquid that was as corrosive to them as battery acid from the rectory rooftop.
What was happening to her? What was she turning into?
She was just as much a monster as they were.
Then again, she supposed being nearly murdered tended to bring out the monster in everyone.
“Never mind about that,” she said to Lucien. “They’ll be all right again in a few minutes.” Her brother had been right about vampiric healing powers. They were amazing. Nothing killed these things. Well, except a stake to the heart, apparently, but Meena, up on the rectory roof, hadn’t been close enough to one to test this theory. Yet.
“Meena.” Lucien’s deep voice sounded like heaven to her ears. Especially when he said her name like that, so filled with pure, masculine love…and longing. “What are you talking about? Who’ll be all right?”
“No one,” she said. She didn’t want to spoil things by having to admit that she’d just spent the past quarter of an hour dousing his kind with holy water so she could get a few minutes alone to call him. “It’s good to hear your voice.”
“It’s good to hear you, too,” he said. “You can’t know what I’ve been going through, not knowing where you’ve been all this time. I’ve been torturing myself, thinking of all the things that might have happened to you and how I haven’t been there to protect you.”
“Oh,” Meena said, flattening a hand to her chest. Tears filled her eyes. “Lucien, you have to stop saying that kind of stuff. You know we can’t be together. It’s impossible.”
“You keep saying it’s impossible,” Lucien said. “But if there’s anything I’ve learned in my five centuries on earth, Meena, it’s that nothing is impossible. Especially to a man as much in love as I am with you.”
A hand appeared over the edge of the rooftop beside Meena’s foot-a vampire, trying to claw his way up the building toward her. Stifling a startled gasp, Meena pulled a squirt gun from the back pocket of her jeans, aimed, and launched a steady stream of holy water at him. He shrieked as his fingers caught fire, lost his footing, and fell fifty feet to the pavement below. Horrified, Meena turned away.
“Meena,” Lucien said. “What was that?”
“That? Oh, nothing. Look, I want you to know I did get your messages. I would have called sooner, but I had to steal my phone back from my brother. He doesn’t know I have it-”
As if right on cue, she heard her brother shouting from a second-story window below, “You want a piece of this? You want a piece of this? Well, then come and get it, you sick vampire pusswad!” This was followed by a small explosion.
“Meena,” Lucien said. There was renewed urgency in his tone. He’d definitely, she realized, heard the explosion. “Where are you?”
“Oh,” she said, “it doesn’t matter.”
A part of her just wanted to keep hearing him tell her how much he loved and missed her. Which was wrong, because she knew he was still going to kill Jon and Alaric.
“It does matter.” He insisted. “Meena, you’ve got to listen to me. I think you’re in serious danger.”
“Really?” She tried to ignore the smell of smoke still drifting up from the rectory kitchen. Father Bernard had already called the fire department and assured them (in case any of St. Clare’s neighbors happened to dial 911, he didn’t want to worry about the NYFD being attacked by vampires) that the only trouble was the “broken water pipe” that had caused them to cancel evening mass in the first place. The smoke? Oh, the smoke was just from a batch of Sister Gertrude’s cookies that had been left in the oven too long.
“It’s funny,” Meena said over the phone, “because I think you’re in very grave danger.”
“I’m serious, Meena,” Lucien said. She could hear him moving on the other end of the line. It sounded, oddly enough, like he was pouring something. “I’d prefer to have this discussion in person, but with things the way they are right now…well, I’m just going to say it: let’s go away together.”
“What? You mean like…on a trip?”
“Yes,” he said with an odd hesitancy. “Exactly. Like on a trip. Well, maybe a bit longer than the average trip. And I know what you’re going to say about my killing your brother and the guard. But I won’t be able to do that if we’re nowhere near them, will I?”
“No.” Meena had to agree. “That’s true.”
“And I know how you feel about your job. But surely you have some vacation time coming to you.”
“Well,” Meena said. She chewed her lower lip, thinking about Stefan Dominic, still tied up in the basement. The Dracul had already managed to infiltrate where she worked and, according to Alaric, where she lived, as well. Taking a vacation until things died down a little wouldn’t be such a bad idea. “A couple weeks off might not hurt, now that I think about it…”
“Well,” he said, sounding surprised. And a lot more cheerful. “That was easy. I thought you’d be more resistant to the idea, to be honest. Can you leave now, tonight, Meena? I can be uptown in a few minutes. Do you think you can get away from the Palatine Guard? And meet me out on your little balcony? You needn’t be afraid. I’ll help you get across, onto Emil’s terrace. Then we can leave from there.”
He sounded so sure of himself. That was one of the things she loved about him. He always seemed to know exactly what he was doing, and on the few occasions when he didn’t, well, that vulnerability only made her love him all the more fiercely.
“Um,” she said, “meeting you on my balcony might be a bit of a problem, actually, Lucien.”
“Why?”
She hadn’t wanted to tell him this way. But now she had no choice. “Well, because right now I’m actually on the roof of the rectory of the Shrine of St. Clare on Sullivan Street in downtown Manhattan, just off Houston,” she said into the phone. “We’re not totally sure what’s going on, but it seems like your brother got Stefan Dominic-the guy we hired to play the vampire on Insatiable, only it turns out he really is a vampire-to kidnap me-”