“Did he hurt you?” Lucien demanded in a voice as hard as stone.
“What?” Meena asked. “No. Well, I mean, he tried. He had a gun. But Alaric stopped him. Now we’re keeping him hostage here and currently experiencing just a little bit of difficulty because a few dozen Dracul really seem to want to come inside and kill us or something-”
“What?”
She winced and had to hold the phone away from her face.
That’s how loudly he’d erupted into her ear.
“Lucien,” she said when the volume of what she supposed was his swearing-it was in Romanian, so she couldn’t understand a word of it-got back to a decibel level she could bear, “I knew you were going to freak out like this, which is why I didn’t-”
“Meena,” he thundered. She had to hold the phone away from her face again. “Stay exactly where you are. I’ll be right there to get you.”
“No,” she yelled into the phone before he could hang up. “Think about it, Lucien. It’s a trap. Alaric says they’ll be waiting for you at the apartment, too.” Which was why she wasn’t going to say a word to him about Jack Bauer. She didn’t need two men risking their lives over her dog. “It’s all just a trap to lure you out so your brother can kill you-”
“Oh, Alaric says that, does he?” Lucien roared. “Well, I don’t care what Alaric says. Do you know who Stefan Dominic is, Meena? He’s my nephew. He’s Dimitri’s son.”
“Oh,” Meena said, taken aback. “So…you’re saying you think we should let him go?”
“I’m saying I’m coming down there to get you, and you and I are leaving-”
“You mean running away,” she said quietly. “Don’t you?”
Lucien’s voice was like ice. “We’re not running away, Meena,” he said. “I’m going to keep you safe. That is my first-my only-priority.”
“Well,” she said, lifting a hand and running it raggedly through her hair. Her voice caught on a sob she hadn’t been expecting.
She thought she’d been doing a pretty good job of keeping it together. At least for the past half hour or so.
But now everything was starting to unravel again.
“What about Jon, Lucien?” she asked, her voice breaking. “Because he’s here, too. What if we leave, and then your brother captures him? Do you think I could live with myself if something happened to my brother? Are you going to protect Jon, Lucien, for the rest of his life, too? Because I don’t think you are. In fact,” she said, and now her voice rose a little hysterically, “I still think you’re going to kill him, and Alaric, too.”
“Meena.” Lucien sounded calm now. The storm was over. He seemed to be choosing his words with deliberate care, the way a jeweler would choose pearls to string a necklace. “I’m not going to kill anyone. Except my own brother. Not to mention my nephew. Then Jon will be safe. And so will you.”
She desperately wanted to believe him. “Do you really think so?” she asked.
“Of course I do, Meena,” he said. “All of this will be over very soon. Now, start thinking about where you want to go. I’ve always dreamed about having a place in Thailand, myself.”
“Thailand,” Meena said. She liked the sound of the word on his lips. “I’ve never been to Thailand.”
“Neither have I,” Lucien said. “We can discover it together.”
Even as she was dreaming of sharing a thatched hut on the beach with Lucien-on stilts, like she always saw in magazines-she heard a scuttling sound. Whirling around, she saw a bat landing on the rooftop just a few feet away from her and beginning to transmogrify into its vampire host.
“Oh, no,” she said with a groan, her heart booming in her chest. She raced toward it, giving the bat the most vicious kick she could, sending it shrieking off the roof…
…just as it changed into a young woman wearing jeans and a leather jacket. The girl screamed as she tumbled through the air, not changing back into a bat quickly enough to save her from falling onto the spikes of the churchyard fence below, which pierced her body in several places.
But since the spikes weren’t made of wood, she just lay there, impaled and twitching, while her friends tried to pull her off.
Meena, watching all this transpire over the side of the roof, made a horrified face and looked away.
“I really hope you’re right, Lucien,” she said, lifting the phone back to her ear. “About all of this being over soon. Because I’m not sure how much more I can take.”
There was no response.
“Lucien?” she said. She held the phone away from her face, looking down at the screen. She still had service.
Lucien, she realized, had hung up on her.
Had she said the wrong thing?
Meena jumped as her phone vibrated in her hand. He was calling back.
“Lucien?” she cried.
“Who?” A familiar voice filled her ear.
“Oh,” Meena said, disappointed. “Hi, Paul. Look, I really can’t talk right now.”
“Whatever,” Paul said. “Sorry to interrupt your Saturday-night mini-Butterfinger orgy. I just wanted to see if you’d gotten Shoshona’s e-mail.”
“What e-mail?” Meena asked. She needed to get downstairs to warn everyone. She understood now why the Dracul were trying so hard to get inside the rectory. It wasn’t just her they wanted.
It was Dimitri Antonescu’s son.
“We’ve been sold,” Paul said.
Meena nearly dropped her phone. “What? What do you mean? The show?” But that made no sense. Shows couldn’t be sold. Could they?
“Not the show,” Paul said. “The network. Consumer Dynamics and everything it owns. This morning. To something called TransCarta.”
“I never heard of it,” Meena said.
“Me neither,” Paul said. “I had to Google it. It’s a private equities firm.”
Meena stood there clutching her BlackBerry to her face. She really didn’t have time to talk, like she’d told him. And yet…“But…what does this mean?”
Fired. Like everything else, she’d now lost her job, too. “Shoshona assures everyone in her e-mail that it doesn’t mean anything, that everything will go on as normal, that TransCarta supports ABN and Insatiable wholeheartedly and looks forward to a profitable future working with us.”
“Shoshona said all this?” Meena asked incredulously. Shoshona could hardly even string together a lunch order.
“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?”