Meena shook her head. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen Jon in such a good mood. Maybe back when he’d been employed.
It was nice to know someone, at least, was enjoying himself on this, the worst night of her entire life.
Then Meena felt her pocket vibrate. What was going on? Someone was texting her? Now?
Casting a furtive glance at her brother-he was still having his animated conversation with Leisha’s husband-Meena pulled her phone out of her pocket and glanced at the text that had just been left for her.
It was from Lucien.
Stay where you are, he’d written. I’m coming for you.
That was when, over in the distance, on the east side, there was the sound of an extremely large explosion.
“Jesus Christ,” Jon said, glancing up. “What the hell was that?”
“I don’t know,” Meena said, looking in the direction from which the sound had come. “That was too loud to be a car.”
“It sounded like a whole freaking building exploding,” Jon said. “Oh, man, look at that.”
He pointed at a bright orange glow that had begun to fill the sky in the east where the sun would have been, if it had been morning. Meena, looking at it, could think of only one thing.
Lucien. Lucien had something to do with that.
She was as sure of it as she was that she was standing there.
The pouring sound she’d heard in the background when she’d been speaking to him. Had that been gasoline?
It didn’t matter.
This vampire war had just been taken to a whole new level.
“Definitely a building,” Jon was saying. “Some insurance company has gotta be bumming right now.” To Adam, who was still on the phone, he said, “What? Yeah, sorry, no, something on TV. Yeah, Meena and I are just chilling in the apartment right now.” He made a comical face at Meena. “We’re gonna maybe order in some Chinese food… Do we wanna have a drink? Uh, naw, I think we’re just gonna take it easy tonight, right, Meen?”
“Uh, yeah,” Meena said, raising her voice so Leisha could hear her if she was there on the phone with her husband. “We’re just going to stay home and chill.”
“Yeah,” Jon said. “So, we’ll see you guys…” All at once, his face went the color of ash. “Oh. You are?” he asked into the phone.
Meena stared at him. “What?” Suddenly, all her concerns about Leisha and her unborn baby came flooding back, full force. “What’s wrong?”
“They’re in front of your place,” Jon said to her, holding the phone away from his face. He looked as if he were going to be sick. “Nine ten Park. They want to know if they can come up.”
Meena felt as if the roof had suddenly shifted a little under her feet. And not because vampires were making another assault.
No, she thought. Not Leisha and the baby. Not this way.
Except…of course. Of course it was going to be Leisha and the baby.
And of course it was going to happen this way.
And she’d always known it was going to.
She’d just refused to see it, because it was too horrible even to contemplate.
Until now, when it was staring her straight in the face.
Chapter Fifty-two
9:45 P.M. EST, Saturday, April 17
Shrine of St. Clare
154 Sullivan Street
New York, New York
She reached over and snatched the phone away from Jon.
“Hello, Adam?” she said. Her fingers had gone numb. She couldn’t feel her fingers.
She couldn’t feel anything.
Except fear.
“Oh, hi, Meena, it’s your best friend’s useless, unemployed husband,” Adam said with his customary self-derision. “Leisha got tired of me hanging around the house all day doing nothing, so she said we had to go for a walk because it was such a nice afternoon, and we ended up in Central Park.”
“Hi, Adam,” Meena said. “Can I talk to-”
“Then we crossed the park and had dinner and ended up in your neighborhood,” Adam said. “So Leisha suggested we stop by and see what you were doing, since apparently you don’t answer any of your phones anymore-”
“Meena?” Leisha’s voice, strong and vibrant, rang in Meena’s ear. She’d apparently wrestled the phone away from Adam. “Hey. What is going on with you? I’ve left you, like, five messages. How was the concert? That boring, huh, that you can’t even call me back to tell me about it? Anyway, can you tell Pradip to let us up? I have to pee like crazy. This kid must have taken up residency on my bladder. And don’t give me that excuse about the place being messy, because at this point, I wouldn’t care if you guys had dead bodies piled up on the floor. That’s how bad I have to go. Your buzzer must be broken or something because Pradip says you aren’t answering, but Jon just said you guys are there-”
“Leisha.” Meena took a deep breath. This was a nightmare. She was living an actual nightmare. “You guys have to leave. You guys have to turn around and get away from my building. Please don’t ask any questions. Just go.”
“What?” Leisha was understandably bewildered. “What are you talking about? Stop playing, I really have to pee. And there isn’t a Star-bucks for like two blocks. And believe me, I’m not going to make it.”
“Leisha.”
Meena’s heart was slamming into the wall of her chest. Jon, standing in front of her, was making frantic hand signals to her and whispering, “Tell them I’m running a fever. Tell them you think I have the flu and you don’t want to Leisha to get it. Don’t tell them the truth, Meen. You know what Alaric said about telling people the truth-”
But she didn’t care about preserving the Palatine’s conspiracy of silence about the existence of vampires.
All she cared about was keeping her best friend and her baby from dying.
“Remember Lucien Antonescu?” Meena asked Leisha over the phone.
“Yeah…,” Leisha said. “Mr. Perfect? What about him? Come on, Meena, make this quick.”
“He’s not so perfect,” Meena said. Her voice was trembling. All of her was trembling.
Was it her imagination, or were the sounds of the attack on the building dying down? Where was Abraham Holtzman, shouting orders to the friars? Why couldn’t Meena hear Sister Gertrude’s Beretta?
“He’s actually a vampire,” Meena said, ignoring Jon, who’d slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Okay, Leisha? He’s the prince of darkness. And a whole lot of vampires are staking out my apartment right now so they can kill him. So you and Adam need to get out of there right away in case some of them see you and somehow connect you with me. Okay? So just do it. Just go.”
Leisha didn’t say anything for a minute.
Then she said, sounding more amused than offended, “Meena, honey, if you don’t want Adam and me dropping by without calling first, all you have to do is say so. You don’t have to try out any of your crazy plotlines for Insatiable on us like this-”
“Oh, my God, Leisha, this is not a plotline for Insatiable!” Meena burst out. How could this be happening to her? And why now, when it really mattered? “It’s real! Do you remember Rob Pace, Leish? Do you remember how I told you not to get in his car? This is like that. If you don’t want you and the baby to end up like Angie Harwood, you’ve got to do what I say.”
“But you never said anything.” Leisha sounded stunned. “You never-”
“I’ve known something was going to happen to the baby for a while, Leish,” Meena continued, “but I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to scare you. That was wrong of me. I should have told you. I’m an idiot. This is all my fault. All right? You’ve just got to believe me when I tell you now. Something bad is going to happen to the baby. You’ve got to get out of there.”
She heard her best friend breathing on the other end of the phone. For a few seconds, that was all Meena could hear, except for Jon, panting heavily next to her, and the traffic noises over on Houston Street. It was silent around the churchyard. The Dracul, it appeared, had given up and gone home.