She walked away from him, starting back across the street, toward the church. If Alaric had gotten inside, she could, too.
“Hey,” Adam yelled after her, outraged. “Where are you going? You can’t leave me here, too, Meena!”
“You’ll be fine out there, Adam,” she called over her shoulder. “Believe me. You’re better off there than you would be coming with me.”
“This is bullshit!” Adam shouted. “Bullshit! You get back here, Meena! You turn around and get back here, right now!”
But instead of turning around, Meena stalked right up to the scaffolding that surrounded the church. There had to be a way inside, she told herself. If Alaric had found a way, she could too.
Tentatively, she laid a hand on the cool blue wood.
No sooner had she done this than it blew apart.
Chapter Fifty-five
10:30 P.M. EST, Saturday, April 17
St. George’s Cathedral
180 East Seventy-eighth Street
New York, New York
The force of the explosion sent Meena sprawling back against the sidewalk where she’d first lain with Lucien. It also sent razor wire and pieces of plywood flying. Meena flung up her arms to protect her eyes. Around her, car alarms went off.
Then, just as suddenly, they were silenced.
When she put her arms down and opened her eyes, it was just in time to catch one particularly huge chunk of blue painted plywood landing exactly where the young couple from the subway would have been…if she hadn’t scared them from getting off the train.
Instead, the wood landed harmlessly on the sidewalk with a solid clunk.
“What the hell was that?” she heard Adam ask from the across the street.
Rising painfully to her scraped hands and knees, Meena found herself looking at the doors to the church, which had now been thrown open. A tall man who looked not unlike Lucien, except that he was a little shorter and a little heavier and wore a light gray suit with a black shirt and tie-which Meena couldn’t imagine Lucien doing-stepped through the cloud of dust left behind by the explosion and peered down at her, a pleased expression on his face.
“Meena Harper, I presume?” he said. Unlike his brother, there wasn’t a trace of anything European in his accent.
Meena nodded. “That’s me,” she said, coughing a little from all the dust. “Are you Dimitri?”
“I am,” he said. He offered her his hand to help her up. Meena, her heart hammering, took it, because what else was she going to do? She had come there for a reason, and that was to free her friend and end this.
The time had come to do both.
“Sorry about that,” he said apologetically. “Oh, look at your poor coat. Here, let me help you.” He brushed dust and bits of plywood off the suede of her jacket. “You know, you’re nothing like I expected.”
“I get that a lot.” she asked, still coughing. “Shorter?”
“Younger,” he said. His gaze on her face was every bit as intense as his brother’s had ever been. But unlike Lucien’s, Dimitri’s brown eyes weren’t sad. No, they didn’t have that kind of depth. They were as shallow as Insatiable’s plotlines. “But pretty!” he added gallantly. “Well, I expected that, to be honest. My brother never could resist a pretty face.”
“Thanks,” Meena said sarcastically as she picked her way across the debris.
She noticed that they weren’t alone. Glowing, red-eyed gazes peered out at them from the shadows…gazes belonging, she knew, to the Dracul, Dimitri’s father’s faithful followers. She caught glimpses of them, expecting to see lean, leather-jacketed men who all resembled Gregory Bane and girls who looked like Taylor Mackenzie, in low-rise jeans and halter tops.
And she did spy Gregory Bane, leering at her by Dimitri’s side.
But the majority of the creatures she saw peering at her looked like ordinary people, no different than anyone she would see riding the subway or standing in line at Abdullah’s coffee cart in the morning, neither particularly thin or fat, young or old, fashionable or unfashionable.
And maybe that, Meena thought, her heart pounding harder than ever, was what scared her most of all.
The one thing they did have in common was that they all looked…hungry.
But hungry, Meena wondered, for what, exactly?
Dimitri was leading her into the church. Meena had never been inside St. George’s before. She knew it was fairly large and had always heard it was pretty. She had seen from the outside that it had a lot of stained glass windows. The largest of them hung above the front doors to the church and was supposed to depict St. George mounted on his steed, slaying a serpentlike dragon.
But she had never even been able to tell the glass was stained because it was so badly in need of cleaning. It just looked black. Hardly any light whatsoever got into the church, even from the safety lamps attached to the spires. The only light to see by was thrown by hundreds of candles that had been lit by the Dracul…and these weren’t votive candles, either. They were thick black candles that had been placed, wax dripping, over every available flat surface in the church, including the pews, which looked like they’d been kicked over.
The walls of the church hadn’t fared any better. They’d met with the wrong end of a few dozen cans of spray paint. There were dragon symbols sprayed everywhere, including across the stained glass windows. Meena, looking up at the church’s thirty-foot ceiling, saw that the choir loft had been equally decimated and was also strewn with graffiti. “Wow,” she said. “You’ve really done wonders with the place. Who’s your decorator?”
She heard a tinkly laugh and then an all-too-familiar female voice behind her said, “Me. I am.”
Meena whirled around, her heart exploding in her chest.
“Hey,” Shoshona said with a great big smile. “Surprise!”
Meena felt as if she’d been run over by a steamroller.
Then again, she thought, why was she so surprised? She’d always known something was going to kill Shoshona at the gym.
Why shouldn’t it have been a vampire? Specifically, Dimitri Antonescu’s son, Stefan, who’d only this morning been ramming a gun into Meena’s ribs.
Still, Meena couldn’t stop herself from staring. Shoshona looked fantastic. Her hair had never been shinier…or straighter.
I guess you don’t need a flat-iron when you’re dead, Meena thought.
“Yeah,” Shoshona said, strolling up to her. “It’s me. Hey…thanks for the bag.”
Meena lowered her gaze and saw that Shoshona was holding a Marc Jacobs jewel-encrusted dragon tote.
In ruby.
Meena’s ruby red Marc Jacobs jewel-encrusted dragon tote, to be exact. The one Lucien had given her.
Meena didn’t know what to say. A thousand different retorts popped into her head.
But she was too stunned to say any of them out loud.
“By the way,” Shoshona said, leaning in close to lay a long, manicured fingernail in the opening of Meena’s white-collared shirt, just where her pulse was leaping in her throat. “Guess who’s just been appointed the new cochairs of entertainment at Affiliated Broadcast Network?”
Shoshona pointed over her shoulder at a middle-aged couple in business attire, who waved enthusiastically in Meena’s direction.
Shoshona’s aunt and uncle.
Meena’s heart sank. Not Fran and Stan, too.
Everyone Meena knew really was turning out to be a vampire.
But cochairs of entertainment at ABN? How was that even possible? All they’d ever done was create a soap opera.
“Oh,” Shoshona said, tossing her long black silky hair. “And guess who they made president of programming at the network?” She pointed proudly at herself. “And as my first official duty in that capacity, I’m firing you, Meena. Sorry about that.”
“What?” Meena cried. She knew she had a few more important things in her life to worry about than her job.
But her job was, in a way, her life. “What can I say?” Shoshona asked with a shrug. “We don’t really appreciate people who are prejudiced against our species. Nor do we need them making disparaging remarks about our so-called misogynistic tendencies.”