…only to careen directly into Alaric Wulf’s wide, solid chest. He’d managed to shake off his new vampire buddies and had come running over with his sword drawn to help her.
“You’re very popular with the Dracula boys,” Alaric remarked drily. “They all seem to want to have you for dinner.”
“Less joking,” she said. Dimitri had his dagger out, the blade gleaming in the candlelight. “More head chopping. And please don’t miss this time.”
“Isn’t this nice?” Dimitri asked Alaric as he tossed the dagger from hand to hand. “We finally get to finish what we started in Berlin. You ran off with your partner that day before we were done. It wasn’t at all sporting.”
“Yes,” Alaric said. “Well, I had more important things to do than stick around to kill you. My partner was bleeding to death, as you might recall.”
Dimitri’s grin broadened.
“I know,” he said. “He was delicious. I’m looking forward to another bite someday.”
Alaric, his face darkening, lifted his sword.
Uh-oh, Meena thought. This isn’t good. Should he be fighting angry? “Alaric,” she said urgently. “Don’t-”
That’s when they all heard it: a sound like no other-certainly nothing human. But it wasn’t anything vampire, either.
It came from the apse at the front of the church, where the altar sat. It was so loud it shook the building to the foundations. So loud dust floated down from the choir loft and the low ceiling that hung over Alaric’s and Meena’s heads.
Turning slowly, Meena was afraid of what she was about to see-but knew full well what it was. Of course it was. She was in St. George’s. All her visions had been of fire. And there were crude drawings of it all over the walls.
She still couldn’t believe her eyes.
But there it was.
A dragon.
On the Upper East Side.
Chapter Fifty-eight
12:15 A.M. EST, Sunday, April 18
St. George’s Cathedral
180 East Seventy-eighth Street
New York, New York
It was crouched in the apse, its huge body and enormous wingspan filling the entire space, while its serpentine head perched on a neck that was stretched nearly the height of the thirty-foot ceiling.
Its claws made obscene scratching noises on the marble floor.
Its scales were ruby red.
Smoke poured from its nostrils.
Out of one of its shoulders poked a tiny wooden stake.
Lucien, Meena thought, feeling as if her heart had turned to ice in her chest. My God. Lucien.
What’s happened to you? What have they done to you?
“Oh…my God,” said Dimitri, dropping the dagger he held when he saw it.
Hearing Dimitri’s voice-and then the noisy clatter of the falling knife-the dragon’s head whipped in their direction…then dipped low to peer at them where they stood beneath the choir loft.
Meena’s frozen heart gave a convulsive double beat. Oh, God. Oh, God. The dragon was looking at them.
A mixture of steam and what smelled like sulfur shot straight at them as the beast exhaled hot air with enough force to douse all the candles in their area.
Suddenly they were plunged into semidarkness.
But Meena could still see, thanks to the fiery glow coming from the dragon’s nostrils, which loomed closer and closer to them…and from which she could hear a strange snuffling sound.
“Whatever you do,” Alaric whispered in the dark, startling her, as he slowly reached out to lay a warm, steadying hand on the back of Meena’s neck, “don’t move.”
“I wasn’t going to,” Meena whispered back. “But what’s…happening?”
It wasn’t what she wanted to ask. What she wanted to ask was, Where is Lucien? Can he really be in there, beneath all those scales? Is that really him?
“I don’t know,” Alaric replied. “I’ve never seen this before. But I think he’s-”
Suddenly, the dragon’s head reared up right next to Meena. She froze, every muscle in her body tensing. She couldn’t remember ever being that paralyzed with fear in her life-not even when she’d realized Lucien was actually a vampire-as she found herself being examined by a huge, double-lidded, foot-wide eye, its many facets, each the color of a blood-red sun, casting her own terrified reflection back at her.
Calm down, she tried to tell herself. This is Lucien’s eye. It’s going to be all right.
But she wasn’t sure that was really true since she could see no hint at all of the man she had known and loved in there. What she found herself gazing at wasn’t a man at all. It was completely, entirely beast.
A giant lid slid sideways over the pupil staring at her, then opened again as the dragon peered at her-and then at Alaric, standing behind her.
Then came that huge snuffling sound again, so loud that Meena would have jumped out of her skin entirely if Alaric hadn’t been keeping such a firm grip on the back of her neck.
Did he just… smell me? Meena asked herself, stunned.
Alaric squeezed the back of her neck.
She got the message. Don’t talk. Don’t move. Don’t even breathe.
It was good advice.
Too bad Dimitri couldn’t seem to follow it.
He’d found the knife somehow where he’d dropped it.
And now he made a running lunge out of the darkness at the beast, going for its giant blinking eye with a scream of pure, unadulterated hate.
This, it turned out, was a mistake. A big mistake.
“…pissed,” Alaric said, finishing his thought about Lucien’s state of mind. He shoved Meena to the floor, then threw himself on top of her. “Stay down.”
The fire that came bellowing out of the dragon’s nose and throat in Dimitri’s direction was white-hot.
It was the searing heat of the sun. It was the brimstone-filled heat from the fiery pits of hell, and it was aimed at a single target. It went shooting over their heads and bodies.
Meena had never felt heat like that before in her life and hoped she never would again.
Meena wasn’t sure if Dimitri ever even knew what hit him. One minute he was there, and the next, there was only fire…
And then there was only thick black smoke.
Where Dimitri had been standing was a charred, smoldering spot.
“Oh, my God,” Meena heard someone saying. And then she realized it was herself. She was saying it, over and over. “Oh, my God, oh, my God.”
“Stay down.” She heard Alaric’s deep voice in her ear. “Just stay down.”
Meena caught her breath as the dragon’s head dipped toward them once more. Lucien swept his gleaming red snout just inches above them, making that snuffling sound again.
He was smelling them. She was certain of it.
Then the head disappeared.
Lucien was turning his attention-and his breath of fire-to the people and vampires in the rest of the church.
Alaric must have realized it, too. That’s why he sprang up from Meena and ran after Lucien’s departing head.
She knew instantly where he was going.
And why. “No!” she screamed.
And she tore off after him.
She lost him in the chaos that was ensuing outside of the sheltering roof of the choir loft.
Yes, there might have been a seventy-foot-long dragon breathing fire in one part of the church.
But in the rest of the building, there was still a vampire-versus-human war being waged. She saw the Dracul sinking their fangs into the necks of novices…Sister Gertrude stabbing a Dracul with a piece of pew…Jon firing his crossbow at point-blank range at a Dracul (and missing). Fran and Stan flipping friars over with a superhuman strength amazing for people Meena had never before seen lift anything heavier than a knish. Abraham Holtzman and Emil and Mary Lou Antonescu had formed some kind of bizarre partnership and seemed to be trying to kill as many Dracul as they could with whatever they could…which appeared to be not many with very little.
Meena, appalled, knew she couldn’t just stand there. She had to do something to help…even if there was a dragon lumbering around, incinerating people with its breath.