Мэг Кэбот – Overbite (страница 3)

Because there were many things Meena Harper knew that her ex-boyfriend didn’t. Not only how people were going to die, or that demons and demon hunters weren’t just the stuff of fiction, but that there was, in every creature on earth, demon or not, a capacity for good and evil.

And that all it took to send any one of them over the edge was the tiniest of pushes.

It was just too bad her precognition didn’t tell her when one of those pushes might be necessary, or in which direction … or when someone other than herself was going to die.

That information might have been useful for her now, as she eased out of David’s car, and his hand shot out and wrapped around her wrist, entrapping it in a grip of iron.

The worst part of it was that he didn’t say anything. He just kept one hand clamped around her wrist, his gaze a dead-eyed stare.

Then he opened his mouth wide to reveal a set of pointed fangs.

Chapter Two

Meena’s reaction was purely instinctual. She sent the tips of his car keys, which she still had clutched in her free hand, plunging into his face.

But—with reflexes surprisingly sharp for someone so inebriated—he caught her hand in his, well before the keys could come anywhere near his skin.

Then he calmly lifted her arm up over her head, until he was pressing both her wrists against the headrest of the seat with one hand.

A second later, he’d pulled a lever so that her seat collapsed backward, and she was lying almost fully supine in his car.

The next thing she knew, her ex-boyfriend was on top of her.

She stared up at him with mingled feelings of fear, outrage, humiliation, and surprise. How had this happened? And how could she have been so stupid? How could she not have seen that all those dreams about David had been a warning, not a prophecy? His brain tumor hadn’t come back.

He’d been turned into a vampire.

Only how? And by whom? The Palatine, the organization by which Meena was currently employed, had spent the past six months hunting down and destroying every demonic life-form in the tristate area that it could find, with a systematic brutality that had caused even Meena, who had every reason in the world to detest them, to feel a little bit sorry for the poor things. It wasn’t their fault, after all, they’d been infected.

This could not be happening.

Especially to her. She’d been trained to defend herself against exactly this kind of thing.

“David.” She grunted as she tried to wrestle her hands free from his grip. If she could just grab her purse, she’d pull out the sharpened stake she always carried with her, and plunge it into his heart.

Then she remembered she hadn’t bothered to bring a purse with her. She’d dashed out of her apartment with nothing more than her cell phone and keys tucked inside the pocket of the light wool cardigan she’d thrown on as she was leaving. She hadn’t expected their meeting to take that long. She was, after all, only going to tell him that he was dying.

He wasn’t, though. He was already dead.

Which was why she couldn’t pull her hands from his grip. Because he had inhuman strength.

“Who did this to you?” she demanded. “How did this happen? And what do you want?”

“What do you think I want?” he said, slurring his words. His dead eyes still weren’t even open all the way. He outweighed her significantly. His torso was practically dead weight on top of her. And he was so, so strong. And his breath still reeked.

“Do you know who I work for now?” she asked from between gritted teeth. “You had better let go, or you have no idea of the world of trouble that you’re going to be in.”

“No,” he said simply, and dipped his face back toward her neck.

Her dress was full-skirted and a little on the short side. She should easily have been able to lift a knee to get him where it mattered.

But it was difficult with the dashboard in the way, not to mention the weight of David’s body pressing down on her. It was also hard to breathe, and he was holding her wrists so tightly, cutting off the circulation to her hands.

Meena’s panic grew. Not just because of the fangs she hadn’t yet felt pierce her skin, but because she realized the hard thing pressing against her through his pants wasn’t just a flask. Not anymore.

When David started fumbling with his zipper with his free hand, Meena’s desire to escape crowded out all rational thought.

Filling her lungs with the foul-smelling, fetid air, she let out an ear-splitting shriek that caused David, whose ear was beside her mouth, to lift his lips from her neck and curse.

That was when the door to the driver’s side of David’s Volvo was not so much flung open as torn off its hinges.

And a second later, David disappeared entirely.

He seemed simply to vanish. One minute he was there on top of her.

And the next, he was gone.

Disoriented from shock, Meena lay there, panting as she attempted to catch her breath and get the blood circulating back in her hands, then trying to figure out what had just happened. Had she dreamed it? The part where she’d been trying to do the right thing, and rescue David Delmonico—who quite clearly had never deserved rescuing in the first place—and he’d turned out to be a vampire?

But no. Because when she turned her head, she saw that the door to the driver’s side of David’s car was gone.

It was quiet on the deserted street, except for the usual sounds of the city … somewhere off in the distance, a siren wailed. She could hear traffic on the avenue. Not so far away, music played from someone’s open window.

Then, from out of nowhere, a body slammed onto the hood of David’s car, causing the entire vehicle to bounce like a children’s amusement-park ride. The windshield caved in, splintering.

Meena screamed again, her voice echoing up and down the deserted street.

David lay there completely still—not unlike one dead.

She didn’t realize what had happened to David—that he hadn’t been seized by flying monkeys, then dropped lifeless to the hood of his own car, where he now lay sprawled, unseeing and unmoving—until the man who’d done all this tapped politely on the still-closed window of her own car door.

She screamed again before she recognized who was looking at her through the glass.

“Meena?” His dark eyes were filled with concern. “Are you all right?”

It was Lucien Antonescu.

Chapter Three

I’m fine,” she said automatically.

She unlocked and opened the door, then climbed—a little shakily, but with all the dignity she could muster—from the car. Lucien held the door open for her, because he was the kind of man who always remembered to hold the door open for women.

He was also the kind of man who had, before Meena’s eyes, once destroyed a church and nearly killed her, along with a number of her friends. So, there was that to be considered.

“You’re sure you’re all right?” he asked her again.

Truthfully, she felt as if she were going to pass out, but she lied and repeated, “I’m fine.” It wasn’t quite a lie. Now that she was out of the car, the night air—delightfully fresh smelling after the inside of David’s Volvo, despite the garbage piled in the cans along the street nearby—had revived her a little.

“Is he …?” She looked over at David, who was still sprawled across his own car’s hood with his head tilted in a most unnatural position. She looked quickly away. “Is he …?”

Lucien was frowning. “Technically, he was dead before I arrived. But no, he’s merely recovering from a broken neck at the moment. Here. You’re bleeding.”

He handed her a handkerchief. Meena, startled, looked down at herself. There were drops of blood splashed across the front of her dress.

“Oh my God,” she said. “Where …?”

Lucien gestured in the general vicinity of his throat.

“He bit me?” Too late, she remembered how David had pressed his lips to her neck, and how relieved she’d been that she hadn’t had to taste his rank-smelling breath anymore. “But I didn’t feel anything—”

She broke off. She hadn’t felt anything the other times she’d been bitten in the past either.

By the man standing beside her.

“No. You aren’t meant to feel it.” It was apparent Lucien was remembering those times, as well. But he looked discreetly away from her and toward David. “Who is he? A friend of yours?”

He said the word friend with distaste, though he was tactfully trying not to show it.

“He’s just someone I used to go out with,” she said. She pressed the handkerchief to her throat, staring at Lucien, thinking the exact same thing could be said about him.

He, however, appeared to be in considerably better shape than David was at the moment. Intimidatingly tall and broad-shouldered, his dark hair thick and lustrous, Lucien appeared as handsome and put together in his dark Brioni suit and crisp white shirt as always. It was as if no time at all had passed since she’d last seen him.

But it had actually been six months.

Six months during which the people with whom she worked—Alaric Wulf in particular—had combed every inch of the city as well as its outer boroughs, looking for him, without success.

And yet here he was, standing right in front of her as if he’d never left.