Мэг Кэбот – Overbite (страница 9)
“Oh.” Holtzman lowered his scraggly gray eyebrows.
“Yes, that,” Alaric said, annoyed. “What else? I certainly hope you put a freeze on that request she made to the Secret Archives.”
Now Holtzman’s eyebrows went up. “I did no such thing,” he said, looking offended. “If any of my staff members wants to request material the Vatican Library might have on file—even material from the Secret Archives—that might in any way help us in our efforts to better understand our enemies, why on earth would I stand in their way?”
“You must be joking.” Alaric could hardly believe what he was hearing. “You don’t believe this dream she’s been having has any sort of merit, do you?”
“I don’t know that it doesn’t,” Holtzman said. “And I don’t see why you feel it doesn’t. In any case, Meena Harper is not why I asked you in here today.”
Alaric’s frown deepened. “Are you saying you actually believe that there’s a chance that Lucien Antonescu—the anointed one, listed in the
“I’m saying,” Holtzman said, “I like to keep myself open to all possibilities.” When Alaric openly balked at this, Holtzman lifted a hand and said, “I understand that certain prejudices exist about Antonescu, and rightly so. Sometimes old memories die hard, and the fact that so many of us, including yourself, are still recovering from injuries sustained fighting him and the Dracul last spring certainly hasn’t exactly fostered a spirit of goodwill toward Meena’s theory. I, however, am willing to give it a chance … if she can prove it, which is a big if. Now, if I may get to the reason I asked you to step in here this evening, which, as I said, has nothing to do with Meena Harper … I know you aren’t going to like this, but there’s no getting around it. I’m sure you’re aware of the Church’s efforts to …”
Alaric instantly switched off his attention and turned to stare out of one of Holtzman’s office—formerly a principal’s office—windows facing Mulberry Street. The moment he heard the words
But that, too, was boring.
He reflected, instead, on Meena Harper, and her theory.
“Saint Thomas said it,” she insisted almost daily in the commissary. “Not me. He believed there is no positive source of evil, or even evil beings, but rather an absence of good in some beings.”
“Which,” Alaric had pointed out, “is why we are employed, and will continue to be so for many years to come.”
This always provoked a great deal of laughter from his fellow guards.
But then Meena would come in with some quote from Saint Thomas like, “‘Fire could not exist without the corruption of what it consumes; the lion must slay the ass in order to live. And if there were no wrongdoing, there would be no sphere for patience and justice.’ True,” she’d go on, “without evil we’d be out of a job. But maybe our job is to provide better fireproofing and protection for the asses, rather than kill all the lions.”
None of this made Alaric feel any better about this book Meena had requested from the Vatican Secret Archives, which she swore—if it was the book from her dream, and what were the chances of that?—was going to prove her theory correct. The still-healing scars that he and many of his fellow guards bore from their battle last spring with Lucien Antonescu and his clan was all the proof Alaric needed of just how wrong she was …
… as was the feeling he and so many of them had in their guts since the fire that had ripped through and destroyed St. George’s Cathedral, the site of that battle.
It was a belief every guard—but especially one who had put in as many years as Alaric had on the force—shared, honed from sheer experience:
True evil did indeed exist, and it was out there, waiting.
Like the quiet just before a storm, they could feel it. It had the hairs on the back of all their necks standing up. Maybe they couldn’t see the clouds rolling in, and maybe they couldn’t hear the thunder …
But that didn’t mean there wasn’t something on its way.
Maybe that something wasn’t Lucien Antonescu. Meena swore up and down that he hadn’t been in contact with her in months.
And there was no reason not to believe her. While they’d had plenty of reports of other paranormal phenomena—succubi, werewolves, and more ghosts than he could count—there’d been no reports from anywhere in the tristate area of attacks by members of Antonescu’s clan, the Dracul. In fact, there’d been no reports of any attacks at all that could be attributed to vampires.
This was frustrating, because the entire reason the Manhattan unit had been created was to root out and destroy the prince of darkness. If they killed him, it was theorized, the demonic beings over which he ruled would be weakened. Demoralized and disorganized without their leader, they’d be that much easier to slay.
Alaric wasn’t certain how much credence he put into this theory. But he did know Antonescu
And he hadn’t risked half a millennium of anonymity to be with her, the way Antonescu had.
It didn’t make sense to believe that the vampire would give up now, even if she’d rejected him. He was only biding his time, Alaric knew. Biding it a little too well, unfortunately.
Because everything between Alaric and Meena had gone wrong as well. Not as spectacularly wrong as it had between her and the vampire because, well, for one thing, he wasn’t a vampire. And for another, he and Meena had never actually gone out.
But he’d at least considered them friends. Now he wasn’t sure they were even that anymore.
It seemed to have started not long after he’d been released from the hospital for the wound he’d sustained protecting her from what undoubtedly would have been certain death at St. George’s Cathedral, when he’d asked Meena if she’d like to have dinner with him.
When she’d looked up at him with those big dark eyes and asked, “Where would you like to eat?” he’d replied, “Well, my apartment, of course. I’ll cook for you.” His culinary skills were excellent.
And why should they go to a stuck-up Manhattan restaurant where some customer was bound to do something to annoy him—such as talk too loudly on a cell phone, Alaric’s number one pet peeve—causing him to have to get into a fight, when he could make something just as good in his own apartment, where no one would annoy him?
She’d instantly looked wary. He had no idea why.
“Do you really think that’s such a good idea?” she’d asked.
“Why would that be a problem?” he’d inquired, genuinely confused.
“Maybe we should just keep it professional,” she’d said, giving him what he supposed she considered a “professional” pat on the shoulder.
That had been weeks and weeks ago, and she was still treating him like he had the plague and leprosy combined. He couldn’t understand it. What had he done that was so wrong? He’d asked Carolina de Silva, a fellow guard with whom Meena had become friendly, and she’d only smiled and told him he should have gone for the restaurant after all.
This information only made him more confused.
Now she wouldn’t shut up about her damned dream.
Why did
A cataclysmic decline in enrollment—no one who could afford to live in such a trendy neighborhood of Manhattan had children … or if they did, they were certainly not choosing to send them to Catholic school—and the building’s general state of disrepair had caused the Church to shut down St. Bernadette’s, with zero protest from the community, at exactly the same time as the Palatine had put in their request for a similar-size space in New York City.
Abraham Holtzman had been pleased … until he’d stepped inside and seen its dismal state, and the tiny desks still littering its hallways. It had taken weeks to clear them all out. The fountain in the courtyard—of Saint Bernadette kneeling before the Virgin Mary at Lourdes—still didn’t work. Apparently, it had been dry for almost a hundred years.
“I was