this wasn’t a single solid piece of St. George’s Cathedral, crumbling at last.
It was, unbelievably, bats. Hundreds, maybe thousands of black, shrieking bats, all headed straight at her, their pink mouths open, razor-sharp claws extended, beady yellow eyes bulging as they swept down from the cathedral’s spires, blocking out most of the night sky and available lamplight with their foot-wide wingspan, their only target Meena Harper and her Pomeranian-chow mix.
At first Meena froze. She wasn’t paralyzed with fear so much as with shock. All she could think was, this was how she was going to die? Being chewed to death by rats with wings?
Meena had been envisioning other people’s deaths for so long, it had never occurred to her that she might one day be experiencing her own.
And now, faced by her own imminent destruction, all she was able to think was that she’d never, not even for a second, seen it coming.
Then, her heart stuck in her throat, too terrified to let out a second scream as she stood at the bottom of the steps of the cathedral, she pulled Jack Bauer into her arms—those bats were nearly as big as he was—then dropped to the pavement to protect her dog, her face, and her eyes. Burying her nose in Jack’s fur, she began frantically to pray, though she’d never been a particularly religious person before that moment. Oh, please, oh, please, oh, please, she prayed, to no deity in particular, as every second the bats’ shrieks sounded more and more loudly in her ears.
And then, just as it seemed the first of those claws had to sink into her scalp, the back of her neck, her unprotected spine, she felt something—or rather someone—drop on top of her, envelop her, blocking out the light and sound almost completely.
And she realized, risking a brief upward glance, that it was the man who’d been standing next to her … the tall, good-looking man with the nice hair, in the expensive coat. The man about whose future she’d felt exactly nothing.
Except that that was impossible. Because he’d thrown himself over her, in order to protect her from the bats.
And now he, not she, was being torn apart by bat claws and pummeled by the impact of their careening bodies. She could feel the force of them as they struck him, one after another, reverberating all the way through his body to hers, as the two of them crouched on the cathedral steps, bombarded by keening winged missiles.
Why he wasn’t crying out with the pain he had to feel as each talon struck him, Meena didn’t know. He wasn’t even trying to shield his face and neck from the bats as they continued to tear at him. Meena couldn’t quite see his face beneath the dark protective folds of his coat, which had formed a sort of canopy over her, shielding her from the menacing attack.
But she thought she caught a glimpse of his eyes once as she glanced out, trying to see what was happening, and she could have sworn…
Well, she could have sworn they flashed as red as the brake lights she’d seen all up and down Park Avenue.
But that, of course, would have been impossible.
As impossible as the fact that she hadn’t sensed he was going to die tonight the minute she’d seen him coming toward her.
And die protecting her.
But that had to be what was happening. Because no human being could go through an attack like this and live.
Meena couldn’t believe any of this was happening. It was four in the morning, and she was on Seventy-eighth Street in front of a church she’d walked by a hundred—maybe even a thousand—times before, and she was being attacked by killer bats, while a man—a total stranger—had thrown himself over her, voluntarily giving his own life for hers.
And then, just when Meena was certain she couldn’t take it a moment longer—when she was convinced the attack would never stop and that they would eat right through the man’s body and down to hers—as suddenly as the bats had appeared, they were gone.
Just vanished into the night sky, disappearing as mysteriously as they’d come.
And the street was silent again, save for the distant sound of traffic over on Park Avenue. There wasn’t a noise to be heard, except for Jack Bauer’s whines and her own ragged breathing. She hadn’t realized until then that she was crying.
She couldn’t hear the man’s breathing. Was he dead already? How could he be dead without her having felt his death approaching? Even though he was a stranger to her, she ought to have known. Her power to predict death—unwanted as it had always been—had never once failed her before.
“Oh!” She found that she couldn’t catch her breath. She was trying to take in large gulps of air, but no oxygen seemed to be reaching her lungs. And it wasn’t because her protector was dead weight on top of her, either. “Oh, my God.”
That was when the man rolled off Meena and, in a deep voice tinged with an accent that sounded to her like a mixture of British and a hint of something else, asked, “Are you all right, miss?”
Chapter Sixteen
4:10 A.M. EST, Wednesday, April 14
St. George’s Cathedral
180 East Seventy-eighth Street
New York, New York
None of it was the slightest bit possible, of course.
That he should be completely unhurt and conversing with her as politely as if she’d just tripped over Jack Bauer’s leash and fallen across the sidewalk and he was a passerby who’d stooped to help her back up.
That she was looking into the eyes of the charming stranger kneeling beside her and saw that they weren’t red at all, but a perfectly ordinary dark brown.
“I—I’m fine,” Meena stammered in response to his inquiry after her health. She’d let Jack Bauer go because she could no longer hold on to his wildly wiggling body. He darted as far as the end of his leash would allow him to, then stood there growling, all the fur on his back raised. Meena couldn’t believe how horribly behaved he was being.
“Are you all right?” she asked her rescuer in a trembling voice.
“I’m very well, thank you.” The man had risen to his feet and now reached down to take Meena’s hands in his, to help her up. “I’d heard, of course, that New York City was dangerous. But I’d no idea it was quite as dangerous as that.”
Was he …? He was.
He was making a little joke.
His grip on her hands was steady. Meena felt oddly reassured by it. And by the little joke.
“I-it’s not,” Meena stammered.
Meena needed, she decided, to sit down. His grip on her hands was the only thing keeping her on her feet.
“I think we should get you to a hospital,” she heard herself say.
Or me, she thought. For a full head CT.
“Not at all,” the man said, putting an arm around her shaking shoulders. His grip seemed to say, I’m in control. There’s no need to worry about anything. Everything is going to be all right now. In a distant part of her brain, she hoped he would never, ever let go. “I’m fine. I think we should get you home, though. You seem done in. Where did you say you lived?”
“I didn’t,” Meena said. Her mind was awhirl, she knew. But whose wouldn’t be after such an event? How could he be so calm? Bats, Meena remembered, sometimes carried rabies. “Did any of them bite you? You should go to the ER right away. They can stop rabies if they catch it early enough.”
“None of them bit me,” he said in an amused tone of voice. He had taken the leash from her and was now walking both her and Jack Bauer—though unlike Meena, Jack