on his way to carefully stamp out the cigar Dimitri had dropped, then lift it and deposit it in the Dumpster behind him.
Lucien was furious … but even when furious, he was still conscientious about litter.
“I have no idea what kind of game you’re playing here, Dimitri,” Lucien said, leaning an elbow on the side of the Dumpster and speaking down to his brother in a voice that was almost eerie in its calmness after the violence that had erupted just seconds before. “Nightclubs filled with investment bankers and drug-addicted young women. That’s your business, and I agreed long ago I’d stay out of Dracul business, so long as there weren’t any human deaths from loss of blood. But now … it’s not the Palatine you need to fear … it’s me.”
Dimitri, slumped against the side of the Dumpster like a piece of garbage waiting to be picked up, winced up at his brother.
“I know that,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. “I’ve always known that. You didn’t have to hit me so hard, you know.”
“These dead girls,” Lucien said, ignoring his brother. “What do you know about them?”
“I told you,” Dimitri said. “I don’t know anything about them.”
A stainless steel countertop that lay abandoned to one side of the Dumpster suddenly rose several feet into the air and dangled threateningly above Dimitri’s head.
“Wait,” Dimitri cried, throwing an arm over his face to protect his handsome features from destruction. “All right, all right. Yes, I’ve heard talk—”
Lucien let the countertop fall harmlessly to one side. The clatter it made was deafeningly loud, and the two men could hear rats squeak and scurry away. Dimitri, still seated in the muck on the alley floor, made a face.
“But you can’t think I know who’s doing it, Lucien,” he said. “Obviously if I did, I’d put a stop to it. I don’t even know why you’d think it’s one of us. It’s clearly some sick pervert.”
“Who drinks human blood,” Lucien said calmly.
“Well, lots of people do,” Dimitri said. “It’s quite stylish to be a vampire these days. Or act like one, anyway.”
Lucien studied his younger brother. He would have liked to have believed Dimitri was as innocent as he claimed.
But Lucien had made the mistake of believing in his brother’s innocence in times past.
And it had nearly cost him his life.
He wouldn’t make that same mistake again, especially when it might now involve human lives.
“If I find out you know anything about these murders,” Lucien said, “and you didn’t tell me or do anything to stop the killer—or happen to be behind the killings yourself—I will destroy you, and everything and everyone you care about, Dimitri. Do you understand?”
Dimitri, trying to struggle to his feet and out of the garbage and slime, said, “Brother! We’ve obviously gotten off on the wrong foot again. I’m sorry about that little misunderstanding back there. Can’t we—”
But Lucien wasn’t done. He placed a hand on his half brother’s shoulder and shoved him back down into the muck from which he’d just been attempting to climb.
Then Lucien leaned over him and whispered into his ear, “No. We can’t. You know the agreement. Everyone can drink. But no one can—”
“For the love of God, Lucien!” Dimitri cried. “Do you think I don’t know, after all these years? No one may kill a human, no matter how much he might thirst. To do so will bring swift and absolute retribution from the prince. The Dracul have lived under your orders for more than a century. Do you think we might have somehow forgotten them?”
“Yes,” Lucien said grimly. “Because you have before. And you will again.”
It was right then that the back door to the club opened and Reginald and his partner appeared.
“Mr. Dimitri?” Reginald asked in some alarm, seeing his boss lying on the alley floor.
Lucien straightened.
“Give him a hand, will you, Reginald?” Lucien asked over his shoulder as he turned to stride swiftly past him and into the dark night. “Mr. Dimitri is going to need all the help he can get.”
Chapter Twenty-one
7:00 P.M. EST, Thursday, April 15
St. George’s Cathedral
180 East Seventy-eighth Street
New York, New York
Meena stared at the cathedral. In the fading daylight, it looked beautiful, with its twin spires straining toward the spring sky and elegant stained glass, even if some of the windows were broken in places. Who would throw rocks at a church window, anyway?
Sure, it was surrounded with the familiar blue plywood that always went up around a building in Manhattan when construction was taking place.
But the plywood was nowhere near high enough to hide the large and lovely cathedral behind it.
A cathedral that, just two nights before, had been the scene of an inexplicable, brutal attack.
Or had it?
Meena stood with Jack Bauer on his leash at the bottom of the cathedral steps, exactly where they had been the night before last when the bats had come swooping down out of nowhere.
At first she’d been worried that Jack wouldn’t want to go anywhere near the church because of what had happened last time they’d been there.
But he showed no sign of any reluctance, trotting right up and lifting a leg on a parked car in front of it.
He obviously didn’t harbor any ill memories of the incident.
But though at first her own had been a bit fuzzy, she remembered it all now, as clearly as if it had just happened a few minutes, and not nearly forty-eight hours, ago. There was the place on the sidewalk where she’d crouched, her heart in her throat, for so long while the bats had flung themselves over and over at Lucien’s face and body, trying—she’d been certain at the time—to rip him apart.
Except that he’d been fine, his face without a mark on it.
And true, there were no actual drops of blood or anything like that on the ground to show that there’d been any attack at all.
But she recognized the crack in the pavement; how could she forget it? Her face had been almost right up against it as Lucien had lain across her, keeping her safe.
It was strange, Meena thought as she stood gazing up at the church spires, wondering if the bats were in there now and when they might awaken—and attack—again. She didn’t get a feeling of evil from the cathedral, even though the exact spot where she stood had very nearly been the site of a savage mauling.
Meena didn’t flatter herself that as a dialogue writer for a show of Insatiable’s quality she was particularly gifted. She didn’t put on airs that she was a creative genius.
Nor did she think of herself as any more creative than the artists she sometimes saw outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the ones who painted amateur sunsets and landscapes and then sold them to tourists who happened to be walking by.
Meena felt her scripts for Insatiable were much the same thing: a reflection of what was happening daily in front of the average American, just like a sunset … only maybe a little more dramatic, to keep people interested.
But she’d always been aware of being a tiny bit more sensitive to mood than other people, possibly because of her ability to tell when something horrible was going to happen to someone.
Maybe