Insatiable

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 bloodred 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.

Scooping up a jagged chunk of crushed pew, she grabbed the hair of the nearest vampire,

who happened to be trying to sink its teeth into the throat of a hapless novice…

…and was shocked to find herself face-to-face again with Shoshona.

“Oh, right,” Shoshona said, smirking at her and at the pointed chunk of wood Meena

held in her fist. “Like you have the guts.”

“Oh,” Meena assured her, “I have the guts.”

There was no way she had the guts.

This was Shoshona. Sure, Meena had never liked her very much. She had told herself,

nearly every day for a year, that today was the day she was finally going to warn her coworker

that if she didn’t stop working out so much, she was going to die.

Now Meena realized that it was never the gym Shoshona had to fear.

It was Stefan Dominic, the man she’d met in it.

Still, Meena had always had every intention of saving Shoshona’s life.

So was she really going to put a stake through her heart and end it? Here, now?

No. Of course not.

“Yeah.” Shoshona smirked some more. “I knew it. By the way, I took something else

from your apartment, besides this bag.”

Shoshona unzipped the top of the red Marc Jacobs bag she still wore slung across her

chest and showed Meena a glimpse of something inside.

“Thanks for all the great story ideas,” she said, smirking. “Have a nice time on

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