Insatiable

long neck.

A stake. Another stake .

Someone else, other than her brother, was shooting at Lucien. Meena spun around, trying

to see who it was.

She spotted Abraham Holtzman in the center of the smoke-filled apse, a crossbow to one

shoulder, reloading.

She threw down her own crossbow and flew toward him.

“Stop,” she yelled at him. “You’ve got to stop. You’re hurting him!”

“Of course I’m hurting him, Miss Harper,” Abraham said matter-of-factly. “That would

be the point, wouldn’t it? I’m trying to distract him while Alaric—”

“But Lucien is on our side,” Meena cried. “He’s trying to help us! He killed Dimitri.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Miss Harper. He killed his brother in order to preserve his grip on

the throne,” Abraham said with measured patience. “He’s the prince of darkness, Satan’s

chosen son on earth to rule over all demon beings. I know you think you love him, my dear,

but he must be destroyed in order for goodness and light to stand a chance—”

“But he’s part of goodness and light,” Meena insisted. “His mother was—”

“Miss Harper,” Abraham said. “You surely can’t be telling me that there’s any part of

that that isn’t evil.”

On the word that, he gestured toward the dragon, which was loosing a stream of its white

fire at the bankers Meena had previously seen attacking Sister Gertrude. One minute they were

there.

The next, they were gone.

“Oh, dear,” Meena heard a voice close to her say. She turned her head and saw Emil and

Mary Lou Antonescu standing beside her.

But they didn’t look anything like they ever had when she’d seen them around their

apartment building. They were both covered in soot and blood, their designer clothing torn and

Mary Lou’s hair in complete disarray. She was clinging to her husband, watching in utter

terror as Lucien breathed fire onto the Dracul.

“Did you know about this?” Meena demanded of them. “Did you know Lucien”—she

didn’t even know what to say, exactly—“could…could…”

Emil turned to look down at her. His expression was grave. And a little bit sad.

And left absolutely no doubt, in Meena’s mind at least, that he’d known. Oh, he’d known

all along.

“The prince has always had a very bad temper,” was all he said, however.

“A bad temper?” Meena cried. She gestured toward the dragon, which had dipped its

long, slender neck to pick up Stefan Dominic in its mouth and was now ripping him apart, limb

from limb. Meena had to cover her eyes with her hands. “You call that a bad temper ?” she

asked, with a moan.

“It’s never a good idea,” Emil said, “to make the prince angry. Dimitri really ought to

have known better.”

Meena, careful not to look in Lucien’s direction, lowered her hands and asked, “Well,

how do we stop it? How do we make him turn back?”

“Oh,” Emil said, tightening his arm around his wife. “We can’t.”

Meena’s jaw dropped. “What? You mean—”

This was exactly what Meena had feared when she’d stood so close to that giant eye and

seen nothing in it of the man she loved…that Lucien would never go back to being himself

again.

Not that it mattered. Meena was still going to do everything in her power to keep him

from being obliterated by a combination of the NYFD, the NYPD, the Palatine, and the

Dracul, whatever he was, man or beast. Or vampire.

“Oh, he’ll turn back eventually, when he stops being so angry,” Emil said. “In the

meantime”—he glanced over his shoulder at the police officer who was now shouting into the

church on a megaphone for them to put down their weapons and come out with their hands on

the back of their heads—“Mary Lou and I are leaving. I would suggest you do the same, Miss

Harper.”

And with that, both of them disappeared before Meena’s eyes. One minute they were

there, and the next, there was nothing at all where they’d been standing, except twin wisps of

mist.

Stunned, Meena looked back at Abraham, who was reloading his crossbow. He seemed

to take what had just happened in stride. He didn’t even care about having missed his

opportunity to stake the Antonescus.

He was after much bigger game.

She was going to wake up soon, Meena decided. Because this all had to be a nightmare.

She was going to wake up in her own room, with Jack Bauer in her arms, and it would be

morning, and the sun would be shining, and everything would be okay. None of this would

have happened. She would get up and go to work, and—

“Meena!” She heard Alaric calling to her from somewhere across the church. “Meena!”

Then she saw him. He was standing directly behind the dragon.

“Move!” he shouted at her, and made a get-out-of-the-way gesture with his arms,

indicating that he wanted her to step away from Abraham.

And right then—in that moment—she knew exactly what he and his boss were planning

to do:

Abraham would shoot at Lucien, distracting him with another stake to the neck.

Then, while Lucien was roaring over the pain of that, Alaric would run up onto the

dragon’s back…

…then slice off its head.

Alaric, Meena concluded, was crazy. Especially if he thought Meena was ever going to

let this happen.

“You’d better do as he says, Miss Harper,” Abraham said, lifting the crossbow to his

shoulder and taking aim. “I know this is painful for you. But trust me, it’s the best way. I

promise you’ll feel much better when it’s all over.”

As Abraham was speaking, the dragon, which had finished its latest meal, looked

around. It had been weaving its head back and forth on its long, serpentine neck as if searching

the apse for its next victim. But now it finally froze…and squared both Meena and Abraham in

its sights.

Those gigantic, crystalline eyes focused directly on them, unblinkingly, like a snake’s.

All the hairs on the back of Meena’s neck stood up as the dragon stared at her. She saw a

stream of smoke release from its nostrils. The noxious odor of sulfur engulfed them a second

later.

“Oh, dear,” Abraham said, freezing with his finger on the crossbow’s trigger. “I think—”

Meena reached up to undo one of the hooks on the messenger strap of the dragon tote. It

slid down from her shoulder. Then, clasping the strap in both hands, she swung the bag as hard

as she could at Abraham, the weight of her laptop inside catching him full across the back.

“What—?” he cried as he stumbled.

He didn’t go down, though. He was too heavy and had far too much experience.

His shot, however, did go wild.

What happened next wasn’t part of Meena’s plan.

Chapter Fifty-nine

12:30 A.M . EST, Sunday, April 18

St. George’s Cathedral

180 East Seventy-eighth Street

New York, New York

T he tip of the dragon’s long red tail shot forward, wrapped around Meena’s waist, and

lifted her bodily into the air.

Meena would have screamed if she could have. But she was being squeezed so tightly,

she couldn’t breathe.

Plus, she was too terrified to scream.

Sailing over the heads of everyone left in the apse, Meena had a dizzying view of

shattered pews, smoldering walls, her dragon tote and laptop sailing off into oblivion, and

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