Meg Cabot - Insatiable

“I don’t think you’re a fool,” he said.

He wanted to say a lot of other things. But he wasn’t suffering from blood loss anymore. So he kept silent.

She yanked on her hand again. This time, he let go.

She took that hand and pressed it, along with her casted hand, to her eyes, which were red with unshed tears.

“You really are annoying sometimes,” she said.

Martin often told him the same thing. “I know,” he said, agreeing.

“Why do you do this to me?” she asked, drying her eyes with the edge of his bedsheet. He doubted she’d find it very absorbent. The thread count couldn’t have been very high at all.

He longed to put his arms around her, to hold her.

But he was afraid she’d slap him.

Or that Holtzman would walk in. Either would have been equally embarrassing.

And besides, he couldn’t lean forward far enough to get his arms around her because of his stupid leg, which was hanging in traction.

Then, her eyes dry, she stood up.

She’d be leaving now, he supposed, his depression complete. And he had no idea if he’d ever even see her again.

Except, to his surprise, instead of leaving, she laid her uninjured hand on his chest.

“I don’t suppose,” she said, “we’re even now, are we?”

He shook his head, not understanding what she meant.

His confusion increased when she bent down and kissed him gently on the cheek, the way she had in the rectory that night.

“Probably not,” she said when she straightened. “I think I still owe you. Plus, you saved Jack, too.”

Oh. She meant all the times he’d saved her life. But she didn’t owe him for that. That was his job.

“You need a shave,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Tomorrow do you want me to bring you some stuff to shave with?”

“Yes,” he said, his mood suddenly brightening.

She’d been the only one to offer. The only one.

This was why he loved her.

Plus, she’d said she was coming to visit again tomorrow.

No, it wasn’t the same as saying she was going to take the job.

And maybe it was only because she was going to be visiting her friend in the maternity ward, anyway, and so it was easy for her to swing by to see him, too.

But by tomorrow, he’d have another speech ready for her, about how she belonged with the Palatine.

And when she came the next day-and she would; he knew she would-he’d have another.

And eventually, he’d wear her down. That’s how the old Alaric Wulf magic worked.

And even if the Alaric Wulf magic didn’t exist-Martin often said it didn’t-one of these days, they were going to have to let him out of traction, and he was going to stumble into some more danger.

And then she wasn’t going to be able to resist warning him to stay out of it.

And that’s when he’d point out, with the kind of brilliant and in-arguable logic for which he was so widely known, that she might just as well get paid to do this for a living.

She would be powerless in the face of such superior intellectual reasoning.

“Okay,” Meena said. She smiled and reached out to run her finger over some of the razor stubble on his cheek. He was careful to keep very still while she did this, so she wouldn’t stop. This was another example of how the Alaric Wulf magic worked. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Unfortunately, that was when she turned around and left.

But his hospital room didn’t seem nearly as unbearable to Alaric after that as it had before she’d come to pay her visit.

In fact, suddenly it felt downright cheerful.

Alaric didn’t think this was the result of powerful neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, being released in his brain.

He decided it was because of the daisies.

Alaric probably would have felt completely differently if he’d had the slightest idea about where Meena Harper was going…that his speech about not sleeping in windowless rooms had convinced her, not that she had to join the Palatine Guard to help him battle the forces of evil, but that she had to go, as soon as she left the hospital, to the single place that most terrified her and to which he’d made her promise not to go at all.

8:00 P.M., Friday, April 23

910 Park Avenue, Apt. 11B

New York, New York

Meena wasn’t sure what made her go back to her apartment.

Everyone told her not to. Alaric, who’d been there and seen the horrific destruction for himself. Abraham Holtzman, referring to his handbook about post-traumatic stress disorder and how it would only make hers worse. Sister Gertrude, who was practical and kind about these things.

Even Jon, who’d been there, too, to see if he could salvage any of his own things.

“It’s awful,” he’d said with a shudder. “Trust me. You don’t want to know.”

But Meena did want to know. Ever since that night…

She tried not to think about that night. She didn’t want to think about it because every time she started to, the tears came, and with them the conviction that Lucien was dead.

He had to be dead.

And then came the horrible hollow sensation in the middle of her chest…

And then, just as terrible, the fear that he wasn’t dead. What if he wasn’t dead, and still loved her, and wanted them to be together?

Which was worse?

The fact that she didn’t know was what made her decide she couldn’t think about it at all. Just not at all.

Not thinking about it was easier than anyone might have imagined. Every time she started to think about it, she just shoved all thoughts, all memories, anything and everything connected to Lucien Antonescu from her mind and thought firmly about something else.

She kept herself so busy at St. Clare’s that she didn’t really have time to think about Lucien. There were the dishes to do after every meal, the pots and pans and casserole dishes piled high in the in the rectory kitchen sink. Cleaning them was Meena’s penance for the burns everyone had sustained because of her. She scoured them until they gleamed, sometimes late into the night, just her, alone in the kitchen, with the sponge and her rubber gloves and the hot soapy water.

And the darkness beyond the window over the sink.

And the glowing red eyes she was convinced she could see burning through that darkness, watching her every move.

She tried not to think about the eyes, and if they were really there, or if she was just imagining them.

There was the soup kitchen to help run, the donations to the thrift shop to help sort through. (The thrift shop was where she’d found her new black dress, among many other additions to her wardrobe. She understood that the donations were meant to be sold in the store. But helping herself to one or two things as she sorted didn’t seem like the biggest crime. Everything she owned had been either destroyed by the Dracul or soaked in Alaric Wulf’s blood.)

But maybe she’d kept herself a little too busy not thinking about Lucien Antonescu (those eyes, burning through the darkness outside the kitchen windows) and what had happened that night.

Because until Alaric’s speech about how wrong it was for people like them to shut themselves off from the scary things in the world instead of fighting them-and he was right, she knew: she absolutely believed that the two of them were alike, he with his sword, and she with her ability to predict danger and death-Meena had thought she’d been doing the right thing by refusing to let herself think about Lucien.

But after Alaric’s eye-opening speech, she realized this was wrong.

She had a moral obligation not only to think about Lucien but to face him, and what he’d done to her and to her life.

Which was destroy it.

If he was even alive, of course. She still didn’t know whether or not he was (except…those eyes). No one seemed to be able to tell her. Abraham would say only that after that last blast of white-hot fire in the church-which had knocked him and everyone else unconscious for a few seconds-he woke to find the prince gone.