Meg Cabot - Insatiable

He looked down at her expressionlessly. The hand beneath her skirt stilled. “Nothing,” he said carefully. “I’m not doing anything to you, Meena. Except loving you.”

She reached up to touch her neck. She was relieved to find that it was dry.

But all it would take, she knew, was one more bite, and then her drinking a little of his blood…

And she would become like him.

She knew it. He knew it.

Meena got to her feet, suddenly feeling as if the walls of the room were closing in on her.

Her heart was racing as fast as a rabbit’s now. So fast, in fact, that she was worried it might actually fly out of her chest.

What am I doing? she asked herself. What am I doing here?

Alaric Wulf had warned her not to go to her old apartment. He’d told her…he’d made her promise she wouldn’t go see it.

Had he known? Had he known that Lucien would come there to find her and that he’d do this to her?

Of course he’d known.

And she hadn’t listened. Oh, God, why hadn’t she listened? She was just like all the people who never listened to her.

Because only now was the very great danger she was in actually beginning to become clear to her…this time, she was the one on the edge of the crevasse. How was she going to get away? How was she going to get out of this?

She didn’t have any weapons.

And even if she did-could she really kill the man she loved, even if it meant…

…her life?

She paced from one side of the room to the other and then back again, taking quick, shallow breaths.

“Meena,” Lucien said, looking at her curiously. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she said. Could he read her mind?

Yes. Of course he could. Or partly, at least. He always could.

Fine, then, she decided.

Let him read it now.

She came to a stop in front of him, her toes balanced on the edge of the pit.

“I can’t do that,” she said. “I can’t…do that.”

He looked up at her from the floor where he still sat. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“Oh, don’t lie to me, Lucien,” she said, exploding. “After everything else I’ve been through because of you? Your freak of a brother trying to kill me? An army of vampires trying to drain me of my blood and drink it? And you’re going to sit there and lie to my face?”

Now he climbed to his feet, his calm demeanor gone. “Fine,” he said. His large hands were fisted. There was a muscle twitching in his jaw. It was obvious he’d known exactly what she’d been talking about all along. “So what? Admit that it would make things simpler, Meena.”

“Simpler?” She laughed out loud, though without humor. “If I were dead?”

“If you were one of us,” he said, putting it in a way that he obviously found more palatable. “Then you and I could truly be together. All this talk of going to Thailand-”

“Yeah, FYI,” Meena interrupted sarcastically, “I knew that was never going to happen, because you’d go up like a roman candle on the beach.”

“-doesn’t mean anything if you’re just going to grow old before my eyes while I-”

“Oh, that’s very nice,” Meena said, interrupting again. “So you’re just going to dump me for someone younger when I get old, like every other guy? Are you suggesting I try some Revenant Wrinkle Cream or that I check into one of Dimitri’s spas-”

He reached out then and cupped her face in both his hands, looking deeply into her eyes.

“I will love you, Meena,” he said fiercely, “until the end of time. I will never stop loving you. My life, before I met you, was nothing. Can you understand that? My life was nothing, meant nothing, even if I may not have known it. And then you came along, and suddenly, everything I knew, or thought I knew, was turned upside down. I will never be the same again. How could I be? You have shown me what it is to love, to feel and laugh and, yes, even to feel alive again. So whether you choose to be one with me or not, I will go on loving you, Meena, even after you are a rotting corpse in the ground. But, Meena, I would like to do whatever I can to prevent you from turning into a corpse. I think I mentioned that before.”

She stared up at him, shaken.

“Yes, but, Lucien,” she said, reaching up to grasp his wrists and gazing into his dark eyes, in which she thought she saw flickers of flame, “tricking me into turning into a vampire so that I won’t grow old and die before your eyes? What if I don’t want to be a vampire? Which I don’t, by the way. I have a dog that hates vampires, remember? I have friends and family here in New York City who I’d like to be able to visit…during the day. Also, I’ve seen death. I really, really don’t like going there. Even to visit. Even for a short while. And, Lucien.” She took his hands from her face and flipped them over so that she could hold them, instead, in hers. “I have a special thing that I can do. I think you experienced it, at least on a small scale, when you drank my blood. I can tell when people are going to die…lately, I can tell when they’re just in danger. And that means I can warn them, give them a fighting chance against death…or at least put it off. If you killed me and turned me into a vampire…I don’t know if I’d have that ability anymore. I’m pretty sure my blood drying up in my veins would end that. And-”

She drew a shuddering breath.

“That, I just don’t think I could live without,” she said. “Because those unspeakable horrors you mentioned before, the likes of which you don’t think I can imagine and that I’m pretty sure you rule over?”

He stared down at her, uncomprehending. “Yes? What about them?”

“I think they’re what I’m supposed to be helping protect people from,” she said. She hoped the tears that had begun to stream down her face again didn’t make him think she was regretting what she was saying.

Because she wasn’t. Not at all.

“I don’t know for certain,” she went on. “But I do know that whenever I don’t help people…well, bad things happen. So…that’s what I’m going to go do.”

He shook his head. Now she was sure that there were flickers of flame in those dark eyes, twin embers, burning bright. Outside the apartment building, the rain, which had been falling gently before, suddenly began to pour. Thunder rumbled off in the not-so-far distance.

“Meena,” he said. The embers were glowing a deep, steady red, exactly the way the dragon’s eyes had. “I don’t understand. What are you saying?”

“I’m saying,” she said, unable to hold back a sob, “that I’m going to go work for the Palatine.”

He stared down at her for a second or two.

Then he threw back his head and laughed.

When he looked at her again, the embers had turned to flames, flaring high.

“Oh, Meena,” he said. “You’re joking.”

“I’m not joking,” she said. She reached up and wiped her tears with her uninjured wrist. “The Palatine offered me a job. And I’ve decided that I’m taking it.”

His eyes were entirely red now. The brown was gone. The dragon was taking over.

“It’s not like I would ever do anything to help them go after you, Lucien.” She rushed to explain. “You know that. I’ll always try to do everything I can to help you. Because I love you, too. I always will. But I just can’t be with you. Not if it means my friends are going to get hurt. And this job…it means I can finally do what I think I’ve always been meant to do.”

“You don’t need a job,” he said with sudden savagery. He reached out and grabbed her by the waist, pulling her hard against him. Outside, lightning flared as thunder caused the building to shudder. The storm was directly overhead. “I told you that I’d take care of you.”