Meg Cabot - Insatiable

Whatever was in the basement, the human employees of Concubine, who weren’t supposed to know about it, not only knew about it but feared it.

Lucien followed Reginald down the narrow concrete staircase, sensing approaching death more closely with every step. He couldn’t just smell it…he could feel it, oozing through his pores the way moisture seeped from the basement walls. This had been what he’d noticed when he’d entered the club: the thump of human heartbeats, quivering with life…and impending doom.

Was this what Meena Harper felt every day of her life, walking down the street, getting on the subway, going about her daily business?

How could she stand it?

They came to two doors. Behind one of them Lucien could hear the heartbeats thundering so loudly, he wanted to fling his hands over his ears.

Behind the other, he heard…nothing.

He nodded toward the door where there was only silence.

“Open it,” he said to Reginald.

Reginald, holding the keys like they were a rosary, looked like he was about to cry. “I really don’t want to, sir,” he said. “Please don’t make me.”

Lucien nodded, understanding. There was only so much the human mind could take.

He lifted his foot and smashed down the heavy metal door with a single powerful kick.

Inside the darkened room, on concrete mortuary slabs, lay the seven financial analysts from TransCarta to whom his brother Dimitri had introduced him the night before.

Only they were no longer alive.

On the other hand, they weren’t quite dead, either.

They were in a place between life and death. Someone had turned their stiff white shirt collars down and bitten each one neatly along the carotid artery, not once, not twice, but three times.

And along each man’s mouth, Lucien saw faint traces of blood.

They were turning. They were currently in a metamorphic state. When they woke, they would be vampires.

And they’d be hungry as hell.

“Who did this?” Lucien demanded, turning to face Reginald, who, unable to control his curiosity-even terrified as he was-stood peering in past the broken door, which hung by its hinges.

“I have no idea,” he said. “What the hell is wrong with those guys? Why are they just laying there like that, all bitten on the neck? Are they…are they-” Reginald couldn’t bring himself to say the word.

“Yes,” Lucien replied.

He swept from the room and back out into the hallway to face the second door, the one behind which he could hear so many heartbeats.

Reginald stared at him.

“I know you’re not going to kick that door down,” Reginald said. “If there were vampires behind that first door, what’s going to be behind that door? Don’t even think about-”

Lucien kicked down the second door.

Behind it blinked a half dozen young women, all very much alive, all in various states of semi-dress, stretched out across cheap mattresses, seeming very weak and confused to see so much light streaming into the room all of a sudden. The smell was not very pleasant.

None of the girls, Lucien could tell, was a vampire. Yet.

But all of them had been bitten and drained, just enough to keep them compliant.

The mystery about what the vamps next door would eat when they awoke was solved.

“Gerald?” one of the girls asked in a bewildered voice.

“Is not Gerald,” another said, sounding even more bewildered.

All of them looked terrified.

Lucien turned around and signaled to Reginald.

“Get them out of here,” he said. “Start taking them upstairs. Wait for me there.”

“Okay,” Reginald said, affable now that the mystery of the basement had been solved. “But what about-” He nodded his head toward the room next door.

Lucien looked around the tiny cell in which the girls had been held, clearly for quite some time, and with no toilet facilities that he could see, save for a bucket. He saw a rickety chair and smashed it to pieces.

“This will do,” he said, lifting one of the chair legs and examining the pointiest end. “Now go.”

While Reginald went to work corralling the girls up the stairs-they needed a lot of assurance that it wasn’t a trap and that they were being set free-Lucien set about his own task.

It was grim work. He had no idea if the men had asked to be turned or if his brother was forming some kind of indentured vampire investment banker army to handle his finances.

Knowing his brother, he guessed the latter.

In any case, these men were not going to wake immortal, with superhuman powers, and thirsting for human blood.

They were never going to wake again at all.

When Lucien was finished with his foul task, he threw the chair leg away, washed himself off as best he could-humans who had not quite turned still exuded massive amounts of blood-and turned to leave the concrete room, giving it one last glance over his shoulder.

It was exactly the last resting place he’d pictured for all of them when he’d met them at the burlesque club.

Only he’d thought they’d be dying in a parking garage, in some sort of car accident. He’d never imagined he’d be the instrument of their death.

Except, he told himself, that he hadn’t been.

His brother was.

Dimitri knew the rules. What was he doing, turning humans and leaving them in a nightclub basement to awaken alone, then throwing them weakened human girls on which to feed?

At least now Lucien had a good idea where the bodies in the parks had been coming from.

“Reginald,” he called as he came up the basement stairs.

Reginald was waiting for him in the bar. He’d given all the girls cans of soda and little bowls of nuts, as if they were VIP guests of the club. Reginald had also, Lucien saw, raided the lost and found on the girls’ behalf. All of them were now fully, if somewhat whimsically, clothed.

“Yes, boss?” Reginald asked. He’d been wiping the bar as if the club was open for business and he was tending it.

“Where does Mr. Dimitri keep his safe?” Lucien asked.

“In his office,” Reginald responded promptly. “Here, I’ll show you.”

Reginald no longer needed the slightest mental push to do Lucien’s bidding. Having found a nest of soon-to-be vampires in his employer’s basement, alongside their next meal, Reginald’s loyalty to Mr. Dimitri seemed to have ended.

“Ladies,” Lucien called to the girls. “This way, please.”

The girls, chattering softly in their native languages, brought their sodas and nuts along as they followed Lucien and Reginald up the stairs to Dimitri’s plush office.

“It’s there,” Reginald said, pointing to a mirror that hung above a large art deco desk. “Behind the mirror. He keeps loads of cash in it. In case he has to make a quick getaway.”

“How fortuitous for us,” Lucien said. “Stand out of the way, ladies.”

He lifted a paperweight shaped like a greyhound and smashed the mirror to pieces with it.

“Dude really likes smashing shit,” Reginald remarked to the girls, who looked impressed.

Lucien took hold of the door to the safe and peeled it away, dropping it to the floor with a thump.

“Whoa,” he heard Reginald say. The young ladies gasped.

Lucien ignored them. He had work to do. As Reginald had stated, the safe was filled with a great deal of cash. There were also a lot of passports. Lucien reached for these and flung them to Dimitri’s desk.

“Look through these,” he said. “Perhaps the girls will find their own.”

There was a flutter of excitement behind him as the girls did just that. Lucien continued to rifle through the safe but found nothing else that would be of any use, to him or anyone else he could think of, except a set of keys and the title and registration papers to a car.