Meg Cabot - Insatiable

There was no response.

“Lucien?” she said. She held the phone away from her face, looking down at the screen. She still had service.

Lucien, she realized, had hung up on her.

Had she said the wrong thing?

Meena jumped as her phone vibrated in her hand. He was calling back.

“Lucien?” she cried.

“Who?” A familiar voice filled her ear.

“Oh,” Meena said, disappointed. “Hi, Paul. Look, I really can’t talk right now.”

“Whatever,” Paul said. “Sorry to interrupt your Saturday-night mini-Butterfinger orgy. I just wanted to see if you’d gotten Shoshona’s e-mail.”

“What e-mail?” Meena asked. She needed to get downstairs to warn everyone. She understood now why the Dracul were trying so hard to get inside the rectory. It wasn’t just her they wanted.

It was Dimitri Antonescu’s son.

“We’ve been sold,” Paul said.

Meena nearly dropped her phone. “What? What do you mean? The show?” But that made no sense. Shows couldn’t be sold. Could they?

“Not the show,” Paul said. “The network. Consumer Dynamics and everything it owns. This morning. To something called TransCarta.”

“I never heard of it,” Meena said.

“Me neither,” Paul said. “I had to Google it. It’s a private equities firm.”

Meena stood there clutching her BlackBerry to her face. She really didn’t have time to talk, like she’d told him. And yet…“But…what does this mean?”

Fired. Like everything else, she’d now lost her job, too. “Shoshona assures everyone in her e-mail that it doesn’t mean anything, that everything will go on as normal, that TransCarta supports ABN and Insatiable wholeheartedly and looks forward to a profitable future working with us.”

“Shoshona said all this?” Meena asked incredulously. Shoshona could hardly even string together a lunch order.

“I know,” Paul said. “But Fran and Stan cosigned. And here’s the weird thing: Shoshona sent the e-mail an hour before any of this was announced on CNN.”

“So then how did she even know about it?” Meena wondered aloud.

It was right then that the hatch that led to the rooftop was thrown suddenly open, letting out a strip of brilliant yellow light from the rectory’s third floor.

“What are you doing up here?” her brother, Jon, demanded. He climbed up onto the roof, dragging a crossbow after him. “What happened to my holy water brigade? It’s like it suddenly dried up or something.”

“Sorry,” Meena said, hanging up on Paul and slipping her cell phone surreptitiously back into the pocket of her suede jacket. “I got distracted. They’re starting to dive-bomb me.” She looked up, scanning the night sky for winged assassins, but everything seemed quiet…for the moment. “Looks like they’ve backed off for now.”

“Yeah, that’s why I’m here. Abraham thinks they’re repositioning, and that you better come back down. It’s probably not all that safe up here anymore anyway.”

“Okay,” Meena said. “Look, I need to tell Abraham something. That Stefan guy? He’s-”

Jon’s cell phone went off.

“Who the hell could that be?” He fished the phone out of his pocket. “Oh, my God. It’s Weinberg.” To Meena’s astonishment, her brother actually answered the call. “Adam,” Jon crowed. “How the hell are you?”

Meena shook her head. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen Jon in such a good mood. Maybe back when he’d been employed.

It was nice to know someone, at least, was enjoying himself on this, the worst night of her entire life.

Then Meena felt her pocket vibrate. What was going on? Someone was texting her? Now?

Casting a furtive glance at her brother-he was still having his animated conversation with Leisha’s husband-Meena pulled her phone out of her pocket and glanced at the text that had just been left for her.

It was from Lucien.

Stay where you are, he’d written. I’m coming for you.

That was when, over in the distance, on the east side, there was the sound of an extremely large explosion.

“Jesus Christ,” Jon said, glancing up. “What the hell was that?”

“I don’t know,” Meena said, looking in the direction from which the sound had come. “That was too loud to be a car.”

“It sounded like a whole freaking building exploding,” Jon said. “Oh, man, look at that.”

He pointed at a bright orange glow that had begun to fill the sky in the east where the sun would have been, if it had been morning. Meena, looking at it, could think of only one thing.

Lucien. Lucien had something to do with that.

She was as sure of it as she was that she was standing there.

The pouring sound she’d heard in the background when she’d been speaking to him. Had that been gasoline?

It didn’t matter.

This vampire war had just been taken to a whole new level.

“Definitely a building,” Jon was saying. “Some insurance company has gotta be bumming right now.” To Adam, who was still on the phone, he said, “What? Yeah, sorry, no, something on TV. Yeah, Meena and I are just chilling in the apartment right now.” He made a comical face at Meena. “We’re gonna maybe order in some Chinese food… Do we wanna have a drink? Uh, naw, I think we’re just gonna take it easy tonight, right, Meen?”

“Uh, yeah,” Meena said, raising her voice so Leisha could hear her if she was there on the phone with her husband. “We’re just going to stay home and chill.”

“Yeah,” Jon said. “So, we’ll see you guys…” All at once, his face went the color of ash. “Oh. You are?” he asked into the phone.

Meena stared at him. “What?” Suddenly, all her concerns about Leisha and her unborn baby came flooding back, full force. “What’s wrong?”

“They’re in front of your place,” Jon said to her, holding the phone away from his face. He looked as if he were going to be sick. “Nine ten Park. They want to know if they can come up.”

Meena felt as if the roof had suddenly shifted a little under her feet. And not because vampires were making another assault.

No, she thought. Not Leisha and the baby. Not this way.

Except…of course. Of course it was going to be Leisha and the baby.

And of course it was going to happen this way.

And she’d always known it was going to.

She’d just refused to see it, because it was too horrible even to contemplate.

Until now, when it was staring her straight in the face.

9:45 P.M. EST, Saturday, April 17

Shrine of St. Clare

154 Sullivan Street

New York, New York

She reached over and snatched the phone away from Jon.

“Hello, Adam?” she said. Her fingers had gone numb. She couldn’t feel her fingers.

She couldn’t feel anything.

Except fear.

“Oh, hi, Meena, it’s your best friend’s useless, unemployed husband,” Adam said with his customary self-derision. “Leisha got tired of me hanging around the house all day doing nothing, so she said we had to go for a walk because it was such a nice afternoon, and we ended up in Central Park.”

“Hi, Adam,” Meena said. “Can I talk to-”

“Then we crossed the park and had dinner and ended up in your neighborhood,” Adam said. “So Leisha suggested we stop by and see what you were doing, since apparently you don’t answer any of your phones anymore-”

“Meena?” Leisha’s voice, strong and vibrant, rang in Meena’s ear. She’d apparently wrestled the phone away from Adam. “Hey. What is going on with you? I’ve left you, like, five messages. How was the concert? That boring, huh, that you can’t even call me back to tell me about it? Anyway, can you tell Pradip to let us up? I have to pee like crazy. This kid must have taken up residency on my bladder. And don’t give me that excuse about the place being messy, because at this point, I wouldn’t care if you guys had dead bodies piled up on the floor. That’s how bad I have to go. Your buzzer must be broken or something because Pradip says you aren’t answering, but Jon just said you guys are there-”