Meg Cabot - Insatiable

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.

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

St. George’s Cathedral

180 East Seventy-eighth Street

New York, New York

The 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 finally, Alaric’s stunned face…until she was flung back into the area where the dragon had apparently first recognized her scent-by the stairwell to the choir loft-and where he seemed to want her to stay put.

Because that’s where he released her, with what she supposed a dragon might consider gentle consideration but that in actuality was a landing that caused her to go spinning back against the same wall where there was only a burned spot to show any proof that Dimitri Antonescu had ever once existed on this planet.

Too stunned to move, she lay slumped there, seeing only blackness.

“Meena!” she thought she heard someone yelling from far away.

But she felt too sick from her violent ride through the air-combined with the force with which she’d hit the wall-to respond.

Then Alaric was there, trying to pry first one, then another of her eyes open, checking her pupils, asking if she was all right.

“Go away,” she said. She wanted to throw up. Her head hurt. Her arm hurt. She just wanted to go home.

She didn’t have a home anymore.

“Meena, look at me.”

She looked at him. She could barely see him in the smoky darkness.

But his face looked tight with concern.

“I thought you had a dragon to kill,” she said.

“Well,” he said, “I guess I missed my opportunity. How many fingers am I holding up?” he asked, holding up two.

“Nine,” she said.

And then the worst happened. The tail returned. Meena sucked in her breath when she saw it, causing Alaric to turn and see it, too. It flashed dangerously red through the smoke, seemingly searching for something. Meena froze the minute she saw it, thinking, Oh, no. Not again.

It was nice that Lucien loved her so much.

But he really needed to work on his landings.

Alaric seemed to be thinking along the same lines, since he raised his sword, as if he was ready to chop Lucien’s tail off at the tip if it came too close…

Only this time, it turned out it wasn’t Meena whom Lucien was looking for. The tail found one of the supporting pillars that held up the choir loft. It wrapped around it…

…and pulled.

“Shit,” Alaric said, throwing his arms over Meena.

There wasn’t time to do anything else.

Maybe if St. George’s Cathedral hadn’t been quite as old as it was. Maybe if it hadn’t been so badly in need of renovation. Maybe if it hadn’t endured so many shocks from a thirty-ton dragon roaring and breathing fire in it for the past half hour.

Maybe then its structural integrity might have held up a little better.