Meg Cabot: Overbite

“It’s all right,” Lucien was saying. He, too, seemed concerned about the footsteps. She saw him glance behind them several times.

He possessed strength and powers considered by the Palatine to be superior to those of any other paranormal entity. She herself had witnessed him do things that no living being ought to have been able to do, including transform himself into a creature twelve times the size of a normal man. That breathed fire. Just a quarter of an hour earlier, he’d ripped the locked door off a Volvo station wagon and hurled a man so far into the air, he hadn’t fallen back to earth until many seconds later.

But maybe these things, coupled with David’s sucker punch, had taken more out of him than he’d realized, since for some reason Lucien didn’t snatch her up and fly off, or dissipate into thin air, both of which she knew he was perfectly capable of doing. He didn’t even pick up the pace, really, though she could tell he was as anxious as she was to get out of there.

What was wrong with him? she wondered He almost seemed …

“Are you all right?” she asked, putting an arm around him. “Here, lean on me.”

“Meena,” he growled. “I’m fine .”

“Of course you are,” she said. “We both are.”

She didn’t sound convincing even to herself.

They turned onto a better-lighted, much more highly trafficked street. There were couples out walking their dogs, and families standing at every corner, waiting for the light to turn so they could cross, eager to get to the Feast of San Gennaro, which had recently started in Little Italy, a few blocks away. Everyone was laughing, enjoying the late-summer air.

No one paid the slightest bit of attention to the man with his arm around the shoulders of the girl with the white kerchief encircling her neck. No one seemed to notice that her arm was around his waist beneath the jacket of his suit, or that they were possibly being pursued.

“Are they still behind us?” he asked her tersely.

She peeked over her shoulder.

“I can’t tell,” she said. “I didn’t get a good look at them. Did you?”

He shook his head. “It was probably whoever turned your friend, then sent him after you.”

“Then …” she said, looking around at all the smiling people, enjoying the first night of their weekend, “Vampires.”

It seemed hard to believe that on such a warm, pretty evening, something so evil could exist.

But she had just killed one. And she had her arm around the waist of another.

“It isn’t anyone from my clan, I can tell you that much,” he said. “Your friends at your new job have done excellent work annihilating almost every single one of them.”

“You told David you rule over all demon life on this side of hell,” Meena said, ignoring his sarcasm. “So how can any of them do something like this without your knowing about it?”

Lucien’s dark eyes flashed menacingly.

“I haven’t been very … available lately,” he replied.

She wasn’t sure if his curtness was due to her having touched upon a sensitive subject, or to their having reached an intersection, and the light was warning them to wait. A bus roared by, followed by a dozen taxis, making it impossible to cross.

She could feel the tension in Lucien’s body, and saw the way he was scanning the crowds of weekend revelers around them.

She also saw, for the first time, the faint purple shadows beneath those dark eyes of his, now easily visible in the much brighter lights along this street.

Meena wasn’t quite sure what it meant for a vampire to have shadows beneath his eyes. At no time during her training with the Palatine had this subject ever come up.

But she was beginning to suspect that despite the impeccable suit and lustrous hair, Lucien had not spent the months since she’d last seen him in some kind of vampire resort, relaxing in a lounge chair in the shade. He had obviously been suffering in some way.

“Lucien, are you all right?” she asked him. “I mean … are you sick, or something?”

He looked down at her, clearly offended by the question. “I told you,” he said. “I’m fine.”

“Well,” she said, “it’s just that you don’t seem like your old self … not in a bad way,” she hastened to add.

“How unfortunate,” he said. “I try so hard to be bad.”

He smiled down at her then. She instantly wished he hadn’t.

Because Lucien Antonescu’s smile did things to her, things that the smile of a vampire had no business doing to a girl who had joined an organization dedicated to eradicating his kind.

But there was still a part of him that was human. Or maybe—as she’d recently begun trying to prove—even better than human.

“You shouldn’t joke about that,” she said, nervously pushing some of her hair from her eyes. “I was serious when I said before that I think—”

That’s when someone—a kid, walking shoulder to shoulder with a group of his college friends down the sidewalk—slammed right into Meena, as if he hadn’t seen her at all.

“Oof,” she said as Lucien pulled her protectively against him.

The kid spun, then landed on the sidewalk. “What the hell?” he complained good-naturedly as his friends laughed at him. He obviously wasn’t hurt, just a little buzzed on beer, and confused.

“I’m so sorry,” Meena said to him, even though technically, he’d been the one who’d walked into her.

The kid said nothing, just continued to laugh as his friends pulled him back to his feet, calling him rude names. Lucien, meanwhile, had already steered Meena away from the group, navigating her quickly back down the crowded sidewalk.

“That was weird,” Meena said. “It was like he didn’t even see me.”

“He couldn’t see you,” Lucien said.

“Couldn’t see me?” Meena looked up at him in shock. “What do you mean? How could he not see me?”

“No one can see us right now,” Lucien said, his face devoid of expression. “It’s called a glamour. I’m afraid I can’t keep it up for long. But it should last us until I can get you back to your apartment. You should be safe there, providing you’ve taken the usual precautions against unwanted demon entry.”

She stared up at him, feeling a sudden mix of emotions. Especially when she realized they were turning onto her street.

“Lucien,” she said, freezing suddenly in her tracks. “How do you know where I live?”

She had been so careful, leaving the rectory at the Shrine of St. Clare’s—where she’d moved after his minions had gutted her last apartment—as soon as she’d realized he knew she was there. She’d had all her mail forwarded to a post office box, canceled her old cell phone, her gym membership, even her library card. She’d sold her old apartment and now shared a sublet with her brother in which even the cable bill was under the original owner’s name.

How could he possibly have known?

Then again … how could he not have?

She wasn’t afraid, necessarily. Not as afraid as she’d been just minutes before. And she certainly wasn’t afraid for her life. All she had to do was press a button on her phone, and the entire Manhattan unit of the Palatine would be there within a few minutes.

Of course, by that time, she could easily be dead.

But dying wasn’t what she was most afraid of. Not anymore.

“Meena,” he said. The smile was long gone. “What you were saying, about my not seeming like my old self …”

The effort it was causing him to form the words was obvious. And now she recognized what it was she hadn’t been able to identify in his face before. It was pain. It was deeply etched in the hollows beneath his eyes.

“I suppose,” he said, “that’s part of my problem.”