Lucien.

She knew. She knew.

How, though? What had happened? What had gone wrong? Why hadn’t the memory wipe succeeded? How could she possibly have put it all together?

Who was she? What was she? What was going on with this girl and her electrically charged, hyperactive brain?

He needed to figure it out before the evening-and his entire mission to New York-went swiftly and disastrously awry.

“Meena Harper,” Mary Lou was crowing as he approached. He realized he’d left the women with whom he’d been chatting so amiably without a word. But the situation had turned dire. It had nothing, he told himself, to do with the darkness of Meena Harper’s eyes and hair, or the slenderness of her waist in that cheap black cotton dress. Nothing at all. This was a matter of life and death, for all of vampire kind. “I want you to meet Emil’s cousin Prince Lucien Antonescu.”

“Oh,” Meena said, smiling. Her two front teeth were slightly crooked. How had he missed this the other night? “I know. We’ve-”

“How charming to make your acquaintance,” Lucien said, interrupting. He took Meena’s hand even as her astonished expression was turning to one of confusion. The prince! her brain was crying. It’s him!

What in God’s name did this mean? Who was she?

“Right,” was all she said out loud, though, in a voice that was considerably less excited than the circus-like atmosphere of her mind. “Nice to meet you, too.”

Her hand was slim and warm. His, he knew, was anything but.

“And this is her brother, Jonathan Harper,” Mary Lou said, her tone one of barely disguised disapproval.

“Jon.” The dark-haired man standing beside Meena corrected Mary Lou, holding out his hand. “I’m Jon.”

“Of course,” Lucien said. He gave the brother’s hand a quick shake, careful not to squeeze it too hard. Still, he saw the younger man wince.

He turned his attention back to the girl, who hadn’t taken her gaze off him once since coming into the apartment. He tried reaching tentatively into her mind once again-

vampire death prince priest dragon

– then just as quickly withdrew.

No wonder he hadn’t been able to wipe away the memory of him: She was clearly disturbed. It was complete bedlam in there.

“Jonathan,” Mary Lou was saying to the brother, “I know you’re good with electronics. My friend Becca just got an iPhone and she’s having a dickens of a time downloading some of the, what do you call them? Oh, right, apps. Do you think you could help her?”

The brother looked at Becca, a large-bosomed young lady wearing a snug-fitting red sheath dress, and said, “Absolutely.”

The girl watched her brother go without comment.

Vampire, Lucien couldn’t help overhearing her mind screaming. Lucien, prince, slayer, dragon, death.

An image of a red tote bag with a jewel-encrusted dragon slithering down one side of it flashed into Lucien’s mind, an image he could make no sense of whatsoever.

Not that he’d understood any of it.

“So it turns out,” the girl spun around to say to him as soon as the brother was gone, “you’re the prince I’ve been hearing so much about?”

He smiled at her politely-he was perfectly well aware of the devastating effect his smile had on human females-then took her by the arm and pulled her gently to an unoccupied corner of the terrace, saying something about what a shame it would be for her to miss the view.

He thought perhaps he could reason with her, even psychotic as she was.

“I haven’t told my cousin’s wife about what happened outside the church,” he explained to her quickly in a low voice when they were well away from everyone else. “I didn’t want to alarm her. No woman wants to hear about a colony of bats loose in the neighborhood…”

Of course he wasn’t going to mention the Dracul.

“I haven’t told Jon, either,” she said in a perfectly reasonable tone of voice, surprising him. “Well, at least…not the part about you.”

“That was probably wise,” he said. “We don’t want to worry our loved ones.”

She lowered her dusky gaze and appeared to be looking into the windows of the apartments below them instead of into his eyes. He had to admit he found her quite charming and had to warn himself to be careful. She was human and, judging by the cacophony in her mind, mad.

Which was a shame, since she was so lovely.

“Especially,” she said, “since no one got hurt.”

“Then we agree,” Lucien said, “we won’t mention it. To anyone.”

“I told my best friend about it,” she said, finally looking up at him. “She doesn’t believe me. She thinks I dreamed it.”

Maybe the situation, he thought, wasn’t as dire as he’d initially supposed.

“Who can blame her?” he said. “The whole thing is a little hard to believe, don’t you think? Bats on the Upper East Side. Absurd.”

“Not as hard to believe as the only explanation I’ve been able to come up with for why you weren’t hurt,” she said, leaning on the brick wall of the terrace. “Since I know I didn’t dream it.”

Vampires, he knew she was going to say. He wasn’t certain how he was going to proceed when she did say it. It had been so long since a human had found them out…a human who wished them harm. Other than the Palatine, of course.

That this disturbingly pretty, but unfortunately insane, girl should have done so was a little upsetting.

Even more upsetting was what he was going to have to do to her, by his own decree, if it was true that she knew.

“And what’s that?” he asked, trying to sound casual.

“I think you’re an angel,” she said, smiling up at him sunnily. “And there was a miracle outside of St. George’s that night.”

Chapter Twenty-three

8:00 P.M. EST, Thursday, April 15

910 Park Avenue, Apt. 11A

New York, New York

Prince Lucien Antonescu didn’t like being called an angel.

But then, Meena realized belatedly, not many men would. “There was no miracle,” he kept saying insistently. “And I’m no angel. Of that I can assure you.”

“That’s not true,” Meena said. She was teasing him. He struck her as a man who hadn’t been teased often in his life. He seemed extraordinarily serious. “You risked your life to save my own, and then you disappeared without even letting me give you proper thanks. That’s pretty angelic.”

“I think your friend is right,” he said to her as one of the caterers brought them flutes of champagne on a little silver tray, “and you’re confabulating your dreams with reality. They were only a few little bats-”

“You said that the night it happened,” she reminded him with mock indignation. “It wasn’t true then and it’s still not true. It was possibly the most horrifying thing I’ve ever been through in my life, and I still say it was a miracle you got by without a scratch. But if you want to keep minimizing it, go ahead. We can just talk about banalities like everybody else. How long are you going to be in the city, and have you been to see any good shows yet?”

He stared at her, his expression surprised. Then he burst into laughter. “I haven’t, actually,” he admitted. “I’d only just arrived the night we met, so I haven’t been here long. What do you recommend?”

Meena sipped her champagne. She felt as if her mind was going a thousand miles a minute. What were the chances of Lucien-her Lucien, the one she’d met outside St. George’s Cathedral-and the countess’s prince being one and the same person? This was going to be so perfect! She needed to find out everything she could about him so she could write up the perfect character description with which to hit Sy.

Not, of course, that her prince was going to be an exact replica of Prince Lucien. For one thing he was too young for Victoria Worthington Stone. They’d need to find someone a little older to play a suitable romantic match.