Alaric had turned toward her, one arm draped along the back of the couch. “What,” he asked Jon, “is she saying?”

Jon’s face had gone a little green. “She knows,” was all he said in a faint voice.

“She knows what?” Alaric demanded.

“How everyone is going to die.” Jon flung him a dazed look. “She’s always known. It’s what she does. She just knows. If Meena says he’s going to kill us…we’re going to die.”

Chapter Thirty-nine

10:00 P.M. EST, Friday, April 16

910 Park Avenue, Apt. 11B

New York, New York

Alaric knew he might have overreacted just a little. Especially when the girl had thrown the phone at him. A phone!

But Meena Harper had shown a great deal more spirit than he had expected.

Of course he’d leapt on her. To immobilize her. That was all. What other choice had he had?

He didn’t know why he’d been unable to keep his hands off her. That had been a surprise.

It was just that she had such nice skin. So soft and smooth…like the wax he used to polish his skis when he went to Kitzbühel every year between Christmas and New Year’s.

It had been virtually impossible for him not to touch her…and to keep on touching her, even though it clearly annoyed her.

Well, she annoyed him. He didn’t want to touch her. He wanted to find out where the prince was, go there, destroy him, then go back to his hotel room and have a nice hot bath.

What Alaric did not want was to be stuck in a New York City apartment crammed with cheap-albeit fairly comfortable-Ikea furniture with the big-eyed, silky-skinned current lover of the prince of darkness, who apparently had the psychic ability to predict how people were going to die.

“She knows all this?” Alaric asked the brother skeptically.

“She’s never wrong,” Jon said to Alaric. “She knows. She just…knows. Since she was a kid.”

Alaric stared at Meena Harper. He had encountered a lot of things in his time since joining the Palatine: a succubus that had detached itself from the body of its evening’s plaything with a discontented shriek because Alaric had hurled holy water at it.

Chupacabras-often mistaken for mangy coyotes but actually a vampiric species all their own, sucking the life from grazing sheep in Texas.

But when they couldn’t find sheep, they’d suck the life from sleeping children happily enough, when they could get at them through an open window.

Demons, flying at him with mouths agape, as a local priest attempted to exorcise them from possessed villagers in the mountains of Colombia.

And of course more vampires than he cared to recall, all with blood streaming down their chins and scarlet-stained shirtfronts, rushing at him from the darkness, screaming obscenities.

Vampires, while romanticized on film and in literature, were generally quite foulmouthed in reality. Only the Dracul made any pretense at civility.

But Alaric could not recall ever once encountering a psychic-not one who actually had anything valuable to say. Why all psychics, if their powers were bona fide, did not immediately go and predict the winning numbers for the lottery, then take their earnings and move to Antigua, Alaric could never understand.

The Vatican didn’t believe in them either-probably for the same reasons as Alaric-and didn’t have a single one on its payroll.

But Alaric could tell by the frightened-yet resolute-look on Meena Harper’s brother’s face that he believed in his sister’s abilities.

And he could tell by the misery on Meena Harper’s face that she, too, believed.

Meena had shooed the dog off her lap and now sat with her elbows on her knees and her face hidden in her hands. With her petite build, short dark hair, and slender limbs and neck, dressed in nothing but the black silk slip, she looked like a ballet dancer.

A ballet dancer having a nervous breakdown.

In another place, in another lifetime, Alaric thought they might have had quite a pleasant time together, because she was not unattractive.

But this was not going to happen now. Because she quite clearly hated him.

Alaric knew what he had to do, of course: call for backup. Let Holtzman deal with these two. He just wanted the address. Señor Sticky would take care of the rest.

He would dispatch Emil and Mary Lou Antonescu, too, on his way out. It was going to be a very satisfactory evening, it turned out.

“Look,” Meena said, lifting her tear-stained face from her hands and glaring at him. Her eyes were very large and dark in her face. “I know you don’t believe me. No one ever does. But I’m not making this up. I didn’t believe it myself until…well, until you said you were going to kill him and showed me that bite mark. And then I knew. And the fact…well, that he’s already dead. Which is why I could never tell-never mind. But he’s going to kill you. Both of you. You’ve got to believe me.”

Her voice, which had irritated him before, had taken on a throaty sweetness now that she was worried. One that he found irresistibly sexy.

What was wrong with him? He was not going to fall for the charms of this…whatever she was. No way. He had some vampires to kill. Then some delicious room service waiting.

“Hold that thought, will you?” he said, and took out his cell phone, pressing Holtzman’s number. “I just have to make a quick call. It will only take a second. Do you want another Coke? You’re shivering. Maybe some tea. Your brother can make you some tea.”

“He’s going to find you first,” she said, a single tear trickling down one of her smooth, gently rounded cheeks. Her eyes were closed, like she was observing something on the back of her eyelids. “Somewhere…a room made out of glass. An atrium. There’s water everywhere. Like a pool. Yes. A hotel pool. But in the air. That makes no sense… Maybe…on a roof. Are you staying in a hotel with an enclosed rooftop pool?”

Alaric’s thumb froze as he was about to hit Send.

“Because that’s where he’s going to find you,” she said. Was she actually seeing this vision, behind her closed eyelids? “Do you like to swim or something?”

Alaric stared down at her. “How in the hell would you know that?” he demanded before he could stop himself.

It took a lot to spook Alaric Wulf.

And that included the creepy way those chupacabras had lifted their heads from the sheep they’d been gorging on when he’d accidentally stepped on a twig while approaching them.

And the way the sheep’s blood had dripped from their pointy little teeth as they’d cocked their heads at him questioningly.

She wasn’t crying anymore.

“I just know things,” she said with a shrug. “Believe me, I never asked for this…gift. And if I could, I’d give it back in a second. Do you think I like knowing my boyfriend is going to reach down into the water and grab you by your hair while you’re swimming laps tomorrow, then lift you out of the water and gouge out your-”

“He’s not,” Alaric said quickly, putting his cell phone away and coming back toward the couch to sit down beside her. “He’s not. Because now that you’ve told me this, that changes everything. Right? Is that how it works?”

Alaric Wulf wasn’t a praying man.

But he was spooked. He was genuinely spooked.

And he was praying that was how it worked.

Because just as he knew he had made a believer out of her about the vampires, she had made a believer out of him about her powers.

“Your warning me that he’s going to be there, that will cause me to change my plans,” he said. “Doesn’t it work that way? Now I’ll be looking out for him. Maybe I won’t even go swimming.”

Alaric’s heart was beating quickly.

And it took a lot these days to get his pulse jumping.

But the image she’d described of the prince of darkness grabbing him by the hair from the water and gouging something out while he was innocently swimming his laps at the Peninsula?