“I’m a vampire!” Meena yelled, stepping off the train but staying in the doorway and still making menacing motions with her hands. “A vampire! Stay on the train!”

“Stand clear of the closing doors,” the voice announced.

The train doors closed, trapping the couple safely inside. Meena immediately dropped her hands, resumed her normal posture, turned, and began walking away. She saw the boy make an obscene gesture at her as the subway car pulled past her and out of the station.

She waved at him.

Meena hurried through the station, which was empty on a Saturday night, inhaling the familiar scent of stale urine, then jogged up the steps to Seventy-seventh Street.

It wouldn’t be long now. What would she do when she got there? She didn’t know, exactly. She still had the stake that Alaric had given her in her back pocket. Maybe she’d stake someone. Like Dimitri.

She’d demanded her cell phone back from Jon after he’d called Alaric. She’d texted Lucien about what had happened with Leisha.

With luck, he would already be at St. George’s when she got there and everything would be taken care of. She’d walk in and find Leisha freed and perfectly fine, and Dimitri and the rest of the Dracul dusted, with stakes in their hearts. Lucien would take her tenderly in his arms, and they’d fly off to Thailand to begin their new lives together as man and wife…after they picked up Jack Bauer from Pradip, of course. Jon could be best man at their wedding.

Yeah, Meena thought cynically as she approached the church, its spires floodlit against the inky sky. That so wasn’t going to happen.

The church looked abandoned…dead. The blue scaffolding that surrounded it was undisturbed, covered in razor wire at the top, chained with padlocks.

No one, human or vampire, was around, that Meena could see.

Had this all been some kind of sick vampire joke? Had they made her come all the way up there for nothing?

And if so…where was Leisha? How was Meena ever going to find her?

Frustrated, Meena stood there at the bottom of the steps in front of the church, exactly where Lucien had tackled her a few nights ago and saved her from what she knew now had been an attack by the Dracul. If only she could go back in time and…

And what? What would she have done differently?

Nothing at all. She’d have fallen in love with him all over again right then and there. Who wouldn’t have? He was everything that-

“Meena!”

Startled, Meena turned around. A familiar voice was calling her name.

She turned again, at first failing to see anyone. Then finally she spotted a man sitting on the stoop of a brownstone across the street. She recognized him in the light from the streetlamps.

“Adam?” she cried. “What are you doing over there?”

As Meena hurried to cross the street to his side, however, she soon saw the answer to her question.

Adam, a white bandage around his throat, had been handcuffed to the metal railing alongside the steps to the building.

“That freak chained me here!” Adam yelled, rattling the cuffs in an effort to free himself. “He told me to stay with Pradip after he patched me up, but I followed him instead. So he threw these cuffs on me so I couldn’t go into the church after him. He said it was too dangerous. What am I supposed to do now, huh, Meena? They have my wife in there! And I’m stuck out here. You have to help me get free, Meena. Do you have a hairpin or something? You can pick locks, right?”

Meena looked down at Adam. He was a mess. His entire shirtfront was covered in what appeared to be his own blood from the bite wound he’d sustained on his neck.

But he didn’t seem to be in shock anymore. His pupils looked normal sized.

And his anger was typically Adam.

“Who left you here, Adam?” Meena asked. She actually had a pretty good idea. But she wanted to be sure. “Whose handcuffs are those?”

“That freak vampire-slayer friend of yours,” Adam cried. “That’s who. The one you and Jon sent to allegedly help me. Some help he was! I’ve been sitting out here doing nothing while my wife, Leisha, is probably being eaten alive-”

“Leisha is fine,” Meena said reassuringly, laying a soothing hand on his shoulder. “I promise you. I would know if something had happened to her.” Meena hoped this was true. “You said Alaric is inside the church already?”

“Yeah, he’s inside the church. I told you, he left me out here while he went in with that big sword of his! He’s even got a name for it. Señor Stinky or something. Meena, you’ve got to unlock these cuffs. I need to get in there and help find my wife. Who knows what they’re doing to her?”

“You should be in a hospital,” Meena murmured, absently patting him on the shoulder.

“Screw the hospital,” Adam said. “I need to find my wife! It’s my fault she’s in there in the first place.”

“No,” Meena said firmly. “It’s my fault.”

She walked away from him, starting back across the street, toward the church. If Alaric had gotten inside, she could, too.

“Hey,” Adam yelled after her, outraged. “Where are you going? You can’t leave me here, too, Meena!”

“You’ll be fine out there, Adam,” she called over her shoulder. “Believe me. You’re better off there than you would be coming with me.”

“This is bullshit!” Adam shouted. “Bullshit! You get back here, Meena! You turn around and get back here, right now!”

But instead of turning around, Meena stalked right up to the scaffolding that surrounded the church. There had to be a way inside, she told herself. If Alaric had found a way, she could too.

Tentatively, she laid a hand on the cool blue wood.

No sooner had she done this than it blew apart.

Chapter Fifty-five

10:30 P.M. EST, Saturday, April 17

St. George’s Cathedral

180 East Seventy-eighth Street

New York, New York

The force of the explosion sent Meena sprawling back against the sidewalk where she’d first lain with Lucien. It also sent razor wire and pieces of plywood flying. Meena flung up her arms to protect her eyes. Around her, car alarms went off.

Then, just as suddenly, they were silenced.

When she put her arms down and opened her eyes, it was just in time to catch one particularly huge chunk of blue painted plywood landing exactly where the young couple from the subway would have been…if she hadn’t scared them from getting off the train.

Instead, the wood landed harmlessly on the sidewalk with a solid clunk.

“What the hell was that?” she heard Adam ask from the across the street.

Rising painfully to her scraped hands and knees, Meena found herself looking at the doors to the church, which had now been thrown open. A tall man who looked not unlike Lucien, except that he was a little shorter and a little heavier and wore a light gray suit with a black shirt and tie-which Meena couldn’t imagine Lucien doing-stepped through the cloud of dust left behind by the explosion and peered down at her, a pleased expression on his face.

“Meena Harper, I presume?” he said. Unlike his brother, there wasn’t a trace of anything European in his accent.

Meena nodded. “That’s me,” she said, coughing a little from all the dust. “Are you Dimitri?”

“I am,” he said. He offered her his hand to help her up. Meena, her heart hammering, took it, because what else was she going to do? She had come there for a reason, and that was to free her friend and end this.

The time had come to do both.

“Sorry about that,” he said apologetically. “Oh, look at your poor coat. Here, let me help you.” He brushed dust and bits of plywood off the suede of her jacket. “You know, you’re nothing like I expected.”

“I get that a lot.” she asked, still coughing. “Shorter?”

“Younger,” he said. His gaze on her face was every bit as intense as his brother’s had ever been. But unlike Lucien’s, Dimitri’s brown eyes weren’t sad. No, they didn’t have that kind of depth. They were as shallow as Insatiable’s plotlines. “But pretty!” he added gallantly. “Well, I expected that, to be honest. My brother never could resist a pretty face.”