even worse than the inside of his car.
Except that now he was trying to slip his hands down the front of the sweetheart neckline of her dress … the dress she’d hemmed herself—well, with a little help from Yalena at the thrift shop. Because though Meena’s new job paid well, she’d had to replace her entire wardrobe, thanks to her last one having been destroyed by a bunch of Lucien Antonescu’s relatives, the Dracul. So thrifting had become a new hobby.
“David,” she said, using an elbow to jab him in the shoulder. Although not too hard, because she felt a little sorry for him. He was a dying man, after all. “This isn’t why I called you.”
“Yes,” he said with another groan. “Oh yes, it is. Beautiful Meena. What a fool I was …”
“David.” She yanked up his head by his hair and looked into his eyes. They were drunken slits.
“Wha …?” he asked blearily.
“I’m sorry that you are having problems in your personal life right now,” she said. “But you chose Brianna over me, remember? And I moved on.”
“But …” His eyes started to focus a little more. “You said on the phone you weren’t seeing anyone.”
She continued to hold up his head by his hair. “I’m not.” Nice of him to rub in the fact that she was single. Like it was her fault her last boyfriend had tried to burn down half of the Upper East Side. “But why would you think that means I’m up for a fling with you?”
He wagged a finger at her. “Face it, Meena,” he said. “The fact that you’re still single means that you’ve never really gotten over me.”
“Or maybe,” Meena said, “it means that there’s a guy who I dated after you that I’ve never really gotten over. Or did that possibility never occur to you? No, I didn’t think so.” She let go of his head to lean over and pluck the car keys from his ignition. “David, go home and sober up.”
She wasn’t going to tell him. Not this way. Not while he was so drunk, and behaving so badly. For one thing, he might not remember it once he sobered up.
And for another, he might not handle the information well. Who knows what he could do? Jump off the George Washington Bridge, maybe.
And there was always a chance, Meena had learned, that things could get better. Our destinies weren’t set in stone. Look at David. She’d warned him once that he was dying, and he’d taken a proactive approach to his health, and now he was …
Well, maybe David wasn’t a good example. But she could think of lots of others. Alaric Wulf, for instance, one of the Palatine Guards with whom she worked. She warned him every day, practically, of some new threat he was walking into somewhere, and because he listened, he didn’t die.
It was just too bad he wouldn’t listen to her about anything else.
“Appreciate what you have, David,” Meena said, instead of warning him that his number was up. Again. “Because it’s a lot, and the truth is … you might not have it for long.”
“But,” he said, looking confused, “I want you.”
“No,” Meena said firmly. “Dumping me for Brianna was actually the smartest move you ever made. Trust me. You and I were not meant to be. You can grab a cab to Penn Station and take the train back to your nice, safe house in New Jersey. I’ll mail these to you.” She jingled the keys in front of him. “You’ll thank me for this one day, I promise.”
Just probably not until after he’d sobered up and she’d called him to deliver the bad news, and he’d had a chance to make an appointment for a complete physical.
She started to open the door so she could get out of the car and head back to her new apartment, back to her new life, the one she was so sure that David, if he knew anything about it, would flee from in a nanosecond.
Because there were many things Meena Harper knew that her ex-boyfriend didn’t. Not only how people were going to die, or that demons and demon hunters weren’t just the stuff of fiction, but that there was, in every creature on earth, demon or not, a capacity for good and evil.
And that all it took to send any one of them over the edge was the tiniest of pushes.
It was just too bad her precognition didn’t tell her when one of those pushes might be necessary, or in which direction … or when someone other than herself was going to die.
That information might have been useful for her now, as she eased out of David’s car, and his hand shot out and wrapped around her wrist, entrapping it in a grip of iron.
The worst part of it was that he didn’t say anything. He just kept one hand clamped around her wrist, his gaze a dead-eyed stare.
Then he opened his mouth wide to reveal a set of pointed fangs.
Meena’s reaction was purely instinctual. She sent the tips of his car keys, which she still had clutched in her free hand, plunging into his face.
But—with reflexes surprisingly sharp for someone so inebriated—he caught her hand in his, well before the keys could come anywhere near his skin.
Then he calmly lifted her arm up over her head, until he was pressing both her wrists against the headrest of the seat with one hand.
A second later, he’d pulled a lever so that her seat collapsed backward, and she was lying almost fully supine in his car.
The next thing she knew, her ex-boyfriend was on top of her.
She stared up at him with mingled feelings of fear, outrage, humiliation, and surprise. How had this happened? And how could she have been so stupid? How could she not have seen that all those dreams about David had been a warning, not a prophecy? His brain tumor hadn’t come back.
He’d been turned into a vampire.
Only how? And by whom? The Palatine, the organization by which Meena was currently employed, had spent the past six months hunting down and destroying every demonic life-form in the tristate area that it could find, with a systematic brutality that had caused even Meena, who had every reason in the world to detest them, to feel a little bit sorry for the poor things. It wasn’t their fault, after all, they’d been infected.
This could not be happening.
Especially to her. She’d been trained to defend herself against exactly this kind of thing.
“David.” She grunted as she tried to wrestle her hands free from his grip. If she could just grab her purse, she’d pull out the sharpened stake she always carried with her, and plunge it into his heart.
Then she remembered she hadn’t bothered to bring a purse with her. She’d dashed out of her apartment with nothing more than her cell phone and keys tucked inside the pocket of the light wool cardigan she’d thrown on as she was leaving. She hadn’t expected their meeting to take that long. She was, after all, only going to tell him that he was dying.
He
