Read the book: «Overbite»
OVERBITE
MEG CABOT
Table of Contents
Title Page
Part One: Friday, September 17
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Part Two: Saturday, September 18
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Part 3: Sunday, September 19
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Fourty
Chapter Fourty-one
Chapter Fourty-two
Part 4: Saturday, October 2
Chapter Fourty-three
Author’s Note
About the Author
By Meg Cabot
Copyright
About the Publisher
Part One
Chapter One
Meena Harper knew things, things no one else knew … things no one could know.
One of those things was that the man sitting in the car beside her was going to die.
There were also many things Meena Harper did not know.
One of those was how she was going to break the news of this man’s impending death to him.
“Meena,” he said, gazing at her profile. “You have no idea how happy I am to see you. It’s funny that you called. I was just thinking of you.”
“It’s great to see you, too,” she said.
This was a lie. It wasn’t great seeing him. How was she going to tell him? Especially when he looked so terrible. He smelled terrible. Or maybe it was the inside of his car. She couldn’t figure out what the smell was.
“I was thinking of you, too,” she lied some more. “Thanks for meeting me.”
She looked around the dark, narrow street. She felt guilty for telling him all these lies, including that this was the street where she lived, then saying he couldn’t come up because her roommate’s parents were visiting.
“Are you sure you don’t want to get a cup of coffee?” she asked. “There’s a place right around the corner. It would be much nicer than sitting in your car.”
Especially considering the smell. And what she had to tell him.
“I’m sure,” he said, smiling. “You have no idea how much I’ve missed you.”
This was news to Meena. She hadn’t heard from him in more than a year. Their split had been relatively amicable—though at the time, she’d been convinced that her heart was broken. She was a dialogue-writer who’d been trying to make a living scratching out scripts for a now-canceled soap opera. He was a dentist specializing in veneers who’d wanted to move out to the suburbs and start a family.
Naturally, things hadn’t worked out.
“I thought you and Brianna were really happy,” she said. “What with the new practice and the baby and all.”
Which made it even worse. How was she going to break the news about his impending death when he had so much to live for?
He let out a bitter laugh. “Brianna,” he said. “She means nothing to me.”
“Of course she does,” Meena said, surprised. “What are you talking about?”
Now Meena was really worried about him. David had dumped her for Brianna. Brianna meant the world to him.
It had to be a brain tumor. That’s what had almost killed him the first time. But she’d sensed it and warned him, and the doctors had been able to find it in time to save his life.
Too bad the fact that she’d known about it had freaked him out so much that he’d run from her, straight into the arms of his radiology nurse.
But it was all right. Meena had built a new life for herself now. Sure, that life had been destroyed by Lucien Antonescu, the man who’d taught her what a broken heart really felt like.
But she managed never to think about him anymore.
Almost never.
It was only that lately, she’d been having such horrible dreams about David. In them, he was dead. It wasn’t that she could see his corpse. In the dream, she could see David’s future.
And he didn’t have one. Just darkness.
When she’d woken from the dream for a third morning in a row, breathless from feeling as if the darkness was closing in on her, she knew she had no choice but to call him.
But she also knew she couldn’t deliver news like this over the phone. They had to meet in person.
David had been surprisingly eager, offering to stop by on his way back to New Jersey after lunch and some dental meeting he had in the city.
But since Meena knew better than to give out her new address to anyone—even old boyfriends with whom she’d once lived—she’d automatically rattled off a fake one, and then met his car as he pulled up in front of the building.
Now, however, she was starting to regret this arrangement. Because David was acting so peculiarly. And what was that smell?
“You,” he said. “You were always the one, Meena.”
“David.” Meena was confused. “You dumped me for Brianna. You said you wanted to be with someone who gave people life, not someone who predicted their death. Remember?”
“I should’ve stayed with you,” David said. “I should’ve. We were so much better together, you and me, than me ’n Brianna. Why didn’t I stay with you, Meena? Why didn’t I? You were magical, with your … magic.”
Finally, comprehension dawned. At least now she knew what was causing the funny smell. It made her job a lot simpler.
“Okay,” she said, looking around on the floor of the car for the bottle. Or maybe he was just still soused from his lunch? How many martinis did dentists drink when they got together in the city for lunch meetings, anyway?
“Remember when you used your magic on me before,” he said, “and made me all better? Do it again. I’m begging you.”
“That’s not really how it works,” Meena said, still looking for the bottle. “I’m not saying I can’t help you. Because I think I can. You’re just going to have to meet me halfway and tell me where the bottle is.”
That’s when he lunged across the seat to kiss her. And she found the bottle. It was actually a flask, and it was pressing aggressively against her thigh through his pants pocket.
Oh, well, Meena thought. That’s what I get, I guess, for trying to play the rescuer. Why do I always do that, again?
Oh, right. Because it was her job.
Which was a good thing, since she didn’t think she could live with the guilt of another soul dying on her watch. It had happened more than once, especially since she’d hooked up with Lucien Antonescu, who’d unfortunately turned out to be one of the demons the Palatine—the organization by whom she’d been hired, after her unceremonious firing from the soap opera (before its cancellation)—was hunting.
Not just any demon either. The ruler of all demons on earth, the prince of darkness.
Meena had never really had much luck in the boyfriend department.
And since most people didn’t believe her when she told them they were about to die, she’d never really had much luck in that area either.
She wasn’t entirely sure what had ever made her think her ex, David Delmonico, was worth saving. As far as she could tell, the earth wouldn’t be that much worse off if he simply disappeared from it.
But there was his new baby, she supposed. The baby deserved a father.
“Meena,” David kept groaning. Mercifully, his lips had moved away from hers, and were now clamped to her neck. Thank God, because his breath smelled 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.
Chapter Two
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 wasn’t, though. He was already dead.
Which was why she couldn’t pull her hands from his grip. Because he had inhuman strength.
“Who did this to you?” she demanded. “How did this happen? And what do you want?”
“What do you think I want?” he said, slurring his words. His dead eyes still weren’t even open all the way. He outweighed her significantly. His torso was practically dead weight on top of her. And he was so, so strong. And his breath still reeked.
“Do you know who I work for now?” she asked from between gritted teeth. “You had better let go, or you have no idea of the world of trouble that you’re going to be in.”
“No,” he said simply, and dipped his face back toward her neck.
Her dress was full-skirted and a little on the short side. She should easily have been able to lift a knee to get him where it mattered.
But it was difficult with the dashboard in the way, not to mention the weight of David’s body pressing down on her. It was also hard to breathe, and he was holding her wrists so tightly, cutting off the circulation to her hands.
Meena’s panic grew. Not just because of the fangs she hadn’t yet felt pierce her skin, but because she realized the hard thing pressing against her through his pants wasn’t just a flask. Not anymore.
When David started fumbling with his zipper with his free hand, Meena’s desire to escape crowded out all rational thought.
Filling her lungs with the foul-smelling, fetid air, she let out an ear-splitting shriek that caused David, whose ear was beside her mouth, to lift his lips from her neck and curse.
That was when the door to the driver’s side of David’s Volvo was not so much flung open as torn off its hinges.
And a second later, David disappeared entirely.
He seemed simply to vanish. One minute he was there on top of her.
And the next, he was gone.
Disoriented from shock, Meena lay there, panting as she attempted to catch her breath and get the blood circulating back in her hands, then trying to figure out what had just happened. Had she dreamed it? The part where she’d been trying to do the right thing, and rescue David Delmonico—who quite clearly had never deserved rescuing in the first place—and he’d turned out to be a vampire?
But no. Because when she turned her head, she saw that the door to the driver’s side of David’s car was gone.
It was quiet on the deserted street, except for the usual sounds of the city … somewhere off in the distance, a siren wailed. She could hear traffic on the avenue. Not so far away, music played from someone’s open window.
Then, from out of nowhere, a body slammed onto the hood of David’s car, causing the entire vehicle to bounce like a children’s amusement-park ride. The windshield caved in, splintering.
Meena screamed again, her voice echoing up and down the deserted street.
David lay there completely still—not unlike one dead.
She didn’t realize what had happened to David—that he hadn’t been seized by flying monkeys, then dropped lifeless to the hood of his own car, where he now lay sprawled, unseeing and unmoving—until the man who’d done all this tapped politely on the still-closed window of her own car door.
She screamed again before she recognized who was looking at her through the glass.
“Meena?” His dark eyes were filled with concern. “Are you all right?”
It was Lucien Antonescu.
Chapter Three
I’m fine,” she said automatically.
She unlocked and opened the door, then climbed—a little shakily, but with all the dignity she could muster—from the car. Lucien held the door open for her, because he was the kind of man who always remembered to hold the door open for women.
He was also the kind of man who had, before Meena’s eyes, once destroyed a church and nearly killed her, along with a number of her friends. So, there was that to be considered.
“You’re sure you’re all right?” he asked her again.
Truthfully, she felt as if she were going to pass out, but she lied and repeated, “I’m fine.” It wasn’t quite a lie. Now that she was out of the car, the night air—delightfully fresh smelling after the inside of David’s Volvo, despite the garbage piled in the cans along the street nearby—had revived her a little.
“Is he …?” She looked over at David, who was still sprawled across his own car’s hood with his head tilted in a most unnatural position. She looked quickly away. “Is he …?”
Lucien was frowning. “Technically, he was dead before I arrived. But no, he’s merely recovering from a broken neck at the moment. Here. You’re bleeding.”
He handed her a handkerchief. Meena, startled, looked down at herself. There were drops of blood splashed across the front of her dress.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Where …?”
Lucien gestured in the general vicinity of his throat.
“He bit me?” Too late, she remembered how David had pressed his lips to her neck, and how relieved she’d been that she hadn’t had to taste his rank-smelling breath anymore. “But I didn’t feel anything—”
She broke off. She hadn’t felt anything the other times she’d been bitten in the past either.
By the man standing beside her.
“No. You aren’t meant to feel it.” It was apparent Lucien was remembering those times, as well. But he looked discreetly away from her and toward David. “Who is he? A friend of yours?”
He said the word friend with distaste, though he was tactfully trying not to show it.
“He’s just someone I used to go out with,” she said. She pressed the handkerchief to her throat, staring at Lucien, thinking the exact same thing could be said about him.
He, however, appeared to be in considerably better shape than David was at the moment. Intimidatingly tall and broad-shouldered, his dark hair thick and lustrous, Lucien appeared as handsome and put together in his dark Brioni suit and crisp white shirt as always. It was as if no time at all had passed since she’d last seen him.
But it had actually been six months.
Six months during which the people with whom she worked—Alaric Wulf in particular—had combed every inch of the city as well as its outer boroughs, looking for him, without success.
And yet here he was, standing right in front of her as if he’d never left.
“I’ve been having bad dreams about him,” Meena went on slowly. She still felt a little bit dazed. “I wanted to let him know he was in danger …”
“Of course you did,” Lucien said. The corners of his mouth curled up a little, as if he found something amusing. “I assume he’s the one who chose the location for your rendezvous?”
“No. I did. But …” She stood there, her wrists still throbbing from where David had gripped them with such fierce violence. “How could this have happened?”
“Apparently he’s been keeping different company since you knew him,” Lucien said. He’d stopped smiling. “Very few people can resist immortality when offered, you know. Vampirism is an extremely tempting and exciting lifestyle choice.”
Meena looked at the ground. She was one of the “very few people” who’d resisted the lifestyle “choice” of vampirism when offered. It was why she and Lucien were no longer together.
Well, one of the reasons.
“I just can’t believe he’d be one of those people,” she said. “He had a wife. And a baby.”
“Well, he hasn’t got anything now,” Lucien said. “Except a ravenous appetite for blood. Oh, and alcohol, apparently. He smells like a distillery.”
“I took his keys away,” Meena said, holding them up. “I thought I’d be protecting him from drinking and driving. I didn’t think it was safe for him to be out on the roads in his condition.”
“It isn’t safe for him to be out on the roads in his condition,” Lucien agreed. “But not because of his driving.”
Meena felt depressed, and not just because of David. This wasn’t how she’d pictured running into Lucien again.
And she had pictured running into him again, more times than she’d like to admit.
But she knew this was wrong, and not just because he was the most wanted man in the entire demon-fighting world—black-and-white photos of him papered nearly every wall of Palatine headquarters. She had to pass them every day in the hallways at work—but because of the other dreams she’d been having. The ones that she’d been having ever since she and Lucien had parted—long before the ones she’d started having lately about David.
These were the dreams that had driven her to make an unorthodox request from a highly restricted area—to the public, anyway—belonging to her employer.
Meena wasn’t even a hundred percent certain what she wanted was there. But if it was, it could hold the key to everything.
The answer, so far, had been a resounding No Response.
“How could I have not noticed right away that he was already dead?” she asked bleakly, staring at David’s body. If this was how things were going to go from now on, she might as well just quit. It was possible she’d be better off working back in scriptwriting.
Then again, no one she knew in that field could find jobs anymore, thanks to the success of reality shows, like the one about the housewives of New York City.
“I wouldn’t be too hard on yourself,” Lucien said, smiling again. “He’s very freshly turned, no more than a day or two at the most. And not handling it well, judging by the alcohol intake. And of course, had he gone home, he’d have killed the baby and its mother. So you did save two lives tonight.”
“You saved two lives tonight,” she said, glancing at him. This was definitely something she was going to tell Alaric Wulf, who often swore that Lucien Antonescu was evil incarnate. But why would someone evil be interested in saving lives? And, of course, she couldn’t tell Alaric, because he’d just hunt Lucien down and decapitate him. “Three, if you include mine.”
“I don’t think so,” Lucien said coolly. “He didn’t want to kill you.” He waved a hand, indicating her throat. “Would you mind? I’m finding that a bit … distracting.”
“Oh.” Flushing, she pressed his handkerchief against the wound in her neck. “Sorry.”
This, she thought grimly, didn’t exactly help bolster her theory that Lucien wasn’t like other vampires. He obviously wasn’t immune to the sight of blood.
Not even her blood.
“Might I ask,” Lucien was saying as he abruptly crossed the street toward some old furniture piled by the garbage cans near a front stoop, “why you agreed to meet with him in his vehicle? I would have thought you’d know by now to be more cautious than that.”
Meena tied the handkerchief around her neck. She watched as he tipped over an abandoned armchair and gave a vicious kick to one of its legs.
“Especially”—he took the jagged piece of chair and handed it to her, then approached David, who was starting to come around, despite his hideously contorted neck—“considering your new place of employment. Or haven’t they trained you better?”
She stuck out her chin indignantly.
“Certainly,” she said. “They have. But this was different. I know him.”
“Knew him,” Lucien corrected her.
“I meant that we’re old friends,” Meena said. “We used to live together. Even so, I was careful. It wasn’t like I told him where I live, or anything.”
He looked wry. “No. You do a good job of keeping that information private.”
She glanced at him sharply. What did he mean by that? Had he been looking for her, the same way the Palatine had been looking for him?
Well, he’d obviously found her. Probably some time ago, too. She wondered why he’d waited until someone was attacking her before attempting to speak to her.
“I guess it just never occurred to me,” she said dejectedly as David began to rub his neck and moan, “that someone I once loved might actually want to kill me.”
Although Lucien had once tried to do precisely the same thing … for slightly different reasons.
“But he didn’t want to kill you, did he?” Lucien asked. “I thought you understood that. What was it you once told me about the daughter of the Trojan king?”
Meena’s eyes suddenly filled with tears … not at the reproach, but at the fact that he remembered. It had been a conversation during a happier time. She was fairly certain now that she’d never know such happiness again. Not unless she was able somehow to prove to everyone—including Lucien himself—that he was not the monster he seemed.
“That she was given the gift of prophecy,” she said, keeping her gaze on the ground in the hope that Lucien wouldn’t notice her brimming eyelids. “And because she did not return a god’s love, that gift was turned by that god into a curse, so that her prophecies, though true, would never be believed.”
“Well,” Lucien said, “your prophecies are believed. By them.” His tone was bitter as he thrust his chin in David’s direction. “As you know, any demon who drinks your blood temporarily possesses your gift of prophecy. That’s an irresistible temptation to most of them. And they’re apparently not above resorting to turning your friends and family members into one of themselves in order to lure you out into the open to get it. I once offered you protection from this, but you turned it down.”
Meena lifted a wrist to swipe at her moist eyes.
“You’re right,” she said, looking at David as he twisted on the hood of the car, trying to get his head back into a normal position. “I did turn down your offer of protection, because it came with a price that was too high for me. And I should never have agreed to meet him. I should never have come out of my apartment, except to go to work. Why should I expect to have a normal life, considering what I am?”
Lucien looked at her, his expression remorseful.
“Meena,” he said, apparently regretting his harsh words. “I didn’t mean—”
“No.” She cut him off with a shrug. “It’s true. Except for one thing.” There were no tears in her eyes as she lifted her gaze to look back at him. “You’re not a god, Lucien.”
“No.” His mouth twisted painfully. “I know I’m not. If I were, I’d—”
But he didn’t have a chance to finish, because it was at this point that David, his head pushed back into something like its normal position, sat up and looked at them. “Who are you?” he demanded of Lucien.
The sky, which had been cloudless, grew dark. The moon disappeared behind a bank of storm clouds. The music playing in the nearby window had long since gone dead. A cool wind stirred, whipping up dead leaves and abandoned plastic bags, and ruffling Meena’s hair and the hem of her skirt.
“You should know me.” Lucien’s voice was so deep and commanding, it seemed to reverberate through her chest. It also held an undercurrent of ice that caused goose bumps to rise on the back of her arms. “I am the unholy one, ruler of all demon life on the mortal side of hell, evil in human form. I am, in fact, the dark prince, son of Vlad the Impaler, also known as Dracula.”
