Overbite. Meg Cabot
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 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