Insatiable. Meg Cabot

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      Chapter Twenty-one

       7:00 P.M. EST, Thursday, April 15

       St. George’s Cathedral

       180 East Seventy-eighth Street

       New York, New York

      Meena stared at the cathedral. In the fading daylight, it looked beautiful, with its twin spires straining toward the spring sky and elegant stained glass, even if some of the windows were broken in places. Who would throw rocks at a church window, anyway?

      Sure, it was surrounded with the familiar blue plywood that always went up around a building in Manhattan when construction was taking place.

      But the plywood was nowhere near high enough to hide the large and lovely cathedral behind it.

      A cathedral that, just two nights before, had been the scene of an inexplicable, brutal attack.

      Or had it?

      Meena stood with Jack Bauer on his leash at the bottom of the cathedral steps, exactly where they had been the night before last when the bats had come swooping down out of nowhere.

      At first she’d been worried that Jack wouldn’t want to go anywhere near the church because of what had happened last time they’d been there.

      But he showed no sign of any reluctance, trotting right up and lifting a leg on a parked car in front of it.

      He obviously didn’t harbor any ill memories of the incident.

      But though at first her own had been a bit fuzzy, she remembered it all now, as clearly as if it had just happened a few minutes, and not nearly forty-eight hours, ago. There was the place on the sidewalk where she’d crouched, her heart in her throat, for so long while the bats had flung themselves over and over at Lucien’s face and body, trying—she’d been certain at the time—to rip him apart.

      Except that he’d been fine, his face without a mark on it.

      And true, there were no actual drops of blood or anything like that on the ground to show that there’d been any attack at all.

      But she recognized the crack in the pavement; how could she forget it? Her face had been almost right up against it as Lucien had lain across her, keeping her safe.

      It was strange, Meena thought as she stood gazing up at the church spires, wondering if the bats were in there now and when they might awaken—and attack—again. She didn’t get a feeling of evil from the cathedral, even though the exact spot where she stood had very nearly been the site of a savage mauling.

      Meena didn’t flatter herself that as a dialogue writer for a show of Insatiable’s quality she was particularly gifted. She didn’t put on airs that she was a creative genius.

      Nor did she think of herself as any more creative than the artists she sometimes saw outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the ones who painted amateur sunsets and landscapes and then sold them to tourists who happened to be walking by.

      Meena felt her scripts for Insatiable were much the same thing: a reflection of what was happening daily in front of the average American, just like a sunset … only maybe a little more dramatic, to keep people interested.

      But she’d always been aware of being a tiny bit more sensitive to mood than other people, possibly because of her ability to tell when something horrible was going to happen to someone.

      Maybe there just wasn’t anything horrible about St. George’s to sense. Because a tragedy at St. George’s had been averted … thanks to Lucien, whoever he was. He’d saved her life. She didn’t know how or why, but he had.

      Did Lucien, Meena wondered, ever think about СКАЧАТЬ