Overbite. Meg Cabot
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Название: Overbite
Автор: Meg Cabot
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Эзотерика
isbn: 9780007483532
isbn:
She was so taken aback by the abrupt end to their kiss, she wanted to ask him what he thought he was doing, and drag his mouth back down to hers again.
But then she saw that he’d flung himself a few feet away, and was in a darkened corner of her room, just looking at her from the shadows, his eyes no longer deep pools of ebony, but twin spots of red …
The same red his eyes had always turned when he was at his angriest.
Or hungriest.
Oh God.
She stared back at him. It had never occurred to her to ask what he was living on these days.
Now, as she looked into those bloodred eyes, it was all she could think about.
“The Palatine have frozen all your financial assets,” she said quietly.
“The ones they could trace back to the name I used to use,” he replied, his voice like liquid smoke, drifting from the shadows and curling around her in burning tendrils.
“Still,” Meena said, shivering. She felt as if she were sitting in a cool, dense fog. “It must be difficult to find human blood to purchase on such restricted resources.” She gripped her duvet, white-knuckled, as she waited for his reply.
“Are you worried I’m not eating enough, Meena?” She heard a hint of mockery in his tone. “Or worried I’m resorting to murder for my meals? Let me put your mind at rest on both counts.” She heard a rustle of cloth. He was reaching into his coat pocket. “Here.” He tossed something onto the bed. She reached instinctively to catch it.
It was the impromptu stake he’d given her, and that she’d used to kill David.
“You have my permission to kill me if I ever try to bite you again,” he said. “Against your will, anyway. I should hope there’s still enough man in me to keep me from ever hurting you. But should an occasion ever arise to prove otherwise … well, you’ve more than amply proved this evening that you know what to do with one of those.”
Meena stared down at the chair leg. She had to swallow before she felt able to speak.
“Lucien,” she said. “I told you six months ago: I don’t ever want to hurt you. I’ll always do everything in my power to try to help you … even help you despite yourself. That’s why I told you about the dream. I think I can prove—”
He stepped from the shadows then. His eyes had gone back to their normal color, but a million different emotions played upon his face.
“You know what I want from you, Meena,” he said, in a rasping voice. “As soon as you’re ready to give it—and admit that’s what you want, as well—come find me. You won’t have to look far. I’ll be close. I always have been.”
Then he opened the bedroom door and walked out. A second later, she heard the apartment door slam.
Alaric Wulf was not having a good day. Technically, he wasn’t having a good week.
This streak of misfortune had started when his supervisor, Abraham Holtzman, called him into his office, saying he had something he wished to discuss in private.
“I already know,” Alaric announced the minute he arrived.
“You do?” Holtzman looked up from his computer screen, surprised. “How?”
Alaric shrugged. “You’re kidding, right? She told me. She’s been telling anyone who’ll listen. You should hear her in the commissary at lunch. ‘What if there is good in Lucien Antonescu, and in all demons? And our job isn’t to destroy them, but to restore the good in them?’”
He felt like his imitation of Meena Harper was dead-on. Sometimes he found himself mimicking her when he was alone. Not on purpose, which was faintly disheartening. He couldn’t seem to get her voice out of his head.
“Oh.” Holtzman lowered his scraggly gray eyebrows. “That.”
“Yes, that,” Alaric said, annoyed. “What else? I certainly hope you put a freeze on that request she made to the Secret Archives.”
Now Holtzman’s eyebrows went up. “I did no such thing,” he said, looking offended. “If any of my staff members wants to request material the Vatican Library might have on file—even material from the Secret Archives—that might in any way help us in our efforts to better understand our enemies, why on earth would I stand in their way?”
“You must be joking.” Alaric could hardly believe what he was hearing. “You don’t believe this dream she’s been having has any sort of merit, do you?”
“I don’t know that it doesn’t,” Holtzman said. “And I don’t see why you feel it doesn’t. In any case, Meena Harper is not why I asked you in here today.”
Alaric’s frown deepened. “Are you saying you actually believe that there’s a chance that Lucien Antonescu—the anointed one, listed in the Palatine Guide to Otherworldly Creatures as he who performs the devil’s work on earth—may have a choice in whether or not he commits good or evil?”
“I’m saying,” Holtzman said, “I like to keep myself open to all possibilities.” When Alaric openly balked at this, Holtzman lifted a hand and said, “I understand that certain prejudices exist about Antonescu, and rightly so. Sometimes old memories die hard, and the fact that so many of us, including yourself, are still recovering from injuries sustained fighting him and the Dracul last spring certainly hasn’t exactly fostered a spirit of goodwill toward Meena’s theory. I, however, am willing to give it a chance … if she can prove it, which is a big if. Now, if I may get to the reason I asked you to step in here this evening, which, as I said, has nothing to do with Meena Harper … I know you aren’t going to like this, but there’s no getting around it. I’m sure you’re aware of the Church’s efforts to …”
Alaric instantly switched off his attention and turned to stare out of one of Holtzman’s office—formerly a principal’s office—windows facing Mulberry Street. The moment he heard the words church and efforts to, he knew that whatever was being discussed was going to bore him. It might possibly have something to do with his being in trouble for killing something in too public or violent a manner.
But that, too, was boring.
He reflected, instead, on Meena Harper, and her theory.
“Saint Thomas said it,” she insisted almost daily in the commissary. “Not me. He believed there is no positive source of evil, or even evil beings, but rather an absence of good in some beings.”
“Which,” Alaric had pointed out, “is why we are employed, and will continue to СКАЧАТЬ