Overbite (10 page)

“Oh, really?” she asked. It was warm inside the car, because the air-conditioning wasn’t on. There was just the warm rush of air from his window, which he’d finally lowered, causing her hair and the ends of her pink scarf to whip around. “Enlighten me.”

“I will,” he said. “But I’m going to warn you right now, when I’m done, you’re going to wish I hadn’t told you. And it’s going to be because deep down, you know it’s true.”

“I highly doubt that,” she said. “But go ahead and tell me anyway.”

Except it turned out that he was right. When he was through telling her, she really did wish he hadn’t.

Chapter Twelve

I
n the four centuries since Europeans first set foot on the island that had come to be known as Manhattan, Lucien Antonescu had watched them try to tame the stream that flowed down the center of Fifth Avenue.

The stream—known to the island’s original inhabitants, the Lenape Indians, as Mannette, misspelled and mispronounced by later Dutch settlers as Minetta—was considered an abomination to city planners . . . but not because they, unlike those Dutch settlers, understood what the word
Mannette
actually meant:

Devil’s Water.

Though the stream was filled with trout, the Lenape gave it a wide berth. It didn’t take long for those early settlers to discover why . . . and how the brook came to earn its curious name. Soon they, too, were avoiding it. Because though the fish were plentiful, the cost of catching them was too high . . . as the bodies of children who’d fallen into the seemingly shallow water, then inexplicably drowned, attested.

Over the course of several centuries, Lucien watched as city engineers attempted to wall up the Minetta Stream, then pave over it, and finally, construct buildings on top of it.

Bubbling up from an underground spring located on East Twentieth Street, the brook originally ran through the center of Washington Square Park, meandered through the West Village, then let out via Spring Street into the Hudson River, which separates Manhattan from New Jersey . . . a distance of roughly twenty-seven blocks, or two and a half miles.

None of the efforts to force the Minetta Stream underground worked. All it took for it to rise once again was a good strong downpour. And then . . .

Chaos. Basements flooded. Subway tracks submerged. The stream gushed down the middle of city streets like something unleashed after years of captivity.

When neither rock nor pavement succeeded in damming the stream, a young engineer insisted he’d found a way to convert the water’s flow into pipes that would force it out through a fountain that graced the courtyard of a Catholic school from which his fiancée had graduated, and to which her parents were proud donors.

On the day of the fountain’s dedication ceremony, however, there was an unexpected storm.

And when the engineer’s fiancée bent to turn on the fountain, the stream, instead of trickling gently from the feet of the statue of the Virgin Mary—symbolizing the miracle Saint Bernadette experienced at Lourdes—exploded from them, causing a chunk of the bronze sculpture to lodge itself in the girl’s skull, killing her instantly.

The horrified engineer fled the city, and the pipes leading to the stream were filled with cement to prevent their ever being switched on again. The statue of the Virgin Mary, now footless, continued to sit in the school’s courtyard, its fountain dry, a testament to man’s folly in thinking he could ever triumph over nature.

In the century that followed, the spring—and the reason for the Virgin Mary’s lack of feet—was all but forgotten . . .

. . . except to home and business owners in the area who wondered why, every time it rained, their basements flooded. And to exterminators who saw—but tactfully kept to themselves—a marked increase in requests for rat traps in restaurants along the route of the underground stream.

And to Lucien Antonescu.

Because though the stream once known as the Devil’s Water now only rose to its former glory when it rained, it still very much existed beneath the ground, its constant ebb and flow carving out over time underground caverns large enough for a grown man to move about in freely.

These secret caverns beneath the Greenwich Village streets provided excellent housing for many creatures . . . especially those that preferred the darkness to the light.

But that wasn’t all it provided.

What hardly anyone—not even the exterminators—realized was that it wasn’t just rats that made their home in these dark tunnels. All manner of beings dwelled there . . . including some that weren’t, technically, alive.

Because so few remembered the existence of the Minetta Stream, or the stories about it, no one human ventured into the caverns its waters had carved. These caves were unconnected in any way to the vast, underground, but well-documented maze of used and abandoned subway, steam, water, gas, and electrical tunnels that existed beneath Manhattan. The only hint they ever gave of their existence was during times of particularly dark and violent weather . . .

Lucien Antonescu—during his many visits to the city, from its days as a bustling Dutch settlement until the turn of the early twentieth century, just before the disaster involving the fountain at St. Bernadette’s—had always felt a strangely magnetic pull toward the Minetta Stream . . .

. . . and not only because, as a creature of darkness himself, he drew strength from its demonic source, but because he’d admired the way it had stubbornly refused to succumb to man’s plans for it.

It had never occurred to him that one day he, just like that young engineer, might have to pay for his own arrogance. Because hadn’t he, too, thought that he could control nature? Only in Lucien’s case, nature had been a woman, not a stream.

But the woman he’d chosen was just as volatile a force, it turned out, as any spring that welled up from under the ground.

And though she hadn’t erupted and killed anyone—the opposite, in fact, since her gift was foretelling when death was imminent, and attempting to prevent it—Meena had, in the end, turned from him.

And the effect on Lucien had been just as devastating.

It was why he was currently living in the caverns carved by the Minetta Stream, hoping the spring would provide him with the thing he needed most . . . if he couldn’t have
her
. If he was truly destined to be the prince of all evil, it would help actually to
be
truly evil.

He’d always seemed to have problems in that area.

But an ancient spring called the Devil’s Water, which had taken the lives of children and a man’s beautiful fiancée, would surely solve that.

And since the stream happened to flow beneath the streets along which Meena now lived and worked, where he could watch over and protect her without her actually seeing him, that made it a perfect solution to his problem.

Though she had made it clear at their meeting last spring—that horrible night in her apartment—that his protection was the last thing she wanted, it had always been just as clear to him that it was something she badly needed.

And so he’d watched. And waited.

And last night, when she’d finally needed him, he’d been there for her, exactly the way he’d promised . . .

Although it hadn’t gone as well as he might have hoped. He was furious at himself for having shown so much weakness in front of her. The spring didn’t appear to be working.

Still, she hadn’t rebuffed him the way he’d been sure she would.

She had, however, done
something
to him. He wasn’t entirely sure what—mentioning that dream about his mother certainly hadn’t helped—but something that had only made things worse.

And now, just when he ought to have had hope—because he’d held her in his arms at last, and felt her heart beating against the place where his own had been half a millennium before, and glimpsed happiness once again—he felt nothing but bone-crushing dread.

Why did she have to mention that dream? And the thing about the angels?
Why?
Especially when he was so close—he knew it. He was sure of it. The stream was going to work. It
had
to.

They wouldn’t have called it the Devil’s Water for nothing.

When it did work, he’d go back to her. He’d be strong again. He’d explain the reality of the situation. He was the prince of darkness. That was simply how it was, how it always had been, and how it was always going to be.

And she was going to have to deal with it. She wasn’t going to have any choice.

Because he wasn’t going to give her one.

Chapter Thirteen

A
t first he thought he was dreaming.

Except that vampires don’t dream.

But that was the only possible way he could be hearing his cousin Emil and Emil’s wife, Mary Lou, having the following exchange about him, apparently unaware that Lucien was perfectly able to hear them . . . he just couldn’t see them, for some reason.

“But what’s wrong with him?” Mary Lou wanted to know. “Why won’t he open his eyes?”

“It’s nothing, Mary Lou,” Emil was saying. “He’s perfectly all right. He’s just resting.”

“But why won’t he wake up? He looks terrible, frankly. I think there’s something wrong with him. Do you think he’s been eating? And why is he living
here,
when he could be living in the W Hotel, where they’ve got over five hundred channels
and
room service. If it’s that nonsense about protecting Meena Harper, he could protect her just as well from the W. It makes no earthly sense.”

“Mary Lou.” Emil sounded frustrated. “I’m hungry, hungover from all those martinis I had during the flight, and really not in the mood to have to explain this again. The prince, like us, is wanted by the Palatine. There’s no Palatine unit in Singapore, where we live. But there
is
one here in Manhattan. Even with his new name and identity, his lordship runs a high risk of discover—”

“Emil. I’m not stupid.” Lucien could tell from the way that Mary Lou’s southern twang was growing more pronounced that she was running out of patience. “None of that explains why he’s living in a
cave
.”

With what seemed like a tremendous effort, Lucien lifted his eyelids. He wasn’t surprised to see his cousin and his cousin’s wife bending over him as he lay on the dark leather chesterfield he had managed to have smuggled, along with other essentials, into the tunnel carved by the Mannette, thanks to a few weak-willed (and therefore easily misguided) deliverymen.

While he’d made sure the men were amply rewarded for their efforts, he’d made equally sure they’d been unable to remember later where the money had come from—or where the furniture they’d delivered had disappeared to.

Failing to murder them for their blood had probably been his first mistake.

Letting himself be seen about the tunnel by other creatures of the night had evidently been his second.

“Hello,” Lucien said, sitting up. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

Mary Lou—who was wearing spike-heeled purple suede thigh-high boots and some kind of fur-trimmed poncho—let out a smothered scream. Emil jumped back as if someone had doused him with holy water.

“We’re so very sorry to have disturbed your rest, my lord,” he cried. He looked it, too. Sorry, and also fearful for his life. “You . . . you seemed—”

“We thought you were dead,” Mary Lou said bluntly. “Except, of course, you already are. So we didn’t know what was wrong. You look terrible. Why are you living in a cave?”

Lucien looked from Mary Lou to her husband, whose face, in the light thrown from the wall sconces, looked apoplectic with embarrassment. It occurred to him that his cousin Emil would always be spared one marital worry, at least: he would never have to worry about what his wife was saying about him behind his back. Mary Lou could always be counted on to say exactly what she was thinking directly to his face.

“Never mind that now, Mary Lou,” Emil said quickly, darting a furious look at his wife. To Lucien he said, “Sire, you know I would never have intruded on your privacy had not an urgent matter arisen, something I felt could not wait until our weekly call. I hope you don’t mind—”

“Not at all,” Lucien lied graciously. Though inwardly, his temper boiled. “I’m delighted to see you both. May I get you something to drink? The good thing about living in a cave,” he said to Mary Lou as he rose from the couch and went to his wine rack, “is that it’s the perfect temperature for storing my collection.”

“I beg your pardon, my lord,” her husband said apologetically. The look he sent Mary Lou might have skewered her on the spot had she been paying attention to him. But she only had eyes for Lucien. “I don’t know what you may have overheard, but Mary Lou was only . . . well, she’s simply concerned about you. We both are. And, of course, she’s still so young. There are some things about our way of life that she doesn’t quite understand—”

“I’m over a hundred and fifty years old,” Mary Lou interrupted. “I realize that might be chump change to y’all, but it’s not like I haven’t been around—”

“I believe,” Emil said nervously, “what she means, sire, is that—”

“Don’t put words in my mouth, Emil,” Mary Lou said. “I’m just going to come out and say it. Because someone needs to. Prince, I completely get it. Sometimes I will admit I sit around and blame myself for everything that happened. If it weren’t for me inviting Meena Harper over for dinner that night, the two of you would never have met, and this whole horrible mess would never have happened . . .”

She paused dramatically, as if waiting for someone to jump in and say,
Oh no, Mary Lou. None of this was your fault.

But Lucien only raised an eyebrow, while Emil stared at her, looking as if he longed to wrap his hands around her neck and choke the life from her.

Unfortunately this effort would have been fruitless, as Mary Lou had died shortly after the Civil War, when she’d met and—unlikely as it seemed—fallen in love with Emil, who Lucien had always suspected of hastening her demise. She seemed never to have harbored any ill feelings toward him for it, however.

“But,” Mary Lou went on, a little less self-confidently, “if I hadn’t, then you, Lucien, would just have gone on through eternity never knowing what true love is. And then how would you have felt?”

“Considerably better than I’ve felt over the course of the past six months, I imagine,” he replied.

“Oh.” Mary Lou looked crestfallen.

“Mary Lou,” Emil said, looking angrier than ever. “There’s something of vital importance his lordship and I need to discuss, and I don’t think you’re going to find it at all interesting. Didn’t you say you had some shopping to do?” He glanced at Lucien. “I apologize, my lord. I really did beg her not to come with me.”

Mary Lou’s jaw dropped. “That isn’t true,” she said. “You begged me
to
come. You know how you hate caves.” She looked back at Lucien. “Anyway, regardless, I
am
sorry. I could kill that Meena, I really could. I know I got it all wrong, and now you’re the one paying the price. I cannot understand why she would choose working for the
Palatine
instead of immortality—and of course, being with the man she loves.”

“Mary Lou,”
Emil said from between gritted teeth. He tilted his head meaningfully toward the way they’d come in.

“Well, I’m sorry,” she said. She shot her husband a look. “Emil says I talk too much. But I just wanted to let you know I’ll do whatever I can to help. Because it certainly looks as if you need it.” She leaned down to lift her Birkin, then stood up. “I suppose I’d better go shopping now.”

“I think that would be for the best,” her husband said.

Mary Lou walked stiffly from the cavern, her stilettos—once they’d left the antique carpets Lucien had thrown across the parts of the floor through which water wasn’t trickling—clicking on the stone surface. Eventually, the clicking faded into the distance. Lucien pulled the cork on the bottle of wine he held.

“So what did you have to travel halfway around the world to discuss with me, Emil?” he asked as he poured.

“Well . . .” Emil said. Suddenly he seemed to grow reticent, but carried on just the same, compelled by duty, as he had for so many centuries. “
This,
obviously, my lord.” He swept a hand to indicate the cavern.

One corner of Lucien’s mouth rose. “You agree with your wife, then, that it isn’t suitable for a man of my noble birth to make his home in an underground riverbed?”

“It’s not just that it isn’t suitable, Lucien,” Emil said. “It’s madness.”

“Is it?” Now both corners of Lucien’s mouth rose. “But I’m the prince of darkness. And you know as well as I do, Emil, I’ve never been very good at my profession. Under my rule, I’ve done nothing but issue such edicts as the one permitting my clan to drink all the human blood they like, but forbidding them from ever killing their victims. I never even knew what any of the other clans out there were doing, because I was always too busy teaching Eastern European history to undergraduates at night school in Bucharest to care. What sort of son of Satan does that make me? Everything that your wife was talking about earlier—‘the horrible mess’ from last spring, in which all of us, and so many innocents, nearly perished—none of that was her fault. It was my fault, Emil.
Mine
. And none of it would have happened if I’d accepted the destiny my father left me when he died, instead of fighting it, as I have been for so long.”

Emil’s eyes widened. He looked more surprised than horrified. “You mean—”

“Absolutely,” Lucien said. “That’s why I’m here. The spring is my only hope. I don’t have the willpower to do it on my own. But with Mannette . . .”

“But it’s obviously killing you,” Emil burst out. “I celebrate your decision finally to embrace your true destiny, since I know your unwillingness to do so before has made you many enemies—enemies who have striven to hurt us, and you. This will make you a stronger leader. But this spring . . . I don’t know. Just because you are Satan’s son on earth, and this spring is a direct source to his power, I cannot say with any certainty that you’re drawing any benefit from it. My wife may have been too blunt in her way of putting it, but you do indeed look very ill, my lord.
Have
you been eating?”

Lucien pointed to a stainless-steel refrigerator in the shadows. “Of course.”

“I cannot understand it, then,” Emil said. “Perhaps because it’s just a few blocks from the Palatine headquarters? And Meena Harper? If you’ll pardon me saying so, sire, she seems to have a debilitating effect on you . . .”

“I have a plan for that, too,” Lucien said darkly, pouring some wine into a glass. “Don’t worry. May I ask how you discovered me?”

“Oh.” Emil looked miserable as he took the glass of rich dark red wine the prince offered him. “I suppose no one’s told you. Of course not. Who would?”

“Told me what?” Lucien sat back down on the couch. “Why do you look so frightened? I’m angry with you, but I’m not going to kill you. Not today. You happen to have caught me at a good time. Though I am slightly disturbed about something.”

Emil gulped the wine. “What?”

“Someone turned one of Meena’s friends. And the friend attacked her last night. Then we were followed. We need to find out who it was.”

Emil choked. “It wasn’t one of us. I can assure you,” he said, after he’d recovered. “There
are
no us left.”

“Yes, I know.” Lucien handed him a napkin. “Which leaves who?”

Emil shook his head as he dabbed at the corners of his mouth. “I don’t know. There’s plenty of riffraff about. That’s how I heard about this.” He waved to indicate the cavern. “Someone saw you in the tunnels. At least, that’s the rumor. I didn’t believe it could possibly be true. I knew you were in the city, of course—where, you will recall, I advised you against staying. But then I remembered how you used to like to go and stand by this stream, to see how they were progressing with damming it up—and I thought, ‘No, he couldn’t possibly.’ But you did. My lord.” He shook his head. “I understand your motivations. I do. And I respect them. But there must be another way. Another place, not as close to the Palatine, to
her,
for you to—”

Lucien shook his head. “No. This is the place. I feel it, Emil. I will admit, I’ve had a slight setback. Last night when Meena was attacked, I had an . . . altercation. It took more out of me than I’d have expected. I haven’t been as strong as I was since the incident at St. George’s. But I’m recovering steadily, and soon, I hope, I’ll—”

“No.” Emil reached into the pocket of his coat and produced a pamphlet, which he handed Lucien. “You need to leave this place. Now.”

Lucien looked down at the purple-and-gold pamphlet, which was advertising a new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “
Vatican Treasures: A Journey Through Faith and Art.
What could this possibly have to do with me?”

“The exhibit features rare art objects and historical documents relating to the evolution of the Church and the papacy,” Emil explained. “It’s one of the largest collections the Vatican has ever released to tour the world. It includes more than five hundred objects,
many of which have never before been on public view
. Its first stop is the Metropolitan.”

“This isn’t a show I’m particularly eager to rush out to see,” Lucien said wryly. “But I still fail to see how it endangers me.”

“Lucien, I’ve looked at the catalog. One of the objects on display dates back to the days of your father, before his death. His
original
death. It’s a
certain illuminated manuscript
.”

Lucien looked puzzled. “So?”

“It’s a book of hours dating from the fifteenth century. It’s said to have come from the region near Poenari Castle . . . and from the description, to have been a gift to a young princess upon her betrothal from her doting husband-to-be.”

Lucien stared at him for a full minute. He wasn’t certain he’d heard him correctly. He had spent a lot of time underground lately, living in darkness . . . absorbing the darkness, trying to become one with the darkness.

The darkness, however, had a way of playing with a man’s mind.

“My
mother’s
book of hours?” he finally croaked. “How is that even possible? That was lost when I was captured by the Ottomans, before my father . . .” His voice trailed off. The memory of what his father had done—not just to him, but to Emil—was too painful for either of them ever to mention. Lucien’s father had made them what they were.

He’d then gone on to kill what scholars estimated were tens of thousands of human beings. But anyone who’d been around at the time knew the number was actually much higher than that.