Insatiable (2 page)

6:00
P.M
. EET, Tuesday, April 13
History Department
University of Bucharest
Bucharest, Romania

P
rofessor?”

Lucien Antonescu smiled up at her from the enormous antique desk behind which he sat, grading papers. “Yes?”

“So is it true,” Natalia asked, grasping at the first question she could think of, since she’d completely forgotten what she’d meant to ask him the moment his dark-eyed gaze fell upon her, “that the oldest human remains ever found were discovered in Romania?”

Oh, no! Human remains? How disgusting! How could she ask something so stupid?

“The oldest human remains found in
Europe,
” Professor Antonescu said, correcting her gently. “The oldest human remains ever found were discovered in Ethiopia. And they’re roughly a hundred and fifty thousand years older than the remains found in what we consider modern-day Romania, in the Cave with Bones.”

The girl was only half listening. He was the sexiest of all her instructors, and that included teaching assistants. On the University of Bucharest’s equivalent of Rateyourprof.com, Professor Lucien Antonescu had been given all 10s in the looks category.

And justifiably so, since he was over six feet tall, lean and broad
shouldered, with thick dark hair that he wore brushed back from his temples and a smooth, gorgeous forehead.

As if all that weren’t enough, he had dark brown eyes that, in certain lights, when he was lecturing and grew excited about his subject matter—which happened frequently, because he was impassioned about Eastern European history—flashed red.

Surely the posts on the message boards were exaggerated…especially the ones hinting that he was related to the Romanian royal family and was a duke or a prince or something.

But since taking Professor Antonescu’s class, Natalia could see why he—and his course—was so popular. And why the line of girls—and some boys, though when he showed pictures of ancient Romanian art, Professor Antonescu spoke so appreciatively of the lush lines of the female form that there was no possible way he could be gay—at his office hours was so long. He was a gifted orator, with a regal yet very engaging presence….

And he was so very, very hot.

“So,” Natalia said hesitantly, taking in the way his perfectly tailored black cashmere blazer molded those shoulders. She wondered why she couldn’t see his eyes—those dark, flashing eyes—better and realized it was because he had the shades to his office windows pulled down. She hoped he’d still notice that she’d worn a new shirt, one that showed off her cleavage to its best advantage. She’d bought it at a steep discount at H&M, but it still made her look irresistible. “It would be correct to say that Romania is the cradle of civilization in Europe.”

This, Natalia thought, sounded very intelligent.

“It would be a lovely idea, of course,” Professor Antonescu said, looking thoughtful. “Certainly there have been human beings living here for over two millennia, and this land has been the site of many bloody invasions, from the Romans to the Huns, until finally we had what today makes up modern-day Romania…Moldavia and Wallachia, and of course Transylvania. But the cradle of civilization…I don’t know that we can say that.” He was even better looking when he smiled, if such a thing were possible.

“Professor.”

The smile caused her to come undone. She knew she was not the first. His bachelor status was legendary, the intrigue heightening whenever he was spotted with a woman—never the same one twice—in the posher restaurants downtown. How many had he asked back to his castle—he owned a castle!—outside of Sighi
oara, or to his enormous loft apartment in the trendiest district of Bucharest?

No one knew. Maybe hundreds. Maybe none. He didn’t seem to care to marry and start a family.

Well, all that would change when he tasted her cooking. Iliana, behind her in line to see him just now, had teased her for saying she was going to invite him over. So old-fashioned! She said Natalia should just offer to sleep with him right there, in his office, like Iliana was going to, and get it over with.

But Natalia’s mother had always told her she made the best
sarmale
of anyone in the family. One taste, her mother said, and any man would be hers.

“Yes?” Professor Antonescu asked, one of those thick dark eyebrows raising.

Natalia wished he hadn’t done this. It only made him look more attractive and made her feel more foolish for what she was about to do.

“Would you like to come to my place for a home-cooked meal sometime?” she asked, all in a rush. Her heart was beating wildly. She was sure he could see it thrumming behind her breast, considering how low-cut her new blouse was.

Something in the dimly lit office made a chirping sound.

“I beg your pardon,” Professor Antonescu said. He reached into the inside pocket of his expensive coat and produced a slim cell phone…top of the line, of course. “I thought I’d turned this off.”

Natalia stood there, wondering if she ought to say something about the
sarmale
or perhaps undo another button of her blouse, as Iliana would have done…

…but she hesitated when she saw Professor Antonescu’s expression change as his gaze fell on the name on the caller identification.

“I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “This is an important call. I have to take it. Could we discuss this at another time?”

Natalia felt her cheeks growing red. It was merely because he was looking at her…and yet had never once lowered his gaze below her neck.

“Of course,” she said shamefacedly.

“And please tell the others,” Professor Antonescu said as he accepted the call, “that unfortunately I’ll have to end office hours early this evening. A family emergency.”

Family emergency. He had family?

“I’ll let them know,” the girl said, pleased. He trusted her! That would put Iliana in her place!

“Thank you,” Professor Antonescu said politely as she slunk from the dark, lushly decorated room, all in richly appointed leather-trimmed furniture and filled with manuscripts that were many centuries older than she was. Even Professor Antonescu’s office was different from the offices of her other instructors, which were as barren as a politburo’s and just as grim.

She opened the door, slipped through it, and turned to close it….

But not before she heard him say, in a voice she had never heard him use before, and in English, “What? When?” Then, “Not again.”

Natalia turned then to see a look on his face that made her heart turn over in her chest.

But not in the joyful way it did when she spied him coming down the corridor toward the lecture hall.

Now she was afraid.

Deathly afraid.

Because those beautiful eyes of his had gone vermilion…the same color her shower water ran when she accidentally cut her leg while shaving.

Only this wasn’t a trickle of water. It was a man’s eyes. His
eyes
. And they’d gone the color of blood.

His gaze was boring into her as if he could see straight through her blouse, past her bra, and into the most intimate places of her heart.

“
Get out,
” he said in a voice that she would swear later, when she told her mother about it, didn’t even sound human.

Natalia turned, threw open the door, and flung herself through it,
flying with a face as white as death past the other students waiting to see their professor.

“Well, that obviously went well,” Iliana said with a sneer.

But when Iliana tried Professor Antonescu’s office door, she found it locked. She knocked and knocked, finally cupping both hands around her eyes and pressing them to the door’s frosted glass.

“The lights are out. I don’t see him in there. I think…I think he’s gone.”

But how could the professor have left a locked a room from which there was no other exit?

9:45
A.M
. EST, Tuesday, April 13
Outside the ABN Building
East Fifty-third Street and Madison Avenue
New York, New York

G
ood morning, Miss Meena. The usual?” Abdullah, the guy in the glassed-in coffee stand outside her office building, asked her when it was finally her turn to order.

“Good morning, Abdullah,” Meena said. “Better make it a large. I’ve got a big meeting. Light, please. And don’t bother toasting the bagel today, I’m running really, really late.”

Abdullah nodded and went to work as Meena narrowed her gaze at him. She could tell he still hadn’t seen a doctor about his out-of-control blood pressure, despite the talk she’d had with him about it last week.

Seriously,
she
was the one who was going to stroke out one day if people didn’t start listening to her. She knew taking time from work to go to the doctor was a pain.

But when the alternative was
dying
?

Precognition.

Extrasensory perception.

Witchcraft.

It didn’t matter what anyone called it: In Meena’s opinion, as a skill, it was totally useless.

Had it been particularly helpful when she’d finally managed to con
vince her longtime boyfriend, David, about the tumor that she could sense was growing in his brain?

Sure, she’d saved David’s life (had they found the tumor any later, it would have been inoperable, the doctors said).

But David had left Meena immediately after his recovery for one of his perky radiology nurses. Brianna healed people who were sick, he’d said. She wasn’t a “freak” who told them they were going to die.

What had Meena gotten out of saving David? Nothing but a lot of heartache.

And she’d lost half the down payment on the apartment that they’d bought together. Which she still owed him. And which he was being a total jerk about her paying back on her pittance of a salary.

David and Brianna were buying their first house together. And expecting their first baby.

Of course.

Meena had learned from that experience—and all the ones before it—that no one was interested in finding out how they were going to die.

Except her best friend, Leisha, of course, who always listened to Meena…ever since that time in the ninth grade when Rob Pace asked her to that Aerosmith concert, and Meena told her not to go, and Rob took Angie Harwood instead.

That’s how Angie Harwood, and not Leisha, ended up getting decapitated when the wheel of a semi tractor-trailer came spinning off and landed on top of Rob’s Camaro as it was cruising down I-95 on the way home from the concert.

Meena, upon learning of the accident the morning after it occurred (Rob had miraculously escaped with only a broken collarbone), had promptly thrown up her breakfast.

Why hadn’t she realized that by saving her best friend from certain death, she’d all but guaranteed another girl’s? She ought to have warned Angie, too, and done anything—
everything
—to stop Rob from going that night.

She swore then that she would never allow what had happened to Angie Harwood to happen to another human being. Not if she could help it.

It was no wonder then that high school, torturous for many, had been even worse for Meena.

Which was how she got into television writing as a career. Real kids may not have enjoyed the company of the “You’re Gonna Die Girl” so much.

But the people Meena discovered on the soap operas her mom liked to watch—
Insatiable
had been a favorite—were always happy to see her.

And when the story lines on the soaps she liked didn’t go the way she thought they should, Meena started writing her own.

Surprisingly, this hobby had paid off.

Well, if you call being a dialogue writer for the second-highest-rated soap opera in America a payoff.

Which Meena did. Sort of. She knew she’d landed what millions would kill for…a dream job.

And given her “gift,” she knew her life could have been a thousand times worse. Look what had happened to Joan of Arc.

Then there was Cassandra, daughter of the Trojan king Priam. She too had been given the gift of prophecy. Because she hadn’t returned a god’s love, that gift was turned by that god into a curse, so that Cassandra’s prophecies, though true, would never be believed.

Hardly anyone ever believed Meena either. But that didn’t mean she was going to give up trying. Not on girls like the one she’d met on the subway, and not on Abdullah. She’d get him to go to the doctor, eventually.

It was just too bad, really, that the one person whose future Meena had never been able to see was her own.

Until now, anyway.

If she was much later to work, she was going to lose any chance whatsoever she had at convincing Sy to take her pitch seriously.

And forget about that promotion to head writer.

She didn’t need to be psychic to figure
that
out.

7:00
P.M
. EET, Tuesday, April 13
The hills outside of Sighi
oara
Mures County, Romania

L
ucien Antonescu was furious, and when he was furious, he sometimes lost control.

He’d frightened that young girl in his office nearly to death, and he hadn’t wanted to do that. He’d felt her fear…it had been sharp and as tightly wound as a garrote. She was a good person, longing, like most girls her age, only for love.

And he’d terrified her.

But he didn’t have time to worry about that now. Now he had a very serious situation that was going to require all of his attention for the immediate future.

And so he was doing what he could in an attempt to calm himself. His favorite classical piece—by Tchaikovsky—played over the hall’s speakers (which he’d purchased and had shipped from the U.S. at enormous expense; quality sound was important).

And he’d opened one of the truly exquisite bottles of Bordeaux in his collection and was letting it breathe on the sideboard. He could smell the tannins even from halfway across the room. The scent was soothing….

Still, he couldn’t help pacing the length of the great hall, an enormous fire roaring in the stone hearth at one end of the room and the
stuffed heads of various animals his ancestors had killed leering down at him from the walls above.

“Three,” he growled at the laptop sitting on the long, elaborately carved wooden table in the center of the room. “Three dead girls? All within the past few weeks? Why wasn’t I told this before now?”

“I didn’t realize that there was a connection between them, my lord,” the slightly anxious voice from the computer’s speakers said in English.

“Three exsanguinated corpses, all left nude in various city parks?” Lucien didn’t attempt to keep the sarcasm from his tone. “Covered in bite marks? And you didn’t realize there was a connection. I see.”

“Obviously the authorities don’t want to start a citywide panic,” the voice said fretfully. “My sources didn’t know anything about the bite marks until this morning….”

“And what attempts,” Lucien asked, ignoring this last remark, “have been made to discover who is committing these atrocities?”

“Everyone I’ve spoken to denies any knowledge whatsoev—”

Lucien cut him off. “Then obviously you’re not speaking to the appropriate people. Or someone is lying.”

“I…I can’t imagine anyone would dare,” the voice said hesitantly. “They know I’m speaking on your authority, sire. I feel…if I may, sire…that it isn’t…well, one of us. Someone we know.”

Lucien paused in his circuit around the room.

“That’s impossible,” he said flatly. “There’s no one we don’t know.”

He turned and approached the wine decanter, which was filled with rich ruby liquid. He could see the reflection of the firelight against one side of the perfect crystal globe.

“It’s one of us,” Lucien said, inhaling the earthy fragrance of the Bordeaux. “Someone who has forgotten himself. And his vows.”

“Surely not,” the voice said nervously. “No one would dare. Everyone knows the repercussions of committing such a crime under your rule. That your retribution will be swift…and severe.”

“Nevertheless.” Lucien picked up the decanter and watched as the liquid inside left a deep red film against the far side of the crystal bulb. “Someone’s savagely killing human women and leaving their bodies out in the open to be discovered.”

“He
is
putting all of us at risk,” the voice from the laptop agreed hesitantly.

“Yes,” Lucien said. “Needlessly so. He must be discovered, punished, and stopped. Permanently.”

“Yes, my lord,” the voice said. “Only…how? How are we to discover him? The police…my informants tell me that the police haven’t a single lead.”

Lucien’s perfectly formed lips curved into a bitter smile. “The police,” he said. “Ah, yes. The police.” He glanced away from the decanter he held, toward the face on the computer screen a few yards away. “Emil, find me a place to stay. I’m coming to town.”

“Sire?” Emil looked startled. “
You?
Are you certain? Surely that won’t be—”

“I’m certain. I will find our murdering friend. And then…”

Lucien opened his fingers and let the decanter fall to the flagstones beneath his feet. The crystal bell smashed into a thousand pieces, the wine it contained making a deep red smear across the floor, where, centuries before, Lucien had watched his father dash the brains of so many of their servants.

“I will show him myself what happens when anyone dares to break a vow to me.”