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