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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.

Chapter Five
    7:00 P.M . EET, Tuesday, April 13
The hills outside of Sighioara
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 thestuffed 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