Succubus Takes Manhattan (3 page)

I didn’t care. At that point, nothing but sleep mattered. So I closed the door, left my bags and shoes in the middle of the floor, and shed Italian couture down the hallway to my bed.

I got up at a ridiculous hour the next morning, well before the sun or any of my friends or coworkers would be up. My body was still on Italian time. If I were the type, I would go to the gym for the six a.m. step class. I’m not that type.

I wanted to go back to sleep. I wasn’t well rested, but I was definitely too wide awake to stay in bed.

Thank the military-industrial complex for the Internet. It’s always open and I didn’t have to bother getting dressed to get online and catch up on what my friends (and enemies, and those in between) have been doing.

MagicMirror, the demon version of MySpace, can only be accessed from a computer with credentials from Hell. Which means it remains secure from prying human eyes.

Gloriana had written a long screed about how she found human cursing demeaning to demons. Normally I would have just scrolled by but I did find it funny that she was so upset humans considered “damn you” and “go to Hell” to be nasty. After all, for them it is. For demons, that kind of language was meaningless. “Go to Hell” came out sounding like “Go to California,” only personally I way preferred Hell. More interesting people, no cars, no pollution.

Okay, the real problem with California for me is—this was very hard to admit. I am not one of those Luddite demons who couldn’t use e-mail and even hate the telephone. I knew demons who didn’t have a microwave or a DVD player because they couldn’t figure out how to use them. I had a dishwasher and a microwave and a computer and a DVD set up and was very seriously thinking about TiVo. But I had never learned to drive a car.

I came to New York in 1893, and before that I lived in Paris. I’d never needed to drive and as a New Yorker part of my identity involved not having a driver’s license. Like many Manhattanites, I have a nondriver’s ID.

While I mused over the driving thing, I scrolled through a number of posts on food and travel and problems with humans without paying attention. There had been so much traffic when I’d been gone that I didn’t really have the time to read every entry carefully—or even not very carefully.

So I nearly missed Hatuman’s invitation.

Hatuman is one of the old ones, and rarely uses the computer. Probably one of his minor minions had actually posted for him, but there it was, a private party at the Waldorf-Astoria next weekend.

I sighed. The Waldorf. Like they couldn’t have found an older, stuffier venue. But then, the old-school demons preferred sedate, conservative places where the only dancing would be the waltz, and even that was a little new wave for them. Probably five hundred demons were invited, and I was going to just ignore the invitation until I thought again.

Hatuman was fairly friendly with Marduk, and this was an event where I could see the old Babylonian god socially. Being Babylonian myself, talking to Marduk casually at the party would only be good manners, required even. This was too good an opportunity to do exactly what Mephistopheles wanted me to do.

I just hated giving up a Saturday night for a boring party where no one would wear anything interesting and there wouldn’t be any younger demons to flirt with me.

I studied the invitation again. Should I bring a date?

But there wasn’t anyone I could bring. Nathan had dumped me. Nathan, who I bet would be brilliant in that crowd, was out of my life. He could talk to Marduk in his very strangely accented Akkadian and ask all kinds of personal and embarrassing questions and Marduk wouldn’t even notice.

It was six thirty in the morning and my alarm wasn’t due to go off for fifteen minutes and I was already furious. Though I did remind myself that my body thought it was just past noon and maybe I needed lunch, and I was tired in that dragging, too-awake way that was this century’s special travel curse.

Maybe I could drag one of my girlfriends along.

I sent an e-mail to all of them, to Desire and Eros and Sybil, asking if anyone could manage to go to Hatuman’s shindig with me. I hit Send with a sense of resignation. I certainly wouldn’t want to go to Hatuman’s party if I didn’t need to talk to Marduk. I’d rather stay home and wash my hair.

And then the alarm rang, interrupting my self-pity session. I turned it off and put myself under the shower and resolved to start the day as if nothing had ever happened. As if I had just woken up out of a good restful sleep and looked forward to my day as an editor at one of America’s most popular magazines.

Yeah, right. Go me.

chapter
THREE

The first morning back at work turned out to be wonderful. I walked into our office and people I barely knew stopped to thank me. The whole ambience reminded me of a movie premiere or a procession entering the Ishtar Gate and proceeding down the avenue, cheered by the people and showered with flowers by those lucky enough to get up on a roof.

I could almost hear people thinking “Hail, O Vanquisher of Lawrence Carroll.” And there was the man himself, looking sour but grudgingly thanking me for saving his shoot, as he put it.

Danielle and two of the fashion editors treated me to lunch at Butter where we ordered two bottles of wine on top of cocktails and got completely drunk. But no one was going to challenge our productivity that afternoon, Danielle assured me. “If you had not appeased him, no one would have been able to work for days and we would have lost all the interns. They were so afraid, the little ones. And I cannot say that I blame them.”

We giggled in the cab uptown, and then Danielle pulled me into her office. “What do you think of these?” she asked, showing me a selection of Jimmy Choo, Manolo Blahnik and Christian Louboutin boots. We both clucked over them all, and Danielle pointed out her favorites and showed me the ones she thought suited me.

“And the very best is that we can keep these,” she whispered drunkenly. “After they are used in my articles, and in the fashion shoots, we do not need to return them the way we usually do. And these”—she swept her hand indicating four pairs of stilettos on her conference table—“these are your size. So I think that, in order to make room for the next collection, you must take them away.”

At the end of the day I got even better news. I went to check my e-mail before I went home and all the girls said they had already been planning on Hatuman’s party and had expected that I would be there. Everyone was going to be there. So it had been the perfect first day back when I got into the taxi to go home.

Vincent met me as he held the door for me. “Lily, Azoked is waiting in your apartment.”

All the happiness of the past few hours dissolved instantly.

“Why did you let her in?” I cried.

“I got her Florentines and Ben & Jerry’s because I thought you needed your reserves if you even had anything left after being away. Though it would serve her right to have it freezer burned,” he said.

Spoken like a true demon,
I thought.
And a true friend.

There was no help for it. I couldn’t make Azoked go away without seeing her. I tried to breathe deeply in the elevator. I counted to ten, and then fifty, as the elevator deposited me at my floor and I walked down the hallway to my door. Breathe. Deeply.

I had thwarted Lawrence Carroll. I had been Satan’s friend for several hundred years. I had survived Nathan Coleman dumping me. I could survive half an hour with a Bastform Akashic Librarian. Without committing murder. I hoped.

I opened the door to find Azoked sitting on my sofa with her feet up, eating Cherry Garcia out of the carton. Even I do not put my feet on the upholstery, at least not unless I was freshly washed. Then she put her used spoon on my coffee table and looked up.

“You are late,” she said, as if I were her secretary and had arrived at work two hours late and hung over.

I refused to dignify her attitude with a reply. Instead, I made rather a show of saying nothing to her while I took off my shoes and unpacked my bag. I made certain to show off the new shoes that had been packed down with stacks of proof sheets.

She seemed to take no notice of my rudeness, but licked her whiskers and her fingers (which were surprisingly human looking, for her face mostly resembled a Siamese cat. A very large cat in a sky blue silk robe and glasses hanging from a matching macramé cord around her neck). Something about the steel gray coloring and the glasses made her appear the perfect blend of feline and strict head librarian. Not the nice librarian who suggested really good books and set aside the latest Janet Evanovich, but the nasty head of department who shushed you as soon as you even thought above a whisper.

“I thought the case of the Knight Defenders was on hold for the time being,” I said. “Have they found a new leader so quickly?”

“They have not,” Azoked answered, not looking up from her grooming. “But I have not come on Satan’s business. I have come as your friend.” Friend? Since when had Azoked ever been anything but a thorn in my side? For any of us? My actual friends, who had met her only briefly in Aruba, thought I must secretly belong Upstairs just for dealing with her.

She had been some use when we were being attacked, and even then it was hardly worth dealing with her. But—a friend? Not in this universe.

“Do you know who was following me in Venice?” I asked immediately. “Was it the Knight Defenders, or was it just some random thing?”

She shook her head. “I have seen nothing in the
Record
about the Knight Defenders. If you were followed, perhaps it was your succubus pheromones.”

I didn’t think so, but I remained silent. Azoked didn’t have the one piece of information I cared about, at least that she could give me. She couldn’t tell me anything about demonkind, and that was where Meph’s enemy lay.

“I have some information that may be of use to you,” she continued, as if she thought my behavior perfectly normal. “About your boyfriend. He is planning to come to Hatuman’s party, it appears. How very odd indeed. I do not know whether he is searching for you, or if he has reasons of his own for attending.”

I shook my head. “Impossible. He can’t deal with me being a succubus. That’s why he isn’t my boyfriend anymore.”

Azoked shrugged. “I only know what I read in the
Akashic.
I thought you would want to know, to be prepared.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Is that all?”

She licked her fingers delicately. “You could offer to take me out to Balthazar. You could invite me to join your brunch at Public.”

“Not even Satan joins our brunch,” I told her. Which is true, but Satan would have been most welcome at any time. She was just too busy, especially on Sunday mornings, and we were thrilled on the very few occasions She could snatch a few minutes and grace us with Her company.

“Well, you could take me out to dinner tonight. I will accept that as a deposit on what you owe me for my assistance.”

“I did not request your help,” I said, pronouncing each word carefully. “I do not owe you. You have never shown any interest in being a social friend.”

Her eyes narrowed and she hissed.

“Unless you can tell me who in Hell is gunning for Mephistopheles,” I amended, knowing full well that she couldn’t find any information on Hellspawn. The
Akashic Record
is the Book of Life. Immortals leave no traces in the Book, no resonance in the threads of Fate for a Librarian to trace. Only the living, the mortal, are recorded in the Book of Life.

And everything about them is recorded. What they think, what they consider, what they discard, as well as what they actually do. Which is why Librarians were so highly skilled. They didn’t simply look up information—though I’d seen Azoked use Google.

“If I find this, you will include me in your brunches forever,” she pronounced.

“Forget it,” I told her. “It’s a Hell matter anyway. No mortals involved anymore. Sorry.”

She hissed again.

I shrugged.

“You will regret this,” she shot at me before dematerializing in a haze of blue smoke, faintly scented with crumbling parchment and stale chalk.

Awful, awful, doubly awful. I wanted my friends. I definitely did not want to go to a party where Nathan would be present. How did Nathan get invited to Hatuman’s anyway? I thought it was Hellspawn-only, no humans need apply. Even then, I was only going because Marduk would be there and I needed to talk to him for Meph.

Life felt pretty sucky just then, so I did what any reasonably smart, hip New York woman would do. I called my best friends.

chapter
FOUR

If I’d looked at my e-mail, I wouldn’t have been so shocked. I could have prepared, could have decided on my story or whether or not I would pick up my phone. But I didn’t look at the e-mail, figuring that there would be time while I puttered around my apartment and got dressed to meet Desi. So when the phone rang I thought it was Des running late, or at worst a telemarketer.

I didn’t expect Nathan, not in a thousand years.

“Lily, I’m really sorry to disturb you,” he started off.

“I thought you didn’t want to talk to me anymore,” I blurted out.

Silence hissed on the line.

“No, Lily. I think about you all the time. I wish we were still together. I keep trying to wrap my head around . . . what you showed me. I keep wondering if I could ignore it somehow, or maybe I’d get used to it. Or maybe it’s not so bad. But that’s not why I called.”

“So you can’t get around it,” my voice must have sounded bleak. Maybe as bleak as his.

“I’m trying. But I called you about our old friend Craig Branford. Who has resurfaced as Richard Bowen, in Huntington, Long Island. Which is where he was from, if you’ll remember,” he started out.

“I don’t know why you couldn’t just send me this in e-mail,” I said softly. Just hearing his voice, so very close on the phone, brought back the stabbing misery I thought had abated.

“I did,” he said, and his voice was tight. “But I think he’s planning to move against you again, possibly very soon. Maybe as early as sometime this week, though I’m not sure.”