Succubus in the City (21 page)

“It’s not about our brunch specifically.” I wanted to get the conversation back to the problem at hand. “It’s about Martha, and about who could know enough about us to set us up at brunch the way Desi was targeted. Clearly there is some inside information being leaked to our enemies. It doesn’t matter how thoroughly we eliminate this group, some other will crop up. The problem is the demon who is feeding them our secrets.”

“Why do you think there’s some demon involved?” Eros demanded again. “I just can’t imagine anyone actually going to this length to betray Satan.”

“Maybe she’s jealous of us,” Desi suggested. “Maybe she wanted to be one of our sisterhood and Satan didn’t choose her. That makes more sense to me than someone trying to attack our Master.”

Hmmm. I hadn’t thought of that. I leaned into the plush red leather banquette and twisted the linen towel pretending to be a napkin in my lap. Most of Hell would be jealous of us, except for the old guys like Meph.

“What would you say to asking Mephistopheles?” I suggested. “He’s been political and at Satan’s left hand forever.”

“He doesn’t travel much in our circles,” Eros mused. “None of us knows him too well, and it might be out of place.”

“He’s friended me on MagicMirror,” I said. “I’ll bet that if we invite him to someplace with really spectacular food he’d meet us. He’d go to Nobu. He loves Nobu. And he likes being consulted as an expert.”

“Unless he’s the one doing it,” Eros protested.

Sybil shook her head and perfectly cut blond tendrils brushed the shoulders of her lace-collared blouse. “Not Mephistopheles,” she pronounced with absolute conviction. “Meph is loyal and has no reason to betray Her or us. He’s hardly aware of us, I’d guess, except for Lily’s Mirror posts.”

“Well, if Lily knows him best, then maybe Lily should meet with him.” Eros waved her hand with imperial disdain.

Okay, Eros was a semi-divinity. But that’s no reason for her to act snobby and withdrawn with her friends.

Still, I would be happy to have dinner with Mephistopheles. He is witty and urbane and he knows all the very best places to eat.

Mephistopheles, Satan’s prime deputy, was rumored to be a fan of gluttony. Not nearly so respectable a sin as lust or greed or wrath. Not that any of them could compete with pride, but that was Satan’s very own baby. Gluttony was down there with vanity, almost verging on the venal. Or maybe more merely the ubiquitous. It’s just not that exciting a sin when everyone is doing it.

Not that it’s his specialty or anything. He, like many of the old-time elite, would insist that his specialty was pride. And the truth was, I was certain that that was where his work was. Gluttony was just more a hobby for him.

Our waiter showed up again wrapped in his Parisian-style long apron and a saucy smile. “Dessert?” he asked, passing out menus.

Well, of course dessert. I ordered crème brûlée. What else would anyone choose in a bistro? Especially one that really does look like it belongs on the Champs Elysées, with a restroom attendant who personally passes out paper towels and has a tip basket at the door. Though when our desserts arrived, Sybil’s Tarte Tatin looked awfully appealing.

So order number one was to set up a meeting with Mephistopheles. But that wasn’t going to be enough.

“MagicMirror,” Desi said. “We should go through all of our friends’ lists, and take a more careful look. Also at some of the junior sex demons who might feel passed over, especially those who have been junior for a long time. It could be that one or two of them deserve promotion, and we could let Satan know. Sometimes She gets really overworked, you know. She can’t be expected to know when every junior demon should move up in rank, and if they have a sloppy superior….” She shrugged.

Desi was the one who had actually worked her way up through the ranks. She had started as an apprentice and had patiently gone through each of the grades of service, making promotions because of her excellent record and results and her staunch loyalty and hard work. As a Priestess of Ishtar, and a royal princess, I had been recruited to the higher levels immediately. Sybil had been an Oracle of Apollo before she had been tapped by Satan, so she had always had high status. And Eros, well, Eros had never even been human. She had been created semi-divine from an illicit relationship between one of the great old gods (who were now among the elite of the Hierarchy) and a human. But even half-divinity packs more power than most demons ever amass in eons of service.

Anyway, Desi was more likely than any of the rest of us to understand what an ambitious young demon might feel and had to do to get noticed.

“So I’m going to set up a meeting with Mephistopheles and we’re going to all do some research on MagicMirror,” I summed up. That didn’t seem like a lot of progress for an entire lunch cabal.

“And we’re going someplace new next Sunday,” Sybil added. “I’ll take care of finding a place.”

“But I keep feeling like we should do something else,” I said. “I want to ask Nathan. He’s a detective so he might have some ideas on how to handle this. He’s got experience solving crimes and stuff like that, and that’s not what we do. So having his expertise might give us a better idea of what we need to do next. Because I keep feeling like we’re missing something.”

“Lily, you’re in too deep too fast,” Eros chided me. “And I mean with Nathan. You have had exactly one date with the man, and you shouldn’t have had that. He approached you about some missing guy. How can you be sure he wasn’t one of your deliveries? I think that you’re just using our situation to make excuses to call him and see him. If I wrote bad TV, I would twist this so that it was you who had been sending those letters, just to have a creditable mystery for your lust object. Or that he was doing it in the hope that you would turn to him and then he could ‘catch the perpetrator’ and make you all grateful for his having saved us all. Or something like that. I don’t think you should see him again.”

“What?” I was blindsided. These were my very best friends. Why couldn’t they support me and be happy for me in finding someone I could possibly care for?

“Lily, listen to us,” Desi said, laying her hand on my forearm. “You don’t have a lot of experience with romance. You’re head over heels over this guy and you really don’t know anything about him.”

“I Googled him,” I protested, having learned my lesson from the Librarian. “I know that he did study ancient languages and he even did a creditable translation in the museum.”

“I’m sure he did,” Desi agreed softly. “But you don’t know anything about
him.
Whether he’s honest and trustworthy or if he could be setting you up. I was set up and I’m more experienced than you in these things. And we just don’t want you to get hurt.”

“Not hurt that way,” Sybil spoke up. “Lily, you’re innocent. You don’t know what men can be like, even if they really like you. The only one you ever were involved with was that castrato back when? The seventeenth century?”

“It counts to me,” I protested. “Niccolo loved me.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Sybil said, smiling. “But he wasn’t, you know, full of testosterone. You don’t know what they’ll do. Hormones. And they say that women are all at the mercy of chemistry. But guys get really weird and I’m sure it has to do with their hormone levels. That’s what makes them all violent and macho.”

“Nathan isn’t violent and macho,” I insisted.

“They are all violent and macho under the right circumstances,” Eros said flatly as she threw her credit card on top of the long curling bill attached to a postcard. “Just like all mortals are susceptible to one of us. You know that. Find the right temptation at the right time and even the most perfect will fall. As long as they have been disobedient in any way. And you know almost every living being has been.”

Sybil had already bitten off all her lipstick. “Eros is right,” she said. “We’re not saying don’t date him, Lily. We’re not saying that at all. We’re just saying to take your time and be careful. Don’t be taken in by good manners and a case of the sniffles. That might mean that he won’t fall for your mojo immediately, but it doesn’t make him that far off your prey. Just…be careful.”

“What if you met him?” I asked. “Then you could see for yourselves.”

“No,” Eros insisted. “What part of no don’t you understand? You are
not
asking him on a date this early in the game. You are going to wait it out and let him suggest the next three at least and you are going to be
busy
for the next time he picks. Do you understand that? You are going to be very very busy and you are not going to be able to see him until next week. Which means after next Sunday.”

“That’s a week from now,” I wailed. “Too harsh. Eros, you’re overdoing it.”

“No, she’s not,” Desi said. Her face was soft and concerned and she reached across the table to touch my arm. “You’re really too trusting. And I know what we can say about me and I know I was wrong, so this is partly my fault. But Eros is right. You need to take it slower and find out more about this guy.”

“We should get out of the city,” Sybil said in her scary predictive voice. “They are searching. We should not be here.”

“Well, that’s convenient,” I muttered.

Three pairs of eyes turned on me. “Sybil never,
never
, fakes her predictions,” Desi said. “You know that. If she says we should be out of the city for the weekend, then we should be out of the city. The end.”

“And I, for one, do not want to deal with another attack,” Sybil added. “I want to go away, someplace safe where no one knows who or what we are and there are no Burning Men looking for us. Especially if they are planning something for the weekend. I’ll bet they know about Sidonie’s gallery party! That would be ripe. All of us in one place and the gallery opening is very public and no one’s going to confront them and Steve’s uncle is a famous architect, he’s probably on the guest list. They’ll be fawning all over him.”

I wanted to stay in the city. I wanted to see Nathan. I had totally forgotten about Sidonie’s gallery opening, which I would much rather skip anyway.

“We could just skip the party,” I suggested.

“And wait for something else?” Sybil asked softly. “We couldn’t have predicted the holy water in the letters. I don’t know that they’re planning something for the gallery; all I know is that the city is not safe for us next weekend. We can leave. We can go on a weekend getaway.”

“It’s the middle of winter,” I groused. “Where can we go that would be any fun?”

“What about skiing?” Eros said, raising an eyebrow.

I may be a thoroughly twenty-first-century New Yorker, but I’m also a princess of Babylon. I have never quite figured out how snow and ice can be fun. I’d tried skiing twice and hated it and reminded everyone of that fact. Which, since they had been present at my humiliation (coming down a mountain on my derriere flailing poles in front of every attractive man in a ten-mile radius, to say nothing of being so bruised up that I didn’t dare show up at the hot tub to soak out some of the pain), they were not going to try to talk me around.

“A cruise might be nice,” Desi said. “Maybe in the Caribbean. They have these singles cruises that sound like they’d be fun.”

“Not a singles cruise.” Eros nixed the suggestion. “We’re not looking for guys who aren’t New Yorkers. I mean, what if you met someone on the cruise who came from someplace else. Like Philadelphia?”

“Ask Meph for some restaurant recommendations?” I piped up. “I’ve been dying to try Morimoto ever since he wrote it up on MagicMirror.”

“So if we don’t go on a cruise, where should we go that would be fun?” Desi mused, more to herself than to the rest of us.

“Philadelphia?” I suggested. They looked at me as if I had really lost my mind.

“You’ve been reading too much of Meph’s food porn,” Desi said. “I, for one, am not willing to spend a weekend out of town for a single restaurant. No restaurant is that good.”

“Aruba,” Sybil said brightly. “I’d love to go to Aruba for a long weekend. Lie out on the beach and have cute waiters with big muscles bringing me Bahama Mamas. You could talk me into it.”

Sybil had been to Aruba last winter for some investment seminar and came back utterly enchanted.

“I’d rather go to Martinique,” Eros started. “The Empress Josephine, Napoleon’s wife, was born there. I think the French have better food than the Dutch.”

“But Aruba has real New York bagels.” Sybil defended her choice. “And there’s lovely Italian food and Argentine steak. You love steak.”

“Would Vincent come with us?” I asked, suspicious. Sybil, right now, was my very specific example and she seemed to be doing everything with Vincent that my friends wanted to dissuade me from doing with Nathan.

“No.” Sybil looked offended. “And yes, I am interested in Vince. He’s very attractive and he’s very nice, considerate, thoughtful. He brings me ice cream and he takes care of all of us. But it’s only been a few weeks and I am definitely not inviting him to Aruba with us. Besides, I don’t think he’s got the money for it and I am not paying his way.”

“Or at least, not yet,” Eros said.

Sybil shook her head and her brilliantly blond hair shimmered in the light. “We’d have to be very serious for me to even consider that. Even if we marry, I’d make him sign a prenup. Back in the days when all of a woman’s property became her husband’s upon marriage, I always made sure that the bulk of my estate was well entailed and tied up with false identities that could not be traced. I had to pay Admin extra for that and you know that Admin will take everything they can get.”

I had to admire her. I hadn’t known that Sybil followed her own financial advice so carefully.

The waiter was hovering nearby and his smile wasn’t quite as all-encompassing as before.

“It’s two in the afternoon and there isn’t a line,” Sybil said directly to him, and then smiled to sweeten it.

“The point is,” Eros continued, “you kill men. You have sex with them and you kill them. You don’t have to analyze them. You don’t ever have to make them stick around.”

“Okay, okay, you’re right!” I caved. “I get the point. I even agree that if Nathan weren’t in the picture I would jump at Aruba.”