Succubus in the City (4 page)

“Everything,” I said, keeping my voice down although really I just wanted to wail. “Nothing. It just feels so meaningless. And lonely. You are the best friends on the planet, the best friends a girl ever had. But I’m tired of waking up alone every morning.”

“Oh, honey, yeah,” Desi said. “You’ve got a real hard time of it, we know. And it’s worse when you’ve got a bad one. Are you going out tonight? What say we rent some silly Bollywood musical and get takeout?”

“We can go to my place and make s’mores,” Eros suggested. “And paint our toenails.”

“But don’t you all have plans tonight?” I couldn’t bear any more guilt right now.

“Nothing that can’t be rescheduled,” Desi told me and Eros nodded. Even Sybil looked up from her decorating magazine and agreed.

I’ve got the best buds in the world.

chapter
FOUR

“We’ll call Martha and paint our toenails and relax,” Desi announced. “Like a pajama party. No boys,” she added with a faux junior high school sneer.

Satan, of course, was too busy to make it at the last minute. “I’m so sorry, dears, it sounds like a world of fun,” She told us, and I could hear the real regret in Her voice. “But I have some appointments that I just can’t reschedule, no matter how much more I would rather spend an evening eating s’mores and painting toenails. Next time, I promise.”

I felt badly for Her. Being the Prince of Evil was a 24/7 gig and She never got any downtime. If She didn’t have a weekly appointment for a massage and a facial at Bliss She would never get pampered just for Herself.

Once some sorcerer did a ritual in Australia right when She was in the middle of Her pedicure and tried to conjure Her to appear for some Satanic worship service. She sent Mephistopheles instead and was old Meph ever furious. He had just gotten seated for dinner at Morimoto and hadn’t even gotten his appetizer yet. That was one unhappy day in Hell, let me tell you. With the popularity of
Iron Chef
, it’s almost impossible to get a reservation at Morimoto, and Meph had been looking forward to that dinner for months.

That was one of the very few times I’ve ever seen Satan actually use straight-out magic just to please a minion. She created a reservation at Morimoto for Meph for nine p.m. on a Saturday night and made damn sure that the table was ready and waiting, too. She does take care of us. And She knows the value of a topflight dinner reservation.

These so-called magicians and sorcerers and such just get things so wrong. They think that we of the Underworld can make things happen according to their desires, and some we can. Sex and wealth, no problem. Can do looks for slightly more, and eternal youth is in the portfolio but only with the right specialists at the top of the line.

Love is much harder.

Dinner reservations at nine on a Saturday night at the most popular places are almost downright impossible.

Which is a long way of saying that Martha is horribly busy and never gets any downtime for Herself, and we were more sorry for Her that She couldn’t hang out with us than sorry for ourselves for not having Her around. Satan can be so much fun.

So in a much better frame of mind I went home to pick up my pj’s and check my e-mail and MagicMirror before going over to Eros’s at seven.

MagicMirror is like MySpace or LiveJournal for Underworlders. Actually, I have a LiveJournal, too, mostly to read what the humans I know are doing, but MagicMirror is my real home territory. It’s secure—only Underworlders have accounts, or can even find it. The URL doesn’t even exist without the right magical interface.

In fact, it’s based on the old magical Magic Mirror that we used to use before it was easier to get online. The old method, which some of the less savvy demons still use, works with a real mirror and blood and takes up loads of energy. Ours. The old-style Magic Mirror still works, but it’s limited and blood is impossible to get out of good linens. Frankly, with all the spells and magical hoopla to make it work, the system is such a bother that no one ever used it to announce movie outings or post food porn.

There were no new updates on my friends’ list. Desi probably wouldn’t mention Steve, at least not until she’d had a first date. And then it would be locked to her “Girls Only, TMI” filter.

A lot of demons don’t even bother with MagicMirror because they can’t handle the technology and don’t see the benefit. Most of us are from an era before telecommunications, let alone the computer. Truth is, many of us date from before written language.

In my own mortal existence, only a very few could read and write. Literacy was a form of magic, and a very powerful one at that. Since I was a priestess of Ishtar before Satan chose me as one of Her (high ranking) minions, I did, in fact, learn to read and write. While most men in Babylon were considered unworthy to be initiated into this most secret of arcane arts, the High Priestess and her few chosen acolytes did learn.

Maybe we were the only women in Babylon who could read and write, though it wouldn’t surprise me if the Queen and maybe one or two of the royal wives learned as well. Wives, daughters of foreign kings who had real status in the Women’s Palace, not concubines.

Princesses were not taught to read. I’m not even sure all the princes were, except the sons of powerful wives who were most likely to inherit. I know a lot about being a princess in Babylon; I had been one. It was a fairly unspectacular position. I was the thirty-fifth daughter of the King by a minor concubine. My mother was not from one of the noble families of Babylon, nor was she a princess married off to secure an alliance. That would have given her the rank of a wife, anyway, and would have made me valuable enough to possibly marry off to some foreign satrap or one of my father’s nobles.

My mother, though, was just an exceptionally pretty girl who was bought by the Palace at the age of fourteen and served the King maybe two or three times ever. I mostly remember her as plump and satisfied with her lot. No great love, of course, but the King had over a hundred concubines and some he never even saw. Since my mother had borne him a child, even a lowly girl child, she had high rank among the concubines. She had a private room in the women’s quarters and several pieces of good jewelry that were gifts from the King.

She had come from a common farm family, so the beauty of the concubines’ quarters in the Palace, though not so fine as the wives’ residences, delighted her. She didn’t have to till and hoe and harvest, grind grain, beat flax, weave, cook, brew, make pots, milk sheep, make cheese, or bear thirteen children. She didn’t have to worry about going hungry due to famine or drought or just bad luck. She scoffed at some of the other concubines, those who complained about never having had love or a man of their own.

“They eat every day,” she would say. “They have a home, with thick carpets and even a bed, and slaves to clean and a bathhouse with lilies in the water and they’re whining? We eat meat three or four times a week and cheese every day and we have beer and wine, morning and evening. We are very fortunate, girl, never forget that.”

And she was right. I’ve lived over three thousand years, and I’ve seen what life is like for most people on this planet. And it sucks. And women usually have it worse, married off too young, having baby after baby until they die in childbirth, eating only the leftovers after the husband and sons have eaten their fill, and still having to work the land or weave the cloth. Even today this is true in most of the world, so I try never to forget what I learned from my mother. I relish the good things I have, and I appreciate the fact that most women in the world do not live in a beautiful apartment (or palace) or have enough to eat every day, let alone food at the best restaurants in New York.

Anyway, minor princesses like me were prized applicants for the Temple service. I knew that’s what I wanted even when I was very young, so I became an acolyte at the age of seven and a novice at twelve. By sixteen I was a full priestess and was being initiated into the deep secrets of written cuneiform. Then Satan came along and offered me immortality, eternal youth and beauty, and power over men. All I had to do was sign over my immortal soul. I did take a few days to consider the offer, but being a succubus sounded very much like being a Priestess of Ishtar, only with better options. Before the week was out I’d signed the contract with Hell. With a little extra bargaining, of course, demanding my escape clause for love and a few additional perks not included in the boilerplate.

Anyway, if I can learn to use MagicMirror, someone who was born in the fifteenth century certainly should be able to master it. I have little patience with Renaissance and Age of Reason types who are constantly confounded by technology while an oldster like me can figure out how to download the shareware to manage my schedule from my laptop.

Now, if I could just remember to sync my Treo and my computer more than once a month I’d be in great shape.

Nothing new on MagicMirror, like I said. Well, it was Sunday. Everyone had been busy Saturday night, and those who weren’t weren’t going to admit it and show up online like losers when they should have been out at a party or club or something. No one would start posting about the weekend until tonight. Except a few really boring Wrath posts about demons who started fights on Saturday night and couldn’t wait to wash off the blood to post about it.

Starting a fight in a bar on a Saturday night is nothing to brag about in my opinion. Mortals manage that well enough themselves without demonic intervention. I just do not understand demons who have to show off when they haven’t even done anything. Satan has to praise their efforts, too. She feels it’s good management practice, even when the Wrath in question merely escalated a shouting match to a fist-fight. “My minions always should feel that they are valued and their efforts are appreciated,” She has said many times.

I only turned to e-mail after the blog, and almost missed the one actual e-mail in the pile of spam I had to clean out. To my shock, there was an e-mail from someone who wanted to talk to me about a missing person. Probably one of my guys, and I did not want to be traced. In fact, I take great care that no one has any idea of where the guys go, and that no one who sees them leave with me can remember me. And I’m very, very good, though today’s technology does sometimes worry me.

There’s more magic to being a succubus than sending a creep up in flames. I automatically fuzz myself on any security camera or device and my phone number and the other e-mail address appears only for my prey. Once the bait gets taken, any other indication of my passing immediately dissolves. When She’s in work mode, Satan is unbelievably efficient. And She has got the entire Security Division to do the work, and they’re very good—among the smartest, most efficient demons in Hell. Under the leadership of Beliel, Security has become one of the premier divisions, which has escalated the rivalry between him and Meph, who is Satan’s first lieutenant, and Beelzebub and Marduk and Moloch.

So no one, especially no human, should have been able to trace me. The e-mail spooked me for a moment and I deleted it. But not before I took note of the address and the name of the sender: one Nathan Coleman.

Deleted.

I got my cute aqua pajamas with the fish on them and last year’s embroidered slippers with sequins and threw them all into a Dean and DeLuca’s bag. Vincent waved at me when I came downstairs again. “Do you want a cab?” he asked, all eagerness. I should see if he has an account on MagicMirror.

“No thanks,” I said. I was planning to hit the bodega on the corner for a couple of pints of Ben and Jerry’s as my contribution to the sweetfest. I’d get a cab when I got to the avenue, but I did appreciate the boy’s enthusiasm.

I got to Eros’s place a little past seven, which was being really early for me. The doorman here isn’t a minion, but he knows us, so we don’t have any problems going directly upstairs. Once I arrived I dropped my bag and took the ice cream into her outrageously luxurious kitchen. Unlike my little closet with appliances stuck together and only enough countertop to cover the dishwasher, Eros had a kitchen where four people could comfortably congregate. I stashed the Phish Food and Cherry Garcia in the freezer, where it kept company with a stack of frozen pizzas and a tiny tub of Godiva Raspberry Truffle ice cream.

I got to the living room where Sybil was already arrayed in a white cotton April Connell antique-style nightdress with enough pin tucking and lace insets to keep a Victorian seamstress at work for a week.

I thought it was a bit early for the pj’s just yet, so I started leafing through the pile of take-out menus Eros had set out on the glass coffee table. Our hostess was in front of the fireplace carefully studying the position of her Duralog.

Desi was the last to arrive, flushed and smiling with her packages under her arm.

“You didn’t,” Eros said flatly.

“Didn’t what?” Sybil asked.

“There were already three e-mails, and I knew I was going to go. It just made sense,” Desi defended herself.

“You didn’t actually send it already, did you?” Sybil demanded.

Desi looked at the polished oak floor.

“Desire, Minion of Hell, I am ashamed of you,” Eros said in her coldest voice. “Six hundred years old and you can’t put a guy off for even a day or two? Still? You know that’s the fastest way to lose him!”

“But his e-mails were so nice,” Desi defended herself. “And we’re going to the museum on Thursday and I won’t see him before that, so it’s okay.”

“It’s not okay,” Eros said. “I can’t believe you.”

“Come on,” I tried to intervene. “We’re here to hang out and enjoy ourselves tonight. No boys was the rule. How about no getting down on our sisters, also?”

All three of them stared at me. “No one was getting down on anyone,” Sybil said. “We’re just afraid that Desi could get hurt. You can’t send them an e-mail the same day. Even the next day is not good. You know that, Lily.”

No
, I thought,
I don’t know that.
A succubus does not play hard to get. Maybe that was part of my problem. Maybe if someone I liked had to work at it for a while he would think about me and what I was worth, and not just be so overcome with lust that he couldn’t help himself. Maybe I had been using the wrong approach all along.