Succubus in the City (15 page)

Governments rise and fall, ideologies are born and die. Religions conquer, impose their morality and turn to dust only to sometimes rise again. Fashion is always just this season and is as reliable as the moon. It will change; it will look wonderful; and three years later we will all wonder how we ever wore those stupid things. The year after the mustard yellow stola the hot color was dark blue and the only people wearing dull yellow were slaves and the poor, who got the castoffs.

I left Sybil sleeping on the sofa bed in the living room when I left for the office the next morning. Yes, I had told her we’d take the day off, but by the end of the evening she had been giggling and six empty cartons of ice cream sat on my dining table. Vincent would let her out and lock up. If he’d come back. It certainly looked like him when I grabbed a cab and headed to my office, where I immediately called the writer of the shawls piece and told her to include some history, maybe discuss the Roman stola. She agreed groggily and I felt vindicated.

Unreal as the whole thing felt, I was still unsettled. Bad things had happened to me in the past. Okay, bad things have happened to everyone in the past, but I was getting tired of being pursued and alone and afraid of the Burning Men. Away from Sybil I could admit that, like governments and thieves, bad restaurants and must-have shoes, the Burning Men were forever. No matter what we did, there were always a few who refused to believe their eyes and insisted on thinking that there was more to the old stories than uneducated fears and rumors. They organized, generation to generation, and identified us. Somehow.

If only we could get into their database, I thought, idly fingering the keyboard on my desk. If only we could erase all our traces. Satan paid dearly to Admin every time, but somehow, generation to generation, the Burning Men tracked us down.

I was sick of hiding. Why was it always the demons and immortals who had to keep our heads down while those prejudiced, self-righteous little men remained on the offensive? Why shouldn’t we hunt them back?

I was shocked that I had never thought that before. In three thousand years, it had never occurred to me that we could fight the forces of Organized Faith. We are, after all, subcontractors for Upstairs. In the greater picture we serve their purposes. Why did we have to take the blame while the Angelic Host got all the praise?

I almost giggled, thinking of how I would love to tell one of the righteous that they were, in fact, perpetuating the Albigensian Heresy. Which would have our own dear Satan on a par with God and fully able to fight Him. Clearly utter nonsense, though She really doesn’t like to be reminded that She functions in this world as She likes only because it serves His purposes.

But much as She is the Prince of Evil and Darkness and we serve the Underworld, the truth is that we’re actually a division of the Heavenly Host. If people weren’t tempted, if they weren’t led astray, then they couldn’t profess their faith or use or even discover their virtues. Hell is the ultimate service organization and our job is approved and vetted by the On High.

I do good in the world, too. I deliver creeps and liars, unfaithful husbands, men who don’t respect women, and brawling louts. If they weren’t worthy of me then I couldn’t find them. Yeah, yeah, the old saw goes that a succubus seduces good husbands and pillars of the community, but how many pillars of the community are wife beaters and child molesters? How many of the so-called righteous sin on the side and expect that their good reputations will save them? Well, all the hot air in the world won’t save them from me. The truly good, the truly righteous and caring cannot be tempted by any of us. Those are the rules.

And these Burning Men, they were no different from any of the men I’d ever known. They might think they are the Army of God, but really all they listen to are their own desires. I’d delivered at least five or six so far as I knew, so I could say that from experience.

I wanted to call Eros. No, I wanted to call Nathan but Eros would talk me out of that, which was a good plan. Bad enough to call last night. Even I realized that to call again today would be pushing it.

I am a succubus, beautiful and terrible, sex incarnate. I do not have to run after anyone, let alone some mortal man who probably would end up responding to succubus pheromones just like all the rest.

I have in all my life had only one proper boyfriend, and Martha and the girls didn’t count him as proper at all. I became a Temple acolyte at the age of eight, a novice at twelve, and was initiated a priestess at fifteen. One year later I was one of the inner circle, chosen as the possible successor of the High Priestess herself. And would very likely have gotten the appointment, too, had I not taken a better offer. From Satan.

I had never had a normal boyfriend in the thousands of years I’d been immortal. I was due some indulgence in mooning. So I can be forgiven for sitting in my office, staring out the window, and thinking of Nathan. How he had an adorable dimple in his left cheek when he smiled and how his aura sparkled when we talked about the ancient world. How he had table manners better than most of the kings I’ve known.

And how could I ask him to help us with the Burning Men without telling him what I am, what my girlfriends are? That was another dilemma entirely.

But we were under attack and he’s a detective (and very good at research, and this looked like the kind of thing that needed research) and ridiculously smart, and it wasn’t like the Enforcers were going to do any good. They probably didn’t even realize that it was just some new iteration of the Burning Men who were after us. Again.

I was feeling all mixed up and like I couldn’t even think straight. So I did what any reasonable, rational woman does when she’s afraid and overwhelmed and at the edge of her rope.

I went shopping.

chapter
FOURTEEN

I went to Barneys, unsupervised and with one goal in mind. I bought a pair of Citizen jeans and a fine-gauge green sweater with lace trim, the color that makes my eyes look greener and brings out the auburn in my hair. For some reason, modern Americans think that everyone in the ancient world had black or dark brown hair and dark brown eyes. The women of Babylon were known for their red hair and green eyes; from modern Iraq to Istanbul the red-haired siren is both admired and not entirely uncommon. I so often envy Sybil her very blond Anglo-Saxon looks—she has perfect peaches-and-cream skin and huge blue eyes and I have to be very careful in the sun or I freckle.

I returned to the office feeling centered and refreshed and ready to think. Somewhat reassured by my new purchases, I wasn’t even upset when I saw an e-mail from Azoked in my in-box. I opened it idly, and it was as terse as I would have anticipated.

I am making progress and may have some information that could be of use soon. Will be available next week, Monday and Wednesday between five and eight in the evening.

Wow. Two whole windows to make an appointment, almost a full week from now. She must have known what had happened. Or maybe she was just showing off her OCD. Having met just one librarian, I had decided that they must be required to be obsessive-compulsive. Otherwise they would get bored and cross-eyed.

Reluctantly I rescheduled my facial and asked the Librarian to come on Monday. Then, since I was already booted up, I checked out MagicMirror. No one had posted about the attack. Even Eros had said nothing.

Sybil’s post from last night was most interesting of all, though.

Had a lovely evening with Lily last night. And met a yummy young demon who actually is cute and has brains and understands about serving a girl ice cream. Hmmm…*smile*

No. Nonono. Couldn’t be. Sybil liked Vincent? I held my head and groaned. That was too crazy. He was just a newbie demon. He might be smarter than an Enforcer, but it was my idea to send him to fetch her last night. And now he was getting all the credit.

It was just embarrassing, especially all the replies congratulating her and asking for details. At least it was a locked friends-only post. I should be grateful for small things. Didn’t she realize that Vincent could perfectly well have his own account on MagicMirror? And that you never should post anything on the Internet, not even on our own private little corner of it, that was not mortal-friendly.

“Never post anything that you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the
Times
,” Mephistopheles had told me when he first friended me online.

After her little lecture last night, I thought she was being just a little hypocritical. It was locked and maybe he didn’t know that she liked him, but he would know soon enough. Okay, maybe she wasn’t being as foolish as I’d thought.

I didn’t want to think about that, so instead I went looking to see if Azoked had a topic. That took a little searching, since there was nothing under her name, which I didn’t expect. She was too sly to post openly, from what I could see from our one short interaction. I had to link through interests in Akashic Library, Librarians, research and Bast before I located a user who seemed to have all the right elements.

There it was on her user page, Bastform demon, female, highly intelligent and engaged in vital research. Interests mostly of an intellectual nature, though she did list needlepoint. Needlepoint? Okay, well, Eros took up china painting for a while about a hundred and fifty years ago. It was quite the rage then, though, and she dropped it after a couple of decades.

And once upon a time I’d tried to learn the violin. But that was in Venice and there were extenuating circumstances.

I went in and started reading. Fortunately, there is no way to trace someone just reading a journal entry, not unless you post a reply. So I could read what Azoked thought.

Quite annoying, though of course I am quite honored by the direct command of Satan Herself. Still, a silly little desire demon thinking that some man not following her into Hell means that there is a conspiracy is probably going to turn into a waste of time. I’m in the middle of the biggest project of the past six hundred years, converting our public records into digitally accessible formats, and I’m interrupted because one of the minor minions has a hissy fit.

Minor minion?
Hissy
fit? It took all my three thousand years of self-discipline and then some to refrain from writing a withering response. And there was still more!

If only that silly succubus had figured out how to use a search engine, I wouldn’t have been needed. But you know how it is with these Luddite demons. They can’t even use a remote, let alone do a keyword search on Google. So I’m doing all the legwork on this one.

I wanted to put my fist through the screen. Not able to do a search on Google indeed! I hadn’t done one on Nathan because I hadn’t thought he was important yet, that’s all. Why would I bother?

So I fed his name into the computer and saw what I came up with on my own, without that supercilious librarian making snide comments about my computer literacy.

There were about thirty hits straight off, most of them published papers on Akkadian. I followed the links and read the papers and realized that he was wrong about a couple of grammatical nuances. How do you tell a guy he’s wrong about something where he has a formal education and you can’t explain the origins of your expertise. How could I say, “Nathan, really, trust me, it’s pronounced like this and I know that because this is my first language. And, by the way, you’ve got the case wrong in the second paragraph.” How do you say that to a guy who almost had a Ph.D. in the field and didn’t know that he was talking about your mother tongue?

Sybil was right, it was hopeless.

Suddenly I felt like my heart was going to break. My friends thought I was stupid and the Librarian hated me and the man of my dreams was going to disappear because I accepted a date for a Saturday too quickly and his Akkadian grammar wasn’t quite up to mine. The world seemed like everything was going to close in on me and I felt like a mess.

I wasn’t going to get any work done. I’d already done my shopping and even the best blast of retail therapy had only delayed the misery, not beaten it. Work was useless. Everything was useless. I blew my nose, left the office and hit the video store on the way home. At least I still had a great selection of ice cream in the freezer.

Why had I ever agreed to a daytime date? Especially one that started at eleven in the morning? I am not functional that early on a Saturday. Usually I’m still sleeping off the vodka and the club and wouldn’t even think of getting up until noon at the very earliest.

It was one of those perfect crisp winter days where the sky sparkled cerulean. It was cold enough that I wished I could wear a knitted cap for my ears and big fuzzy mittens. Unfortunately, fashion does not bow to the mere flourishes of a New York winter, and so I made do with my shearling coat and Gucci gloves. If it hadn’t been for the boots I could have walked over to the Met—three long blocks in sneakers when it wasn’t biting cold would be lovely. But it was miserably cold and I was wearing stiletto boots, so I took a cab and tipped extra since the driver wasn’t thrilled about going from Eighty-eighth and Lexington to Fifth and Eighty-first.

I arrived at the stairs leading up to the Met at precisely ten past eleven on Saturday. He was standing on the top craning his neck trying to cover all the approaches. Good sign, I decided, and I ran up the stairs, all twelve million of them.

He wasn’t wearing a hat either, but did have an elegant burgundy cashmere scarf and an old East German military greatcoat that I lusted after, the kind that belted in close and almost swept the ground but still managed to look almost menacing.

“Your ears must be freezing,” he said. “Let’s get out of the cold.”

Which we did. We went into the museum, to the Egyptian exhibit. The Met has one of the best collections of Egyptian artifacts in the Americas, including an entire temple. It’s a small temple, to be sure, but it had been donated by the Egyptian government for aid in salvaging buildings and monuments from areas that had been covered by Lake Nasser when the Aswan High Dam had been built. So the Met has an honest-to-Satan Egyptian temple. The Temple of Dendur.