Succubus in the City (11 page)

“Pick up, Des, pick up,” I muttered. I didn’t realize I’d said anything aloud until Azoked gave me a startled glance.

Finally Desi decided to answer her phone. Or maybe it was buried in her purse again and she hadn’t found it too easily.

“What?” she asked abruptly, as if I hadn’t spent most of my day trying to take care of her.

“I’ve got a librarian right here this minute, Des. Think. Do you have anything of Steve’s? Anything at all that would link to him.”

“No,” she answered too quickly. “And if I did have anything I’d have thrown it out.”

“Think, Des.” She’d been better at dinner, but had obviously come home and indulged in a good cry. “A librarian could use it to trace him. It would make our pursuit much easier.”

“Oh.” There was a long pause, and then she asked if she could call back. I shot a glance at Azoked, who stared down her nose stonily, and said if she found anything she should let me know.

“I have about two thousand possible Nathan Colemans and Nathan R. Colemans, but this one looks promising.” The Siamese cat Librarian had that lilt to her voice that meant she had something you really wanted to hear and that she was waiting and holding out and maybe would tell you if you treated her particularly nicely.

“Would you like some coffee?” I offered. “Shade-grown Kenyan, and I grind the beans fresh.”

“That will do,” the Librarian took the bribe. “You do have real cream, don’t you? And some biscuits? I would love a biscuit.”

“Biscuits?” Where was I going to get biscuits at this time of night? As if I ever had such things in the house anyway.

“Yes, of course. To go with the coffee. You don’t even have any chocolate chips in the house?” She sighed as if she were much put upon.

“Oh, cookies!” I said. Why was an Akashic Librarian using Britspeak? “I have Oreos and Pepperidge Farm Mint Milanos, if those will do.”

“The Milanos are acceptable,” she agreed. “Though I prefer bakery biscuits. Especially Florentines. Next time please see to the Florentines.”

What a bitch! She was in my apartment and I was brewing her coffee and then she ordered me to have her favorite snacks on hand whenever she calls. And who knew when that would be. She worked for Satan, same as me.

I was steaming mad, but there wasn’t a lot I could really do about Miss Thing’s attitude. The waiting list for an Akashic librarian ran to decades. Maybe Pussyface was available because no one could stand her. I fumed as I ground the beans and set up the French filter. I arranged the cookies on a plate, not one of my better pieces, and added some Oreos because I liked them. In an act of absolute contempt, I left the cream in the cute little pint carton instead of putting it into a creamer the way I would have if, say, I were serving the homeless in St. Joseph’s. The finishing touch to my revenge was a handful of pink Sweet’n Low packets that I tossed on the table. No sugar. Let Ms. Snot cope.

Truth was, I would hardly have treated an enemy that way and this was a librarian whose skills I desperately needed. Truth was, she wasn’t any worse than any Bastform demon I’d ever met and a lot more useful than most. Truth was, I was scared and pissed and needed to take it out on someone, and she was just the last straw in a generally unpleasant day.

She took her coffee, glared at the Sweet’n Low as if it were radioactive, touched the cream carton like it was coated in something noxious and smelly, and gobbled down all the cookies, Milanos and Oreos both. No, I’d been right. She wasn’t just Bastform, she was a major pain in the nether regions.

After she had finished her snack and licked her paws and face so many times I started to hope the fur would rub off, she turned back to the computer.

“Now this one looks promising,” she purred. “Graduated from Yale, 1996, hmmm, Magna Cum Laude in Near Eastern Languages. Odd. Interesting. Hmmm.
R
stands for Rhys. Born in New York City, February 19, 1974, hmmm, an Aquarian. Aquarians can be difficult, you know. Very cerebral, often not emotionally mature. Prone to valuing ideas above people. And, hmmmm, looks like he’s overly attached to Mama. Or at least hasn’t cut the apron strings nearly so much as someone his age should have.”

At that point the Librarian gave me a look that could only be thought of as sisterly. Though she was a bitch in silver fur, she could still feel some bond over the emotionally immature males.

Rhys,
I thought, almost chortling. Gotcha! That explained the pale skin and black hair. Welsh, I should have recognized it straight off. But that was bad, too. There is a strain of magical sensitivity among the Welsh that can be dangerous to the likes of me.

Well, there are sensitives in every population group. Only they are more common and more pronounced in some than others, though there is a definite nature–nurture controversy in this area. Some cultures promote other-physical awareness, while the more rationalist Western cultures deny their existence.

In the past, especially in eras of great faith, in places where faith was the default, my job was so much harder. Men would try harder to resist me. They were aware that creatures like me existed and that I was not only the end of their mortal life but that their souls were forfeited to Hell through my ministrations.

Now so few New Yorkers believe that they have souls, saved, forfeited or otherwise. So they don’t worry about it and they aren’t suspicious.

My librarian was hmmming again. “Odd, odd,” she muttered, staring at the screen.

“What?” I asked, trying not to sound as impatient as I felt.

“Interesting,” was all she answered, which made me want to rip her head off for the twentieth time in the past hour. Except then I would never get any cooperation from the Akashic Division and Satan had pulled a lot of strings to get this one.

“Please?” I was begging, not my usual style. “Pretty please?”

She turned slowly and shook her head. “Young lady, you must understand that I have only the most cursory information at the moment. I need to crosscheck things, to look up references. This is only the most preliminary skim of only the most public bits of knowledge. Indeed, you could have looked it up yourself. Did you Google him? Because that’s most of what I’ve done so far.”

The Akashic librarian uses Google? I wanted to put my fist through the wall. I could have done that days ago if I’d thought that Mr. Coleman had any relevance to my life at all.

Azoked regarded me more kindly than before. Though after calling me “young lady” there wasn’t anything she could do to make me like her. I didn’t need to like her. I only needed to be able to work with her, and hoped that most of our work would be done at a distance. “They do not stop being programmers after they die, you know,” she said as if I were a child of limited intelligence. “The Akashic Library has acquired a few top people recently, and we expect more. We do have first call on any programmer admitted to the Afterlife. And if it’s any consolation, I was using the internal Akashic version of Google, which isn’t available without our authorizations.”

“Oh.” That makes it all better. Not. But I wasn’t going to risk alienating the demon. It did seem that she wanted to do her job; it wasn’t her fusty school-marmish attitude that I found so irritating; it was her Bast-like personality. But it stood to reason that an Akashic librarian would be all about the process of digging out detail. She probably couldn’t understand that some people—namely, me—are just not detail-oriented.

“I expect that you shall be seeing Mr. Coleman again rather soon,” Azoked said, shaking her head again. “Yes, I expect quite soon. Well, I expect that you can get hold of me if you need to. And if your little friend Desire does find some item that I could use as a sympathetic link, please do let me know as quickly as possible. I can send a servant to collect it, or she can even drop it with your doorman. He is a most efficient minion. I expect that he will make full demon in record time. Excellent young man, young Vincent.

“Well, then, I’ll be off. A laptop and a slow connection through our firewall means that I am not at my most efficient. And I have access to resources that do not leave the precincts of the Library, as you understand. I can’t do more than the most surface kind of search here, not to mention the fact that I am starving again. You wouldn’t happen to have any Starbucks Espresso ice cream, would you? I thought not. In our own research facilities librarians have amenities. And full librarians like myself have twenty-four-hour service, and of course the management keeps all of our preferences fully stocked. No, I will return to our main facility, and shall communicate when I have some reasonable data. I expect that e-mail is the best way to get hold of you.”

I think I sat there with my mouth open for a full minute. Not because I wasn’t anxious for her to leave. Truth to tell, I was dying to remove my Manolos (which were four inches high and hurt like holy water after the first hour or so), my hose, and my very confining jacket. I hadn’t had a minute to just sit all day without someone throwing problems at me, and I was craving a bubble bath like my prey craved me.

So I told her sure, I understood that she had better access to her tools at her desk. I knew she was a miracle worker, et cetera, et cetera. And how should I contact her if I suddenly needed her?

She grinned, an expression I had thought was not in the Bastform repertoire. Ever.

“Magic,” she quipped, holding up a BlackBerry.

I must have blinked, since I didn’t consider a BlackBerry magic at all.

“Oh, please.” She gave me that look that communicated
Look at what I have to put up with and all these nonBast demons are so stupid
much more effectively than any words ever could. “All the varieties of instant communication? And information retrieval and note taking? If this is not magic, what is?”

I had to get her out before she started another lecture. So I just agreed and mentioned that it was getting late and that she might want to pursue this investigation where she had Florentine cookies and Starbucks ice cream and all the necessary comforts. Finally she was gone and I was free to shed my clothes on the living room floor and head to the bath.

chapter
ELEVEN

My apartment has a lot of great features. The building has a beautiful lobby with a conscientious doorman. In my opinion it probably has the best location in the city, on the Upper East Side just half a block off an avenue with plenty of cabs and three bodegas within a three-block radius, and that’s not counting the bagel bakery, the reasonably good pizzeria, and the two newsstands that carry flowers and chocolate for those late-night emergencies. I have hardwood floors, twelve-foot ceilings with the original 1904 moldings, a kitchen with counters and a door, a living room with windows on two sides, a bedroom large enough for my king-sized bed, and a walk-in closet that could be billed as a second bedroom.

All these advantages are secondary. I love the place because of the bathtub.

My bathroom has the original black-and-white tile with an oversized pedestal sink and the huge claw-foot tub that had been installed in 1904. It was long enough that when my head rested against the rolled edge my toes didn’t touch the opposite end. And it was so deep that I was immersed to my neck, where the hot water could work its spell on my knotted shoulders.

A Chicago shower had been installed over it and I had found an elegant Battenberg lace curtain that tied open when I wasn’t keeping water in. The wall above the shoulder-high tiling had been painted a very pale green back in the 1920s and I’d kept the color.

I turned on the hot water and took down my jar of Lush bath bombs. I had the pink ones and the sexy ones and the ones with flower petals, but tonight I wanted mostly comfort. So I decided on a yellow Butterball, set it on the ledge and put the rest of the jar back in its decorative spot on the windowsill.

I turned the water off and sank down into the deep hot water. It hadn’t even been twenty-four hours since I’d delivered Kevin from this very tub. But if I were to be sentimental about every delivery job I did, there wouldn’t be a place I could live or a city I could endure for long. I dropped the bath bomb into the water and watched it fizz as the delicious aroma scented the air.

By the time I left the bath, dried, and was ready to slip into bed, I had put the events of the day behind me. I embraced the bliss of sleep for at least six hours until the alarm rang.

Wednesday started much better. I arrived at the office late but no one seemed to notice. The place was in an uproar with the Big News about a designer who had just announced a move from his own line to take over design duties at one of the Great Old Fashion Houses. Danielle had left a huge pile of shoe boxes next to my desk and I spent the first hour of the (admittedly, very late) morning trying on next season’s metallic sandals and wedgies. Danielle was so good to me.

I called over to her office and thanked her effusively for the shoes. “Oh, no problem, Lily,” she said. “They sent them over for us to look at for a shoot, but nobody else wears size five. Really, what else would we do with them?”

Back when I was mortal, I was considered a tall woman. The kings of Babylon were large men, physically as well as diplomatically and militarily, and I carried their genes. I was accounted a towering beauty with rather large feet—three thousand years ago. Now I’m considered petite. At five foot three, I am the shortest person who works at the magazine. I may be the shortest person in the building. And I definitely wear the smallest shoes.

“Well, I really appreciate it, though,” I told her. “And when those new Chanel bags come in, the oyster’s got your name on it.”

She almost squealed, but that would be undignified in front of the interns. I was happy for her. Myself, I just can’t get that worked up over oyster.

Then I went to lunch with my boss and two of the fashion editors and I got their support on the shawl feature. My boss even said it was “an excellent idea” and thought we should maybe run it in November and include the evening-wear shawls to go with holiday finery. It looked like my special feature was getting bigger and better. I called around to a couple of fashion houses and started ordering garments for the issue, which they were all excited to supply. As usual and as expected, but I was delighted to see that at least four of my favorite designers were featuring shawls and scarves in the winter collections. Then, to top it all off, my first-choice writer for the assignment was available and agreed immediately.