Succubus in the City (5 page)

This thought lingered in the back of my head as I changed into my pajamas and painted my toenails “Mermaid Mint.” It stuck with me as I debated the merits of General Tsao’s Chicken versus Crispy Orange Beef in the take-out order and Eros lit the Duralog.

My mind wandered back again as we waited for the food to arrive, as Sybil talked about more home renovation plans and Desi tried to clear her reputation by not talking about Steve. When the log was blazing nicely, Eros laid out the supplies for s’mores on the table and pulled out the rotating, extendable marshmallow toasting sticks in brushed steel with a ball-bearing turning mechanism. Eros doesn’t cook, but she’s got every food-prep toy ever made that will fit into her oversized kitchen. She has the KitchenAid mixer and fancy blender, she has a whole set of All-Clad pots, and every gadget Cuisinart makes. And rotating, length-adjustable marshmallow sticks.

“So, Eros, did you hear anything from Beliel?” Desi asked as she judged the perfect golden color of the marshmallow.

“What’s Eros doing with Beliel?” I asked. Beliel is one of the Big Five in Hell. He’s the Head of Security, which is one of the most efficient, organized, and covert groups in the Underworld. Satan has been very pleased with their progress lately, but we don’t hear much.

Eros just shrugged. “I’m not doing anything with him,” she said. “Just like you and Mephistopheles. We chat sometimes.”

“Beliel is a foodie?” I asked. Because most of my relationship with Mephistopheles centers on restaurant reviews in MagicMirror. Really. He and I don’t actually get together, we just read each other’s food porn. And that’s about all.

Eros shook her head. Her long chandelier earrings swung around her otherwise bare neck. “No, but he’s interested in real estate and this building is going condo. I’m buying five apartments and he was interested in investing. At the inside price.”

“Of course,” Sybil said sagely. “You’re buying five? Do you think I could get in? That’s going to turn an excellent profit in a few years.”

“I’m not just buying them for the investment,” Eros said. I could understand that. Only Sybil is really savvy about money. The rest of us hand over our portfolios to her and she manages everything. And makes us very tidy returns. But…then why was she buying so many?

“First of all, if any one of you wanted to live here, we could arrange it. The apartments are all beautiful, and I would so love to have all of you in the building. Think of it, all of us living under one roof. It would be wonderful.”

Sybil sighed. “I just bought all this new wallpaper.”

Eros was buying five apartments. In this superbeautiful luxury building. And she was willing to rent them to her friends, to us, at a reasonable rate.

“It’s not like I really need the money,” she said, and we knew that was the truth. The fact is, none of us need the money. Live long enough with the support of Hell and you can put away quite a nice nest egg. Acquiring property like Eros was about to do was one of the most reasonable ways to keep the cash flow large enough to support a full-blown Manolo Blahnik habit.

But, much as I like the building and much as I love my friends, I didn’t quite see us all living together like college girls in a dorm. We’re a little too old and too independent, for one thing. And for another, well, I love Eros’s building but I really like my apartment. It suits me. And I hate moving, even when the packers do the worst of the job.

Even with chocolate and graham crackers set out elegantly on the table and high-tech roasting sticks in our hands, we were all stunned into immobility and shocked to silence. An eighteenth-century German clock ticked loudly on the mantelpiece for minutes as we all tried to find words and thoughts to put together.

“Oh, come on, it’s not as if none of you have ever bought property,” Eros finally said as if she were exasperated. “You all own at least an apartment in Paris or a ranch in Texas.”

I wondered who had invested in Texas. I had bought commercial property in San Francisco right after the Big ’Quake in ’06—nineteen oh-six, that was. That, and the villa in Tuscany and the coffee plantation in Hawaii were keeping my bank account very happy, along with my nice investment portfolio. But I had never bought a New York apartment.

For a moment I wondered why I hadn’t, why I’d lived in this city for decades but hadn’t committed to a single property. Maybe because there were so many temptations and I just wasn’t a settling-down type of gal. Maybe if NYU didn’t own everything worth having around Washington Square Park I would have taken the plunge, but really I had to remember that back in the ’70s that had been a kind of sketchy area full of drug dealers.

No, it wasn’t the building or that she was buying that was the shock. Or even that she had already planned for us all to live together here. It was that Eros was being her old demigoddess self, making the decisions and arrangements and assuming that we’d all go along with what she’d decided. You’d think that after a few hundred years she would have figured out that we’re pretty self-reliant and independent and sometimes need our space. And that just because she’d been a goddess once didn’t mean that she got to tell us all what to do.

“So, who’s in?” she asked cheerfully. “I’d already had some ideas on who might like which unit best.”

“I just bought wallpaper,” Sybil reminded her again. “So I don’t think I’ll want to move, at least not for a long time. But it’s a great investment, Eros; you’re a financial genius to think of it!”

“C’mon, Eros, it’s awesome that you’re doing this and I’m really impressed. But I think we’re all kind of settled in our places,” Desi said diplomatically. “It would be fun, and maybe one of these days we’ll all move in, but I don’t think that would happen soon.”

“What about Beliel?” Sybil asked. “Is he going in with you, or is he buying as well?”

Eros shrugged. “He’s going with me, since he’d need me to get the insider price. It was really between the two of us to get the five apartments, but I thought it would be a great idea for us to all live together. It would be fun. But if it isn’t going to work out…”

“Is Beliel moving in?” I asked, more out of curiosity than anything.

“He wants a place in New York,” Eros admitted. “Not that I think he’d be here all that much, but there are a lot of security issues in this area and he’s tired of the Pierre.”

At that, all of us, me included, stuck our marshmallows on the fancy sticks and rotated them carefully over the Duralog until they were evenly dripping and brown (but not burned). I dutifully constructed the chocolate and graham sandwich and made appreciative noises, but I didn’t taste a thing. Even with my best friends, the isolation threatened to overwhelm me. As soon as it was reasonable, I changed back into my street clothes and said my good-byes.

chapter
FIVE

Monday morning the alarm got me out of bed. Alone, as always, but at least there were no ashes to clean up. No, I’d come home and taken a long hot bath in my clawfoot tub (why would I give up my perfect bathtub and move to Eros’s building?) with a Lush bathbomb fizzing and scattering fine scent and flower petals in the steamy water. I lay back with cucumber slices on my eyes and a box of Godiva truffles on the floor next to me and tried to simply enjoy the sensations. The scent and warmth of the water soothed my muscles and the cucumber made my eyes feel less itchy and swollen. And the truffles were strictly medicinal.

Do not think, do not think, I commanded myself. Just feel the water, smell the flowers, remember that Lush products are all organic and fresh and you could eat them if you wanted to. Except they’d taste like soap. Taste the truffles instead. Mmmmm. Chocolate.

I slept deeply that night and woke up and went to work on Monday dressed in a new Versace blouse with my favorite tweed pencil skirt.

I actually love my job. I’m the accessories editor at
Trend
, a famous and important women’s fashion magazine, and today I had to sort through two stories and a photo shoot for our next issue, get the writer and stylist moving for the issue after, and decide on the page, writer, and photographer for the month after that. Not to mention the regular monthly updates on accessories and bags, which I usually work out myself with the help of one of my favorite photographers and the art department.

So I was leafing through the press releases from various companies when I saw the most adorable Kate Spade bags for spring in woven wicker with different-colored leather accents. Those wicker bags, they were the stuff of my lust. One set even had the leather trim in a pale metallic bronze. It would be perfect with everything in my wardrobe and it just flattered my complexion. I admit that I spent more time fantasizing myself with this new bag than going over photos for the next issue.

Yes, I work. We all work. Sometimes, on the really bad days, I wonder why I bother, why I don’t stay in bed all day eating chocolates and watching DVDs. I don’t really need the money, which is good because in publishing I don’t earn enough to live the way I live anyway. That’s on the bad weeks. Mostly, though, I work because sitting at home all day gets lonely and dull after the second week. And I’ve made mortal friends in the office and it keeps me in touch with the way the world is today. Whenever today happens to be.

Back in previous eras I’d done different things. Of course, being in the Court (Ottoman, Russian, Dutch, and English under Charles II) was always a proper job along with the perks. How else could I establish my credentials among the decadent nobility? Then in the Victorian period proper women didn’t work, but we were expected to spend a lot of time supporting Causes. I helped organize charity balls to assist fallen women. Being one myself, I felt that I was uniquely in a position to assess their needs. Besides, I rather liked organizing charity balls.

Truth is, without a husband or children and without any friends who are free during the day to meet for lunch and museums and shopping, life is just too dull without a job. Work also gives me a sense of who I am when I’m not being a succubus. I mean, I can’t be all succubus all the time. I don’t have the stomach for that many men in Arrow polyester and even Satan doesn’t ask for more than three deliveries a month. When I was a Priestess there were things to do besides sex (which was a sacred part of our duties in Babylon) and ritual worship, singing and chanting and decorating altars. The Temple was a business, and as a prospective High Priestess I had to learn to run it, to deal with tradesmen and schedule deliveries and decide on allocations. How much for sacred oil this moon, and were we going through the sacramental beer too quickly.

Honestly, a lot of my life in the Temple was straightforward management, no different from any manager in any company in modern New York. No different from running a brothel, either, which I’d done a few times when I’d had to train a few of Satan’s newer recruits.

I thought about the many experiences I’d had as I sat through an afternoon marketing meeting. How many hundreds of thousands of meetings just like this one had I endured in my long existence? At least I’d perfected the pretense that I was paying attention while I let my mind wander, and chimed in just on cue about the new line of bags and how I thought we needed to target more accessory houses for advertising. Which was what they all expected me to say, and then the conversation went back to the age-old argument of whether we should try to develop a strategy to get rid of drugstore cosmetic support.

So I listened to the same arguments again and then went back to my office and spread photos of chunky bracelets over my desk, circling the best ones with a blue marker and making notes on the appropriate places to insert in the single page of text. It was diverting enough that I forgot I was, in fact, a personal courier to the Prince of Hell Herself, and mostly considered myself an ordinary accessories editor at
Trend
magazine.

Which was still the way I felt as I took the subway home and stopped in the bodega on the corner for some fresh flowers to brighten up the living room. After working on Spring and Summer collections all day (not to mention scheduling a page of beach totes and the best in dressy flip-flops) I needed something to counteract the dark and chilly reminder that it was still February.

Vincent saw me half a block away and had the door gaping for my entry. “Would you like me to help you carry those up?” he asked eagerly.

“It’s okay,” I told him. “It wouldn’t look right if you’re not here in the lobby, especially after dark. I mean, really, we’re counting on you for our safety, not to carry flowers around.”

That straightened his shoulders. “Oh, and I have to tell you,” he whispered as I got my mail. “There has been a man asking for you. Says his name is Nathan Coleman. He said he called but you were out, and said that he’d try to drop by again. I’ll get rid of him if you’d like.”

Nathan Coleman? The name rang a bell—yeah, the e-mail about the missing man. Guess he wasn’t a spammer then. I was going to have to get rid of him.

There were ways to deal with this. The easiest was probably the most direct. I could just meet with him and act confused, and it would be all over. I couldn’t help him. If he persisted, I could use my attraction on him and that would end the situation immediately. He’d be missing then, and I might have to think about moving, or change my name or something. I’d had to do it before and I really hate that, though with Eros buying five apartments at least there was a place I could go on short notice.

The one thing I did know from all my experience was that putting off the inevitable didn’t make it any easier. Or better. Better to just get it done with. “If he comes back, call me on the intercom,” I told Vince.

“But he could be dangerous,” he protested.

I smiled. I could be dangerous, too. And it was better to appeal to the doorman’s sense of honor and protective nature rather than make points for feminist self-determination.

“I think I know who he is,” I mollified my would-be knight. “It’s really okay, he just wants to ask about a friend. And if there is any trouble, I just have to hit the intercom and I know you’d be up in a second.”