Succubus in the City (13 page)

I shook my head. “No, I don’t think you’re crazy at all. And if I could get a job translating ancient texts—well, let’s just say I do understand and leave it at that.”

“Where did you go to school?” he asked, utterly innocently. “What did you study?”

All the expected questions. Fortunately, Admin had set me up. “I went to Mount Holyoke.” And I had, too. For a summer. But Admin had me in their alumni system with a transcript and a picture of me in the yearbook, and I get regular letters asking for money. Which I give. “Comparative religion and romance languages,” I said. “I was really interested in the Italian Renaissance. If I’d gone to grad school, that’s what I would have studied.”

He looked at me quizzically. “So why didn’t you go to grad school?”

I shook my head. “No jobs. Come on, Italian Renaissance history and literature?”

“More call for that than ancient Near Eastern.” His tone was bitter.

I shrugged. “I’d think that there would be more call for ancient Near Eastern. It’s a whole lot harder to learn those languages than Italian.”

Both of our plates were empty, which is saying a lot. Benny’s does not believe in small servings.

“So tell me, are you free Saturday or Sunday? We could go to the Temple of Dendur at the Met and have lunch.”

A date. He was asking me on a real date. A museum date, no less, during the day. A very appropriate first date, not a bar or a movie, but the Met no less.

“Let me check my schedule,” I said after a moment. “Saturday might work, but I have to check. Sundays I usually meet my girlfriends for brunch, and we have a solemn pact. No guy gets in the way.”

He grinned. “I can respect that. But check on Saturday and let me know. If I don’t hear from you by tomorrow I’ll ping you.”

The waiter brought the check and Nathan threw down his credit card without even looking at it. I pulled out a few bills, enough to cover what I thought was my share.

“No, not to worry,” he said, refusing my money.

Sometimes it’s hard for me to know how to deal with which world I’m in. Only a few decades ago I would have been insulted if he hadn’t picked up the tab. Now it was my turn. “I insist. We just ran into each other. I can’t let you take me out.”

He opened his daytimer and pulled out a picture and handed it to me. It was a slightly better version of the one he had shown me over a week ago of the fair-haired fortyish man who was still a complete stranger to me. “You’re helping me out by offering to show this around,” he said. “Dinner is on the company.”

Well, it would be churlish to refuse that kind of an offer. “Thank you.”

“Don’t forget to show it around,” he said. “And send me an e-mail about Saturday.”

“I will,” I said as I waited for him to sign the credit slip. He walked me to the door and turned north. Once on the street I bolted around the corner before I started to grin.

I had a date, but I had better check my schedule for sure. Because the last thing I needed was a date with Nathan during a mojo moment. I couldn’t spoil this, and I couldn’t risk Nathan. No, I had better make sure that the stars were going to cooperate.

But I was still dizzy with desire, with the delicious joy that comes of being paid court by a handsome, intelligent, personable man. He liked me, he wanted to see me again, he liked
me.
The real deep me, the me who had been a Princess of Babylon and a Priestess of Ishtar, who had chatted with Aspasia in Athens and had cheered the gladiators of Rome. And it was for this, and not just for my perfectly proportioned body and my pheromones that he wanted to see me again.

For a creature of Hell, I was in Heaven.

chapter
TWELVE

“You can’t go,” Eros said flatly. “Look at what happened to Desi.”

“That has nothing to do with it,” I answered defiantly. We met for lunch at the ABC café, where the food was almost as wonderful as the décor. Twenty Murano chandeliers in various color combinations littered the ceiling. It was a crazy quilt of whatever they had at ABC at the time and there was no telling just what it would look like from one meeting to the next.

I had called and asked her to meet me. I needed support. I needed advice. I needed a girlfriend who would listen to me obsess about a guy I’d just barely met.

“But the schedule works, and it’s a daytime date,” I protested. “That doesn’t count like Saturday night. I’m being busy on Saturday night.”

“It’s still Saturday and you can’t,” Eros repeated.

“Screw the rules, I want to go.” I probably sounded as petulant as the Librarian had made me feel.

Eros sighed and blew on her tea. The way she ate you’d think she had to diet to keep her figure; she eats very little and drinks plain unsweetened tea. Sometimes I wonder if she even likes food.

“You’ll do whatever you want, in the end. But you know that if you appear eager you’ll lose him. Men want to chase, that’s their nature. It may feel stupid, but the more you make him work for you the more he’ll value you in the end.” And then she cocked her head. “But for you the end really is the end. Remember that? Why do you ignore that?”

Because I hadn’t been thinking of that. Because I had just enjoyed being with Nathan. Because I thought he was the most attractive man I’d seen in ages, decades probably. More because he’d heard of the Ishtar Gate and the Ceremonial Way. He cared about Babylon and he cared about the past. For him it might all be ancient history, but it was my history, and it mattered.

I wondered how badly he spoke Akkadian. I wondered if he liked pomegranates.

My home is gone. The land is still there but the language has been dead for thousands of years. The music, the buildings, the warm familiar things are all dust in a desert today. Sometimes I miss it so much it’s like a big gaping ache inside. My home, my past, my childhood. Sometimes I want the comfort foods that my mother fed me, but today I’m not even sure I would know what they were. I certainly don’t know how to make them (and neither did my mother—even a minor concubine was served by cooks) or what went into them. But I miss them all the same.

I shrugged. “It doesn’t always have to be the end. I can let them live if they satisfy me. I’ve even done it more than once. And I like Nathan because he knows all about my people. He knows who Ishtar is and about the Ceremonial Way and he even says he can read Akkadian.”

“You like this guy because he reminds you of home?” Eros asked, clearly perplexed.

“That’s a piece of it,” I admitted. “That’s not all, though. He’s frighteningly attractive and smart and he likes Benny’s, too.”

“I should have known.” Eros shook her head. “You’re infatuated, which feels great. But if you’re going to make this work then you can’t go on Saturday. Not when he asked on a Wednesday. You know better than that, and if it were me you’d be telling me exactly the same thing.”

Only it would never ever be Eros because she would never in a million years say yes to a Saturday date on a Wednesday from a new guy who wasn’t a steady boyfriend. What Eros forgets is that I have never really dated. I went straight from being a priestess to being a succubus.

Priestesses of Ishtar were not celibate. Far from it, in fact. Ishtar was a fertility goddess and her priestesses were expected to take lovers and have children. But they were to take many lovers, although their allegiance was to the Temple and the Goddess and not to any man.

So here I am, three thousand years old, and I have never had a steady boyfriend in my life. Well, not a regular boyfriend, at least not one Satan would recognize. Niccolo had certainly been a lover and partner in every way, but he doesn’t count in the grand total of my life.

Self-pity joined homesickness. I wanted Niccolo. I wanted Nathan. I wanted my mother. I wanted—something.

I got the bread pudding.

“You’ll do whatever you want, but you’ll be sorry. Honestly, Lily, remember that you don’t have a lot of experience where romance is concerned. Especially big-R Romance. Guys don’t get it unless they have to work for it, and work hard. Otherwise they don’t value you. These are things that most girls learn at fourteen.”

Yeah, well, at fourteen I was learning how to keep the Temple books in a neat hand (having mastered the intricacies of written cuneiform and basic arithmetic, which at the time were Mysteries). There was no concept even close to romance.

“Besides, I have a very good reason you can’t go on Saturday. Sybil, remember our totally paranoid terrorized Sybil? She needs us to help hide in the etheric.”

“I wish she’d stop being such a baby. That was four hundred years ago, and she shouldn’t keep freaking about it,” I said.

“Sure, she’s always going off about her Burning Men, but that doesn’t mean they’re not a real threat.”

“What are you saying? Do you think this is bigger than we thought? They’re just another bunch of conspiracy nutcases and they’ll disappear when the next big thing comes along.”

Eros shook her head. “Beliel is concerned for our safety. He sent me an e-mail about that after Satan contacted him, because Satan thinks that there really is a conspiracy against Hell, and you know how She gets when She thinks there’s a turf war. Why do you think She dealt with Admin to get that librarian on the case pronto? You know how much She loves dealing with Admin, and I’ll bet they charged plenty.”

I wouldn’t take that bet because, Admin being what they are, they probably took twice as much as I’d imagine. And it’s not something as crass as money, either, since they have no use for it. No, Admin gets paid in favors, which is how they keep up their inventory. As I understand it, they work something like eBay. They provide a forum to match up the magics needed and what they have on call to do whatever it is that needs to be done—for a percentage, of course. With all the potential that Satan commands they could be sitting on quite a pile of future magic and potential favors.

Fortunately, my specialty is not in demand outside of the original use. So I’m no good to anyone but Satan and my magic doesn’t get loaned. Desi and Eros and Sybil, though—they have had to go on Admin assignments when needed. I wondered whether they had been part of the bargain for the Librarian. Looking at Eros chewing her lipstick, I thought perhaps they might have been in the deal.

Suddenly I felt a little sorry for my best friends, and had some sudden insight besides. No wonder they wanted this cleared up as soon as possible and with as few uses of other resources as they could manage. Doing it ourselves would mean that they might not be called on to perform for Admin.

“Okay,” I agreed. I would have to tell Nathan I couldn’t make the Temple of Dendur. I’d stand by Sybil instead, to keep her from becoming the pawn of her fears. Because, bottom line, a girlfriend is forever.

I got back to the office but couldn’t concentrate on work. Instead I flipped through photos of sunglasses without seeing them, thinking about poor Desi and Nathan. Eros was wrong, I told myself. There was no reason not to go to the museum with Nathan on Saturday.

But somehow I managed not to actually hit Send on the e-mail, as I recomposed and tinkered with the wording, first to accept and next to decline. But decline in a way that made it very clear that I wanted to go and suggest a different time. It was hard. Finally it was late enough that I could reasonably leave the office and go home. Maybe there would be voice mail from Nathan, I thought. Or maybe that snot of a librarian would come through with something useful.

One can always hope.

Vincent was on duty when I arrived home. He held my bags while I got my mail. I had the usual pile of junk and bills and one thick creamy envelope that looked almost like a wedding invitation, but the calligraphy was too regular and had to be computer generated. Besides, I didn’t recognize the return address.

I dumped the rest of the mail on the table and my big bag on one of the dining chairs and opened the ersatz wedding invitation.

Succubus, we know who you are.

We know what you are.

We know where you are.

You and your kind will not escape us.

I started to scream. The pain raced up my fingers and infected my hands. I couldn’t hear myself shrieking, couldn’t think.

I hit the intercom desperately, waving my hands in the air to cool the burning that came off the paper, which was slowly being reduced to embers on my eighteenth-century Aubusson carpet.

Vincent was at the door three minutes later. When I thought about it later I realized that he must have raced up the stairs all the way to the sixth floor because the elevators in my building are so slow. He had to pound on the door, and I was afraid to touch the knob. My hands were burning as if there had been acid on that rich, creamy, twenty percent rag.

And there as good as had been.

Vincent screamed at me to open the door, and by the time I managed the knob I saw several of my neighbors ranged in the hallway. I didn’t recognize any of them, but of course I wasn’t seeing straight.

“Help, help, my hands,” I sobbed as Vincent entered the apartment.

“Nothing to worry about, folks. Looks like a little accident with the iron. I’ll take care of it. No problem,” he assured the other residents as he closed the door behind him.

“What happened?” he asked urgently and all I could do was point to the floor.

The evil note was still there, the words now outlined in glowing red clearly legible in the gray ash. Vincent read them and even scribbled down a copy before he stamped them out with his heavy boots.

I was whimpering by this time, my mascara running down my face. The palms of my hands were bright scarlet and blisters were forming on my fingers where I’d touched the letter.

Vincent pulled me up and took me into the kitchen, where he held my hands under the cold water at the sink for what felt like forever but was probably more like ten minutes. Then he washed my palms very gently and sat me down on the sofa, wedged me in with embroidered cushions, and took off my shoes.

He went to the bathroom and emerged with some Betadyne ointment and gauze bandages. Funny, I remember him going into the bathroom but until he came out with the first-aid supplies I couldn’t imagine why he’d gone in there. Shock, endorphins, fear, whatever it was, I wasn’t tracking very well.