Succubus in the City (39 page)

Tonight—I had no idea what Nathan had in mind tonight. Dinner, I expected, though he hadn’t told me where. We’d done the art opening and the museum, so it could be an intimate evening or we could be out on the town. Clubbing maybe? Or a movie?

Finally, I gave up and decided on my newest pair of Citizen jeans, a romantic blouse with thick lace cuffs, and a pair of actually sensible low-platform boots.

I was still putting things into the bag I’d chosen for the evening when Nathan rang the bell. At least I’d thrown in the clean underwear and toothbrush before he arrived. It was okay if he saw me transfer my wallet, keys, and cell phone. Which he did.

He was smiling and his face glowed with more than the cold. In his right hand he brandished tickets. “Anonymous Four at the Cloisters,” he said. “Are you starving? The show starts at seven thirty and I thought we could get dinner afterward.”

Okay, I was now officially impressed. Museum, art opening, and now concert of the most famous early-music a capella group in New York. At the Cloisters, no less. What had this guy done, taken dating lessons?

“Sounds wonderful,” I said. “Who did you kill to get the tickets?” I knew those tickets couldn’t have been easy to come by, not unless he’d ordered them ages ago with only hopes of a date or plans to scalp one of them.

He shook his head. “My mother had them, decided that she was doing something else this evening and called me yesterday,” he said. Then he shrugged. “Well, I had planned something different, but I thought you were probably into this music.”

We took a cab across the park and way uptown. The Cloisters would be one of my very favorite places in the city if only it were closer to anything and if there were shops and restaurants convenient. Unfortunately, it’s on the West Side near the George Washington Bridge in Fort Tryon Park where martial arts groups work out and people let their dogs run during the day.

Nathan held my hand in the cab as we sped toward the most romantic date spot in New York City. The Cloisters was an amalgamation of five real French cloisters that had been brought over and reconstructed in New York. I remember when it first opened, back before John D. Rockefeller gave the money for the Met to buy it and relocate the entire thing to its present location.

Most of the structure houses a collection of medieval art and artifacts, but the chapel is used for events like charity balls and weddings. And concerts. According to the program we were given, it is considered acoustically exceptional and performers do not need microphones.

I had never been to the Cloisters in the evening, especially a cold winter evening when the strangely transplanted medieval building was glowing with warm yellow light. Most of the galleries were closed at this hour, but we did have to traverse the cloister itself to get to the chapel, and I stopped to admire the subtle colors of the marbles in the golden light. I noted four colors of marble, the columns all of pink or yellow, black or green.

Nathan held my hand as we moved through the sheltered walkway. Utterly enchanted, I found myself remembering times when this would be the very latest design.

We entered the chapel and were handed programs. When we took our seats I almost gasped aloud. I remembered hearing of Hildegard von Bingen when she had been alive. I had been living in Paris then, when Abbot Suger was building St. Denis, the first Gothic cathedral in the world. And I’d heard whispers even there about Hildegard, a woman with talents that dwarfed the men of her generation. She had been a composer, painter, poet, and the abbess of not only her own establishment but also the local authority for a thriving and populous region in Germany.

Yes, I remembered more clearly now. When she had been very old she had submitted her papers and her work to the University in Paris to be considered as a Doctor of the Church, and she had been turned down. Because she was a woman. All my sisters and I had been horrified, though I had to admit we hadn’t been surprised.

But it was the end of the Second Crusade and the men were returning, and the women who for years had tilled the land and run the businesses and practiced the trades and professions, all these women were told that they should return home to be wives and mothers and leave the work of the world to the men. And so Hildegard, a genius to rival Leonardo, was shunted aside and forgotten.

I had been angry then, as I had been angry when the same thing had happened at the end of World War Two. In eight hundred years, not all that much had changed.

Now, in New York, in the most medieval setting in the New World, four women performed music that I had never heard before. Four women doing all the parts that in the Abbey of Bingen must have been sung by a hundred or more, and yet in the acoustic glory that had been transplanted from France, we could hear every note unamplified. Hildegard von Bingen died eight hundred years ago, but her music was as alive and thrilling now as it must have been at the end of the Third Crusade, when Philip Augustus of France and Richard Coeur de Lion had retreated in shame.

I was transported. Back in time but also into my own soul, the soul I had sold to my Beloved Master Satan to do Her will forever. In the world in which this music had been written, we had been understood. People knew that Satan walked among them. They were wary of demons and angels alike. They lacked technology and education and even basic hygiene, but they knew there was more to reality than molecules and telescopes, TV and the Internet. They knew the unseen world, knew not only that we did, in truth, exist, but also that we were ranked and organized, that we had jobs and damnation, that we were both their tempters and their deliverers.

They knew the Hierarchy. They talked to us daily, mostly to Upstairs, but many had called on us as well. We were powerful then and we were paid in worship and respect and awe.

So I remembered as I listened to the music, and the music alone without the associations was beautiful enough to strip me down and leave me vulnerable.

I wanted to think that what happened that night would never have happened had we had some other date. If Nathan’s mother had used her own tickets, if he had dragged me out to some boring art film or pretentious jazz club, everything would have been fine. I would have done exactly what I knew was right, what my girlfriends had counseled me. I would have been strong, would have been firmly anchored in right now.

But we did go to the Cloisters and we heard the most amazing music that I’d heard since the Beatles first landed in North America.

By the end of the concert I was sobbing, softly, just tears running down my face and my chest heaving a little. Nathan turned to me after the third upwelling of applause and wiped away a tear with his thumb. “Are you all right?” he asked, concerned.

I nodded, not able to speak.

“Come,” Nathan said quietly, using my hands to raise me from my seat. “We’ll get some food into you and you’ll feel better. I’m sorry, I’m really sorry, I didn’t know it would affect you this way.”

At that point he was leading me out and this time I didn’t notice the magnificent museum that surrounded us. “Don’t be sorry,” I said. “It was beautiful. It was so beautiful and it just—there are so many things, Nathan. So many things that I need to tell you and I’m so afraid and the music brought them all back to me. And I’m so afraid.”

“Shhhh, don’t be afraid. Nothing to be afraid of,” he said soothingly, as if I were a child. “Come on, we’ll get a cab, there’s a whole line of them here. And we’ll go get some food and you’ll feel better.”

I only nodded. I could do no more, so he steered me into a taxi and gave the driver instructions and we ended up at a place that was quiet and dark with intimate tables that were well separated. It wasn’t a place I knew, not a place well known or written up in CitySearch, but clearly an elegant bastion of Old Money.

My menu swam before me and Nathan ordered for both of us, scallops and salad and then simple steaks. I could hardly eat. I cut and chewed and pushed food around on my plate, but somehow my throat and stomach had closed, and although the food was delicious I could barely swallow.

“I am so sorry, Lily,” Nathan finally said after we’d let the waiter clear our nearly untouched plates. “I only wanted to do something special for you, something you’d really enjoy. I didn’t mean for it to hurt you.”

I shook my head. “It was wonderful, Nathan. It was the most beautiful music…I had no idea. But…it brought up things, things about me, about my past. My friends said that I shouldn’t say anything to you, that I should wait or that it wouldn’t matter, but the memories started to crowd me out and now—”

“You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to tell me,” he said quickly. “We’re both adults in the modern world and we’ve both lived and things have happened. I expect that. Okay, maybe you’ve done some things you would rather not have. So have I. But we learn from those things and we go on and they’re what make us who we are. And I’m falling in love with you. With who you are. Not the airbrushed, perfect Lily, but the one with the red nose in the bathrobe that I met that first night at your door.”

I was falling in love with him, too, had been since I met him. But if this was the real thing then I had to tell him. I had to be honest. If he thought he loved me, then he had to know me, had to know who I was. And that meant…

“Nathan, I’m crazy about you and that’s why I’m so afraid. Before we go any further there is something really important you need to know about me. Because maybe you won’t be able to love me if you know and I don’t want that to happen and I’m so afraid.”

He reached for my hand across the table. “Don’t be afraid, Lily. Truly, really, don’t be afraid. I can’t think of anything you could tell me that could change the way I feel and what I want with you.”

I was insane.

I looked up, looked into his warm, bright eyes, shining with sincerity and love. I felt his fingers around my hand, engulfing and protecting. And I looked at him dead-on and I said, “Nathan, I’m a succubus.”

chapter
THIRTY-ONE

“What?” he asked, as if he hadn’t heard the word. “You said you’re a what?”

“I’m a succubus,” I repeated. “I’m a demon who lures men to their death, but don’t worry, I only deliver the bad guys to Satan. I would never ever deliver anyone decent. I never would have hurt you. But that’s—that’s what I am.”

Suddenly I had said all the words and he was glazed and frozen, his mouth gaping open and his hand slack.

“And Satan promised me, too, that if someone knows what I am and loves me anyway, I can leave. I can stop being a succubus. I could even become a mortal and there’s nothing I want more, Nathan. I want to be a mortal woman with you, and marry you and live like totally normal people.”

He withdrew his hand from the table. “Lily, there is no such thing as a succubus. There is no such being as Satan. You’re having delusions. Are you in therapy? Have you tried medications? There are some very good drugs these days—”

“No, no, Nathan,” I protested. “Really. What if I could prove it to you? Would you listen to me? Would you at least try?”

“How could you prove it?” he asked gently, sadly, as if speaking to a crazy person.

“Give me a minute,” I said.

Satan,
I thought in a manner that was half magic and half prayer.
Satan, this is Your servant, your Chosen, Lily, and I am in great need. And there is none but You can help me. Please, show this mortal that we exist. That the Hierarchy exists and that I am a demon as I have said. Please convince him that I am not crazy. I ask this as the boon You granted me.

All my heart and love I put into that plea, all the need and desire and hope that I had ever had.

And in She walked, Martha/Satan, in pastel Dior.

“Please, tell him what I am,” I said, my voice all scared and little girl.

I wondered how he would know She was Satan. She looked like any Upper East Side president of the Junior League who had a thirty-room cottage in the Hamptons and threw brilliant parties. She did not look like most people’s image of the Prince of Darkness.

She reached Her right hand as if to shake his, and, being well trained, Nathan rose and shook Her hand. But She didn’t let go. Instead She grasped my hand in Her left and said, “Let’s go then, shall we?”

And there was a sickening lurch of color and light and a whoosh like a jet taking off, only louder and surrounding us and then suddenly we were not in some Old-Money steak house anymore. We were on the terrace of a mountain palace, and before us lay Hell.

The terrace was strangely familiar, nearly Babylonian if I thought about it. The floor was tiled in cobalt blue and a small table had been set with fine linen and crystal and a large pitcher of iced tea. Sugar and lemon lay in silver bowls and three long iced-tea spoons were laid out beside them. A vase of purple flowers, tulips, roses, and calla lilies graced the center of the table, and for some reason I found the elegance and yet ordinariness of the iced-tea service more frightening than anything else.

Around us the air was hot and dry, like the desert. The sky appeared mostly yellow with streaks of red, as if it were near sunset. I did not venture too close to the wall at the edge of the terrace, trying to keep my focus on the iced tea.

“That’s for later,” Satan said. “It’s rather warm, don’t you think? We’ll be needing it soon, I expect.” Then She turned to Nathan. “Would you care to take a brief look at the larger picture here, before we go on a bit of a tour? Lily, of course, is quite familiar with the setup, being one of My Chosen. She has great status here, you understand. She is not simply a succubus—I have hundreds—but one of My inner circle. An ordinary succubus, working under several layers of supervisors, would never have met Me, let alone come into the position where I consider her a personal friend.”

Satan had changed as well. She no longer looked like the president of the Junior League. Here where She ruled Her beauty blazed, harsh and exotic. Her hair was still that deep, rich chestnut but now it was a great mass that shone in the unnatural light, loose down Her back and thick around Her face. Real humans only dream of hair like that but no living being actually has it. Nor was She dressed in designer pastels. Now Satan wore a tight gown in a style vaguely based on a cheongsam that appeared to be made of light and flames and shadow, constantly changing over Her skin so that at one moment it appeared to expose Her arms and at the next had long complicated sleeves. Her nails matched the oriental ambience, ridiculously long and brilliant scarlet to match Her luscious mouth.