by Nina Harper
Perhaps I was just overwrought and stressed, and still too miserable about my breakup with Nathan to make much sense. Maybe the man just had been some random person who’d gotten off the boat, maybe he had been lingering because he was meeting someone in Apostoli. Maybe the events of the past month had made me more paranoid than reasonable.
I took a hot bath to calm down, then dressed in new Italian clothes. I pulled my auburn hair into a tight chignon, so if anyone happened to be looking for a Titian-tressed succubus, they wouldn’t notice me. I looked perfectly and properly Venetian. It was a little late for dinner, but there would be places open. And I was certain that this time I wasn’t followed.
Still, it was time for me to go home.
chapter
TWO
I arrived home at seven in the evening, after a reasonable flight and a horrific cab ride that included all of the Long Island rush hour. Vincent, my doorman, welcomed me with a flourish and took immediate charge of my bags. Home. I was tired and jet lagged, though the time disassociation hadn’t really caught up with me yet. It was just very late and I wanted to take a hot bath and go to bed.
They had fed us very well in first class on Lufthansa. I had drunk my way across the ocean: excellent wines, vodka served with the caviar, and ice wine with dessert. I had indulged in all of it, along with a salmon dinner almost good enough to be served in a restaurant. I remember when travel, even for the wealthy, had been arduous. When the only way to get from one place to another had been a horse or a cart or carriage and even the best inns had assumed shared beds, to say nothing of shared facilities.
I staggered into my apartment, Vincent behind me with my bags. All I wanted to do was kick off my shoes and figure out whether I was awake enough for a hot bath before bed.
What I got was Mephistopheles.
He was wearing a bespoke Savile Row suit in conservative charcoal and was sitting in my Eames chair reading Bon Appétit magazine. Not that he cooks, but it was their yearly restaurant issue.
“Listen to this,” he enthused as I collapsed on the sofa. “ ‘The chef has combined a deft hand with the traditional preparations of Provence and the ingredients of their own organic farm in upstate New York, and has an imagination rarely found.’ I must go there.”
“Meph, if you’ve come here to read me restaurant reviews, I’m going to scream,” I said wearily. Meph might be my friend and Satan’s first lieutenant, but he had never shown up in my living room before. Usually we scheduled an appointment and he had made reservations at one of his favorite restaurants. And since Meph was a gourmet of the first order, his picks were worth whatever he wanted from me. Which, truth to tell, was rarely anything more than the current buzz about a newer, trendier restaurant or an idea for a birthday present for Satan.
His showing up in my apartment like this was unprecedented, and I was worried.
“I’m just this minute back from Europe and I have work tomorrow and you didn’t even call. Or leave e-mail. I checked my e-mail and my voice mail on the Treo in the cab. There was plenty of time.”
Meph looks like a CEO, which in some ways is precisely what he is. The CEO of Hell. Satan is the sole stockholder, but Meph runs most of the daily operation. “Telephones and e-mail are not secure,” he said. “I’ve placed a silence on this apartment for the time we are both here, but it will dissolve when I leave. I don’t want to leave any possible trail.”
My eyes got wide. This was bigger than I had anticipated. “Okay,” I said. “But maybe I should have some coffee. I’m horribly jet-lagged.”
“Of course,” he said. And waved his hand and an extralarge Kenyan appeared in my hand, steaming with just the right amount of sugar and hot milk, with a sprinkle of nutmeg on the top. Meph is a class act all the way.
“You remember the slight problem you had with some fanatics recently? I believe they called themselves the Knight Defenders?” he asked.
I nodded. I wouldn’t have called it a slight problem. They had pursued me and my friends, tried to kill us, and, for all I knew, had followed me to Venice.
“They haven’t managed to resolve their leadership issue and regroup, have they?” I asked, worried. They had made my life pretty unpleasant for the past few months. They were also the reason I’d met Nathan. He’d been trying to hunt down their leader, who had happened to have my name and contact info in his files.
“I do not know,” Meph told me. “That is not the question at the moment. As I recall, you were concerned that they were getting their information from a source inside Hell.”
“That was one possibility we thought about,” I agreed, and then took a long sip of my coffee. “But we couldn’t think anyone could be disloyal to Satan.”
“You are too loyal yourself, Lily,” he said. “Certainly that is possible. But I remember at the time you were also concerned that it might be some junior demon who was trying to get Satan’s attention or eliminate you in order to move up. Now, I have no reason to suspect anyone, but it has come to my attention it might be me someone wishes to replace.”
I took a sharp breath and drank some more coffee. “Tell me more,” I said. “I’m tired, and I might not be up to speed right now, but I want to know what’s going on.”
He got up and looked out my window. “There is one other thing,” he added. He hesitated. “Please do not tell Satan I’ve been here, or that I’ve talked about this. I don’t want to upset Her.”
That was an understatement. No one wanted to upset Satan. Even Upstairs they tried to avoid it. A grumpy Satan could make lots of lives amazingly unpleasant. I’d seen Her in a bad mood a few times in my very long demonic existence and I’d have to say, although She is my dear friend and my close mentor, that even I avoid Her at those times. If She can terrify Her own Chosen, I didn’t want to think about what She could do to the rest of the world.
On the other hand, I was loyal, first and always, to Satan. If Mephistopheles was going to tell me something in confidence that could hurt Her, or that I thought She needed to know, I would violate his confidence in a heartbeat.
“I can’t promise unless I know what this is about,” I said carefully. “I’m one of Her Chosen, and if I think there is something She needs to know, I will tell Her.”
Mephistopheles blinked. “Of course. I can talk to you, I chose to talk to you, because I trust your loyalty absolutely, Lily. The problem is, outside of you and a few of Her other Chosen, I can’t trust anyone. But I don’t want to go to Satan immediately with simple gossip—I could risk hurting a loyal demon. And truthfully, I need your help. Is there any way you can talk to Marduk? You are Babylonian, after all, and I thought he had some fondness for you. Which would be quite silly, given that there are much better reasons than your long-gone nationality to find you an excellent companion and pillar of Hell.”
I wanted to roll my eyes. Meph sometimes took it over the top, but then he was a gentleman of the old school. The very old school.
“I can probably get in to see him,” I offered. “What do you need? Can it be something casual, like at a party? Or do you need me to actually go to him and have a formal conversation?”
“Oh, informal would be much better,” Mephistopheles said immediately. “I just want you to sound him out a bit.”
“About what?” I hated being blunt, but I wasn’t ready to commit myself until I knew what this was all about.
“Really, I would like to know what he says to you, if he’s trying to sound you out,” Meph answered.
“You think he might be plotting something?”
Mephistopheles shrugged. “You know there has always been bad blood between us. A rivalry of sorts, though I never thought it was a problem. I just always thought he was more conservative and afraid of change. And that could be the truth; I would not want to harm his reputation if it’s just Marduk trying to pretend we all live back in the time of the Roman Republic.”
I giggled. “The Empire is more like him. Marduk really can’t deal with democracy.
”
Meph actually smiled. “You’re right. Make it under Tiberius. Tiberius was his kind of emperor. But don’t start anything, Lily. What makes me suspicious of Marduk may only be a quirk of his own personality and he could be an ally.”
“Or he could be an enemy,” I said softly.
“No, not an enemy,” Meph countered. “A rival. Maybe. But it could be someone else. Keep an open mind.”
I nodded. “Will do.”
“When can you see him?”
“I’ll have to look at my calendar. I’m too tired right now and I don’t have a clue as to what’s up in the social life of Hell. I haven’t been on MagicMirror for a week.”
Mephistopheles shrugged. “Nothing interesting on my friends’ list,” he said firmly.
Fortunately, I knew him well enough to realize he meant that no one had posted any foodporn. At least not from any restaurant he had yet to try.
“Give me a few days and I’ll find something,” I promised, yawning. “But I’m not worth much now and I’m fading fast. The coffee helped but . . .”
“Of course,” Mephistopheles said. Then he took my hand and kissed it with a flourish before he disappeared in a haze of sulfur stink that did not dissipate until I opened the window. In early March, which felt like January this cold winter.
I didn’t care. At that point, nothing but sleep mattered. So I closed the door, left my bags and shoes in the middle of the floor, and shed Italian couture down the hallway to my bed.
I got up at a ridiculous hour the next morning, well before the sun or any of my friends or coworkers would be up. My body was still on Italian time. If I were the type, I would go to the gym for the six a.m. step class. I’m not that type.
I wanted to go back to sleep. I wasn’t well rested, but I was definitely too wide awake to stay in bed.
Thank the military-industrial complex for the Internet. It’s always open and I didn’t have to bother getting dressed to get online and catch up on what my friends (and enemies, and those in between) have been doing.
MagicMirror, the demon version of MySpace, can only be accessed from a computer with credentials from Hell. Which means it remains secure from prying human eyes.
Gloriana had written a long screed about how she found human cursing demeaning to demons. Normally I would have just scrolled by but I did find it funny that she was so upset humans considered “damn you” and “go to Hell” to be nasty. After all, for them it is. For demons, that kind of language was meaningless. “Go to Hell” came out sounding like “Go to California,” only personally I way preferred Hell. More interesting people, no cars, no pollution.
Okay, the real problem with California for me is—this was very hard to admit. I am not one of those Luddite demons who couldn’t use e-mail and even hate the telephone. I knew demons who didn’t have a microwave or a DVD player because they couldn’t figure out how to use them. I had a dishwasher and a microwave and a computer and a DVD set up and was very seriously thinking about TiVo. But I had never learned to drive a car.
I came to New York in 1893, and before that I lived in Paris. I’d never needed to drive and as a New Yorker part of my identity involved not having a driver’s license. Like many Manhattanites, I have a nondriver’s ID.
While I mused over the driving thing, I scrolled through a number of posts on food and travel and problems with humans without paying attention. There had been so much traffic when I’d been gone that I didn’t really have the time to read every entry carefully—or even not very carefully.
So I nearly missed Hatuman’s invitation.
Hatuman is one of the old ones, and rarely uses the computer. Probably one of his minor minions had actually posted for him, but there it was, a private party at the Waldorf-Astoria next weekend.
I sighed. The Waldorf. Like they couldn’t have found an older, stuffier venue. But then, the old-school demons preferred sedate, conservative places where the only dancing would be the waltz, and even that was a little new wave for them. Probably five hundred demons were invited, and I was going to just ignore the invitation until I thought again.
Hatuman was fairly friendly with Marduk, and this was an event where I could see the old Babylonian god socially. Being Babylonian myself, talking to Marduk casually at the party would only be good manners, required even. This was too good an opportunity to do exactly what Mephistopheles wanted me to do.
I just hated giving up a Saturday night for a boring party where no one would wear anything interesting and there wouldn’t be any younger demons to flirt with me.
I studied the invitation again. Should I bring a date?
But there wasn’t anyone I could bring. Nathan had dumped me. Nathan, who I bet would be brilliant in that crowd, was out of my life. He could talk to Marduk in his very strangely accented Akkadian and ask all kinds of personal and embarrassing questions and Marduk wouldn’t even notice.
It was six thirty in the morning and my alarm wasn’t due to go off for fifteen minutes and I was already furious. Though I did remind myself that my body thought it was just past noon and maybe I needed lunch, and I was tired in that dragging, too-awake way that was this century’s special travel curse.
Maybe I could drag one of my girlfriends along.
I sent an e-mail to all of them, to Desire and Eros and Sybil, asking if anyone could manage to go to Hatuman’s shindig with me. I hit Send with a sense of resignation. I certainly wouldn’t want to go to Hatuman’s party if I didn’t need to talk to Marduk. I’d rather stay home and wash my hair.
And then the alarm rang, interrupting my self-pity session. I turned it off and put myself under the shower and resolved to start the day as if nothing had ever happened. As if I had just woken up out of a good restful sleep and looked forward to my day as an editor at one of America’s most popular magazines.
Yeah, right. Go me.
chapter
THREE
The first morning back at work turned out to be wonderful. I walked into our office and people I barely knew stopped to thank me. The whole ambience reminded me of a movie premiere or a procession entering the Ishtar Gate and proceeding down the avenue, cheered by the people and showered with flowers by those lucky enough to get up on a roof.
I could almost hear people thinking “Hail, O Vanquisher of Lawrence Carroll.” And there was the man himself, looking sour but grudgingly thanking me for saving his shoot, as he put it.
Danielle and two of the fashion editors treated me to lunch at Butter where we ordered two bottles of wine on top of cocktails and got completely drunk. But no one was going to challenge our productivity that afternoon, Danielle assured me. “If you had not appeased him, no one would have been able to work for days and we would have lost all the interns. They were so afraid, the little ones. And I cannot say that I blame them.”
We giggled in the cab uptown, and then Danielle pulled me into her office. “What do you think of these?” she asked, showing me a selection of Jimmy Choo, Manolo Blahnik and Christian Louboutin boots. We both clucked over them all, and Danielle pointed out her favorites and showed me the ones she thought suited me.
“And the very best is that we can keep these,” she whispered drunkenly. “After they are used in my articles, and in the fashion shoots, we do not need to return them the way we usually do. And these”—she swept her hand indicating four pairs of stilettos on her conference table—“these are your size. So I think that, in order to make room for the next collection, you must take them away.”
At the end of the day I got even better news. I went to check my e-mail before I went home and all the girls said they had already been planning on Hatuman’s party and had expected that I would be there. Everyone was going to be there. So it had been the perfect first day back when I got into the taxi to go home.
Vincent met me as he held the door for me. “Lily, Azoked is waiting in your apartment.”
All the happiness of the past few hours dissolved instantly.
“Why
did you let her in?” I cried.
“I got her Florentines and Ben & Jerry’s because I thought you needed your reserves if you even had anything left after being away. Though it would serve her right to have it freezer burned,” he said.
Spoken like a true demon, I thought. And a true friend.
There was no help for it. I couldn’t make Azoked go away without seeing her. I tried to breathe deeply in the elevator. I counted to ten, and then fifty, as the elevator deposited me at my floor and I walked down the hallway to my door. Breathe. Deeply.
I had thwarted Lawrence Carroll. I had been Satan’s friend for several hundred years. I had survived Nathan Coleman dumping me. I could survive half an hour with a Bastform Akashic Librarian. Without committing murder. I hoped.
I opened the door to find Azoked sitting on my sofa with her feet up, eating Cherry Garcia out of the carton. Even I do not put my feet on the upholstery, at least not unless I was freshly washed. Then she put her used spoon on my coffee table and looked up.
“You are late,” she said, as if I were her secretary and had arrived at work two hours late and hung over.
I refused to dignify her attitude with a reply. Instead, I made rather a show of saying nothing to her while I took off my shoes and unpacked my bag. I made certain to show off the new shoes that had been packed down with stacks of proof sheets.
She seemed to take no notice of my rudeness, but licked her whiskers and her fingers (which were surprisingly human looking, for her face mostly resembled a Siamese cat. A very large cat in a sky blue silk robe and glasses hanging from a matching macramé cord around her neck). Something about the steel gray coloring and the glasses made her appear the perfect blend of feline and strict head librarian. Not the nice librarian who suggested really good books and set aside the latest Janet Evanovich, but the nasty head of department who shushed you as soon as you even thought above a whisper.
