Succubus Takes Manhattan

by Nina Harper

  “Yes, I really wore that,” I snapped, exasperated. The girl might be useful and a willing volunteer, but I wanted to take her head off. “And the rest of it. And if your fashion sense is more early Madonna, that’s your business. Tonight you’re supposed to be me, and these are my clothes.”

  “I hate Madonna,” she wailed. “Madonna is so, like, not cool.”

  It was my turn to say “Whatever,” though I expect that my intonation wasn’t quite as utterly world-weary as a nineteen-year-old’s could be. “Just put them on. And don’t do any makeup.”

  The girl stuck her tongue out before she took the clothes and departed. I was so aghast that I was unable to move or speak or even think for minutes.

  It was Desi’s giggle that brought me back. “You should see yourself,” she said, standing in the doorway. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so . . . stunned, Lily. You look like you’ve just been slapped.”

  Then it was Sybil’s turn to laugh lightly. “Oh, much worse than that. Raven doesn’t like Lily’s clothes.”

  “The little philistine,” Desi said, her tone completely heartfelt.

  “I heard that,” the little philistine yelled from the bathroom. I heard the door slam, and she entered the room.

  “Makeup,” Desi said. “And shoes. What size do you wear?” This last was directed to Raven.

  “Nine,” the girl answered, and I groaned. I wear size five and was thought to have large feet when I was alive. Though it comes in handy now because a lot of samples are sent in less-salable, very small sizes, so I often luck out.

  No such luck for Raven. I didn’t have a pair that would come close. “This is going to be a problem,” I muttered. “Anyone else here wear a nine?”

  Eros did. We all looked at her, but she said nothing. I couldn’t blame her—she was wearing the cutest pair of Christian Louboutins, from the spring line that had just been released a week ago.

  “Meph,” Desi yelled. And Mephistopheles knocked discreetly on the door.

  “Come on in,” I said, but he merely nudged the door a few inches. “Really, it’s okay,” I reassured him, but he resolutely stood his ground. Meph does not think it appropriate to enter a woman’s boudoir unless he is about to seduce her. (Well, that’s the way he would put it.)

  “Raven won’t fit into Lily’s shoes,” Desi explained. “And she can’t go barefoot.”

  “And you can’t find shoes that will fit?” he asked, a little horrified. Meph does not want to know anything about women’s clothes, except how to take them off. He certainly didn’t want to be dragged shopping. Not that that was an option at that hour of the evening.

  “Can you throw a glamour on her shoes?” Desi asked sweetly, pointing to Raven. “Make them look like these?” She held up a pair of my favorite Manolos, the ones with the pink trim on the black straps. They would be exactly what I would choose with that outfit, come to think of it.

  Meph shook his head slowly. “If she were wearing sandals, or something close, I might be able to do it. But she’s got those heavy flat boots the kids wear these days. I can’t enchant them to look like anything but heavy boots.”

  He seemed sad. Raven shrugged. “Why don’t I just wear my boots then? It isn’t like anyone will be looking at my shoes.”

  “Anyone who knows Lily knows she would never, ever, in a million years, wear Docs,” Sybil said.

  “They don’t know Lily that well, though,” Eros pointed out. “They think they know something about us, but Marten confused them in Aruba. They have some information but it’s incomplete.”

  “They know about Public,” I corrected her.

  “Public is, well, public,” Eros continued without missing a beat. “They know things that can be observed, things that they can find out through conventional means. Some things we know they have inside information about, but mostly they’re going on mortal investigation.”

  “My shoes are not exactly a secret,” I groused.

  Eros shrugged. “I doubt they’ve got your Barneys bill. Maybe Meph can do something to smarten up the Docs? Put a few pink flowers on them, or make them appear more like Betsey Johnson’s? She has done some heavy boots with a punk look.”

  I wasn’t sure that Meph could pull it off without at least a picture, and the boots Eros was thinking of were a couple of years out of date.

  “I could possibly do some pink flowers on the boots,” Mephistopheles said dubiously. “If you’d sketch out what you mean. I’m not sure I have any idea how they ought to look.”

  That wouldn’t be hard. Big daisies, throwbacks to the seventies, pink and yellow. Not that I would wear anything like that, but at least they would look like something.

  “No,” Raven protested. “No pink. No flowers on my boots. I’m doing this all your way, but enough is enough.”

  “It’s only illusion,” Eros explained reasonably. “The whole thing will dissolve in a few hours anyway.”

  “No,” Raven said again. She softened. “Please? I’m wearing the clothes, we’ll do the makeup your way, but please don’t make me wear boots with big daisies.”

  How did she know they were daisies? Had she actually remembered the style we were trying to re-create? If she could identify designer boots she might not be completely hopeless after all.

  Something about the girl intrigued me. So many contradictions, all unresolved. Brains and ambition with a clichéd (and unattractive) look, willing to sacrifice, to be hurt, but not to have an illusion cast on her boots.

  “Satan wears Chanel,” Desi said as if she were revealing a secret. “And Dior and Lanvin. Definitely classic French fashion.”

  “Ladies, we’re running out of time,” Meph announced, clearly uncomfortable with the subject matter and where the conversation had ended up. “I suggest that we permit Raven her preferences in footwear, do her makeup, and start over to the park. We have only forty-five minutes.”

  “We’ll never manage her nails,” Eros groused. “So the nails and the shoes will be definitely not Lily.”

  “It’s dark and late and they’d have to notice. They’d have to know and we have no reason to think they will,” Sybil said, and she sounded like a leader, like the kind of powerful, definite person who would turn your quarter of a million into a fortune. “We should just finish up with the makeup and get on with it or we’ll be late, like Meph said.”

  Desi and I took Raven into the bathroom and initiated her into the mysteries of Real Grown-up Makeup. A soft Estée Lauder blush, Lancôme eyebrow filler, and some shaping and arching to the brows themselves (she squirmed and protested while we tweezed, the whole time trying to explain that she had never had her brows waxed. Which was obvious).

  We were ready. We were done. We presented her and reached for our coats.

  “Not you, Lily,” Meph restrained me.

  “What do you mean, not me?” I protested. I’d done the most of anyone to get Raven ready, to hire Nathan, to try to get Vincent back. I wanted to be there for the showdown. I deserved to be there!

  “You still look like yourself, Lily. They’ll see the substitution with you standing right there,” Desi explained gently.

  No, no, this could not be happening. I was going to go. They were not about to keep me away.

  “Give me one minute,” I begged. “Just a minute. I’ve got a wig . . .”

  “No, Lily. Not this time,” Meph interrupted. “You’ve done brilliantly, you’ve served Satan well and I would expect that She will admire your efforts. And one of those efforts has to be staying away from the exchange. Desire is right—your presence could destroy the entire plan.”

  I pouted. I protested. And I gave up, or at least acted as if I accepted my defeat.

  And as soon as they left I ran into the bathroom.

  chapter

  EIGHTEEN

  It took all of ten minutes. Out of my four wigs I chose the dark brown page boy. It was good enough to pass in the dark.

  I found the light blue running suit I’d bou
ght in a fit of insanity last summer when I thought I could find prey jogging through the park. That had lasted for exactly one session. There were plenty of prey in clubs where I could wear pretty clothes and where the men were actually looking for women. Girls in sweats and sneakers didn’t appeal so much, or maybe seemed too wholesome to go home on first acquaintance. In any case, I still had the outfit, white running shoes trimmed in a matching powder blue to go with the soft blue pants and zippered jacket. The clothes and the wig (with a matching blue cap pulled down over the bangs) made me entirely unrecognizable.

  I didn’t even try to use makeup and besides, I didn’t have the time.

  I nabbed a cab right in front of the building and then hesitated for a moment trying to remember exactly where the kidnappers had said to meet. Central Park is a big place—bigger than many small towns. There’s Sheep Meadow, where concerts are held in the summer (it wasn’t there) and the tennis courts (not there either) and the pond and the Met. I’d only seen the note for a minute and I had to reconstruct . . .

  “Central Park. The Carousel.”

  The Carousel was at the south end of the park. In good weather I could walk there from Barneys to celebrate spring. It’s an old-fashioned one, with horses trimmed in painted gilt and silver, an Edwardian fantasy, and it’s popular with families and dating couples alike.

  The cabdriver let me off at Fifth Avenue, and I walked quickly into the park. From afar, the Carousel looked shadowy and haunted; it offered a lot of hiding places. I’d never thought of that before, on the bright spring days when nannies scolded and I’d giggled with my girlfriends and we hung on to the fantastically painted poles and ponies. I would never see it the same way again.

  The Carousel stood out from the trees that were still winter bare. In a month or two everything here would be obscured with foliage, but now it was still stark and barren, the trees just raw trunks emerging from the earth, with none of the wild ferns or cultivated plantings that made the park so inviting when the weather turned warm.

  I peered into the darkness and studied the shadows, but I didn’t see anyone, not the kidnappers, not Meph and Raven and Sybil either.

  Where were they? Had I forgotten, or gotten it wrong? Were they over on the West Side near the Museum of Natural History? Were they hidden in the bushes where New York’s teenagers go to lose their virginity and often their wallets under the hedges? It was still too cold for the kids to be huddled making out where no one might recognize them or pickpockets working the area looking for pants and purses that have been flung aside in the abandon of adolescent passion.

  Fear warmed my belly. It had been a long time since I’d been afraid, really afraid. But I was still afraid of holy water, of attacks, of these Burning Men who knew our weaknesses and wanted to make us suffer. Even more, I was afraid of being wrong, of not finding them, of being thwarted. I was afraid that they’d left me and I would be left out of the action.

  Might as well check out the scene before going anywhere else, I figured, and I made my way down the long flight of steps that hugged the wall. I was careful but my heart was pounding. Not just because of what I might or might not find, but because everyone knows that a woman should not be alone in Central Park this late at night. Central Park in the night belongs to the dealers, the teenagers and lovers, and the people who prey on them. And Central Park late at night has belonged, on a few infamous occasions, to serial killers.

  I may be a demon and impervious to death, but I was also a New Yorker to the bone and I knew right down to the soles of my ridiculous white Nikes that I was entering the danger zone. I pushed my hands into the pockets of the warm-up jacket, and there found a hard metal tube. I clutched it in my palm, finding the nozzle area with my thumb. Pepper spray. I’d tucked it in the pocket of the suit when I’d used it for jogging, along with a whistle.

  Great. I had a whistle and pepper spray against a gang of demon hunters who were armed with holy water that burned like napalm, and probably other things besides. Possibly blessed crosses and maybe even relics. I hadn’t been close to a relic in over a hundred years.

  And I was going to fight them with pepper spray? I was clearly an idiot.

  Then I saw a flicker of movement, shadow in shadow, deep in the undergrowth. I heard something scuffling, something large. I held my breath and pressed myself against the cold damp stone wall.

  The shadow moved again and it was large, humansized. Though what kind of human? I wanted to crouch, to hide, only there was nowhere to go without drawing attention to myself. Very slowly I slid down to the steps, holding my breath. Please please please don’t look this way, I thought. I held the pepper spray can and pulled my hand free of the pocket. Just in case.

  “Miss, are you okay?”

  I looked up and nearly screamed. I knew that face and . . . didn’t he recognize me? If I could fool Nathan then I could certainly fool kidnappers.

  “It’s me, Nathan. Lily.”

  “Lily?”

  I sat up a little straighter. He was bent over me, shielding me from the view of the Carousel. “What are you doing here?” I demanded.

  “I should ask you the same thing,” he hissed. “And you’re obviously in some kind of disguise. So tell me why you’re here instead of safe where I left you.”

  “I asked you first,” I said, petulant.

  He sighed and rolled his eyes. Which I could see quite clearly in the dark, the whites shining in the starlight. “This happens to be my job. You hired me, remember. So I’m out here to see if I can observe these kidnappers and maybe follow them back to their lair. You weren’t going to do anything stupid?” He looked at me and groaned. “No, you’re already in the middle of doing something stupid. Why couldn’t you stay home? I’m a professional and we have procedures for these situations. You’re an amateur and you don’t belong here. Go home, Lily, and let the professional you’re paying take care of this.”

  I shook my head stubbornly.

  Well, he could have been worse. At least he hadn’t said that I was incompetent, and it was true that I wasn’t a professional. Who’d want this job anyway, slinking around in the middle of the night in the park in the cold? Bleh. But I still had too much at stake, and it was personal now.

  So I told him in a whisper that hurt my throat about Meph and Raven and how they were planning to make the switch and then track Raven magically.

  “I told you, I told all of you, not to do exactly this. We. Do. Not. Give. In. To. Kidnappers,” he recited as if it were the Prime Directive or something.

  “This isn’t exactly your normal case,” I pointed out. “So how much time do we have?”

  “Enough time for you to get in a cab and get out of here before they’re supposed to show,” he said, pulling me up.

  I jerked away. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying here. He’s my doorman and Raven is wearing my face and my clothes—”

  “I should have known that the clothes would come into it somehow,” Nathan interjected.

  I looked at him curiously. “Well, she looked totally stupid in that garbage she had on. No one would ever take her for me.”

  “You’re going home,” Nathan ordered me.

  He seemed to have forgotten that I didn’t take orders well. “No I’m not. I’m staying right here.”

  He probably would have argued longer but I saw more movement behind him. “Shhh,” I warned him. “There’s something back there.”

  “Get under cover and stay here,” he said, dragging me a few feet over to where a tree drooped close to the wall. It wasn’t much cover but it was better than nothing. Only I couldn’t see anything. So I waited until he moved into a better position and followed him.

  I had to say I admired him then. He slunk from view, he merged into the few shadows of barren trees more than I thought possible.

  I moved over at least fifty feet closer to where I’d seen movement. Then, aware that I was a shining beacon of pastel in the night, and that neither Nathan nor Meph wanted me
there, I picked a spot that might not have had as much cover as the one where Nathan had deposited me, but where at least I could see whatever was going on. I pressed myself into the trunk of the tree and dared only peek around the side.

  I couldn’t see Nathan at all. Maybe he really was that good at hiding, or maybe I just didn’t know where to look. I didn’t have time to try more carefully because a sudden movement and a crackle in the dry twigs caught my attention.

  It was Meph and my friends. I could hear Desi stage-whispering, making comments about outfits that people should really not have worn. They were walking loudly and too carefully, their lovely Jimmy Choos and Louboutins not up to the terrain. Maybe Raven keeping her boots had not been such a bad idea after all.

  From this distance in the night she looked so much like me that even I wasn’t sure that she wasn’t. The fake fur Betsy Johnson shrug over the thin lace blouse was probably not all that warm, but she walked as if she were walking on the runway in Milan, not through Central Park at night to be handed over to our enemies. Meph escorted her, her hand on his elbow.

  They stopped and stood near the entrance, where during the summer days a bored employee takes money and tickets and opens the gate when the Carousel stops and a new round of people get on. My attention was so fixed on them that at first I didn’t even see the kidnappers approach. They were leading Vincent with a pillowcase over his head. Not even a plain white pillowcase, but one with the logo of the Mets. That was pretty low, I thought. Vincent was a Yankees fan.

  They were inside the Carousel gate and came up slowly. Meph came forward to them and talked softly to the man who appeared to be the leader. Although I’d seen Craig Branford several times, in the dark and half obscured by the rest of the company, I couldn’t be sure if it was him. I hoped it was him. I would hate to think there was another one leading another group of Burning Men, though I knew that was extremely unlikely.

  Or maybe it was a lieutenant; maybe Branford himself didn’t dare show up in person. Maybe he was afraid of being revealed, or maybe he didn’t want this action traced to his organization. Which was nuts since that would be the first place we’d look. But still. These self-righteous idiots don’t realize that there are some fairly intelligent residents in Hell and that some of us can figure out their idiot devices.