Succubus in the City (8 page)

“Yeah,” I lied, but for some reason his mistake bothered me. Maybe because he never did ask my name.

Suddenly I wanted him gone as quickly as possible. I didn’t want to have to make him come in order to go, but that was my inescapable burden. My prey have only one way to Hell, and that’s through Heaven. Or at least one really spectacular orgasm.

Sighing, and knowing it was only a preliminary promise, I started to caress his cock with my soapy hand. Big shock, he started to get hard. I would have bet money that he had been too drunk to get an erection, but clearly I was wrong. Maybe it was his capacity for alcohol, maybe it was that he had a quick metabolism, or maybe he was just lucky. Maybe it was me who was lucky.

He had slumped to the bottom of the oversized tub and was stretched out as if on a bed. He sighed and leaned his head back against the high-contoured tub wall as I wrapped my fingers more firmly around his hardening member and began to squeeze in earnest. If I were lucky, if I were very lucky…

I helped him to stand and started to give him the hand job of his life in the shower. When he sagged against the tile I supported him with my hip and shoulder because if I were very, very lucky I wouldn’t have to do any more.

Just a few more good, firm strokes.

“Oh yeah, oh yeah, baby, don’t stop,” he moaned.

I didn’t. I didn’t dare hope but I pumped my hand like a prayer of deliverance and licked into his ear for good measure.

He just leaned against the tile and let me do him. Since he’d stopped squeezing my breasts, he hadn’t bothered to touch me, except to hang on to my shoulder when his knees went weak. Not even an attempt to turn me on, to do anything for me at all.

I held his balls lightly and then massaged softly behind them with my left hand as my right kept going. I tightened my grip and added a bit of speed, of insistence. I wanted him to come. I wanted him gone.

And then he came in the shower, all over my thighs and his. Not a huge orgasm but I didn’t care. He had been so drunk I was shocked he could manage at all. Desperation, it had to have been.

He came and he cried out, and suddenly he disappeared in a flash of flame and a swirl of greasy gray ashes down the drain.

Now I only had clothes to hand over to Vincent in the morning.

Even though it was near three in the morning, and I had to be at work in five hours, I turned off the spray and got out the Scrubbing Bubbles and scoured the tub immediately.

Then I took a long and very hot shower with my favorite lavender soap and shampooed my hair twice.

When I felt fresh and decent I toweled my hair dry and then wrapped a clean towel around it. If I could get it mostly dry, I would only have to blow dry for a few minutes before I went to sleep. Then I took care of business.

First, I wrested Kevin’s wallet from his wet jeans. He had almost two hundred dollars in cash, which went into my wallet. I looked at his driver’s license. I was right, he was from New Jersey. Twenty-six years old. A gold MasterCard with a NASCAR sticker filled out the rest of the contents of his billfold. No pictures, no business cards, not any he had collected or any of his own. Not even a phone number written in pencil on a cocktail napkin.

His jeans and boxers were soaking, so I laid them over the shower rail to dry. I’d give everything to Vincent to take to Lighthouse International, the store for the sight-challenged on East Fifty-ninth Street. No rush on this, and I am careful to rotate charity shops. I wasn’t expecting company for a day or two at the least. I’d leave the wallet without the cash on the seat of the cab that I took in the morning.

By the time I’d finished these little chores my hair was ready for a touch-up with the blow dryer. Then I settled into my soft luxury sheets, blissfully alone.

chapter
EIGHT

Desi was sobbing so hard that I was having trouble making out her words. I caught “Steve” and “Satan” and “museum” but I could have been wrong about any of them. Maybe I really should change carriers again, I thought, as I asked her to repeat herself for the twentieth time. Or buy a phone separate from the Treo. The Raz-r is really cute in an edgy kind of way. I wondered if it worked any better.

“Argggh, eeee, Steveeeee, rrrrrr, glbglb,” came through the handset.

“Cafeteria,” I shouted, twice. “Cafeteria. At one.”

I hoped no one in the office could hear me. The door was closed, but the walls are thin. I wish she’d called on the landline, but Desi is nothing if not addicted to her speed dial. Since it was Friday and 11:30, a fair number of the staff were already starting on lunch, and most of the rest of the office were on their phones finalizing their weekend plans. I hoped.

There were a few more incoherent noises before there was nothing. I hoped she’d heard me. Just to be sure, I sent an e-mail to her work address. Not that she would be sitting in front of her computer at the moment, given the condition she was in.

Since Cafeteria at one was one of our usuals, I hoped at worst she’d opt for the default. Oh, what the hell. I picked up my office landline and looked up her office phone. When she didn’t pick up I left a voice mail. “Look, Desi, I think you need a shoulder. Cafeteria at one for lunch, I’ll see you there.” Then I hung up and hoped she could make it through the next hour and a half.

Desi is a desire demon. I had once understood that to mean that she created unquenchable desire in her prey. They adored her, they could not exist without her, and she got them to sign a contract with Hell for their souls in return for having their desires, or at least some of them, fulfilled. They want her so badly that they don’t even hold out for a demon contract; no, they sign their souls over to eternal torment just to have whatever she will provide.

Eros and Sybil work the same way, delivery by contract. Which rates more highly because it is ostensibly willing. Ostensibly only because my friends inspire such desire, lust, or greed in their prey that their prey are only too happy to sign. The very best of their recruits (though only about one percent) are eligible to become demons, though that has to be bargained and in the contract in advance. Almost none of their victims even realizes this alternative is possible, and we don’t advertise. If they don’t ask for it, in writing, in full legal format in all six of the appropriate paragraphs, they don’t get it. And since we’ve got all the best lawyers, we can usually get contracts interpreted the way we want them.

In reality, it appears to me that Desi feels as much desire for her current object as he feels for her. She angsts, she despairs, she gets all giddy and loses her sense. And she is constantly in this state because this is her position. Embodying desire for others means that she experiences it herself in far greater measure, and a whole lot more often.

Poor Desi.

I wondered what Steve had done to her.

Friday was a quiet day at the office and I’d finished most of the work I really had to do. So I had MagicMirror up on my computer. Asura, Lady of Vengeance, had taken a vacation to Aruba where she drowned two divers and complained about the cuisine. Which seemed like it was mostly American chains and steak houses. Well, what do you expect, going to a Dutch island? I was really tempted to write that in her reply column, but you don’t say things like that to the Lady of Vengeance.

I watched the freezing rain splatter the window. Aruba sounded nice. Two days now without sun and constant precipitation—no wonder Desi was a mess. What’s the good of being a demon with a pile of cash when I couldn’t take off and go to Aruba for the weekend? Everyone else on MagicMirror was someplace warm and nice. Asura in Aruba, Beelzebub in Rio, even the Furies were off in Baghdad, which sounded a lot nicer than New York in the rain. Of course, they were just loving all the war and chaos and were hoping to take credit for some of it. As usual. They really liked to go where everyone else had been in on the action and then talk like they were responsible.

Hi everyone! Ohhhh, this is one of those travel posts just like sending picture postcards but so much faster! We just couldn’t resist war and mayhem! Bombs, mines, all the fun and none of the bad weather. Restaurants are a little scarce and most of them aren’t very good at the moment. Journalists have such pedestrian taste—it’s all lamb and roast beef and rice. And no drinks! When we finish up stirring up the crazies here, we’re off to someplace where cute young waiters serve drinks with umbrellas in them.

Anyway, having loads of fun! Wish you were here! Well, you probably wish you were here, but look at all the souls we’ve delivered in so little time. So easy. *sigh* It’s almost like a vacation.

I mean, really! At least they write with capital letters and punctuation and have not succumbed to IM abbreviations.

I was so fed up with their posturing that I closed down the site and went to zappos.com instead. And after a thorough perusal of how various companies are trying to copy the best designs it was time to go to lunch.

The restaurant is in Chelsea, very trendy with the twenty-something set and very loud. It also serves amazing lychee Bellinis, blood orange martinis, and the kind of comfort food that a demon in distress really needs. There are elegant selections on the menu as well, but I thought that Desi could use a burger or mac and cheese, and how many cool and trendy places can offer lychee Bellinis
and
mac and cheese?

Desi was already seated at a table when I arrived. She was in a back corner, as private as anything could be in this room. A large bright cocktail sat in front of her.

Good. At least she was taking some kind of care of herself, then.

“Hey, I thought this should be a three-martini lunch,” I quipped at her as I took a seat.

A waiter appeared immediately and I ordered a blood orange martini and another of whatever Desi had. She would probably need it, and it was better to be prepared.

For a desire demon, Desi looked a mess. Usually her shiny hair, a perfectly exquisite but understated shade of warm honey brown, bounced in gentle waves to just below her shoulders. Now it looked stringy and dull. Her eyes, usually as large and round and blue as an anime character’s, were red, surrounded by dark puffy circles. Her white blouse, the one with the extravagant cuffs, looked wilted, and washed out her complexion. She looked like she’d been up all night.

“Hey, Des,” I said, and I squeezed the hand that lay limp on the table.

And she began to cry. “I don’t know, Lily,” she said. “I don’t think I’m heartbroken; I think mostly I’m just angry. Or am I losing my touch? Am I all washed up? Am I a
failure
?” Her voice went up at the end in a long wail.

“You’re certainly not a failure,” I stated firmly. “What happened?”

“You remember Steve, that cute cop I met last Sunday at brunch? We had a date last night to go to the Brooklyn Museum, to see the display of his uncle’s designs.”

“Did you go?” I asked.

She nodded. “He picked me up at six and we went for sushi and then we went to Brooklyn. It seemed like everything was great. We were having a good time and he took me through the museum and for a cop he really understands art. He gets it in a big way. We even talked about that, and I found out that he studied architecture at Cooper Union.”

I whistled, impressed. “Why’s he a cop, then?”

“His uncle. He’s a cop because his uncle is this world-famous architect and he wanted to take Steve on and make Steve move to Rome.”

“That’s not the end of the world,” I pointed out. “What’s so bad about Rome?”

“His uncle is a tyrant and Steve felt like he was never going to leave the family. He wanted to get out on his own and do something himself.”

I nodded. So far there was nothing to explain Desi’s misery, the mascara blotched from tears and the mis-application of tissues. “So what happened?” I asked. “What’s the problem?”

“He’s Catholic,” she wailed, and then sobbed into her sodden hankie. “I don’t know how he knew what I was, but he knew. But we were in the museum and I went to the ladies’ and before that we were talking about stopping for a late snack afterward. And then I got out of the ladies’ and he was talking to this guy and then he saw me and he looked like he’d seen something awful. Like I had turned into some kind of monster. And then he hissed at me, I mean he really actually
hissed
and said ‘I abjure thee, creature of Satan, servant of darkness.’ And the rest of the formula, too, only I can’t bear to repeat it.”

Then she broke down again, sobbing anew. At least this bout of tears cleaned off some of the runny bits of makeup still clinging to her lashes.

“How could that be?” I asked. “Whoever that man was you saw in the museum must have told him.”

“I’d figured that out already,” Desi said. “But how did he know? How did he know where I’d be? How’d he know Steve was my date? And mostly, how did he know that Steve would know the full formula to reject me?”

Reject. What a mild, puny word for what he’d done to Desi! Had she been some minor minion, his formula (along with the appropriate paraphernalia and faith) would have cast her directly into Hell. But she is old and strong and one of Satan’s girlfriends, so she was only desperately hurt and mauled and in tears.

“But when you didn’t explode in a puff of smoke or something, didn’t he figure out that he was wrong and apologize?” I inquired. Not that he was wrong, of course, but usually when they try that and we don’t disappear according to schedule they decide that we’re not monsters at all and that they got it wrong. Clearly Steve had not followed the mainstream line of thinking on this.

“He didn’t. He didn’t even take me home. He stranded me in Brooklyn.”

Just then the waiter appeared and I ordered our lunch. “Two macaroni and cheese, another lychee Bellini, and two Banana Nilla Vanilla puddings for dessert.” Desi was definitely in need of comfort food. For a moment I wondered if I should have just ordered dessert and have done with it, but Desi needed vitamins and protein as well.

I waited until the waiter was well away before I asked my next question. “Have you told Satan?”