Succubus Takes Manhattan (2 page)

When I woke up in Venice, I had not been able to forget history (my own and its own) and misery (all mine), and so the only reasonable thing was to go shopping.

Shopping in Venice is as picturesque and inconvenient as anything else in this city, with no wheeled vehicles and hundreds of bridges, all with steps. It isn’t easy to get a water taxi. They don’t cruise like taxis in New York. Gondolas, which had once been used for actual transportation, are now tourist commodities. The gondoliers all have their regular routes and little chats like the people who drive horse-drawn carriages around Central Park. They won’t take you to, say, Barneys.

Down in the shopping district around San Marco I bought two Prada jackets, several pairs of Versace slacks that hadn’t shown up in New York, and a pile of Valentino shoes, blouses and skirts. I hauled the packages down to the vaporetto stand and took the Number One public boat up the Grand Canal.

On the boat I saw a face that I was certain I’d seen in Versace, or maybe outside La Perla. Not a particularly remarkable man, not a face I would have noticed except that he bore a strong resemblance to Vincent, my doorman back home. The Number One is the most used vaporetto in the city, I told myself. It is big, a water bus with multiple stops. Probably just a coincidence. But I nervously shredded the ribbon handle of the shopping bag all the same.

It was not far to Ca’ d’Oro, just behind the second bend in the canal. Ca’ d’Oro is one of the most beautiful of the Grand Canal palaces, smaller than some but decorated in the vaguely Eastern and very ornate style that has become the hallmark of Venetian design.

I got off the boat as quickly as possible and walked across the Campo Apostoli to my hotel. If he followed me I should be able to spot him in the open square, but I wanted a running start. Apostoli is open but there is a café, a restaurant, and a church, to say nothing of the tobacco shop on the corner. Plenty of places to hide. I cut through the restaurant tables set out on the cobblestones with their green and white checked cloths and walked close to the building until I hit the gelateria half a block up. Not the best gelateria in Venice, but I could duck inside rather than buy my ice cream from the window. As I ordered and the strawberry ice cream was scooped into a cone, I watched out the large glass door.

He was there, casually perusing the menu at the restaurant where I had tried to disappear. I pressed my back against the wall, trying to watch him while he couldn’t see me. The server had to call me twice to get my ice cream, and I took the cone and resumed my post inside the door.

This could have just been his stop, I thought. He could just be hungry. But when he looked around the square, took a few minutes to read the café menu (which was very short) and then crossed the campo to inspect scarves set out on a rack in front of a shop, I couldn’t believe it was coincidence.

“Is there a problem, miss?” the petite woman behind the counter asked in Venetian dialect.

I wanted to say no, but I couldn’t manage to speak until I’d taken a few deep breaths. “I think that man followed me when I got off the vaporetto,” I said in the same dialect. When Admin changed my identity and gave me American English they had not removed my Italian. I speak it fluently and the Venetian dialect also, which is not really Italian and is unintelligible to anyone not raised Venetian.

The woman came out from behind the counter and looked where I was pointing. She snorted. “Here,” she said, and showed me out the back of the shop into an alley. I circled from the opposite direction and entered the hotel from the side entrance instead of the front. If the man waited for me to emerge in the square he was going to wait a long time, but that didn’t stop my heart from pounding.

I threw the new bags into the closet and they landed on top of several other shopping bags with elite logos. All I had done for days was hunt and shop and be angry. And when I was angry I hunted and made random men pay for my heartbreak. Which, in my opinion, was perfectly reasonable.

Now I was afraid and confused. How could anyone know I was in Venice? Who would possibly know I was here? They couldn’t have followed me, not the men who had hunted us back in Brooklyn. Only my closest friends knew where I was.

I thought about changing my clothes, going out and hunting down the man who had followed me. Hunting him and delivering his soul to Satan. The part of me that was furious with Nathan, the part of me that had been hurt and frightened so many times by the Knight Defenders, who had tried to eliminate all the demons in New York, was all for it. But I didn’t really want to hunt. I didn’t want to get that close, that intimate, with an enemy who was trying to destroy me.

I waited, tense, for a call from the hotel desk. I expected my shadow to come looking for me, but after an hour and a half the call never came. Maybe he hadn’t known where I was staying. The hotel is discreet and down several blocks from the campo; you would have to know it was there. Perhaps he didn’t know.

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.