Succubus Takes Manhattan Read Online Free

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