Succubus Takes Manhattan Read Online Free Page A

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