before and we’ll do it again. And we’ll start our investigation tonight. So now, dessert,” Satan ordered.
One does not disobey the Prince of Hell, so I paid careful attention to my lingonberry crème brûlée, along with bites of Desi’s Arctic Circle dessert (made with blueberry sorbet and passion fruit curd), which Martha had declared a medicinal necessity. Seratonin levels and all that. And Satan ordered ice wine all around for all of us, sweet and cool and just the right bit of alcoholic tinge to the very scary evening.
chapter
TEN
It wasn’t until I got home and signed on to MagicMirror that I realized that I’d gotten a new job. Along with being a succubus and an accessories editor, I was now the head of a research team. Great. It’s a good thing that I had a decent education when I was mortal—or what passed as an elite education back in Babylon, though at the time even the Dewey decimal system and microfiche were beyond imagination, let alone Internet search engines. I started to hope that our assigned demon would be as good with them as with the Akashic record.
My laptop was sitting on the coffee table where I’d left it that morning. I threw my coat on the floor next to the sofa, reached over and booted up. As I waited for the programs to check that they had all their parts I ran my palms over the gold and rose silk upholstery and studied the walls. But I still liked my deep bronze paint and architectural white moldings.
Being good, I checked the e-mail left for me at my MagicMirror dump, which was different from my work or personal e-mail addresses. Nice touch of Satan’s, to have my new minion get in touch with me here and leaving it up to me whether or not I should give out other personal methods of communication. And, indeed, there was already a message in my in-box bearing the Akashic ISP address.
Lilith Ad-Hzar, Princess of Babylon, Priestess of Ishtar, servant of Hell , was the first line of the e-mail. I had to admit that I liked the style. Obviously this demon, in the hour it had taken me to consume my dessert, hug my friends, and get into a taxi uptown, had already done a good solid search on me.
I am the Librarian Azoked, assigned to assist your investigation. Let me say first that it has been my privilege to serve Satan with my specialized abilities and training for two thousand years. While I have been in charge of a research project for the past five hundred years, Satan Herself has requested my personal attention to this matter. As I have not been fully briefed on the situation, I will need the particulars, both of the conditions and the context in order to resolve your predicament.
Azoked, Librarian
Okay, Azoked, how about let’s get started now. I hit Reply and typed out the words, hit Send, and then went on to my friends’ page.
I’d barely read the very first post (Melanie, one of Eros’s clan, was taking a vacation in Corfu and wanted shopping and packing advice—I didn’t even have time to tell her that Barneys had just gotten in some great beachwear—when I smelled a sharp strike of sulfur. I turned and there was an elegant Bastform demon librarian plugging the power supply for her Thinkpad into my socket.
I was suddenly grateful that I’d been sitting on the sofa in the living room, fully dressed. Thank all Hell and the engineers for wireless connections, though usually I felt that way when I was online in bed, wearing an oversized Ozzy tee. (Okay, they’d been handouts all over Hell about twenty years ago, though really he never was one of us. Talk about a poseur! But he tickled Satan all the same and She made sure we all had that No Rest for the Wicked promo shirt—which by now had been washed to soft and cozy and which I sometimes like to wear in utter defiance of the entire world.)
After all, I have all the wonderful, beautiful things a girl could want. But sometimes I don’t want to feel like I have to be beautiful all the time. Sometimes I
One does not disobey the Prince of Hell, so I paid careful attention to my lingonberry crème brûlée, along with bites of Desi’s Arctic Circle dessert (made with blueberry sorbet and passion fruit curd), which Martha had declared a medicinal necessity. Seratonin levels and all that. And Satan ordered ice wine all around for all of us, sweet and cool and just the right bit of alcoholic tinge to the very scary evening.
chapter
TEN
It wasn’t until I got home and signed on to MagicMirror that I realized that I’d gotten a new job. Along with being a succubus and an accessories editor, I was now the head of a research team. Great. It’s a good thing that I had a decent education when I was mortal—or what passed as an elite education back in Babylon, though at the time even the Dewey decimal system and microfiche were beyond imagination, let alone Internet search engines. I started to hope that our assigned demon would be as good with them as with the Akashic record.
My laptop was sitting on the coffee table where I’d left it that morning. I threw my coat on the floor next to the sofa, reached over and booted up. As I waited for the programs to check that they had all their parts I ran my palms over the gold and rose silk upholstery and studied the walls. But I still liked my deep bronze paint and architectural white moldings.
Being good, I checked the e-mail left for me at my MagicMirror dump, which was different from my work or personal e-mail addresses. Nice touch of Satan’s, to have my new minion get in touch with me here and leaving it up to me whether or not I should give out other personal methods of communication. And, indeed, there was already a message in my in-box bearing the Akashic ISP address.
Lilith Ad-Hzar, Princess of Babylon, Priestess of Ishtar, servant of Hell , was the first line of the e-mail. I had to admit that I liked the style. Obviously this demon, in the hour it had taken me to consume my dessert, hug my friends, and get into a taxi uptown, had already done a good solid search on me.
I am the Librarian Azoked, assigned to assist your investigation. Let me say first that it has been my privilege to serve Satan with my specialized abilities and training for two thousand years. While I have been in charge of a research project for the past five hundred years, Satan Herself has requested my personal attention to this matter. As I have not been fully briefed on the situation, I will need the particulars, both of the conditions and the context in order to resolve your predicament.
Azoked, Librarian
Okay, Azoked, how about let’s get started now. I hit Reply and typed out the words, hit Send, and then went on to my friends’ page.
I’d barely read the very first post (Melanie, one of Eros’s clan, was taking a vacation in Corfu and wanted shopping and packing advice—I didn’t even have time to tell her that Barneys had just gotten in some great beachwear—when I smelled a sharp strike of sulfur. I turned and there was an elegant Bastform demon librarian plugging the power supply for her Thinkpad into my socket.
I was suddenly grateful that I’d been sitting on the sofa in the living room, fully dressed. Thank all Hell and the engineers for wireless connections, though usually I felt that way when I was online in bed, wearing an oversized Ozzy tee. (Okay, they’d been handouts all over Hell about twenty years ago, though really he never was one of us. Talk about a poseur! But he tickled Satan all the same and She made sure we all had that No Rest for the Wicked promo shirt—which by now had been washed to soft and cozy and which I sometimes like to wear in utter defiance of the entire world.)
After all, I have all the wonderful, beautiful things a girl could want. But sometimes I don’t want to feel like I have to be beautiful all the time. Sometimes I
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