Succubus in the City by Nina Harper Read Free Book Online

could eat them if you wanted to. Except they’d taste like soap. Taste the truffles instead. Mmmmm. Chocolate.
    I slept deeply that night and woke up and went to work on Monday dressed in a new Versace blouse with my favorite tweed pencil skirt.
    I actually love my job. I’m the accessories editor at Trend , a famous and important women’s fashion magazine, and today I had to sort through two stories and a photo shoot for our next issue, get the writer and stylist moving for the issue after, and decide on the page, writer, and photographer for the month after that. Not to mention the regular monthly updates on accessories and bags, which I usually work out myself with the help of one of my favorite photographers and the art department.
    So I was leafing through the press releases from various companies when I saw the most adorable Kate Spade bags for spring in woven wicker with different-colored leather accents. Those wicker bags, they were the stuff of my lust. One set even had the leather trim in a pale metallic bronze. It would be perfect with everything in my wardrobe and it just flattered my complexion. I admit that I spent more time fantasizing myself with this new bag than going over photos for the next issue.
    Yes, I work. We all work. Sometimes, on the really bad days, I wonder why I bother, why I don’t stay in bed all day eating chocolates and watching DVDs. I don’t really need the money, which is good because in publishing I don’t earn enough to live the way I live anyway. That’s on the bad weeks. Mostly, though, I work because sitting at home all day gets lonely and dull after the second week. And I’ve made mortal friends in the office and it keeps me in touch with the way the world is today. Whenever today happens to be.
    Back in previous eras I’d done different things. Of course, being in the Court (Ottoman, Russian, Dutch, and English under Charles II) was always a proper job along with the perks. How else could I establish my credentials among the decadent nobility? Then in the Victorian period proper women didn’t work, but we were expected to spend a lot of time supporting Causes. I helped organize charity balls to assist fallen women. Being one myself, I felt that I was uniquely in a position to assess their needs. Besides, I rather liked organizing charity balls.
    Truth is, without a husband or children and without any friends who are free during the day to meet for lunch and museums and shopping, life is just too dull without a job. Work also gives me a sense of who I am when I’m not being a succubus. I mean, I can’t be all succubus all the time. I don’t have the stomach for that many men in Arrow polyester and even Satan doesn’t ask for more than three deliveries a month. When I was a Priestess there were things to do besides sex (which was a sacred part of our duties in Babylon) and ritual worship, singing and chanting and decorating altars. The Temple was a business, and as a prospective High Priestess I had to learn to run it, to deal with tradesmen and schedule deliveries and decide on allocations. How much for sacred oil this moon, and were we going through the sacramental beer too quickly.
    Honestly, a lot of my life in the Temple was straightforward management, no different from any manager in any company in modern New York. No different from running a brothel, either, which I’d done a few times when I’d had to train a few of Satan’s newer recruits.
    I thought about the many experiences I’d had as I sat through an afternoon marketing meeting. How many hundreds of thousands of meetings just like this one had I endured in my long existence? At least I’d perfected the pretense that I was paying attention while I let my mind wander, and chimed in just on cue about the new line of bags and how I thought we needed to target more accessory houses for advertising. Which was what they all expected me to say, and then the conversation went back to the age-old argument of