chapter
TWELVE

A short nap and a hot bath later, I had just climbed into the realm of survivable. I’d lit three aromatherapy candles, one for calm, one for relaxation, and one for stress release. This was possibly a mistake as the scents blended into a jumbled mishmash rather than a pleasing potpourri. Still, I managed not to think about Vincent or Lawrence or work or even Meph and his problems. I let my mind drift over my wardrobe instead. After all, I still had a date tonight.

Then my cell phone shattered my fragile cocoon.

I debated not picking it up. The whole thing hurt too much, as if I were sore from a ski accident and achy all over, and any pressure, any interruption only made the dull throbbing erupt into acute agony.

The phone did not stop, and so, knowing that this was a stupid move, I answered it.

“Lily, you were brilliant,” Danielle said over a strangely echoey connection. “Lawrence, he stormed out of the office screaming. He ran into the street, he didn’t even take his coat.”

“Don’t tell me he got run over,” I said, terrified that I’d killed the guy—without ensuring his eternal torment first.

“We are not so lucky,” Danielle answered. “But he is gone for today, and who knows how long he will stay gone. He was in a rage. He pounded on Amanda’s door and demanded that she fire you immediately.”

“And?” I asked. Lawrence might be powerful enough to make such demands and even get Amanda to listen to him, but she didn’t make editor in chief by being an idiot.

“She told him to stuff it. Just like that,” Danielle chortled. “She said she was tired of his infantile displays. I quote exactly. She said those very words. That is when he left.”

“Danielle, you’re an angel,” I told her, crossing my fingers. Not that Danielle is not the best coworker in the world, but “angel” isn’t exactly a compliment where I’m from. “What do you think will happen?”

“I do not know,” she said airily. “It does not matter. You have won. Amanda supported you and told Lawrence that he was infantile. Which he is. I think the meeting tomorrow will be very interesting. But . . . I still do not understand what the problem was. What made him so very angry with you?”

Ahhhh, now I understood why she was calling. I was shocked that she hadn’t been able to hear every word even though the door was closed. And I wondered if she’d called out of her own curiosity or if some of the others had put her up to it.

“You know, everyone has looked at your office,” Danielle told me after I’d finished my recitation. “It looks like Iraq, like someone fought a war in there. All those lovely purses, all over the floor.”

I almost sniffled. “Don’t let anyone take anything. Tomorrow I’ll have to redo what I did today. There are some really nice bags for a bunch of the upcoming shoots. If nothing’s damaged, a lot of the folk in fashion are going to be very happy.”

“You will have much support,” Danielle assured me solemnly. “What are you doing now? When you left for lunch we thought you needed to go home and drink and take a lot of Valium.”

“I had a bath and I’m going to have to go get dressed. I have a date tonight.”

“Oh, no,” Danielle exclaimed. “How can you have a date after such a terrible day? Tonight you should wear only your slippers and eat foie gras and chocolate and not have to be amusing or look elegant.”

I laughed. “Really, Danielle, I’m a bit shaky but I think a date is just the thing to take my mind off the whole Lawrence debacle.” Not to mention Vincent.

She joined me in laughter. “Well, then, we shall see you tomorrow at editorial meeting?”

“If I’m not in before the meeting do you think anyone would mind?”

“Lily, if you manage to make it to meeting tomorrow at all you will be our heroine. Already everyone thinks that you deserve at least a full day of sick leave and extra hazard pay.” Danielle said this very seriously, which always made her accent more pronounced.

“That’s the best reason in the world for me to show up. So I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”

When I got off the phone I felt much better. Definitely worth dripping down the hallway to get the call, I decided. Suddenly I felt free of the crushing misery of Lawrence’s tantrum and ready to go out with Marten.


I was just thinking it was time to leave when the intercom buzzed. An unfamiliar doorman came on the line and announced that Marten was here and should he send him up?

I was disoriented and a bit confused. I’d thought I was meeting Marten at his hotel. I hadn’t expected him to come up to me. “I’ll meet him in the lobby,” I said, and grabbed my coat and bag.

The lobby of my building is not as grand as Eros’s, but it is warm and comfortable. Two large overstuffed club sofas face each other on the polished marble tile floor in front of an oversized fireplace. Usually fires are lit from December through February, but this month was cold enough that a fire was roaring on the hearth. I was glad that Marten had the opportunity to sit in comfort. He sat as close to the fire as he could get and was staring into it, and he didn’t see me arrive.

“Marten, I’d thought I was going downtown to pick you up. I hadn’t expected you to come here,” I said as I approached.

Marten shrugged. “Yes, I know I was taking a chance, but it did seem the more polite thing to do. You don’t mind?”

I shook my head.

“You didn’t want me to come up,” he said. He made it a simple statement of fact, without accusation or edge.

“I had a bad day at work and the place is a mess. I didn’t want you to see dirty dishes and lingerie draped all over,” I said lightly.

He smiled, and his eyes crinkled pleasantly at the corners and warmed. “I am sorry, I should have thought,” he said. “Of course you could not be expected to want a visitor on a workday. Where did you want to eat? Unlike my own city, which is more like a small town compared to this, there are so many choices that I could not decide.”

“I made a reservation at Pastis,” I told him. Thank the Internet for Opentable.com—and some pull in Hell to get a table at one of the hottest places in the city at the last minute. Meph must want something from Marten very badly to give us his reservation, because it was Meph who offered. I would have been fine taking my chances on the line at Cafeteria.

We got into a taxi and piled several large shopping bags into the trunk. I waited until we were settled and the cabbie confirmed where we were going before I popped the question. “Why did you come pick me up? We could have missed each other.”

“But we didn’t,” Marten said. “I was in the neighborhood anyway and I wanted to see where you lived. It’s very nice.”

“In the neighborhood?” I was suspicious.

“Barneys.” Well, okay, he did have the evidence. Those shopping bags. There wasn’t anything like Barneys in Orangestad.

But Barneys was twenty blocks downtown. Not in the neighborhood at all, not by my reckoning.

Marten reached over and took my hand across the cab’s backseat. “I am so happy that you have some time to see me this evening. You had a bad day at work—will you tell me about it?”

Maybe I was just in a suspicious mood, but I wasn’t buying the terribly nice-guy act. He was covering something up. I was intrigued, but I wasn’t going to pass by an opportunity to tell him about Lawrence and his temper tantrums and how he terrorized the entire office. I didn’t tell him about Vincent, though. Not quite yet.

And Marten listened. All the way downtown from the 60s (since it took that long to have the earlier part of the conversation) he paid attention, asked appropriate questions, appeared to actually process what I was saying. By the time we got out at Pastis, he had said very little besides “Why is that?” and “He did what?”

We were seated much faster than I had ever been at Pastis. I don’t know whether it was because it was a Monday night, which is traditionally slow, or whether there was a special tick next to Meph’s reservation. In any case, we were shown to a quiet table far from the door and the waiter’s station, handed menus and left alone.

We took a break in the conversation to think about food. Pastis is the sister restaurant to Balthazar, but their menus are somewhat different. After some consideration I decided on the homemade mushroom ravioli because I was definitely in need of comfort food.

After we ordered, Marten asked again about Lawrence. “Are you certain he isn’t in the Hierarchy? He sounds like he could be demonic.”

I shook my head. “Not a chance, unfortunately.”

“Unfortunately?”

I rolled my eyes at my date. “If Lawrence were a demon, unless he’s at Meph’s level I would outrank him. He’d think twice before blowing up at one of Satan’s Chosen. And he really wouldn’t try to make me give up my reserved photographer for a project that he hasn’t even gotten okayed yet. Besides, if he were a demon, I expect that I would have learned somewhere.”

“Have you looked for him on MagicMirror?” Marten asked.

I raised an eyebrow. “You know about MagicMirror? I didn’t think humans knew. I thought it was Hell-space,” I said to cover up for the fact that I’d gone into his MagicMirror account.

“Hellspace does not necessarily mean demon-only access,” Marten corrected me.

“I didn’t know that. I thought it was demons only,” I said slowly. “You know I’m a succubus. What else do you know about me?”

“Nothing,” Marten answered, and for some reason I believed him. Maybe it was the way he looked at me, as if all the masks and pretenses were gone. Or maybe he just had a very good act. “I know what Meph told me, that is all. I thought you might be a succubus when I saw you at the resort, but only because you are so beautiful in a way that is not quite human. You have an aura that feels like sex and Hell, but I can’t describe it more completely. I knew that it was dangerous for me to have sex with you, but that just made you more attractive. I didn’t know that you were one of Satan’s Chosen until this minute when you told me so.”

“Meph didn’t tell you?” I think I squeaked.

Marten shook his head. “He told me that you were important and that if I hurt you he would see to my torment himself. He made me feel as if I were fifteen years old and meeting the father of my date. A very stern father who says that he has seen the movie that we are going to see and that he will quiz my young date upon her arrival home to be sure that is where we went and to promise me that he will be waiting up.”

“And I thought the Dutch were so liberal.”

Marten laughed. Really laughed with his eyes crinkled up and his face red, a laughter that pierced the tension and fear that I’d wrapped around myself. So I laughed with him and we laughed until we couldn’t breathe, even though I didn’t know what was so funny.

“Yes, we are liberal,” Marten said when he finally caught his breath. “We are like New Yorkers, really. We are very liberal with what we believe people ought to have permission to do. That does not mean that we will do it, though. There is a very big difference. And so we are famous for the red-light district and the smoking cafés in Amsterdam, but most of the people there would not go to them themselves. It is all good for tourists who bring in money, and we go about our business.”

“That does sound like New Yorkers,” I muttered.

Marten grinned at that, a disconcertingly innocent grin. “You all forget that of all the places in the New World, New York was Dutch for a hundred years. It’s here, in the culture. Sometimes I can feel it, see a little shadow or trace of something I recognize.”

Just then our server arrived with our food. I wasn’t starving anymore, I’d forgotten in the moment of release that I had been hungry. But the food smelled good and my body remembered that I never had bothered with lunch. So I left the subject to attack my plate and I was glad to see Marten do the same.

After the first wave of hunger had been overcome, Marten lay his fork on the table and leaned toward me. “Lily, I know very little about you, but what I know I like very much. I was surprised that Meph invited you to our meeting on Sunday, but it was a good thing for me. It meant that I could relax, that you knew what I was the way I know what you are, and we could go on without pretending. I will tell you something. Yes, you are right, I do not have long or serious relationships with women. Not because I would not like to have a real girlfriend, not because I cannot care for someone, but because I am afraid of my secrets. What if I date a nice woman and she discovers what I am? Will she leave me? Will I always have to hide? How can a person have an honest relationship if they have to hide something so important? It is easier not to have a relationship at all than to take that risk.”

Did I dare trust him?

I wanted to trust him. What he said made sense, and having been rejected so recently for the same thing, I knew the issue was real. If Nathan was going to love me, then I wanted him to love me, who I really was. I didn’t want to hide all the time. I could understand why Marten didn’t want to hide either.

“So tell me about your secret. I’ve never met a ceremonial magician before, at least not socially,” I said as I reconsidered. Could I actually become interested in Marten as more than just a holiday fling?

“I discovered ceremonial magic when I was fourteen years old,” he began. “There was something in a newspaper about Aleister Crowley, describing him as the most evil man who had ever lived, and what fourteen-year-old boy can resist that? So I went to the public library and I found books. Crowley, Dion Fortune, Mathers, and the Golden Dawn. Yeats. I read them voraciously. I wanted to be a magician. There was a group of the OTO, Crowley’s order, in Rotterdam. It was just a small group who met twice a month in someone’s living room in a suburb. We recited passages from the Book of the Law and I learned a few basic rituals.

“It should have been wonderful, but it was not. I learned a little, but the older members of the lodge were more obsessed with the politics of the OTO than with actually doing any ritual. You must understand, the politics of the modern magicians are more arcane than what we wish to learn. We spent more time talking about why we were the real heirs of Crowley’s order than we spent talking about magic.”

I rolled my eyes. “That sounds like a waste of time.”

“It is,” he agreed. “But we often have to put up with unpleasantness to actually get to the root of the things we seek. There are so many false trails, so many tricks, so many ways the real truth is hidden. It is like that for you as well, I think.”

It seemed silly to me. “Why don’t you just make a pact with Satan?” I asked innocently. “I did. And here I am with everything a magician could want.” I eyed him coldly. “Is that why you flirted with me and seduced me in Aruba?”

Maybe Marten was going to answer, but the waiter showed up with the dessert menus and preempted him. I wondered whether that was an act of magic in itself.

We considered the desserts, pondered the eternal question of crème brûlée or molten chocolate cake and decided to order both.

Marten was more animated, more directed, more sincere than I had ever seen him before. His eyes were shining and he wanted to tell me more, wanted to talk on and on about his strange obsession.

That fascinated me. He had been all polish and style in Aruba, at the party, even in the meeting with Meph. Even in bed. But here talking about his quest for magic, his passion showed through the camouflage of uberhip Eurotrash.

“I cannot tell you, Lily, how great a pleasure it is to talk about such things. In Rotterdam I could not talk at all outside of my circle, and they . . . they disappointed me. They were not the magicians I had dreamed of. They taught me, that is true, and I learned the basics of ritual, of astrology and gematria, of the uses of Tarot. But they were limited. Even their faith was limited. They did some magic just to prove to themselves that magic worked.”

Excited by his love for magic and his pleasure that he could share it with me, Marten became more engaging and amusing than I had thought possible. His eyes sparkled the way Nathan’s had when he talked about the ancient world.

“But you see, Lily, there are no women I have dated who I can talk about this with. Never. So I had given up, so many times given up.”

“Aren’t there women magicians?” I asked. After all, I had been trained to be a High Priestess and had been as adept as any of the men I’d known in the Temples of Babylon.

He sighed and shook his head. “There are, but few. In the old days, the Golden Dawn was the great innovator because they counted women the equal of men. In many of the orders, women are seen as the passive vessel for a man. The feminine power is important, but too many magicians think that women are to be used, not to be treated as partners in the working.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said flatly. If I had been able to take that stupidity seriously I would have been furious, but as it was all I could think was that no wonder almost no magicians ever achieved anything.

“I agree it is ridiculous,” Marten said, and something in his face made me think that he was telling the truth. “And I had always hoped to find a Sister in one of the orders who would be my partner in a great working. But there were too few women, and most of those who would be worthy partners were too suspicious of men. And I cannot blame them, not after what I have seen.”

“That’s so sad.” The words came out of my mouth before I could stop them. “But why did you move to Aruba? I would think that you’d be even more isolated there.”

“If I am alone and cannot talk about those things that move me the most, at least in Aruba I’m in the sun and it is always warm and I can go to the beach every day. And, there are some learned people on the island. One rabbi, who holds a study luncheon at the bagel shop in Orangestad, has helped me with my Hebrew, and there is a priest who has taught me much Latin and even some Greek. And there is a community, a very small community but not such a contentious one. That, too, is worth something.”

“This community, how much do they know about you?” I asked. I was pretty sure that he was far ahead of them, if he had managed to get demon services and a fortune from Satan. To say nothing of lifelong youth. Again I wondered how old he actually was.

Marten shrugged. “They are well meaning and they have respect for me. And do not question too closely.”

We had been so involved in the conversation that I had barely noticed when the desserts arrived. Dessert! And I hadn’t even paid attention.

But Marten appeared glad of the distraction and plunged his fork into his chocolate cake as if it would yield buried treasure. Which, being molten cake with a chocolate syrup center, it did.

“So why were you telling me all this?” I asked as I licked crème brûlée off the tines of my fork.

He laid down his fork, as if this were to be an important revelation. “In part, I think, because I can. Because you are a succubus, you know about magic and power, and you already knew what I was.” Then he took another bite of cake and thought for a moment while he savored the richness of the molten filling. “I think, also, I have told you because I wanted you to know, Lily. I like you. Not just because you are beautiful. I only date beautiful women. But you are intelligent and interesting and know about the unseen. And you make jokes and love good food—you are Lily, you are just you. And it is all of you I like. And, I want you to like me. Not just the clothes and the tan, but that I am a person too.”

Something changed inside me. Something twisted and knotted up and the world was a different place. Oh, we were still in Pastis, but my crème brûlée was only half finished and I didn’t even care.

I looked at Marten, really looked. Yes, his fashion sense was impeccable, yes, his body should be up for Cosmo’s men-without-their-shirts page, and yes, his accent was charming. But inside the cutout of the “perfect cute guy” there was something deeper, something more interesting. He had a passion and fulfillment in life, he had chosen a difficult path and had become a master. To wrest the concessions he had won from Satan he had to be a master.

Passion and mastery in a man are sexier than broad shoulders and soulful eyes.

Dinner was done and the check arrived just quickly enough to prove there were people waiting, but just past the point when we would feel rushed. Marten withdrew his credit card and raised a hand when I took out my wallet. “No, you are my guest,” he said.

And, being a woman of the world and an earlier time, I returned my wallet to my purse.

“Shall we walk?” he asked. So walk we did, chatting. For about twelve blocks with the wind frigid off the river full in our faces.

“It is cool out here,” he noted, and blew into his ungloved hands. “Would you like a coffee?”

While I wasn’t interested in coffee, I understood that he would welcome the opportunity to warm up. So I nodded with what passed for enthusiasm as he led me to the nearest Starbucks. Luck held and there were two armchairs available.

For a while we just sipped our lattes in companionable silence.

“You’re a magician,” I said softly. “Isn’t there anything you can do to find out who’s attacking Meph? Can’t you do some spell or something?”

Marten winced. “I thought you would know better. Spells are for gamers and fantasy books. In the kind of magic I do there are no spells. There are rituals that may create an environment to make something happen, but there is no recipe like so much eye of newt and stir three times and voilà!: a reliable result. This is not chemistry, not cooking.”

“Don’t be angry because I don’t know anything about it,” I protested. The incipient deeper feelings I thought I might have for Marten made me uncomfortable. “I’m a succubus; I don’t do magic.”

He shook his head. “You do it all the time. We all do. Crowley defined magic as a deliberate act of will to change the objective environment to conform with subjective desires.”

I sighed and drained the last of my latte. “That would include turning on a light.”

“Precisely,” he agreed.

“So I don’t understand what isn’t a spell and what it is you do,” I complained. He wasn’t being at all clear, and while I knew ceremonialists had a reputation for being cryptic, this was ridiculous.

He leaned back into the wing chair. “I cannot make a charm or a spell, do this and that will happen. That is a fantasy. There are two ways to work with this particular kind of magic. The first is the old tradition, to force a demon to do it for you. You, my dear Lily, are magic. The right demon can accomplish whatever a magician desires.”

“Hmmm,” I said, but I could see it quite clearly. I’d avoided those traps for aeons, but I knew demons who hadn’t. “And the other way?”

“The other way is to manipulate energy,” Marten went on. “We live in a sea of energy all the time,” he continued. “And we are part of it, we interact with it. We manipulate it without thinking. What we think, what we imagine, what we focus upon, is and becomes more real. The focus, the image is like a mold. And if we pour enough energy into it we can fill this mold and bake it and what comes out will conform to the mold we have created. We are always making these molds and pressing energy into them. What is different for the magician is that we are trained to make better molds.”

“Doesn’t sound so different from scientists.” I tried to needle him. But he grinned. “Precisely. We were the first scientists of the world.”

“Science isn’t magic now,” I noted.

“It is very much still magic,” he said, smiling. “It is magic that everyone can do. Once upon a time it was great magic and power to be able to read and write, to add and subtract. Today we have general literacy, but that does not make the skill less powerful. It only means there is far more power in the world.”

Partly I wanted to tell him that he was crazy, but I knew the magic of literacy. When I first learned to read and write as a young royal Priestess three thousand years ago, it was truly a magical power. To have such access to memories, to the knowledge of those who were dead, to communicate over time and distance, that had been great power. Nor was it less because it was no longer secret.

“So you’re saying that you can’t do anything for Meph? For me? You know that I was injured recently? Satan healed me, but they tried to destroy me and my friends.”

His eyes widened and he took my hand. “I did not know you had been injured. What happened?”

So I told him about the witch hunters who had sent holy water–infused letters through the mail to me and my friends. About how it looked like a wedding invitation and so I opened it and it had burst into flames in my hands and the fire clung like napalm. How Vincent had come up and called Satan, and how She had sent word to the rest of Her Chosen. And then how She Herself had healed my hands. How She had taken my blackened, charred hands between Her own and how I had become whole again.

He took my hands as She had, turned and examined them. There were no scars, no trace of the violence that had been done. “You are much beloved of your Mistress,” he said softly.

“Master,” I corrected. “She is feminine to those She loves, and a scourge to all the rest. Well, at least that’s the way we think of it.”

Marten laughed at that. “You know what I’d really like to do with you?” he asked softly.

“What?” I expected some kind of kinky sex or maybe something just racy.

“I’d like to wake up with you and eat a proper Dutch breakfast with ham and cheese and real Dutch bread and hot chocolate in bed and then go shopping in New York.”

“When do you leave?”

He shrugged. “I have a flight tomorrow, but I can probably rebook later.”

I smiled slowly. “I’m sure you can rebook. I have to go to the office tomorrow. It’s Tuesday. But if you can stay a few more days . . .”

“I can stay,” he said. “I will stay.” We went back to his hotel and he arranged to extend his stay, and then we went upstairs and snuggled while we watched Batman Begins on Pay-Per-View.

By the time the movie ended I was yawning. I tried to cover it up because of course we would have sex, but Marten surprised me again. “You are tired,” he said. “And you must go to work tomorrow. So I will send you home now and we will meet again for dinner tomorrow. And perhaps you can take part of Wednesday so you can stay over and I’ll order breakfast from room service and we’ll shop. How does that sound?”

Could I arrange it with work? Suddenly I was grateful to Lawrence. He was a complete jerk with arrested development, but no one would question me taking a day off when he had just run half the office off in terror.

So Marten poured me into a taxi and gave the driver my address, and even money for the fare. Putting me in that cab, being more concerned about how I felt than about his getting the sex I would have given him, endeared him to me like nothing else. On the long ride uptown I was giddy and felt like singing. Marten had made me feel glorious.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that intense flying feeling meant I was falling in love, but I ignored it.