Succubus in the City Read Online Free PDF

a Saturday night at the most popular places are almost downright impossible.
    Which is a long way of saying that Martha is horribly busy and never gets any downtime for Herself, and we were more sorry for Her that She couldn’t hang out with us than sorry for ourselves for not having Her around. Satan can be so much fun.
    So in a much better frame of mind I went home to pick up my pj’s and check my e-mail and MagicMirror before going over to Eros’s at seven.
    MagicMirror is like MySpace or LiveJournal for Underworlders. Actually, I have a LiveJournal, too, mostly to read what the humans I know are doing, but MagicMirror is my real home territory. It’s secure—only Underworlders have accounts, or can even find it. The URL doesn’t even exist without the right magical interface.
    In fact, it’s based on the old magical Magic Mirror that we used to use before it was easier to get online. The old method, which some of the less savvy demons still use, works with a real mirror and blood and takes up loads of energy. Ours. The old-style Magic Mirror still works, but it’s limited and blood is impossible to get out of good linens. Frankly, with all the spells and magical hoopla to make it work, the system is such a bother that no one ever used it to announce movie outings or post food porn.
    There were no new updates on my friends’ list. Desi probably wouldn’t mention Steve, at least not until she’d had a first date. And then it would be locked to her “Girls Only, TMI” filter.
    A lot of demons don’t even bother with MagicMirror because they can’t handle the technology and don’t see the benefit. Most of us are from an era before telecommunications, let alone the computer. Truth is, many of us date from before written language.
    In my own mortal existence, only a very few could read and write. Literacy was a form of magic, and a very powerful one at that. Since I was a priestess of Ishtar before Satan chose me as one of Her (high ranking) minions, I did, in fact, learn to read and write. While most men in Babylon were considered unworthy to be initiated into this most secret of arcane arts, the High Priestess and her few chosen acolytes did learn.
    Maybe we were the only women in Babylon who could read and write, though it wouldn’t surprise me if the Queen and maybe one or two of the royal wives learned as well. Wives, daughters of foreign kings who had real status in the Women’s Palace, not concubines.
    Princesses were not taught to read. I’m not even sure all the princes were, except the sons of powerful wives who were most likely to inherit. I know a lot about being a princess in Babylon; I had been one. It was a fairly unspectacular position. I was the thirty-fifth daughter of the King by a minor concubine. My mother was not from one of the noble families of Babylon, nor was she a princess married off to secure an alliance. That would have given her the rank of a wife, anyway, and would have made me valuable enough to possibly marry off to some foreign satrap or one of my father’s nobles.
    My mother, though, was just an exceptionally pretty girl who was bought by the Palace at the age of fourteen and served the King maybe two or three times ever. I mostly remember her as plump and satisfied with her lot. No great love, of course, but the King had over a hundred concubines and some he never even saw. Since my mother had borne him a child, even a lowly girl child, she had high rank among the concubines. She had a private room in the women’s quarters and several pieces of good jewelry that were gifts from the King.
    She had come from a common farm family, so the beauty of the concubines’ quarters in the Palace, though not so fine as the wives’ residences, delighted her. She didn’t have to till and hoe and harvest, grind grain, beat flax, weave, cook, brew, make pots, milk sheep, make cheese, or bear thirteen children. She didn’t have to worry about going hungry due to famine or drought or