Simple stuff, prepared well. So much better than a gourmet meal that took a twelve-minute narration and a French dictionary to decipher.
Picking up her glass of wine, she took her food over to her table, and she chose the seat that faced out from the kitchen area so she could look at all the things she owned. Her private space, her lair, if you will, was a vast open area in the basement of one of downtown’s older office buildings. Technically, it was one of a dozen or so storage facilities more typically used for—snooze—collections of corporate files and records, a perk for the businesses that took up whole floors of the upper levels.
Hers was different, and not just because she could camouflage it and its precious contents at will. Instead of stupid paperwork and useless hard drives or whatever the fuck was in those other ones, hers was filled with beauty.
Picking up her fork and knife—Christofle, sterling—she cut into the meat and put a piece in her mouth.
Crap. It was chewy. Proof positive that how good something looked was no true measure of its worth.
As she swallowed with a grimace, she picked up her sauvignon blanc and took a healthy draw on the razor lip of the crystal glass. Most other people would have gone with a red, but that was too heavy for her—and God, she hated what she was eating. It was like taking medicine, something that was nasty going down, but which had therapeutic benefits.
Or at least it had better have benefits. Otherwise, she was wasting her time.
To distract herself from the familiar, bitchy malaise setting up shop in her internal monologue, she looked with pride at all the haute couture she had collected over the decades. Some was original, from the seventies, eighties, and nineties. Some she’d snagged more recently from high-end vintage shops. And some was brand-new, from Fifth Avenue, Rodeo Drive, Worth Avenue.
Such masterpieces she owned: Gucci, Vuitton, Escada, Chanel, Armani, Lacroix, McQueen, McCartney. If she’d had a different aesthetic, she could have gone the Mainbocher and Givenchy route as well, but Audrey Hepburn had always given her heartburn.
And then there were the accessories. For fuck’s sake, she’d had Manolos before Carrie-goddamn-Bradshaw, and the soles on her stillies had been red for years before the plebs had found Louboutin.
And not just from walking through the blood she’d spilled.
Back to her wardrobe’s wonderfulness. Of course, part of the fun was the display, and all of the skirts and dresses and blouses and slacks were parceled out among countless hanging racks. There were sections for separates, and then outfit outposts organized by designer. A whole table for Birkins and a set of shelves full of Chanel. But the arrangements weren’t static. On a regular basis, she switched things up. Sometimes it was chronological order by era; sometimes it was chromatic. She’d tried once to do it by value, but that had been impossible to get right. The older stuff had price tags that were pennies on the dollar now, and rarity and history made some of what she had priceless.
Keep eating, she told herself. You’ve got to keep eating.
As she choked down the larger of the two pieces of meat, her eyes caressed the optical cacophony before her, the fine silks and sequins, the cashmere and fur, the handbags, shoes, and lingerie, all of it offering so many colors, so many textures, so many choices for individual expression. And the collection was such a source of satisfaction and happiness, each piece like a child adopted into a loving home. Whether she’d stolen it or paid the purchase price, taken it off a corpse or gotten it gift-wrapped to herself, her ownership was indisputable and immutable, and her beauty was always magnified a thousandfold by what she placed on her perfect body.
Her clothes were the halo that she, by her nature, would never possess metaphysically.
But fuck it, she could look good while she did evil.
And yet . . .
As her silverware clinked softly against her plate, there was such silence here, a reminder that what she adored might be grounding for her and an important source of hunt-and-peck, acquisitional excitement, yet in the end . . . these fashion masterpieces couldn’t touch her. Hold her. Laugh and cry with her.
She was alone in a crowded room.
Shoving her plate away, she sat back with her wine, swirling the yellow wash around the inside of the clear glass.
Chianti and fava beans, huh? she thought as she regarded the golden color. How common.
Then again, human organs were hardly a delicacy, were they. And worse, the shit was not working.
She wasn’t eating this for her health, for fuck’s sake.
Not her physical health, at any rate.
There just had to be a way to capture the love that was out there, the love she saw between others who were coupled up, the love that everyone else on the planet but she had managed to find. Just because she was a demon didn’t mean she had no emotions. No need to be cherished. No desire to be seen as valuable, distinctive . . . significant . . . by the one she found valuable, distinctive, and significant.
It was a natural instinct.
As well as one hell of a Dr. Phil show.
Devina, you know, I’ve been doing this close to forty years now, so I know what I’m talking about. How’s your life working for you?
“Not great, Phil,” she said aloud. “I just want what you and Robin have.”
Her mental Dr. Phil leaned forward in his suit and tie, his big gold watch winking from under his cuff, his bald head covered with makeup so it didn’t reflect the studio lights. If you look back on your previous relationships, how would you say your behavior was? Were you a good partner?
“Of course.”
Devina, we can’t change what we don’t acknowledge.
She thought about her one true love, Jim Heron. “I only tried to kill his girlfriend once.” As Phil gave her that look, she cursed. “Fine. A couple of times. But she was so fucking annoying, and I don’t know how in the fuck he picked her over me.”
Relationships are a two-way street. And it sounds like he was on a different road than yours.
“Well, then he needed to read his goddamn map right. Get back on course. Get with the program.”
Look, I may just be a country boy—
“Oh, will you drop the Southern poverty bullshit. You have a net worth of over four hundred million dollars. It’s time to give up the relatability-signaling of overalls you haven’t had on your fat ass for half a century.”
Imaginary Dr. Phil stared her straight in the eye. If you were in a relationship right now, would you contribute or contaminate?
“Fuck off, Phil.”
With a lackadaisical fork, she poked at the heart muscle. How long had she been doing this? Hoping to find fate through her digestive tract?
She was running out of patience. And Gas-X.
On a wave of frustration, her eyes swept around her lair. And it was hard to pinpoint exactly when the thought occurred, but the next thing she knew, she was getting to her feet and going across to her display of Birkins.
The Hermès handbags were on display on a lovely partner’s desk she had five-fingered from a French count with whom she’d had a lovely little dalliance that had satisfied her for a fortnight . . . and ended up with him disemboweled and hung on an iron fence.
But why focus on the unpleasant stuff.
Besides, her ending had been fine. She’d moved on to bigger and better things. Specifically a blacksmith who’d been hung like one of the war stallions he’d shod.
Now that had been fun. But again, not anything that had lasted. Lot of hair on the back—and she wasn’t talking about the hooved mammals who were supposed to be sporting a saddle.
And this was her problem. In fact, nothing had lasted. Not even Jim Heron—because he’d never been hers to begin with.
For fuck’s sake, she wasn’t getting any younger.
Of course, she also wasn’t getting any older.
Immortal, hello.
The most expensive of all her handbags was the iconic Himalaya Niloticus Crocodile Birkin 35 with the diamond hardware. The white-and-gray masterpiece was given pride of place on an inlaid antique bed stand that had two drawers—because come on, she had to put it on some kind of pedestal. And as she stood before the bag, she took a moment to appreciate the pattern of scales and the bilateral markings that meant the darker sections of the skin were on the outsides, the creamy white center a perfect contrast.
So beautiful.
And yet not her most valuable item—even though on the secondary market, because it was a 35 with the diamond hardware, it was worth a cool $400,000. Or more if she sold it with the matching diamond bangle. Which she had.
Below its white gold feet, she pulled open the antique stand’s top drawer—and it was with piercing defeat that she reached forward. She supposed she was kind of like a guy in the way she never wanted to read the assembly instructions, ask for directions, or be told what to do at a crossroads. So for her to use an aid, even if Dr. Phil always referred his guests to experts for help, seemed like—
Devina frowned.
Leaned farther forward.
Patted her hand around the inside of the drawer. Which was totally fucking empty.
With an explosive curse, she ripped out the bed stand’s top level. Nothing was in it. And even though her eyes were functioning just fine, like a fucking idiot, she turned the thing over and shook it.
As if what she’d expected to find in there was somehow stuck to the bottom.
The Book was gone.
In a frantic whirlwind, she opened the drawer underneath—in case she’d misremembered which one she’d put it in. Also empty. The drawers of the partner’s desk were likewise Book-less, the silk thongs and bras bearing no resemblance to the human-flesh-covered tome she was looking for.
With shaking hands, she started to go through her other bureaus, the shelves by her bedding platform, the kitchen cabinets, the shit in the bathroom area. She even went to check under her bed before remembering that it was a fucking platform with nowhere to store anything underneath.
“Where the fuck is my Book!” she yelled into the silence.
And then she remembered . . .
Wheeling around to the far corner, she glared at the five-by-five metal pen with its water bowl and pallet. The goddamn thing was empty because the fucking virgin idiot she’d had in there had escaped.
“You sneaky sonofabitch,” she breathed as she walked over.
It had been her fault, really. She’d obviously underestimated him—probably because she hadn’t actually needed him. The abduction had been a compulsion rather than something demanded by her circumstances, a relic of past behavior that was no longer required. With her mirror destroyed, she didn’t have to worry about protecting her privacy here as much.
She’d been lonely, though.
“You little shit,” she said as she stared down at where she’d imprisoned him. “Did you take my fucking Book?”
He was the only one who’d been here since she’d seen it last.
The fucking bastard must have watched her flip through the pages that one morning.
Devina turned back around to the antique bed stand, now emptied of its drawers. There was, of course, another explanation, one that was utterly unthinkable. So she promptly discarded it.
The Book loved her. Of course it wanted to be with her.
No, he had taken her Book, the little shit, and even if she wasn’t thinking of using one of its spells to bring her true love, she was still going to need the fucking thing back.
It was hers, after all. And she was nothing if not possessive.
“Motherfucker,” she muttered.
Now she needed to find the goddamn thing.
The following evening, Mae was back at her garage door, car keys in hand, purse up on her shoulder. She hadn’t slept at all during the day, and First Meal had been a single piece of dry toast that had gone down like sheet metal.
“I’ll be back soon,” she called out to Rhoger.
Why did she wait for a response? Like, did she actually think he was going to sit up in that tub of ice water, and put in an order for Jimmy John’s?