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blush looked at all right on me, but I had my own lipstick and Eros came through with the mascara.
    “Come on, let’s go out and have a good time,” Sybil urged me. “You look fantastic.”
    Nathan was not at the party and wasn’t going to be at the party. Ever. But there were demons I could talk to and besides, I was drunk enough that I had almost forgotten the entire reason I’d come. I had to talk to Marduk for Meph. If I hadn’t promised I would have been out hunting or watching DVDs of the Gilmore Girls.
    I’d promised. And so I went back into the fray, determined to find Marduk and learn whether he had been plotting against Mephistopheles. Which was not going to be entirely easy. Marduk might be a traditionalist, but he was not a fool. And he and I didn’t have much of a relationship, despite our shared roots. We didn’t run in the same circles, didn’t go to the same parties, didn’t have the same friends. He would hardly trust me with his treason, if he were involved in treason. I would have to be careful.
    First I had to go through the polite noises with a number of demons I hadn’t seen in ages. Had to repeat what I’d been doing for the past decade or two, tell everyone how pleased I was to have come and no, I hadn’t been avoiding or snubbing anyone. I’d just been busy, they knew how it was . . .
    I worked my way around the first room and then the second. And then I saw Marduk.
    Marduk had been a god in Babylon, at times even the head of the pantheon, and he never forgot it. Neither did anyone around him. He was seven feet tall, which was not unduly large in a gathering of demons, but towering enough that he stood out in the room. He had a carefully curled and trimmed beard, and his hair rippled down past his shoulders in a perfect pyramid. He reminded me of my father, who had worn precisely this style three thousand years ago when he had been king. It had been quite the thing back then, but Marduk had never changed. Even his robes were cut to the ancient patterns and looked like they had been made out of the same scratchy fabrics.
    I drifted closer to him, until I was at the edge of the circle where he held forth, and I remembered why I’d avoided him for the past fifty years, and for a hundred and fifty before that.
    Marduk is always at the center of an adoring clique. He can’t stand to be alone, or to listen to anyone else. He is always talking as his sycophants circle around, applauding his stories, asking questions, showing unending interest in whatever caught his fancy.
    When I approached he was telling a story about some Greek scientist who had figured out that all of Babylonian astronomy had come directly from Marduk, and how this Greek had begun a cult to him in Athens. I’d heard the story before and besides, I found his arrogance tiring.
    Did Meph know what he had been asking?
    Yes, he had to know. He was Mephistopheles, and he knew how completely self-involved the older ex-gods all were. Even Eros has momentary flashes. Marduk’s only concession to modernity was that he acknowledged Satan as the chief god of Hell.
    I maneuvered so that I would be in his line of sight. He squinted at me as if he didn’t quite remember who I was. “Lilith?” he asked.
    I bowed at the waist. Not the full obeisance required by a godhead, but we were at a party. And the fact of modern Hell was that, as one of Satan’s Chosen, I outranked him. But I was politic enough to play along with his vanity, especially since there was no other way to get what I (or Mephistopheles) wanted. “Indeed, Lord, it is good of you to remember your servant,” I said in Akkadian. It didn’t sound quite so smarmy in my mother tongue; they were just ordinary phrases that didn’t mean anything more than polite greeting.
    “You have been absent from my court for a very long time,” he observed.
    I bowed again. (Marduk liked the bowing and it cost me nothing. So long as I didn’t have to go down on my knees on the