I was still at my desk fiddling with the book when I got a call from Judy.
I should have let it go to voicemail, but I couldn’t resist. “Hey, where’s the fire?”
“I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m in trouble, and I don’t know who else to call.”
I remember thinking this is one of the most annoying things about the real world. No matter how good your exit line is, no relationship is ever completely over, and no one in your life is ever completely gone. Lives go on and lives intersect in ways you can’t possibly predict.
My first impulse was to tease her or drag this out, but it had been a long time since I’d seen Judy this scared, leaning into her bedroom wallscreen and whispering like she was afraid someone would overhear.
“Okay,” I said. “What’s the problem?”
“I made a huge mistake, and I need a computer guy. You’re the only one I trust.”
“Oh, so you’re just calling for tech support? You need me to change your wallpaper or something?”
“Please, Tim, this is serious. I could lose my job.”
I sighed. “What did you do?”
“You remember I wear two phones on my wrist? The pink one is personal, and the blue one is for work. Well, I took some very personal photos from my POV the other day, while I was logged in to the wrong one.”
“When you say personal, you mean… personal? Like the ones you used to send me?”
“Yes,” she admitted, blushing. “And then Brian sent one back.”
“So, you took naked pictures of you and Brian on your work phone?” I wasn’t trying to be mean, but I couldn’t help it. I started laughing so hard I had to turn away from my camera.
“Stop laughing at me!” Judy snapped. “It could happen to anybody!”
“It could happen to anybody who takes the nude filter off their POV, and to anyone who forgets to take their work phone off, and to anyone who forgets to put a DND lock on their device after work hours, like I told you to do a hundred times. I guess it could happen to anybody like that!”
“Are you just gonna sit there and say I told you so, or are you actually going to help?”
“Of course I’m going to help,” I laughed. “If we’re lucky, this could be a simple fix. When you took the pictures, were you logged directly into a cloud app, or did they go to local storage first?”
“Whatever the default is,” she said. “I think they go to local storage first and sync after.”
“Okay,” I said. “The cloud part is easier than you think. Just pull up your work account and send the photos to Secure Trash. All the big corporate services have hard wipe protocols that should scrub them completely, unless you’ve pissed off an IT guy who holds a grudge. Then just do the same thing with the local copies. Secure Trash, not Recycle.”
“I can’t delete the local copies; I don’t have the phone. We have a department security audit Monday morning, so I left my phone on the director’s desk when I left tonight. I didn’t realize what was on it until I got home.”
“But you’ve got codes to the building, right? You can just go in and get it back?”
“My phone is my key. The door code won’t work unless I’ve got the phone on me, and the phone is locked inside. I’m hoping your phone can still get you in.”
I started laughing again and had to make myself stop. “Alright, my job is over but I’m still on the hook for maintenance. That should be enough to get me in. What am I looking for? Is it the same phone you had last time I saw you? Datacore G5 on the sky-blue strap?”
She nodded.
“And you’re sure it’s still on his desk? My key might get me in, but there’s no way I could hack a safe.”
“I think so,” she said. “He left early today and should be gone all weekend.”
“Okay,” I said, only coming off mildly annoyed. “I’ll head over there and see what I can do; hopefully without breaking any laws.”
“Thank you,” Judy said, sounding sincere and humble. “I knew I could count on you.”
* * *
“If you’re going to the museum, I need to come with you,” Lydia said.
“I can think of about twenty reasons why that’s a bad idea,” I said. “Why would you even want to come?”
“That museum is dangerous now. Hundreds of valuable objects that could be attracting demons or any number of other things.”
“I thought it was protected. It’s supposed to be the best security inside a whole secure campus.”
“It was,” Lydia said, “until I spent six months corrupting those wards.”
“Wait, the museum is wide open to demons now, because of you?”
“Because of us,” Lydia corrected. “I had to break the wards to let your book out.”
“And they haven’t been repaired?”
“It would take a brilliant wizard to even detect what I’ve done. Repairing them would take an archmage.”
“And we’ve only got one of those. But even with the wards down, even with you looking human, I can’t just walk in there with you. I’ll have to spoof credentials just to get myself in.”
“I told you, I’m very good at hiding. I won’t even be in the same physical plane with you unless there’s a direct threat. You do what you need to do, and I’ll just tag along in the gray, making sure no other demons interfere.”
I didn’t like it, but I agreed, shamed by the sudden feeling of warmth and confidence that surged through me, knowing I would have her by my side.
* * *
I had technician-level access to museum systems, so it was trivially easy to make the doors log me as a maintenance bot and take the cameras offline with a firmware update. I was pretty sure I could get away with this, even if they did have security guys coming in on Monday. And it’s not like I’d be stealing anything. I could just pop in, grab the phone, delete the photos, and put it back. In and out, maybe fifteen minutes.
If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
Something about being back in that big open room, back under the dim lights of an empty public space, triggered an irrational surge of fear in me, remembering being sliced open and pinned against a wall by a thing that was now fetching my shoes.
I glanced over my shoulder and saw Lydia floating in astral space, hopefully invisible to everyone but me. I was annoyed by how quickly just looking at her calmed me down, banishing the memory of one monster by taking comfort in another.
I made it to the director’s office and was stopped dead by the one thing I couldn’t hack - a manual lock on his door. Who uses a manual lock these days? The director of a museum for magical artifacts, of course. I didn’t remember him having a physical lock before, but maybe he’d installed it after the attack.
He hadn’t even closed the blinds on his office window. I could look inside and see Judy’s phone sitting there on his giant antique desk, with the projection bump centered on its pale blue strap.
I could have leaned over and grabbed it, if I hadn’t had a window in the way. Could I risk breaking a window? Could I make it look like a conventional break-in and just not take anything?
“Timothy, what do you need?” I heard Lydia’s voice like it was coming through earbuds again, perfectly clear, even if it was just in my head.
“It’s got an old-fashioned conventional lock,” I whispered back, “but maybe I can make the maintenance bot unlock it while it’s doing its rounds…”
“Timothy,” Lydia repeated, somehow enunciating each word, “tell me what you need.”
I sighed, slowly realizing what I was about to do. “I need you to go inside that office and get Judy’s phone off that desk, without leaving any trace that you were there.”
“That should be simple,” she said. “Describe the object you need and point to it.”
“A modern phone is like a watch band with a tiny silver disk in the middle. Judy’s phone is that baby blue strap on the edge of that wooden desk,” I pointed. “But Lydia, you shouldn’t just pop in there. The motion or your body weight could set something off.”
“I won’t be using my whole body. The only part of me that will enter physical space is my hand, in the fraction of a second it will take to grab the object, and even that will be invisible to most observers. You’ve already disabled the cameras?”
I confirmed that and said, “Yes.”
“Very well,” she said. “Just relax.”
I was staring at the phone, looking exactly where I expected her hand to pop in, but I still missed it. The phone strap just vanished. She was gone and back so fast, I didn’t even have time to worry. One second, she was hovering beside me as a kind of washed out ghost, then she flickered for a moment and was back, dropping Judy’s watch in my hand.
I gaped at her. “You can do that any time you want, for any room you want to get into?”
“I suspect more of them are shielded with magic these days, but I can enter any space that’s not warded against astral travelers.”
“Could you rob a bank for me?” It was supposed to be a joke, but my tone came out way too serious.
“Probably not,” she said. “There was a period in the 20th century when magic levels were so low, most institutions didn’t bother with eldritch defenses. But now, with the level of background magic rising exponentially across the Earth? Surely your corporate overlords have found ways to protect the money.”
“The wards on this building could have held off an army of supernatural creatures before I weakened them,” Lydia said. “It took me months to coordinate with my Master’s Inquisitor and relay his instructions to my pawns. Even then, I had to have help from the inside. I wouldn’t advise you to rob a bank, but if you could master protective magic like the mage who drew these wards, I suspect you could earn all the material wealth you need, just working a few days a month.”
That was one of Lydia’s most frustrating traits, constantly assuming the sale, planning for the day when I would be happily murdering for her Master, lounging by the pool in my mansion while I waited for his next kill order.
“It’s a little disturbing,” I said, “realizing how easy it would be to steal shit with you.”
Lydia shrugged. “Lots of new technology now, but still easier than the Watergate.”
* * *
I was wasting time chatting with Lydia because I really didn’t want to do this next part.
I grabbed Judy’s phone and logged in. It was weirdly intimate, realizing she had left my biometrics in her access list, while I had immediately removed her from mine.
“Fuck,” I said silently. “I have to look at her gallery to do this, and the thumbnails are too fucking small.” I looked at Lydia’s ghostly form. “I really wish you could do this for me, but I can’t risk you turning physical, just to protect my feelings. I guess I’ll finally get to see if Judy had that mole removed.”
I may be dead. I may be a prisoner. I may be roasting in Hell next week, but if this ever goes public, I want credit for this. I watched this whole sequence again in Azael’s mirror, and I will remember this day for as long as I burn - the day I forced an angel to look at naked pictures of my ex-girlfriend.
There were eight pictures that Judy obviously wanted me to delete, a rapidly escalating series of nudes that started with her lifting her shirt up in front of a mirror, then showing off parts of her body that she had clearly worked very hard on, until we finally got to the end of the road.
“Wow, she really is hot for this guy,” I projected to Lydia. “She never shaved that close for me.” I had to cough and turn away because there was only one photo left, and there was only one thing it could be.
“Well, that was a lovely trip down memory lane. Let’s see what Brian’s packing.” I threw Judy’s vagina in the trash and brought up Brian’s dick. “God damn,” I said to Lydia. “That’s even worse than I imagined. I hope this thing fits in the trash.”
I double checked the last week of photos to make sure I got everything and handed the strap back to Lydia. “Be sure to put this back exactly the way it was on the desk.”
“Yes,” Lydia said. “I have done this before.”
She did her magic trick again and the phone appeared back on the director’s desk. I left as quickly as I could without rushing, hoping no one would try to rob the museum while I had the cameras off.
* * *
I left the museum smiling, laughing, and giggling like a kid, exhilarated by the thrill of a successful heist. If Lydia had been physical, I would have kissed her right there. I was still laughing when I got back home, spinning around in my desk chair.
“You are taking this remarkably well,” Lydia said, shimmering back into solid form.
“Huh?” I said, briefly confused. “Oh yeah, I guess I am. Shit, I really am. I should be crying on the floor right now, but this whole thing is just a big joke to me.”
“You were ready to have me kill these people two weeks ago. What changed?”
I sighed. “You flipped my switch.”
“What does that mean?”
“Every man has a switch in his head, an up/down toggle switch that says GIRLFRIEND or NO GIRLFRIEND. When the switch is on NO GIRLFRIEND, every little thing feels like the end of the world. You miss something or forget something or have a bad day at work, and it gets really easy to spiral down.
“You start thinking about the little thing you fucked up, and in a couple hours you’ve worked your way down to ‘no one loves me’ and ‘no one will ever love me.’
“It’s not true, of course. You can sit there and tell yourself it’s not true all night, but that’s how it feels. It becomes super easy to get jealous or get your feelings hurt or lash out at happy couples who have what you don’t. Or you can go totally off the rails and stalk your ex in the middle of the night.
“But it goes the other way, too. When the switch is in the GIRLFRIEND position, you can have the same bad day, but it’s not so bad, because you know you’ve got somebody waiting for you. You know somebody’s gonna be on your side, even if she’s telling you something you don’t want to hear.
“This night could have been a deadly blow to my ego, but I’m over here laughing my ass off, because something in my animal brain thinks I have a girlfriend. And that’s a problem, because I’m not feeling happy, healthy, and well-adjusted because I’m in a new relationship with a nice girl. I’m feeling happy, healthy, and well-adjusted because your succubus shit is working, and that means every victory we share together brings me one step closer to losing everything.”
Suddenly deflated, I walked back to the bedroom and started taking clothes off.
Lydia followed and stopped at my bedroom door. “Does this mean we’re taking a step back? Do you want me out of your bedroom? Do you want me out of your bed?”
I couldn’t answer. I just stared at her, silent and paralyzed.
“Timothy, I’ll do whatever you say, but you have to say it.”
I couldn’t look at her. I bowed my head and closed my eyes, trying to keep my breathing under control. She started to turn away and I said, “No. Don’t leave. Please don’t leave. I didn’t know I was having nightmares until they stopped.
“Everybody who tries to live here gets freaked out by nightmares, but I just thought they were dreams. I dream about guys from the compound: Mister Braddock and Mister Patton and Mister Vaughan, mostly. We sit around the fire, and I tell them stuff I’m worried about. Their mouths move, but I can never hear what they say back. I never thought of them as nightmares because I was just happy to see them again.
“I knew I had trouble sleeping, but I thought that was just a shitty diet or something, until that first night you laid down with me and every muscle in my body just relaxed. Was that a demon thing? Are you using some kind of magic to help me sleep?”
Lydia whispered, “No.”
“Well, whatever it is, I can’t live without it now. Just please, stay on your side.”