“So what do you do?” I said, dazed into saying something conventional. It was clear Archie had told the truth about one thing—this guy obviously had a job. He was probably supporting all these other bums.
Vicomte Clarence Gide Sans-Souci du Turbin Montmorency turned toward me very slowly. His eyes changed.
Every hair on my body stood up.
Suddenly I saw a flicker in the air around him—a shiny top hat, a glimpse of white bone under the dark gleam of his cheek. And at his groin, a naked erection as big and red and shameless as a Bavarian knockwurst.
“You’re one of those voodoo guys,” I said breathlessly.
“You’re thinking of Baron Samedi,” Archie said.
My skin prickled.
Veek tipped his almost invisible top hat. “His nephew.”
I broke out in gooseflesh. It occurred to me now that I was all alone at two a.m. in a mysterious warehouse installation with four very hot, exceptionally horny, magical men.
Quick as thought, my body ran a preview of a fantasy that shocked my girlish brain.
Veek put up both hands. “Ne vous inquietez pas, Miss. I don’t poach. I am really very well-behaved. I do my laundry,” he added, glancing disparagingly at Baz and Archie, who looked homeless next to him. “And—I go off to work.” He smiled at me again, giving me a shiver, tipped the invisible top hat, and left, picking up a briefcase I hadn’t noticed sitting on a chair.
“And that’s why Archie fights black guys,” Baz said.
“He don’t fight me, girl. I make love, not war,” said Kamadeva.
“Fuck you,” Archie said, going to the sink and sticking his head under the faucet. “You fucking Brahmin, you’re whiter than me.”
“It’s a Greek thing, or a sex demon thing?” I said.
Kama pulled a bottle of beer out of a fridge and winked at me as he swigged. “Yo, hot bitch, I’m a god of lust. Pre-Shivite.”
I blinked. “Really.”
Archie was drying his wet head with big gobs of paper towels. “Kama. Leave her alone.”
“Children, children,” Baz said.
I stared at the paper towel act. “Don’t you have a beach towel or anything?” I said, distracted. “That’s horribly wasteful.”
Archie rolled his eyes. “Don’t start. We have plenty more.” He pointed to a Costco-sized pack of paper towel rolls on top of another fridge.
“Well, it’s ecologically unsound,” I said. “You use cloth towels at the bar.”
“The bar has a service. There’s five of us here, and nobody does laundry until they’re forced to. Except Veek,” he added, bitterly prim.
I shook my head. “Slackers.”
Baz nodded. “You’re catching on. Slackers first. Slackers forever.”
A feeling was building in me—no, a decision—and it scared me. I was convinced now about the sex demon thing. If I didn’t quite trust Kama, and Veek scared me, I felt my heart melting to breaking point over Archie. No wonder he seemed wound so tight. I wanted to kiss him like that again, I wanted to boink him up against a wall, and I wanted to stroke his head and tell him he was just a big baby and hold his face between my breasts until he calmed down.
But what convinced me they were in serious trouble was Baz. Baz seemed worried.
Something told me Baz never sweated small stuff.
I’d seen this kind of behavior among my brothers. These guys clustered around Archie as if he was in some kind of danger. Like when my brother Luke came out in high school, and the rest of my brothers casually managed to be right behind him a hundred percent of the time for the next three months.
I thought I knew how they felt. I wanted to throw my body down over Archie and shield him.
I was dead on my feet with exhaustion and emotional confusion, but deep down inside I had decided something big.
Archie poured himself a huge tumbler full of water and drank it. “Time I took you home,” he said to me when he set down his cup.
The sex demons waved goodbye. We went outside.
Archie unlocked his Firebird. “I probably shouldn’t have brought you there, but it’s done now. You’ve seen ’em. Now you can ignore them.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, putting on my seatbelt. “They seem like nice guys to me.”
He sent me an impatient look. “That’s their job. To seem like nice guys while they seduce you.”
“I’m not a virgin, Arch. And I have eight brothers.”
“Just—just stay away from them.” He sounded terribly tired. His Mister Cool thing had faded. I saw worry in the set of his lips, silhouetted against the driver’s side window.
I realized what I would have to do.
If he really wanted to protect me, then I could control him. Well, say, steer him. By playing on his desire to protect me. Which would work as long as he felt like that about me.
Was it even possible to save a sex demon from whatever threatened him?
It was a stupid plan. Way stupid.
So of course I went with it.
Chapter Three
ARCHIE DROVE ME BACK to my apartment without a word. My head was whirling. My body was on fire. I only touched him once in the car, by accident on the elbow, but I got such a zap off him, I decided just to get home and try to think.
I suppose another woman would have freaked out about the sex demon thing. The magically glowing dicks the size of horse dongs. That reeking lair.
Actually it was the lair that comforted me.
My eight brothers had declared our decrepit, empty dairy barn off-limits, years before I was born. By age seven, I was judged old enough to fetch and carry for them. I was permitted to enter the barn as long as I swore, cross my heart and hope to die, stick a dirty needle in my eye, never, ever to tell what I saw there. Beer, porn, piles of semi-legal firecrackers, an old motorcycle they never did get running, pizza boxes piled to the rafters, dirty sweat socks and shirts, stained mattresses, used condoms, electronic toys. And my brothers lolling all over the place, swaggering, fighting, loafing, playing hard. I cleaned up after them, lied for them, and towed contraband in my little red wagon for them.
So Archie’s lair felt like coming home.
Plainly, Archie thought I should be horrified.
He didn’t need to know that by the time I was ten, it had been me cracking the whip and my brothers who did the jumping.
The next morning, I got up feeling particularly jaded and hung over.
Baz was in the kitchen futzing with the cappuccino machine. “Memo from the Regional Office,” he said, making my morning just that little bit worse.
I staggered to the kitchen table and picked it up. It started to smoke under my fingers. “Whoa, a grade two. What’s with them?”
“Beats me. I’m guessing they got a memo from lower down and the shit’s floating to the top.”
“Coffee,” I croaked, trying to read the already smoldering page.
Blah blah blah, productivity levels, blah blah blah, unfavorable balance in the audit, blah blah blah, forms and reports and splitting headaches in triplicate. As I held it over my head and squinted at it from below, to keep the fumes out of my eyes, Baz put a steaming cup on the table.
“Thanks.” I dropped the memo and sipped.
The memo began to char the table under it. Baz grabbed it with tongs and put it in the sink. The room filled with smoke. Baz opened the back window onto the alley and turned on the exhaust fan.
“I suck.” I stared at my brown and white foam. “What am I doing here? This is a fool’s game.”
He slumped into a chair opposite me and sipped his latte. “It’s the only game going,” Baz said. “You want eternal youth and plenty of time for going to the gym, this is the job.”
“Wouldn’t it be weird,” I said slowly, “to have a job where doing well got rewards? Where your home office and your regional office were the same thing for real, instead of pretending to be deadly enemies like donkeys and elephants?”
“Dud
e, I don’t think you can rebel against hell.”
Coming from Baz, this was satire of a high order. “You mean, only if you want to have your hair on fire for five hundred years.”
“I mean,” Baz said softly, and I looked up at him in surprise. “These days you run an excellent risk of getting a green sheet in your file.”
“Oh, now I’m scared.” I saw his point. The Regional Office, like the Home Office, is so mired in quality circles and The One Minute Manager and its own hierarchy that even a green sheet is an empty threat.
“My point exactly.” He sat there and sipped, looking fucking inscrutable. Smartass. He’d been around thousands of years longer than the rest of us. Veek was just a baby compared to me. My thoughts banged around, pissing me off and confusing me. Green sheet! That proved how dead the whole “hell” idea was. Consequences had no relation whatsoever to actions any more.
Baz was watching me as if my thoughts were running in live feed across my forehead.
“Am I keeping you amused?” I snarled.
“Eternally,” he said.
“What were we talking about?”
“Green sheet,” he said.
“They’ve got to find you first.”
“They’ve got to find your records first,” he corrected.
I looked at him. I was beginning to get an inkling. “And if they can’t?”
He shrugged. “It’s all about accountability these days. You know as well as I do that it’s not how much you score, it’s what your score is on their computer.”
I remembered suddenly that Baz, back in the early eighties when everyone was drafted to help with the Regional Office’s big conversion from paper to electronic record keeping, had been a data processing temp in General Accounting.
“You didn’t,” I whispered. “You did something to your file at the Regional Office.”
He smiled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Fucking Baz never turned a hair. I’d have liked to see him bent out of shape just once. I’ve known him since the nineteen sixties, when we first set up the lair.
Different lair.
They burned down every few years.
What was a party without marshmallows?
“What are you afraid of, Baz?” I said suddenly. “If not the Regional Office.”
“Same thing you are,” he said.
I squinted at him and said, “Hard work?” We both shuddered. “Nope, not you. You got enemies?” I studied his eyes and remembered something I’d spent centuries diligently trying to forget since the last time I’d felt a twinge of fear. “Shit. You too.”
“It’s an occupational hazard. Nobody wants us, Arch. We’re temporary. There isn’t a woman alive who wants a sex demon for more than about forty minutes on a rainy Saturday night.”
“Not a woman alive,” I repeated slowly. Our eyes met. “All except one.”
He inclined his head. “All except Her.”
Hot squishy fear clutched my bowels. I hadn’t felt her tentacles in centuries. In the nineteen sixties, when she ran a major membership drive, I’d managed to limbo under her radar. Hard to do in those days, when everybody was horizontal. But things had been quiet on that front for a long time.
Too quiet.
I remembered the card Lido had brought me from some woman he met outside Cheaters. The card I’d left unopened under the bar. “You think?”
He shrugged. “I’ve been feeling something. A familiar tickle. Just watch your back, okay, buddy?”
I nodded soberly.
“I’m gonna stack some z’s,” he said, and walked out of the kitchen.
I looked off into nothing, probing my perimeter, counting internal organs. Like that would protect me if she ever really came after me.
Her.
She is the enemy of us all, at the lair, in every hell and underworld, the predator who pounces on every sex demon in the business.
Love.
Chapter Four
SUNDAY NIGHT, AT WORK, I got my courage up. The white square envelope was still behind the bar where I’d left it. I hadn’t dared touch it while Chloe was there. I took it into the men’s room and disemboweled it.
There was another envelope inside.
It was sealed.
I checked the outer envelope. Nothing on it except “Archimedes” neatly printed in Greek.
After a long, deep breath, I opened the inner envelope. A layer of tissue was wrapped like a whispering condom around something inside, a thick card with handwriting in gold ink…I pulled off the tissue. It read, in English:
Archimedes,
your richly deserved reward
is coming.
It was signed with a scrawled heart.
My stomach turned into an ice-cold lump.
The threat was clear.
After all these centuries of laying low, ducking and swerving, hiding out, playing dead, I was caught.
Worse, Chloe could soon be caught, too. Because of Chloe, I was committed to this fake victims’ compensation program for a fake Ravenswood Project. I had to arrange a rain of men for her, and I had to keep my roommates away from her—what had I been thinking, bringing her to the lair?—and I had to do all this without having sex with her. Because if I did, Aphrodite would be onto her. As she would be on any woman I did more than once.
It could get ugly.
I fingered the card. What would she do to me? Turn me into a tree? A fish? Maybe a bed of reeds or a bird? She’d done all that to rivals and scorners before, and she wasn’t one to repeat herself.
And what might she do to Chloe?
That question made me so sick to my stomach, I had to think about something else.
Like Chloe. Another problem. Chloe was just too blessed vulnerable. If she flipped like that over a couple of kisses, what if one of my fucking roommates got hold of her? Would I even know she’d been compromised by one of them until it was too late?
These and other cheerful thoughts chased through my head.
One thing I was sure of. She’d be back as soon as possible to get me to repeat those kisses.
Sure enough, Monday evening she came prancing into Cheaters on those long legs, brandishing a big mauve packet.
“Looky!” She tossed the packet on the bar and scooped up the tonic water I’d put out for her.
“What is it? Company propaganda of some kind?”
“Company opportunity. This is where we win big bucks and fame and fortune.”
I read the label. “‘Venus Dreams, the new taste sensation from Boshy Beverages.’ Sounds like crap.”
“And good evening to you, Mister Cheerful.” She eyed me with bushy-tailed cheer. “It just came down from company headquarters in Syracuse. Take a look!”
Chloe looked tarted up a bit more than usual. The extra lipstick. The sparkle in her eyes. The bouncy, squirmy-two-year-old energy. And—I sniffed with my extra sex-demon sniffing powers—the unmistakable odor of a lady deer expecting a gentleman caller.
I’d really put my foot in it this time.
To avoid further eye contact, I opened the envelope.
“It’s a contest,” she burbled. “They want a logo for the product and some advertising and promotion ideas, and the winner gets a trip to headquarters in Syracuse and twenty-five thousand dollars and a cruise to the island of Cyprus—”
At the thought of Cyprus I shuddered involuntarily. I muttered, “Second prize, two nights in Pittsburgh. What, did old man Boshy fire his advertising company again?”
“Yup. C’mon. We’ll enter together. You have all the brilliant ideas. I know the product line and Boshy’s hot buttons. We can rock this contest!”
“You’re mighty bubbly today.” I spread out the papers.
“I’m motivated today.”
She’d given me an idea. Maybe I could divert all this hormonal frenzy onto job ambition. Get her out of brand bimbo hell. “And does inspiration smite you?”
She sent me a languishing glance
. “This is my ticket to the top. Oh come on,” she said, when I rolled my eyes. “You’re always pushing me to use my business degree.”
“It’s not an advertising degree, is it?”
She stuck her tongue out at me. Her tongue! She might as well have unbuttoned her blouse.
I blinked. “Where did all this ambition come from? I’ve been pestering you to go for a promotion for two years.”
“I’m inspired.” She sat back on her stool and beamed at me.
Well, that didn’t totally suck. Yesterday, she’d walked in here so depressed, I’d made a once-in-forty-years error.
I studied her. She had her black suit on, the one I call her funeral suit and she calls her upwardly mobile suit. It’s too short for business, but then, everything she puts on that pretty butt looks too short with those legs under it. The jacket is cut too low, so of course under it she wears a cami cut down to Venezuela.
For Chloe, this outfit was a declaration of war.
“We can do this,” she said throatily. Her eyes got darker, looking into mine.
My mouth felt dry. I drank some of her tonic. “Do what?” I croaked.
“Come up with a brilliant idea. Your department.” She held my gaze, took the tonic out of my slack hand, and swigged.
My plan was working fine, except for the part where I kept noticing how good she smelled. Heart thumping, I shuffled the papers on the bar. She bent over them and her suit jacket gapped.
I kind of tuned out for a while, peeking. Self-control has not been a big part of my life up to this point.
She burbled along, flipping through the contest entry form and filling in little boxes with my pen. “I’m dying to go to Syracuse. They say if you get invited there it’s guaranteed you’re getting a promotion. I haven’t tasted the new product yet—Venus Dreams. Probably another sticky drink, oh well.”
Staring at her chest, I might have lost patience and dragged her into the back office if two words hadn’t punched through the fog: “Syracuse” and “Venus.” I have kind of a phobia about them. Reluctantly, I tuned back in.
“They announce the winner in six weeks, so they send us to headquarters for the big product launch party—hello? Archie? Are you listening?”
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