She made a face. “No! What is this?”
“Two unpleasant but necessary jobs, at least, if you’re going to have an army or eat meat or wear leather or sleep on down pillows or—”
“That makes no sense.”
“Or, if you want a hell for bad people so the good people can have a better neighborhood to go to, you have to have demons.”
After a pause, she said, “I get it. I think.”
“I don’t torture the damned. I don’t even steal souls or sign contracts with them, or whatever the bullshit protocol is these days. I just get women into bed.” I wiggled my eyebrows. “Not too different from the amateurs you go home with on a Friday night.”
“Amateurs? As in, unpaid?”
I got up and loaded two hundred pounds into the leg press. “Now you’re calling me a whore,” I said, pretending to be offended. “How about, amateurs in the sense that they don’t know their way around the female body with a flashlight and a Sex For Dummies manual.”
She burst out laughing. “Okay, okay, I guess what you do isn’t so bad.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence. But you don’t have to compliment what you haven’t sampled.” I sent her a smoldering look, pinched my knuckle under a weight, jumped, yelped, cussed, and stuck my knuckle in my mouth. “I hate this machine. Why don’t they buy a fucking Gamma?”
“But why work for hell? Do you prefer working for the bad guys? Is it more, I dunno, romantic?” she said.
“Now you’re insulting my maturity level. Thanks a lot.”
“Oh, for—”
“I work for whoever the Regional Office may be because darned few religions in the past two thousand years have been sex-positive.” I shrugged. “It’s job security. If these doofuses actually approved of sex, I’d be on public aid.”
That got another pause.
I put the wrench down and looked at her with concern. “Don’t tell me you’re morally opposed to sex, down inside.”
“Oh, please,” she said. “Do I look like that kind of girl?”
“I’m not sure. I’m beginning to think I don’t know much about you at all.”
This seemed to make her feel better. “Good. Stay mystified.”
I sat down at the leg press and started working nice, slow, steady sets.
I could feel her eyes on me. It was messing up my rhythm. “Knock it off.”
When I turned to glare at her, she gave me a doe-eyed smile. “I met an angel.” She was looking at my upper arms. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to let her look. I work hard on them.
“What?” Then I saw what this meant. The rain of men had started. “So the charm worked and you met an angel. Awesome.” My crankiness was turning real. I got up and reset the machine for the next user. “Lido’s good at that stuff.”
“A girl angel.”
I did a double take. There was mischief in Chloe’s eyes.
“She had a clipboard and a badge on a lanyard around her neck, and she wanted to know if you were having sex with me. I said no, even though technically you made me come eleven times by kissing me.”
“That was six at most.”
“The first time. When you scalped my bikini region the other day, I came five times.”
My boner was starting to throb like one of Lido’s speakers. I tried to scowl. “So you complained.”
“I didn’t tell her.” She shrugged. “Hey, you only kissed me. Who is she, my mother?”
Now I frowned for real. “This really happened.”
“I do not make stuff up.”
I sat down carefully on the bench so I could face her. “Tell me.” My stomach didn’t feel so good.
She explained.
I was thunderstruck. In all the years I’ve worked for these clowns, I have never, ever had a field visit from the Home Office. I’ve never even had a field visit from my Regional Office supervisor.
I said, “Tenariel? That’s a low-level angel.” I’d have to look her up in the staff directory back home. I cursed mentally. When that didn’t relieve my feelings, I did it out loud.
Chloe said, “Mostly she wanted to know how the rain of men is coming along.”
I stared at her. I was really freaked out. Because the whole “rain of men” victims’ compensation thing was just a line I made up to cheer up some girl in a bar. This girl.
Somehow the Home Office had got wind of it. And they were taking it seriously.
She smiled her little-girl smile and swung her legs out of the rowing stirrups, so that her pretty knees pointed at me.
I said, “So even though you know we’re being snoopervised, you yanked off the personalizer capsule and gave away the charm. And stomped on the capsule.”
“I’m sorry. Is that bad?” Her merry eyes turned solemn. “It’s creepy, Archie.”
“I’m a sex demon,” I said with stony patience. “I’m supposed to be creepy.”
“No. You’re supposed to be cuddly and comforting and unalarming to get my guard down and make me trust you and think you’re my friend.” My insides double-clutched at the reproach in her voice.
“Are you fucking with my head?” I demanded. “I’ve got heaven watching to make sure I don’t score your mythical cherry—however did you convince her you still have that?—and expecting me to rain men on you—”
And how had they come to expect that?
Were they watching her so closely that they were scanning her thoughts?
Impossible.
I shook my head so hard it rattled, trying to clear it. “And now you don’t like the magic it’s gonna take, because it’s creepy. Thanks, Chloe. Way to set me up.”
Her face changed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t try to get you in trouble.” She watched as I tried to control my panic. In a small voice she added, “Are you in trouble?”
“Are you kidding?” I said automatically. “They don’t know I exist.”
This was not technically true. I resolved to go home and check the Regional Office memos stacked up by the toilet. For once, it might turn out to be important to, like, read them.
“Archie,” she said, and put her hand out to touch my bare knee. I felt a zap that sent Mister Johnson into hyperspace. She looked upset. “What can they do to you?”
“Not a damn thing,” I said roughly, pushing her hand off my knee and backing away. “Meet me somewhere tonight so I can get another sample and get this program back on track.”
She blinked rapidly. Great. Now I’d made her cry. She said, “Okay. My place?”
“Eight or nine o’clock. Lido and I have a lot to do before he goes off to his gig.”
She nodded.
I escaped. This was going to be a challenge—getting a few pubic hairs from her without letting her drag me into bed.
What kind of sex demon is afraid to get the girl into bed?
I would need all my slacker skills to avoid it.
Chapter Eight
I BROODED ALL THE WAY HOME. Nervous is how I would describe my mood as I threw my backpack into my Barcalounger at the Lair and headed for the shower.
Chloe’s lipstick was still smeared all over the mirror. Somebody had buffed a face-shaped reflective hole at about Veek’s head height, and somebody else had pulled the stool out from under the sink and left it where I could bark my shins again. Shite. These guys were so slack it was sickening.
“While you were making a mirror to shave in, you could have finished the job,” I complained to Veek when I got to the kitchen.
He didn’t even glance up from the funny papers. “Why? I can shave.”
“And you left the fucking stool where I could break my fucking shins on it, shrimp,” I said to Kama.
“Hey, I can shave,” Kama echoed, copycatting Veek as usual. I cuffed the back of his head and reached for the bacon. The first bite reminded me why I like breakfast. Limp and greasy, with crispy ends. “Nice work, Baz.”
“Thank me, motherfucker,” Lido said, “You can do my laundry to show your gratitude.�
��
I glanced at Baz. “Really?”
“Really,” Baz said, loading his coffee with sugar.
I wondered what Lido really wanted. He had this thing, very irritating, where he did you favors and then he waited for you to notice and melt with appreciation and spontaneously offer to do whatever he wanted you to do for him, without him having to ask. It was like he was somebody’s mother or something.
I grumbled, “Why didn’t you clean the mirror, too? You’d be able to see your vagina in it.”
“Tempting, but no thanks.” Lido loaded his plate with bacon and toaster waffles and slathered butter and maple syrup over all of it. “There’s never any ham,” he complained, building a waffle-and-bacon sandwich.
Baz ignored the bitch at his catering. He does most of the cooking around here, and the rest of us pay for the groceries and consider ourselves fucking lucky, because Lido and Veek and I can’t cook, and Kama won’t because he once spent about forty years as a short-order fry cook and refuses to go near a stove ever again.
Baz said, “She’s your girlfriend. You pissed her off. You clean up after her.”
“No lady with the smallest pretensions to refinement would wish to relieve herself in that chiotte,” Veek murmured from behind the funny papers.
“She wasn’t pissed with us because the bathroom is a latrine,” I said. “She was pissed with herself because she cleaned it.”
Kama, Veek, and Lido all put down whatever they were holding to stare at me, openmouthed.
“Listen to Mister Sensitive,” Kama said, dumping Captain Crunch into a bowl the size of a basketball.
“Have a care to your own female parts, Archimedes,” Veek murmured. “That is girlfriend talk.”
I said, “I’m worried about her. She had a visit from a Home Office caseworker the other day who told her she had to save her cherry for a decent man.”
Baz glanced over his paper and the tops of his glasses. “The Home Office sent somebody?”
“According to Chloe.”
“Save her cherry?” Lido frowned. “What are they smoking up there? Pardon me, Arch, but that girl is no virgin.”
“What do you mean?” I bristled. “I never touched her!”
“Scrunchie on doorknob less than a week ago,” Baz reminded me dispassionately, turning to the editorial section of the Tribune.
I returned to the point at issue. “I’m not kidding. She described the creature to me. It was some kind of angel. Clipboard, ID on a lanyard, heavy mojo, name of Tenariel.”
Kama scratched his scalp with the tip of his spoon, chewing cereal. “But what the fuck would the Home Office care?”
“According to Chloe, they’re taking this victims’ compensation program seriously,” I said.
“But you made that whole thing up,” Lido said. “I was there. I heard you lie your head off in the bar to Chloe about it.”
I slapped the table with my TV Guide. “Goddammit, Lido, what were you doing skulking around Chloe at Cheaters anyway?”
“Chill,” Lido said. “What I ask myself is, how does the Home Office know about some bogus line you laid on some girl? For hell’s sake, if all the lies we told women got laid end to end—”
“Exactly,” I said, thankful at least that somebody saw the problem.
“It matters nothing,” Veek said, fastidiously buttering his toaster waffle. “They know.”
We all looked at him. “You’re mighty sure,” Baz said.
“There was a memo.”
“You read a memo?” I stared at him.
Veek shrugged. “During a contemplative moment in the salle de bains, yes.”
Lido and I looked at each other. Lido left without a word. I heard him trip over the stool in front of the bathroom sink and swear. A few moments later he came back with one of the Home Office’s memos printed on their dreadful flimsy, gray, recycled paper—no wonder we kept it in the bathroom. Lido thrust it at me. “There. Last item.”
The memo was from the Home Office, addressed to my supervisor at the Regional Office and CC’d to, like, fifty-six names. Buried in the CCs was my name, with a circle penciled around it. I wondered idly what minimum-wage angel had the job of circling the name of every recipient and making sure that that copy got to that individual.
The last item on the memo was a one-line reference to the Ravenswood Project, and a victims’ compensation program. “Well, I’ll be blessed,” I murmured. The remark Review process is incomplete sent a shiver through me.
The name Tenariel did not appear on the CC list. There was something wrong with that, too.
I put the memo down.
Baz picked it up with two fingers.
“I’m fucked,” I said, as the memo’s importance sank in. “For some reason they’ve heard of this bogus project and they’re acting like it’s real. And, holy shit, if Chloe spent any time in that bathroom, then she’s read this too. I can’t picture her resisting that juicy pile of reading matter.” I said to Lido, “Did you find the Regional Office copy in there?”
He looked at me blankly. I raced to the bathroom and shuffled through the foot-high stack of official correspondence. Then I shuffled it again. But I already knew. “She found it, she read it, she took it. Shit, shit, shit.”
I dragged my carcass back into the kitchen. Everybody stopped talking at once.
“Gossiping about me, huh. Poor old Arch. He’s bought it at last,” I said with sarcasm.
Kama said tentatively, “It ain’t so bad.”
“Not so bad?” I turned on him. “The Regional Office is going to review a Ravenswood Project that doesn’t exist. The Home Office expects me to make good on that stupid victims’ compensation program, which I only made up to get her to smile, for the love of fuck. Now I have to collect some more DNA samples off her because, last time, genius over here made a charm she could find and dismantle.”
“Hey, that was one of my best,” Lido protested.
“And if I get carried away and boink her, the Home Office will come down on me for tampering with a virgin under their protection.”
“And that’s not all,” Baz reminded me.
“And that’s not all, thank you, just shoot me,” I said. “Between me doing her with obvious disastrous consequences, and the Home Office guarding her mythical cherry, and—”
“Other things,” Baz interrupted.
“Thank you, other things, she’s in a lot of danger. I have to get that sample to make the charm. And if I do, she’s liable to—I’m liable to—” I ran my hand over my head.
“You’ll get her,” Veek said soothingly.
“We’ll help you get her,” Kama said.
“I don’t want to get her. If I get her, she’s toast from three different directions.”
“We don’t care about her,” Kama said. “You need her, so we’re helping you get her.”
“I don’t need help getting her,” I said, as patiently as I could. When he means well, Kama is a terrifying force.
“You need help keeping her,” he amended.
This reminder I did not need.
“I can’t. That way, the Home Office will be watching her every move, and my every move, and it’ll make her a target for all those losers from the Regional Office…and other entities.”
“Entities like what?” Lido scoffed. He’s one of the babies. He doesn’t really grok the scene yet.
I looked at Baz, who folded his newspaper and walked out. When he came back, he had my old dog-eared copy of Bullfinch in his hand, which he dropped on the table, open to a page. Then he started cleaning up.
Kama picked up Bullfinch and started reading aloud. “Aphrodite, goddess of love.”
I cringed. “Do you have to read it aloud?”
“No, no, it’s great stuff. Listen to this. Did you know she cursed her own son for falling in love with some broad she had her knife into? She egged on the Bacchantes to kill a guy. Those bitches. Before your time,” Kama said, waving a condescending hand. “She’
s turned ex-lovers into stones, shellfish, flowers, and sharks. Shit, she made some girl fuck a bear. Man, and I thought I was tough.”
“You’ve always made love, not war, Kamadeva,” Baz said as he loaded the dishwasher.
“And look where it got me,” Kama grumbled.
I interrupted. “Well, that’s where it’s going to get Chloe if we get too close. So please don’t help me get her.”
“She’s just some girl,” Kama said, staring at me. “It’s not like Aphrodite can do anything worse to you than she’s already done.”
“Oh, can’t she?” I said sourly. “I think I won’t put that theory to the test.”
Veek stepped in and took Bullfinch away from Kama. “And we do not wish Archie to feel that he must take extraordinary measures to protect Chloe.”
Kama looked from Veek to Baz to Lido.
Lido flicked his cigarette lighter on and stared at Kama over the flame.
Kama turned pale. “Oh. Okay.”
Chapter Nine
I HATED IT WHEN MY ROOMMATES treat me like a cripple. I grabbed Lido by the elbow and steered him into the lab.
In the lab, Lido said worriedly, “Do you really think the Home Office will—you know—if you screw Chloe?”
“No idea,” I said gloomily. I thought of that careful pencil line around my name, the labor involved in personalizing every single copy of a fifty-six-CC memo, and the total loss of heaven’s grip on priorities that this implied. “No, of course not.”
“Do you think doing these charms and stuff will give us points with the Home Office?” he said hopefully.
I lifted an eyebrow at him. “Gimme a break.”
“Probably not,” he admitted. He opened drawers and cabinets and handed me a bag of magic ingredients, which immediately leaked on my hands. “What I don’t get is why the Home Office bothered to send anybody at all.”
“If they did.”
“You think Chloe lied?”
“I think somebody visited her. Somebody with serious chops.” Immediately I regretted saying it.
He looked at me, and I could see Bullfinch trembling on his lips, so I hurried ahead. “You know how things are with that bloated corporate mess. Same with the Regional Office. I wonder if they even try to recruit any more. Of the five of us, you’re the only one who was originally signed up as a mortal. Baz has been around since Mesopotamia, and he signed on in the fourth century. I wandered in out of the rain in the ninth century. Kama works under an alias—they don’t even have his real name, they just made something up based on some eighteenth-century British demonologist’s blind-ass, bigoted grasp of the Hindu pantheon. I’m not sure his contract is valid. Like he cares or they care. It’s a paycheck, right? And Veek’s operation is actually run via the voodoo priesthood. The Regional Office pretends they have jurisdiction to save face and bloat their numbers. I’m amazed they had the get-up-and-git to hire you.”
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