Amanda shook her head. “See-food diet.”
“Four stars and above when I eat out, otherwise, junk,” Jee said, which I knew, having roomed with her for two years. A little shamefaced, she added, “Every now and then I want some home cooking.”
“North Indonesian?” I said.
“Or if you can’t do that, I’ll take Thai.”
“No problem. We’ll set up delivery schedules for the staples, and each of us’ll get our own special stuff for ‘every now and then.’ But we are not going to live on junk food all the time. I like to cook. There will be meals. There”—I pointed—“is a dishwasher. I won’t abuse my privileges if you don’t abuse yours.”
“I didn’t go into this business to do dishes,” Jee grumbled, eyeing the dishwasher.
“Me either,” I said pointedly.
That night, I made the team file a preliminary on our monthly report. We’d got past the squabbling-over-rooms part, and had phoned the movers to bring our stuff in, and made plans to redecorate, and ordered about three hundred dollars’ worth of junk food to be delivered by the grocery service. Emergency rations. Everybody’s favorites.
Meanwhile Amanda pulled out as many brews as we fancied it would take to keep us from going insane from filling out the online forms. Jee opened one of the cub-scout-camp-size bags of Cheetos. I fired up the laptop. We dragged three of the recliners to face the far-right TV and sat down to commune with hell’s payroll system.
Baz, the faceless incubus who had used the system before me, had left all the defaults in place on the Regional Office interface, as I’d hoped he would, but I soon discovered that in the intervening weeks since I’d last logged in, Second Circle, as threatened, had upgraded to Windows 8, which is truly a hellish invention. I came close to throwing the laptop across the kitchen.
“Here,” Amanda said, woman of few words. I handed her the laptop. Right away she had it working. “We’re using the new interface, right?”
“There’s a new interface?” I watched her fingers dance.
“‘Fraid so.”
Jee and I looked at her with respect. Farmhand looks or no, this softball queen would be an asset to the team.
One by one, each putting left foot up on top of right thigh, yoga-style, we handed the laptop around and keyed in the eighty-eight-digit Infernal Identification Numbers tattooed on the soles of our left feet, and saved them under a shorter, friendlier password. I know, right? Some security system. But not even a demon can remember an eighty-eight-digit sequence. That was why the Regional Office chose to make IIDNs that long when they went paperless in the eighties. Of course it was also why the whole system was leaky as a second-grader’s backpack.
First thing, the system wanted us to log two-thirds of our quotas.
“What?” Jee growled irascibly. “I just got here.”
I sighed. “Just make something up.”
We grumbled and cussed our way through the monthly report screens, which had of course changed in the past three and a half weeks. The Regional Office’s infrastructure has grown immensely more complicated since computerization. It’s been a major contributor to the fall-off in productivity in the field, and, in-house, has led to demons abandoning their line jobs in droves, which means that traditional punishment in the Inferno has become a joke. The firepits are cold and dead. Everybody hunches at workstations now. On the other hand, anybody with engineering chops is guaranteed promotion down below. Plus, such damned souls as we get now have to do data entry.
Jee and I cobbled together something for a mid-month report, each of us anteing up a mythical encounter with a guy in a bar. She hemmed and hawed a lot over the details. As in, details about what she was wearing when she fucked these mystery guys: her dress, her hair, her jewelry, and her manicure. Jee is a perfectionist. Then she got just as fussy about making up names and details for her sexual conquests for the month.
I tried a few suggestions to hustle her along.
“No way would I fuck a guy in a toupee. Girls don’t make passes at men who wear glasses, or hadn’t you heard?”
“Glasses go on your nose, not your scalp,” I said.
“No toupee,” she said flatly. “I’ll settle for shoe-lifts.”
“You’re a pain in the ass.”
“I sleep with men,” she said defensively. “I’m just picky.”
“You’re not supposed to be picky,” I hissed. “Equal opportunity sinning, remember?”
“Nobody said anything to me about affirmative action,” Amanda said.
“She’s being a pain,” I said. “Ignore her.”
When Amanda’s turn came, she quickly tapped out her stats, filling in the fields for name, description, date and time of the encounter, marks and moles, and details about the mark’s sexual perversions, if any.
Jee and I stared at her open-mouthed.
“You’re good,” I said.
Amanda turned her bovine face toward me. “What? It’s all true.”
“You banged some guy today?” Jee said. “We’re just moving in.”
“He was the moving guy. He was right there at my place. I could finish out my quota.”
We stared at her, but that was apparently all she had to say.
The doorbell rang from way, way downstairs. “The movers,” Amanda said.
“You had them deliver at one o’clock in the morning?” Jee said.
“Best time,” she said.
“Are any of them as cute as the one you banged?” I said, draining my beer and putting the empty bottle on the table. “C’mon. Let’s go supervise the move.” I thought of Amanda, the practical. “And get a jump on the rest of our quota. Tomorrow, we’ll collect the new girl.”
Beth
And now it was tomorrow, and Beth woke up with a headache and a belly full of fear, because her money had run out.
She looked around at her belongings spread out on the smelly bed and rickety dresser: one suitcase, a few clothes, her laptop, her phone, an unbelievably tiny assortment of shoes. What had she been thinking when she packed? This wasn’t a hop to a Mexican resort with nice shops. She was homeless as of today. Beth staggered to the bathroom, drank from the faucet because the glasses looked smudgy, then knelt and threw up for a long time.
Because everything awful ends eventually, she flushed and rinsed her mouth and showered and dressed in her last clean underwear set and a quiet Vera Wang sheath that wasn’t too dirty. The icky black runny feeling in her belly didn’t go away.
She was trying to put her makeup on without meeting her own eyes in the mirror when someone knocked at the door.
“I’m not ready for housekeeping!” she yelled.
Knock knock knock.
“Go away!”
“Beth, we’re from the Regional Office.” A woman.
She poked herself in the eye with the mascara wand. “Ow.”
But that was just a drunken dream. She’d imagined a telepathic demoness with a perfect French manicure and a wry smile. She’d dreamed up the contract. Right?
Knock knock knock.
Tears running from her right eye, Beth looked around for her Fendi clutch. There. On the floor by the bed. The mascara wand fell from her fingers as she saw the stiffly folded sheet of paper sticking out of the clutch.
“Beth? Are you all right?”
She put her hand over her streaming eye.
What did it matter if it was a dream or not? She was free to fuck up her life on her own. Suddenly she could all too easily see herself hauling a dirty, scarred version of this suitcase down the street, and bringing men back to this room, like those girls who made these walls thump all day and all night.
But would any man pay to come here with an old broad like me?
“How bad am I going to feel?” she asked herself.
“What?” came the woman’s voice outside.
Beth took a breath and yelled, “How bad am I going to feel when I work for hell? Worse than I feel now? Because I feel pretty awful!�
�
Feminine murmurs came from outside. “Don’t blame me if she freaks,” said a different woman.
The door opened. Beth felt a wave of sizzling cold pass over her skin, which told her that she could indeed feel more afraid.
A lovely young blonde put her head inside. “Beth?”
Beth’s legs gave out. She sat bonelessly on the bed. Her hand closed over the clutch and the folded contract.
Three very tall, incredibly leggy young women trooped in, looking warily at her.
The lovely blonde sat down on the other bed, the hem of her tight knit red dress riding up over her exquisite legs, and put out her hand. “I’m Pog. This is Jee, and this is Amanda.”
Jee was dark-skinned in a shade Beth didn’t recognize, with masses of real-looking jewels, a black Armani cocktail dress, cheekbones for days, and big, beautiful, almond-shaped, angry black eyes. Amanda was another blonde. Her two friends were shapely twigs, but Amanda looked Nordic-husky and thick with strength, dressed in gray sweats and sneakers.
Beth sucked in a long breath. “Hello.” She shook hands. Pog’s handshake was exactly correct: firm, cool, respectful, brief. Beth shuddered anyway.
“We thought you might want a ride to the Lair,” Pog said.
“You look like you’ve been worked over,” Jee said. “Pardon me,” she added when Beth sent her a sharp look. “But he did a number on you.”
“How do you—know?” Beth felt stripped.
“We get a profile,” Pog said brusquely, as if to silence her companion.
Beth felt old and saggy. What could they possibly see in her? “I haven’t signed the contract yet.”
“I think you did,” Pog said.
Beth opened the folded sheet and looked at the bottom. That was her signature all right. “I was very drunk.” She offered it to Pog with a trembling hand.
“Keep it. Time to get you out of here. Amanda?”
The Nordic blonde dug into her fanny pack. “Here. Keys to the Lair, your bedroom, and the van. They’re labeled,” Amanda added proudly, as if labels were her own invention, and handed Beth a bunch of keys.
“I have a car,” Beth said numbly. “My old Audi.”
“Handy,” Pog said. “We’ll pick it up later. The van’s for when we go out trolling together. And for groceries. You’ll be in the rotation with these two junk-food junkies.” She snapped her fingers at Amanda. “Oh, and the phone.”
Amanda produced the latest iPhone with a casing Beth had never seen. It seemed a different color from every angle. “I don’t know if you lose stuff a lot,” Amanda said, “but you won’t lose this. We’re all in it. It’s got a new number, super-blocked, but I programmed it to take forwards from your old number.”
Beth took the new phone and slid it into her clutch next to her own phone, cramming the contract in behind it. The clutch was now unfashionably fat. She held on tight.
Pog looked around the unbearably squalid room. “Want help packing?”
Beth packed. The others took turns going to the bathroom.
Jee took the longest. When she came out, she had Beth’s makeup case. “Nice stuff,” she said approvingly.
Beth felt a pathetic surge of gratitude that something she had done had earned Jee’s approval. She tucked the makeup bag under her carefully folded, soiled clothes in the suitcase.
“We’ve paid your bill,” Pog said.
Amanda pulled out the handle of the suitcase. “C’mon.”
The four of them walked out, Beth last, looking behind her, feeling that she was abandoning a known-if-revolting refuge for one she couldn’t imagine.
While Amanda was putting Beth’s suitcase in the van, and Jee was climbing into the back, Pog pulled Beth aside. “Don’t mention Delilah by name,” she said. “Just call her your ‘recruiter.’”
Beth nodded numbly.
Amanda drove the van. Jee and Pog sprawled on a bench seat along one side, opposite Beth, who sat primly seatbelted on her bench with her knees together. Their leggy ease and youth filled her with some emotion she was ashamed to acknowledge. They were Farrah’s age, somewhere south of twenty-five, beautiful simply because they were young. Beth had never been that relaxed, even when she was a cheerleader.
She hated them. It was a very unpleasant feeling, being this close to women who were exactly what she despised the most, who looked perfect and had everything and yet wanted more, something that didn’t belong to them.
Then Jee spoke, and the hate popped away. “So you were married for what? Twenty years?”
“Twenty-eight,” Beth said dully.
“You angry?” Jee said.
Beth looked at her. “We had a house in Glencoe with a six-hundred-foot frontage. Farrah went through it the day after Blake served me the papers. At first, she put yellow stickies on everything she regarded as Blake’s. They were everywhere. I was afraid to open a door or a drawer, in case they would fly off. Then she took them all down and put blue stickies on everything she would let me take. That hardly took even one pad of stickies. Blake got all the cars except my old Audi. He took the house. He said I was sure to find employment right away. He agreed to a settlement, but his check bounced.”
Jee cleared her throat and Pog shushed her.
“He can’t pay a settlement,” Beth said, her voice strengthening as she spoke. “I should know. I do our bookkeeping. We’ve been running in the red ever since the real estate bust. He can’t pay it. He promised what he’ll never deliver. And he took everything else.” Her voice rose, and dark anger filled her like sausage in a casing, making her feel tight and dirty inside. “Yes. I’m angry.”
Jee made a moue. “Good. I can work with angry.”
“What am I going to do?” Beth blurted.
Jee’s teeth showed in a way that reminded her of Delilah. “Get even, honey.”
Beth snarled, “I want to make him feel like this.”
Jee leaned forward and patted her on the knee with delicate, French-manicured fingers. “This’ll be fun.”
The Lair, which Beth agreed justified its capital letter, was a work in progress, a giant factory space with parked cars and work benches and dark, echoey emptiness. Amanda changed her sweats for even grottier painting clothes so she could finish striping the basketball court in that giant factory room downstairs. The rest of them passed through a door into a locker room so old it didn’t stink any more, and up some metal stairs into their real housing: a long, narrow hall, a few doors.
It was unlike anything Beth would have imagined as a lair of succubi from hell. She felt more off-balance than she had last night. Last night she’d talked herself out of suicide by dreaming up a beautiful telepathic woman offering her a demonic contract. That actually made a kind of sense.
This grubby loft space, not so much. The terrible emotions that had brought her here would have to wait outside.
Jee offered to fix Beth a margarita, but she shook her head. Last night was too green in her memory.
“Coffee, please,” she said with a shudder. Jee disappeared in the direction, she supposed, of the kitchen.
Pog led her down the hall. “It’s Sunday, so I suppose those contractor bums won’t show up until late. We’re having the bathroom redone. The toilet works, and the sink works, and there’s this dinky temporary shower, but with four of us it’s gonna be annoying. You should have seen it.”
“You should have smelled it,” Jee said, pressing a frosty bottle of beer against Beth’s hand.
“No coffee?” Beth said forlornly. “I have such a headache.”
“More calories,” Jee said briefly.
“Your headache,” Pog said, “is all in your head. If you get my drift.”
“No,” Beth said, feeling stupid.
“Jee, show her the mirror. I’ll start dinner.”
Bemused, Beth took a sip of her beer. It was ice cold and sharply hoppy. Her head began to feel better. She took another pull.
Jee towed Beth with one hand and Beth’s suitcase
with the other down the hall to one of the bedrooms. “There,” she said, positioning Beth in front of a mirror on the back of what was presumably Jee’s closet door.
Beth looked. The Vera Wang sheath hung on her like a sack. She looked gaunt and yet stronger than she felt. Her mascara was a mess around her right eye. She made a distressed sound.
Harsh fluorescent ceiling lights snapped on. “I love this moment,” Jee said. “It’s like the day they bring home the pony.” She handed Beth a cotton makeup swab. “Go on, look.”
Under pitiless light Beth cleaned off her smeared mascara. Jee handed her the wand out of her suitcase to put on fresh.
“Concealer first,” Beth said.
“What for?” Jee said, a little smile in her voice.
Now I know I’m in hell. I’m rooming with sadistic, perfect sluts who ruin people’s marriages and then make fun of them for being old.
Beth drew herself up. Suddenly her heart was thudding. She peered into the mirror, nauseous with masochistic curiosity.
Exactly how much worse than Jee did she look?
Wait.
Her crow’s feet were gone.
The lines under her eyes were gone.
The lines around her nose were gone.
The fine blonde hairs on her lips, temples, forehead, and chin, which she’d had waxed off monthly at Elizabeth Arden back when she had money: all gone.
She opened the mascara wand and paused.
Her lashes were long. Really long. Her eyes should have looked nude and pink and bleary and old. Instead they were larger than she remembered. They gleamed. Her lashes waved like well-ordered forests, and they didn’t need darkening.
The scar on her jaw where she’d taken a tennis racket in the face thirty-five years ago was gone.
She looked...perfect. Okay, her hair was a mess, but even in the glare of the overhead fluorescent light it was a good mess, darkly blonde and tousled. Beth put her hands up and tangled the mascara wand in her hair, and Jee deftly removed it before she could smear black into her fading honey-brown dye job.
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 3