My stomach was growling hard.
The first four waffles went ding. I flipped open the irons. Pog grabbed two with her fingers and started chowing. Then she pointed at the other two. “Eat.”
Pog takes pretty good care of me, too.
“Thank you, mistress,” I said, and I stuffed a whole one into my mouth, my stomach was growling that loud.
The shower started running again. Probably Beth. She gets up early. Amanda goes last. I think she puts herself last. Pog wouldn’t shower until breakfast was over, but that’s a’cause she’s fussy and don’t like what all that steam does to her makeup. Plus she’s a messy eater. We all are. We get so hungry.
There was maybe two gallons of waffle batter in the bowl. We made waffles like maniacs for twenty minutes. Then we started eating them off the irons again.
I waited for Pog to tell me what went wrong last night for Jee. Please tell me.
She din’t say nothing.
But sure enough Beth come in looking like a cheerleader wearing her mom’s clothes. She’s a blonde like Pog and Amanda, but she likes to keep her body shorter, maybe only five-nine. “What happened in there last night, Reg?”
She started whipping cream. I’d do it, only Pog says it’s Beth’s job. I think Pog only says that to keep Beth from driving her crazy in the kitchen. Beth was a homemaker in some fancy suburb before she signed on. Her husband dumped her for the babysitter. She ain’t got over being somebody’s cook and bottlewasher yet. Only way Pog can keep her from trying to take over the kitchen is give her special jobs.
“Sweartagod, mistress, I got no idea. She let me go home and get things outa my room at my ma’s house. I shoulda come back then,” I said, mad at myself. “What happened?” Beth would tell me.
“I woke up standing in the hall in my PJs,” Beth said. “I must have thought one of the kids was having a night terror.”
“Your kids have been grown up and out of the house for eight years,” Pog said.
“I can’t help it,” Beth said. “It’s hard-wired into you.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Pog said shortly.
“Blueberries, mistress?” I said, to keep the peace. I wanted to ask, what’s a night terror?
Beth said blueberries and Pog said strawberries. I put out the blueberries and took some strawberries outa Pog’s fridge and started washing and hulling. Beth clucked at me and took that over. I went back to prepping eggs and measuring melted butter for Pog.
Amanda come in last, after she had her whack at the shower. She don’t dress up at all. She looks like one of those semi-pro Chicago girl softball players, big and rangy and curvy—a glamazon. I set her up with a triple-shot low-foam salted caramel latte, pronto.
“Did you hear Jee screaming last night?” Beth asked her.
Screaming? My stomach went ugh.
“Want me to slice those strawberries, mistress?” I said to Pog.
Amanda din’t say nothing. She hardly ever does.
I waited for Jee to call for me to come fix up her shoes—she got about fifty pairs—but she din’t. My heart sank.
Pog piled waffles on a paper plate and put them on the floor by my dog bed. I looked at ’em, my stomach growling a whole lot so I bet everybody could hear it. Then I looked at the door.
“Maybe you’d better go see if she needs anything,” Beth said kindly.
I coulda kissed her.
I went and scritched on Jee’s door.
“I didn’t call you,” Jee says from inside. She din’t sound so happy.
I waited.
In a minute she says, “I can hear you breathing out there.” She probably could. She’s a succubus. She can hear a hard-on on a guy at fifty paces.
I din’t say nothing.
After forever she said, “Go eat.”
Miserable, I drug myself back to the kitchen and ate my waffles.
When she finally sailed into the kitchen, looking like Miss Indomalapalesia of 2017, all brown and perfect and stormy-looking, I was done eating and I was making more cappuccino for the girls.
She din’t even look at me.
I wanted to crawl in a hole and die.
I decided that when my chores was over, I was gonna look up this “night terrors” thing.
JEE
With all the stuff I’ve done and been done to, I never thought I’d be spooking out now, just as I’d become a succubus and settled down to a perfect life. I had a brand new, unbroken body. I had a room of my own, a lair full of trusted sisters-in-wickedness, plenty of food, drink, weed, and all the designer clothes and jewelry I could wear. Oh, and a houseboy.
Now this.
It couldn’t go on. If I was losing my mind, at least my street cred shouldn’t suffer.
Pog and Reg were cleaning up after breakfast, helped by Beth. Everybody had their eye off me, finally.
I went downstairs to the locker room and consulted the best magician I knew. Amanda was in there, cleaning the spikes on her golf shoes.
My back and neck felt knotted. “I need a spell.”
She didn’t even look up. “What kind of spell?”
I knew exactly what I wanted, but how could I describe it? Plus, I didn’t want to have to say it out loud. I still felt fragile.
With Amanda, you say things out loud. God knows if she gets anything that isn’t words of one syllable. “I suppose you heard me last night.”
“Oh. Yeah.” She went back to cleaning her spikes. “What kind of spell?”
Thank goodness she’s retarded. I sat down at the other end of the bench with the golf shoes between us. “You remember Get Smart, the TV show? About this dumb secret agent, and he had all this fancy gear that almost worked?”
Amanda smiled, nodded, then did a double take and looked at me. “How on earth did you learn about Maxwell Smart when you grew up in Indonesia and Thailand?”
“Duh. All American TV is available over there. Especially the old stuff.” I had fond memories of Agent Ninety-Nine, the unflappable girl sidekick. One of the best things about my childhood. Let’s not think about childhood this morning. I rushed on, “Remember the Cone of Silence?”
Now Amanda was smiling at the toe of her golf shoe. “But—” She glanced up at me.
I couldn’t meet her eyes. I got up and walked around the locker room, inspecting the newly cleaned and repainted lockers.
She said, “It would be pretty loud inside. Why would you want it loud inside?”
I wandered over to the big washbasin, which looked like a stainless steel fountain in a waist-high cement basin. Well, waist-high to a normal person. Coed demon sluts run tall. When we moved in, the whole thing was stuck shut with lime deposits and rust and nastiness, like everything else in this place. Now it’s shiny. It’s amazing what money can do.
“If it gets loud in there, it’ll wake me up,” I said over my shoulder. “But I’ll have privacy.”
Amanda’s denseness is a big plus sometimes. She didn’t seem to connect what I was saying with what happened in my room. “What if it doesn’t wake you up?”
I hadn’t thought of that. It rocked my nerves to imagine being inside a small space with my amplified screams and I might still be unable to wake up. I drew a shaky breath. “Then I guess it won’t.”
“Do you want the Cone of Silence to shut off once you do wake up?”
I thought of how long I’d sobbed after I woke up and threw everybody out of my room, sobbed with the pillow jammed over my head in humiliation. “No thanks. Let’s just keep my bedroom, uh, private. All the time.” After all, Reg was in there with me sometimes. I stole a look at her.
Amanda nodded. “I think I can do that.”
I pushed the on-button at the fountain-spout in front of me and watched a smooth, wide fan of warm water spurt out and arch up toward the center of the washbasin. My nerves began to settle and my neck muscles loosened. “Thanks. I’ll pay you whatever.”
“Screw pay. Only if it cuts into the last golf days of the season,�
� Amanda said, as indifferent as if I’d asked her to pass the salt.
I couldn’t face her. I nodded at the spray of water and then strode out.
The midday meal at the lair of the coed demon sluts was a team effort that day. Reg made sangria. Beth ordered in Ann Sather cinnamon rolls, which even Pog admitted were better than hers, made with both butter and lard, hoo boy so good. Amanda cleared the table and slapped down fresh paper plates and tableware when the litter got too deep.
I had sangria and watched. I was a slave for seven years. I’m done with work.
Pog cooked up a monster frittata with two dozen eggs, crumbled sweet Italian sausage, minced ham, diced Jarlsberg cheese, pineapple chunks, diced red and green pepper, leftover caramelized roasted carrots, and some crunchy fried onion bits because Amanda had bought a case of them at that food service supply store and we were trying to eat them up. There’s only so many crunchy fried onion bits you can eat with beer. That calls for pilsner, and none of us besides Reg likes pilsner.
I drank my brunch. Big surprise. “C’mon, c’mon, I need that back rub, stat,” I grumbled at Reg, while he loaded flatware into the dishwasher.
“Be right there, mistress,” he said breathlessly. He tied a knot in a big black garbage bag and hoisted it out of the barrel next to the kitchen table. “I only got the two hands.”
“Are you talking back to me?” I said dangerously.
He fitted the new bag into the barrel, sending me a languishing look. “No, mistress.” Multitasking on me.
“Somebody else could do that,” I complained.
“I like to keep it nice for you,” he said. “It’s so clean here.”
We all looked at him with incredulity.
“Oh, leave it,” Pog said, as I’d known she would. “Give her the damn back rub before she expires of old age.”
He sent her a servile look and dropped the bag on the floor. I stalked out, Reg scampering ahead to open the kitchen door for me.
When the kitchen door had swung shut, I stopped in the hall so fast, he bumped into me.
“Sorry, mistress,” he whispered.
I took pity on him. “Go sort my shoes, will you? By color this time.” I wanted to listen at the kitchen door.
I waited for him to go into my room and shut the door. Then I put my fingertips on the wall and stretched my demon hearing, aiming it at the kitchen.
Amanda was telling the others about the spell I had asked for.
Pog said, “Oh, good grief. That’s Jee all over. See a problem, throw money at it or spackle it over.” Thanks, buddy.
“What would you do in her shoes, Pog?” Amanda said.
“She doesn’t want to hear herself screaming?” Beth said. I heard her bustling around the kitchen, probably looking for something to clean that Reg hadn’t got to.
Amanda said, “She doesn’t want us to hear her screaming.”
Beth is clueless. “But why is she screaming?” There are a million unwritten rules about being a succubus, most of them made entirely for our own benefit. Like, don’t pry into other people’s pasts.
“Ask Reg,” Pog suggested. “He’s dumb enough to tattle.”
“Why would he know?” Beth persisted. “He started here the same day I did.”
I rolled my eyes and reminded myself never, ever to tell Beth anything. Reg was not dumb enough to tattle, but Beth?
“Because she wants to tell him, and she doesn’t want to tell you,” Amanda said. So she did get a few things. Amanda doesn’t treat people like they’re stupid, but you never misunderstand her.
Beth didn’t say anything.
Reg
Jee come back to her room and let me give her a back rub. I been getting pretty good at it. Only this time, she started stiffening up. That was all wrong. She was supposed to loosen up from that. She was trembling, too. She pushed her face into the bed real hard.
Me, I thought maybe she was horny, but when I tried to pull off her panties, she rolled over and socked me so hard on the side of the head, I went flying against the door with a big bang.
Then Pog and Beth come and tried to open the door. A course I was lying against it, holding my head, so they couldn’t come in.
I felt stupid.
Jee got up and started changing clothes like nothing happened.
I got up.
Beth pulled me into the bathroom so’s she could make a fuss. My head was bleeding kind of a lot, and she was all concussion ER blah, and Amanda said I was a demon now so no, and Pog squinted like she was trying to figure out what I done wrong this time. She got that look in her eye like the time she made them throw me off the balcony. She thought I’d forgotten that, but no way. I mean, who forgets that?
Jee come in the bathroom and peed and brushed her teeth like we wasn’t even there. Then she went out, shopping I guess because she had one of her little stringy purses over her shoulder.
Amanda went into Jee’s room with her toolbox.
I offered to help.
“No, thanks.”
Beth started asking me stuff.
“I ain’t supposed to tell.”
“Reg.” Beth looked me in the eye. “What did you do?”
I shrugged. “She was all tense, so I thought she wants me to you-know, and I takes her panties off, only then she clobbered me. Guess I shoulda ast.” That made me red in the face. “Rule number one is ask first. Guess I learned that one the hard way.”
Beth pinched up her face. “You went back to your mother last night—”
“Did not! Brr! Just to get some stuff.”
“So you don’t know what happened.”
I guessed, “Jee got in a fight?” But who with? Everybody here respected her.
“She screamed in her sleep.” Beth looked pale. “It went on and on. We couldn’t wake her. She—became violent when we tried. Finally Pog put the light on and said her name. That worked.”
That’ll teach me to go home for a hockey stick and a few comic books. I put up my hands. “Whoa, whoa, I dunno if you should be telling me this stuff. Jee don’t like people talking up her bidness.”
Just the thought that Jee been freaking out and I wasn’t there made me feel sick. It was my job to take care of her.
“I’m telling you in case it happens again,” Beth said. “She seems to think it will. She’s asked Amanda for a spell to—to prevent us from hearing her.”
I was thinking too hard to say anything. I knew she had a hard life before she got her contract. She said once she come from one of them cardboard box towns on a beach in Malapalesia or something, and a big wave killed everybody. That would wake a person up screaming. Shit like that can warp a person’s outlook on life.
I thought of somebody like me nothing ever happens to, bored outa my skull in Berwyn, never been anywhere, and I felt lucky to know somebody like Jee. She come outa that and made something of herself. I was grateful she bothered with me.
“I won’t do nothing to provoke her,” I promised Beth. “I don’t need any of that stuff from my mom’s house no more. I got better stuff now. I don’t know why I went back there.”
I did, though. For days I been feeling my mom back there like a toothache, pulling at the back of my mind like a baby crying next door, wah wah wah. When I got home—back to her house—she was all where you been you serpent’s tooth and so on. I was sorry I’d come back.
Beth’s a mind reader, I swear. “She’s your mother,” she said with a gentle voice, like I couldn’t of helped myself, or maybe she thought I shouldn’t of just run away when I got my contract.
Heck with that. I got enough of that from my mom.
Jee
Next day, I woke up in a foul mood. I smelled pancakes on the griddle—usually my favorite breakfast—but today I felt used and angry and sour and full of a jaded mistrust of the entire world. I didn’t need to cut open a bonefish to tell me I’d had more bad dreams. If I don’t wake up during the dream, I don’t remember it, as a rule, and if I do wake up, it’s
because I’ve screamed my throat raw. I swallowed experimentally. Nope. Guess I didn’t scream long enough to wake myself up this time.
Ugh. Lousy start to the day.
I got some dirty looks from Beth and Pog when I got in to breakfast.
“What?” I said, hoping like hell the Cone of Silence spell had worked. If it hadn’t, I’d have a word with Amanda.
Pog just shrugged and went back to the griddle.
Amanda was eating pancakes and ignoring everything. She never commented if I raised a ruckus. Not even if I did it in her presence. Sometimes just for the heck of it I felt like slapping—
“You didn’t have to hit him so hard,” Beth said in her most critical tone. She was always criticizing the way I treated Reg. She didn’t get my jerk-whispering program.
A slight movement behind me made me spin around. Reg had my coffee in his hands. His eyes were on the floor. He had a scab on his forehead from yesterday, and a brand-new purple and black shiner nearly closing one eye.
“Who hit you?” I blurted.
His good eye flickered up at me and then down. He put the coffee on the table in my place and just stood there, good little boy, waiting for what came next.
I swallowed. Had I done that? Looking at his quiet expression, I began to feel nauseous. I sat down in Pog’s chair because it was closest and my knees weren’t working. I felt like a horrible person. It put the tin hat on my misery. Now I knew why I hated the world and myself this morning.
Reg got on his knees in front of me. His bruised face turned up toward me. “Mistress, don’t cry.”
“I’m not gonna cry,” I snapped. “Get up.” He got up and backed a foot away, looking hopeful out of his good eye. I’d have sworn he wanted me to belt him again. “Come with me.”
I blundered through the kitchen door into the hallway. When the door had swung shut behind us, I stood him against the wall under the ceiling light and turned his face up so I could get a good look. Man, I’d really walloped him. My chest filled with horrible hot boiling lead. Taking the back of his head in my left hand, I laid my right palm over his forehead and swollen eye and let heat flow out through my palm.
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 28