“Huh,” I said. “Oh, yeah. The tissanammi.”
“I was five. It just wiped us off the beach like a squeegee. I was only five. My whole family died.”
I nodded, but I was thinking, Holy shit.
“So these guys. What did they do?” I said, dreading the answer.
“They said they would feed me and take care of me if I would do the work they wanted. They gave me rice and a little water. I didn’t know what I was doing.” She caught herself up on a hysterical sob. “I didn’t know!” Then she stuffed her face into my neck and squeezed.
“Sh-sh, sh, I’m here. Ain’t nobody else here. Shhhhh.” I knew what she was saying then. “That’s when the devil made you sign your soul away so’s you could be one of these girls, right? Those bastards.” I knew how to find Ish, anyway. Kinda. Ish was in for a punch in the nose.
“No,” she says, pulling her face back. “No. It was slavers from Thailand.”
“Thailand?” I scowled.
She explained about how they can do stuff in Thailand they don’t do other places, like keep kids in these places where they—god, the stuff she said they made her do. I got sick twice. Yarked right there in the wastebasket by her bed.
“I’m sorry, mistress,” I gasped in between hurling. “I’ll buy you a new wastebasket.”
She just said, “Why do you think it’s rubber?” She seemed like she’d calmed down.
I wiped my mouth off with that wet bloody rag. She looked pretty calm now. But more like a young girl than her usual man-eater supermodel self.
“They did that shit to a five year old girl?”
“And boys. Equal opportunity slavers.” She smiled!
“This is not funny,” I said. “So what was that monster then? Something to scare away the slavers from a little kid?”
She scowled. “Monster?”
“You got all like a tiger there when I tried to get outa bed.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Tried to—Reg, were you in this bed when—”
Uh-oh. Looked like I was in for a beating after all.
I talked fast. “I couldn’t let you be scared all alone. I couldn’t do it. You can hit me if you want,” I said stubbornly, “but I just can’t sit and do nothing if you start crying.”
She shut her eyes, and I thought, I’m in real trouble. But she opened them again. “That was a weretiger. It’s a child-eating monster, not a child-protecting monster.”
“No,” I said firmly. I knew what was what. I’d had one of those monsters in my closet when I was little, too. “That thing protects little kids that’s getting hurt.”
“You’re pretty sure of yourself.” She swallowed. “I chewed holes in you.”
“You din’t know I wouldn’t hurt you.”
“Yes, I did,” She sounded impatient.
“No, you was just a little kid right then.”
I did some mental math.
“If the wave come in 2004—then you’re—” I couldn’t even say it. She was just a kid! “So the Regional Office recruited you when you was five.”
“No. The slavers captured me when I was five. They told me I had agreed to seven years indentured service. They told me that what I said on that beach, five years old and starving and dying of thirst and horror, in exchange for a cup of water and a handful of rice, was a binding contract. They were human, Reg. Just people.”
I shook my head. “Holy shit.”
“People can be a lot worse than the Regional Office.”
“I guess.” I thought. “So when did you sign up for the Regional Office?”
“A demoness came to the whorehouse. She chose me out of a lineup and took me into one of the rooms and offered me a new contract. She said I would get a demon body, one that wasn’t all deformed and broken from the work I’d been doing. And it would heal itself if it got hurt. I could be big. Grown up.”
She wiped the side of my face with her thumb. “I’d get paid, Reg. The slavers only fed me and housed me. Now I would get my first cash money in my whole life. By then I’d seen enough American TV to know what the good life was, and I wanted everything money could buy. She said I could fuck as few as three men a month, and I got to pick who, what, when, where, how often, how much, and even if I just gave ’em a boner, it counted. If I didn’t like a guy I could send him away, and if he did something I didn’t like, I was free to knock his block off. That appealed to me.” She chuckled. “I got plenty of beatings back then. So I said, ‘Sign me up.’ I’ve never looked back.”
“She saved you,” I said. “Just like you saved me.” I felt my eyes sting.
She brushed under my eye with her fingers. “That’s one way to look at it.”
“That’s the only way to look at it.”
She rubbed some wet off my face again. “Look,” she said, “I’d love to sit here and cry some more, but I think I smell chorizo and scrambled eggs.” She looked down as if she could see what was hard like a baseball bat between us, which she couldn’t because there wasn’t room. I was pressed up against her as close as I could be. She said, “Let’s fuck.”
So we did. And then we got up and had chorizo and eggs.
I was doing laundry downstairs and Beth come in. She was the only coed demon slut that washed her own stuff. I think she thought I shouldn’t hafta do her wash. Whatever. She hit me once when she got mad, but she’s not into the scene. That was okay. I din’t see how I could have more than one mistress. Jee was enough.
So Beth seen I was spritzing stain remover on Jee’s sheets, and she was all like, “Hey, that’s blood.”
I forgot Beth also thought she was everybody’s mother. “Yeah, bitch of a stain, huh?” I rubbed with the rag and seen it was loosening. Whew. Jee had some nice sheets.
“That’s not menstrual,” Beth said.
“Uh,” I said, totally embarrassed. What could I say?
“And I bet it’s not Jee’s, either.” Beth turned on me, all snarly-mom. “What did she do to you?”
I hunched a shoulder. “It wasn’t nothing. But—hey, lookit this!” I shook the sheet out. Something hard fell click on the floor.
It was a claw, long and curved and sharp and crusty with dried blood.
I hoped it was just one she shed, not that got pulled outa her hand by force. Feisty girl like Jee, she would need all her claws.
Beth had a cow. “Oh my god, Reg! What—did she—and you bled all over the sheets—my god, Reg!”
“Never mind,” I growled. “She fixed it, okay? Look.” I pulled my tee shirt off and showed the spots on my side and my shoulder. There was a little scar maybe, but I din’t mind.
Beth looked at the scars. “When did this happen? These marks look months old.”
“I said she fixed it.” I pulled my tee shirt back on. “Don’t have a cow.”
She shut up then.
I kept the claw. It was the first thing of Jee’s I ever got.
That afternoon the water heater blew a gasket and made a big mess in the locker room. Amanda worked on it. I helped some. She decided it was busted. It was after twelve so we couldn’t get same day replacement from Home Depot. We’d have to pick one up ourselves. That set off a comedy of what new heater do we get and who goes to fetch it. Pog was feeling cranky because she had like fifty things going on in the kitchen and the dishwasher wouldn’t run and she wanted Jee outa her hair. It stuck out a mile to me. Dunno if Jee saw it. They do this to each other. Pog’s turn.
It din’t help Beth had opinions about water heaters. She and Amanda opened Amanda’s laptop and went over the ones Home Depot had on their website.
“I replaced our water heater in Glencoe,” Beth said. “With two teenagers and a so-called adult male narcissist? We had to have eighty gallons. Blake took a fifty-minute shower every night.”
“So you think eighty’s not enough?” Amanda said. She was all over grease from replacing pipes. I guess the Lair was so old, it would need a lot of new pipes before we could even put in the new heater.
Everybody looked at Jee.
Jee was drinking beers in a pink deck chair by the grill. She waved from the wrist like Queen Elizabeth. Then she turned it into a middle finger.
“I can’t go,” Amanda said. “I have to get these new pipes in before we can install the new heater, and dinner is spoiling.”
Everybody looked at Pog, standing over Amanda like she could make the old heater work from impatience.
“I’ll go to Home Depot,” Beth said. “Even if we have to take a floor model. I’ll make sure we get a Rheem. And it’ll be bigger than eighty gallons. I’m good at getting the price down on those,” she said grimly. That I believed. “Reg, I’ll need you along.”
Jee sat up. “What for? I need a back rub.”
“One, he can help me get it in and out of the van. And two, the plumbing department staff pays a woman more respect if she has a man along, even if she does all the talking,” Beth said sourly.
“I’ll play dumb,” I promised her, and everybody looked at me.
“Take him,” Pog said. “Dinner is spoiling.” She looked about to blow a gasket herself.
“Hey,” Jee said.
I ducked my shoulders up around my ears. Battle of the Titanics.
That’s when Pog got foxy. She sighed. “You’d better go with them,” she told Jee, “and make sure the tank’s big enough.”
Jee finished her beer. “What do I care? I always get the first shower anyway.” But she got up and jerked a thumb at me. “C’mon, Reg.”
I sighed and come after her.
On the way to Home Depot, Beth went after Jee about the bite marks on me. “All over his shoulder.”
Jee looked at me, and I thought I was in trouble.
“She saw the blood on the sheets,” I said.
“And there was this claw,” Beth said. I coulda choked her. “He’s all scarred up.”
Jee narrowed her eyes at me.
I felt that feeling like all my nerves stuck out a foot, but in a good-bad, bad-good way. Sheepishly I pulled the long chain up outa my shirt and showed her how I put the claw on it to keep it.
She din’t try to touch it. She just looked. Then she pulled me to my knees in front of her, which made me blush because she din’t usually touch me in front of people, and stretched my shirt so’s to look at my shoulder.
I said, “It’s all fixed. Even the scars is more faded since this morning. Seems to be getting a little itchy.”
Jee got a panicky look. “Shit.”
“They have faded since this morning.” Beth frowned. “If he’s healed to scarring point, then it can’t be septic.”
“If the claws of the weretiger are tainted, and if you get scratched by one, you could turn into one,” Jee said, very sober.
“Weretiger?” My jaw dropped. “You mean I get to be a child defender monster?”
Beth said, “Omigod.”
“It’s not a child defender,” Jee said, rolling her eyes.
I couldn’t stop a grin. “Yes it is.” It came to me that if I got to be a weretiger, I could find those sons of bitches in Thailand someday and teach ’em to take a joke.
“What are you thinking?” Jee said, but before I could tell her, Beth pulled the van into Home Depot. Instead she said, “Let’s get this water heater back to Pog before she strokes out.”
Beth looked at me sideways the whole afternoon.
I got so curious, I just ast Jee. “How come, if you’re from, like, Austronesia or whatever, you don’t talk like that? You sound American to me.”
We brung the water heater back. Amanda was still running pipes in the locker room. Beth was in the kitchen “helping” Pog make dinner with no running water.
And me and Jee was back in her room, the door shut and locked. I guess she wasn’t too pleased about that time when everybody come in after I flew against the door. I was rubbing her shoulders.
She tensed up after a minute, like she took that long to figure out what I was asking. “Oh. My American accent, you mean?”
“I guess so, yeah.” I worked my thumbs deep and wide across her back, right between the shoulder blades, up by her neck where she was tensing up. The tight stuff eased. “You sound like you grew up here.”
She made a nice noise. “Do that some more.”
I smiled to myself. I love it when she likes what I do.
The tension moved out of her back, but I felt it moving into other parts of her. I was sitting on the backs of her legs, so I could tell. Somewhere on the front she was tensing up. Her stomach? Her quads? I wanted to suggest turning over and maybe see what I could do there, but I’d never gave her a tummy rub before, not like a back rub. I din’t know how she’d take it.
Her face was against the sheet. When she spoke, it come out muffled. “I guess because of TV. We got a lot of American TV in that place. I worked hard to learn my American accent. I got treated better because I sounded American. For a while.”
I tried to picture this and couldn’t. “What, like, while you’re waiting for a john to come in for a blowie, you get to watch Sanford and Sons or South Park? Like that?”
“Yep.”
“Whoa. But, hey, spics and black kids and foreigners like that, they watch our TV, and they don’t know how to talk good American.”
“They probably aren’t motivated to get the fuck out, like I was.”
Now her butt muscles was tightening. I eased off her thighs and worked my hands down to her butt and rubbed gentle but deep. Her butt was so strong. Was that a succubus thing? It wasn’t like we did enough basketball to build those muscles. Maybe it was because she was just so strong. Also, young. I wondered exactly how old she was.
Well, all I could do was ask. Only I wasn’t sure how to lead up to it.
“How long was you there? Watchin’ all that TV?”
She jerked against the bed. I realized she was laughing. “Reg, you’re the soul of delicacy. You mean, in the Thai whorehouse? A little over seven years. I was just under six when they got me, and just past thirteen when I was recruited. I told you that.”
“Did you have another team before this one?” I said, suddenly realizing what this meant. “Did you have another houseboy with them?”
I knew I sounded jealous. So what.
Her head turned on the bed. I seen a little smile, though her eyes were closed. “Nope. You’re my first houseboy, Reg.”
I felt better.
“This is my first team, too,” she murmured.
“So what didja do before that? I mean, as soon as they recruited you to the Regional Office?”
She wouldn’t tell me, I knew. Who talks about their childhood?
“Two years turning tricks with Pog out of a nice apartment downtown, getting used to my new body, shopping.”
“What, here?” I was flabbergasted. “Like, right in Chicago?”
“Of course right in Chicago. What, you think we don’t have whores in Chicago?”
I shrugged uncomfortably. “Did you have a pimp?”
“Nope. Pog was with me.” She heaved a sigh, and I could tell her front was relaxing, because her butt started to soften up too. “She used to have a pimp, years ago. One time, while we were working together, she ran into him downtown and he followed her back to our place. Guess he recognized her without all that extra weight.” She chuckled deep in her throat. “He was the first guy I killed.”
My hands went quiet on the backs of her thighs. “Killed a lot of guys, didja?”
“Not hardly.” She yawned. Good, she was relaxing again finally. “Don’t stop that.
“Okay,” I said, and got back to work. “Did you turn into a tiger on him?”
“No. He started beating Pog and me, and I just had enough. That day, I realized that I was free and living in America. I had my own place and clothes and regular meals and I knew my trade. And I thought, why do I have to take this shit? I just punched him. He choked to death. Collapsed windpipe. It was awesome.” She sounded so relaxed and sleepy.
“Don’t ask. I called Ish and he sent us here to meet up with Amanda. You showed up the next day.” She chuckled sleepily again, and I wondered if she was thinking about how they throwed me off the balcony.
I looked at her, face down on the bed, a little streetlight coming in through the window making her skin look kinda goldy orangey brown. She was breathing quiet and even now. Asleep. I felt mushy suddenly. She should let me massage her to sleep every night. One of these days she might not wake up screaming.
I eased off her lower legs so’s not to wake her. It occurred to me there was some gaps in her story still. Not that she told me much tonight. But I mean, if she din’t leave nothing out, that meant, how old was she now? If she was five when they picked her up on the beach after the wave, plus seven years was thirteen when she got away and turned into a succubus, and then spent two years with Pog in Chicago and then come straight here... that made her....
Fifteen.
If that.
I looked down at her long, smooth, strong, perfect supermodel body and remembered how she said getting used to my new body.
I started putting some stuff together. All of them was tall. Jee, Pog, Amanda. Even Beth grew herself taller when she was remembering she was a sex demon now and not some kinda desperate housewife of Winnetka. That was how they wanted to look. Taller than most guys.
Well, I could relate to that. Din’t I grow an inch or two since I moved in?
I wondered what Jee’d looked like before she got this body. This long lean hot mama body suddenly seemed fake to me, even though I just been touching her all over. I sure liked doing that. She did too. I knew that. That was why she got to sleep so fast.
Fifteen. Huh.
Not twenty-five going on a thousand, like she seemed when she was awake and in control of herself—and me.
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 30