She wiped her tears off with the backs of her hands. “You really do look beautiful. I can’t imagine any man saying no to you.”
Amanda’s smile hadn’t quite faded. It made her look lovely. She shrugged. “They never do.”
Cricket followed her downstairs to the back of the Lair’s cavernous factory space, where the cars and the van were parked. All the young ladies were there, looking like a million dollars apiece.
Jee came downstairs last, arguing with Reg.
“You can’t do this, babe!” Reg said as Jee stalked past him to the van. “It’s bad for you!”
Jee put her back to the van door. “I’ll be fine.” Cricket didn’t think she was fine. Jee seemed edgy. She had on a super-sexy black and orange stripey dress and crazy-high shoes.
The other girls stood there, listening uneasily.
“So are we gonna take off the cone of silence?” Reg said, baffling Cricket.
Jee scowled. “I like my privacy.”
Reg turned red. “Won’t matter if I’m there or not. If you start—”
“That’s enough!” Jee snarled, almost panicky. “I can handle this.”
Suddenly things seemed complicated. Cricket felt sorry for them. “You look great,” she offered. “Very beautiful and fierce. Like a lady tiger.”
Everyone went quiet.
Reg’s eyes got big and round.
Jee sent Cricket one horrified glance. Her face crumpled. Then she ran for the stairs.
Cricket felt awful.
“Mistress!” Reg bleated. To Cricket he mouthed, Thank you. Then he scampered up the stairs, too.
“Was that my fault?” Cricket said in a small voice.
Pog rolled her eyes. “Drama, drama, drama.”
“It’s not your fault,” Beth said. “They’re just like that.”
“I’ll apologize to her,” Cricket said.
“Great,” Pog said. “Now Jee will have two slaves.”
Cricket smiled quietly. “I don’t mind apologizing.” If these kids thought that her apologizing to Jee made Jee the boss, they had a thing or two to learn about controlling people with meekness. Although Reg seemed to have it figured out. “Maybe she can show me how to look younger.”
Amanda looked at Cricket as if she could see right through her skull to those sneaky thoughts. “Good idea,” was all she said.
The three remaining demon ladies got into the van and drove out of the building. The big rolling door closed behind them.
Thoughtfully, Cricket made her way upstairs. She guessed she would have to buckle down to this self-transformation thing.
Reg was in the kitchen, cheerfully cleaning. To Cricket’s experienced eye the place seemed spotless, but maybe Reg was why it was spotless.
She crossed the hall to Jee’s door and scratched on it.
“What?” Jee snarled on the other side of the door.
Cricket opened the door and stuck her head inside. “Am I intruding?”
Jee seemed to be fuming, but her face cleared. “Hell, no.”
Cricket explained her problem.
Once Jee understood, she seemed to put her bad temper aside. “Okay, get naked,” she said.
It was like a visit to the doctor’s office. Only Jee got naked too. Soon they stood side-by-side at the mirror, Jee elegantly brown and unnaturally perfect and so tall, a twenty-something supermodel, and Cricket incredibly short and faded, like a shabby version of herself, the way everyone looks naked. Like when they move your stuff to a new house. In the full light of day, every ding on the furniture shows.
Jee showed Cricket how to stretch her body so she wouldn’t have to be the midget on this crew anymore. She got her to look younger, too, finally—really younger.
“Uh, you know, only creeps lust after nine-year-olds,” Jee said uneasily. “You might want to dial it back up a bit.”
Cricket frowned. “No, really. This was me at twenty. I was married with two and a half kids by that time.”
“You look nine. Cute as a bug, but nine. Try makeup. Half the models in the big magazines are under twelve. If you could see them without makeup, you could tell.”
Cricket gave that queenly brown face a shrewd look and wondered what had brought Jee to the Lair. She opened her mouth. “How old were you—”
“Later,” Jee said brusquely. “We’re working on you today.”
“Okay.” She turned back to the mirror. “I’ve always wished I didn’t look like a bug.”
“You don’t look anything like a bug. I lied.”
“I want to look beautiful and exotic like you.”
Jee rolled her eyes. “Do yourself a favor. Don’t call a brown woman ‘exotic.’”
“Is that like saying ‘dusky?’” Cricket said with interest.
“Yes,” Jee snapped.
“Okay. I won’t.” Cricket stared at herself, fascinated. Was she really younger? She stroked her hands, smooth and unfreckled and unwrinkled, like baby’s hands. Not even chapped from washing diapers. Her legs were equally perfect. And, as she’d noticed in the cemetery, no Caesarian scar. “Wow.”
“Now, what face would you like to try on? You can copy someone else if you want. Nobody here, please,” Jee added. “We pulled that trick a few weeks ago to get Beth into her ex-husband’s apartment, but that was a special case, and we had the law to contend with. Think of a movie star or—what is it?” she broke off peevishly when someone knocked. She yelled at the closed bedroom door, “I’m still mad at you!”
“I ain’t going away,” Reg said from outside the door.
Cricket pretended to be absorbed at the mirror, pulling at her features with both hands and letting her face stay that way, like a kid playing with Play-Doh.
“C’mon, Jee,” Reg said outside.
Jee groaned. “All right. Stay there,” she told Cricket, and went out in her birthday suit and shut the door.
Cricket scampered to the door and leaned on it with her ear to the crack.
“Come in the kitchen,” she heard Jee say.
The swinging kitchen door grumped. Cricket listened harder. Reg’s voice murmured. If she tried, she could actually hear what he was saying. Wow, demon ears, huh?
“You din’t eat enough breakfast,” she heard him say. “You want to fit into your nice party dresses, don’t you?”
Yep, Reg had figured out that the meeker you act, the more you’re in control. Cricket had married three times, all three of them alpha males. Jewish alpha males. She’d got that one down early.
A refrigerator door opened and shut. A few minutes later, Jee murmured something.
Reg replied, “You din’t scream last night.”
Cricket blushed and pulled her ear away. She should let them be private. She had a lot to think about. She wandered back to the mirror in Jee’s room.
So Jee screamed at night, and Reg took care of her when she thought she was tough and she wasn’t. Pog was boss of the kitchen in a way that seemed to be about more than good cooking. Everybody made fun of Beth for acting like a mom, but they looked to her when a question about right and wrong came up. Amanda said nothing until someone was desperate, and then she defused the moment with a quiet, seemingly random remark. Amanda was also kind without appearing to notice how that made you feel. In case, maybe, you felt like crying? Or because she didn’t want to see your feelings?
That didn’t make sense. No, Amanda paid attention. She didn’t show feelings. But Cricket had a shrewd idea she felt plenty. She was getting tuned in to Amanda.
Cricket tried out some new looks, remembering how she’d been at twenty-five, thirty-five, fifteen, forty. Then a sound from the kitchen reminded her that this wasn’t her room. She returned to the room she was sharing with Amanda.
The mirror here wasn’t as big. Cricket wondered if she could fit into any of Amanda’s things. Go down to the aquarium, surprise everybody. That would be fun. She poked through the closet until she found a dress so tight and short, it would fit about anybody who
didn’t mind looking tarty, and a pair of shoes to match.
That reminded Cricket, she didn’t know how to do the tart thing yet. I’d better practice a bit before I muscle in on the big girls doing the real thing. With that dutiful thought, she grabbed her purse and sallied forth to find a taxicab.
At the Aquarium, the richies were driving up to the foot of the steps and leaving their cars with the parking valets. They looked very swanky. Cricket paid off her cab and studied the terrain, looking for, what did Amanda call them, marks. In addition to the old guys in tuxedos there were loafers, kids on skateboards, tourists riding those blue rental bikes the city parks around town, and a couple of throbbing school buses, all loaded up with rioting children and waiting for some secret signal to start their cavalcade. The August sun shone on the trees, the lawns, the white stone of the Aquarium, the wind-tossed gulls, and the sparkling lake beyond. It was a great day for tempting.
There. On the bottom step, at the mouth of an awning, stood a guy in waiter’s clothes. Thickset, sandy hair, a little sad-looking but appealingly so, twenty-two maybe, with a gold plastic badge that said Dave, and a fistful of paper that she guessed had to do with the benefit going on inside.
Cricket watched Dave greet the richies as they stepped up under the awning. “Welcome, madamoiselle,” he always said. His accent was pretty good. The ladies seemed to like it. Cricket parked herself on the vast Aquarium steps to watch. She took careful note of the appearance of each woman he flirted with. Some just got the printed program. Some got the full treatment. She tried to figure out what he liked, and began betting herself which ones he’d go for.
After fifteen minutes, she thought she had him taped. She did a quick primp at her reflection circa nineteen-thirty-two in an ad on the side of an Aquarium sign. Back then she’d been twenty-four years old and unusually busty, thanks to a couple of babies. She thought of Jee, swaggery and dangerous in a tiger-striped dress, of Amanda all painted up and loaded for bear. Could she swagger like that?
“So, Dave,” she said, walking up behind him. He jumped. “How does a girl get to know you?”
AMANDA
When we came out of the Aquarium, the first thing we noticed was Cricket perched on a big plinth overlooking the staircase, writing furiously on the back of a jogathon flyer with a golf pencil. She had on one of my spandex dresses for bar slut work. The shoes were parked next to her on the limestone plinth.
I came up to her and put my hands on my hips. “What now?”
“Oh, there you are. Amanda, this is Dave. He’s been helping me learn how to be tempting.”
Dave was a husky guy in a waiter’s white shirt, black pants, and black bow tie. He lounged on a stair below the plinth, his legs loose and long in front of him. It was a good thing his pants were black. He seemed to have caught a water balloon in his lap. His eyelids fluttered.
“Come along,” I said with amusement. “Van’s back behind the Field Museum.”
In the van, Cricket explained. “So I thought I should try it out before I walk in on a delicate operation like you ladies had going in there. Dave was great.”
“What did you do to Dave?”
In the dimness of the van, Cricket wriggled into her seat, full of her adventure. “Well, first, I made myself look like one of those women he was flirting with. He’s a terrible flirt. Actually he’s pretty good at it.” She smiled. “Been a while, I can tell you. I remembered what you said about succubus mojo. I didn’t know how to do it, but I figured I’d try. I thought, ‘What’s gonna make ol’ Dave feel really good?’”
“And did it?”
“Heck yeah. First couple of times, I just went up and put my hand on his zipper. No point being subtle, am I right? I got him going. You bet. Say, you can smell a guy getting hard with one of these demon noses, can’t you? Pretty fancy. But after a while I noticed this bum laying on the grass, I guess he was thirty feet away, under a tree, he was getting all bothered too. So was I using too much mojo? I kinda pulled it back in, like when you set the garden sprinkler and you just want to water a corner of the yard, and that kept it all on Dave. Say, Dave didn’t have near the staying power I thought he would. Do you think I was overdoing the sprinkler?”
“Poor Dave.” I couldn’t help laughing. “Ask me one question and then wait for the answer, okay?”
“I don’t know what the rules are. I mean, when is he tempted, and what’s just overkill?”
“Arousal of lustful thoughts or feelings. That’s what our charter says.”
“So if I talk dirty to him, does that count?”
“It’s not about you. It’s about his reaction. Jee can do it with eye contact alone.”
I wondered if I should call paramedics for Dave. Then I figured someone was bound to find him eventually, if he didn’t get back on his feet pretty soon. Did Cricket have the faintest idea what she’d done to him?
“Huh,” my little roomie said. “I got him hard eight times. I got him to flezn five times. The last three times I got him hard, he tried to ris but I think he was too pooped. See, I took notes.” She brandished her scribbled-on flyer. “I got so I could just kinda smile, you know? That got his wood working.” She elbowed me. “Get it?”
I found myself blushing. “I get it.”
“But so I can see that if you want to tempt more guys, you might just want to get that old snake to thicken up, maybe get a little pre-come, but you’re not aiming for Old Faithful on every guy every time. Do we run out of succubus mojo? I didn’t know. I didn’t want to waste it. That time I gave the bum a hard-on, also, some kid going by on a skateboard nearly took a toss. I wrote down his description in case he counts.”
I drew a long deep breath. One of us had to. “Sheesh, Cricket, you’re a grandmother.”
“I’m a succubus grandmother,” she said proudly. Then she squinted at me. “What, you didn’t think I knew all the words? Kiddo, I was married for sixty years. Three different horny Jewish husbands to keep me busy. You think we played parcheesi the whole time?”
Weakly, I allowed as how that would give her some chops.
Then she blew my mind again with this speech:
“Arman had some natural talent, but mostly he was young. Hoo boy, recovery power. He didn’t want much. Couldn’t get too elaborate. He’d go off like a boy scout at a bar mitzvah. But give him ten minutes, boom, he was back on the job, like Dave at the Aquarium. Lucien opened up a whole new world for me, always something new, swings and wings, chips and dips, chains and whips, back door, front door, Cincinnati bowtie. But Irving.” She paused, while I readjusted my assumptions about this woman yet again. “Irving was old when we married. He had patience. Irving introduced me to the fun of just fooling around. First time I ever tried a Dutch rudder.”
She kept that up for the next ten minutes. Everyone in the van fell silent. By the time we got home, nobody wondered how Cricket would adjust to the job.
At the Lair, Cricket scampered on ahead up the stairs, and I suggested to Pog that we should try to keep her with us when we went to work. “Obviously we can’t count on Jee to watch her.”
“You think she needs it?” Pog said in a skeptical undervoice. “It’s not like she’s a virgin.”
We both laughed.
“I admit I still thought of her as a grandma. She shocks the shit out of me. When she gets her mouth going.”
“When is her mouth not going?” Pog said.
We walked into the kitchen to find that Cricket hadn’t paused even so long as to change clothes before delivering her next shock. While the rest of us took quick showers and changed, she put on a fashion show for Jee and Reg—trying out faces and bodies instead of dresses and shoes. It was taking her about ninety seconds between changes, which wasn’t a record, but quite good for a noob. Pog and Beth nuked popcorn. We all plopped into our chairs, each within easy reach of a cold six, and watched the show.
Jee seemed a little crazed. I put it down to the fight she must have been having with Reg—why el
se were they eating popcorn and watching Cricket fool around with her new demon body when they could be, well, fooling around?
But once we were all comfortably wedged into our loungers, Jee interrupted Cricket’s Marilyn Monroe impression to say, “Show us that first one you did, Cricket. That gorgeous Greek woman.”
Cricket’s eyes lit up. “Isn’t she something? Give me just a minute.” And she vanished through the kitchen door.
“How’d it go at the Aquarium?” Jee said, rolling a sardonic eye at me.
“Okay,” I said. I didn’t know what was going to happen for her, now that she couldn’t work, and I didn’t know how to talk to her about it.
Luckily the door opened again.
And Delilah walked into the kitchen. The demon who was responsible for my signing up for Ish’s demon slut team.
My heart jumped sideways.
A gasp came from Beth’s chair. She started up in her lounger with a joyful expression.
Delilah just stood there a moment, taking in our reactions with sparkling eyes. Then she opened her lips, and Cricket’s voice came out.
“Isn’t she stunning? I love her hair, don’t you? I’ve never seen anyone so smooth. She said her name was Delilah, and then she said I mustn’t mention her name. Oops, I just did, didn’t I? She’s the most gorgeous woman I ever saw in my life. Don’t you think?”
Only Reg was calm. “I’d bang her. Little older than the usual here,” he added, glancing at Jee out of the corner of his eye.
Cricket-as-Delilah wore a very Cricket-like pout of contrition, which looked weird on Delilah’s face. “I did the wrong thing again, didn’t I?” she said in her little-girl-sorry voice.
I glanced at my teammates. They were all looking at each other, and at Cricket.
“That’s weird,” I said slowly, “We were all recruited by the same person.”
Jee said, “She saved my life and she gave me all this.”
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 63