Cameron’s wife locked eyes with her hubby.
Had Cricket sent her some juice through her husband?
I nudged Cricket. We got up and took off toward the jousting arena. My last view of Cameron was him kissing his wife a little peck that turned into a really long mash. The kids swarmed around them unheeded. Ben was smiling off into space. Cameron had a wet spot on the front of his yachting shorts.
“I saw how you got that Ben all hot and bothered, so I thought I’d try it,” Cricket was explaining.
“You tried to fix his marriage.”
“I didn’t try.” Cricket looked smug. “I fixed it.”
“How do you figure?”
“I thought it all out. He talks to me, he gets all horny, and then I, gosh, how do I put this? I kind of wrapped that up like a hand grenade and put it into him with a message.”
“A message.”
“Yeah. Like, ‘the next orgasm you have, the person you see when you have it, you’ll have the best sex of your life with them forever.’ I waited until she got there and then I made him look at her. And blam-a-rama.”
I was dumbfounded. “That’s magic.”
“I know. You guys are teaching me great stuff.”
“I didn’t teach you that. You just worked a magic spell somewhere between hedge-witchery and ceremonial magic.”
“Wow. Is that advanced?”
I rolled my eyes. “Uh, yeah.” We walked past a booth selling satin witches’ hats and corny wizards’ staves with big glass jewels on their knobs. “I’ve never tried doing that.”
“Why not? It’s a hoot.” Cricket skipped beside me, her face child-young again. “Teach me more!”
“What can I teach you? You do stuff with your succubus powers I never even heard of.”
“So how come I can do it? I just made that up, you know. It seemed like something I could try. So I did it. How does that work?”
Again with the thousand questions. I shook my head helplessly. “Who knows? You know how magic is kind of everywhere now. We don’t talk about magic in Chicago. And the federal government gets really upset about magic. But you can’t shut the internet up. I think the consensus is, once the magic wakes up in you, don’t ask me about that part, then you start using it according to your own, I don’t know.” I walked silently beside her. “Your own desires, I guess. How come Jee and Reg turn into tigers and we don’t? How come I just crook my finger and do my thing back of the outhouse, and Beth takes forty-five minutes to convince the guy never to cheat again, and Pog insults him until he’s practically popping, and Jee can make him come in his pants from twenty feet away? It’s who we are. It’s what we want out of magic.”
“Well, I think magic is like a mask. Did you ever go to Mardi Gras? Oo, drums! Let’s go look!”
We stepped into a big tent where a guy was selling handmade porcelain-fired djembes with sturgeon-skin tops. Immediately Cricket was bouncing from one drum to the next, trying them out.
“Wait, what about Mardi Gras?” I said, catching up to her.
“You get yourself a mask. Everyone wears them. But the mask doesn’t hide you. It makes you more like yourself. Like it intensifies you. Like succubus magic.” She was going nuts on those drums. A young guy with a man bun came up and started drumming opposite her. Cricket moved over so he could use one of the drums standing close to hers. They locked gazes and grins and went to town.
Sheesh, she was about to score again. Because she was having fun. That had to be Cricket’s superpower. Jee’s were jerk-whispering and were-tigering. Pog’s was cooking. Beth’s was momming.
Cricket had fun.
What was my superpower? I looked down at my beige sundress and my giant beige straw bag and thought about the quickie with Ben, wordless and impersonal, at least friendly I hoped. I didn’t want trouble. I just wanted to make my score on a guy who wouldn’t be unpleasant.
It occurred to me I’d been lowballing myself.
“You didn’t tell me I was gonna have an orgasm,” Cricket said accusingly, beating the drum in a complicated rhythm and bouncing up and down.
Drumming right next to her, the man-bun kid dropped his jaw. I was pretty sure he realized she was talking to me.
I flushed. “It’s no big deal. Like a sneeze.” I would have explained that it came with the demon body, but not right in front of a mark.
Cricket finished her test-drive on the drum with a kind of fast dribble and a pop. She and the kid were red-faced. He high-fived her and turned away quickly. I saw a wet spot on the front of his cargo pants.
Cricket hooted loudly. “That’s a sneeze? Boy, I want some of your hay fever.”
Another man, apparently the drum booth owner, stopped by. “You’re pretty good,” he said reluctantly, as if Cricket had extorted this compliment from him. I was reminded of bike store guys, who never complimented a woman ever, in case she got the wrong idea. He did have a tablet with a credit card swiper in his hand.
“I know,” Cricket whispered. “Don’t tell anybody.” She grinned and handed him a credit card she’d been keeping between her belly and her pink-and-black-splashed spandex exercise tights. “Send six of these sturgeon-skin headed djembes and two with calfskin heads to this address.” Grabbing the tablet from him, she tapped on it. “How long will that take?”
“Six weeks.” The drum guy’s jaw fell. “You do know they’re eighty dollars apiece.”
“Honey, I’m Rockefeller and Paris Hilton rolled into one. Make it four weeks and I’ll pay a hundred each.” She patted him on the hand, and he smiled dizzily, and she handed back the tablet swiper, and he got busy.
We ran into Beth in a booth selling spandex tights in insane patterns and colors. She was picking up four pairs of horizontally-striped tights in different colors, two black and white, one black and hot pink, and one fire-engine yellow and chartreuse. Beth always buys at least three of everything when she buys clothes. I think it’s a North Shore mom thing.
She smiled when she saw us come in. “I was going to surprise you with these,” she said to Cricket, handing her the yellow-and-green striped tights.
Cricket squealed with delight. “Can I try them on?”
“We don’t try on clothes,” Beth reminded her. “Everything fits now, remember?”
“Well, I want to wear them,” Cricket said, and carried the tights off to the corner behind a curtain that served as a fitting room.
“How’d the trolling go?” Beth said to me.
“You should have seen her. She fixed this guy’s marriage.”
Beth goggled. “On her first try?”
“You could learn something from her. She’s all carrot, no stick.”
Beth stared after Cricket. “Gracious.”
“That she is.” Not to be outdone by Beth, I picked out a pair of black-and-white harlequin tights, vertical-striped on one leg and big diamonds on the other, and then, since they had them, two more pairs in crazy colors.
“You’re going to wear those?” Beth said incredulously.
“They’re for Cricket.” I tucked the tights into my giant shoulder bag.
“Of course.” Beth nodded. “All carrot, no stick? She really fixed him?”
I shrugged. “Ask her. She’s into complicated, apparently.”
Cricket came out wearing the tights, and we went back out into the rising heat and got some frozen gelato served in hollowed-out lemon and orange rinds.
Since we’d already scored the rest of the day was ours. Cricket took an elephant ride. I watched her waiting in line, wriggling and squealing like the little kids. When she was up on the elephant, though, she was quiet, round-eyed, totally absorbed, as if she could draw animal wisdom out of that huge gray body.
The elephant seemed to like her up there, too. Its heart rate calmed and yet its energy seemed to pick up: with my succubus senses, I could share that moment almost as intensely as Cricket. I closed my eyes, listening for her heart, and then realized I already heard it. Her heart was beating
in time with the elephant’s. Mine settled to the same rhythm. I breathed in the smell of fresh and powdered elephant poop, and, over that, Cricket’s sweat-and-baby-powder odors. I realized the elephant was listening to the drums in the drum tent halfway across the Faire, because I could feel its muscles twitching along with the syncopated rhythm. Cricket caught on a moment after I did. When I opened my eyes, she was writhing slowly on the elephant’s back, her legs sticking out like a child’s, her head thrown back, her palms glued to the immense gray head as if that was how she could tune in.
I didn’t need to touch her to tune in to her. She radiated a familiar vibe. This is the best feeling of my whole life. It was certainly the best of mine.
We found Pog at the arena, where we watched a trained eagle display, then some sword-fighting and jousting.
I noticed something odd. Normally I’d have been running for the van after an hour of the crowds, what with the sweats and perfumes and eight kinds of music from every direction, the smells of food and beer and kid throw-up, the agitated animals. But today I felt okay. I don’t say I wouldn’t have rather been back home, or taking a bike ride in the woods. But I could stand it.
I decided it was being with Cricket that steadied me. It was like going to the circus with a nine-year-old. She focused like a laser on everything, one thing at a time, and she loved all of it, and she had to tell me about why each thing she encountered was so great. I was paying attention to her, not the cacophony and stinks and the masses of hot human bodies. Yet I could see and feel them through her. And because she loved it, I...didn’t hate it.
She seemed to understand when I started to max out. Those bleachers at the jousting arena were pretty packed. “Let’s get a couple of those big roasted turkey legs apiece and go back to the van,” she whispered to me as the jousters took their final bows.
“Shit, yes!” I whooshed out a breath. “But after the crowd leaves.” I shook myself all over, brrr, trying to get rid of the feeling that all those people had left traces of their energy, like a musical sweat-print, stuck on my skin.
Beth climbed down the bleachers to take pictures of the jousters, who were posing and shaking hands with little kids sticking their arms through the fence.
“Didn’t you love that eagle with that guy? He said when you work with birds you have to commit. Twenty-five years minimum. It’s like marrying them. Better know that before you let a baby eagle imprint on you, huh? My marriages never went longer than twenty years. Wouldn’t it be marvelous to have wings? We should try that. I bet we could. Pog, don’t you think we could grow wings?”
Pog met my glance over Cricket’s head. “Has it been like this all day?”
I frowned her down. “It’s fine.”
“I thought the jousters were fun, but they were faking those fights. Like actors. Well, they’d have to. You don’t want to hit someone with one of those swords. They are real swords, aren’t they? They clang nicely. That’s the difference between a show you put on for the audience and a game with rules but no script. Like our basketball games. When we do our tournament, we’re gonna play to win,” Cricket promised me.
I was hot, dizzy, battered by human contact, and distracted with hunger. “Tournament?”
“Uh.” Pog caught my eye again. “Yeah, I was going to tell you about that. We’re playing basketball against the Regional Office in a week.”
I stood up suddenly. “What?”
Cricket craned her neck at me. “Aren’t you happy?”
“It was her idea,” Pog said. “Ish arranged it.”
I sat down again. The bleachers had emptied out, except for the four of us. “Wait again, what?”
“Nine circles of hell. Nine teams,” Cricket said, looking pleased. “We represent Lust. I guess they have a basketball court in hell. Pretty amazing, huh? Have some water. You look dehydrated.”
“I am starving,” I admitted weakly, accepting a bottle from her. I thought about our team pounding around on our home-made plywood court back at the Lair. I thought we were getting better every day, but how could I really tell? A dozen times in the past weeks, I’d imagined getting up a friendly pickup game against a neighborhood team from the Y or a health club or something. Every time, I’d decided it wouldn’t be fair. We didn’t tire. We could do things with our bodies no human player could do. And what’s the point of holding back in a game? Once you know how to do something, you want to do it. We had let ourselves use our demon advantages against each other all this time. Now we’d formed bad habits. We could never, in fairness, ever play against mortals. It wouldn’t be real sport.
But against other demon teams, they would be good habits. Very useful, in fact.
I thought about those clowns I’d worked with in the Regional Office, year in and year out, always mocking me for staying in shape, because why bother? They could effortlessly make their demon bodies look like bulging monsters out of a comic book. They had no concept of working together—this was the Regional Office, where there is no “i” in team and we do quality circles twice a week and everybody talks about what was on mortal TV last night instead of trying to improve their performance rating. I smiled slowly.
Cricket was smiling anxiously at me. “You okay with this?”
I leaned over and gave her a big one-armed hug. “Yes.”
“Whew!” she squeaked from the depths of my hug. “Hoped you’d like it!”
“Thanks, Pog,” I said to her over Cricket’s scalp. “I know you must have blackmailed the shit out of Ish to get him to go for it.”
Pog grinned. “I did. It was fun. Do you think we can win?”
“Hell yes.” My heart was expanding in my body, fiery hot and happy. “But we have a lot of work to do this week.”
She rolled her eyes. “I knew it.”
“Quit bitching. Where’s Jee and Reg?”
“Back in the van, having sex?” Pog guessed. “Or maybe Jee was freaking out again. What she’ll put in her monthly report, I can’t imagine, since she’s been unable to troll for two and a half weeks.”
Cricket disentangled herself from my hug. “How’s she gonna eat? That girl’s expensive.”
“We’ll make some shit up for her on her monthly report,” Pog promised.
“Jee and Reg are in the van,” Beth said, returning with her phone in her hand. “Did you tell her about the tournament?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Yes,” Pog said. “Now get your stuff. We’re going home.”
Tournament! I tingled all over.
Elimination Round One. I had butterflies in my stomach. The tourney was being played at a high school gym in Dis, the center of the Regional Office, all the way down at the bottom. The elevator was the worst part, as far as I was concerned, but my teammates looked curiously around them the whole way. With the exception of Pog, they were all new recruits, and had never spent an hour down here.
From the looks we got in the elevators (ten of them, each as cramped and stinky as you might imagine) the office demons weren’t used to the sight of so many field operatives in one place. It was a lot like my old defense contractor’s office in that respect. In theory soldiers were our business, but we seldom saw any—mostly paunchy old generals, not hot, sweaty young grunts carrying big guns. Or, in our case, big boobs.
The gym itself was a replica of a 1950s English high school gym left over from when Pink Floyd filmed interiors for The Wall here for three memorable weeks, and you couldn’t get away from the music, everybody was playing it. I inspected the baskets and the striping using a measuring tape. The refs were pretty proud of it, which told me something right there—they hadn’t thought to cheat on any of the markings to give one team an advantage. There were fresh wood shavings in the cracks between floor and wall behind the baskets. They’d been installed that recently.
In other words, our opponents had no experience with the game at all. The six of us exchanged glances, but we didn’t mention it. We didn’t hardly speak. I had warned them that thes
e guys, while probably under-practiced at basketball compared with us, were champion cheaters. Our mission today was to play our best against Greed and whoever else won in the first round, and watch the best teams. Learn their styles. Steal their good ideas.
I was keyed up, ready to compete, ready to think our way to victory, and cheat like hell, excuse me, like the Regional Office.
Because the crazy stuff we could do, our opponents could do. If they thought of it. And if they’d practiced, which they hadn’t. After like a zillion years, these guys were about to find out how “stacked deck” felt from the other side of the deal.
One thing we noticed right away. We had the only female players present. This would turn out to be incredibly important later.
We were lucky. The gym had just one court and the bleachers were small, too. Even so, the bleachers weren’t totally packed. This meant that we could watch our competition play each other after our game.
Because they put us first! The rush made me dizzy.
I supposed that was how they drew even half an audience. According to one of the refs, everyone had come to look at the all-girl team from Lust. Nobody had seen this many female demons in one place in four centuries.
Spectator sports in the Regional Office had become a solitary thing, ever since ESPN was invented. Demons didn’t go into the field. Demons hardly went to their own bars any more. Everybody had Playstations and widescreen Tvs at home. I wasn’t the only demon to spend ninety-nine percent of her life at her desk with junk food.
So here we were, playing Greed in the first game.
The ref explained this to me, too: all the pretty people would play the first game, to pack the seats. I suspected also that it was political, an effort to mock the pursuits of the living. The Regional Office was always, always looking over its shoulder at the Home Office. That was why they were such a mess. Both offices imitated mortals, but they watched each other even closer.
Greed’s team was a joke. Bunch of prep school boys. That was their look anyway, with perfect teeth and plaid shorts and expensive watches the refs made them take off after Reg pointed them out. This made the Greed coach look smug. I couldn’t imagine why, until I caught their players sneering silently at our shoes. Jee being Jee, we had raided the Nike store downtown for the top of their line. But none of the shoes on these shiny little money groupies were available in stores. I suppose the fancy sneakers boosted Team Greed’s morale.
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 71