“Don’t make me do this.”
At the warning in her tone, I ducked my head and peeped up at her submissively.
She sighed. Then she put down the white thing and picked me up again and turned on the cold shower. It was awful! Cold water stung me. I struggled in her arms, but she held tight. Now she was scrubbing me with her hands! All the lovely fish smell was washing away! Noooo!
“Dammit, Cricket!” I said, as she held my face in the spray.
Voices sounded outside.
Cricket dragged my human body into a toilet stall and dumped me on the floor. Then she leaped out again, grabbed our Target bag, and came back. I think she would have gone back for my wet swimsuit, but the potty building door opened and I heard two little girls come in.
Naked and soaking wet and shivering, I picked myself up off the concrete. My head cleared slowly. With an effort, I remembered that I didn’t have to feel cold. I gave myself a shake to wake up my demon body heat.
A kid went into the stall next to mine.
Cricket was leaning against the stall wall, giggling silently. She handed me the bag.
Oh yeah, my clothes. I put them on.
Meanwhile, Cricket laughed silently until she cried.
“Somebody left their swimsuits in here,” observed one of the little girls. “Hurry up! I have to peepee!”
“I’m hurrying,” said the one in the stall next door, hollowly.
I opened our stall door and pushed Cricket out. She was holding her stomach, her face a mask of howling mirth. I followed.
“Is she sick?” said the little girl waiting.
“She’s hysterical,” I said. “C’mon, Cricket. Let the kid peepee.” While the kid stalked into the stall and slammed the door, I put on my shoes. Then I picked up my sopping swimsuit. I checked the Target bag to make sure we had everything—keys, wallets, phones, four texts from Pog, holy shit, we’d been playing in the water for three hours, credit cards, all there. Then I hauled my snorting, weeping, giggling roommate outside.
We’d missed lunch.
Back at the Lair, everybody was in the locker room downstairs. They gave us dirty looks for missing practice, too.
“You stink!”
“What’s that smell?”
We slunk to the big communal ring-shaped fountain, got naked, and climbed in. Jee came by and squirted us with body wash with some disgusting fake scent like Jasmine Seaweed or Urban Reuben Sandwich. For that, I grabbed Jee and dunked her in the fountain. She squealed. Reg piled in to defend her. Pog and Beth kept squirting that horrible crap on everyone, until the fountain foamed over with ghastly-smelling suds. And Cricket sat on the edge and laughed.
CRICKET
Cricket watched Amanda closely at dinner. The athletes, Amanda and Reg, declared that carbo-loading before the tournament was appropriate, so they all downed massive quantities of Dave’s Italian Kitchen pasta and desserts, and, to Jee’s and Pog’s disgust, abstained from marijuana or alcohol.
Cricket didn’t mind. She had ice cream instead. She made sure Amanda got her carbs, and if anybody asked a question Amanda couldn’t answer—such as how can we possibly win?—she filled the air with chatter and counter-questions until Amanda was off the hook.
She even tried not to chatter Amanda to pieces at bedtime.
But Amanda was the one who started a conversation. Probably nervous, poor kid. Wasn’t every day you led a team of succubi against the massed demons of hell in a basketball tournament.
“So what kind of afterlife plan do you think you would have made?” Amanda said drowsily from her bed three feet away, when the lights were turned out. “If you’d known you had to have a plan.”
“You should be asleep. Big day tomorrow,” Cricket warned her.
“C’mon.”
Cricket pitched her voice lower and slid into the singsong tones she used when telling stories to her boys before they slept. She’d always made the stories up on the spot.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she answered at random. “I’d probably have picked somewhere beautiful to go. Like Catalina. Or western Michigan, where the sunsets are gorgeous. I’d walk around on the beach and find a perfect spot, where the waves come up at high tide but mostly it’s flat and smooth. I think I would pick up shells and things there.”
She and Alban had taken the boys to beaches like that in summers. Beautiful days by the water. Beat-up little cottages on the sand, rented by the week. The boys always slept the best there.
Amanda’s breathing was shallow and irregular. She wasn’t asleep yet. Faking it maybe. It would be a shame if Amanda skipped sleep, the night before the big game, just to keep Cricket company.
“Then I would lie down in that perfect spot all day. But I wouldn’t get sunburn, because I’m dead. And I’d lie on my back sometimes and stare straight at the sun. I’ve always wanted to stare at the sun. But they told me I’d go blind. But you can’t if you’re dead, right?”
She heard the question in her own voice and remembered that Amanda always felt like she had to answer questions.
“I don’t know,” Amanda murmured.
“Never mind, cookie, that was a storytelling question. Just listen.”
She waited. Amanda’s breathing settled a little. Cricket lowered her voice a little.
“So I would lie there and get hotter and hotter and hotter in the sun. So hot that my skin melted and turned into clear glass. And all the things I had ever thought and seen and felt and done and heard and smelled and everything would heat up inside the glass. And the whole thing would start boiling. I’d be a glass bottle full of Cricket soup. And finally all the memories would boil down to sticky stuff, like that sandwich spread from England that’s like salty brown glue.”
There, a joke. But Amanda didn’t make a sound.
She dropped her voice a little. “And then even the glue would burn down to ash. And the wind would blow past my open mouth, and make a noise like blowing across a bottle, and all the ash would blow away, and I’d be empty, and the sun would burn right through me to the sand underneath me. And I would get lighter and lighter. Not heavy like glass. More like a bubble.”
Cricket thought about her fellow inmates at Loriston Home, who spent years floundering in their pasts, trying to figure out why this or that, or just remembering. Plenty of time for that when they’re dead, she thought, and then recalled that this was her afterlife, not theirs. They would each have different plans, no doubt.
“And the tide would come up and wash over me sometimes, and the glass bubble would be so hot from the sun and the stuff burning to ashes inside, that the waves would go hissss on my glass skin.”
Amanda’s breath was very slow and even now. Cricket smiled. I’ve still got it.
“And then what,” came her voice drowsily.
Cricket hadn’t thought that far ahead. She’d been flowing along with the story: the beach, the sun, the waves, the sensations of her past boiling off like soup on the stove.
“Oh, then I guess—I guess it gets dark and I get up and go inside for cocoa.”
Amanda rolled over on her back with a sigh. Her arm came across the space between them, and her hand fell on Cricket’s bed next to Cricket’s hand.
“It’s a good plan,” Amanda mumbled.
Cricket slid her hand over her roomie’s hand and turned on her side to face her across the darkness between beds. Her eyelids drifted shut. Pretty good story, she thought. I’ll have to remember that one.
AMANDA
The gym bleachers were packed with demons. The scoreboard read a hundred and twelve to a hundred and twelve, with ninety seconds left in the game.
Five really tall demons were trying to play keep-away with Team Succubus.
We had given this all-male demon team from Sixth Circle—Anger—a very rough time. For four periods we’d been battling them, jumping a point ahead and losing a point to tie up, over and over and over. The crowd got steadily bigger, which meant that this crappy little high school gym w
as full to capacity, i.e., about eight hundred demons. Team Anger looked frazzled. Demons don’t easily get physically tired, but we can get mentally tired.
It didn’t hurt that they were fiendishly, so to speak, distracted. Since the elimination round a week ago, Jee had taken our uniforms to a tailor to get cut down to Venezuela. There were cheerleaders in Dallas wearing more than we wore tonight.
We dialed our pheromone output up to eleven. We slammed into the boys from Anger with enthusiasm, and if they knocked one of us down, that player went on penalty, and if he had to walk bowlegged to the box, well, boo hoo.
Plus, wet spot.
Sometimes we found ourselves blowing a puff of succubus-energized air up the shorts-leg of the guys guarding us, but that wasn’t technically a foul. It wasn’t our idea that they should stretch their bodies until they were nine feet tall. If they showed us their junk, they were just begging to get their junk mocked.
We’d worked out our strategy and it worked just fine, which was just lazy. We figured all we had to do was keep using sex against them every two points and we could control the game right up until the buzzer. One-twelve to one-twelve, ninety seconds.
Anger coach called a TO. We went into a huddle ourselves, mostly to gloat, but Reg stood on his chair and watched our opponents. In a minute, he clambered down to join us with a worried face.
“They’re passing around some kind of drink. What do you think, Amanda? ’Roids?”
We all looked over our shoulders at the massive hulks on the other side of the court.
“I don’t know,” I said, now worried myself. “They look pretty smug.”
“They always look smug,” Jee sneered.
“I’ve got succubus mojo I haven’t yet unleashed,” announced Pog with relish.
“Uh, guys,” Beth said. “Check the oners-bay.” Our Klingon vocabulary didn’t include the functions of sex organs.
“Fuck,” Jee said in English.
I looked. Anger’s monster commando players turned one by one to face us, and I could see from here that the tents in their basketball shorts had collapsed. “Saltpetre,” I said in English.
Apparently the Anger coach was listening in on us, using his own demon hearing, because he showed us a vile grin and a long-clawed middle finger. Then he curled the middle finger back down into his fist—and jabbed the fist up.
“Colorful,” Pog said.
“Multi-lingual,” Beth said.
“Now I suppose they’ll grow another foot apiece,” Jee grumbled, and Reg groaned.
Their coach ducked his head to his team and sure enough, they grew another foot.
“Gamespeak, you idiots,” I said. In Klingon I added, “What have got? Better come up with it fast.”
“Me good idea,” Cricket said. She wasn’t picking up Klingon very fast. “Short short player many legs crawly thing.”
“What?” Beth said.
“You want us to get under them and punch them in the crotch?” Jee said. “I like it.”
Cricket tried miming what she had to say, and then when that failed, she shrugged and said in English, “Cockroaches.”
I said in Klingon, “You want us to turn into,” then in English, “cockroaches?”
She shook her head violently. “No, no. Run fast short legs under tall legs.” She made a scuttling thing out of her hand and made it scurry along her forearm, and I got it.
I met Reg’s eyes. “Well? We’ve certainly practiced the plays. We just have to up the ante.”
“Lot of jumping,” he predicted.
“I can jump,” Jee said.
“Me too,” said Beth.
“Me three,” said Pog.
The refs blew their whistles at us and we trotted out on the court.
Demons that size shouldn’t have moved very fast. The Anger boys moved fast. One by one my teammates accelerated until we scurried like Cricket’s cockroaches between their ankles, each of us looking for a chance to take the ball back.
The clock ticked down. Eighty seconds. Fifty seconds.
The demon audience stood up and stayed up, screaming, whistling, blowing horns.
Cricket sat down suddenly, right in front of the nine-foot demon with the ball.
He tripped over her. Down he crashed, and Beth shot over his head like a derby girl vaulting a pile of fresh meat. Another Anger demon reached out an arm like a telephone pole and smacked her out of the air. My heart double-clutched. If she hit the ground and rolled, she’d foul out for illegal travel.
I speeded up, though I was too far away to help.
In mid-flight Beth let go the ball and it fell straight into Pog’s hands. How did Pog get there? Scurry, scurry!
Pog dodged the giant hands reaching to pluck the ball by force from her grip, zipped under his legs, and passed to Jee.
Jee dribbled down the court so fast, it looked as if she did indeed have six legs.
Twenty-two seconds.
She stopped and stood there under the basket, looking around. What the fuck? Shoot, dammit! But she made eye contact with me and smiled.
Oh, for—!
In that moment, an enormous shoe, big as a picnic table, came down and obliterated her. A second shoe landed beside the first, as if to make doubly sure she was done. The ball bounced free—she’d let go of it at the last moment. Too bad. If it had popped, we’d have got a mandatory time-out.
Reg hurled himself forward. No, Reg! She’ll be fine! Stay with on game! He moved in a blur over the giant demon’s shoes. The ball, dummy!
But the biggest demon had spun in place, ouch, Jee, and took half a step forward, rising onto his enormous toes, I guessed, to shoot the length of the court at Anger’s basket.
And he tipped over.
Reg had tied his shoelaces together.
The crash was epic. He took down two of his own guys. I saw Cricket hopping between arms and legs and guessed the man she’d been guarding was on the floor. She and Pog took a moment to peel Jee off the deck and dust her off. With a handful of seconds left, I couldn’t watch.
I’d lost track of Reg.
Pog was jumping straight up into the face of the Anger demon she was guarding, trying with her normal-sized body to block something with an elephant-sized head.
I was doing the same, so I was the one who saw the ball fly out of bounds into the bleachers.
The whistle blew.
A riot started in the bleachers. Demons were punching, howling, oh, they had fun.
It didn’t seem that we were going to get the ball back.
The refs shrugged and brought out another ball.
Twelve seconds on the clock.
We had another stage wait while the refs tried to decide if tying an opposing player’s shoelaces together constituted a foul. The noise was unbearable. As our team captain, Reg joined the confab. I couldn’t distinguish what he was yelling, with broad gestures, but I imagined it had to do with squashing an opposing player flat with a foot four times her size.
Beth and Pog put Jee back together, and Cricket came up to me with an idea. I nodded. She went to tell the other three, and I stood by to give Reg the lowdown as soon as the TO broke.
It was decided that Anger would get the ball at the sidelines, but everyone—our team included—could stand within “a player’s height” of the ball. Reg convinced them that the only sensible way to rule that was to make that our height, not the Anger boys’ height. Because if they went with “tallest player” instead of “shortest player,” well, we could grow taller too. Down that road, the last damn four seconds might never get played.
This meant that Anger had to keep that ball, and they would start standing on top of us and on one another’s feet. Their guy wouldn’t have room to throw the ball.
Cricket got right under the guy with the ball. I saw her crouched nearly to the ground. Reg, Pog, and Beth were guarding, their eyes on the Anger demons, not on the ball. Jee stood next to me.
“You okay?” I said.
She gr
owled. That was all.
Her hair was a mess and her makeup was a total loss, but otherwise she seemed poised. I looked back at my guy.
The whistle blew. The Anger demon on the sidelines looked from one to another of his teammates. Each of them had someone leaping up in their face like a freaking jack-in-the-box, except Jee’s man.
As we had planned, the ball-holder decided to throw out to him.
And Cricket shot up like a pheasant, like a bottle rocket, like a winged cockroach, straight between his hands, popped the ball out of his grasp, and—then there were two balls in flight.
Two Anger demons decided they had the right one and spread out across the court, tossing it swiftly from man to man. The ball in their hands was too big. And it was way too heavy.
Two more Anger demons held their guard, dammit. They had learned not to underestimate us.
The fifth, loping out to take a position near their basket, was the only demon to realize there was something wrong. The player from Lust who should have been guarding him seemed to have vanished off the court.
The ball lobbed its way sluggishly from Anger player to Anger player, more like a medicine ball than a basketball.
As the Anger forward stood poised to take a long throw at his basket, his ball sprouted arms and legs and wrapped them around his giant wrist. The Anger forward shook his wrist—the ball clung to him—he grabbed the ball with his other hand and pried it off—and the ball tumbled awkwardly to the floor, turning into Cricket, grinning a grin bigger than her face.
She rolled out of the way as the Anger captain, losing his temper as only a professional can, stamped after her with his number-eighty-seven sneakers, screaming and dribbling saliva from his four-inch tusks.
Meanwhile, Beth had retrieved the real ball as it bounced, unheeded, and passed it to Jee between our guards’ ankles.
Jee shot it between her guard’s ankles to Reg, who was in the clear.
Reg dribbled fast as a cockroach straight into a forest of demon legs, spun and passed back to Pog.
Pog passed to me.
Thoughtful of her. I got to score the winning point. I jumped and threw. The ball wafted cleanly through the basket.
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 77