Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5

by Jennifer Stevenson

  As it fell into Cricket’s waiting hands, the buzzer went.

  We’d won.

  The gym erupted in cheers.

  I didn’t really care about the trophy. What felt great was chest-bumping my teammates like a crack monkey and the gym ringing with cheers. We were the underdogs, the first mostly-female basketball demon team to win the First All-Hades Intramural Basketball Tournament, ever.

  I’d been yearning for a team like this since I entered the Regional Office. I’d left the comfortable, soul-numbing boredom of my cubicle in Heresy for this. For months now, I’d been suffering much the same sensory overload these male demons suffered tonight, driving my teammates hard, putting up with their drama, all for this.

  We could have stayed for a post-tourney orgy, but we passed, though the fans and other basketball players begged. Of course they did. We would end up being the main course. We were succubi, so we specialized in being desirable. Fuck that. Or, rather, don’t fuck that.

  “You have to pay us to do that shit,” Jee said.

  “Yeah, ya deadbeats,” Reg said, putting on his pimp manner when he had no hope of pulling it off. “I gotta reward my girls. You think boning your sorry asses for free will make ’em happy?”

  The captain of Team Anger indicated that his guys would be willing to pay. Guess their saltpetre had worn off.

  I was speechless.

  Jee, thank goodness, was also speechless—only a temporary condition, I feared.

  Beth looked at the captain of Team Anger as if he was a second-grader who said a bad word. “Young man, that’s not very respectful.”

  “Boychik, I’ve looked up your shorts at your beystim, and I gotta say I’m not tempted,” Cricket said in a kind tone that had to cut deep.

  Pog stepped up in his face. She took the trophy out of my hand and jammed the pointy end up his nose. “See this? What part of ‘we won’ don’t you understand, cupcake?” Scornfully, she tossed her sweaty blonde hair over her shoulder and turned away. “C’mon, team. We’re celebrating tonight.”

  We collected our gear and sailed out of the gym. Reg was prancing. Jee stalked ahead like a queen exiting a pigpen. Beth and Pog laughed and whispered to one another like a couple of high school mean girls, groomed each other openly until their hair was obnoxiously perfect again, and sent malicious smiles loaded with succubus power at any demon dumb enough to whistle at us.

  I shouldered the equipment bag and followed.

  Now that we had the trophy, I felt weird.

  If we had been at the Lair, and Cricket eyeing me like a pint-size eagle crossed with Sigmund Freud, I would have admitted that I enjoyed the drama.

  Here, in the Regional Office, I decided that I just felt a little dizzy. That’s all. A little off-balance.

  Cricket slipped her hand into mine. She was almost as tall as I was right this minute, although during the game she’d varied between nine-and-a-half inches across and eight-foot-five. She didn’t look at me. My body hummed with satisfaction. I had a goofy idea that she could hear it.

  After ninety minutes, ten sweltering elevator rides, and a feverish quick-change into civvies in the van, we sat around a big table in a tavern in the Loop. Reg had just flashed his plastic at the waiter. Jee had tucked a hundred dollar bill into the waiter’s hand. Pog was ordering everything off the appetizer menu. Beth was unbuttoning the top button on her jeans, because it had been almost five hours since we last ate and she had puffed up two sizes.

  Cricket was showing the waiter, using large gestures, that we wanted every one of the specialty cocktails to be brought to us, three at a time, so that everyone could try everything before the real food arrived with the wine order. I’d never seen her talk so fast. I sat back, letting her gush of words express what was in my heart, feeling heard, seen, understood, approved. I had a crazy wish that everyone would go away, even my other teammates, so that Cricket and I could feed each other dinner one bite at a time. She would shut up then. But I’d be able to give her what I wanted to—to feed her—I shook my head—something. Crazy.

  For once, it felt great to be overstimulated.

  The trophy gleamed in the middle of the table, facing me.

  I looked around at my team and felt unreservedly happy.

  When Cricket said she wanted to go camping as her reward for doing the Celebration of Life, I was all for it. We’d had a couple of great bike rides together. The memory of that crazy day at the dog beach sometimes woke me up giggling out of a sound sleep. I’d found her to be good company, silently appreciative of the beauties of nature, always up for the physical challenges of outdoor fun. If we’d kept it to the two of us, maybe it would have turned out the way I imagined.

  If we’d kept it to the two of us, I might have run away from home a lot sooner.

  As it turned out, we brought the full crew. Beth came because Beth is compulsive about being included. Pog came because she’s convinced we would all starve if she weren’t there to cook. Pog wanted Reg to come along to be her sous-chef, and Reg wanted to come, and Jee wouldn’t stir a step without Reg, so which one of them was the dominatrix and which one was the submissive again?

  So the whole cavalcade took two cars: the van for all the luggage and Beth’s aged Beamer as personnel carrier. I drove the van and Cricket rode shotgun, navigating and, of course, chattering.

  “I haven’t gone camping since nineteen-fifty-four when Alban and I took the boys to Shabbona Wood State Park. We had an Airstream, but it wasn’t big enough for everybody. My littlest wanted to sleep alone in the tent. Alban was afraid he’d get eaten by a bear, so he stayed out there with him. It thunderstormed that night, and Alban said later that Seymour snored, and he spent the whole night rolling between the wet tent wall and Seymour snoring in his ear. In the morning Seymour had a giant insect bite over one eye. I thought it was a mosquito bite, but Seymour looked inside the tent and found a spider half the size of his hand hiding up in the pole corner by the tent flap. Alban wouldn’t let him kill it. Are you afraid of spiders? I’m not. I let them live in my house. I’d rather have spiders than silverfish, wouldn’t you? What exactly do silverfish do, anyway? My aunt thought they were horribly destructive. My daughters-in-law all retired to Florida, where they had giant flying cockroaches. They also have lizards that eat the cockroaches. So there’s always something to take care of your pest, right? Except when it’s a non-native pest like those emerald beetles and tent worms and things. Do you know I’ve never seen one of those emerald beetles? They sure killed a lot of trees. Have you ever seen one of them?”

  It took her seventy-seven seconds to say all that. The drive lasted four hours.

  While Cricket chattered, the Illinois landscape outside the van got hillier. Small streams cut creases between the farmers’ fields, and old granny willows lay tumbled across the streams like pick-up sticks, defiantly green even though fallen. Red-tailed hawks glared at us from fence-posts. A blackbird chased a crow twice its size away from the point of a tall spruce, fiercely harassing the bigger bird with beak and bad language.

  When we got to Starved Rock, Cricket quieted down. The park was huge, full of limestone gorges and stands of white pine and white oak, pock-marked with Boy Scouts, with the mighty Illinois River running past it to the north, vast as a lake in some places, narrow and fast in others. We saw deer, bluebirds, coyotes, trail ponies, meadows white with daisies, bald eagles, a perfect paper hornets’ nest suspended from the tip of a branch hanging low over the river, a flotilla of canoes full of ladies in red hats and purple sweatshirts, and wild black raspberry canes lining the road, loaded with fruit. By the time we had bumped over the crappy dirt road to the camp ground, Cricket was silent, and her eyes sparkled.

  The first thing Jee did when we opened the van door was grab a chair and plant it under a tree. Reg brought her a cooler full of the makings and set her up with a mimosa. She didn’t move for another two hours. Jee playing martyr. At least she was quiet about it.

  It had been raining mos
t of our trip down from Chicago. The forest preserve seemed deserted. The nearest main campground was four acres of bare, muddy gravel where giant RVs could plug into electricity, water, even a cell tower, and the mud was dotted with cushy outhouses and hot-water shower buildings. There weren’t any RVs today. Maybe the rain was keeping other campers away.

  Our campsite was in the overflow campground, which was my idea. We had a whole pine wood to ourselves. All the trees were fairly young, their branches hanging low, so that we had to crouch while we pitched our tents. This was darned uncomfortable until Cricket thought of shrinking herself shorter. Duh. Everyone copied her, except, of course, Jee, who was sitting down.

  Pog supervised. Beth kept trying to be helpful and drove Pog nuts. Reg alternated between fetching and carrying, pouring fresh mimosas for Jee, and keeping the peace. I really didn’t know how we would ever have got by without him.

  The three of them set up individual tents for Pog and Beth, because in spite of our careful plans back home, Pog now decided she couldn’t sleep with Beth without trying to kill her for always knowing how to do something better than she did. This screwed up our sleeping arrangements, because Cricket and I would now have to bunk together. I wasn’t sure how Cricket would take that. Originally she had insisted that we have separate tents, saying it was the least she could do after invading my private room at the Lair.

  Then Jee announced that she and Reg would be using the big tent that I’d planned to use for supplies that needed to stay dry, and maybe a table if it was raining during our frequent and lengthy meals.

  This meant that one of the small tents would be needed for the table and the supplies. But when we started loading stuff into it, we found that one small tent wouldn’t hold them all. Plan B would have had someone sleeping in the van, but everybody felt we were here to enjoy nature, dammit, and we should try to get with the spirit of the thing, and besides, Jee, the least naturey of us all, decided that the van smelled, and it was parked seventy yards from our campsite, so we couldn’t even stash supplies in it conveniently.

  Cricket and I hauled stuff out of the van in silence. Pog and Beth started to set up the big tent, and Jee insisted (from her comfort zone by the mimosa station) that it had to move farther away from the center of camp so she and Reg could have more privacy, and Reg helped them pull up all the stakes and haul it thirty more yards.

  Cricket looked at me and I looked at her. Wordlessly, we took the last pup tent as far from the others as we could get, deep into the pine woods.

  Long, dead, red pine needles cushioned the forest floor. Our footsteps cracked them, sending up powerful scents of pine resin and heat-baked dried needles, It was Cricket’s idea to lie down and roll around on the ground before we pitched the tent. She found two sharp rocks that way. Then we laid out our newfangled round pup tent and popped it open. This was a different kind of tent than the A-shaped Army tents I’d grown up with. No pole in the front to bonk your head into, and a heck of a lot lighter.

  This far from the others, I could hear lots of woodsy sounds. Chipmunks made their little ratchety calls. Somewhere up in the tops of the pines, a jay had a hissy fit, ringing like an old-fashioned telephone. A pair of squirrels tore up and down the trunks of nearby trees, their claws scrabbling on the bark. Some kind of little bird went bee-bee-beep. My head filled up with the heavy green shade of the pines, brilliant reds of the pine needles underfoot, sounds of birdsong and grasshoppers whirring, the smell of pinesap, smells of our sweat, smell of the transmission fluid leak under the van a hundred and fifty yards away—my senses stretched—now I heard our teammates’ voices settling down to murmurs, and the unmistakable crack, hiss, and tinkle of a beer bottle opening.

  I wanted a beer, but all these smells and things were such a trip, I just flopped down on the pine needles in front of our tent and lay back, looking up through the layers of pine boughs at the clouds.

  Cricket flopped beside me. Out here in nature, she was as silent and clingy as a hound dog, and just as good company. In the city I was hypersensitive to people always being near me, more and more it seemed, every day. Here it was nice to have the company of someone who clearly understood how precious the peace was. I wondered why it was so easy for me to bear the overpowering smells and sounds of the woods and the drug-like luxury of the pine-needle cushion under my back, when the Lair, a hotbed of luxuries, drove me batty with all its stinks, and my roommates seemed like giant sweaty engines that blasted odors and noise and emotion in every direction. I decided that I trusted the woods.

  Back at the main camp, clanking and hissing sounds told me that Pog was starting dinner. Cricket spoke for the first time in an hour.

  “These demon senses are really great out here.”

  I grunted. I’d stopped being surprised that she seemed to know what I was thinking. It occurred to me now that maybe she just thought the same thoughts. Hells knew, she blurted out whatever came into her head.

  “I wonder if we can dial it back. So we won’t have to hear them back at the camp.”

  I’d been staring into the pines above us, but now I froze. “What?”

  “It’s so pretty here. If I couldn’t hear Beth and Pog arguing, it would be even better.”

  “So—” I held my breath. In all the time I’d been here in the field, feeling like a mouse caught in a pinball machine, it had never occurred to me to—

  She said, “So maybe we can turn our ears down? I found out I can turn them up. Why not? I like that little bee-beep bird.”

  And then Cricket shut up.

  She had a real gift for silence. When she used it.

  It had never, ever occurred to me to dial back the extrasensory powers that came with my demon body. I guess maybe I was still thinking like Daddy’s little soldier. When you got high-quality equipment, you used it to defend and protect yourself. Why would a soldier ever want to hear less, smell less, see less?

  Cricket stiffened, and then I heard it, too: footsteps. Something clinking. I stretched my hearing a bit, and an instant later I identified our visitor: Reg was clumping through the woods towards us, mouthbreathing as he still did, carrying something clanky.

  “Hey,” he said when he arrived at our tent. “Want a beer?” He was lugging one of the bigger coolers.

  I just craned my neck and grinned at him. Beside me, Cricket said, “Thanks.”

  Reg plopped his load down within our reach. Then, because he was everyone’s houseboy, not just Jee’s booty slave, he opened two brews and handed one to each of us.

  “Thanks,” I said too. From here on the ground, Reg was all legs and nostrils. He smelled like male sweat and his morning’s sex with Jee and Jee’s face powder and new sneakers and the Cheetos he’d eaten in the car and Pierre Cardin aftershave and a cut on one finger with Neosporin and a fresh Bandaid and oh thank goodness he lifted his head and turned and trotted away, eager to be needed by someone else.

  Together, Cricket and I breathed simultaneous sighs of relief.

  She pulled an apple out of the pocket of her sweatshirt and handed it to me. Gratefully, I took a bite and held it in my mouth, breathing. The apple flavor and scents—sweet flesh, tart skin, bitter seed—washed Reg out of the air, out of my head.

  Suddenly I stopped, staring at the apple with the bite out of it. Silently I took the bite out of my mouth and held it up, to show Cricket. I showed her the apple. Then I fitted the missing bite into the spot it had come from.

  “People geometry,” I said.

  She grinned at me, took the bitten bite out of my hand, and popped it in her mouth, chewing with her mouth open, all kid.

  I took immense satisfaction in her smug silence.

  That was really a brilliant idea of hers. What if I could dial it back?

  The best demon repellant the field could muster was the sheer volume of its data stream, administered via eyes, ears, nose, skin, tongue, and the most treacherous input source of all, emotion. Living in enclosed spaces with four other women and a rand
y cabana boy was like standing in front of a firehose, like staring up into a country sky full of stars, like trying to count snowflakes as they fell. There was something going on all the time. All the time.

  When I first moved in, I thought I could take it. Back then it was just me and Pog and Jee. Then we added Beth. Then Reg. Then Melitta came and as swiftly went, shunted off to college and maybe a normal future, whatever “normal” meant, lucky kid. Now Cricket. Cricket used fewer cosmetics than any of the others, but somehow she took up more room.

  No, that wasn’t possible. I noticed her more. She was right there in my bedroom, after all.

  It wasn’t like I minded. I liked all of them. I was so glad to be on an all-female team. And Reg, good boy that he was, so different from the dullards and outsize pricks in the Regional Office, he was fine. He was more than fine. Without him, Jee would be a huge handful. Although I actually didn’t mind being around her twenty-four-seven diva act, which was barely skin deep. The real Jee, compassionate and helpful, came out all the time, especially around Reg, or any of the noobs when they were lost ducklings. Beth could be incredibly kind. Pog fed us all relentlessly; I knew it was part of something that rode her the way Jee’s childhood poverty and sex slavery rode her, but Pog didn’t burden us with that. She cooked a smoking bastard, as Dad used to say.

  What had made me aware of all their good points? In specific, the kindness of my teammates? Well, it was Cricket. She took up more room, to my addled senses, than the others, maybe because she was always paying attention. She babbled, and she pried, and she seemed more of a child even than Reg or Jee, but she didn’t miss much. She was way too interested in life to cop an attitude. She just breathed.

  At this moment a tiny snore broke beside me.

  Two seconds later, someone at the main camp began beating on a baking pan.

  I nudged Cricket with my foot. “C’mon. Chow.”

  Two hours later, Pog and Beth set off on a hike, still bickering. Reg did the dishes. Jee did her nails. Cricket made an attempt to help Reg and got shooed off.