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

by Jennifer Stevenson

  “I’ll help,” Cricket offered. “I’m not hungry.”

  “I can hear your stomach growl,” Amanda said, smiling so sweetly that Cricket felt hairs rise all over her body. “I’ll raid the fridge. This has to be finished by tonight. If I’m wrong and the trichome discoloration isn’t as advanced as I think it is, I’ll grab a cab and come join you.” Their eyes met for a long, mindless moment until, drowsy with the joy of it, Cricket blinked. Amanda said, “You go.”

  They stood on the metal stairs between the living quarters and the lower Lair. With a quick glance up the stairs, Amanda reached out and lifted Cricket onto the stair above her, because as usual Cricket had let her body shrink down without thinking, and folded her in a tight, tight hug.

  Cricket closed her eyes and felt the power and tenderness radiating from Amanda into her body in a way she’d never felt with her husbands. And she’d known they loved her, all right. This was something else. This demon body was good for lots of things.

  On impulse she pulled loose enough that she could kiss Amanda on the mouth—so different from a man, why was that? Is it just because it’s Amanda?—and the two of them stumbled on the stairs and damn near fell down them.

  Amanda pulled herself out of the kiss and stepped back, panting. “I have to do this. Go. Eat.” She turned and ran clanking down the stairs.

  Cricket heard the squeal of the weed-drying-room door.

  She stood there and swayed for a moment, savoring the echoes of love through her body. In love again. At my age! Boy, never say die. She bounded up the stairs to take her place in line for the shower.

  AMANDA

  I bolted as soon as the van was out of sight. I didn’t have time to drive downtown to the LaSalle Street garage, or dowse for a hellgate, or fool around. I crossed the street, ran to the corner where a huge cottonwood tree stood between the sidewalk and the railway embankment for the Metra, climbed the tree, got as far out as I could on a limb as I felt it could hold me, and waited. If I jumped just right, there wouldn’t even be a body.

  Here came the train.

  CRICKET

  Three hours later, Cricket pounded up the stairs to the roof. “She’s gone!” she wailed.

  Everyone lolled in the hot tub. “Who’s gonged?” Pog slurred. She was really wasted. Making up with Beth had ended with the two of them drinking every bottle of retsina at Greek Islands Restaurant, and then they’d come home for box-wine sangria.

  Beth sloshed into sitting upright. “Amanda? Cricket, what’s going on?”

  Cricket caught herself on a gasp. She squeezed the scrap of newspaper where Amanda had scrawled Sorry. Please don’t tell anybody. She’d found it in the weed drying room. “Nothing. She went shopping. For more bins. For the weed. She went out.” That last word choked her.

  She was gonna cry. She turned away, gasping, feeling as if big trucks were driving through her body from all directions.

  “Cricket?” Beth said.

  She didn’t tell them how she’d followed Amanda’s scent, to the place where the sharp, metallic smell of Amanda’s despair had ended.

  “Oh, leave her alone,” Pog said.

  “I need to throw up,” Cricket announced, and fled back downstairs.

  “Told ya,” she heard Reg say behind her.

  “He’s right,” she heard Jee say, faintly, as the door swung shut.

  In the bathroom she recognized that somehow she’d messed it up. The pain settled. She would find Amanda. She would fix this.

  Being a lesbian was more complicated than she had imagined.

  She needed a native guide. She fetched her phone out of the bedroom.

  Late that night, in a booth in the back of Lauren’s favorite sushi joint a block north of her bar, Cricket talked, while Lauren listened and wolfed down a platter full of seafood so pretty it belonged on a magazine cover.

  For once Cricket had no appetite. She told it all: Delilah’s visit, and getting thrown out of the convertible in the cemetery, and the Lair, and the sluts, and demon basketball, and Amanda being so kind, and how that had snowballed, and how she’d run away. She was in tears by the end.

  “Holy fucking shit, Big Squeak,” Lauren said around a big mouthful of dragon maki.

  “But that’s not the thing. The thing is, what do I do? What did I do wrong? I can wear her down,” Cricket said with confidence. There wasn’t anybody she couldn’t wear down. “But I don’t—I don’t wanna. I want her to be ha-a-a-appy,” she wailed, and let the tears run down her chin.

  “First you have to find her,” Lauren said skeptically. “And hey. Eat. Look who’s telling who to eat.”

  “All right already, I’m eating!” Cricket bolted a chunk of sashimi tuna whole. “I know where she is. I know how to get there, too.”

  Lauren paused with pickled mackerel dangling from her chopsticks. “You’re going after her. To hell. Big Squeak, isn’t that dangerous?”

  “Pff. Those guys?” Cricket waved that off. “It’s this gay thing I’m worried about. With a man, first you have sex, and that solves ninety-five percent of your problems right there, and then while he coasts on the afterglow you fix the rest. But this. I feel dumb. I feel like this is my first two months with Alban. Help me out here, kiddo.” She sniffled and wiped her nose on her arm. “I’m clueless.”

  “Oh, Bubbe.” Lauren folded her in a big hug. “You goofball. What do you want? Have you really talked much yet? About your feelings for each other? About how you feel about that ‘lesbian’ label? What about how you felt about lesbians before now? How do you feel about relationships, commitment, when it’s another woman? Is marriage to a man different from legal-in-twenty-states marriage to a woman? Do you care? Why? What about the other stuff, the usual stuff, like, will it mess up your work life if it falls apart? Are you gonna stay sex demons? If not, will you move in together yet? It’s a lot to think about.”

  “I—” Cricket began.

  “And did Amanda know she had those feelings before she met you? All the same questions. She’s gotta think that stuff through. And then you need to tell each other.”

  “We didn’t. We haven’t had time. This just happened last night.”

  Lauren laughed. “I’m going home and put this in my diary. ‘Today, Big Squeak went off the rails and thought I knew more than she did.’”

  “Don’t mess with a desperate woman.” But Cricket smiled. If Lauren was laughing, it wasn’t the end of the world yet. She felt better. “Come off the shit.”

  Lauren came off the shit. “The good part and the bad part about the gay thing is, you’re both new at it. This is like a really big deal. You both just found out you’re gay and you both just fell in love and you both just did something about it, all that in one night?” She pushed the empty platter away and dropped her chopsticks on it. “And you’re surprised somebody panicked? It’s not rocket science, Big Squeak. Go find her and talk to her. Just don’t quit. What am I saying, you never quit.”

  Cricket breathed deeply. Her strength began to return. “Nope. I never do.”

  When Cricket got home from seeing Lauren, people had finally noticed Amanda was missing. She wasn’t surprised that they ignored her. She was the rookie, after all. They all thought they knew Amanda better than she did.

  They stood in the garage area and argued over Cricket’s head.

  “You don’t think those big ugly demons from Anger came after her?” Beth said worriedly. “Because we beat them at basketball?”

  Pog made a pshaw face. “They’re terrified of the field. That’s what impressed them. It’s why they took us seriously enough to do the tournament in the first place. We’re field ops. It didn’t really sink in that we were women until we showed up with tits.”

  Reg said, “Heh heh.”

  “You don’t look a hundred percent convinced of that,” Beth said.

  “What do you want me to do?” Pog snarled. “Call your boyfriend and report her missing?”

  “I’ll check around,” Jee sai
d. “Reg, you drive. I’ll sniff the local hellmouths for movement.”

  “Sniff?” Cricket said.

  “Yeah, sniff,” Jee explained. “Use my spidey-senses and see if I can find any signs of demons coming or going at those gateways. Amanda has an emotional signature, too, kind of a psychic scent. I know it, so I can track her. Reg will drive so I can focus.”

  “I’ll get the big flashlight,” Reg said, and vanished up the stairs.

  “I can sniff, too,” Cricket said in a small voice.

  She’d sniffed when they got back from dinner, and she’d gone to the weed drying room and found Amanda’s note. It was a terrible smell, full of pain and doubt and terror and yearning. She’d followed that smell all the way out the door, up the street, up onto the railway embankment, up a tree, to a branch so loaded with the smell of Amanda’s anguish that it was a wonder the branch didn’t break and fall onto the train tracks.

  Cricket had grown squirrel hands and feet in order to climb that tree—grown them without thinking. She was following her love. She’d go anywhere for her.

  It looked as if she did have to go back to hell. Because Amanda must have had a plan.

  Beth wasn’t letting go of the Anger-demon-menace idea. “What if they kidnapped her?”

  “All right, all right! I’ll call Ish!” Pog howled. “You call Doyle.”

  “Reg, is there gas in the van?” Jee yelled.

  “But you said—” Beth faltered.

  “Shut up!” Pog screamed, “Shut up! Shut up, everybody!”

  Nobody knew what to do, and Cricket felt horribly guilty. This was all her fault. Whatever she’d done with Amanda, or to Amanda, it had driven her away, and the whole team was in hysterics, and even if they did find Amanda, she might not want to come home if Cricket was there.

  She’d have to do this on her own.

  It was easy for her to slide away unnoticed.

  The main reason Cricket didn’t ask for help was because Amanda didn’t share her business. Please don’t tell anyone.

  The poor baby. Apparently Lauren knew her stuff. Cricket was aware that almost everyone—except her—suffered horribly from worrying what other people thought. But why would it upset Amanda if the sluts found out?

  She thought this through as she took a taxi up to the Loriston Home.

  She pictured Amanda, using people geometry, the insides of her, her shapes and smells and textures. Amanda, taciturn and full of feelings, beautiful and never thinking so, starved for love and believing she didn’t deserve it. In those few hours before her disappearance, she’d bloomed. Her face had been bright with her love. To Cricket’s new demon senses, it had seemed as though Amanda’s heart had opened up, and light and heat were blazing out, strong enough to make the whole team happy just being in the same room with her.

  That was it. That’s why she ran away.

  Amanda wouldn’t have wanted her feelings to be seen. She’d been freaking out when it was just her and Cricket in a tent. Add witnesses? No. Jee and Reg might flaunt their love, let their spats and their makeup sex spill all over everyone else. Not Amanda.

  And Cricket realized she wouldn’t come back, not while they were both so confused. All those questions Lauren had said. Plus some more that Cricket had thought up in the meantime, like, What will it do to the team now that we’re in love? And What if one of us falls out of love? Who moves out? Cricket would fight to the death to keep this relationship. If it was a relationship.

  Lauren was right. They had to talk.

  Cricket left the cab waiting at the Loriston Home’s back stairs. Technically there was a lock on that door, but the door was often left ajar. She knew at least four residents at the Home whose nocturnal restlessness got them out of bed and sent them wandering the grounds. She caught up with one on the stairs, just the person she hoped to see.

  “Florence, it’s me, Cricket.”

  Florence made no comment on Cricket’s midnight reappearance. She was too busy hauling her bulk up one step at a time, leaning on the rail, pausing to wheeze every two steps. Florence had often said that when the day came she couldn’t climb those stairs after her starlight constitutional, she would take sleeping pills. Cricket wanted to boost her butt up the last few steps, but she didn’t. Florence had a plan. Don’t mess with her plan.

  “I was thinking,” Florence said, gasping for breath, leaning against the wall at the top of the stairs, “about that big ginkgo tree at the southwest corner.”

  “I know the one. It gets real yellow in the fall. I saw it from my window every day.”

  “Me too,” Florence said, not commenting on Cricket’s use of the past tense. “If I can make it to the first frost, I can sit on the bench by the sidewalk and look at it. Take my Ambien and fade into that glow. You know how the leaves all fall at once, and then they lie there on the grass in a blaze of yellow, and Luis and Jorge let them be for a few days because they’re so pretty. If I take my pills on that bench, nobody will have uncomfortable thoughts about looking at the leaves.”

  “Honey, they won’t think about it at all, after the first day. If that. It’s a good plan.”

  Florence looked at her in surprise. “You’re right.”

  “You could even sit down right there in the middle of the yellow leaves.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t do that. All those footprints. Medics and nurses scuffing them up. The leaves only lie there for a couple of days. So pretty. It would mess them up for other people.”

  Cricket looked into Florence’s watery eyes. Somewhere in there was the girl who had danced professionally and, for one summer that she never stopped talking about, joined the circus, following a young man. As Cricket now knew, that girl was still in there.

  Cricket nodded, as if to tell Florence, I see all the way inside you and I understand. She’d been doing it for years. Sometimes, like tonight, it was even true.

  “I came to ask you about those pills.” she said.

  Florence didn’t blink. She led the way into her apartment, and counted out her hoard, and divided the pills evenly into two piles. “I split ’em with people now and then,” she confided, although Cricket knew, of course. It was why she was here tonight. “Can take a while to get more.” She looked shrewdly at Cricket. “I didn’t figure you for one who would ask. You like life.”

  “Oh, I’m coming back. I’m just going to hell to get my girlfriend.”

  Florence pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows, Huh. She handed over a fistful of pills. “Thanks for the crazy dream, Cricket. Good to see you.”

  Cricket put the pills in her pocket. “So what are you gonna do after you’re dead?”

  “After?”

  “Your plan’s great so far.” Cricket went to the apartment door. “But it doesn’t hurt to think a little farther.”

  “After, huh?” Florence eyed her. “You would know, I guess.”

  “Yup.”

  “Huh. I’ll think about it. Good night, Cricket,” Florence said, and shut the door.

  She thinks I’m dead, Cricket realized once she was in the taxi. Made sense. Nobody at the Home would know what stirring things had been going on in Cricket’s family. Families didn’t make friends with other people at the Loriston Home. It would be like befriending your granny’s cellmate. Probably all the old folks knew was that Cricket had vanished. Not a surprising event, at the Home.

  The Lair was empty when the taxi dropped her off. The team must have scattered on their search program—Jee and Reg to sniff at the doorways between the Regional Office and the field, Beth to call on her cop boyfriend, Pog to hassle Ish via Skype.

  That wasn’t a bad idea. But it might take Ish a while to find Amanda.

  Cricket knew that Amanda hadn’t bothered looking for a door to the Regional Office. She’d made one—made it by killing herself, or as close to killing her demon body as she could manage. Cricket was willing to bet that that was as close to a plan as Amanda had.

  She decided to take the pills in the hot tub
. If she sat just right, she’d sink into the water and be sure to drown, even if there weren’t enough pills to kill her demon body. Thinking of Florence’s compulsive thoughtfulness, she reckoned that it was time the team did a thorough scrub of this hot tub anyway. Beth would insist, and Reg would do a good job.

  Her conscience clear, Cricket washed the pills down with swigs of chocolate milk she’d snitched out of Reg’s refrigerator. Then she lay back and floated, staring up through Chicago’s streetlight-tinted haze at a handful of stars.

  I have a plan. I wanna go where Amanda is.

  A brief sleep later, or so it seemed, Cricket woke with the sun in her eyes. Waves were washing in and out nearby. She was hot, burning hot, but in a pleasurable way, as if her bones had been cold all her life and finally felt toasty. Listening to the waves lap on sand like slow, shallow breaths, she remembered to breathe. She coughed. Warm water spilled out of her mouth, and then she rolled over and vomited water neatly and efficiently onto a sandy beach.

  When she sat up, gasping for air, she realized she was naked on the sand, and the sun was hard overhead, drawing at her as if she were a seedling being pulled up toward the sky.

  She was awash with sensation. Her mind was empty.

  That’s right, I’m dead. I can stare at the sun if I want.

  With a sigh, Cricket lay back on the sand and heard it crunch under her. She picked up a pinch of it. The sand squeaked between her fingers. Suddenly too tired to puzzle anything out, she lay back and let her gaze meet the sun. What have we here? Who are you? the sun seemed to say.

  But the sun’s voice was too big, and hers too small, for her to talk to it. Burning light fell like a spaceship ray out of a science fiction movie, burning through her skin and bone and blood into her heart, making her spine glow like a burnt-up stick, leaving her barely visible like a bubble on the sand, just a ghost of a body going pink with fire, then white with ash.