“Yeah,” Ish said with heavy sarcasm. “Another dumbass kid ruled by his dick. A pushover. Kind of guy who gets pussywhipped by a club full of strippers,” he growled, remembering.
Reg didn’t get it. “You worked in a strip club? Dude, you’re my hero!”
“Fuck, kid, when you live here?” Ish snorted. “I had strippers for day care. Strippers helped me with my homework. My dad pulled me out of college after two years and put me to work in the club.” Belatedly he remembered why that was a secret. “Don’t tell anybody I told you that.”
“I won’t tell anybody you told me that,” Reg said obediently. “But what a cool dad!”
“Uh-huh,” Ish said, remembering the endless rain of contempt Morty called parenting. “What did he think? I would grow a pair, because all those hot girls were calling me boss?” He laughed, and it came out soft. “Some of ’em knew me from before I had hair on my chin. They rolled over me when I was a little kid. And they never stopped rolling.”
“Nice feeling, all them hot babes rolling over you, idn’t it?” Reg said, totally missing the point.
Though maybe that was the point after all. When Ish was in his twenties, he was as distracted by the babes as Reg. He was by no means immune today.
Ish eyed Reg and drank beer. Maybe Reg had the right attitude. If you gave up all pretension to authority, you didn’t have to be responsible. You could wallow in your enslavement, like this dumb fucker did. It was never your problem when the shit hit the fan.
Ish twitched at the memory.
One thing he knew. This time, there would be no escape from responsibility. Sooner or later. His belly filled up with hot lead, until he had to get up and walk down the hall to take a panic shit.
POG
Apart from the severe shock I suffered when I realized who Ish really was, things settled down for a few days. Nobody new showed up to move in with us. That was nice. Cooking for eight was a lot more work than cooking for six. We’d been training Reg to cook; he was talented and remarkably tidy. Wasn’t enough. Soon I was forced to accept Beth’s help in the kitchen. Reluctant as I was to give up some control, I went over to a rotating roster for breakfast only. Reg and Beth one day, me the next, because I was faster, better, and more reliable than they were at dishing up mega-calorie meals.
But it freaked me out that our newest roommate was my oldest friend and enemy. I’d never learned why Delilah chose to recruit me. Had Ish, who was really Ishmael “Mal” Greenberg from South Shore, fingered me to her? What had really brought Ish into the Regional Office? Had he actually committed suicide? The thought of my childhood buddy killing himself stabbed at me, until I remembered the last time we’d spoken back in South Shore, and then I wanted to stab him. My feelings yo-yoed crazily between rage and heart-melting sympathy and bewildered betrayal and the infinite comfort I’d once felt with Mal, as I’d called him back in the world before the Regional Office, before that terrible day. I was constantly having to remind myself that I hated him.
Also, Jee gained more weight and ate less and less. This added greatly to my freakout. Her appetite kept dropping, which is fatal for a sex demon: she gets fat. Beth and I wondered if it was because she couldn’t come trolling for scores with us anymore. Reg was there to prevent her from stepping out on her own, like she did that time when she nearly killed a hotel suite full of drunken conventioneers. She seemed sullen but she took it. We heard nothing from her room, of course, since Amanda had installed that cone of silence to keep Jee’s night terrors from waking us all up.
But Reg would meet my eye every morning with a little head-shake. Nope. She still woke up screaming.
And she didn’t eat.
“What the hell will she eat?” I muttered under my breath at least four times a day.
“What’s the big deal? They’re taking a vacation from food,” Ish said. He was eating Snickers bars one after another and watching me and Beth get sixteen big chickens ready for the oven.
“I’m not talking to you,” I shot at him, then said to Beth, “It’s worse than that. They’re also taking a vacation from sex, if I know those two.” I washed chicken carcasses with vicious efficiency. “It’s unnatural. Normally they’re both as vain as cheerleaders and horny as rabbits.”
“Hey,” Beth the ex-cheerleader said from the stove, where she was putting gizzards into a pot for, get this, fresh homemade stock. I’m too damned lazy to make stock.
“You just got a thing about being fat,” Ish said.
I turned on him with my hand jammed up inside a raw chicken carcass. “Do you want a black eye?” I snarled. Real flames may have shot out of my eyes, or maybe I only wished they did.
“She has a thing about being fat,” Ish informed Beth, who was listening avidly. “She was fat when she was mortal. So now nobody else is allowed to get fat.”
“What do you know?” I said savagely. I couldn’t confront him with Beth here. I wasn’t sure I was ready anyway.
He shrugged. “It’s in your file.”
I pointed with the chicken. “We threw our last smart-mouth supervisor off that balcony out there.”
Ish stuffed two full-size Snickers bars into his mouth at once. “Thaff’s nah a faffon affeffory, you know.”
When I was eight, Mal used to talk with his mouth full to gross out my mother. That was back when she still let me have candy bars.
Beth giggled.
I glared at Ish. “You were so polite when you showed up. Did you finally grow some balls?”
“Not really. I’m not scared of you.” He gave me a big, disgusting, chocolatey-nougat grin.
She has a thing about being fat. The blood rose into my head with a thump. He had a nerve!
Suddenly I felt weak. I turned away, put the chicken in the drainboard with its other naked friends, and shut my eyes, resting my greasy hands on the cold steel edge of the sink, talking sense to my fluttering guts.
I’d lost my first life and my first best friend to fat. I’d gained a new best friend when Jee and I got our skinny demon bodies. Now she’d fallen in love and gone to fat and I’d lost her. Viewed rationally, this did not make sense, but the teenager in me thought it did.
In the past week I’d made Thai tom kha soup, four versions of Minangkabau’s tribal dish rendang, which Jee would never find anywhere else on the Third Coast, coconut pudding, jellied milk fish, and, stifling my gag reaction, bubble tea. She tasted everything, then went back into her room. Hey, at least she tasted. It’s not like she’s rejecting you. Just your cooking.
Meanwhile she and Reg looked like Spreading Middle America.
“We’ll find something she wants to eat. I have to.” What the fuck good was it being a sex demon with infinite allure and nearly unlimited funds and a massive size-zero wardrobe if I couldn’t get my best friend to eat? I hyperventilated until I was dizzy.
Where was my rage? Gone with Jee’s rage, apparently. Only I didn’t have a Reg to catch me when I fell.
Pah. I didn’t need a Reg. What was the matter with me?
Well, I knew what was the matter. It was Ishmael Greenberg, sitting at my kitchen table, drinking beers out of my fridge, begging me to hide him from what he fancied was an army of vengeful demons.
Well, at least one demon was after him. This Buugh character. It would be tempting to call Buugh up on the bat phone and tell him to come fetch the little weasel.
Ah. There’s some rage.
I thought of the last time I saw him. No, don’t make me remember that. Not with Mal in the room.
Instead I remembered him on the playground at recess at St. Ida’s, talking quietly with me about everything in the world while the other kids played dodgeball. Listening, too. Mal had always been a good listener. We had managed to stay friends, all the way up through junior high.
He was always so nice to me.
Except that once.
That memory hurt like a red-hot poker coming straight up through my body into my throat.
I swallowed har
d. Not that.
While I stood there like a dope, trying to pull myself together, quick footsteps rang on the metal staircase down the hall, and in another moment Cricket burst in carrying a big plastic bag from Ann Sather. Melitta was with her.
“Look what the cat dragged in!” Cricket said. “Found her on the mat.”
“My last final was yesterday.” Melitta hugged Beth, then me. Her college flannels and jeans were almost as frumpy as her high school wardrobe, but now she had succubus-long legs, and her beige skin was clear and smooth, and she wore Jee’s diamond tennis bracelet. “Who’s this?”
I was still collecting myself.
Beth answered for me. “This is Ish Qbybbl, our Regional Office supervisor. He’s making an onsite field visit.”
“Right. We met on Skype,” Melitta said. She shook hands with Ish. She might recognize him, at that. Ish’s look was, as I’ve said, distinctive.
Cricket unpacked the Ann Sather bag on the kitchen table. “I talked to that chef,” she told Ish. “It’s okay. He’s retired.”
I wiped my chickeny hands on my apron. “Is that what I think it is?” All this thinking about my fat days had me starving.
Ish stared at Cricket. Cricket always seemed either under-age or grandma-faced. She was still adjusting to her succubus form. Today she had settled on a geeky teenager look: hacked-off short brown hair, Star Trek tee shirt, jeans, sneakers—still not sexy yet. She’d taken to stretching her body taller, say, five-eight, and she kinda had hips and boobs, but her face was still middle-school young. I wondered why Ish thought she was stare-worthy when the rest of us were so much hotter.
She set two big foil trays of Ann Sather cinnamon rolls on the table.
“I love you!” I took a tray from her, tore off the foil lid, and was about to stuff the whole thing in the oven when I realized the tray was still warm. My voice broke. “You brought fresh ones!”
Cricket plopped into a chair, looking pleased. “I know you like.”
“Thank you, Cricket,” Beth said, like a mom pointing out to all the other children how a nice child behaves. She started eating a cinnamon roll, holding its warm, drippy, sticky goodness in both hands and getting frosting up her nose. If she’d realized she was doing that, she’d have given herself a scold and a napkin.
I didn’t point a finger. I woofed down my first roll. Melitta sat beside me and got busy with both hands, too.
Ish was still staring at Cricket. “You talked to him?”
“He’s a demon all right,” the new girl said. “He came here last summer, and he fell in love, and he’s living with her up the Metra line a ways in a bungalow on Catalpa. He says hi,” she told Ish. “That was why he was looking at you in the restaurant. He recognized you from when you worked in Lust and he worked in Gluttony.”
Daintily, Cricket fished a roll out of the open tray, put it on a paper plate, and began picking it apart, peeling away short, sticky lengths of pastry and sucking her fingers after each bite.
Ish blinked. “So is he here with Gluttony? I wonder who’s processing his monthly reports.” To our stares, he added, “He really is a chef.” He had a cinnamon roll in each hand.
“I doubt if he’s uploading any reports,” I said with a full mouth. “I think he’s off the grid now.”
Cricket shook her head. “He got moved over to Anger for the special task force that got sent here, and he fell in love and got deleted from the computer system and all that. So you’re safe.”
“He was a chef in hell?” Melitta said, licking icing off her upper lip.
Beth was frowning. She sat down at the table, the better to dig into the open tray of cinnamon rolls. “Why didn’t they send demons from Anger?”
“Ran out of them, I’d guess,” Ish said. His color had returned. “I know Bu—uh, my Senior VP had to scrounge to get five guys to play in that basketball tournament.”
Something occurred to me. I squinted at Ish. “How do you plan to get paid while you’re here?”
He looked shifty. “I have some money saved.”
Mal had looked shifty, too. Got it from his dad, the original.
A thousand emotions boiled up in me.
I barged out of the kitchen and went to the bathroom, which was empty, for a miracle. I stared into the mirror. Look at thin, thin, thin Pog.
Was this how Jee felt before she lost her nerve and started hiding in her room, haunted by the past? All that was over now. I stood in a luxurious, immaculate bathroom and looked into a sparkling mirror surrounded by soft makeup lighting at a perfect face. Yet I still smelled the pavement under the bridge at 57th Street in Hyde Park. Right up against my face, it had smelled like grease, old gum, wino urine, spilled fries and ketchup, crapped-in-and-slept-in old clothes, foot diseases, and fear.
These thoughts didn’t settle my nerves at all. Plus, dinner wasn’t getting made.
I chased everyone out of my kitchen so I could crash around, clanging pots and pans into the dishwasher, and think.
My head was a mess.
At the heart of it was Mal or Ish or Mal. The good friend, the manageable boss, the bastard. I couldn’t live with him right here under my nose, bringing all this crap back up. I would have to kill him. I’d promised myself I would murder him back then, when I was nineteen and that red-hot poker had first seared my heart. That had crushed me like a cockroach. Of all the cruel times people had withdrawn their love and sent me away empty, that one had filled me with a pain I still could feel.
When I was a teenager, I had tried to live on pain instead of food.
These days, of course, all eating did was make me thin. Thinner. I kept myself rail-thin as a succubus, except for the obligatory boobs and booty, but even those were supermodel size.
I knew I was a mess about food. Always had been, my whole life.
But I hadn’t realized until this moment how much of a mess I was about Mal.
I couldn’t kill him now. He was a demon, immortal and indestructible, like me.
Maybe he thought he’d escaped hell. But I would see to it he had a taste of eternal suffering anyway.
The roasted chickens were a success. I felt vindicated somehow.
After dinner, the whole team met in the hot tub. It was obvious to me we were going to have to send some of these people away or get a bigger hot tub. Reading from left to right we had Beth, me, Ish, Reg, Jee, Amanda, Cricket, and Melitta crammed into a tub designed for four. Ish had seated himself opposite Melitta, apparently to protect her from his new-guy boner, which was still up and around. He also gave Jee as much space as possible. That “fifteen” thing must have really got to him.
I’d made gallons of sangria, and Ish and Reg between them had hauled them upstairs in two of those five-gallon paint buckets so loaded up with sliced fruit that we would eat it as much as drink it. Everybody grabbed a mug with a handle on it and dipped in. We got pretty sticky.
I said, looking at the sangria-tinged ring around the tub, “Reg, this thing’s gonna have to be emptied and scoured out tomorrow.”
“I’ll help,” Ish said. I sent him a hostile look. He said, “What? The kid’s overworked.”
“Is that remark aimed at me?” Jee said lazily, apparently too drunk to get mad.
Ish shrugged. “He’s got six of you to look after and I’m at a loose end.”
Per our agreement, Amanda cleared her throat.
Silence fell.
“Okay, everybody,” I said. “Time for the origins recital.”
Jee groaned. “Do we have to do this?”
“Yes,” I said. Ish was in trouble with the Regional Office, and we needed to alert everybody. And, ugh, do the life story strip-tease.
“We agreed on it,” Beth said. “Every time we get a new recruit, everybody shares their—their origins story.”
“We don’t have a new recruit,” Jee snapped.
Everyone looked at Ish.
“I think,” I said, sighing, “we don’t have a choice.” I looked at Reg.
Reg shrugged. “I saw a ad on Craigslist.” He hooked a thumb at Ish. “He interviewed me.” He turned to Jee and gave her neck a quick rub with one hand. “And she taught me my job.”
Jee gave him a quick smile. “I was a child prostitute in a Bangkok cat-house.” She sent a challenging look around the hot tub, daring someone to make a comment. Nobody did. “Now I’m here.”
Amanda put her mug on the deck, stood up dripping, and said formally, not looking at anyone, “I was recruited out of the Regional Office. Somebody dropped Ish’s flyer about this field op on my desk. I contacted him. And here I am.” She sat down and picked up her mug.
Cricket didn’t get up. She was a cheap sangria date. “I was in a nursing home, waiting to die. This is a better deal.” She glanced at Amanda. Watching them, I blushed.
Melitta put her hand up in a half-wave, like Beyoncé doing the queen wave. “My stepfather was a child molester. I couldn’t leave my mom with him, and I couldn’t live with him. This team gave me the backbone to fight.” She gave all of us a grateful smile. Melitta had polished up her image some when she got her demon body, but she had never gone tall-and-glam. It pleased Jee in particular that she didn’t make herself look white. She was way too nice a kid to hang with so many angry bitches. I was glad she spent most of her time now at college.
Beth lifted her chin. “My husband dumped me. I was suicidal. And uptight. And out of a job.” She paused, and I imagined her trying to condense whatever she would have said next into something quick. She sighed. “And now I’m not.” She raised her mug to the rest of us.
Ish looked at me, clearly hoping I would go next. I shook my head. He swallowed. “I don’t want to make trouble.” To Beth he said, “I was suicidal, too, I guess. So that’s how I ended up in hell.” With a dismissive shrug, he added, “I’m just a desk jockey.”
I opened my mouth to demand more details.
Then he raised his eyes to me, and I felt myself go hot.
He knows.
Ish knew that I knew he was Mal, and he knew that I knew that he knew.
His lips barely moved. “What’s your story?” I had a feeling that he would have done anything not to ask. Or maybe he was dying to ask but was also scared.
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 87