So he knew I was mad, too.
My skin rippled. I looked away from him, feeling memory coming up in me like a volcano of heartburn. I cleared my throat.
“I was a fat whore. A broke fat whore. Then I got the lucky offer, and now I’m a thin whore. Jee and I worked out of an apartment for two years. Then this team formed. I was told I would be straw boss.” I turned on Ish with a narrow stare, wondering all over again how I’d been recruited. If he knew what he’d done to me.
He wouldn’t meet my eye. Yeah, he knew. “You’re still straw boss, Pog honey,” he whined.
“Call me honey again and I’ll kick you in the dick,” I said conversationally.
“So,” he said in the middle of the silence that followed this. “How did you die?” He looked like he was swallowing glass.
I scowled. “What do you mean, die? I didn’t die. I told you. I was barely sort-of sometimes not-homeless. I needed dental. The recruiter offered me a demon body and thirty pieces of silver per month. Boom.”
He looked dumbfounded. “When was this again?”
Did he want a kick in the dick? Nobody should pry. Rule number one.
“Two years ago. Don’t you listen?” My voice rose. “I’m not repeating this song for you or anyone.” I couldn’t take any more. I put on my boss voice. “So that’s the deal, people. When Ish gets around to telling us more about his problem with the Regional Office, we’ll know more. Until then, keep your eyes and ears open.” My brain was full and my heart hurt. “I declare this meeting over. Everybody out of the hot tub. Reg, you stay and clean up.” I glared around the circle and yelled, “Out!”
ISH
The girls scattered. Ish wanted to run at that tone of Pog’s voice. But he stayed long enough to gather up an armload of mugs, since nobody else did, and carry them downstairs from the roof to the kitchen. He saw Reg disappear into Jee’s bedroom. That’s right. Jee duty beats Pog duty. The rest of the girls went all the way down to the ground floor.
Boy, Pog was mad. He couldn’t blame her. Since everybody else was finking out on cleanup, he grabbed this first chance to be alone with her.
He climbed the roof stairs again.
Pog stood knee-deep in the hot tub, staring off across the night-time neighborhood rooftops, naked and motionless. She looked scrawny from the back. He wanted to say, You never looked fat to me, Polly.
Yeah, that would go over. After their meeting ten years ago.
Guilt pounded Ish over the heart. For once his dick behaved itself. He was glad he’d kept his undershorts on for the hot tub. He cleared his throat.
She looked around at him. “Where’s Reg?”
“Jee’s room.” He bent and picked up a sangria pail, empty now except for a few gnawed orange rinds.
She didn’t comment on Reg’s defection. She reached into the control panel on the edge of the deck and got the tub draining. Then she watched Ish pick up orange rinds and cherry stems off the deck and put them in the pail. There was something sinister in her stare.
“I’m sorry I said that, back then,” he blurted.
Slowly she squared off to him.
This was it. He realized that she knew who he was after all, and she was still pissed.
“Everybody has to tell their story sometime,” she said, as if pretending she didn’t know what he meant.
He let the anger in her eyes sink through him like a good hard punch. C’mon, Polly. Punch me hard. Get it out of your system. So we can be friends again.
He pushed. “I’m sorry I did that, ten years ago. I was wrong.” Maybe if he got her to yell, she’d feel better.
With his demon senses on the stretch, he could hear her heart hammering, smell tears in her eyes and in her throat, see even by the murky light here on the roof that her mouth worked and her eyes narrowed and her fists twitched.
Then she said the meanest thing she could possibly have said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Ouch. It was gonna be like that.
Okay. He could take more. He’d come back and he’d keep coming back until he got through.
She smiled. “Have you seen our locker room?”
They brought the buckets to the kitchen. Then Pog led him down to the ground floor.
The locker room was on the first floor, apparently part of the original factory. Ish heard voices outside. Pog threw the door open and a gush of scented steam billowed out.
The voices stopped. Water splashed in the silence.
Ish stood in the door, gaping.
The girls were down there, jaybird naked every one, standing or sitting in a giant fountain-thingy in the middle of the room, frozen in the act of soaping up. Reg was there, too, scrubbing Jee’s back. They looked at Ish.
Ish put on his dressing-room face. Don’t mind me, girls, it’s just me. Just ol’ Mal. I mean, ol’ Ish.
As one, they turned back to their showers.
“You’d better clean up,” Pog said at his elbow. “You don’t want that sticky hot tub scum on your sheets.” As if his sheets weren’t already a disgrace. “And—” He felt her hands on his hips and jumped. “Lose the undies.” She yanked his shorts down to his ankles.
Now his boner was fully exposed on red alert. “Uh—”
But Pog turned away and climbed into the basin of the fountain. “They’ve seen it.” Her butt waved in his face.
Maybe if he lathered up enough, nobody would notice him going off every ninety seconds like friggin’ Old Faithful.
He sighed and climbed after her.
It was a lot like junior high school days at the club.
Weirdly, he felt at home.
The fountain thingy had a centerpiece that squirted fans of warm water down in all directions. Ish took a position in front of a nozzle, putting the centerpiece between him and most of the girls, and sudsed himself all over with some of the peach-scented crap from the bottle Beth was using.
“What the hell?” he said. “I don’t remember this thing from when those guy sex demons lived here.”
Amanda answered him. “It was here. The incubi never used this room. You should have seen it when we moved in.”
“Before my time,” Cricket said.
“So gross,” Beth said.
“We hired an army of contractors,” Pog said.
“Horny contractors,” Jee said.
Melitta sat on the broad lip of the fountain, shaving her legs. That took Ish way back. The strippers even used to wax each other in front of him. He shifted so he wasn’t looking at her. Kid was just outa high school, for fuck’s sake.
He cleared his throat. “That must have taken forever.”
“Oh, no. The reno was done in four days,” Pog said.
“We incentivized them,” Beth said in a deep, raunchy voice, and Ish did a double-take, while the other girls laughed. Whoa. Little Suzy Homemaker, the porn version.
Pog pointed at Ish suddenly and squealed, “Look who’s got a stiffy!” She snatched up Melitta’s shaving cream and started squirting Ish with it. One by one, the other girls grabbed up their bottles of smelly stuff and joined in.
“Hey!” Ish flailed, slipped, grabbed the center fixture for support, slipped again and nearly cold-cocked himself on the chin with the nozzle, and clung tight, his grip gradually failing on the slick steel. “Reg! Help!”
“Right here with ya, boss,” Reg muttered nearby. Ish realized the naked onsite-manager-slash-cabana-boy was also gripping the center fixture, giggling uncontrollably, hiding his face on his arm as bath gel, hair-care products, and shaving cream showered down on the two of them.
The girls howled with laughter.
Even Pog was laughing, unselfconscious and giggly and squirting her teammates and the guys and shrieking when she got squirted. Made him happy down to his bones to hear her laugh again.
Their laughter finished Ish’s embarrassment. He was back in his dad’s strip club, fetching and carrying for the girls, walking in and out of their dressing room whene
ver, petted by the sweet girls, bossed by the tough girls, his boner ignored by all, as if he was just a dog with a big waggy tail that whapped everyone on the thighs, cussed if he got underfoot, but accepted.
No wonder Reg was so darned happy here.
If he worked it right, Ish could come on as second waterboy.
First waterboy, dummy. You’re their supervisor.
Yeah, right.
Next morning, Ish very reluctantly went for a business run with the team. The plan, he learned, was simple: The girls put on skimpy jogging clothes, jounced along the footpath for a mile or two, took notes on every guy they tempted, went home, and logged their report. Neat. This was Pog’s idea, of course. The girl was a born executive.
Ish had claimed he felt a need to supervise them, since Reg was clearly useless. In truth he was terrified of being left alone in the Lair. A night alone in Reg’s old room had begun with a marathon sheet-messing session and ended with Ish curled in a ball, trembling occasionally, wondering when the Regional Office would catch up with him.
So when Pog assembled the team for the morning trolling session, Ish butted in. He hated running. But it beat waiting to get bodysnatched out of the Lair.
They took the van to Lincoln Park, left it in the lot at Foster Avenue, and started pelting down the foot track alongside the lake. Ish fell way back in the rear. Each girl had her phone in her hand and her earbuds in, seeming oblivious to traffic on the path: joggers, runners, dog-walkers, tourists on bikes rented from the city, tourists with baby strollers, bike teams in spandex roaring by at high speed, gym classes of high school boys running by with sweat dripping off their skinny chests, crowds of macho Polish and Mexican soccer players with impressive calves, and lady joggers in ones and twos. All the guys in the park lusted after Ish’s girls, and Ish lusted after all the girls.
Ish’s demon body was doing its thing, making him feel too much. The crowds gave him the willies. They were loud. They stank. Their body heat or their energy fields or whatever made him feel like he was being jostled and bumped between weather-balloon-sized animals. He did his best to stay six feet or more away from every single living thing on the path.
The sluts didn’t seem to mind at all. They were maddeningly sexy in their running clothes. It wasn’t obvious, but they were using their phones to take pictures of every male who whanged up a boner as they passed.
Which was plenty. Ish could tell. It was only one of hundreds of things he knew and regretted knowing simply by getting within six feet of someone. Amanda called it laydar. Part of being a Lust demon. Ish suffered intensely.
He also heard every yelling gull flying by as if it was screaming in his ear. He smelled every stinky pair of squeaky sneakers, every whimpering dog’s behind and fallen ice cream bar, complete with squalling toddler.
And the lake! Like a flat mountain, its vast presence rolled over on him with boat horns and fish smells and nonstop surf noise.
Goddamn demon senses.
The field. Ugh. No wonder demons didn’t come here if they could help it.
Something white appeared on the lawn in the distance. Thirty yards ahead of him, Beth broke from the slutpack and jogged into what appeared to be a circle of white lumps in the brilliant green grass. She paused in the middle of the circle, jogging in place, looked around with a bemused smile, looked up as Pog ran past, and scampered back onto the path to join her.
Ish was out of breath. Supposedly his demon body could do anything, if he could figure out how to make it, but obviously he hadn’t yet figured out how to run. He sweated and he smelled and he felt like a goldfish in a bowlful of barracudas. He ran into the circle of white things too, and awarded himself a pause, bent over, hands on knees, wheezing and dripping. He saw now that the circle was composed of a dozen white stone or plaster Buddha heads—just the heads—seemingly immersed in the grass up to their noses, their eyes blank and blind with Zen-doo-dah.
Was it art, or a statement about the futility of exercise, or what? Inside the circle of Buddha heads he couldn’t hear the lake or the screaming kids or the yelling gulls, couldn’t smell anything but the grass under his feet and his own sweat. Huh. He began to relax.
Then someone caromed into him, knocking him to the grass with extreme prejudice.
When he rolled over and looked up, he saw his Regional Office Senior Executive VP standing over him. Buughdebogh’s bald dome was purple-chrome with emotion, his claws poised as if to disembowel Ish.
“You little weasel,” Buugh hissed, picking Ish up by the straps of his borrowed jogging singlet and shaking him. “What did you do? What did you bring into the Regional Office? What is it? And why—didn’t—it—get—you?”
“I duh-uh-uh-uh! I don’t know-ow what you’re ta-a-a-alking about!” Ish stuttered.
Buugh shook him until his teeth rattled and his head snapped back and forth like a daisy flopping on its stem.
“Idon’tknowwhatyou’retalkingabout!” Ish screamed out in one breath.
“Grrrr!” Buugh threw him down on the grass. He hissed, “Then I’ll show you.”
Ish looked fearfully around him. The circle of grass he lay on was still defined by a ring of impassive, blank-eyed Buddha heads, but outside it, he could see the opulent confines of a Regional Office executives’ conference room. The place looked messy, as if there had been an all-night meeting and the cleaning staff hadn’t come in to tidy up yet.
Buugh strode to the edge of the circle and pulled on a pair of huge, hazard-yellow, elbow-length rubber gloves that clashed with his elegant business suit. Then he reached outside the circle and dragged forward a rolling cart and lifted a clear plastic box off the top of the cart. Inside lay a metal briefcase. He opened that with two very gingerly clicks. The briefcase was fitted with packing foam, and inside that, nestled like a very tiny bomb or a bottle of perfume in an unlikely commercial, was a test tube, and inside that was another, smaller test tube. The outer test tube was corked, with a wax seal over that, and magical sigils impressed into the wax.
Buugh took a pair of forceps off the lower shelf of the cart. With them he carefully lifted the tube out of its foam nest. He stood over Ish, holding the tube as if threatening to drop it on him.
He growled, “Do you have any idea what your little basketball tournament did to the Regional Office? No?”
Ish shook his head violently. “It was just a little basketball.”
Buugh chuckled an evil, bitter chuckle. “Within three weeks of your little basketball thing, every demon who had attended the tournament vanished.”
“What?” Ish squeaked. His eyes bulged.
Buugh nodded impressively. “Some left farewell notes. Some were seen exiting via gateways to the field. Some never turned up for work, haven’t been found. And some just...dissolved.” Buugh made a clumsy gesture with claws protected by thick rubber gloves. “Poof. Maybe they’re still alive on some other plane of existence, but if they are, they’re not telling.”
Ish looked down at himself and felt his own trunk and limbs over with his hands, feeling stupid. “Why didn’t I go poof?”
“That’s what I’m here to find out. You have two minutes to explain before I drop this on you.”
“But what is it?” Ish said, puzzled. He peered at the test tube in Buugh’s gloved claws. It looked like it contained a pinch of tiny black flakes.
“We don’t know what it is. Nobody can study it long enough to find out before they go poof. But your team tracked it into that gymnasium on their shoes, and after they left, within three weeks, nobody who had been in that gymnasium could be found.”
“But wait a minute, there was a week between the qualifying round and the finals.”
“That’s why we didn’t suspect you, at first. Apparently it doesn’t always get them right away. It took Inhuman Resources three weeks to notice the unusual attrition, and another month to identify the tournament as the start of it and figure out what the vector must have been.” He scowled impressively. “There have b
een further losses, not directly connected to the basketball tournament, in environments where the tournament attendees worked. We think demons tracked this stuff back to their offices and maybe infected others. Now. What is it?” he roared.
“I don’t know!” Ish protested, waving his hands. “You know me. I work for you. I’m a desk jockey.”
“Who else are you working for, and what is this?” Buugh brandished the test tube. It slipped out of his tongs and fell toward Ish.
Ish lunged and caught it, his heart hammering.
But Buugh was just as quick. He dropped the tongs and seized Ish painfully by the wrist. “Nice try. I’ll take that.”
He couldn’t take the tube away from Ish with his glove on. He shook off the glove, then found his claws were too long to do anything useful. Ish watched the claws shrink until Buugh’s fingers were the pudgy digits of an ordinary executive—ordinary so long as your executive was normally purple. He grinned and puffed halitosis into Ish’s face.
“Thanks.” He took the test tube and slid it into the breast pocket of his fancy vice-president suit.
Ish stared, baffled.
Buugh seemed to simmer down. “Over the last month, thirty-nine demons vanished while they were trying to analyze this stuff. We lost the entire cleaning crew of the gymnasium. Just sweeping it off the floor was dangerous.”
“I don’t get it,” Ish confessed. “The girls came, they played basketball, they left. They brought a really good lunch. I ate it with them. None of it killed me.”
“Maybe the antidote was in the food.” Buugh eyed him a long moment. “They tracked it in on their shoes. It’s all over the basketball court. Sweeping doesn’t get rid of it. The flakes are too thin. Doesn’t seem to matter how little of it makes contact, either. Some demons were contaminated by looking at it on a slide under a microscope. Some couldn’t even be in the same room with it. Others were able to collect some bigger particles and put them into this tube, as you see.” He patted his breast pocket. “I myself am completely immune, of course,” he added, puff-faced, as if reminding himself that being a double duke of hell counted for something.
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 88