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

by Jennifer Stevenson

  But you’re handling it with rubber gloves and you’re terrified that tube will break and scatter that stuff in here, Ish thought. He cudgeled his brain. Something the girls brought down to Dis from their Lair did this. On their shoes.

  It had to be in the Lair.

  “I’ll get right on it, sir. I’ll find out what it is. I’ll—”

  “You’ll find out whose little plot this is, what they poisoned us all with, and how to counteract it. Or your punishment will be awful!”

  “Yessir!”

  “Do it now. Today. Yesterday!” Buugh screamed.

  “Yessir! Right away, sir!”

  Buugh made an impatient gesture, and Ish felt himself slip and fall—he kept falling—falling— It was a pleasant sensation compared with having Buugh screaming his face. He landed on his back on the grass inside the circle of silent Buddhas, in a state of bliss. After a moment it occurred to him to try to breathe. Then he discovered the wind was knocked out of him.

  He didn’t panic. There were worse things than suffocating in the late summer sunshine by Lake Michigan.

  “Hey, buddy, you okay?” Pog’s angelically blonde, upside-down head looked down on him.

  “O-ay,” he wheezed, as the rest of the team pattered up, looking smoking hot.

  They got him back on his feet and breathing. Once on his feet, he scrambled hastily out of the ring of Buddha heads.

  Pog and her team followed him. “What happened? We saw you run into the circle and then that guy ran after you and then you both disappeared.”

  “My boss. Regional Office.” Breathing was getting better. Ish looked at their sweet, young, lovely, completely untrustworthy faces and decided to keep most of it to himself. He couldn’t be sure they hadn’t actually plotted against the RO and deliberately tracked demon-death-dust into the gym. “I shoulda stayed out of that circle.”

  “No more circles,” Pog said, as if memorizing it.

  “But he let you go?” Amanda. That girl was too smart.

  Ish waved that away. “For now. I talked my way out of it.” He straightened the jacket of his loud-patterned satin track suit and glanced at the ring of sightless white Buddha heads buried up to their noses in the grass. “Let’s get away from here.”

  POG

  “How do you think she feels when you tell her she’s disgusting?”

  Beth was on her relentless mom warpath. I was her victim this time.

  I was trying to assemble a potato-cheese tump casserole for lunch. It takes longer to bake than you might think. You want it mushy inside—like cheesy potato-y garlicky baby food—but crusty and brown on top.

  “Hey, I don’t say it out loud.” Much.

  “Do you really think she doesn’t know how you feel?”

  I couldn’t meet her eye. I slit open three big bags of frozen shredded potatoes very carefully and dumped them into my biggest bowl.

  “Ask her if she minds how you feel about her being fat,” Beth suggested now.

  I bristled. “Why would I insult her?”

  “You never know. She might not feel insulted. After all, this is your issue, not hers.”

  I opened a huge bag of sliced onions. Normally I would prep my own vegetables, but not for this casserole. “Why don’t you lay off?”

  Beth pulled the top off the first three-pound tub of sour cream.

  “I’m not ready for the sour cream,” I snapped.

  “I know. Just getting it ready for you.” She peeled the inner foil lid off. “Why don’t you love her as much, now that she’s fat?”

  “I—” That hit me hard. I mixed the onions into the potatoes with my bare hands, fluffing and turning the mass of frozen shreds. “I do.” Of course I still loved her. I slit open the CostCo-size bag of mixed shredded cheeses and shook it over the potatoes and onions. Then I fluffed the mix again. “I’m just...scared for her.”

  Beth didn’t say anything. Forcing me to say all this.

  I mixed cheese and potatoes and onions. “Fat girls don’t get nice treatment. I’m terrified for her that she’ll bloat up and then won’t be able to get thin again.”

  “Tell her that. She’ll respect your fears.”

  “Hah. Jee doesn’t fear anything. That’s why she doesn’t believe there’s anything for anyone else to fear.” I fluffed vigorously, sending shreds of cheese and frozen potatoes all over the counter.

  “I think you know that’s not true,” Beth said, intensifying the mom voice.

  It occurred to me that I was doing to Jee what my mother had done to me. Fussing over what she ate. Criticizing her looks.

  Beth was right.

  I hated that I’d done my mother’s trip to Jee. Maybe I did owe her an apology.

  I looked Beth in the eye. “Will you lay the fuck off me if I tell her?”

  “I will lay off,” Beth promised. She handed me the first tub of sour cream.

  “Separate bowl for that.”

  She handed me my next-biggest bowl and I scooped the sour cream into it with a whisk. One by one I cracked a dozen eggs into the bowl and handed her the empty shells. I had to put my back into the whisk. The mixture was stiff. It got runnier as the eggs mixed into the sour cream. Then I added the second tub of sour cream.

  She opened the half-gallon of heavy whipping cream for me. “Sounds like she and Reg are done in the bathroom,” she said, cocking an ear to sounds coming from the hall. “Shall I leave the kitchen?”

  I rolled my eyes. “No! I’ll—I’ll go talk to her in her room. When I’m good and ready.” I looked at the mountain of veggies and cheese, the vat of sour cream and eggs, and the carton of whipping cream. “Can you do this?” I said, a little hoarse. “It goes in four nine-by-thirteen pans. Greased. Three-twenty-five for sixty minutes, then add the second bag of cheese on the tops and turn it up to three-seventy-five for twenty.”

  “I can do that,” Beth said meekly.

  I pointed. “There’s the cayenne and the salt. Use them wisely.” I was doing her a favor, letting her season it herself. My way of saying, Thanks for kicking my ass into this.

  “Yes, Pog.” The big faker. She thought she could outcook me any day of the week.

  But she was not the boss of this kitchen. And we both knew it.

  I handed her the whisk. Then I slumped off to Jee’s room.

  Reg was helping Jee get dressed. When he saw my expression he muttered, “Uh, guess I’ll go get your latte,” and slid out.

  Jee gave me a shrewd look. “’Sup?”

  “Beth,” I said bitterly. “Trying to make trouble between us.”

  In Jee’s puffy, unfamiliar moon-face, her eyes were as big and bright and black as ever.

  “About my, uh, issues.”

  At that, she sat down on her bed with her shoe in her hand. “I keep forgetting you used to be big.”

  It was true, she wouldn’t have known from personal experience. I’d barely ever mentioned it to her. Together we had established Rule One, no questions about the past. Together we had discovered the joys and powers of being thin, perfect, powerful succubi. We never looked back.

  “Rub it in.” I pulled myself together. This was not supposed to be me bitching her out. “Jee—I—it scares me to see you like this.” I whooshed out a breath. “Bad things happen to big girls, out there in the world.”

  It was hard to look at her. She was my friend, my warrior comrade, my fellow-traveler in rage. But she didn’t look like the Jee I knew, supermodel thin and fierce. She looked doughy and vulnerable.

  Her face softened even more. “But I’m not out there in the world. I’m here. Reg takes care of me. You all do. Thanks, roomie.” She watched me open my mouth and added, “It’s just for a while. I’m—we’re recovering. From our childhoods. Our icky, icky childhoods. It’s actually helping us to be fat, if that explains it. Both of us were starved scrawny, growing up.”

  I couldn’t speak. Jee’s childhood horrors trumped mine a thousand percent.

  She said now, “I know I ha
ven’t been around much. I’m sorry.” Holy mack, Jee apologized! Who are you? What have you done with my friend? She looked at me with such gentle eyes that I felt new terror. “I’m not fit to be around people these days. My nerves stick out a foot. I’m a huge bitch all the time. And yes, I still scream at night.”

  Oh god, oh fuck, stop telling me this stuff! Protect yourself!

  “You’ve always been a huge bitch. It’s what I respect about you,” I offered.

  “I’m protecting myself, and Reg is protecting me, and I’m protecting him. We have to—to grow our shells back before we can rejoin the world. I’m so grateful that we can stay here in safety.”

  And there it was. We was Jee and Reg, not Jee and Pog anymore.

  I cleared my throat. “It’s just that you seem to have, I dunno, lost your rage. You’re not mad anymore. How can you stay safe? What if you go outside the building like this?”

  I gestured helplessly, picturing men jeering at her, slapping her and grabbing for her shoes, her jewelry, and her purse, kids throwing stuff, old people in the grocery butting her in the back with their shopping carts, cars almost clipping her as she crossed the street, even nice women confidently expecting her to step off the sidewalk for them because she was the subhuman. The fat girl.

  The idea of someone doing those things to my friend filled me with fury and panic.

  She said, “I’m taking a break from rage.”

  I shook my head, terrified for her. “Not a good idea.”

  Her voice softened until she was barely audible. But she looked straight at me. “Everyone has to cry it out sometime.”

  I felt paralyzed. Was she accusing me—putting some kind of curse on me—what? Fuck, what was it with my roomies? Everybody was a psychiatrist now.

  “I don’t cry,” I said tightly. Which was such a lie. I’d been crying for weeks, usually on Beth, who actually liked it.

  But I didn’t want to make Beth happy.

  I wanted my best friend back.

  This was the woman who taught me how to use my succubus powers to make myself supermodel tall and thin. How to fit any bra I liked and any pair of jeans without having to try them on in the store. Who punched in my ex-pimp’s trachea and made me watch him choke to death, so that I would know, know for certain that he was gone, and I was strong enough to survive, and nobody could ever, ever fuck with me again.

  I hated to admit such a thing, because it felt like I was losing the only friend who ever got me. I said, “I don’t think I’m like you.”

  She cradled that shoe in her lap, touching it without looking at it as if it was a sleeping kitten, and held my gaze. “You’re just not there yet.”

  The air stopped in my chest. Tears burned the backs of my eyeballs. “Well, that’s not condescending,” I blurted, feeling stupid and helpless and friendless.

  I blundered out of there.

  Reg stood in the hall with Jee’s latte mug in his hand. He gave me that look of his, like, I know I’m not your dog, but I can tell that you might kick me anyway. Then he went into her room.

  I slumped against the wall, boneless with shock.

  It struck me that that was exactly the way I’d seen fat girls behave toward, well, everyone. It wasn’t like the whole world was their owner. But anyone could kick them anyway. Anyone. It was a defense ploy, really. I remembered back when it was one of my defenses. I’d had this idea that if I seemed to be ashamed of myself already, then maybe, sometimes, they wouldn’t think it was worth kicking me.

  Eventually I had realized that, no, pretty much everyone would kick me, because I was a safe target. No need to hate themselves for it. I would hate myself. They were off that hook. And they knew it.

  I guess I was in my late twenties by then. I’d found rage, and steel in my heart, and a growing conviction that I did not deserve to be treated the way people treated big girls. And yet I was still broke, still a fat whore, still friendless, still without health insurance or a safe place to sleep.

  Even steel rusts.

  If Delilah hadn’t recruited me, I might have given up after all.

  I didn’t know what had just happened in Jee’s room. I was pretty sure she wasn’t upset with me. Yet I was in a rage with her. I felt lost. That was so weird. A little monkey-me locked in the back of my brain scampered and gibbered in panic, because I suspected that Jee pitied me.

  Hey, she was the one who was getting fat!

  That was insupportable.

  I followed the sound of Beth doing dishes and went in and popped the cap on a cold bottle of hoppy IPA and sat down and watched her. That was something else I could do for Beth—let her martyr herself in my kitchen.

  I know, right? Apparently, Jee had to get fat and sloppy and be waited on and adored by Reg, in order to get over being a child sex slave. She wasn’t over it yet. Reg had to get fat and sloppy and kicked around by Jee and the rest of us, to get over being abused all his life by his psycho mother. He was still working on that. Beth had to do my housework, when we had a perfectly good cabana boy standing by, because of stuff left over from her decades of trying to buy her family’s love by waiting on them hand and foot, and she wasn’t over it.

  And here I was, freaking out. About what, I did not want to know.

  “I need to find something she’ll eat. Something good.”

  I’d been disappointed, to say the least, when it seemed Ish was responding the wrong way to our gang attack in the locker room. It was supposed to humiliate him. But he and Reg had just cowered against the fountain and grinned at each other. Couple of natural-born houseboys.

  Well, I had plenty of other punishments up my sleeve for Ishmael Bloomberg.

  Bright and early next day I hauled Ish out of Reg’s room and told him he’d have to come out in the van with Cricket and Amanda and me for a grocery run. It was their day, and normally Reg would willingly have taken their place. But Reg was holed up in the room closest to the bathroom, from whence, naturally, not a sound emerged, and of course there was no point in knocking, either. Cone of silence.

  “May as well get you broken in on the chores,” I said.

  “Hey, I’m your supervisor,” Ish mumbled into his coffee.

  “Hey, Reg is our onsite manager,” I said nastily.

  He didn’t look threatened, but he heaved a sigh. He sent me a wistful look that reminded me of Mal.

  Amanda and Cricket came into the kitchen, looking offensively cheerful. “Good morning, merry sunshine!” Cricket sang.

  “Shopping day, ladies. Right after breakfast,” I added.

  Beth came in and we got to work: eleven five-egg deep-dish chorizo quiches with experimental tot-crusts or beer-soaked tortilla-chip crusts, nine huge jacket potatoes with a smorgasbord of toppings, and a vat of waffle batter. The waffle batter was my clever stroke, because with three waffle irons on the table I could make people pour and watch their own waffles. The jacket-potato toppings were smart for me too, because they got Beth out of my hair for twenty minutes, shredding three kinds of cheese, mixing sour cream with chopped chives, softening butter, microwaving and crumbling bacon, and mincing scallions and sweet onions, plus prepping all the waffle toppings. Ever since her first week Beth has prided herself on providing hand-whipped cream at our table when it’s called for. The day she switches to canned, we’ll know she has finally gotten over being a career housewife.

  Even Jee and Reg waddled in eventually and ate something. I think they were drawn by the noise and conviviality more than the smell of food, although I noticed they ate two quiches apiece. Would that do it? Would an egg dish bring Jee out of her funk?

  I watched her nibble and share bites with Reg and felt a complicated pinch in my heart mixed with fear in my belly. My mother would never have put a whole deep-dish quiche in front of me. Once, when I was out with Vito, my now-dead pimp, a waiter put breakfast in front of him and two other girls and never served me at all. Didn’t even ask me for my order. Had Vito told him to do that? Or had he just assumed I
didn’t deserve to eat?

  Brrr. I hadn’t thought about those times for two solid years. What the hell was the matter with me?

  Everybody was sitting around groaning and checking that their waistbands were getting loose enough, and Reg had started on the pots and pans, when I made my move.

  “Here’s the list.” I slapped it on the table. “Everybody make sure what you want is on it, or else you have to come with us to the store. And no bitching afterward.”

  Ish said, “That was really tasty, Pog. Thank you for a delicious meal. Good whipped cream, Beth.”

  I glared at him.

  “You’re welcome, Ish,” Beth said in that look, somebody has some manners around here tone.

  The rest of them milled around the table, kibitzing on the grocery list.

  Jee stood, up-ended the whipped cream bowl over her head, and licked it clean. “C’mon, Reg,” she said hollowly from inside the metal bowl. “Shower.” When she handed him the bowl, her short black hair was streaked with whipped cream.

  “Yes, mistress!” And there went my scullery maid, out the door.

  I opened my mouth again, but Ish was already at the sink, smoothly taking over from Reg.

  Hmph.

  He didn’t even resist when Beth took things out of his hands and rearranged the dishwasher for him.

  Wuss.

  I got Cricket, Amanda, and Ish into the van and we headed for Whole Foods, where Jee’s need to pay the most for everything would be satisfied. Although when she expected to eat any of it, I had no idea. It had really hurt, watching her pick at those quiches. She was still as big as a barn.

  Then I thought, I have to stop thinking those things. She’s a wounded child, healing. She needs Reg’s care. She said she needs our care—she meant my care, right? Her best friend? We’re still best friends, right?

  Dammit, I missed shopping with Jee. Back when we were the only roomies, we had done everything together. From flipping tricks with just a touch, twenty guys a night sometimes, to taking our antique silver pieces around to the rare coin dealers and getting top dollar with the same succubus touch, from clothes and jewelry shopping to staying home and figuring out what nifty things our demon bodies could do, we’d been inseparable.