Now it was Reg twenty-four/seven, and I was out in the cold.
Oh, right. I had Beth. Needy, helpful Beth, who wanted so much to mother me.
Full of mixed feelings, I stared at Ish’s back. He was pushing a grocery cart in front of me. While I watched, Cricket went up to him and spoke in an undertone. He looked over his shoulder at me, a kind of is this okay? look.
I came up to them. “What?”
“I was asking your boyfriend here if I could tempt him. Just to fill out my dance card,” Cricket said. “I’m at thirty-nine temptations for the month. Just need one more to make it forty.”
I rounded on Ish. “What the fuck have you been telling her?”
“Nothing! Not a thing!” He put up his hands.
“He is not my boyfriend. In fact he’s on my list for—for—ever,” I finished, flushing.
“Is this about him sending Reg to be our pimp? I think he’s over that idea,” Cricket said.
I spun to look at her and she just stood there, smirking like she always does when she’s being outrageous and believes she’s too cute to get smacked for it.
Nobody smacks anybody on this team. Except for that thing between Jee and Reg. I pressed my lips together.
Amanda strolled up and dumped a double armload of ice cream pints and quarts into the cart. “Now what?” she said resignedly.
“Your girlfriend,” I growled.
“Don’t look at me. I have no control over her.” Amanda’s biggest defense against the world is noninvolvement on the grounds that she’s just a grunt. Thinking is officer work.
I turned away from her. “Do what you want,” I said to Cricket, and sailed off, leaving them in a huddle around the cart in the middle of the organic produce section. I felt hot with confusion and close to tears.
I thought I’d be safe in the frozen organic pizza aisle, but nope.
Ish presented himself at my elbow. “I have to talk to you.”
I could feel myself getting hysterical. Somewhere inside, a nineteen-year-old version of me was weeping with rage. “Get away from me.”
“Look, I’m sorry I—I moved in on you—you all.”
“I don’t care,” I grated.
“I’m trying to be useful. I know you have a lot on your hands with this crew.” He sounded so full of hope. Like someday I would appreciate him and stop feeling the heat of the strip-club lights or the flat of Vito’s hand on my face.
I narrowed my eyes at a box of gluten-free macaroni and cheese. Jee had a weakness for any kind of mac’n’cheese. She might be tempted to try this. My heart thumped so loudly it overrode the bass line in Do You Think I’m Sexy? in my head.
“Polly,” he said, stepping closer, and I jerked my face away.
“Don’t call me that.”
“I did such a bad thing to you. I never forgave myself. You can keep punishing me if you want.”
I lied again. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Making you strip and then saying you—”
I whirled and smacked him in the head as hard as I could.
He slammed against the freezer case and slid to the floor without a sound.
“Listen, you,” I hissed, bending over him. “I don’t forgive you. Just because you’re being nice now doesn’t mean you weren’t a rat then. When I needed you the most.” I choked on that last bit. I hadn’t meant to show any feelings but rage. Hang on to your rage. You’re not ready to fall apart like Jee. I was getting short of breath.
I thought maybe I’d knocked him out, but he opened his eyes at me. A trickle of blood ran down the side of his head and into his shirt collar. “Okay.”
He stood up on his own, and I walked away. A naggy, terrifying thought pursued me. Was this how Jee had started hitting Reg?
We churned through Whole Foods like the locusts we were, pushing four carts full of organic produce, grass-fed red meats and kindly-raised poultry, wild-caught fish, dairy products with one ingredient, local distillery products, a massive selection of ice cream in quarts and pints, and whatever happened to catch our fancy in the bakery.
I was a nervous wreck. I didn’t look at Ish again. Instead I inspected the giant cupcakes, each topped with a glob of buttercream frosting as big as the cupcake. My heart was still pounding as I selected two dozen and had them boxed up. Once we were all seated in the van, we ate the lunch food each of us had personally selected in the steam-table section to keep our strength up for the upcoming CostCo run.
Ish kept his mouth shut. He didn’t look at me. He gave Cricket the oysters out of his chicken-thighs and couscous, and took responsibility for opening and serving light Spanish wine all round.
I didn’t drink. Fixing a ticket was still a pain in the ass, even when you could seduce the officer. Damned dash-cams.
I felt like a rat for crushing Ish’s hopes, and especially for clobbering him. But what did he hope for, anyway? When he showed up at the Lair, I’d had this insane feeling that he wanted to be seen carrying my books to class for me. Wear my letter sweater. The idea was ridiculous.
But there was no mistaking the subtle pressure he’d been putting on me since he arrived.
I couldn’t deny that today, since that smack in the head, that pressure had finally stopped.
I felt weirdly forlorn.
In CostCo I suddenly found I had other things to worry about.
ISH
Ish dragged himself through CostCo after the girls. Apparently they expected to buy a lot: he and Amanda pushed big flatbed carts, and Pog and Cricket each had one of those grocery carts on steroids. They bought cases of beer, wine, and hard liquor, cases of toilet paper and paper towels, cases of paper plates, crates of eggs, cases of butter, gallons and gallons of milk, half-and-half, and whipping cream, and twenty-pound sacks of flour, rice, white sugar and brown sugar. He supposed a load like that was normal when you were feeding eight hungry demons. Six, he corrected himself. Jee and Reg were eating only twice as much as ordinary mortals.
He stared after Pog with his heart in his eyes as she stopped to sample personal pizzas, minestrone soup, chocolate-covered goji berries, whatever those were, and pocket yogurt. She seemed to be subtly aware of him. Her back was always turned.
He supposed that that was a compliment. She remembered him. She had feelings for him. Hostile, cruel, furious feelings maybe—he touched the side of his head. His demon body had healed immediately, but he imagined it was still sore from where she clobbered him in the Whole Foods frozen aisle. Other than pulling his pants down in the locker room and that smack on the head today, she hadn’t touched him since that night at the Piddlies concert, eleven years go.
So if she was mad at him, that meant she must remember not being mad at him. She must remember the time when they were friends. She seemed to feel he had ruined their friendship. Therefore she must still, somewhere down in there, want their friendship.
Maybe the more accurate way to say it was, she used to want their friendship. He’d fucked that up pretty good.
He heaved a giant, resigned sigh.
That Cricket girl seemed nice. Sometimes she looked sixty, sometimes maybe nine years old. What was up with that? He’d never seen demons switch up their bodies so much. Today she looked about fifteen, which wasn’t at all hot, actually. She really looked like a cricket in human form. Bony, sexless, energetic, happy all the time.
The big basketball girl cruised up next to Ish while they waited for Pog and Cricket to try some chicken nugget samples.
He gave her a glance. “You two been together long?”
“About two months.”
“And Jee and Reg?”
“Four months.”
The sample-hounds moved on up the aisle, and Ish and Amanda patiently pushed their flat-bed carts forward a few feet. Ish remembered that he’d seen with his own eyes Beth flirting with some guy at Ann Sather’s. A cop, the girls said.
“Pog got a...special friend?”
Amanda chuckled beside h
im. “Nope. Neither flavor.”
Somebody butted Ish in the back, and he turned around. A mom with one kid in the basket and another at her elbow was trying to pass him. He pushed his cart over and let them by. “Does it interfere with your work?”
“Nope.”
Boy, getting this girl to talk was work.
The warehouse seemed full of moms and kids today. Ish felt pushed to the side, not only the side of the aisle, but the sidelines of life in the field itself. Everybody here was paired off and had kids. Even his sluts had steadies.
Except Pog.
Hope flickered in him.
Up ahead, she said something to Cricket, then turned around and looked back. Her gaze was completely cold as it passed over him.
Yeah, no.
Somebody butted him in the back again. “What the fuck am I doing here?” he grumbled, and moved his cart to the side.
But the basket-pusher behind him didn’t pass. He got bumped again.
He looked behind him, and at the same time caught a whiff of something horrible. Gooseflesh raced up his arms and neck. He met the basket-pusher’s glowing red eyes and gave an involuntary yelp.
A demon looked back at him—a short, slight demon, wearing a child’s body, apparently seven years old and dressed by a gender-neutral parent, because its clothes were brown, its hair was short, and it was homely enough to be a boy, or a girl with no future in newscasting. The cart was half-full of groceries. It bared its sharp snaggle teeth and hissed at Ish.
Savage little demon! Buugh must have sent it.
Ish understood immediately. There was no mom. This thing had followed them into the warehouse, grabbed a cart, thrown some stuff into it, and now it was coolly trailing him, pretending that its mother was just down the aisle somewhere, You keep pushing, honey, I’ll catch up. It gave off a stench like a Greed demon. It had to be in Buugh’s service—the Greed VP was no friend of Buugh’s, but he was a lazy jerk, and Buugh could requisition his demons when he needed them. Which meant Buugh was really, really running low on Anger commandos. Which meant he was probably saving them up for more important assaults.
Good news, bad news, Ish thought distantly while his heart tried to jump out of his body.
“What?” Amanda said next to him.
Ish faced forward, not knowing what else to do. “That thing. Behind me.”
“I saw it,” she said, also facing forward.
“It’s following me.” Panic. Shit, shit, shit! “Block for me!” He abandoned his flatbed cart and plunged off down the appetizers aisle.
Two seconds later he heard its evil footsteps pattering behind him.
POG
Someone whistled behind us.
Cricket’s head spun around. “Amanda. Trouble,” she said.
I sighed. “Now what?”
Amanda appeared at Cricket’s side. “Demon chasing Ish that way. Small one. Greed.” Then she bolted.
“For fuck’s sake,” I said. After what he’d done to me, I’d have enjoyed watching Ish get slapped around by pimps for a few months, but demons were over the top. I shoved my cart, then Cricket’s, and then the two flatbeds they had been pushing into the center of the double-wide aisle between the raw chicken coolers on one side and the vodka racks on the other. Then I followed.
I tuned my demon hearing to pick up their voices.
“It’s a kid!” Cricket’s voice.
“No it’s not. It’s a Greed demon.” Ish’s voice, breathless. “It was following me. It wanted me to know it was following me.”
I heard snarly noises, presumably from the demon.
I heard nothing from Amanda. Amanda didn’t talk without having something to say.
I found them. They had cornered a small demon up against the cinderblock wall of the warehouse, way in the back where only employees with forklifts go. Amanda and Ish were making mystic passes over it with their hands.
The demon glared at Ish and snarled at everybody.
“They’re containing it,” Cricket whispered to me.
I stood in front of our catch with my fists on my hips. “What do we do with it?”
“I know a spell to make it show its true form,” Amanda said now.
Ish stared at her. “You do? How do you know that?”
She shrugged. “I started in Anger, then transferred out to Gluttony, then Greed.”
“You transferred into my team from Heresy,” he reminded her. “What were you doing in all those different circles?”
“Looking for someplace that wasn’t ninety-nine percent male,” Amanda said, her eyes on Ish’s pint-sized stalker and fishing a ballpoint pen out of her shirt pocket. She told it, “This can go the easy way or the hard way.” She scribbled on a scrap of paper and showed it to the demon. Garbled demonspeak came out of her mouth.
A puff of smoke or steam popped out of the demon’s ears and its little red eyes went wide. Then they went brown. Other than that, it wasn’t much different. It still looked like a seven-year-old with attitude.
“Guys. It’s really a kid.” Ish’s voice softened. “Hey.”
The demon started trembling.
“Maybe it can’t talk,” I said.
“Maybe it doesn’t speak English,” Cricket said.
Ish hunkered down in a squat before the demon child. “Hey. Don’t be scared.” I was surprised at how gently he spoke. “You don’t have to go back there.” He didn’t try to touch it. “Look around you. This place is better. Have you ever tasted ice cream?”
“We should find out what it wants before we start buying it ice cream,” I suggested.
Ish fished half a chocolate bar out of his shirt pocket and offered it, and the thing lashed out at him with a small, sharp-nailed hand. He jumped back. “Okay. Okay.”
“I have an idea,” Cricket said. She turned to me. “Pick up my clothes for me?”
“What the fuck?” I demanded.
But she was already slumping to the ground, shrinking, wriggling out of her clothes—in the shape of a golden retriever puppy. Cricket the puppy bounded forward on four fuzzy little legs and panted up at the demon, her stubby tail wagging so hard that her whole body wagged.
The demon’s eyes widened. It didn’t seem as scared.
Cricket yipped.
The demon slowly squatted. Then it stretched out a hand.
Next moment, Cricket was covering the demon child’s face with puppy kisses. The kid tried to squeeze her in its arms. She wriggled away, yipping.
Then she turned and ran.
The demon ran after her.
“Cricket!” I yelled.
“I’ll keep an eye on her,” Amanda said. “Pick up my clothes and meet us in the restroom in ten minutes.”
Then she turned into a puppy.
And off she went.
I rolled my eyes. “This team.”
Ish picked up our teammates’ clothes, shoes, and handbags, and followed me back to our carts.
We stretched our demon bodies a little taller so we could watch the demon kid and the puppies charge up and down the aisles and barge into carts and people, yipping and squealing. The demon kid snatched pizza samples off the sample cart and threw them after the puppies. The puppies stopped to eat the samples. The demon kid caught up with them, and there was a grand, squirmy, yippy-yappy melee while the demon kid tried to cuddle both puppies and the puppies tried to score as many face-licks as they could. Then they broke up and started running again.
They brought that corner of CostCo to a standstill. The puppy parade had quite a fan club.
Security would have had an easier time if the place hadn’t been so crowded.
I transferred all my stuff into Cricket’s cart. Ish consolidated his and Amanda’s flatbeds. Then we followed the circus as best we could.
The intercom blared. Security guys slipped on spilled dry lentils and smashed-jar-loads of salsa. Customers stood and swore or laughed or pointed, and everyone pointed their phones.
The demon kid and
the puppies raced across sectional sofas, scattering cushions. They scrambled up among the canned goods, eluded Security by crawling across cases of sardines between aisles, and escaped into the next aisle. They actually climbed a shelf in sporting goods all the way to the ceiling, the kid climbing like a monkey and the puppies following not so badly, humping and struggling one paw at a time up the metal struts. They knocked a dozen basketballs down into traffic.
I laughed until I cried. I laughed myself into hiccups. I thumped Ish on the back because he was whoop-laughing, where you can’t breathe in without giggling. I’m pretty sure I peed my pants. It got so every time we heard something go crash, we started laughing again, and our ribs hurt and tears ran from our eyes and, speaking for myself, my mad went away forever and a great peace fell over me and stayed.
In the liquor department, the mess was less tidy. Security yelled louder, accompanied by the sounds of bottles clanking against each other and smashing on the floor.
The fugitives were, in fact, getting closer to the restrooms.
“C’mon,” I said. “Let’s work our way to the potty.”
“You trust them to get there?” Ish sounded skeptical.
“Sure, why not?”
“I think I know what they’re doing,” he said, standing on the back bar of a cart and peering over the heads of people in front of us.
“What?”
“They’re seducing it. Every demon has its Achilles heel—same as you girls. If it isn’t sensory input, which it doesn’t seem to be in this case, it’ll be something. Coming into the field from the Regional Office is a trip, let me tell you.”
This I knew. “It’s too young to be horny,” I objected.
Ish took over pushing the cart. I had to say, he was pretty good at weaseling it between rubbernecking shoppers. “There’s more than one way to seduce a demon,” he said with authority.
“But why do we want to seduce it? What’s the point?”
“The point is, demons go AWOL every day, especially the ones that come into the field, and especially the ones that aren’t used to it. The sensory overload is unbelievable. Sooner or later, something gets to ’em, and they just snap. Why do you think you could whup the pants off the Anger boys at basketball? They never see women down there anymore. Let alone run into them on the court and get girl sweat all over them.” He seemed suddenly thoughtful.
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 90