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

by Jennifer Stevenson

  “Hey, we beat those putzes fair and square,” I said hotly.

  “Yeah.” I could tell he wasn’t listening to me.

  It was time to rendezvous with our werepuppies at the toilet.

  We had to leave our carts in Pharmacy to get to the restroom, because there was no moving a cart in the center of the store. I left Ish outside the ladies’ room and went in, carrying Amanda’s and Cricket’s clothes. I wished I had that piece of paper that Amanda had threatened the demon with. Wait—I checked her jeans pocket. There it was. Armed with this, I marched to the back stall and peered under the door.

  No feet.

  I knocked. A puppy-whimper answered me. I said, “C’mon, don’t fuck around. Here,” and shoved all the clothes under the door. Then I retreated to the wall, where I could stand guard in case anyone tried to enter that stall.

  But no one did. Apparently all the customers were out in the warehouse, watching the chaos.

  In a moment, Amanda came out of the stall, dressed.

  Five seconds later, a puppy hurtled through the restroom doorway, with the demon child pelting after her. Amanda held the back stall door open. They ran inside, and Amanda shut the door on them.

  “Hey,” Ish said from outside the restroom.

  I went out to join him.

  “That kid needs new clothes if we’re gonna get it out of here.” He had a handful of kids’ clothes with tags still on, Sheesh, Ish, get us in more trouble, why don’t you?

  “Get it out? Why would we want to—oh, just give them here.” I took them from him.

  When I returned to the rear stall, Cricket stood there, dressed, looking about nine years old. I looked inside the stall. The demon kid sat on the toilet, panting and grinning. I rolled my eyes and handed it Ish’s thievings. “Put those on if you don’t want to end up at the police station.”

  “Don’t threaten him,” Cricket said. “He’s being very good.”

  “How do you know it’s a he?”

  “Puppy nose.”

  “Huh.” We had a stage wait while the kid dressed and Ish lurked at the door like a dad waiting for his kid to finish peeing by herself. The demon boy emerged, dressed. I stuffed all the tags and the his old brown and now very dirty clothes into the garbage can and piled paper towel waste on top to hide it. Then we came out of the potty and joined Ish in the hall.

  “What were you doing following Ish?” I demanded.

  The demon opened his mouth finally. “Orders. VP Anger-Lust borrowed me to watch him.” He pointed with his chin at Ish.

  “Why did you show yourself?”

  He shrugged.

  I tried to phrase it more carefully for the literal-minded demon. “Did this VP tell you to let Ish see you?”

  He shook his head.

  “He’s a kid,” Cricket said. “Sheesh. He just wrecked CostCo for the fun of it.” She fiddled with the back of the kid’s collar and yanked off a tag.

  “Hey,” Ish said. “People are coming.”

  We looked around. Without the puppies and our demon captive, the shoppers seemed to have remembered why they were here. They streamed toward check-out with their carts.

  “What are we gonna do?” Cricket said. “We still have to buy our groceries. We got four carts.”

  And we’re not taking this little monster back among the shelves. Nobody said it out loud.

  “We have two carts,” I told her. “Piled really high.”

  “I’ll watch him,” Ish said.

  I looked at him. “You gonna freak out?”

  “He’s a kid,” Ish said. “Hey.”

  “What?” I demanded with half-hearted impatience.

  Ish said, “Gimme some money. I just realized, all I have are silver pieces.”

  I dug out my wallet and handed over a couple hundred bucks. Maybe he’ll rent a limo and run away and take the kid with him. But I didn’t really want that anymore.

  It took us half an hour to finish our order, steering around areas where Security and Maintenance were cleaning up, and get through check-out. We found Ish sitting on a picnic bench over by the chow window, feeding pizza and churros to the demon kid. He was talking soothingly. As I rolled up, I heard him explaining how stores worked, especially this one.

  “His name is Wyrmagghkalek. He’s only eight. I dunno where they pick up these souls,” Ish said in a censorious tone. “He must have been in Greed for two hundred years. The Regional Office stopped trying to recruit kids right after they instituted confession for confirmands. The ROI was stupid bad.”

  Amanda and Cricket just stared at him.

  “That’s Catholic-speak,” I explained. “Confession used to be a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Then it was all the time, but only for adults.”

  Ish nodded. “Yeah, it never worked, recruiting kids for hell. They’re too young to really know what they’re doing, and once they have some experience they realize that. As soon as they get a chance, they go AWOL. And boom, your vesting outlay walks out the door.”

  The kid paused briefly in the middle of shoving a churro into his mouth. “Boom.”

  Ish turned back to him. “You like that? How about some ice cream now?”

  I followed him to the chow window. “Ish, we can’t keep this kid. There’s no room at the Lair. I don’t want a kid on the team. You get points for seducing him away from the Regional Office, okay, but now what?”

  “He’s not gonna move in. He wants to stay here.”

  “In CostCo? How does that work?”

  “He’s from Greed. He never had any toys or good food or anything when he was down there. If he stays here, he gets everything in the store, twenty-four/seven.” Ish gathered up six of the ice cream parfaits he’d just paid for.

  “They won’t be serving pizza samples twenty-four/seven,” I said, grabbing the other five parfaits and returning to our picnic table.

  “We’ve discussed that. I gave him some ideas. Especially about haunting discreetly.”

  “Great. We’re unleashing a discreet demon-child to haunt CostCo.” We put the parfaits down on the table, where the demon kid and our teammates fell on them with glad cries.

  “And how do you know about recruitment ROI from two centuries ago?” I said to Ish, wiping soft-serve vanilla ice cream off my nose.

  He scraped the bottom of his parfait cup with his spoon. “I was a numbers cruncher down there.”

  Hm. He spoke in the past tense. Had Ish really and truly gone AWOL himself?

  To that point, that stuff he said about demons suffering sensory overload when they visited the field had to be true of him. He never liked coming up here. He was known for it. So was sensory overload making him crazy here?

  Instantly I thought up about half a dozen ways I could use that information to make him miserable.

  Then I realized my heart wasn’t in it. He’d been so sweet to this poor little demon bugger. And he was on the ball during our puppy crisis. I realized that at some point during the afternoon, I’d run out of mad. Back in my memory where he was rejecting me, he was still a rat. But here and now? I gnawed my upper lip.

  The trouble was, I didn’t enjoy punishing him. It made me feel like a rat, too. Until he did something to earn another spanking, I couldn’t force myself to make him eat any more dirt. And I was just plain tired of being mad.

  Cricket and Amanda finished their ice cream.

  “We gotta go, Wyrmy.” Ish gave the kid a fistful of cash, probably whatever he had left of the two hundred I’d just given him. “Remember. Don’t steal money. They get hysterical about that.”

  The demon boy actually gave him a hug! Then he ran back to the chow window.

  “Are you sure he’ll be all right?” Cricket said, looking over her shoulder as we shoved our mountains of purchases out the door.

  “If he isn’t, he’ll catch up with us next time we shop here,” Ish said confidently. He didn’t seem to feel that this would be an imposition.

  I decided he really didn’t mind. Odd bird, Ish
.

  It was as we were pushing our mountainous carts out of CostCo that I saw a familiar face in the check-out line. Things had been moving too fast for me today. The brain didn’t work. Inside me, a little kid yelled wantwantwant!

  Snake-fast, I grabbed Amanda’s arm. “Who is that?” I hissed.

  She looked back. “Where?” She was keeping the pile of liquor cases steady on her cart.

  “In red, in the last check-out line. Short woman, dark hair, Latino?”

  Cricket was too busy steadying her own load to look.

  Ish turned his head. “Wow. That—that looks like what’s-her-name—that cook your folks used to have.”

  I almost broke my neck swiveling back to see, but we were being pushed inexorably to the exit by the flow of shoppers, and Cricket’s load was teetering. We had to leave. Especially since I didn’t trust Ish’s new friend to keep quiet until we made our escape. Reluctant to leave now, I kept pushing forward with the crowd. My heart pounded.

  At the van, I remembered her name. “Gabrielly. Gabrielly Harenha.”

  “Whatever happened to her?” Ish said, as if I hadn’t tacitly forbidden mention of our mutual past.

  “She got fired,” I said.

  “She was such a great cook. Those little Brazilian cheese puffs killed me. I could eat twenty at a sitting.”

  “You can get those at CostCo,” Cricket offered. “Want me to run back in and get some?”

  “Store-bought?” I shuddered. “Besides, nobody made them like Gabrielly. She was teaching me how to make them when she got fired.” Now I knew why spotting her in the store made me feel terrible and elated and comforted and desolate and hopeful and guilty and all mixed up.

  Then I had a sudden inspiration so blinding that I signaled Amanda to drive.

  I stared out the window into the memory of that kitchen. Pão queijo. Little baked cheesy bread-balls made with sour manioc starch and tons of cheese. Gabrielly could even get meia cura cheese. She had a source for every exotic ingredient. She’d actually been in the act of teaching me to work the starch when my parents came home early from some rained-out garden party, and boom.

  What froze me in my seat was this thought: What if I could make that for Jee? Would she eat it? How could she not? Pão queijo were irresistible. You couldn’t stop eating them. Hot out of the oven, crisp on the outside, airy and cheesy on the inside, they were a bite of texture and flavor, all promise and no commitment. A demon would pack away fifty or a hundred without feeling any pain.

  I’d get her to eat something irresistible.

  That evening, with enormous difficulty, I talked Jee into coming out with us. The event we were crashing was a big charity auction at the Peninsula, and the benefit for us was, Jee could get her fancy duds on again and start rejoining the world, please? No work, because according to Reg she was still screaming in her sleep. Just hang with us. Get some fresh air. Try some fancier cooking than mine.

  I think Jee agreed to this because she could see how upset I was. That threw me more than anything else. Jee, being considerate of other people! Frankly it freaked me out.

  I couldn’t fool myself. I was losing it. Once I’d put my anger at Ish on hold, I couldn’t even think straight. Without the anger I had no defenses. Worse, I began to remember the time when I’d really liked Ish, back when we were kids and he was Mal, my awkward best friend.

  It didn’t help that right now he was being a great roommate. He was kind. He was even nice to Wyrmagghkalek. Beth had taken him to her bosom and now congratulated me on burying the hatchet, whatever that meant.

  “I’m so glad you’re making it up with him. He’s a really nice guy.” she said as we painted our faces at the bathroom mirrors.

  “Oh yeah? Maybe you wouldn’t be so ready to forgive him, if it had been you.”

  “I gather you knew him before you were recruited?” Beth being delicate.

  “I knew him from the third grade. We were really close for a long time. And when I needed him the most, he hurt me and insulted me and turned me away, and I ended up with that bastard Vito, my first and only pimp.”

  Beth turned to me, her blusher brush in her hand, the picture of motherly horror. “Oh, honey!”

  That caught me off guard. My poise dissolved. “He c-called me fat and said I was too f-fat to be a sus-stripper!”

  I collapsed in her arms. She petted me and went there-there and I felt ridiculously comforted.

  The whole story came out.

  “Wait, he was in a strip club?”

  “Stony Island Gentlemen’s Club, alias Million Dollar Fantasy Ranch, alias Pole Position, alias Pussycat Palace. His dad renamed it every two years when he reorganized to avoid taxes.” I sniffled. “Mal, I mean Ish, worked there. My mother said Ish, I mean Mal, was ‘low class,’ but he and I stayed tight. He was my only friend through grade school and junior high. Then I got sent to a private high school, and we lost touch.”

  “Hm,” Beth said. “I mean, huh.”

  “Except for that one time at the Piddlies concert.”

  “Ah.” She kept patting me on the back. I closed my eyes, luxuriating in feeling like a baby who is loved.

  Then the good-bad bit of that Piddlies concert came back to me. I pulled out of her arms. “I’m starving. Let’s get out of here.”

  The team got in the van. Jee looked terrible, wearing a lightweight silk thing that was supposed to drape, but on her current body it just tented. She looked at me with concern, as if I was the hot mess here.

  Reg looked awful too. He overflowed his jeans, and his paunch stretched that expensive white tee shirt indecently, making him look cheap.

  Ish was dressed in clothes borrowed from Reg: a navy hand-woven Italian shirt under a black silk and wool Blass jacket, with some not-too-tight jeans and demure brown wing-tips, very tasty and twenty-first century. He’d even trimmed back his Barry Manilow sideburns a bit. I waited for him to make some pathetic attempt to flatter me or suck up, but he sent me a tiny smile and then looked away, scanning the rest of the team, as I was doing. Maybe he was feeling defended and safe for the moment, too.

  That made me wonder how safe he had felt working in the Regional Office for ten years. I still didn’t know what had made him suicidal, his word, enough to go to hell.

  There was more to Ish than met the eye. For once, I was a tiny bit curious.

  I touched the switch to open the loading dock door and smacked the van roof twice.

  Technically we weren’t trolling. We were showing up to a benefit buffet, just a little affair to save the gay baby whales or something, with the idea of...well, I was a little hazy on why I’d organized this jaunt, and I hoped nobody would ask.

  I had plenty of half-assed reasons why. I was desperate to get Jee out of the Lair. Also, Ish was increasingly nervous in the Lair—probably his dick was giving him trouble around us hot naked babes, because he was new to the field. And it was true, Melitta could use some coaching in the gentle art of scoring those thirty pieces of silver without getting her hands sticky. Finally, I was tired of cooking. I didn’t like to admit that even to myself, but dammit, eight demon mouths to feed were a lot more than our original four. Once, it was just me and Jee. How had I become responsible for eight people?

  Beth took point, since this was her territory. For purposes of this evening, she was wearing a face in her late thirties, extremely well preserved, made up, and bejeweled. Somebody who could conceivably have serious money.

  “Beth Asucar,” she said to the woman at the door, laying down the fake ID Amanda had made for her. “Party of eight.”

  The woman wore a name badge that said Dindy. Dindy ran her eye over us. At the sight of Jee, Reg, and I suppose Melitta, who is presentable except she looks too young to carry serious checkbook and she’s not white, she said “Eight?” just a shade on the haughty side. We were, after all, gatecrashers.

  “How about we make our gift now? Anonymously.” Beth reached into her oversize Coach bag for a rubber-bande
d stack of hundred-dollar bills and laid it on the table. “We wouldn’t want to bother your bank with a lot of little checks.”

  Dindy the door dragonette’s eyes bugged out.

  Beth laid another stack next to the first. “And we do love those gay baby whales.”

  Dindy watched Beth’s hand dip into her purse, mesmerized.

  “Three. Four. Five. Let’s see, what’s the late registration bump on these tickets?” Beth smiled at her.

  “Two hundred,” Dindy said automatically.

  Beth put another stack on the table, then leaned closer to whisper, “You might want to notify catering that the party just got bigger. And a lot hungrier.”

  Dindy nodded automatically and opened her little tin cash box, which wouldn’t come near to holding all that cash.

  “I love doing that,” Beth confided to me as we sailed into the ballroom.

  “I thought you used to do charity events all the time.”

  “I did. I thought these people were my friends. But when I needed them they turned out to be two-faced bitches.”

  “So giving them a stack of cash pays them back how?”

  Beth said serenely, “It messes up their accounting horribly to get cash, because at least half the point of these events is getting your name into their database so they can keep pestering you. Three least favorite words in a fund-raiser’s vocabulary? ‘Anonymous cash donor.’”

  “You’re making some kind of point about revenge, and I’m not up to the subtlety.”

  “It’s emotionless.” She slanted a look at me and then back at Ish, shambling along beside Reg in the tail of our cavalcade, as if he knew he had got in with the sherpas. “Saves wear and tear on you, and gets your point across. In a nice way.” Beth was the queen of nice. Which is by no means the same as kind.

  “I don’t want revenge on him,” I hissed, half-lying. “Besides, he’s in so much trouble, I don’t have to do anything worse to him.”