The rest of my teammates pushed past me, erupted onto the factory floor in their pajamas and ran out to encircle the demon, whooping like second-graders playing Indians, their bare feet thundering on the basketball deck.
I tossed my big knife to the floor and ran after them. I knew we only had one weapon worth anything. I hoped to hell we had enough of it amongst us to do the job.
Cricket darted forward, shorter than normal, what the—? She bodychecked the demon on the back of his legs. He didn’t even totter, but I saw his skin twitch all up his back. She’d hit him with succubus mojo.
Reg dashed past him on his other side, but didn’t try to touch him.
“Reg, you idiot!” I yelled. Did he even know how to do what the girls were doing? Or was he playing dumbass hero?
The Anger demon was roaring.
Ish hopped from side to side, dodging behind Amanda or Jee or Beth. “Neener neener!” he yelled. That was my fault. I did tell him he was supposed to be bait.
Meanwhile the girls took turns running past the Anger demon as he spun, and tagging him when his back was turned to them, zapping him over and over with succubus mojo.
I took my turn. With my first contact, I realized the Anger demon was panicking. We were definitely wearing him down.
And I noticed Melitta standing where he had left her, her arms folded, shaking her head.
I faded back out of the circle of succubi surrounding the demon. “What?” I yelled to her, over the racket of many feet on the deck and neener-neener and demon roaring.
“I had a plan,” she yelled severely.
“With the mirror? It’s over there.” I pointed. I wanted her away from the center of things.
She stalked away. Smartypants collitch kid.
I went back to work on our uninvited guest. He was beginning to slip and stumble on the plywood deck. This was because he was involuntarily emitting male demon generative fluids—as I watched, it happened again.
Beth dashed up to him, stopped dead, tore her tee-shirt, still smeared with strawberry juice, clean off her own body, and brandished her boobs at him. Her boobs were ridiculously huge. The demon gave a gasp and struck out with one taloned fist. As it made contact with her right boob, a big spark flared.
Beth went flying backward and landed with a crash on the deck.
As he struck, the rest of us ran up and laid hands on him. A blaze of unnatural light flared, setting the Anger demon aglow.
He threw up his arms, let out a wail like an air-raid siren, jizzed in his leather skirt, slipped on the drippings, jizzed again, fell to his knees, grabbed his crotch, and slowly keeled over, twitching.
I looked around. Melitta had carried that mirror to where we stood around our fallen visitor.
“What’s this all over the floor?” Cricket said, stooping to pick up something small and black.
“Ew,” Beth explained.
But I took it from Cricket. “Looks like an old dry leaf.” The floor was speckled with them. I looked up and saw another fluttering lazily down from the roof-beams.
“Will you look at my basketball court?” Amanda demanded. “I can’t keep this thing nice for two weeks.”
The Anger demon muttered, “Basketball court?”
Meanwhile Reg, reverting to houseboy, was sweeping the deck.
Ish grabbed a handful of the blackened leaves. “Where did this come from?” he said in a queer voice.
Beth pointed up. Ish looked up. Everyone else looked up.
Yet another blackened leaf fluttered down from the roofbeam onto our captive.
The Anger demon stopped twitching. He looked up. “Aaagh!” he yelled, and covered his head with his arms. Ish sprinkled his handful of black leaves over him. He flinched as if they had been anvils.
“I’m doomed,” the Anger demon moaned.
“What is that?” Melitta said.
“Just some of the stuff left over from olden days, afore we lived here.” Reg pointed up. “It comes off the I-beams up there. Stuff’s all over.”
Ish crumbled a leaf between his fingers until it was nothing but black dust. “Was it getting on the basketball floor when you were practicing for the tournament?”
“Sure,” Reg said.
The Anger demon moaned louder. “I’m gonna dieeeee.”
Jee strolled over and kicked him on the foot. “Demons don’t die, dummy.” She sniffed at the black dust on Ish’s fingers.
“Maybe not, but they do go AWOL,” Ish said, his face grim.
“You guys, may I please finish what I started here?” Melitta said in a voice of studied patience.
“Let her work,” Amanda voted.
“Oh, for—!” Jee said.
“Melitta, honey,” Beth began.
“No, I’m curious,” I said. After what we’d done to him, he seemed to think these shriveled up little black leaves were the end.
Between them, Amanda and Cricket got our captive on his feet. He was a lot shorter now. He looked like a ’roided up bodybuilder maybe, but merely human. This must have been how his mortal body looked, before he became a demon.
“Reg, get the lights on?” I said.
“I’ll do it,” Ish said.
Melitta was frowning at her phone. “Ah. Here it is.” She handed the phone to Reg. “Call a cab, will you? To take him...here.” She pointed at the phone screen.
“Will somebody tell me what the fuck is going on?” I said, too relieved to yell.
Melitta turned to the Anger demon and took his arm. That spark happened again. “I wasn’t just messing with your mind. You’re really something. Have you looked at yourself lately?”
She led him to where she had propped Jee’s long mirror up on a plastic lawn chair.
“See?” She stood him in front of the mirror and tenderly laid a hand on his back.
“You’re going to need another mirror,” Jee said, and darted away.
The demon breathed in deeply. He seemed to grow again—a little taller, straighter, and more muscled. “Wow,” he murmured.
“Exactly,” Melitta said. “You should be sharing this. It’s too good to waste on commandoing or mowing lawns.”
“Mowing lawns?” Ish said.
“That’s what some of the local demons do. Or short-order cook, like that guy at Ann Sather,” Cricket reminded him.
“Melitta, how did you ever figure this strategy out?” I said.
“In a minute,” she said. “He needs to get a good grip on this.” She was standing behind the Anger demon. I realized she didn’t want to appear in his mirror with him. Why not? “There’s a Crossfit down in Boy’s Town where I think they’d appreciate him.”
“Here,” Jee said, trotting up and handing Melitta something.
“Perfect.” Melitta gave it to the Anger demon.
“Is that my compact?” Beth said.
“Well, he’s not getting demon jizz all over my mirror,” Jee said.
“Wow,” the anger demon said again. He stared into Beth’s pocket compact mirror.
“You’re beautiful,” Melitta said in his ear. “Go help other people be beautiful. When they see you, they’ll want to be beautiful like you. But nobody is this beautiful. Don’t you love him?”
“Does anybody mind telling me what the fuck is going on?” I said. “Because one, I’m starving, two, I need a drink, and three, what the fuck?”
“It’s this stuff,” Ish said. He scooped up another handful of the leaves Reg had swept into a pile. “You girls tracked it into the Regional Office, and it’s been making trouble down there ever since.”
“Reg, is that cab here yet?” Melitta said.
At the front door, Reg waved. “Just got here.”
Our captive looked ridiculous in the leather skirt, but in a buff, meaty, just-a-little-gay way. He kept staring into the compact mirror. Reg handed him a fistful of money and led him to the door.
“You cured him of his doom-and-gloom anyway,” I said to Melitta. “But how in the world did you th
ink of it?”
She shrugged. “I go to school with thousands of just-post-adolescent males.”
“But—Crossfit in Boy’s Town?”
“It’ll still be open at midnight. Those guys don’t sleep. And we don’t want him living here, do we?”
“Nope.” I blinked. “Nopers. No, I’m not cooking for anything like that. Speaking of which. It’s beer and explanations o’clock.”
Ish returned. “I put him in the cab.”
I took Ish by the elbow in a not-very-friendly grip. “You’ve been withholding information again, boss. Time to talk.”
We cleaned out the beers in the barbecue-area refrigerator pretty quickly. Reg ferried more down from the upstairs fridges, along with tequila and some limes and four of those big bags of red licorice we’d bought at CostCo, and we took slugs of Cuervo and listened to Ish.
He had a strange story to tell.
“So, okay, wait a minute,” Jee said. “That time you came jogging with us, you got kidnapped into the Regional Office. And that executive VP told you we’d brought something into hell that kills demons.”
“It’s not known if they died. But they did run away. A few of them ‘went poof,’ his words,” Ish said.
“And he showed you this black stuff, like we have downstairs, and said that was lethal on demons?” Beth said. “It’s just leaves.”
“Rose petals,” said Cricket. “Can’t you smell?”
Amanda scooped a handful from the pile Reg had swept up and passed some around.
“Okay,” Jee said. “Rose petals.”
“So what?” Beth said.
“Oh, shit,” Ish said.
We all looked at him.
He was gnawing his lip. “Five incubi lived here together, before you. The last one to leave had a girlfriend. Then he married her. You went to the wedding with me, you and Amanda and Jee. The bride, Yoni, had a thing about roses. I bet you a skillion dollars she left roses all over this joint.”
I stiffened. “The day we moved in, I found a note from someone named Baz taped to my refrigerator. He warned us that there was ‘a hoodoo’ on the Lair.” I turned on our supervisor. “There’s more to this, Ish. What the fuck happened? What is this stuff?”
He seemed to shrink, huddling in his plastic lawn chair. “I don’t know what it is, but if it’s old rose petals, Yoni did it. She’s, uh, she’s a goddess now. An avatar.”
“Whose avatar, Ish?” I said less patiently. “There’s a lot of goddesses.”
He swallowed. “The big one. You know her as Delilah.”
“Oh.” Amanda stood suddenly. “I’ll run an analysis.”
“You do that,” I said.
She filled her pajama pockets with the dried rose petals and then strode off toward her lab.
My teammates and I shrugged at each other.
“This calls for more calories,” Cricket said, and then she caught my eye. “Pizza?”
I nodded. “I can’t cook right now. My head is exploding. Beth?”
“I’ll phone in the order,” Beth said quickly, in her self-appointed role as my lieutenant.
We took ten minutes off to argue about the pizza order. Reg was about to go back upstairs for more liquor when Beth reminded him that the trunk of her Beemer was full of mixers and liqueurs. He and Beth played barkeep while we sat down to powwow again.
“Okay, Ish,” I said, breathing deeply through my nose to prevent my skull from popping. “Tell us what happened to the incubus team.”
He muttered, “They got married.”
Beth burst out laughing. “Oh, boo hoo!”
Cricket said, “All of them?”
“Yeah.” Ish was sweating heavily. “Even the gay guy. He went and done it in some state where they got gay marriage. Boom, he’s off the grid, too.”
I was getting an icky feeling about this. “And who recruited them?”
We watched Ish. He said to his shoes, “I think she might be the goddess of love.”
“What?” Jee erupted in a cackle of glee. “You mean like, hey Venus, oh Venus, lady seashell bikini, I’m your Venus I’m your fire?”
Melitta sang, “Don’t you know my ass is famous?”
Cricket beat on the arm of her plastic Adirondack chair. “Strike dear mistress and cure his heart!”
At that moment, Amanda came back with a paper in her hand. She gave Cricket a double-take stare. “Who are we talking about?”
“Delilah. Keep up.”
Melitta said slowly, “Huh. I always wondered why she wasn’t pushing me to have sex with men for my monthly report.”
“We won’t push you either, honey—I would hope,” Beth said, sending a warning look around the room.
“The important thing,” Amanda said now, “seems to be that she steered every one of us toward this team.”
“Ish recruited me,” Reg said, looking baffled.
“She drove me here from the nursing home,” Cricket said. “She told me her name was Delilah and not to tell anyone.”
“But you did,” said Beth, mistress of the obvious.
“I’m a blabbermouth.” Cricket shrugged. “I’m known for it.”
Jee said, “She yanked me out of that Bangkok cat house right before I was scheduled for the snuff movies. She saved my life.”
“She saved me from jumping in front of a bus,” Beth said.
“She saved me. And then I saved my mom,” Melitta said, lifting her chin.
“She might be the one who dropped Ish’s recruitment flier on my desk,” Amanda said. “I never got her name.”
“Hot forty-something cougar with green eyes?” I said. “I met her in a soup kitchen. I had a miserable toothache. I mentioned it to her, and she took me aside and offered me a job with dental. You know what the job was.”
We all looked at Ish. He looked at his hands. “I got my best friend killed,” he said, sneaking a quick glance at me and then going back to examining his hands. “I thought I did, anyway. I felt like dying. I belonged in hell. I remember thinking that very thing as I—as I got closer to the Calumet River. And next thing I know, I’m sitting on one side of a desk, and she’s on the other side, and there’s flames all around, and she’s telling me I work for her now. She said if I did good, I could get out of the Regional Office when I was ready to leave.”
“She sent you to hell?” Beth said, scandalized.
“Best place for me,” Ish mumbled. “The guilt was killing me. You don’t have to feel anything down there.”
“Define ‘if I did good for her,’” I said.
“Every now and then she sent me a file. I never saw her again. She just left it on my desk. That’s how I knew when another one of you was about to turn up. Same for those slack sex demons who lived here before you. Maybe she’d phone, or I’d get voicemail.”
“What were you supposed to do then?” Beth said.
“I didn’t do anything! I just opened the account in the computer and set up the payroll and reporting, like I’m supposed to. I didn’t do anything,” he vowed.
“But you do what she says,” Beth said.
“Wouldn’t you?” Jee said.
“So she walks in and out of the Regional Office like she belongs there,” I said, cutting through the chatter again.
“Well, doesn’t she?” Ish said. “It’s hell, isn’t it? Love fucks everything up,” he added with the authority of an eyewitness.
I side-eyed him. “Yeah. It does.” For some reason, I started feeling warm.
Cricket grunted. “I always thought she was a goddess. Someone from outside the whole good-evil, heaven-hell, upstairs-downstairs thing.” We stared at her.”Well, she practically admitted to me she was running a stealth op inside the Regional Office.”
Amanda laughed. “Cricket could get that out of her, if anyone could.” She and Cricket exchanged gooey looks.
“So,” I said, feeling a little breathless. “We were all recruited by a love goddess—”
“The love goddess,” I
sh said.
“—And she had a stooge in this building putting a hoodoo on some rose petals, long before we showed up. And she didn’t warn us. So all this was her idea.”
“If she knew about it,” Beth objected.
I squinted at her. “C’mon. Did Delilah strike you as somebody who didn’t do her staffwork?”
Beth said nothing.
“Right. So I guess the question is, what’s she up to? Would the Regional Office care if they knew she’s doing it? I’m guessing yes, they would care, simply because she’s asked each of us never to mention her.”
“Hold on,” Beth said. “How do we know she’s not, I don’t know, working for the Home Office? Spying on the Regional Office?”
We made skeptical noises.
“Nah,” Reg said.
“Nope,” I said.
Amanda said it for all of us. “I don’t see the Home Office sponsoring a Lair full of demon sluts.”
“She hates the computers,” Cricket said. “She said as much to me.”
“Really?” Jee said. “What else did she say?”
“She didn’t tell me much,” Cricket said. “I just guessed. From, you know, context.”
“Come on, Cricket,” Amanda said. “Think.”
Our oldest member, who looked about nine at the moment, rolled her eyes up and fingered her chin. “Well, she cares about us. She sent me here to push Amanda ‘out of the nest.’ Whatever that meant to her.”
“You never told me that,” Amanda said.
“You didn’t ask.”
“But what did she mean? I’m still here,” Amanda said, looking puzzled.
“If she’s really the goddess of love, she probably meant that she wanted you to fall in love,” Cricket said. “And she hates the bureaucracy. And she thinks the Regional Office is a joke.”
“I’m not laughing,” Melitta said flatly. “That big demon jumped in our back door right behind the car, just as I was driving inside.”
I couldn’t argue with that. It was one thing to beat those hairy ass-cracks at basketball. It was entirely different having them barging into our Lair. He’d belted Beth twenty feet with one punch.
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 94