I made three hundred dollars a day by hooking, and no taxes paid. As long as nobody beat me up and robbed me, or stiffed me.
Do the math.
While I sat there thinking all this, I felt better and better about myself.
I also started thinking along lines that hadn’t been necessary to consider for over two years, since I got my demon body and my IIDN tattoo and my friend and partner Jee and we became thin and beautiful.
Many women wished to be beautiful. This was backwards. They were wishing that someone else would find them beautiful. What they wanted was to change other people’s opinions about them.
Why did I have to please another person in order to exist? I exist, dammit. I am very much a real person, I’m fat and strong and hungry and tired, I’m homeless and dirty and I’d kill for a hot shower so I certainly won’t say no to sex for a hot shower. But I resent having to have sex with you just so I can get a hot shower. I would take a decent paying job that didn’t involve fucking you for a hot shower.
Yeah, well, they don’t like to give those jobs to fat women. And when they do, they pay you less. Because you’re fat. You’re less real.
That left me with a question I’d never finished answering, though I’d started asking myself many times.
Yeah, I did a dumb thing, hooking. But it wasn’t just the money. It was fat whore. I’d had something to prove to my father.
Sitting there in fat jail, in rags, mostly naked, staring out that narrow doorway at the reflection of my overflowing flesh, I wondered what I’d been hoping to prove to him. What would have taught my father a lesson? What kind of person had I thought he was? Who was he, really?
Nineteen-year-old me had had no idea. She was trying so hard to please them both. They were all about conditional love, and she had lost their love at age thirteen and never got it back, and yet she kept trying.
So what had I been thinking?
I would never have figured it out on my own.
Ish would have understood. Thinking of that gay-baby-whales benefit and my shocking encounter with my mother and father, I tried to imagine what Ish must have seen. What facts would have been terribly obvious to him, that I totally missed because I was flashing back to nineteen years old, terminally anxious and eager to please? What would Ish have seen?
Well, that my father was and is permanently fixated on his own importance. He never stopped measuring himself on this richie yardstick. The more money he made, the longer the yardstick got, the richer the people he wanted to hang with, rinse, repeat. My mother, I realized now, was a version of me, completely blind to anything but winning his approval. She’d lost me without even noticing.
Ish saw all that. And how did I know? Because he lectured the team on being kind to one another, that very night.
I was stunned at how much I’d underestimated him.
I’d known him since third grade. Ish, while being no hero, had always been a superb judge of character. No wonder my mother hadn’t liked me playing with him. He taught me to locate and listen to my bullshit detector. He was nice to me.
I guess that made him kind of a hero.
I’d lost him, along with the team and the field and control of my body. But somehow I felt steadied. Thinking of Ish reminded me of all I had learned. I remembered the miracle of Delilah’s deal, and living and working and hanging out with Jee, who taught me so much about pride and anger.
For the first time since I arrived in fat jail, I paused on hating myself.
Jee was right. I’d needed to be in a safe place, or at least a place where I couldn’t do anything but think, before I could think about all this stuff. Say what I liked about fat jail, I had privacy. And all the time in the world.
Only I didn’t have a Reg beside me to rub my sore ankles and tell me he loved me and distract me from the horrors of the past.
Whenever I got tired enough to sleep, I would curl up against the wall of my cell and wonder when I would feel safe enough to cry.
And then I woke up to find Ish standing outside my narrow doorway.
ISH
Ish slumped to the deck and stared at the smoking hole in the plywood where Buugh had vanished, taking Pog with him. Despair and bewilderment had him in their grip. “She’s gone.” He looked from one slut to the next. None of them seemed as devastated or as lost as he felt.
“Shut it!” Reg screeched. “Shut that door!”
Amanda came up with the barbecue tongs and probed the hole in the plywood deck. “Here it is.” She rubberbanded the tongs shut around the emblem that had turned into a door to the Regional Office, and stuck it head-downward in a bucketful of dried rose petals. “It ought to work again, if I can decipher any of the words or sigils.”
“Bet you a nickel one of them is D.O.O.R.,” said Cricket, peering into the bucket with interest.
Amanda gave a half-laugh. “Bet you’re right.”
“We’re going after her, aren’t we?” Melitta said, looking from one face to another.
“We’ll need ammo,” Jee said, almost gaily. She had definitely lost her doughy appearance and now wore her old narrow-eyed Amazon ferocity.
Reg said with determination, “I’m on it.” He dragged the old cardboard refrigerator box they used for recycling to the back door. “Melitta, do you know where the broom is?”
“On it.” Melitta jumped up. In a moment she was sweeping the edges between the floors and the walls.
Beth squatted next to Ish and rubbed one hand on his back. “Don’t worry. I’m sure she didn’t mean it.”
“Doesn’t matter. It’s true. I’m a coward and a wuss.” Had she lied last night? I love you, too. “She said you made her be nice to me,” he accused Beth.
“I did not. I just pointed out that you’re still in love with her. In spite of whatever passed between you at the strip club. Or in high school.”
“Sheesh, did you shave each other’s pussies while you were at it?” he said, grossed out and offended and comforted all at the same time.
So at least Pog knew. She’d forgiven him for that day at the club, too. That meant, Ish reflected, that she really had jumped in front of the Buugh bus to save him. He felt not in the least comforted to know that Buugh and everyone else here thought she was right: he was a wuss, a spineless apparatchik.
He was distracted from these thoughts when Reg arrived from his trip to the alley, dragging the now-empty box onto the deck again.
“Here, Melitta,” Reg said breathlessly. “Put ’em in here.” The two of them began scooping armloads of dried rose petals into the box.
Amanda peered into the box. “Looks good. Try to get it as pure as you can.”
“Centrifuge, el cheapo style,” Melitta said, and shook the box gently. “The good stuff rises to the top.”
“Huh,” Amanda said. “Okay. When it’s full, bring it into the lab.” She went to the wall and fetched a stack of old paint buckets that looked like they’d been there for centuries, and held one so Reg could scoop some dried rose petals into it. “Cricket, let’s get back there now. I’ve got some ideas.”
“I’ve got some ideas,” Cricket said.
“Pog was right.” Ish watched their industry with gloom. “The only reason I’m not at the bottom of the Calumet River from ten years ago is, Delilah put me in the Regional Office, where I could hide out and be numb.”
“And she did that so that one day you would run this team,” Beth pointed out.
“You think?” He’d been so sure that his value to Delilah was exactly his spinelessness.
“Who knows what Delilah thinks?” Melitta said, sweeping rose petals. “Boy, these things are everywhere.”
Jee was playing thoughtfully with a handful of the dried, blackened rose petals. “She did it so you’d help us make those demon fuckers wish they’d never messed with us.”
Ish had never felt more helpless. “But what can I do?” he wailed.
Beth made herself comfortable beside him and put her arm around his s
houlders. “Look at it this way. You weren’t afraid to die when you thought she had died.”
He remembered Paul Schoenvetter saying harshly, Our daughter is dead. From that moment, his own life had ended. Right up until Delilah brought Pog and Jee to him at the Regional Office and said, Here’s the start of your team. It had been so good to see Polly. She’d looked horribly scrawny but prosperous, and her eyes were as bright as ever. Every time he’d talked to her on Skype since then, he’d felt himself waking up a little.
Then he’d come to stay at the Lair, and suddenly his dick pointed due Polly twenty-four/seven. It was like a bomb had dropped on him, a delicious, perfumed, bare-skinned bomb that blew his mind every hour on the hour. He’d felt alive.
He only knew that now, because now he’d died all over again.
Beth kept pushing. “She knows you tried to kill yourself over her.”
He covered his face with his hands. “I know.”
“So you won’t be afraid to go down there and get her out.”
“Whaaat?” He looked up at her with horror.
“They can’t kill her, can they?” Beth said.
“I guess not.”
“They can’t kill you.”
No, but they can make me even more miserable than I am now. Ish sat beside Beth while the broom crew gathered old five-gallon pails full of dried rose petals from every corner of the big old factory space and ferried them to the refrigerator box. “They know I’m useless.”
Beth just sat there with her hand on his back. “It’s amazing, isn’t it? I’ve been living here for months and probably saw this stuff everywhere. I just didn’t notice it.” She dabbled the fingers of her other hand in a little pile of rose petals. “They sort of smell nice, when you get enough of them in one spot.”
Ish leaned away from her. “Keep your distance.”
Beth rolled her eyes. “Don’t worry, I’m spoken for. So are you.”
“How’s collection coming?” Amanda bustled up, looking efficient and effective and everything Ish wasn’t. She poked her nose into the big box. “Wow, good work, guys.”
“Why doesn’t Amanda go?” Ish said. “She knows the RO as well as I do.”
“Because I wouldn’t be looking for the woman I love and you will,” Amanda said. “You can’t get lost. You’ll know her when you see her.”
“Why wouldn’t I know her?” Ish bristled. He suspected he was letting them talk him around. “I mean—why wouldn’t you?”
“If they pull one of those Mountain-King guessing games,” Amanda said.
Unexpectedly, Reg put his broom in air-guitar position and made a bwarrrm noise. “Spilla wine, take that girl!” he sang.
“That’s just a song,” Ish said stupidly.
“Every story comes from somewhere,” Cricket said.
His heart felt like a bag of concrete in his chest. Tell me what to do, somebody. Beth was right. He couldn’t even die this time. And he had a stronger suspicion that if Delilah were to show up, she’d toss him straight into the fire herself, a fire she had planned all along. It finally occurred to Ish that Pog had been right about these rose petals. Something was up. They were all cat’s-paws in a game between the gods.
“What will they do to her?” Beth said now.
Tears filled Ish’s eyes. He shook his head.
“Well, what were they going to do to you?” Man, Beth could be a pest.
“That doesn't matter,” Ish said desolately. “Whatever they do to her, it’ll be something she hates.” No wonder Pog took his place under arrest. She knew he was helpless. She rescued him. She was the brave one. “Some terrible things must have happened to her when she was hustling. She survived it all. She sailed in here and took over. She’s the heroine.”
“I know, buddy,” Beth said unnecessarily.
Amanda raised her voice. “Okay, guys, I need some input.”
“Council of war,” Jee said. Ish turned and saw that Jee had been assembling a big hookah with four long, snaky hoses on it. “Relaxation, invigoration, inspiration, and rage,” she said, as if naming the hoses. She held up a plastic baggie of vegetable matter.
“Gimme,” said Ish. If he was to be the sacrifice, he’d like some medication, please.
They pulled chairs up to the hookah and fired it up.
“Cricket and I have determined some things,” Amanda said. “One, the rose petals retain potency whether they are ingested, breathed, or make contact with skin. They can be boiled, ground up, or burned. We could mix them with cement and pour it across every doorway in this place, including down that hole.” She pointed with a hookah mouthpiece. “Any demons that come through it would be infected.”
After two tokes Ish felt like a new man. He wasn’t alone. These ladies were six times as smart as he was and a lot braver. He looked at the hookah mouthpiece in his fingers. “Burned, huh?”
“We thought of that.” Amanda nodded at Cricket. “To boobytrap this place.”
“How about you mix it with this shit? You grow it here?” Ish felt a foolish grin cross his face.
The girls nodded at each other. Cricket wrote something on a yellow pad.
“Demons seem to be really scared of the rose petals,” Beth squeaked, handing her mouthpiece to Melitta. She whooshed out her smoke. In her normal voice she said, “But they don’t take effect for weeks, right, Ish?”
“That’s what Buu—what he said.” Ish felt proud to contribute to the brain trust. “Between two and six weeks. Though I guess sometimes it’s instantaneous.”
“So what’s the use?” Jee said. “We want to stop them in their tracks, not make them lie awake worrying for two to six weeks after they’ve mangled us.”
“Not necessarily.” Amanda looked at Cricket and then at Ish. “We have two missions here.”
“Three,” Cricket said.
Amanda rolled her eyes. “Okay, three. One, deter demons from re-entering this space. Now that they’ve opened that door”—she lifted her chin at the bucket where she’d parked the demon emblem—“it can open again in the same spot, even if we remove the door.”
The girls set up a clamor.
Amanda raised her voice. “That’s why we’ll boobytrap it and make it scary, so they’ll lock the door on their side. Two, we want something we can attack with. Melitta got lucky last night. We got lucky in CostCo the other day. They won’t come one at a time every time. Probably not ever again. How many commandos do you think they have left, Ish?”
There was definitely more than Mary Jane in that smoke, he thought, because he actually did feel invigorated. “Hard to say. Sometimes I think the Regional Office ran out of real demon commandos decades ago. Because when they sent that task force last summer, they were drafting demons out of other Circles.”
“What?” Melitta laughed. “Did they issue them a scary commando demon suit and say, “Here, put this on, we’re going in country at oh-four-hundred?’”
“That cook at Ann Sather is from Gluttony,” Cricket reminded them.
With the knot in his belly eased and the horror of watching Pog vanish down Buugh’s rabbit hole fading, Ish realized something. “You girls aren’t afraid at all, are you?”
“Of what?” Cricket said. “A guy who grows his own fangs out so far, he can’t eat an ice cream cone? They’re more afraid of us than we are of them.”
“No, really. That kid—” Ish waved in Melitta’s direction. “She was dancing with that Anger commando. She’s just a kid! And nothing scares Jee.”
Jee smiled quietly. Reg passed his mouthpiece to her and, after one puff, she handed it on to Beth.
“C’mon, Ish,” Amanda said. “You worked down there for ten years. How can you possibly be impressed any longer?”
He had to admit, she had a point. “I dunno. I guess, because I had the nuns in school. They drill it into you how terrible hell is. That was why I wanted to die and go there.” He sobered further. “After Pog died—after I thought she was dead. I thought it was my fault. I
was so ashamed of myself. I felt so guilty. I wanted to believe in hell.”
Beth patted his hand.
“And once I got there, well, you spend a long time with these guys and never get any reality checks, you start believing their bullshit. You play to the pose to keep ’em happy. I never asked to get promoted. I just wanted to stay off everybody’s radar and mind my own business.”
“Agenda, guys?” Amanda raised her voice again. “Where was I? One, two. Right. Three, we need two kinds of weapons for Ish to carry into the Regional Office when he goes to fetch Pog.”
Ish didn’t flinch. He hoped to heck they’d give him some of this smoke before he did such a stupid thing. He felt ready now.
“One kind of weapon is a big scary threat. Doesn’t have to be real, although if it is, we get double the value. Beth and Jee are right, they’re terrified of the sight of these things, or anything that looks like flaky black stuff. But the other kind of weapon should be the real thing. We want to contaminate their space. Make it easy for them to find and impossible to eradicate. War of nerves. If it really works the way our recent visitor said it does, and Ish can plant it, then in a few weeks, hell will practically empty out.”
“‘And all the devils will be here.’ What?” Melitta said to their blank looks. “It’s a quote.” She smiled maliciously. “Cliff’s Notes.”
In the end, Ish wound up going into hell cold sober. They’d cooked up anti-demon armor spells and hung them all over him. He stood there, feeling a little foolish in a khaki shirt and camo cargo pants borrowed from Amanda and an army-guy-size backpack full of goodies invented and constructed by the team. He protested and whined and grumbled so as to maintain his status as supervisor and team coward, but the truth was that he wouldn’t have let anyone else go.
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 97