Buugh looked as though he might speak, but the RO CEO just smiled at him. Delilah wandered up and led the big boss away.
Pog assembled Ish and her crew with light touches and eye contact. Team Succubus sneaked out with the exiting derby fans.
POG
I had expected that we would never set eyes on Delilah again—at least not until she wanted us to do something for her—but she turned up later that night.
When we got back home, there was no sign of the demon invaders. They’d made a mess of the junk food we left behind. They’d also taken the keg with them, dammit, so there went our deposit.
The sauna, sadly, was still a pile of lumber. Amanda kicked at it. “Oh well. I was gonna have to buy a new one.” She brightened. “With better climate controls.” Then she knelt and reached down into the hole where the demons had burned a door all the way to the Regional Office. “Huh.” She picked up a tiny chunk of slag. “The emblem. It feels dead.”
“Well, we didn’t do that,” Beth said.
“I think they don’t want anyone else using that door again,” Jee said.
“It’s food o’clock,” I announced. “We owe ourselves the rest of that celebration.”
Beth phoned in the world’s biggest Thai food order, and Melitta and Ish lugged booze up to the roof, and I allowed that we didn’t need metal implements to eat Thai if we used chopsticks, so the whole mess could go in garbage bags and nobody would have to do dishes afterward, halleluia. Cricket and Amanda tidied up the mess on the basketball deck yet again. Jee and I assembled three crates full of cocktail mixers and Reg chose baggies of weed from the slacker stash in the sixth freezer. By then the food had come.
And then we ate. Crikey, it was good to eat. I stuffed myself. Then I drank cocktails that Jee dreamed up until my stomach had dealt with the first installment of food, and I stuffed myself again. We had to phone for a second order of pot stickers and rice.
When the Thai food was gone and we were smoking the last of the slackers’ weed, Cricket nudged Amanda heavily in the side with her elbow.
“Hey, isn’t that our recruiter?” She had spotted what I only then noticed: a woman walking across the neighboring factory’s rooftop.
Jee stood up.
When I saw who it was, I stood up.
Delilah. The source of all our changes.
She’d recruited each of us, and kept us quiet about it, and somehow installed Ish at a desk in the Regional Office so we could all get on hell’s payroll.
Whoever and whatever she was, this was not a demon, and she was not here to make our lives better. More interesting, maybe. I’d had enough interesting for a while. I dialed up my demon eyes, the better to see her by starlight.
“Ahoy,” Delilah said in a musical voice. She wore a red-and-yellow flowered beach sarong, and sandals that laced up her exquisite calves all the way to her knees. She paused at the neighbor’s parapet wall between buildings. “Permission to come aboard your roof?”
That was polite of her. Considering.
I looked around at my teammates. “Might as well,” I said.
Reg rose slowly until he was erect in the hot tub. Really erect. It occurred to me that if Ish had recruited him off Craigslist, he had probably never met our—our what? Patroness?
I got out of the hot tub. I didn’t want to have to look up at her from the water.
Delilah looked unbelievably smooth and powerful. I could feel the rays of her personality from twenty feet away. She stepped over the parapet wall and sat down on it, as if aware that we were naked or half-naked, sitting below her in a tubful of water, and she was being polite about it. She looked human.
But she was not. Oh, no.
If mortals have a visible aura, and demons a halo of power only visible to demons’ eyes, Delilah’s personal energy field blotted out the stars.
I moved to stand between her and the hot tub.
“I imagine you have some questions,” she said in a friendly way.
“We do,” Beth said behind me.
“I don’t,” Jee said, arriving at my elbow, poised like a Doberman pinscher about to spring.
“I got what I wanted,” Melitta said, behind us.
I turned to Melitta. “Then shut up. Because some of us want to know stuff.” I turned back warily to our personal goddess.
“What stuff?” Delilah sounded encouraging.
I opened my mouth and paused. What do you ask a goddess?
Ask quick and be smart about it. It was probably like talking to that stupid eight-ball oracle or a leprechaun: don’t fuck up your three questions.
“What’s with the stealth op inside the Regional Office?” Cricket said, coming to my side and interrupting what I admit was probably the lame and halting list of complaints stuck in my throat.
Delilah sent her a damn, you’re good look. She took a breath, paused, and sighed. “The pyramids are crumbling.”
That set off some babbling. Cricket cut through it. “Like, the Soviet Union and hell and heaven and the Internal Revenue Service?”
“Yes,” Delilah said. “Exactly. It’s a slow process. It happens about every twenty-two-hundred years, and it can leave a real mess behind. The Sahara Desert.” She paused, as if to let us picture the Sahara Desert and wonder how pyramids might have done that. “The Regional Office has lost much of its effectiveness. It has turned inward on itself. That took a lot of effort on the part of many people over three hundred years. You can all take credit for making a difference.”
I’d been about to complain about her sending me recruits faster than we could find them bedrooms to sleep in. We were way past that. I shut my mouth and let Cricket handle this.
“Will we live through the transition?” Cricket said.
My jaw dropped.
Again, Delilah gave Cricket the congratulations, right question look. “Yes.”
My heart put-puttered in my chest. I looked around at my teamies. They all appeared as gob-smacked as I did, except for Reg, who seemed serene, of course. Jee was the center of his universe, and now he knew that Jee would last forever. He was set for life.
I nudged Cricket. “Go on. Ask her more stuff,” I whispered.
Cricket reverted to her namesake. “Are you done with us? Is that Buugh guy gonna come back? Because he didn’t seem super crumbly to me. Does this mean we keep working for the Regional Office? What did you do to that CEO guy to make him quit being boss of hell? He looked pretty smitten. Maybe we should join roller derby. Those demons that came to the derby won’t be going home, will they? Can we call you up sometimes if we have a problem with the Regional Office? What if we stop sending in our reports?”
Delilah laughed the prettiest laugh in the world.
I could feel myself falling under her spell.
There wasn’t a thing I could do about it.
“Let’s see,” she said. She touched her fingertips, one at a time. “We’re done if you want to be done. Unless I have an emergency.” Her dimples showed. “Duke Buughdybogh has been wallowing in those rose petals for weeks. He thinks he’s immune.” She gave that laugh again. “He’ll leave you alone for fear of finding out that he isn’t. You can keep working for the Regional Office or not, your choice. You’ve seen the last of those demons who followed you to roller derby unless you keep going back there. I think they may have become fans. The RO CEO is a very old friend.” She patted her hair. “Although of course he’s far too young for me.”
“Too young?” Beth stared. “He’s as old as time.”
“Oh, please, darling. I’m sixty thousand years old and I’m not as old as time. His sect only just formed in the fourth century. He’s waiting for me back at my bower, asleep until I wake him. Poor boy, he never wanted to be an administrator.” Her eyelids drooped. “He’s much better at field work.”
My skin was doing a thing I read about once called horripilating. It wasn’t just the hairs standing up, scared stiff. There was a creepy-crawly hot-cold part too.
“You’re going to leave us alone,” I said.
“Probably.” She gave me a but-seriously look that I didn’t believe for a minute. She spoke very slowly. “But before I go, I want to thank you for your hard work, and the risks you’ve taken, and I want to bless each one of you.”
She looked at us, one at a time. “Pog, bless you. Ish, bless you. Beth, bless you. Jee, bless you. Reg, bless you. Amanda, bless you. Cricket, bless you. Melitta, bless you.”
This doesn’t take any time at all to write, or read, but it seemed to take a long time for her to say it, like a deep bell with many overtones, ringing so slowly that the echoes for one blessing faded away completely before the next bell-stroke sounded. She blessed me first! I was melting into a puddle of hot tears. I knew then that she wasn’t just a goddess of sensual love. Her face shimmered before me, and sometimes she looked like Gabrielly.
Every name she spoke gonged through me as if I’d never heard it before. I knew my teammates. Now I knew I loved them. I could feel them cringe in the intervals of deep silence, each waiting for her or his own name to be spoken. And then the moment of being blessed changed everything.
I don’t remember how we got downstairs. The Thai food trash bag got down, which was all I cared about, and the empty liquor bottles and plastic cups and chopsticks and the weed pipe. There were too many of us to sit in the kitchen. We ended up on the basketball deck next to the barbecue grill, sprawling in lawn chairs, drinking beer more because it was there than for the buzz.
“This is restful,” Beth said.
“Heck yes,” I sighed.
Ish perched on the arm of my pink plastic adirondack chair, as if he couldn’t get close enough to me. I felt good down to my toenails, feeling him near.
“Can we have s’mores?” Reg said like a little kid.
“Oo! Oo!” Cricket squeaked. “Can we, Pog?”
Amanda looked over at me. “She won’t settle down until she gets them.”
Maybe it was marijuana smoke lingering in the big room or residual blessing bliss in my blood, but I made a big decision very suddenly.
“Know something? I’m sick of being the boss of food around here. If you want s’mores, do them. If you want to cook a whole cow, cook it. Fuck it. Half of you can cook as well as I can. Go for it.”
With a squeal, Cricket shot up the metal stairs toward the junk food stash in the kitchen.
Beth turned to me with concern. “Pog, honey.”
“I mean it. I don’t care if you make a mess in the kitchen.”
“I do,” Reg said indignantly.
“Great. Terrific. You’ll be the one who makes sure it stays nice, then. Won’t be me.”
“Really?” Reg said. He scampered after Cricket.
“We’ll use the dome grill,” Melitta said. “You can’t get a proper flame on the gas one.” She leaped up and dragged the cheapo dome grill over to our circle of lawn chairs.
“You’re letting someone else touch your dome grill?” Beth had a smirk in her voice.
“I don’t care,” I said wildly, feeling feather-light in my body as I let go of control. “I may never eat again. I don’t care if I gain sixty pounds. So what if I look like Mae West sometimes. She was hotter than a two-dollar pistol.”
Ish leaned over and nibbled my ear. “You’ll look hotter than a pair of new Nikes at the corner of Seventy-Sixth and Dorchester.”
Beth got up to help, of course. They arranged the grill on top of some cinderblocks so nobody would have to stand up to set fire to a marshmallow. Then they scrounged lumber cut-offs and old cardboard and discarded demon hazmat suits and argued about how to lay the fire.
I watched, blissfully not giving a darn. Somebody else’s problem.
Cricket and Reg came pelting downstairs with boxes of raspberry chocolate squares, mint chocolate squares, caramel chocolate squares, graham crackers, gingersnaps, wheatmeal crackers, jam, peanut butter, marshmallows in regular and baby chicken and other fanciful shapes—oh right, with Halloween only two months away the stores were already full of goofy candies—and a formidable arsenal of pointy metal things.
Jee won the argument about who got to throw the lighted match onto the grill.
Foom! The grill sent up a pillar of flame.
Everybody went Ooooh!
I shook my head and relaxed even deeper.
“That’s gonna make a mess on my basketball deck,” Amanda said, as if it didn’t matter.
I looked down. “Hey. You fixed the floor.” I said, noticing belatedly that the smashed plywood section had been replaced and the whole deck repainted.
“I figured it was one way to guarantee you’d get back okay,” Amanda said.
“How so?”
“Like lighting a cigarette to make the bus come,” Cricket said.
This was so Cricket, a nonsequitur that sounded crazy and later made sense when you processed it. I laughed.
Jee looked up and met my eyes, and she laughed, too. She looked happy. My heart flew high, seeing the lightness in her eyes. I realized I’d felt deadly grim ever since we rescued Reg from his mom, and Jee started screaming in her sleep.
Since we met, the two of us had been on a train fleeing the past, a train full of horrors and sadness. Only then she got Reg. Her train started running in reverse then. I should have felt sorry for her, but she had Reg. I’d been so jealous. And I’d hated myself for it. It set me up for all that fat crap, the mean talk and the bad memories and running into my parents and fat jail in hell.
As if hearing me thinking this, Ish leaned into me. With one hand he held a flaming marshmallow ghost on a skewer. He put the other arm around me. The bad, sad feelings slid away easily.
I reached to the next lawn chair and put my hand over Beth’s. She flashed a smile at me and went back to listening to Melitta talk about college. My new best friend. I could have two, I decided. My head fell back against Ish’s side. Three. Plus Amanda was such a rock, she’d been so brilliant and steady when we needed magical tech, and Cricket had said just the right things to Delilah, and Melitta was maybe the bravest of us all. Cricket didn’t know what fear was, but Melitta did. She just didn’t let it stop her. And thank all the powers and little fishes, I thought, not for the first time, for Reg, taking care of Jee when she was at her most tiresome.
Maybe I should do that. Be a diva now and then. Fall apart and cry all over Ish and make him wait on me hand and foot. I looked up at him. “Would you do that?”
“Sure,” he said easily. He poked his skewer at my face. “Open up.”
I sucked the blackened, molten marshmallow ghost off the end of his skewer. “You didn't even ask, do what.”
Ish handed his skewer to Cricket and accepted a beer from Reg, who stood at the fridge reaching brews around. “Do what?”
“Will you wait on me? Encourage me to quit work for a while? Put up with me being a basket case?”
He paused in the middle of raising his beer bottle. I saw his adam’s apple move and I thought, Uh-oh, what now? Then he drained his beer and looked at me. “That reminds me.”
I sat up. “What?” This couldn’t be good.
He patted my shoulder. “Wait here.”
He went through the sleeping-quarters door and I heard him clanging up the metal stairs. Sixty seconds later he was back. His feet rang slower and heavier on the way down.
He had that suitcase with him, the one he’d brought when he moved in.
Reg cleared off the plastic lawn table they were using for s’mores ingredients.
Ish dumped the suitcase on it and opened it out flat.
The thing was loaded full to bursting with plastic sandwich bags. Each sandwich bag was full of blackened old silver coins.
An hour later we were still trying to guess what it was worth.
“I dunno, thirty-five years times thirty pieces per month times eight?” Reg turned out to be a bit of a math whiz. He turned to Ish. “I’ll take a pay cut for the sake of easy accounting.”
Ish was trying to look modest. “Sure. Me too.”
Beth had a yellow pad and a calculator. “I make it an average monthly take of sixty thousand dollars, if half the coins are common specie minted in 1800 or later. That’s over seven hundred thousand a year. Say we each spend half of that and invest the other half at five percent. In twelve years we would each have in the neighborhood of five and a half million—”
“But we’re not earning it thirty coins at a time,” argued Jee. “We’ve got it all right now. Surely we would make better money investing bigger chunks immediately.”
“Surely we would flood the market with antique coins and devalue the whole hoard within weeks if we tried to liquidate it all at once,” Beth retorted. “No. We take thirty coins per month apiece and dispose of them in the usual manner. As time passes, they get rarer, don’t forget. I really know what I’m doing.”
“So we split seven hundred thousand dollars eight ways?” Reg said.
“Oh, no. We each get seven hundred thousand,” Beth said.
We stared at each other in wild surmise.
“Even I couldn’t spend all that,” Jee said.
“So we don’t ever have to work again,” Amanda said.
“I could go to grad school for—for life,” Melitta said, her eyes shining.
“Whatever floats your boat.” I rolled my eyes. “I guess this means we can quit sending in reports to the Regional Office anytime we want.”
We stared at the piles of sandwich bags.
“Unless we want to stick around,” Jee said. “For the fun of watching the pyramid crumble.”
“You just want to hurt mean people,” Beth accused her.
“Well, duh.”
But Beth had a thoughtful look. “We could do some good.”
“Scariest words in the language,” I said. “Count me out.”
“We could be consultants for the city,” Reg said. “You know. For the hinky stuff. Or, like, for the government.”
“Fuck the government,” Jee said crisply. “It’s crumbling, too.”
“We could mess with my grandchildren. Their lives are all screwed up,” Cricket said, grinning.
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 102