“That’s harsh. I’m a mail clerk at a law firm,” Kama said. “Unbelievable amounts of poon at a law firm.”
“I would think lawyers were too stuffy to have sex.”
“Too careful,” Kama said. “The mail room boy scores like a bandit if he’s young and cute. Because they know that he alone would rather fuck than sue.”
“And Baz?” I said.
Baz glanced at me, as if deciding if I rated an answer. “Stagehand. Number two electrician at the Galaxy Theatre, so I push boxes elsewhere about forty percent of the time. Next,” he added.
“It’s Archie’s turn again,” Lido grumbled. “You got a name for us?”
Archie made a whiny noise in his throat. “I never kiss and tell. Or even ask. That’s why they take the bartender home.”
“You don’t remember their names?” I said incredulously. “Because I do.”
“Uh-oh,” Kama said.
“Give him time,” Veek said. “It will be seen ’tis part of his charm.”
“Part of his charity program,” Baz said lazily. “Find ’em, feel ’em, fuck ’em, fix ’em, forget ’em.”
I directed a questioning look at Archie. I still hadn’t forgotten him calling me a loser.
“Fix ’em?” I said.
But I knew.
He lifted the old eyebrow. “Well, I work in one place. Not like Lido here, a different town every night. I can’t keep doing return engagements. I’d never get anything done.”
“The spell wears off if he engages in intercourse with them a second time,” Veek rumbled.
I said, “What wears off?”
“The mojo. The spell. The find-a-better-man whammy,” Lido said.
“He doesn’t have to do that,” Kama said, in an excusing voice. “We’re only required to seduce, and, if possible, pervert ’em. Introduce a little variety in their vanilla ice cream.”
Veek said, “Ahem.”
“Or chocolate,” Kama added. “Which would make weasel dick over here strawberry, but we don’t talk about that.” He jerked a thumb at Lido. Huh—did Kama know about Lido?
I looked at Lido, but he just said, “Fuck you, Kama,” casually. He didn’t look at me.
Yeah, Kama knew, and Lido knew he knew.
I zeroed back in on Archie. “What mojo-spell-whammy?”
Archie shifted in his lounger, hunching his shoulder at me. “Just a little magic Lido helped me cook up. Makes my life twenty times easier, and I don’t have to keep changing jobs. You tend bar long enough, all women come to you. Saves energy.”
“Whammy?”
“It’s a posthypnotic suggestion,” Lido said. “If you zap ’em good and hard with the old sex-demon mojo, it rattles them out of their routine. Then you tell ’em they’re, like, Bambi or something—”
“No, Bambi’s the dumb one,” Kama said with authority. “Get it right, faggot.”
“Suck me up your a-hole, dot-head,” Lido murmured.
“Someday, Archie will give up his dependence on mortal-made spell casting,” Baz said in a pitying voice.
“You tell them,” Archie said, raising his voice over the razz and the squabbling, “that they’re worth more than a casual fuckfest with the bartender. You tell them to forget all about this bartender because they’re fabulous, and they know it. You tell them they should go find somebody who deserves a fabulous woman like they are.” He glanced over at me. “And they do.”
“Like that woman who sent you the wedding invitation,” I said.
He blinked. “Wedding invitation?”
“Lido brought it into the bar the other night. Some woman gave it to him on the doorstep outside.”
“Right,” Archie said again. He looked tense. Huh. That could be because the guys were razzing him. Archie, I had realized by now, was of all five the least able to take a razz. This could be why he felt obliged pick a fight with Veek all the time, and why Veek needled him harder than the others did.
It could also mean that he felt guilty for being nice to the women he fucked. Shouldn’t a sex demon want to make them miserable? Or was that really part of the job? I could ask.
But the third possibility occurred to me in an inspiration of shining glory. And of course, like the idiot I am, I preferred that one.
Suppose Archie didn’t want me thinking about what he did for other women because he had me in his sights?
As if he heard me thinking, he said, “It’s late. You should head home.”
“You wish,” I scoffed. Not for nothing had I fetched and carried for my brothers for seven years. I felt his temperature rise where his arm touched mine on the lounger. My heart went pitty-pat. “We were talking about your monthly score. If you don’t remember their names, I certainly do. How many of these forms do you have to fill out per month?”
“Three per demon,” Kama said.
“Three?” I said incredulously. “You only have to do paperwork for three women each? I can’t believe you guys. Archie must do three women in a week.”
“No wonder I don’t remember their names,” he said weakly.
“And you can’t be bothered to fill out the forms for just three in the whole month? Professionals like you?”
“Hey,” Baz said, a note of offense in his voice. “We are not professional sex demons. We are professional slackers who survive by faking being sex demons.”
I looked at each of them: Veek in his impeccable white shirt and gold Gucci accessories; Kama, twisted into a pretzel on the back of his Barcalounger; Lido, whipcord thin, with his glued-up rocker Mohawk; Baz, weirdly pale and lizard-like; and Archie, who made my breath catch in my throat every time I glanced his way.
“Don’t even try to bullshit a bullshitter,” I said. “What’s the most important thing in life?”
“Nookie,” Kama said promptly.
Veek snorted. “Sex.”
“Poon,” Lido said.
“Women,” Archie said.
Baz lowered his pale eyelids halfway and looked at me. “Paperwork. Which we have not yet completed.” He pointed at his watch. “Two more hours, gentlemen. I can’t push Send until we’re done.”
More gloomy silence.
“Oh all right,” I said. “Here.” Glancing at Archie again, I put out one finger. “Diane something.” I snapped my fingers. “Um, Chambers. Copyeditor at the Tribune. Two kids. Two ex-husbands, both behind on child support. Fucked you in May, wandered back into the bar in July with her very own stockbroker, complete with matching diamond rings. You fill in the rest,” I added primly. “Since I have no idea what you did to her.”
Although I could guess it had probably started with one of those amazing kisses.
Archie eyed me back. “Sorry.” He shook his head. “Short-term memory loss. Comes of sitting in bars to long.”
“You don’t sit! You slacker,” I added. “You’re a fake slacker. You don’t sit, and you don’t pervert these women. You run around like a mad thing, when you aren’t boxing or fixing that piece-of-crap Firebird of yours. And you send them off to get married.” I grimaced. “Isn’t there something in the code of the sex demons that specifically rules out being nice to people?”
“All over the world,” Baz said, pointing at his laptop. “At this moment, for the next two hours, demons of every description are doing exactly what we’re doing.” He shrugged. “Who has time to be evil? It’s just a job. And it’s laughably easy to slide by. Although not for some people,” he added, looking at his roommates with contempt.
“I was never evil,” Kama protested. “I was a role model to married couples for centuries. Fathers brought their boys to my temples to learn how to please their brides. The fuckin’ crops didn’t come up without me. Shiva himself took lessons from me, so he could learn how to destroy the world and recreate it every time he bangs his wife.”
“Should you be even mentioning that?” Veek said in a warning tone. He pulled a lighter out of his impeccably pressed chino pocket and flicked it on.
Kama
winced and muttered, “Fuck you.”
“They’re all transplants,” Veek said kindly to me. “Émigrés, if you like, into a relatively new corporate pyramid—I speak of the Christian hell—this so fine institution of which they are proud slacker members.”
“But you are not,” I said.
“I am not.” He bowed his head. “My gods are very much alive, and in the field. My priest has the whip hand—as I am so often reminded,” he added, glancing around as if to forestall comment. “My camerades de chambre work for a dying pyramid. Their gods ’ave not been heard from for centuries. Their devils are mired in paperwork. There are barely sufficient resources left to keep a bloated workforce on the payroll—a badly trained, unpoliced, undisciplined, unproductive workforce.”
“And proud of it,” Archie said. It was the first time he’d sounded convinced of anything all evening. “We don’t work for anybody. We’re free men.”
I looked at him as if he was out of his mind. “What are you talking about? You work ten-hour shifts, five and sometimes six days a week. What do you mean, you don’t work for anybody and you’re a free man?”
“Bartending is a McJob. And I wouldn’t call it work,” Archie said. “More like cruising and getting paid for it.”
I laughed. “You have a point.”
In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that their resemblance to a barn full of randy teenagers was more or less exact.
What they were free of, speaking with absolute precision, was marriage.
I.e., women who were the bosses of them.
They reminded me so much of my brothers that I felt like hugging them and dragging them off to make them take baths. With lots of soap.
“All right.” I looked at my watch. “How many are you short?”
Baz looked at the screen. “We need four more.”
“Fine. Are you ready?” I began rattling off names, occupations, physical descriptions, and personal details on Archie’s list of recent conquests. It was surprising how many of them I could remember. Maybe Archie’s appalled expression inspired me. I didn’t stop at four. I kept going until, Baz said with glee, we had filled half of next month’s quota as well.
“I suppose you never send in more than your three apiece,” I said.
“Of course not,” Baz said. “You saw how hard it was to get them to do this much work. If anybody gets a rush of inspiration, we bank ’em until next month. You’re a treasure.” He turned to Archie. “Don’t piss her off for a few weeks, until we’ve drained her memory dry.”
Archie said, “We can’t. I’m arranging a rain of men for her. Which Lido’s going to help me with?”
Baz looked at him blankly for a moment.
“Rain of men,” Kama said. “Isn’t that kinda backward? Rain of women, now, that I could see a point to.”
“You know, the project Lido and I were on,” Archie said. “Victims’ compensation? You promised to help, too.” He sounded genuinely panicked, and I glanced at Lido.
“Yeesh, keep your shirt on,” Lido said. “I said I’d get to it.”
“I need that spell,” Archie said. He glanced at me. This, I realized, was where a tactful girl would leave the room. “Don’t you have to go, like, powder your nose or something?”
“Nope,” I said. I resumed my imitation of a cat on a pillow.
He sent me a long disgruntled look. “We’ll discuss it later. Right now—”
“Right now,” Baz said, “we still have to fill in your perversions with these twelve women Chloe came up with.” He looked at me over his half glasses. “If it won’t offend you.”
“Pretend I’m not here,” I purred from the Barcalounger. “I’m finding this incredibly educational.”
Archie growled from the depths of the chair next door.
I smiled.
“I need that spell now,” I said to Lido when Chloe finally got up to pee. The woman was like a camel. I couldn’t help wondering if her brothers had ever drawn the line at discussing anything around her. “Rain of men. Fast.”
Lido frowned. “Are you sure about that?”
“Decent men,” I added. “No dickheads.”
“It isn’t that easy,” Lido said, and my heart sank.
I thumped my chair arm in frustration. “Why not?”
“Because it’s always easier to do evil than to do good with magic,” Lido said, as if I was a moron. “You were an architect. You ought to know that.”
“Engineering is not a moral discipline,” I said as patiently as I could. “I designed buildings, ships, weapons, pumps—shit like that.”
“Weapons don’t kill people, people kill people,” Lido said sententiously, and I cuffed at him with a moody backhand.
He danced away. “Seriously. You’re gonna have to set your sights lower. How about a rain of one decent guy? That’s a lot easier. I’ve got shelves of love-seeking spells.”
I brightened. “That could work. Love spells?”
“Love-seeking spells. Different from love spells. You use a love spell against one person, i.e. to catch one specific individual you’ve been lusting after, someone who is otherwise unattainable, or refusing you. Like your brother’s wife. Or the only brand bimbo who hasn’t fallen for you yet.”
“Fuck you,” I said absently. “Can you do a spell that attracts some unnamed, unknown person and makes them love her?”
“I’m telling you, yes,” Lido said. “We’ll need a few things.”
“Like what?”
“Well,” Lido said, and a completely fake innocent look crossed his face. “A couple of pussy hairs would be great. I assume you want someone for her who’s, like, good in bed.”
I scowled at him. “I suppose so.”
He raised his bushy Hungarian eyebrows at me. “Well? Go.” He made shooing motions. “Fetch me at least two short and curlies. Try not to get any of your own DNA material on them.”
I made a face. “How would I—no, why would I—”
“How do you think magic works, fathead?” Lido said. “Just go get it.”
I had serious doubts about this process, but I always do. I’ve never taken magic seriously, not even in those thousand years I lived through during which it was jake to study magic. But the fact was, Lido and I were the technicians of the bunch. Kama ran on pure libido, plus his encyclopedic knowledge of how to make anything function as a temporary dildo or silicone girlfriend. Baz ran on natural evil—I hadn’t bought his line about the death of the pyramidal hierarchy yet, that’s for sure. And his lordship’s mojo was different from ours. He was born special. His deal worked through chemistry and herbal combinations and whatever-the-fuck his priest cooked up, but basically, he was magic.
But Lido and I were the geeks. My expertise ran to math and physics and other real stuff. Lido geeked out on spells, recipes, lists of demonic names, pentagrams all scribbled over with Hebrew letters and shit. Mortal magic, really.
That gave me more to worry about. What if Lido’s spell failed?
Fuck it. One thing at a time. Worst case, I’d have to work my whammy on her. Get her all hot and bothered, impose the posthypnotic suggestion that she would soon meet a worthy man, and off she would go, like every other woman I’ve met for the past fifty years.
Hopefully I could pull it off without actually fucking her.
I hadn’t forgotten Aphrodite’s note, which Chloe had mistaken for a wedding invitation, or its implicit threat to any woman I might get close to.
Come to think of it, it was Lido who had suggested the posthypnotic suggestion thing. And he’d produced the Freudian theories that backed it up. He was a flake in a lot of ways, but Lido was a good scholar. I decided I could trust him.
I drew a deep breath. Okay, then.
I went to the bathroom door and knocked.
Chapter Five
I’D PUT IT OFF as long as I could. After seven years hanging out in my brothers’ barn, I knew what the bathroom at the Lair was liable to look like…an
d smell like.
Sooner or later, though, a girl’s gotta go.
So here I was, facing a woman’s age-old debate with herself when using the boyfriend’s bathroom.
Do I put extra toilet paper over the seat and hope it doesn’t stick to me afterward?
Or do I break down and use the dusty, crusted, ancient cleaning products that have been sitting under the sink for god-knows-how-many years? Obviously no one here used them unless…
Looking around and wrinkling my nose, I couldn’t imagine what would set these guys off in a cleaning frenzy.
I felt a familiar click of decision, and knew defeat. They couldn’t force me to leave the building while they squeezed out erotic fantasies for the monthly report.
But they could blackmail me into cleaning their bathroom.
A girl has to pee.
First, trying to breath only through my mouth, I used the rusty-can Lysol on the toilet seat. Then I peed. Much relieved, I set to work. It would just be this one time, I told myself. My gift to them for all the fun I’d been having here.
Just to make sure they understood my position, however, I got out my ex-favorite lipstick, the super-red one that was worn down to a nub and gathering lint in the bottom of my purse, and I wrote in huge letters all over the bathroom mirror, DON’T GET USED TO IT.
Anyway it was worth cleaning up for other reasons. In the process, I found a pile of reading matter on the back of the toilet: predictably, American Boxing, Classic Car Review, a couple of exceptionally cheesy reality porn magazines, a crossword puzzle book with an expensive pen clipped to it—which one of them used this? Had to be Baz or Veek.
And I found a pile of flimsy sheets of not-quite-tissue paper, each printed in an old-timey font that made my eyes water. Some of them had obscene sketches of a non-imaginative nature scrawled on them.
The name “Archimedes” leaped off one page.
I sat down on the closed toilet seat lid and squinted.
They were all form communications. MEMORANDUM, I made out, unpuzzling one letter at a time. TO: a whole string of names, of which Archimedes was the very last one. FROM: Temporary Assistant Deputy Brevet Supervisor with a long name, REGIONAL OFFICE. CC: a bunch of names, including, in a very different, plain block font at the bottom of the list, HOME OFFICE. I remembered the guys mentioning the Home Office. That was what they called heaven. The Christian heaven, Veek would say in his precise way.
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