“Better not.” She stumped out.
Jee
That dream left me pretty shaky. I woke up from it feeling the weight of his body fade slowly off my arm. He’d smelled terrible and weepy and scared.
I sucked it up and asked Pog for help. Amanda was great for stuff you needed, as long as you didn’t have to explain anything like feelings. Pog was better at insight.
We were thinning some cans of cheap white paint with water into big five-gallon buckets at the paint sink, down by the barbecue grill in the factory space. I hate messy jobs. This was not what I became a succubus to do.
But the whole team was in on it. Summer was coming in, hotter than me in a Dior sheath, and we’d been sweltering. Amanda decided the quick way to deal with it, while we waited for more contractors to deliver central air and contractor booty, was to spray the building’s roof lightly with white paint. This would reflect the sun and, in theory, reduce the interior temperature ten to fifteen degrees.
Sunbeams tried to poke into the factory space through the dirty chickenwire-reinforced windows. Dust motes danced. I was sweating. Dust and paint stuck to my skin. I felt gross.
“I woke up. I swear to you, Pog, I was awake. And he was there, in the bed. He was right there.”
“And it was a dream? Or it wasn’t?” she said, staying calm. “This stuff is lumpy,” she added, pouring the can into a big five-gallon bucket. “Amanda says we have to strain it.”
I began to relax. She and I had gone through plenty of weird shit when we first started rooming together. Our brand new demon bodies had done goofy things. We’d helped each other. Talked it over and calmed the fuck down.
I could use some calming.
“I was awake. The pillow and sheets were wet.” I scowled at the wall behind her, daring her to ask why they were wet.
I missed that little rat. I was not coping with life without him.
But you don’t have to explain stuff to Pog. “So? Do you have any idea if it was your room or his room?” she said. She plunged her arms into the bucket up to the elbow.
Now there was a new idea. “You mean I might have gone to where he is?”
“You might have. Boy, this is thick at the bottom. Squishy. I wonder how long it sat at the store before they marked it down.” She squished thoughtfully. “Technically, you’re both sex demons now. Here, filter this.”
“Okay, that’s creepy.” I found Amanda’s paint strainer on the shelf, positioned it over an empty bucket, and started pouring. “How did it happen?”
“Well, that’s the essence of our job. Succubi are supposed to show up in men’s beds and jerk ’em off in their sleep. The men think they’re dreaming. Or maybe they are dreaming and we get into their dreams somehow.” She shrugged. “I’ve never bothered with the magical stuff. Men are so easy as it is. Why work that hard for my monthly quota?”
“So I dreamed I was with him and maybe ended up in his room. But what does it mean?” I was baffled.
Pog looked at me soberly. “It means you’re plugged into each other. A connection. A bond,” she said with a straight face. “Fuck, I dunno. Ask Amanda. I’m not the magician in this bunch.”
I decided I wouldn’t bother Amanda with that one.
We mixed up two five-gallon buckets of paint and brought them to the roof, where Amanda was getting a sprayer ready and Beth was sweeping up leaves, gravel, candy wrappers, and other litter off the painting surface.
I kept thinking about the connection between me and Reg. How could he just pop into my bed like that? Because I knew darned well it was my bed. The sheets and pillowcase had been wet with my tears in the morning. He had come back to me.
And then he’d left.
That thought—the hope that I wasn’t just hallucinating, which, considering the weretiger claw he’d found in my sheets last week—my thoughts spun away from the claw, back to the thought, he came back to me!—that was no hallucination. My head whirled with the possibilities.
Why, Reg? Why did you leave me for her?
I couldn’t even think those words without flinching away. It was as if a wave the weight of the world was smashing me to the ground.
People leave you. They just do.
But he didn’t stay gone. There was some kind of connection there. What could have brought him into my bed from his unimaginable mother’s house, to hold me and comfort me when I was at my worst and weakest?
Well, there was the weretiger thing. I had had no idea that I could be a weretiger until later, when I saw the fresh bites and claw marks on his sides and shoulder. When he showed me the claw he’d found in the sheets, long and curved and sharp and ugly and crusted with his blood. I knew then that I’d done him damage that couldn’t be magicked away.
If the taste of his blood hadn’t bound him to me, or me to him, then guilt bound me to him.
Up on the roof, Amanda got the sprayer going and almost immediately used up our two buckets of paint. Pog went down to mix more without my help, because she said I didn’t do it as nicely as she did. She was right. I wasn’t going to ruin my manicure for this.
I got a garbage bag and started shoveling Beth’s piles into it, still brooding.
I was also suddenly uncomfortable with the Dom/sub thing. Bond was right. I used to feel in control there. Hah! The more obedient he was, the more obsessed I became with controlling him and caring for him. That alone weirded me out. I’d never pulled the jerk-whisperer gag for longer than one night, with clients back in Thailand. Maybe my owners had known not to let it go longer than a night. Maybe they knew about this bond. How the Dom is bound to the sub, how the sub controls the Dom.
Reg never had such an idea in his dopey head. He was too innocent. All he wanted to do was please me.
Was that it? Had I gone soft from all those foot -rubs and cups of coffee brewed just right?
It could be something else, too. A bond that could draw him to me like that—into my Cone of Silence, past my locked bedroom door—what could that be? Did I even want to know?
It was horribly hot on the roof. Beth swept and I picked up trash piles. Amanda swore when the sprayer clogged, took it apart, and put it back together about every two minutes. There was no wind. A white mist seemed to hover over the whole roof, probably visible only to us with our demon eyes. It got into our hair, stuck to our skin, our eyelashes.
Beth, of course, forced me to think more about Reg, once I’d definitely decided I didn’t want to.
“I don’t think he’s happy there,” she said firmly.
“Like you know shit,” I said.
“That cabbie said he looked scared,” Pog said, blundering through the door with two more buckets of paint.
I glared at Pog. She was supposed to be my ally on Team Unemotional.
I caught Amanda’s deadpan expression. Amanda never judges.
Beth does. “You’re going to leave him there? He could be scared. She could be hurting him.”
“I don’t even know if he wants to see me,” I said, trying to sound gruff. It felt like they were taking turns hitting me with a hammer.
Pog glanced up from pouring paint through yet another sieve.
I rolled my eyes. “Okay, maybe he would rather—live here. How do I find out? He didn’t leave a number, and he gave away his cell phone. Ish claims he doesn’t have an address on file, which I can’t believe. Those rooster bastards all stick together.” C’mon, girls, stick together for me. I’m drowning in pain and I don’t know how to ask for help.
They didn’t answer.
Beth and I dumped big bags of litter over the edge of the roof into the dumpster, two storeys down. Pog went back downstairs, the traitorous slacker. Amanda swore.
The sun beat down. I was roasting, covered with a film of whitewash crud, and near tears.
Nobody had any ideas, apparently. They were gonna hang me out to dry. I would never see Reg again. That woman could be starving him. Did she know he’d get fatter now, if he didn’t eat five or six thousan
d calories a day? Would she even notice he was gaining weight?
Suddenly I wanted to know how Reg was doing.
I wanted it a lot.
“There’s the old succubus gag,” Amanda said thoughtfully, as if she could hear me thinking. She was putting the sprayer back together for the twentieth time.
I waited for her to say more, too full of helpless pathos to speak. Between sweat and sun, her Nordic blonde hair frizzed out and glowed.
Pog came back out onto the roof with another bucket, this one full of beer in bottles so cold, they shed an icy fog out the top of the bucket. Okay, I take back traitorous slacker.
We helped ourselves.
Amanda said, putting down the sprayer and smearing paint on her forehead, “You have your connector—say you know what his blood smells like, or his jizz or his sweat, or you have a hair sample, or something.” She glanced at me as if to make sure I was taking notes. “You wait until you’re pretty sure he’ll be asleep. And then you tune in to the frequency of that particular sensory cue. It’s like tuning a radio. Exactly like tuning a radio, actually. Your nervous system is amazingly sensitive if you know how to work it.” She drank beer.
Everyone else was watching me.
I concentrated on opening my beer. “And then what?” There was ice in the bottleneck. In that moment I loved Pog.
“And then you’re there. Naked. With him. If you know what his house looks like, you can arrive outside and get in through a crack in the window, like smoke. If you’re in a hurry, you find yourself hovering over him in bed, or bang, just fucking him.”
“How do you know all this? You haven’t been a sex demon very long,” Pog said.
Amanda shrugged, raising her beer bottle. “I did my reading.”
Darkness was lifting away from my mind as I thought about Amanda’s old succubus gag. My chest felt lighter. I filled up with sunlight that didn’t burn.
I chugged the beer in my hand. It went down like nectar.
“You have a tissue sample?” Amanda said.
I nodded.
And nobody said anything else, to my intense relief.
Reg
That night Jee come to my bed. I knew it was for real ’cause she was pissed off.
“Where the hell have you been?” She glared down at me where I was laying on my old steel camp bed, her hands on her sexy hips. She sounded totally disgusted.
I jumped off the bed fast and wrapped my arms around her legs and rubbed my face on her thighs. I was so happy to see her, I coulda cried.
She put her hand on the top of my head. I felt so good. Like she was blessing me. I sobbed against her thighs.
“Reg, what’s the matter?” she said. “Are you locked in here?
Then I heard Ma’s footsteps coming down the basement stairs. I jumped up so fast, I felt faint like my blood pressure was gone all white. I hissed, “Go! Go quick, before she sees you!”
The footsteps quit, so I knew she was down here in the basement—any second now that door would open—
“You hafta go now!” I pushed Jee away hard.
She got a mad look. “Now, Reg—” she started to say.
I leaped up and slapped my hand over her mouth. “Don’t!” I whispered. I hadda reach high—the closer I got, the shorter I got. She seemed to get taller. She looked mad.
I looked over my shoulder at the door, cringing.
And then the door opened.
In the same second, Jee said “Fine,” and I felt her melt outa my hands like nothing.
“What is going on in here?” my Ma said.
“Do I have to switch it out of you?”
Ma been working on me almost an hour and I still din’t tell her nothing. I couldn’t believe myself. Just a few weeks with the girls, and I had the balls to tell Ma no.
I looked her in the eye. “Up to you, Ma.”
She got a mean look, and I knew I was in for it. If she hit me on the back, I could take it. But if she hit my feet—
“Lie down and take off your shoes,” Ma said grimly.
“Awww, Ma. Don’t you want me to get your groceries today? I can’t drive if you hit my feet.”
“I’ve been driving all this time all by myself. Turns out I can do it just fine,” she said. “Some people think they can get along without another person to help them out. We’ll see about that.”
She took the switch off the wall.
I lay down.
It took forever, like it always does.
At first I tried not to think about Jee or the girls or the Lair or the car they let me drive or the things Jee gave me or Pog’s cooking. I was afraid it’d all spill outa my mouth if I thought about it.
Then after a few hard hits I knew I wasn’t gonna tell. I went ahead and let myself think of those things, like Jee’s moans when I done a good foot rub, and a hundred other things. In between hits it was like I went far away. I only hadda come back when the switch hit my foot.
After a while I knew that if I could find a way to go away from Ma again, I would. Because there wasn’t nothing here for me except this pain.
But I din’t tell her nothing. I couldn’t put Jee and the others in danger. Remembering how Jee’s back was all scarred up—her real back, not her supermodel succubus back—and how she cried and cried in my arms, I couldn’t expose her to this.
I let the hits to my feet pop me up into the sky, where I could watch Reg getting beat and think how much I loved Jee.
Eventually Ma threw the switch on the floor and sat on the bed next to me.
Now what?
I braced myself. She din’t have a lot of imagination, but she was persistent, Ma.
The bed was shaking. I realized she was crying. Ma! I turned over and looked at her.
She covered her face and shook all over.
I was about to reach for her and give her a hug, and then I saw the switch on the floor. My feet felt like flaming beachballs. I lay twisted around for a minute, watching her cry.
Then I turned over on my stomach and grabbed the bed frame.
I felt mean.
Ma had feelings too. Her life sucked. All she had was me, and a piss-poor thing to have I was.
But a part of me said No. It wouldn’t do no good, me trying not to be mean, when she was so mean. When she got over the weepies she’d beat me for seeing her cry.
And I din’t care. Boil it all down, I just din’t care.
Funny thing, next day my feet din’t feel too bad. Normally after that I couldn’t walk, and that would of been a day of rest for me. Ma used to give me that if she beat my feet. She knew I hated that worst of all, so she’d let me watch TV or play video games and heal up.
I din’t let on I wasn’t hurting. No point asking for trouble. As it turned out, today she had me cleaning silver in the parlor. That’s the only time I was allowed in the parlor, on account of I broke a china dingbat in there one time when I was little. The sofa and the chair with the gold thread on them had plastic covers. I put newspaper over the coffee table, too. You hadda be careful standing up from the sofa because the chandelier hung kinda low. I pretended it hurt to stand up.
The silver cleaning stuff got under my fingernails. After an hour or so my fingers ached. I din’t say nothing.
She sat in the plastic covered chair and told me off for a while, ungrateful son, weak, stupid, disappointing, worthless maggot male just like your father, blah blah blah.
I kept my eyes on my work.
After a while she got up and stumped off to watch TV.
That gave me time to think.
I wanted to ask her, Ma, what makes you think I want to come back to this? You’re not selling me on mother love and home sweet home.
I thought some more. Jee might hit me one time and she feels so bad, she treats me nice after that. She gives me stuff. The others yell at her for hitting, I know. I heard them. They don’t know she don’t mean nothing by it.
But Ma was different.
I thought about this a l
ong time while I cleaned the silver. Then I cleaned the oven since it’d been a while, plus I din’t hafta stand up for that either. I was thinking about Ma.
I guess my dad and her wasn’t married a long time. Sometimes I wondered if they ever got married. She called me a little bastard sometimes. She meant it in her heart. But it could be true. That had to suck, guy gets you pregnant and runs off, leaving you with a kid you don’t want.
She told me that plenty of times. I ruined her life being born. Just being born is a sin, she used to say. I wondered if her folks ever said that to her. Did her Pa run away on her Ma? Did her Ma beat her? I never met them, if she ever had family.
It was always just us.
That sneaky part of me, the part that told her No and I wouldn’t talk even if she beat me, it said, And if I can work it, it’ll be just her. Because I ain’t sticking around for more of this.
But how could I get away? Ma could find me. She done it once already.
If I went back to the Lair, sooner or later she’d find my girls. And then what?
I shuddered all over.
Thinking about the switch hitting my feet yesterday, I felt something inside me get hard and cold. She’s not touching my girls.
Jee
Beth was the one who barged into my bedroom. I had no idea how long I’d been in there. Except I was starving.
“Jee, honey, are you okay?” she said, looming over me between the light from the venetian blinds.
I burrowed under my pillow. “Go away.”
I felt her sit down on the bed. Dreading what would come next, I stiffened. Yep, here it came. Her hand fell lightly on my back under the blanket.
“Jee, honey—”
I growled. The sound came straight out of my nightmares into my throat.
Then she pulled the pillow off my head.
“No!” I yelled, pulling the blankets up, but she turned me over by my shoulder and light poured over my face. I squinted against it, trying to glare at her.
Beth got a good look at me. She gasped.
I was so miserable I didn’t even care what she saw. I filled my lungs and yelled, “Go away and leave me alone!”
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 32
