Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5

by Jennifer Stevenson

  But she was looking at my bed now. “Jee, your sheets are soaking wet. Have you—” She looked at my face again, and her eyes widened. “Wait—who—Jee? Is that you?”

  I stiffened every muscle in my body. I wanted to throw myself on her and tear her to pieces, or just die. I settled for glaring.

  Beth seemed suddenly older and heavier and tireder. She pulled the covers back and looked my whole body up and down. She said quietly, “If you don’t eat something you’ll never fit back into your pretty clothes.” Then she pulled the sheets back over me and went out, closing the door.

  I rolled over and grabbed the pillow and screamed into it. That hurt my throat. Apparently I’d been screaming a lot since I ran back to the Lair and slammed into my room. Possibly in my sleep. I threw the sheet off myself and looked at what Beth had seen.

  Ugh.

  I got out of bed and dug around for a bathrobe I kept for this kind of emergency. Then I sneaked into the hall. My thighs rubbed together. My boobs felt like giant bladders on my chest.

  The smell of baked cheese and potatoes almost made me run into the kitchen, but I stood at the door and listened.

  “—think she’ll come?”

  “She’s probably starving,” Pog said. I heard the scrape of steel on a baking pan. What had she made? I sniffed, and my stomach growled like a weretiger.

  “She was all small and roly-poly and brown and shriveled,” Beth was saying, as if Pog hadn’t spoken. “There were dark patches and scars all over her. Her—her face. Her eye. One of her eyes was all messed up. Pog, is that who she was? What did they do to her?”

  “Look in your mirror,” Amanda said, and I felt a spurt of satisfaction. Beth’s total lack of sensitivity had got to Amanda, even.

  Beth shut up.

  I realized I would expire from hunger if I stood there a minute longer. Plus, if I went into the kitchen, Beth might shut up.

  The damned bathrobe wouldn’t tie all the way around me. I was that fat. I pulled myself together and grew myself taller, anyway, and smoothed my skin out. They wouldn’t have the satisfaction of seeing what Beth had seen.

  I swept into the kitchen.

  Pog put a bowl on the table at my place. Then she scooped up some orange and white gooey glop out of a casserole pan and plopped it in the bowl. It looked like dog vomit and smelled like heaven.

  I didn’t even ask. Pog handed me a big spoon and I dug in.

  Cheese. Potatoes. Onions? Cream and butter both, mmmmmm. I shut my eyes and moaned, and then I got busy with the spoon.

  Nobody talked. We just shoveled in the goodies.

  The casserole was almost empty, and I looked longingly at it.

  And Pog took another one out of the oven.

  Had she known I would get up today? Had they decided to send Beth in after me?

  I sneaked a look at Beth. She still looked like somebody’s mom.

  She’d come to get me so I wouldn’t miss lunch.

  Was this what it was like to be born with an American mom? You yell at her and she just tells you to come and eat?

  “What is this stuff?” I said, when I had begun to feel less like a shark on a diet.

  “It’s a tump recipe from Beth.” Pog said. “Of course I doubled the butter and cream and tripled the cheese.”

  I looked at the second casserole pan. There wasn’t much left. The others were looking at it, too.

  We all turned our eyes to Pog.

  She burst out laughing. “Gotcha.” Then she pulled a third pan out of the oven.

  “Watch out. This one’s got chunks of sweet Italian sausage in it.” We all moaned then. “You were right,” she said to Beth. “It’s sickeningly easy.”

  Beth was scooping glop out of the new casserole dish. “You were right, too. It’s way better with all the extra butter. I’m so glad I don’t have to cut down on the fat anymore.”

  The sausage bits were just the right size to fit on the spoon with plenty of cheesey potatoes.

  Everyone else was drinking coffee, but Pog had put a beer in front of me. I finally stopped shoveling and drank. I saw the logic. Way more calories in beer. As I drained the bottle she put another one on the table.

  “Just gimme the six,” I said, embarrassed to be waited on like an invalid.

  Everybody seemed to relax. I realized I’d said barely a word since I came in.

  I tightened the belt on my bathrobe. I could tie it, now. Food was doing its work.

  “Okay, what happened?” Pog said, and I knew I wouldn’t get away with silence this time. She reached over and touched my chin. “He’s our houseboy too.”

  I gave her a wary side-eye. Realizing that the waiting-hand-and-foot-on-Jee part of our day had ended, I fetched two more sixpacks to the table and sat down, relieved to note that my thighs no longer rubbed together as I walked.

  Everyone took a beer. Bottle caps cracked and hissed.

  “Okay,” I said, after a cold swig. I told them how I’d hunted up some of Reg’s toenail parings where he’d thrown them at the bedroom wastebasket and missed. I’d used the method Amanda had described. It seemed to work just fine. One minute I was in my bedroom, uh, thinking about Reg. The next, I was standing over him in this grotty-smelling underground room. As Amanda had warned, I was naked.

  He was asleep on a saggy little twin mattress on a rusty-framed bed that must have been eighty years old. The air conditioning had the basement freezing cold. His blanket didn’t quite cover his feet, although he’d folded himself as small as possible under it on the narrow bed. The room, I could see once my eyes adjusted to the gloom, was full of junk—posters of Chewbacca and killer robots, a computer with a big chunky monitor, a flat monitor connected up for video games, open metal shelves piled with clothes you couldn’t give away, worn-out shoes, Costco-sized packs of cleaning products, pieces of bicycles, and bags full of dog food pellets. The carpet stank like dogshit, literally.

  I’d barely had time to take all this in. I’d pulled the blanket off him and seen a kid, maybe sixteen. His face and back were covered with pimples, and his hair flopped into his face.

  As I described this, Beth looked meaningfully at Pog and Amanda, and I knew she was reminding them that I had regressed in my room.

  My voice faltered for a moment.

  “Well?” Beth said.

  I hunched a shoulder. “I woke him up. He seemed glad to see me at first.” I would never forget the feel of his arms wrapped tight around my legs and his face hot against my thighs. “But then this woman came down into the basement and he shushed me and he—he threw me out.” The memory choked me. “Maybe he was so scared that I caught it from him. I went invisible, instinctively. I guess she’s his mother. She didn’t seem so fucking deadly to me,” I grumbled.

  “How did he throw you out?” Amanda said.

  “I don’t know,” I said slowly. “It felt like he pushed me out. Like his fear was strong enough to shove. Huh.”

  I’d spent thirty-six hours thinking about things like Reg chasing me away and me wondering why he would prefer that stinky hole of a room and that horrible old woman to me, rejecting us, rejecting what we’d had—whatever that was. I went over everything we’d said and done with each other since he arrived at the Lair, and felt worse by the minute.

  It hadn’t occurred to me to wonder how he’d managed to eject me from that room.

  “Did you leave then?” Amanda said patiently. I realized they were still looking at me.

  “That’s not all.” My head began to throb. “I hung around, but I stayed invisible. First she bitched him out. Wanted to know if he had let friends come into his room, and what was that smell—do you think I smell?”

  “Yes,” they chorused.

  “You always smell,” Amanda said.

  “Perfume usually,” Pog said.

  I sent them a hate look. “Yeah, well, she ragged on him hard. She put him down and yelled at him and guilt-tripped him and threatened him.” My throat was tightening.

&
nbsp; They waited.

  “And then she—she beat him. With this stick like thin bamboo, on his feet. He just—took it. He lay there and took it.” This was the hard part. I swallowed. “And when she stopped hitting his feet she started crying, and he looked at her, I swear to god, like he felt sorry for her.”

  Beth made a sound in her throat.

  I felt myself falling apart. “I got out of there.” I covered my face with my hands. “He just took it! He loves her. He won’t leave her no matter what she does.”

  I felt an arm around my shoulders. Beth said soothingly, “Of course he loves her. She’s his mother. You don’t get over that right away. Oh, honey, don’t cry. You’ll see. I think he liked it here.”

  “No, you don’t see,” I sobbed angrily behind my hands. “He likes it that I hit him. I’m just as bad as she is! Nobody should hit him! I hate myself!” I blurted, aghast to hear those words coming out of myself.

  I felt apart completely. Beth cuddled me and soothed me. Pog ferried hot coffee and liquor to the table in alternate doses. I went from sobs to hiccups to slow, bitter, acid tears, struggling for breath. I was so grateful for Beth at that moment that I forgave her for being such a pain in the ass and stupid all the time.

  Eventually Amanda spoke. “Did you leave my tracer there?”

  I hiccupped one last time and nodded. “First thing. You were right, I arrived naked. I had the tracer in my mouth. I spit it out and put it in his shoe. I think it’s a shoe he’s using, because it was on the floor. That room is full of dog crap but it’s super tidy,” I said, remembering. “Huh. I guess that’s not just me yelling about tidiness. God knows when he’ll walk again,” I added darkly. “In the east they call that bastinado. Beating the soles of the feet? It hurts like a motherfucker, and you can’t walk for days.” I hitched my breath and blew a ton of snot into a paper towel.

  “So what’s the plan?” Pog said in her executive voice.

  Beth’s arm tightened around my shoulders. “We’ll get him back, honey,” she said.

  I’d had enough of her mommy-takes-charge. I shrugged her off. I snarled, “I could go in there and rip her throat out.”

  “Inadvisable,” said Amanda crisply. “He’d be the first person suspected if she died or disappeared.”

  “She dies,” I said stubbornly.

  “Is he going to love you for doing that?” Beth said in an annoyingly gentle voice.

  I glared at her for a long inbreath and a short sigh. “Probably not.”

  “You could get him to kill her,” Pog said thoughtfully. “We could help out with the body. Hey, we’ve got resources.” We certainly had. We’d got rid of her dead pimp, once upon a time.

  Beth said, “Yeah, but then he’s got her death on his conscience. That’ll mess up the clean break. Trust me, I know about clean breaks. You want them as morally simple as possible.”

  I looked at Beth with renewed respect. “Plus,” I realized now, “it could give him nightmares for life.”

  Nobody looked at me after I said this.

  “So we can’t kill her and he can’t kill her,” Pog summed up. Then she stabbed me through the heart with her next words. “You have to admit, though, if he doesn’t reject her himself, on his own decision, he’ll never be free. He has to leave on his own.”

  “He won’t,” I said. I tasted bile. “I saw his face right after she beat his feet. He loves her. He felt sorry for her. She’s got him by the balls. She’s his mother. I’m—we’re just some teen rebel fantasy come to life. He’ll never leave her.”

  I realized that I was living my teen rebel fantasy too. Delilah had showed up in that Thai brothel just when I was at an age where, beatings or no beatings, I was beginning to fight back. I’d known perfectly well that they wouldn’t keep a disobedient girl. My rage would absolutely certainly have got me dead, if Delilah hadn’t recruited me to the Regional Office. And I had been so angry, I hadn’t cared. The worse the beatings got, the more rebellious I’d felt. Even though I’d known it was fatal to fight back.

  Those days weren’t so very long ago. Couple of years.

  Suddenly I saw it from Reg’s perspective.

  Reg’s mom had had him a lot longer than the slavers had me.

  Reg was only with us three weeks.

  Would the memory of life in the Lair—with me—be enough to tempt him? What could I offer him to compete with his lifetime of Mommy Dearest?

  Well, I could promise I’d never hit him again.

  Yeah, and he’d believe me why? I’d turned into a tiger and chewed him until he bled. In my sleep.

  I stared bleakly at eleven empty beer bottles on the table. “It’s hopeless.”

  But I didn’t feel totally hopeless any more. I had my roomies on my side.

  “First thing we do,” Pog was saying as I came out of my black reverie, “we locate that house.”

  “Done,” Amanda said without looking up from her laptop. She read off an address in Berwyn. “My tracer is working.”

  Pog nodded at her. “Next, find out what we can about the mother.”

  “Already on it,” Amanda said.

  Beth brightened. “We could buy him off her.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said, looking at her sourly to hide my sudden hope.

  “You’d be surprised how fast love dissolves when people realize that money means more than they do. Even to blood relatives,” Beth said darkly.

  I remembered that her daughter had double-crossed her to her ex-husband, until she found Beth’s purse full of half a million dollars’-worth of diamonds.

  “Besides,” I said, “how’s that going to get him to reject her?”

  “Get him to buy himself off her,” Amanda said. “He’s making more than we are.” She didn’t sound bitter. The Regional Office is pervasively sexist. They couldn’t know that we’d reduced their onsite manager to a houseboy. Reg still got paid better than we did.

  “That’s not a bad idea,” I said slowly, thinking it over. “But if we go over there and hand him the money, won’t he just hand it to her?”

  Pog looked from one to another of us. I could see the wheels turning in her head. “Maybe.”

  Meanwhile it was time for us to make some money ourselves. The four of us got dressed. Of course it took me longer. It always takes me longer. I like to look like a million dollars—literally. I want every guy who lusts after me to realize he just can’t afford me.

  So I didn’t realize they were talking about me down in the garage until I came downstairs. I was tricked out extra-special. Perfect makeup, perfect hair, five-ounce spandex dress on my six-foot body, nine-hundred-dollar tall strappy shoes, diamonds on my fingers and in my ears and around my neck, diamonds worth more than most lawyers make in a year. I needed to buy me some more diamonds. Tonight I would score big and get a record bonus.

  When I got to the van, they stood there and looked at me.

  Pog cleared her throat. “You can’t come.”

  I ignored that. I went to get in the side door of the van.

  Amanda moved to block me.

  I looked from her to Pog. “What?” I said to Pog. I saw it in her face. “Why not?”

  Amanda didn’t say anything.

  Pog looked uncomfortable. My buddy was hanging me out to dry.

  Beth said gently, “Because you’re under age, honey.”

  I exploded. “I’ve been under age all this time! You didn’t say a word when I was shagging the plumbers! You were fine with me jerk-whispering Reg. What the fuck is this?”

  “You’re fifteen,” Beth says.

  “I know I’m fifteen, dammit!”

  They just looked at me.

  “I was thirteen when Delilah recruited me. I got my new body right away and I turned tricks downtown for almost two years. And you,” I swung around on Pog, “you tag-teamed with me the whole time! Now suddenly I’m too young?”

  Pog frowned. She didn’t look at me while she said, “Jee, you left Thailand to get away from the busi
ness. Okay, granted, working for the Regional Office in the last two years, maybe you’ve become comfortable with the business. But then what happened? What’s going on?”

  They weren’t kidding. I would actually have to talk my way out of this. Cold fear flew over me.

  Stifling my rage, I explained, “I left Thailand because they were gonna put me in a snuff movie. I was getting hormonal and mouthy and I finally realized how angry I was that I’d been done like that—enslaved at five when the whole fucking world outlawed this kind of thing, and somehow it was still happening, and it was happening to me. Nobody on American TV got done like I was. What made me think I deserved to live like they do on TV, I can’t imagine, but I saved my life by signing with Delilah.”

  The fact was, I didn’t know what was going on with me right now. I couldn’t explain. I couldn’t even think about it. It happened when I was asleep, and I didn’t even remember when I woke up. I felt breathless. My teamies were turning on me.

  I poked Pog in the chest. “I don’t give a damn about my pretty pink little pussy and I never did. The sex part didn’t bother me at all.”

  She said nothing. Maybe she knew that was only kind of true.

  “What do I have to do to prove I’m old enough for this?” I yelled. “Dammit! Don’t change the rules on me because you turn out to have middle class morals!” Desperately I added the weakest argument. “I thought you worked for hell!”

  “Question,” Amanda said.

  I turned on her. “Well?”

  This was so unfair. Amanda didn’t even have emotions. Why did she care?

  “Shall I take the Cone of Silence off your bedroom?”

  She was asking me if I was still crying and screaming in my sleep.

  The panic rose up in my throat. I hunched a shoulder. “How should I know? I sleep through it all.”

  “Except when Reg is here,” said Miss Tactful.

  “Shut up!” I screamed, suddenly as hormonal as I’d been at thirteen. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

  I blundered past them, ran upstairs to my room, and slammed the door.

  I paced my room, hyperventilating and screaming into the magical anechoic chamber Amanda had made for me.