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

by Jennifer Stevenson

  Amanda was a big girl. Anybody tripping over her would be sorry. Cricket grinned to herself and wriggled down in her lawn chair.

  Amanda practiced broad jumps like a frog. With each jump she landed on the wooden basketball deck with a thundering thump.

  Cricket’s aunt would have been aghast to see her do that, too.

  All of a sudden Cricket couldn’t sit still anymore. She got up and went to her own spot on the deck, plenty far away from Amanda, squatted like a frog, and jumped. That was fun! She tried it again and nearly went over on her nose. Boy, this demon body was sure good for frog-jumping. She jumped and jumped and jumped.

  She slipped finally and landed on her tailbone, laughing, breathless.

  Amanda was watching from the edge of the deck. She was smiling again. “Nice work, grasshopper.”

  “They named me Cricket when I was seven,” she gasped. “But I’ll take a promotion.”

  “C’mon.” Amanda walked over and gave her a hand up from the floor. “I’ll show you how to prep and dry buds.”

  AMANDA

  Cricket chattered all the way to the back of the factory floor. I’d known the silence was too good to last. I was heartened to note however that she’d quieted down a bit in the presence of the weed. Was it THC working in the air, or did she just like nature? I had no time to puzzle this out. Cricket was fairly hopping alongside me. They’d named her well. Chirp chirp chirp.

  “Do the plants die in the wintertime?”

  “These plants stay alive. They’ve been crossbred to live year-round if you keep them warm.”

  “That was fun, jumping around on the floor. What’s it good for?”

  “Develops fast-twitch muscle in the upper and lower legs.”

  “Can’t you just think up some fast-twitch muscle? Like Beth does when she changes her face? I’m so glad I learned how to change my face finally. That was fun.”

  I shook my head. “I can make my body become anything I want it to be, but I still have to learn how to use it. Athleticism is about practice. Learned habits. It’s a process, not a goal.”

  “Who’s your basketball team? Is it these girls? Who do you play against?”

  I’d forgotten Cricket’s ability to ask tough questions. I took the harvest into the drying room that I’d converted from a skanky old sauna, and put it on the bench. “Dunno. Depends on the team, I guess. I kind of think—” I stopped.

  “I think they’ll think you got what you wanted just because they’re playing basketball here in the Lair with you. But you want more.” She looked suddenly shrewd and sweet at the same time. “You want to compete.”

  Most of the time she was like a little kid, all bounce and dumb questions. And then this. Shit, she was sneaky.

  “Well, of course,” I said.

  And sometimes she was just a sledgehammer. “Can you get up a game with a local team maybe? Chicago’s full of, like, amateur adult teams.”

  I shook my head. “Wouldn’t work.” I wouldn’t even bring it up to Team Slut, not because I was afraid that they’d fight me on it—they might not—but because I was afraid I wouldn’t be strong enough to resist the temptation. “We’re demons,” I said firmly. “It wouldn’t be fair. We’re superhuman. We shouldn’t compete against mortals.”

  “Well, can you compete with other demons?”

  I opened my mouth to say No and stopped. “I don’t see how.”

  “What if the other girls get tired of basketball? I guess you could join a health club. Racquetball. Golf?” she added, making a face.

  The drying room got smaller.

  I hunched a shoulder. “I like team sports.”

  For a long minute, she eyed me. I didn’t like this silence any better than the chatter. “And this is your team.”

  I don’t make friends easily. If I had been able to say that out loud, it wouldn’t have been true.

  Last night I had realized how much I needed my team. Now the whole truth rolled over me. I was—oh no—dread seeped up out of my gut—I was happy here.

  Back in my Army brat days, that had been a sure sign that Dad was about to be transferred.

  But Dad was dead and buried. And I was here.

  With an effort, I shook off the dread.

  My glance fell on the box of buds. Picking up each by its stem with my fingertips, I started setting them out on a sheet of clean wax paper. “Shut up and watch. I’ll show you how you dry marijuana.”

  Cricket was quiet while I snipped off the bigger, yellowing leaves, then the little leaves, then hung the buds up with clothes pins, keeping them separated so that the resin extruding from them wouldn’t stick them together and make them dry unevenly. Eventually, when I knew she was really listening, I started explaining the process.

  “Keep the air circulating, but don’t let it blow directly on them.” I turned on the tiny oscillating fan on the floor. “I run the sauna heat super low, on an automated ten-minutes-on, two-hours-off cycle. Several times during drying I let it cool way down, to sweat the buds. That means,” I added, when she didn’t pipe up, “that moisture deep in the bud and stem has a chance to seep outward as the exterior dries. The slower it dries, the less danger of mold. Mold will ruin the harvest.”

  I realized Cricket was taking this all in the same way she’d taken in the growing plants and the exercises. She had two modes: mouth open, or senses open. When she was looking, listening, smelling, and feeling, she was her most interesting.

  I had a sudden flash on my dad. Dad fixing the car, and me squatting like a mouse in the corner, watching everything. Come here, stupid. Make yourself useful. He’d hold out a wrench or a can of lug nuts, and I’d get to come closer and make myself useful.

  A quick glance told me that Cricket wasn’t going to ask questions—but she was dying to.

  “I’m only taking part of each plant this time because I’m running an experiment. All the documentation says that early-harvested buds yield a bright, heady high. You leave the bud on the plant longer if you want a heavy snoozer buzz.”

  Still Cricket didn’t speak. Her eyes glittered, though.

  “Most of the good stuff is in the resin. Here.” I snapped on the big light. “Take a look.”

  She came closer. I could hear her heart pounding. This stuff really excited her.

  I passed her the hand-held magnifying glass. “Hold the bud by the stem. Now look at it through the glass. See the trichomes? They look like tiny, clear, long-stemmed mushrooms. That’s resin extruded from the flower. In time, the resin will turn cloudy. Then it’ll start to turn color—amber or reddish. That’s a sign of a more mature bud.” I explained the harvesting process, the drying process, the precise temperature variations, post-dry processing, and how we used small leaves off the buds for brownies. I explained cultivation. I let her taste the dabs of fresh resin stuck to the collecting tub. Finally I let her cherry-pick which buds were ready to come upstairs, based on trichome color. We put the user-ready buds in the plastic tub for transport.

  Cricket didn’t say a damned thing the whole time. It was totally bearable.

  Eventually Pog texted me that breakfast was ready. I took the buds and Cricket upstairs. We stuffed ourselves on sandwiches made of french toast with bacon or ham slices inside, stuck together with maple syrup and extra butter, then re-battered and fried a second time. Pog and Reg must have been working since dawn, because the oven was stacked full of them. Everybody had a sixpack of craft stout or porter brewed with coffee in front of them, in honor of it being breakfast.

  Beth was making a list on a yellow pad. While we ate, she bombarded Cricket with questions about a million lists for the party. When the sandwiches were gone, I glanced at Cricket. “You okay?”

  “Ugh,” Cricket said.

  “Want to get out of here?”

  She nodded. “I got a date. You can come, too.”

  Cricket and I walked through the pouring rain to a dark bar on Clark Street, about half a mile north of Wrigley Field. It wasn’t a sl
ut kind of place. Jee would have turned up her nose. The neon liquor signs behind the bar lit everything a little greenish. The clientele ignored us. The smells of beer and a wonky sewer set up a tingling in my poor abused sinuses.

  Cricket was wearing her sixty-year-old face and one of Beth’s hand-me-down dresses. On Beth it was retro cute. On Cricket, with her hair a pure white, chaotic Jewfro today, it was sharecropper’s-mom.

  The bartender scampered out under the flap to greet us.

  “Lauren honey! Mwah!” Cricket gave the bartender a long hug.

  “You look great, Big Squeak.” Maybe because it was dark in the bar, Lauren made no other comment about how young Cricket looked today. I figured Cricket was shielding Lauren from guessing anything about her new demon life.

  “You too, cookie. You staying out of trouble?”

  “More or less,” Lauren said. I examined her with interest. This would be the rebel great-granddaughter who sided with Cricket against her mother.

  “Well, that sucks.” Cricket gave her another hug and stepped back to introduce us. “Amanda, this is Fistin’ Grey, alias Lauren Wardner, my nogoodnik descendent on roller skates.”

  I looked down. Lauren had on sneakers.

  “She keeps saying this is a dyke bar, but I never see any dykes in here,” Cricket complained.

  I cringed. The only two customers were wearing plaid shirts, but they seemed to be landscaping employees, judging by the pungent smell of man-sweat and the wet cut grass on their boots.

  Lauren laughed. “It’s like this by day, it’s a dyke bar by night, and on bout weekends, the derby girls come in here for the afterparty. Have a beer. To what do I owe the honor?”

  We sat on stools at the bar. Lauren served us bottled beers with ice in the necks. Bliss. I noticed she didn’t ask Cricket anything about the rumored Brazil cruise or wintering in St. Thomas or her escape from the Loriston Home.

  “I’m throwing a party. You’re invited.” Cricket sounded more cheerful about the Celebration of Life than she had so far. “I gotta get your mom off my case. My roomie thinks this party’ll do it.”

  “Really?” Lauren squinted at me. I returned the favor. She was in her early twenties, tough-looking, with a lean face and big eyes and big sleeve-tattoos coming up big biceps onto her shoulders. Something off about her pulled at me. As she studied me back, her expression said, You too?

  Me too what, dammit? People think I’m dumb. I’m not dumb. I’m slow.

  “Oh, not this roommate. Different one.” Cricket sucked some beer past the ice in her long-neck.

  Lauren kept eyeing me, as if she wondered if I’d figured something out. That got me worried. With Cricket, there was plenty to figure out. She was Pandora’s Box of Crazy.

  Lauren said, “Mom’s on a rampage. She got my uncles into it.”

  “Poop,” Cricket said deeply. “This gaga thing?”

  “I’m guessing.”

  “She just wants me back in the Loriston Home, where they’ll spy on me for her.”

  “Duh,” Lauren said around her beer bottle’s neck.

  “That reminds me, do you want your grandfather’s cufflinks? I didn’t take much out of the Home. Now I’m wondering why I took anything. Maybe you’d like ’em? It’s the gold and opal pair.”

  Lauren’s eyes lit up. “Ook ook!”

  Cricket smiled. “They’re yours. So what’s with your derby wife?”

  I thought, Ah, that’ll be it. She’s gay.

  They went off into a sprightly conversation about people with ridiculous names like Dum-Dum Round and Leaning Power of Lisa and Anaesthesia Steele. I turned on my stool and watched the rain pour down outside the dirty window.

  People were getting wet out there. Three middle-aged white guys in suits were standing in the actual rain, without umbrellas, looking at the door of our bar.

  Suddenly I got a bad feeling. “Uh, Cricket?”

  “What?” She turned away from her conversation. “What’s wrong?”

  I pointed. “Know them?”

  She stiffened.

  I stood up.

  Lauren said, “Merde.”

  Cricket stared out the window, shrinking and aging by the second.

  I elbowed her. “Dial it back up.” When she glanced at me, I bent to her ear. “Not so old or short,” I whispered. “You want more power here.”

  She cackled. “Cookie, you don’t know so much.”

  “Last chance. You want to slip out the back?” Lauren said tensely.

  I felt Cricket tighten a little beside me. “Hell, no. This is perfect. Although if you have an office or something—because I think they’re about to—yup.” Without my demon senses, I’d have thought she was worried. But I knew better. She had just put her demon powers on standby. It was like hearing a shell snap into a shotgun.

  The three suits marched in and cornered us against the bar.

  The landscaper customers took one look at them and, abandoning their beers, sidled to the door and left.

  The suit on the left nodded. “Bubbe.” He looked at Lauren with distaste and said, “Keeping disreputable company as usual, I see.”

  “You’re so hard to please, Uncle Dave,” Lauren murmured in a sultry voice, and primped her hair, a gesture that showed off her muscular, tattooed arms. “Don’t you like my outfit?”

  “If you must do this, can’t you dress like a lady?” he grumbled uncomfortably.

  He ignored me. This was a mistake, but he was a long way from finding that out. I limbered up my succubus mojo, grateful for once that I’d so often witnessed Jee taking down guys just like this.

  “Can we talk?” the suit on the right said in an overloud voice.

  “You’ve never had a problem before. It was your brother who lisped,” Cricket said, reaching out and patting another suit on the shoulder. I blinked. That guy was almost identical to the speaker. “Amanda, these are my grandsons with no manners, David and Jonah. Who’s your little friend?” She stuck her hand out to number three.

  Suit number three was shorter and older than the grandson twins, maybe sixty. Like theirs, his face was a professional-white-guy power mask, but he flushed when he shook Cricket’s hand. I glanced at her. Her air of suppressed glee told me she had sent a succubus shock into him. Since she looked about seventy at the moment, older than he was, I knew he must be freaking out just a bit. Guys from the entitlement zone do not lust after women their own age. Union rules.

  “This is Dr. Novotny, from the University of Chicago. He’d like to talk to you,” I-think-David said, still ignoring me.

  Dr. Novotny sent him a snotty glance. “I’ll speak for myself,” he said curtly. “Can we be private a moment, Mrs. Immerzang?”

  “This is the gaga thing, isn’t it?” Cricket said. “I get it. You ask me who’s the President right now and mark me down if I say I think he’s a dope. Sure, why not? Can we use the office, cookie?” she said to Lauren.

  Lauren was bug-eyed, as I’m sure I was. “Uh.”

  Cricket grabbed Dr. Novotny by the sleeve and he went still. She must have hit him with another succubus jolt. “We’ll be in the back room,” she said to me. “Have fun with the boys. They’re poops. They could use a lesson in fun.”

  Wait, was she telling me to seduce her grandsons? I sent her a frankly skeptical What? glare.

  Lauren picked up her phone.

  “I betcha after that gay-hate charge when they were in law school, they learned their lesson,” Cricket said wickedly.

  “Bubbe!” the silent brother burst out.

  “I shouldn’t have paid the settlement for you. Look at the gratitude I get.” Cricket tugged at Dr. Novotny’s sleeve. “C’mon, sonny, let’s get the inquisition going here.” She led him out the back of the barroom. “Are you any relation to Sheldon Novotny? Back in the Depression his dad had a chicken farm out on the edge of Skokie, and Sheldon sold chickenshit by the wheelbarrow for people’s gardens. My aunt used to buy it off of him....”

  Her voic
e grew fainter. I dialed back my demon hearing, folded my arms, and leaned against the bar, wondering how important it was to Cricket’s plan—quite obviously she had a plan—that I get these guys off-balance. Or just get them off. They were expensively dressed and tall and broad and graying perfectly at the temples and just begging for an attitude adjustment.

  David continued to ignore me.

  Lauren put down her phone and said, “Drinks, gentlemen?” in a cool voice.

  David ignored her, too. Jonah said gratefully, “Beer.”

  I decided David was the force behind this move today. Apparently he didn’t have a lot of morals. He did seem to have homophobia, which I could use.

  Jonah, I sensed, was a bit looser.

  So I chatted with Lauren, trying not to look as tense as I felt, using body language that suggested we were pretty friendly.

  I murmured, “Pretend I’m gay. It’ll bother them.”

  “Uncle Dave, really, but yeah,” Lauren murmured. “Let’s.” We put our heads together like schoolgirls and looked back over our shoulders at the twins now and then. Me, I looked at their crotches. You’d think a guy in barrier clothing would be immune to that trick, but nope. Personally I thought they covered their dicks up with business suits because otherwise someone could tell when they had an erection.

  But they couldn’t hide an erection from me. My demon laydar was never wrong. David was definitely feeling it. Jonah not so much.

  I’d seen Beth make a guy come in his pants with a look. Normally I wasn’t that mean. Today, I wanted to leave scars on these guys.

  “The stuffy one’s got a cob up his butt and another in his crotch,” I murmured not-very-quietly to Lauren. “But his brother is trying to distance himself. Can we play them off against each other?”

  Hunched over his beer, two barstools away, Jonah twitched.

  “David’s the bigger asshole,” she conceded. “But Jonah always does what David tells him to.” I could smell the rage on her. I wanted to scar her uncles. She wanted them dead. “For our purposes, they’re a single organism.” Whoa, big vocabulary for a bartender. Her style screamed deliberate underachiever. What was off about her? Playing along with the lesbo thing, she was petting my arm, which made me even more nervous.