He wasn’t sure how to explain it, or even if he should. Calladia had made it clear he was the villain in her story; she wouldn’t care about his feelings of loss.
But who else could he talk to about this? The people he’d known over his long life had been sorted into neat categories: ally, enemy, entertainment, prey. No one knew better than a bargainer how easy it was to manipulate feelings of intimacy and love, which was why effective bargainers eschewed close friendships or other emotional entanglements.
Calladia might not be his friend, but she’d seen him in a vulnerable place and helped him. And fundamentally, he wanted to talk to her.
“I felt an emotion,” he said, pushing the words past his tight throat. “But I don’t know why.”
Calladia cocked her head, studying him. Then she reached out and touched his elbow. “Let’s walk while you tell me more.”
Astaroth had been bracing himself for her anger at the mention of what had transpired with Mariel. A relieved breath puffed out of him, and his shoulders relaxed. “It’s odd,” he said as they started walking. Her touch had been brief, but he still felt the echo of it against his skin. “It feels like I’ve lost something. There’s this hollowness inside.”
“What do you think you lost?”
Astaroth grimaced. “I don’t know. It’s just a sense of something missing.” Or someone, he realized. Ozroth had chosen humanity over everything Astaroth had taught him, and he wasn’t sure how to feel about that. He made a frustrated sound. “Never mind. Talking about feelings is obnoxious.”
“If you think this is obnoxious, you should try therapy sometime,” Calladia said with a lopsided smile. “It’s great but also terrible.”
He scoffed. “No therapist has the time to unpack six centuries of baggage, and proper demons don’t need therapy anyway.”
Except he wasn’t a proper demon, was he? He was an anomaly. A hybrid who had somehow risen high in demon society before being brought very low.
Calladia dug into the sore spot mercilessly. “What do you think counts as a proper demon?”
“A strong, full-blooded one.” Shame spiked at the reminder he was less than. “Feelings are a waste of time. All they do is complicate things or ruin a decent stratagem.”
Calladia blew a raspberry. “Spare me the high council propaganda. Emotions are important.”
“Not when the rest of your species doesn’t feel them half so intensely,” he said. “What kind of aberration am I, focusing on pointless emotions that won’t help me accomplish my goals?”
Calladia was fussing with her braid, mussing up the strands further, and he wanted to smack her hand away, brush her hair out, and re-braid it properly. “You say aberration like it’s a bad thing,” she said, forehead furrowed in a contemplative expression.
He scoffed. “How can an aberration ever be considered a good thing?”
“Being different is just that: being different. It isn’t a crime.” Her voice rose as she continued. “My mother would say I’m an aberration, too, but do I give a shit? Absolutely not. And you shouldn’t either.”
By the way she was nearly shouting, Astaroth suspected she might, in fact, give a shit. He remembered the tense conversation he’d overheard at her childhood home. “You think your mother expects you to be exactly like her?”
Calladia kicked a rubbish bin at the edge of the curb. “She expects more than that. She wants a daughter, heiress, campaign manager, and hype woman all in one. Pearls and pantsuits and lipstick and all that bloody nonsense.” She apparently realized what she’d said the moment Astaroth did, because she barreled on. “And now your Britishisms are rubbing off on me—great. The point is, I’m not bloody polite or scheming or diplomatic or whatever-the-fuck-else she expects. I’m rude and loud and too masculine for her standards, and I’m a disappointment to the family who will never make anything of myself if I don’t fall in line and become the perfect little Cunnington cunt.”
Apparently he’d hit a nerve. He liked it though. He wanted to hear her rant about anything and everything, especially if it meant she was opening up to him.
Opening up to him? Lucifer, had he really just thought that? In practical terms he’d experienced less than a day of being half human, and already he was growing mawkish.
Calladia cleared her throat and yanked on her braid again. “Anyway, that’s not important. Back to your situation.”
Astaroth wasn’t going to let her get away with that misdirection. He fumbled for a response to make her feel better. “I think you’re perfect just the way you are.”
Calladia stopped walking. Her head snapped around. “What did you say?”
That had been too close to a confession of his growing infatuation. “Well, ah . . .” How to salvage this so she didn’t sense his glaring, Calladia-sized vulnerability? “Obviously not perfect, perfect,” he clarified. “You aren’t some goddess, even if you’d be an excellent model for a statue of Athena.” Wait, not better. He rushed onward. “What I mean to say is, you may be rude and loud, but some people find that interesting, and any talk of being too masculine is nonsense springing from a strict sense of the gender binary most species have moved beyond. You are wholly yourself, and that in itself is perfect, because anything else would be a lie.”
He lapsed into awkward silence. That had been way too much. Any moment now she was going to smack him upside the head and tell him he was the worst.
Calladia looked shell-shocked. “Wow,” she said. “That was actually really sweet.”
“It’s not sweet,” Astaroth hurried to say. “You have many less-admirable qualities.” He tried to come up with one. “You talk in your sleep, for instance. Horrific.”
Calladia laughed and punched him in the shoulder. “Shut up.”
“Gladly.” He’d started to sweat from nerves, so he wiped his forehead as nonchalantly as he could.
“And hey,” Calladia said, shifting from foot to foot. Her eyes darted before meeting his. “Thank you. For being sweet.”
“Yeah, well, don’t count on it. I’m still a horrible, irredeemable monster.”
“Of course,” she said, looping her arm through his. “I wouldn’t expect anything less.” When Astaroth stared at where she was touching him, Calladia rolled her eyes. “Come on, you secret softie. Let’s find a place to stay.”
Astaroth let himself be towed along, marveling that somehow, despite having little practice with honesty, he’d managed to say the exact right thing.
* * *
“This is it?” Astaroth looked skeptically toward the canopy of a very thick, very tall tree. Rungs were hammered into the wood, and a structure was perched halfway up, mostly obscured by branches.