“Awake, armed, and dangerous,” Astaroth said.
The griffin let out a series of screeches. It took Calladia a moment to realize they were laughing. “Frieeeeeeeeends,” Tansy repeated, then burst into a rapid-fire explanation Calladia only caught half of. Something about hugging? And . . . a scare? She shared a baffled look with Astaroth.
“Did you say they’re lovebirds?” a man asked, loud and clear. A man with a New Zealand accent.
Oh, shit. Calladia reran the griffin’s words through her head. Tansy had said rugby, not hugging, and were instead of scare.
The werewolf pack had found them.
“Do we try diplomacy or shock and awe?” Astaroth whispered.
Calladia considered. They were trapped high above the ground in a room with one exit, outside of which stood at least one werewolf. Astaroth, with his demon immortality, would survive a jump to the forest floor, but Calladia would break a lot of bones at best.
“I hate to say it,” she whispered back, “but I think we should attempt diplomacy.”
Astaroth made a face. “Can’t you cast a spell and turn his organs inside out or something?”
“Did you know werewolves have excellent hearing?” came Kai’s response from outside.
Calladia winced. “We need to workshop your definition of justified violence,” she told Astaroth. Then she took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. “I’m going out there.”
“I reserve the right to bludgeon him to death with this poker,” Astaroth said, waving the implement in question.
“I can still hear you,” Kai said.
Waiting wouldn’t accomplish anything, so Calladia unlocked the door and flung it open to reveal Tansy, Kai, and Avram, the brown-haired wolf she’d teamed up with during the brawl. She lifted her chin and marched out like a queen whose territory had been invaded. “What do you want?” she demanded.
Kai was dressed in charcoal slacks and a white button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled up to display muscular forearms. His left arm was in a sling, and the outline of a bandage was visible through the thin fabric of his dress shirt.
His right hand was behind his back. When he moved, Calladia braced herself for an attack, but instead, Kai produced a bouquet of red roses. “For you,” the werewolf said.
Next to Calladia, Astaroth made an outraged noise. He swung the fireplace poker at the bouquet, knocking the flowers to the floor.
“Oi!” Kai glared at the demon. “Mind your business.”
Tansy cocked their head. Intelligent black eyes darted between Kai, Astaroth, Calladia, and the bouquet, and then the griffin squawked and raked one leonine paw against the floorboards. “Not friiieeeeeends.” Their wings flapped in short, agitated bursts, and they snapped their beak at Kai. “Liiies. Bad customer seeeervice.”
“Why are you here?” Calladia asked Kai. “And why do you have flowers?”
Kai sank to his knees and clapped his right hand to his chest, then winced. Apparently he’d jostled his injury. “I had to see you,” he said. “It’s not every day a beautiful woman stabs me through the heart.”
Avram rolled his eyes. “She barely nicked your shoulder, bro.”
“It’s a metaphor, bro,” Kai replied. “But a woman who can fuck me up is the absolute dream.”
“Surprisingly,” Astaroth muttered, “we’re in agreement on that. But she’s fucking me up, not you.”
The two men eyed each other, visibly bristling. Calladia sighed. “So you came all this way to give me flowers?” she asked Kai. “At dawn?”
Kai’s eyes darted away. “Well, not entirely.”
Avram stepped forward. “Enough bullshit,” he said. “This is a job. You can flirt later.”
“What job?” Calladia asked suspiciously, looping more yarn around her fist.
Kai stood up. “Nothing terrible. Just a friendly bit of—”
“Bounty hunting,” the other werewolf interjected.
Calladia started tying knots.
Astaroth settled into a combat stance, holding the poker like a sword. “Has that Moloch bastard come to try to finish me off?” he asked.
Calladia whispered a spell.
Kai made a high-pitched sound and cupped himself. “Calladia?” he asked, eyes so wide she saw the whites around his brown irises. “That has to be you, right?”
Astaroth’s head whipped around. “What did you do to him?”
“Applied some judicious pressure to his testicles,” Calladia said. “Don’t get jealous.”
“You should be applying pressure to my testicles,” Astaroth muttered.
He didn’t need to remind her. Calladia was grumpy, tired, and sexually frustrated, and she had zero patience for weird werewolf bullshit. “Who sent you?” she asked. “Was it Moloch?”
“Don’t know who this Moloch bloke is,” Kai wheezed, still gripping his crotch. “Can you let up a bit?”
In response, Calladia tied another knot to increase the pressure.
“Hnngh.” Kai’s eyes rolled back in his head. “I might like that.”
“Oh, for Lycaon’s sake.” Avram turned toward Astaroth. “Word got around about the fight,” the werewolf said, “and a demoness commissioned us to find you. She says she’s your mother?”
TWENTY-ONE
Astaroth’s emotions rioted like bees whose hive had been kicked. He was angry, randy, angry about the interruption to his randiness, confused, alarmed . . . It didn’t help that, despite facing a hostile werewolf trying to nick his witch, his cock was still half hard.
Curse everyone on this platform who wasn’t Calladia. Curse the entire universe for interrupting him when he’d been knuckle-deep in her luscious cunt.
Lucifer, the feel of her. The sounds she’d made. It had been everything he’d imagined and somehow, impossibly, more.
And now he was supposed to think about his mother?
Despite remembering very little about Lilith, Astaroth cringed at the juxtaposition of his mother and the grand time he’d been having fingering Calladia. It was enough to deflate his erection, which was probably good for his critical thinking skills.
Lilith had commissioned werewolf bounty hunters to find them? “What does she want?” he asked.
Kai cast him a scornful look. “I don’t know, maybe you stayed out past curfew. Why don’t you hurry home to mummy and let a real man take care of your girl?”
“Hey!” Calladia did something with the yarn wrapped around her knuckles, and Kai’s knees buckled. “First off, I’m a woman, not a girl, and I don’t belong to anyone.”
Astaroth felt a fierce burst of pride. He might think of her as “his” witch, but that was a private, relational expression, not a claim of ownership. He was her demon as much as she was his witch. “Quite right,” he said. “And, that real man nonsense is an artifact from less progressive times. Most species have moved beyond that.”
Not demons though, he realized with an uncomfortable jolt. Gender relations had nothing to do with the power struggles on his home plane, but the concept of a “real” demon still held sway.