A Demon's Guide to Wooing a Witch （Glimmer Falls, #2(37)

He didn’t realize he was quietly singing until Calladia gasped. “Wait,” she said. “No way.”

She was probably surprised by his recall of the lyrics—as was Astaroth, now that he thought of it. “I don’t know how I know the song,” he said. “It’s just familiar. Maybe there’s an amnesia exception for music?”

“Not that,” she said, flapping her hand. “You’re a Swiftie?”

He squinted, confused. “Is that a species? We’ve already established I’m a demon.”

Calladia cackled again, flashing her spellbinding grin. “So Bing’s an oracle and Swifties are a species. This is perfect.”

“Come on,” he said, once again annoyed and entranced. His lips tugged at the corners like he might join her hilarity, but fearsome demons didn’t laugh at themselves.

“Swifties are fans of Taylor Swift,” Calladia said once she’d stopped chuckling. “She’s a pop singer. Well, she started in country, but she’s branched out since then.”

Taylor Swift. He turned the name over in his head, but no images appeared. He shrugged. “Apparently I’m a Swiftie.”

This seemed to delight Calladia even more. “Me, too!” she exclaimed. She turned the song up, then alternated between singing—loudly and with a questionable understanding of pitch—and explaining the inspiration for the song. “She writes about her exes a lot,” she practically yelled over the music. “In this one, she’s singing about a guy she dated when she was younger. He was older and more experienced, so it was kind of a problematic age gap.”

“How much older?” Astaroth asked, intrigued by what she considered problematic. Three centuries? Five?

She made a face. “Thirteen years.”

Astaroth choked on his own spit. He coughed, pounding his chest. “You think thirteen years is problematic?” he wheezed when he was finally able to speak.

“She was only nineteen!” Calladia said defensively. “That’s a big maturity gap.”

“Huh.” Astaroth felt an odd tightness in his chest. It was worry, he realized, though why he should worry about Calladia’s age preferences was a mystery. “So you wouldn’t date someone thirteen years older than you?”

“I would,” Calladia said, “but I’m not nineteen. I’m twenty-eight. A lot of growth happens during your twenties.”

Twenty-eight. Lucifer, that was young. Yes, he knew she was human and thus subject to a short life span, but he hadn’t really thought about it specifically. When Astaroth had been twenty-eight, he’d been . . .

He frowned. What had he been up to at twenty-eight? He’d struck his first bargain around forty, but before then . . .

Fog.

Hang it, why couldn’t he remember?

“I guess that seems silly to you,” Calladia said.

Astaroth snapped back to the conversation. “What?”

“A thirteen-year age gap being problematic.” She slid him a glance. “Since you’re older than dirt.”

“I object,” Astaroth said. “Dirt is substantially older than me.”

“Still, you must have had, ah, relations with plenty of people younger than you.”

“I have,” he said. “Though it all blurs together after a while.” Nameless faces, nameless bodies, the dances of attraction or manipulation or boredom or some mix of the three. There had been princes and priestesses, demons and elves and humans. None of them stood out as being particularly remarkable.

“Hmm.”

He couldn’t tell what sentiment lay behind that syllable, but her jaw looked tighter than it had before. “You disapprove?”

“Not at all. If I was six hundred years old or whatever, I’d probably have a massive body count, too.” Her fingers flexed on the steering wheel. “I guess you get good at it after that long.”

“Oh, I was good at it from the start.” He smirked at her eye roll. “Why, looking for tips?”

He’d gladly give her some. Or literally the tip, should she express interest. The spandex had been packed away, but her well-worn jeans were just as much of a problem, as he suspected anything would be that had the fortune of cupping that remarkable arse. He eyed the fall of her messy blond braid over her shoulder, imagining wrapping the bright length around his hand while he thrust into her from behind.

His trousers grew tighter.

“No, thank you,” she said vehemently.

It wasn’t the enthusiastic response a demon might hope for, but it was the response he’d expected. Still, he deflated a bit. Metaphorically. The trouser situation remained an issue.

Calladia braked, and Astaroth was distracted from her rebuttal and his erection by the sight of a stop sign. The road terminated in an intersection, where a green sign with white arrows indicated what lay ahead: scenic lookout, 5 miles to the left, and fable farms, 15 miles to the right.

Calladia pointed to the sign. “Maybe Alzapraz’s instructions weren’t so bad, after all. ‘Head east and begin the fable.’？”

“It’s a bit of a reach,” Astaroth said. “Shouldn’t he have said ‘begin at the Fable’ if he meant it as a literal place? Or, I don’t know, ‘drive to Fable Farms,’ if he really wanted to be helpful?” A certain type of warlock adored riddle shite like this, and though it was a solid branding move, it was deeply obnoxious for the people forced to solve those riddles.