A Demon's Guide to Wooing a Witch （Glimmer Falls, #2(64)

Nearby, a short pixie with pink-and-green hair expressed alarm. Another of Calladia’s friends, presumably. Whatever she said was lost, because Calladia was walking toward Astaroth, cracking her knuckles, and she was all he had focus for.

The last few days had taught Astaroth to be wary when she looked like that. The emotions captured in the memory didn’t match what he felt now though. At the time, Astaroth had been full of disdain. He’d considered her annoying and irrelevant. Beneath him.

So you’re the demon who’s been destroying the forest? Calladia began tying her hair up, and Astaroth instantly knew this memory was about to devolve into a fight. The demon who destroyed my best friend’s greenhouse? The one trying to force Oz and Mariel to make a bargain?

He’d looked at her soul then, opening his demon senses. It was brilliant, pure in its power. And Astaroth, greedy demon that he was, had wanted to claim it for himself. Seize a new victory out of the bitterness of recent defeat. Maybe with her soul as an offering, the high council would allow him to amend the terms of the wager. He could still come out on top.

Astaroth’s sweat had felt cold in the forest air. Moloch couldn’t win. Not before Astaroth revealed . . .

But the particulars of what Astaroth needed to reveal drifted away like mist.

Do you want to become a princess? he’d asked, determined to find the price that would convince her to hand over her soul. Own a diamond mine? Say it, and it’s yours.

I do want something, she’d said, stopping just out of reach, but I can’t get it through a deal.

What had she wanted? He desperately wanted to know. He’d wanted to know back then, too, but for a different reason. Until he knew her vulnerabilities, he wouldn’t be able to use them for his own ends.

It was strange, feeling this split in himself. It seemed impossible he’d ever viewed her with sneering disdain, yet the memory was definitely his.

I can give you anything.

No thanks. I take what I want.

He’d noticed her beauty even then. The mix of classically delicate features and visible musculature had been interesting. His mind had traveled down speculative paths, considering what the angry, pretty witch would take if she could.

Then she’d punched him in the throat.

In the present day, Astaroth yelped and twitched. Calladia instantly sat upright, shoving hair out of her face to reveal flushed cheeks and heavy-lidded eyes. “What is it?” she asked, voice still blurred by sleep. “Who’s there?”

He sat up, too, powered by a burst of outrage. “You punched me in the throat!”

“I did?” Calladia looked down at her hand, then back at him, blinking slowly. “Sorry, I’m an active sleeper. You look fine.”

“Not in your sleep,” he said through gritted teeth.

She squinted at him, and he saw when her mind finally caught up with the conversation. “Oh,” she said. And then, “Oh! Wait, did your memory return?”

“Some of it,” he said, crossing his arms. “I remember you hitting me.”

“Well, at least it’s a start,” she said with a cocky grin. “I’m sure you’ll remember the rest of the beatdown soon.”

The casual way she spoke about it set his teeth on edge. “You sound awfully cheerful about it.”

“And you seem upset, though I’m not sure why. We’re enemies, remember?”

“Because . . . because . . .” Dash it, he wasn’t sure why he was angry either. It was just that after all they’d been through together, being attacked by her stung. That the attack had happened before their recent adventures didn’t seem to figure in to his addled brain. With memories popping up willy-nilly, it felt like she’d punched him moments ago.

And why did she have to say it like that? We’re enemies, as if that neatly summed everything up. As if she still saw nothing more in him than a foe to be vanquished.

“You had it coming, if that helps,” Calladia said, oblivious to how her words had skewered him through the heart. She looked around the bed, and her brow furrowed. “Where did the pillows go?”

“Hang the pillows.” Astaroth rubbed his temples, struggling for calm. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Calladia grabbed a pillow from the floor and tossed it in his direction. “That I beat you up? I thought I had.”

Pain stabbed through his head, and his eye twitched. “It was completely unprovoked.”

“Mmmm, was it though?” she asked skeptically, chucking another pillow and narrowly missing his face.

She wasn’t taking this seriously enough. He batted the next pillow aside. “I didn’t do anything to you,” he argued, “and then you hit me and insulted my hat—”

“It was a terrible hat,” she said.

Astaroth gasped, because now he recalled it wasn’t just a good hat; it was his favorite. “That fedora cost more than four hundred quid and came custom from my favorite London haberdasher!”

Calladia scoffed and shifted to kneel facing him, apparently giving up on the pillow wall. “I don’t know why you’re buying hats using sea creatures as currency—”

“I said quid, not squid.”

“Either way, you overpaid.” She looked him up and down condescendingly. “You looked like the flag bearer for the incel cause.”