He had a flash of a wall of brambles and a furious-looking witch with curly brown hair. That image lurched abruptly into another: the same witch standing with a blank expression on her face while a demon with black horns and hair cried out, sounding agonized.
Was the brunette Mariel or some other witch he’d met during the centuries missing from his memory? Considering the presence of a heartbroken-looking demon, he suspected it was Mariel and he’d gotten a brief glimpse of the bargain gone awry. Which meant that large, very upset-looking demon was Ozroth, Astaroth’s so-called protégé. Former protégé now, after choosing love for a human over his duty to the demon plane.
Astaroth’s chest felt tight. He focused, trying to identify the emotion. It was . . . loss of some sort. A subtle yet bitter grief.
He chose them, Astaroth thought nonsensically.
“Earth to Astaroth,” Calladia said.
Astaroth opened his eyes to find her snapping her fingers under his nose. The gnome was nowhere to be seen. The world spun, and he braced his feet farther apart to center himself. Curse these dizzy spells.
Calladia looked concerned. “Is everything all right? Where’d you go just now?”
He hesitated, wondering if mentioning Ozroth and Mariel would anger her. Then again, it wasn’t like she’d forgotten what he’d done to them, even if he had. “I think I remembered Ozroth and Mariel.”
Calladia stiffened. “What did you remember?”
“Not much.” Astaroth weighed his words carefully. “I saw a woman with curly brown hair casting magic on a wall of plants. Then I saw a demon with black hair next to her.”
“That does sound like Mariel and Oz.” Wariness lurked in Calladia’s brown eyes, and her posture was tense. “Anything else?”
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.