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.
Astaroth didn’t care if this werewolf deemed him less than a “real” man. So why did he care so much that he wasn’t a “real” demon?
It was a disquieting thought he didn’t have the time or focus to delve into, so he focused on practicalities. “Did Lilith seem hostile?” he asked Kai, wanting to get a sense of what he and Calladia might be walking into. His mother had sounded friendly on the phone, but she was famously （and proudly） insane.
Kai gasped. “Her name is Lilith? Like . . . the Lilith?”
“I’m sure there are others with that name,” Astaroth said, “but none with her notoriety.”
Kai whistled. “Damn. And she’s a MILF. You’d better get down there and talk to her before she rips out someone’s spine.”
“She’s here?” Calladia asked.
Kai pointed over the edge. “And she brought a friend.”
Astaroth looked to Calladia, because she was his partner in this quest and he wasn’t willing to go anywhere without her. “Shall we?”