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

by Sarah Hawley

His past was still jumbled, but the present felt so vividly intense that Astaroth couldn’t comprehend how he’d hidden his human emotions for so long. He was starting to wonder why he’d hidden them for so long. There were practical reasons, of course. If he didn’t remember joining the demon high council, he at least remembered the bite of unbridled ambition in his youth.

He’d attained heights few demons dared aspire to, and he’d done all that despite the human tendencies that might make him a less ruthless competitor.

Maybe living on Earth had given him an outlet to explore humanity. And Calladia, with all her fire and foibles, was humanity in its most tantalizing form.

“Recovering will come down to time and willpower,” Isobel said. “I cannot force your mind to produce the memories it has lost. They will return once you’ve healed and are ready to seize the life you want.”

“Memories can be planted, altered, erased. They cannot be pulled forth unwillingly, at least not with my powers. The damage is not irreversible though—you gain more with every hour, and a time will come soon when your will, your reality, and your mind reach an accord. When you are ready, all shall be restored as it once was.”

Astaroth’s mother looked furious. Bones were woven into her red braids, and she wore an iron breastplate and greaves over a black catsuit. She was holding a sword with a wickedly barbed end. “Who’s ready to bleed?” she called out. “Mama’s thirsty.”

The mystery of how the werewolves and Calladia’s friends had teamed up had been solved by the revelation that Ben and Avram were cousins. After Avram had shared news about the brawl in a family chat, Ben had decided the Glimmer Falls gang needed to investigate what Calladia was up to. Bronwyn had given Avram the same directions she’d given Calladia and Astaroth, and the combined expedition had reached them just in time.

“No, I’m on the side of justice.” Themmie tucked her green-and-pink hair behind her ears, revealing a scattering of piercings. “However you feel about Astaroth, there are countless other hybrids who might be exiled, oppressed, or killed if Moloch gets his way. That’s worth fighting for.”

“A cause needs a movement,” Themmie said. “It isn’t enough to swap Moloch out and sub Astaroth in—there’s still a fundamental issue to be solved. Namely, hybrid rights. You need to sway the minds of the people, build support from the ground up. Otherwise this issue will keep cropping up.” “I agree,” Calladia said. She looked at Astaroth. “Remember what I told you? Maybe hybrids aren’t just victims. Maybe they can be warriors.”

“So because Moloch got his hateful message out first, he gets to be the only one speaking up?” Calladia asked. “If you don’t oppose him, you’re complicit in what he does.” Sandranella pursed her lips. “True, but tradition . . .” “Fuck tradition,” Astaroth said suddenly. “Calladia’s right. The demon plane has grown stagnant. We have a chance to change things.”

“And whatever I’ve done in the past doesn’t matter right now.” “It matters to me!” Oz roared, shooting to his feet. “You trained me to suppress any soft emotions. You taught me how to torture, manipulate, and take advantage of humans. Now you claim to have suddenly changed?”

“I don’t remember what I did to you,” he said, his eyes fixing on Oz at last, “and I don’t expect you to forgive me, but if nothing else, think of this as a way to make amends. I could have come out as half human centuries ago, helped codify hybrid rights into law, but I didn’t because I was afraid to lose power. Now an entire group of people like me are in danger.” His lips twisted bitterly. “Hate me all you want. I’m still going to fight for this.”

“Tell me bargaining is my duty, that I’m weak and a failure to my species for quitting. That I’ve let a mortal poison my mind, and my emotions are embarrassing.” Astaroth winced. Ozroth spoke with the ingrained bitterness of someone who had been told those things many times. “I don’t remember saying that, but I’m not going to say it again.”

Would the parents try to change or hide those half-breed traits, or would they embrace them? Embrace them, he decided, considering their bright smiles. And those children would make it to adulthood feeling valuable just as they were, rather than feeling like they fell short of an impossible expectation. Astaroth had done the opposite. He’d taken in a young child, then shaped that child to reflect the person Astaroth had secretly wished he could be: a pure-blood, ruthless demon, unafflicted by the doubts and fears of humans. There was no such thing as a demon entirely unafflicted by doubt or fear though, or if there was, it would be someone like Moloch, whose worldview had become an exercise in sadism.

“You told me the most important thing a bargainer could be was cold,” Ozroth continued. “ ‘Make your heart ice,’ you said. ‘No one will ever be able to hurt you.’ ” Had Astaroth been right in that? In some sense, perhaps. But now he saw an ugly truth. “In doing so, I hurt you though. Didn’t I?”

Astaroth struggled every day to hold himself to the standards of a true demon. If he had been trained properly on the plane, rather than in secret on Earth, maybe he wouldn’t have developed an affinity for humans. Maybe his hidden weakness would never have had the chance to burrow into his brain, digging roots so deep he was still trying to get them out centuries later. Ozroth could be a hero to the species. He could be the perfect demon Astaroth wasn’t.

And if Ozroth had been a bit too young for training, and if it had been a difficult time in the boy’s development to do so, Astaroth hadn’t cared. Astaroth had never allowed himself to feel grief. If he never felt it, he didn’t have to understand it or empathize with those who did.

Because Ozroth had been the answer to Astaroth’s self-doubt, and to see the younger demon succeed was to know his own success. It had never been about Ozroth at all. Taken all at once, the memories painted a damning picture. Astaroth had been a selfish, sometimes cruel mentor so focused on ambition that he’d failed to give his protégé space to be a child, or even his own person. Ozroth had been an extension of Astaroth, like his sword: a weapon to be wielded to ensure the demon plane thrived, and Astaroth’s reputation with it.

It was a strange notion, that Astaroth could be a wholly different person without his memories. Maybe identity was just a story people told themselves. When Astaroth’s past had been stripped away, it had put an abrupt end to the narrative he’d told himself for centuries, and a new story had begun.

Your memories will return when you’re ready to seize the life you want. The moment he’d apologized to Ozroth, he’d regained that segment of memory. His course was clear. There would be no going back to who he had been.

“Are you happy here?” Ozroth looked toward the door of the restaurant, and his expression softened. “Yes, I am.” “Even losing your immortality?” Astaroth pressed. “Especially losing my immortality.” Ozroth’s mouth curved in a small smile. “My life may be shorter, but it’s so much brighter. Why would I want to go back to what I was before?”

Just because a new story had started didn’t mean his responsibilities had ended. There wasn’t room for loving a mortal in that story. Human emotions couldn’t be reshaped so easily though. Astaroth loved Calladia, and he would keep loving her for as long as he could. And if his heart ached at the thought of their inevitable separation? Well, as Elwenna had known when she’d given her child up, sacrifices had to be made for the species. Time for Astaroth to make one.

Maybe that had been the problem all along. Calladia’s wounds from that first, disastrous love had never fully healed. She’d ignored the pain, instead shutting down the parts of her that were capable of love and vulnerability. And what did she have to show for that? Anger problems, trust issues, and a relationship with her mother that had stagnated in its awfulness. She’d gotten stuck in self-destructive habits, never shaking off the weight of her trauma.

If you don’t love me as I am now, you don’t love me at all.”

In trying to protect her heart, Calladia had instead created a prison for her true self. She let the final walls around her heart fall away and gave herself over wholly to this moment and this man, who, despite his flaws and his troubled history, had helped her find the key to her shackles. Love wasn’t trying to force someone to be who you thought they should be. It was loving them as they were while supporting them on their journey toward becoming their best self.

“I’ll never get enough of you,” he said against her lips. “The sun could die and the stars could fall and the earth could rip itself apart, and none of that would matter, so long as you were in my arms.”

“They’re feeding on the magic.” “Should we be worried?” Mariel shook her head. “They’re not stealing it from us. It’s like being adjacent to the souls, or to us, is enough to make them thrive.” Calladia’s heart raced. If that was true, this could have enormous implications for the demon plane and the fraught witch-demon dynamic. “If witches and warlocks were allowed to live here,” she said, “bargainers wouldn’t need to harvest as many souls. Just the presence of magic users would give the plane energy.”

“How are we weak?” Astaroth asked. “I’d argue our weakness is in refusing to embrace diversity. Hybrids have much to offer our community.” Pride swelled in Calladia’s breast. How far he’d come—from despising his human half to embracing it, from playing politics to leading a revolution.

He would not be deterred. After a lifetime of manipulation and lies, Astaroth had found something more important than power. “I choose love,” he told her. “I love you.”

Past and present merged. The vicious, desperate demon he’d been for centuries melded with the softer version Calladia had brought out, two halves melding into a whole. That vicious, cold self settled into the realm of memory though. Who he’d been the last few days felt immediate and real. That new, better person couldn’t have existed without the amnesia, he realized. He’d been twisted by ambition, and only by forgetting it had he managed to uncover the human half he’d buried so deep.

“This is the problem,” Astaroth shouted over the din. “We are no longer a council comprised of multiple viewpoints, and we’ve been prioritizing our own power ahead of the well-being of the plane. We have effectively adopted a two-party system, which anyone on Earth can tell you is a recipe for disaster.”

“Moloch arranged for the murder of Cassaviel,” he said, naming the demon whose position Astaroth had taken on the high council. The confession had been extracted during a booze-heavy night of high-stakes Bingo with a group of retired immortal assassins. “When Moloch wasn’t named to that open position, he had the assassin murder Drivanna as well.”

Yet more evidence one shouldn’t dismiss humans, since what they lacked in immortality or super strength they made up for in technical ingenuity and a passion for oversharing.

The best aspects of Astaroth were human. Maybe it was because human lives were brief. They crammed in so much meaning that each day was an adventure. They cared so fiercely that their love stories echoed through time. He wanted to make his mother proud, but more importantly, he wanted to make himself proud.

Words could do a lot, but not everything. His truth was a feeling, precious and warm, held safe within his rib cage. His truth was also in his arms, his equal in every way.