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“Oh, shamelessly,” Tix agreed as he walked in with a tray of what appeared to be tea. Crizzelo followed him, carrying her own tray of sandwiches and cakes. It was good to know they kept proper teatime in Hell. “She’s always had hounds around. She raises them from puppies and treats them like her children. Since she stopped bearing children they rather are.”
“She’s not in a relationship?” I asked, curious about his mother.
Tix placed the tray down, and then his head fell back and he laughed. And laughed. After a moment, he put a hand to his belly and shook his head. “The mistress is so amusing. No, Lady Sloane. My mother is not in a relationship and hasn’t been in thousands and thousands of years. Her ex is rather daunting.”
“Her ex being the Lord Lucifer,” Crizzelo explained. “Not many demons want to date the Lord of Hell’s ex-wife. It’s said he still has feelings for her.”
“But she has a couple of thousand kids. And I didn’t think they were Lucifer’s.” I remembered what he’d told me.
He waved that off. “No, of course not. Those were all experiments. Only one of them was Lucifer’s, and she was my mother’s only daughter. After Layla was lost to us, my mother broke things off with Lucifer and pursued having the perfect child. She finally got him and she stopped.”
Crizzelo’s head came up, and the expression on her face made me think there was another side to the story, but she simply went back to her work.
Gray snorted. “I take it you’re her youngest.”
Tix shrugged, an elegant gesture. “Well, you can’t top perfection. So now she has these hounds, and there is no way she would allow them to be spelled and sent to take out my master. She knows how seriously I take my job.”
I had to wonder because the hounds had definitely been spelled. Liv had briefly examined the collars and she’d told me she suspected blood magic. She’d thought it was a witch rather than a demon because of something she called the “signature” on the spell. It was some kind of mystical witch thing, like a unique scent or particular handwriting.
The only problem was things like that could be faked or copied.
“Have you informed her the hounds are here?” Trent asked. Hestia had snuck over his way and had her big head on his lap while Trent ran a hand down her broad back. The males had taken up spaces on either side of Fenrir, while Puff stayed on my son’s lap. I swear that puppy had his pride on. Like he was telling the bigger, badder hounds “Look at me. My dad’s the best.”
Tix leaned over to pour the tea with a practiced hand. “I was going to ask Lord Sloane if it’s all right if I send word. Or perhaps I could take the hounds to her dimension myself. It’s been a while since I saw my mother.”
“You visit her every week,” Gray pointed out.
“Only because she would be lonely without me. And we so enjoy watching a spot of television together. Mistress, you must watchSurvivor Hell Planewith us. It’s so funny when they vote out the demon and he gets eaten by whatever sponsored the week’s show. One time it was a group of demons promoting their cooking show.”
I hadn’t started binging Hell plane shows yet. “I don’t want to know, do I?”
“Let’s just say it was aSurvivor/Top Chefcrossover that you can’t find in the human world. Such fun. And I learned a lot about properly seasoning a marine-based demon. You don’t want to overcook it.”
“Tix, I need to make this plain to you,” I began, my belly turning slightly. “I know I may seem to be the kind of wolf who will eat anything…”
“I would never feed you demon,” Tix said, passing me a cup of tea.
Crizzelo’s eyes went wide. “There is no demon in the cakes, Lady Sloane. I promise. And the sandwiches are ham and salmon from the Earth plane. We had it delivered.”
I wondered if Amazon had drivers on the Hell plane. “That’s good to know.”
“I certainly wouldn’t serve them to a pregnant female,” Tix was saying. “You don’t know how it will affect you. Certainly demon flesh can have an effect on the consumer. Think of it as one last fuck you on the demon’s way to a next life.”
I was curious about how they dealt with death here in Hell. I took the tea but put it down because Eddie hadn’t made it for me, and until I could use the charm Lee had given me, I wouldn’t be consuming anything. “I wasn’t aware the Hell plane believed in multiple lives.”
“That’s my fault, baby.” Gray did take his tea. “I never exactly talked about the ins and outs of demonic religion.”
“I would think they wouldn’t be religious.”
Tix gasped and clutched where his pearls should be. He was a very dramatic demon. “Of course we are. We simply have a different set of values. And though we’re immortal, we can obviously be killed under the right circumstances. Those circumstances include being foolish enough to think you’re going to win a game show when your personality is obnoxious to the extreme. I have no idea what that demon was thinking.”
Crizzelo’s lips curled up, showing off sharp fangs. “I like the showNailed It. If you don’t get it right, they nail you to the wall, and you spend the rest of the show hanging there. It’s fun.”
Tix shrugged. “They don’t even die on that show. Though the moans of pain and begging for sustenance is amusing.”
We had totally different versions of amusing.
“Okay, as a wolf who has on occasion gotten heated in battle and maybe taken a hunk of demon flesh,” Trent began, “what exactly do you mean by have an effect?”
