“Hey Belial,” Lilith shot the demon a furious glance, “will you quit your beatboxing, or I swear to Dog I’ll beatbox your ears.”

His single, vein-etched eye widened as she swept a taloned claw inches from his snout and he tumbled backwards in mid-beat into a vat of moral turpitude soup.

“Watch it, mam,” he coughed, picking lumps of jellied depravity out his hair, “you nearly had my eye out then.”

She skewered him with a look that would have frozen sunspots.

“What,” she snarled, “do you think I was TRYING to do?”

He tensed expecting another wave of maternal violence; she was always grouchy at this time of the millennium.