He had never seen a demon behave like this. Never seen one bring an animal from the human realm into The Void, never seen one consume flesh at all.
Demons fed on emotions—fear, lust, pain, joy—but this one was consuming meat.
His hand moved faster, and the blood cascading down its throat with saliva and filth, a perverse waterfall of heat and hunger.
“Your human,” the demon rasped, those two words emerging in a high, fractured whine. His voice cracked under the weight of his desire, and that was when Erevos feltanger.
Hot, seething, primal anger—something he had never known—flared through his core, and it spilled out of him in a loud snarl, so sharp and violent it echoed like thunder across the cave walls.
This was the demon who had frightened Lyssena. This was the thing defiling flesh, drooling sickness, stroking himself with blood while whispering about Erevos’s little songbird. This was the one he had to destroy.
“You always feed on so many humans . . . give me the girl,” the demon rasped, his breath quickening, his hand a blur as he stroked himself. “I want to fuck her while I suck her cries of pleasure and drink from her cunt,” he gasped, voice slipping into a panting rhythm that made Erevos’s fists curl tighter. “And when I’m done—” he squeezed the tip of his organ until liquid bubbled at the slit, “—I’ll consume her flesh.”
The demon let out a guttural sound of pure pleasure, and Erevos did not wait.
With a single command, his shadows surged forward like blackened tendrils, and they tore the demon’s length apart, ripping it down the middle.
Erevos clenched his fists as a heat like molten stone erupted inside his chest—true, bubbling rage that poured through him like it had always been waiting there, dormant until now.
He did not know he was capable of this kind of fury, just as he hadn’t known he could feel warmth. But Lyssena had made him feel.
Lyssena was his.
Mine.
And now, he understood it. His little songbird had stirred something even demons were not meant to feel.
“Erev . . . os,” the demon growled, voice strangled and wet with agony, and for a moment Erevos thought he heard real, true pain, the kind that demons were never supposed to feel.
That wasn’t right.
Demons didn’t feel pain.
Demons couldn’t die the way mortals did, but they could be unmade, could be erased, destroyed, and vanish from the face of The Void, and Erevos intended to do just that.
But before he consumed the broken creature before him, he asked, “Why do you do this?”
As Erevos’s shadows slithered around his throat, choking him, coiling tighter like serpents made of smoke and wrath, the demon let out a low, rattling sound and spoke.
“Aren’t you bored?” he hissed, his voice both broken and amused. “Don’t you want to feel?”
Erevos could hardly believe what he just heard.
“Come on,” the demon coughed, stretching his cracked mouth wider and wider, splitting his cheeks with the motion, revealing far too many teeth. “You want to live an empty life? Oh . . . oh, youcanfeel.”
Those were the last words he ever spoke.
Because Erevos consumed him whole.
After standing in the cave for quite some time, surrounded by the lingering stench of blood and decay, Erevos made a decision to burn everything inside.
If other demons came and fed on the remains, if they drew power or pleasure from what had happened here, it could only lead to ruin.
So Erevos summoned his shadows, and they coiled through the cave like smoke made of fire, and they consumed the filth.
They licked over the blood-soaked stone, dissolved the broken bones, devoured the rotting carcass of the deer, and swallowed the air itself until the cave was nothing but heat, silence, and ash.
Only Erevos could burn with shadow. It was a skill as rare as it was precise.
