Erevos wanted to understand it.
But more than that, he wanted her to understand it, too.
“I’ve killed the demon who frightened you,” he said finally. “I’ve erased him from The Void.”
Lyssena said nothing for a while. She simply looked at him, her hands curled into the sheets at her sides. Erevos could feel her breath brushing the air between them.
“You said demons change from emotions,” she said quietly, and Erevos dipped his chin.
“It happens,” he replied. “When a demon feeds too deeply from a single emotion, his body . . . begins to reflect it.”
He had seen that happen with many of his kind. Not all, but too many to count.
“Spikes are the mark of rage. But not all demons crave such things.”
“What other emotions can do that?” Lyssena asked.
“Sorrow can change the body. Some demons lose their shape, their skin constantly dripping like weeping shadows. Others become smoke, formless, unable to hold onto anything because they have consumed too much despair.”
He paused, then added, “There are those who favor trust. They appear soft, hollowed, their backs open and defenseless.”
Lyssena’s eyes grew wide again. “And that?” she asked, lifting one hand to point down toward the new hardness straining between his legs.
For a moment, Erevos said nothing.
Then his eyes dropped to where she pointed. “That,” he said, “is not from rage.”
He moved a hand toward himself, trailing it down his abdomen, until it brushed the hardness she’d indicated.
And at the moment of contact, heat bloomed like the briefest caress of her knee from before.
“It feels the same as when you touched me,” he said, gaze returning to hers. “When your knee brushed it. That’s when it began.”
Lyssena was still.
Erevos flexed his hand and hovered above the new organ. “Can I touch it?” he asked. He wanted to feel this heat again. He did not know what it was, but it felt very good. So good, he even wanted his songbird to try.
“Youdohave a cock . . . ” Lyssena breathed, and Erevos turned his gaze fully toward her, drawn by the sound of her voice as much as the words themselves. She was half-sitting on the bed now, her arms braced in front of her as they held her weight, her body angled toward him as she leaned closer.
A cock, Erevos thought. A male genitalia.
“I never had one before,” he said slowly, as if speaking the words aloud might help them settle into sense.
He tried to understand why his body had changed this way, why this particular shape had formed between his legs when it never had before. That other demon had possessed one—the one he had erased—and perhaps this, too, was the result of excess, of feeding too long and too deeply on lust until the body bent itself to accommodate it.
Erevos had never consumed lust. He simply had never sought it.
Or . . . had he?
His gaze returned to Lyssena. To the way her green-apple eyes were fixed on him without flinching. To the way her lips were parted, and how her arms pressed inward, squeezing the mounds of her chest together as she leaned forward.
They looked fuller now than before, heavier somehow.They might be as soft as her cheeks, he thought that, too.
The first time Lyssena had touched his shadows, he had felt that warmth bloom inside him, and it had returned again andagain since then, growing stronger each time she drew closer, until now, with his songbird nearer to him than she had ever been, he felt himself teetering at the edge of something he could not name, something that threatened to unmake him entirely.
Could that be attraction?
Erevos did not know. But he wanted to.
