Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
Blood Where There Should Be None
Erevos
Erevos followed the scent of blood flooding his senses with a metallic tang that clung to the inside of his throat.
It smelled like the armor worn by knights in the human realm, like coins rubbed together between anxious fingers, like pots and trays warmed by fire.
These were familiar metals, but strange here, for such things did not belong in The Void, had no place in its vast, airless silence.
And that alone made the scent dangerous.
He did not know what he would find at the end of it, only that it was foul and wrong, and he had to see. So he went.
He passed through the crooked trees, their limbs like hands reaching into the ever-dark, and pushed through bushes with leaves as thin as ash. He crossed stones as smooth as bone and rivers that did not flow with water but with shadow made thick and slow, like ink drawn through silk.
And still the scent pulled him forward.
It led him to a narrow mouth of another cave, one among many scattered across The Void, but this one reeked more than the others, reeked of wet iron and rotting heat, reeked of something fresh.
He walked inside, and the stillness changed around him, growing heavier and damper.
Erevos began to hear something spilling.
Something tearing, wet, and uneven.
Something quickening like frantic steps or breath or both.
And then something breaking.
The deeper he walked, the stronger the scent became, until finally, in the center of the cave, perched atop a stone slick with something dark, he saw a demon. Low and hunched, sitting still in the middle of the cave.
“Erevos,” said the demon, its voice low and wet.
Erevos did not know his name, but he had seen this one lurking in the far corners of The Void before. Now, he feasted.
The demon crouched over the carcass of a deer. It was dead, rotting, alien to this place, for no such creature existed in The Void, and it tore into its flesh with a hunger that seemed unnatural for a creature like him.
Bones, slick with gore, clattered to the floor and rested against his knees, and blood . . . thick, dark blood poured freely down his chest, soaking into the slick sheen of his black skin, coating the ridges of his rib cage and slithering down to something Erevos could barely comprehend.
An organ, hard and pulsing, jutted grotesquely from between the demon’s legs, and he was stroking it, his blood-slicked hand moving faster and faster, pumping with a rhythm.
The demon breathed hard through his jagged teeth, each one glistening red, and Erevos could only stare.
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 felt anger.
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, you can feel.”
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.
He watched as the last remnants of the foul scene crumbled into nothing, and then he stood in silence again.
Erevos was a smart demon. He was observant and curious. He knew he was not like most of his kind, and he had known it for a long time.
Where others did not care, he did.
Where others lived in endless cycles of dull hunger and forgotten centuries, he watched and learned. And it displeased him, deeply, that this grotesque, corrupted demon reminded him . . . of himself.
But he could not lie to himself; he enjoyed feeling.
He enjoyed seeing Lyssena eat honey with soft sounds of satisfaction; he enjoyed the way her laughter spilled from her throat like a melody only he was meant to hear.
He had known for some time that he could enjoy things as he had studied pleasure, understood satisfaction, but he hadn’t realized until recently that he could actually feel.
Not just contentment.
Joy.
He had felt it the moment Lyssena laughed at the joke he made, the moment she tasted the honey he offered with her eyes shining bright. It was a strange, fluttering warmth in his chest that refused to leave.
He wanted to feel it again.
And again.
He wanted to learn how to make her happy, how to create moments like that not only for her, but with her.
He wanted to feel together with his songbird.