Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
What Hunger Shapes
Erevos
It was difficult to concentrate with such sweetness lingering in the air, but Erevos had to.
He rose from the bed and rolled his shoulders slowly, feeling his muscles beneath skin that no longer felt entirely his. Now that he was standing, the weight of the new spikes along his spine and head felt like a string of thorns that had grown from within.
“I know what it is,” he said to his songbird, who was still watching him with parted lips and wide eyes that flicked up and down his body. Her gaze lingered downward—longer than it lingered upward—and Erevos followed it, expecting to find another change.
And he did.
It wasn’t like the spikes on his back or the ones that fanned out from his head, which he could now feel when he lifted a hand to trace them. No, this one was . . . different, not so “spiky” at the tip.
“The spikes on my back are not like this one between my legs,” he said.
He considered how best to explain the nature of demonkind, how bodies changed with emotion, and how The Void shaped its children according to what they fed on. It was not something Erevos had ever needed to explain. It was simply known.
“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” he said at last. “Not to me.” He glided his hand over one of the spikes.
“When a demon consumes too much of a particular emotion, it takes a toll on its body. Sometimes the change is visible. Sometimes it lies dormant, hidden deep beneath the skin until it awakens.”
Lyssena blinked, her lashes brushing the tops of her cheeks, and Erevos took it as a sign to continue.
“I’ve consumed rage before,” he said, lowering himself onto the bed beside her, the mattress shifting beneath his weight. “But never enough to feel it etched onto my body. Not until now.” He paused, then added, “Yesterday . . . I did. And now rage has left its mark on me.”
“Does it hurt?” she asked, her voice small, brows knitting.
Erevos felt warmth in his chest, not fire, but something gentler. Something soft. Lyssena still smelled sweet, but it was no longer the same sweetness from before. It had changed. And Erevos, for all his knowing, could not yet decipher it.
“It doesn’t hurt,” he said, dropping his gaze to his hands.
What was this? This warmth inside him—so constant now, so strangely good—what did it mean? He had been warm ever since Lyssena entered his world, warm in ways that had nothing to do with the nature of his body. Had she given him emotions? Shown him how they felt?
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.
“You do have 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 and again 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.
He lifted his hand again and wrapped his fingers around the new length between his thighs, circling it experimentally, and his hips jerked forward at once as though his body had acted entirely on its own.
What was this sensation?
If Erevos’s eyes were capable of widening, they would have done so now.
“Lyssena,” he breathed, startled enough by the sudden surge of pleasure that he pulled his hand away as quickly as he had touched himself, the heat lingering even after contact was broken.
His songbird had changed color.
She no longer merely had the eyes of a green apple. Now her face had taken on the deep, flushed red of one as well, her cheeks and nose burning bright as one hand flew up to cover her mouth, her body going utterly still.
Erevos studied her reaction carefully. Was this a human gesture? Had Lyssena covered her mouth so he would not put his new cock inside it?
Oh. If the simple pressure of his hand had felt like that—if it had drawn such a response from his body so quickly—then what would her lips feel like, soft and warm, closing around him instead?
His gaze dropped back down to himself, to the rigid length standing proud and unyielding between his legs, hard as his head, pulsing with life and heat.
“I don’t know much about it,” Lyssena said, though her voice came out smaller than before, softened and partially swallowed behind her palm, and as she slowly lowered her hand, the tip of her finger caught on her lower lip, tugging it down just a little before it went up again.
That single, absent gesture claimed Erevos’s attention completely.
For a long moment, he could not hold onto her words at all, could not remember what she had said or why, because his thoughts had narrowed to the curve of her mouth, the slight press of her fingertip against her lip, and the sudden, unfamiliar awareness of his own body responding to the smallest movement of hers.
And then she crawled closer.
Her knees brushed against his left thigh as she moved, the contact light, yet it sent a pulse through him, as though her touch had traced a hidden seam beneath his skin and set something loose inside him.
“Before my engagement,” Lyssena continued, “my mother taught me how to please a man.”
The word engagement struck Erevos.
That human male—the one who had dared to believe she might belong to him, the one who had frightened her, wanted her—rose in his mind in a flash of cold, and for a moment, Erevos felt the familiar, corrosive pull of rage coil tight in his chest, sharp enough that the spikes along his spine twitched in response, ready to bloom again.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Lyssena murmured.
Her hand settled on his thigh first, and then her other hand closed around him.
Erevos’s thoughts vanished.
Her grip was gentle, her fingers sliding along his length in slow motions that sent sensation spiraling through him in waves, every pass of her hand leaving behind heat and pressure and something dangerously close to ache, so overwhelming in its novelty that his muscles flexed on their own.
“Lyssena—” he groaned, the sound torn from him before he could shape it, before he could stop it.
He had never felt anything like this in all of his existence.
The only comparison his mind could grasp was the moment she had tasted the bread he had made for her, the way something warm and unsteady had bloomed inside him then, too, as though her pleasure had reached into him and changed him from within.
He watched her hand move, transfixed by the way her fingers circled him, by the contrast between her soft skin and the rigid heat of his body. He lifted his gaze to her face and found her watching him just as closely, her eyes framed by her lashes.
Her scent returned all at once.
It flooded the air between them, thick and sweet and intoxicating, far stronger than before, curling around him until it felt as though it had weight, as though he could sink into it and be lost entirely, and Erevos realized that he wanted exactly that.
He wanted to drown in her sweetness, in her hands, in whatever this new, uncharted thing between them was becoming.
Lyssena’s breathing slowed, each inhale deeper than the last, and Erevos could hear the quiet pull of oxygen into her fragile, human lungs, the soft release as she let it out again. And the awareness of it filled him with a fondness he did not yet know how to name.
He adored that.
He adored that his songbird breathed the air he shaped for her, that her chest rose and fell because he allowed the atmosphere of his realm to cradle her, that she wore garments spun from his shadows against her skin, that her hands held his cock without fear, without hesitation, and that she no longer looked at him as something to flee from.
Erevos adored Lyssena.
With her fingers still wrapped around him and that thick, intoxicating sweetness pouring from her in waves, he leaned his torso toward her, drawn by instinct alone, and slid his right arm around her waist, pulling her closer until their bodies met fully, and the sudden shift in balance sent them both tumbling onto the soft bed beneath them.
Lyssena gasped in surprise.
The sound vibrated through him, and her hand tightened reflexively around his cock, squeezing just as Erevos lost whatever fragile restraint he had left and collapsed over her, his weight braced carefully so as not to crush her, though every part of him burned with heat and pressure and the overwhelming need to be closer still.
The sensation crested too quickly.
His body seized, arching into hers as something dark and warm spilled from him in thick pulses, smeared across her new dress, staining her with him, and Erevos groaned low in his chest as the force of it tore through him, leaving him trembling and utterly undone atop his songbird.