Chapter 14
ALEK
Fire was all I could feel.
A burning, searing, incessant pain licked its way up my throat and seized control of my tongue, wrenching it in these sweltering sparks like it was being branded by a hundred different hot irons.
Still. I tried to plead. I tried to beg it to stop, but I didn’t have enough air. Not when it’d been traded with blood.
I was on my knees upon a slab of damp stone in a cavern void of sound other than the blood bubbling from within. From inside my body. From inside my lungs and throat.
My hands were covered in it. In dripping, warm red that puddled in my palms. My chest was soaked from where it spilled from me.
Feed. Me.
Its voice was a grotesque whisper from within my body, from within my own mind, crushing my chest by its weight, no different from a thousand heavy stones.
Feed. Me.
I clawed at my throat. At my chin, my fingernails scratching at my skin, peeling it from me in pinwheels of flesh that wedged beneath my fingernails.
EAT.
FEED. ME.
I could smell him. I could smell the human with his beating heart and his wild essence, like rushing water down a fall, and I was so thirsty.
He was near. Too near. My eyes shot open, and there he was.
It was like my vision tunneled to him. He slept in the corner of my room on the floor near the door. Feloré, the voice whispered, like a siren, compelling me to respond while my mouth continued to fill with syrupy blood, spilling down my chin.
If his taste was anything like his smell, then he was delicious. Feloré. His essence will dissolve on your tongue. Tart and beautiful and raw.
It barely occurred to me that I was inching across the floor to get to him. Crawling as sleek as a midnight fog. I’d inch quietly so he wouldn’t wake. My nostrils flared the closer I got, with his human scent getting stronger. Without a sound, I pushed myself up and stood over him.
He slept so prettily, and my cock went rigid at the sight of his sleeping form, draped in a silver chain. FEED. I clawed my cock from my trousers, dragging my gaze down his body where it lay curled on the floor. EAT.
His heart was beating as he slept. His blood pumping. His face peaceful.
I would hold his full lips to mine and slither my tongue all the way down his throat until I licked his insides.
I would pin him beneath my total weight and bury my hard cock so deep inside his warm human body that he could taste it on his tongue.
I wanted him to taste it. I wanted him to look up at me with his stunning eyes so full of life while I unleashed into his body. Inside his soul.
Wait. I was not…awake.
I was stroking myself. I was standing over him, but I was not awake?
No. This was a dream, maybe. My eyes were open, but I was not here.
EAT, said a voice from within. TAKE. FEED—but no.
No, something was not right. I stopped. Something had gone wrong.
I needed to wake up. This wasn’t me. I wasn’t awake. The fires inside me stoked but I squeezed my eyes shut and gritted my teeth. Wake up!
Then I did.
I blinked hard, and my bed chambers merged back into focus. I could suddenly see the crisp lines of my surroundings, not just a tunneled vision of Feloré where he lay asleep beneath me. My heart quaked in my chest and my fingertips trembled as I staggered backward as quietly as possible.
He stirred and my eyes rounded further. I darted into the washroom, catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror just long enough to see what I feared. The blood red eyes, glowing as if tinted by flames—I saw it. The demon he thought me to be.
My hands shook as I dug into my pocket where I fished out a cigarette with unsteady and jerking fingers. I clenched it between my teeth and summoned fire. Fuck, tried to summon fire.
“Come on,” I whispered, when the fire crackled but didn’t hold. “Come on, come on.”
My teeth scraped over each other. The urge to go back in there and take him was blinding. It was blinding.
“Please,” I said to no one—the fire? As it flickered, then vanished. “Come on!”
Then it was there. It answered, just long enough for me to light my herbs and inhale them deeply. I held my breath so long that the headache was instant, pressing outward against my skull, rendering everything too bright, too sharp, like a blistering stab to each of my temples.
But it worked. It always worked.
Slowly, hesitantly, as if it hated to go, the beast inside me retreated, slithering back down my throat, clutching my flesh with its claws in a desperate attempt to stay.
I could hear it pleading, hissing like a fire doused in water. Until the next time it roused, for now, it could only cry, Feed me.