Page 1 of Demon Food

PROLOGUE

It’d been three hundred years since the streets ran red with angelic blood. The Great War, a war of catastrophic cost, killed tens of thousands of people and every last angel in the kingdom of Novithia.

Now to live in Novithia, is to live under demonic law, and under demonic law, people serve one of two purposes.

Be their slave. Or be their food.

PART I

1

FELORÉ

Ihad no idea how old I was.

I supposed it was safe to say I was in my mid-twenties, but birthdays weren’t something we celebrated in the orphanage where I grew up.

In a place where compassion was a rarity, you learned to scrape by on little. Little acknowledgement. Little food. Little hope.

The only day we were celebrated was on our Choosing Day. It was when a human’s future was determined for them by nothing more than a quick glance and a feeling of what that human should become. A whole life decided with less attention than one might give to a rat in the street.

Maybe that was why it felt so personal to me—why my hatred for them was concentrated in my blood like a thick syrup. I wasn’t just any human living under their tyrannical rule. I was their human whore.

In other words, I was demon food.

Not that we were allowed to call them demons anymore. Oh, heavens no, child.

If you let it slip, it would be the last time you said it. It’d be the last time you said anything at all, as the punishment was a swift knife to the base of your slandering tongue.

There was a wall in my village where they nailed them all. Over time, they looked less like tongues and more like leathered fruit, which was a strange and horrifying sight to any starving human.

To their faces, I called them by their proper name, and I did it with a lifetime of manufactured respect that made my mouth pucker in bitterness:

Vultae.

But behind their backs, I cursed their vile existence. Every time one smiled at me, no matter how pretty he was, I fantasized how it’d feel to spill his blood with my bare hands. To take his life as he slept so soundly on pillows spun from the finest silk.

Not that I’d ever get the chance. But a boy could dream.

“Feloré,” said the brothel’s latest newcomer. “Are you still awake in there?”

The brothel keeper usually put new whores on a lounge next to mine so they could learn from someone seasoned. I’d forgotten this one’s name, but his voice reminded me of a scratchy cat’s mew. One somewhere between its eighth and ninth life.

I’d draped my legs over the back of my amethyst-colored sofa, so I could hang my head off the side, flipping the room upside down. I’d tried my hardest to wipe clean some of these questionable stains that were here long before me, but it didn’t help. They were encrusted in time, each promising a sinful story.

This brothel had existed before the Great War and before the vultae had taken their place as supreme rulers. It was a free-to-choose type of society back then, or so I’d heard. Now, this was a state-sanctioned brothel and one of hundreds throughout the kingdom.

“Hello in there?” the newcomer asked, his voice frail and his words a little slurred.

His tongue must’ve still been swollen from the metal pipette they pierced through it when they gave us the title of concubine. They welded it on each tip so it could never be removed. Like a branding.

“Tell me you’re awake,” he said.

I let my eyes drift shut as the blood rushed to my head, making it feel like it was full of cotton. “Barely.”

It’d been a slow day at the brothel. Only two vultae had visited all day, and while one had chosen me, he only paid for an hour. That was barely enough to make quota.

“I feel like I’m going to pass out,” he said. “I’m starving.”