Page 48 of Demon Food

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.

PART II

15

ALEK

Fucking gods, my head pounded. My side stung. My whole body ached like it’d been pummeled with stones.

It was the next morning, and the heat of the bathwater, tinted pink by my blood, was the only thing bringing me any comfort.

Say thank you, my father had said as he brutalized me, ripping my flesh to shreds, Say thank you, and it stops.

I could still feel the splitting of my skin. I could still feel the horrendous pressure of being torn apart by invisible hands.

I slept in the washroom all night. Well, slept was a stretch. I’d dwelled in the washroom all night like a vagrant troll, listening to the sound of Feloré’s beating heart.

It slowed as he slept. It was perfectly rhythmic, pulsing in a soothing cadence all night long, like a familiar song. I found myself tuning into it constantly throughout my sleepless night just to hear the thud.

Every so often, he would whimper, and that part fucked me up. It was surely a symptom of whatever dream he dreamt, but every time, the sound twitched my cock and made my abdomen constrict with need.

Two weeks I would be locked up with him. I had to survive two fucking weeks of this. It wasn’t fair. It was like tossing a bloody steak to a starving wolf, close enough to smell but just out of reach.

Except he wasn’t meat. He was very much alive. Keeping it that way was going to be the sword I fell on.

The clergy, who were in charge of finding the humans to be slain for one’s first, had brought me over a dozen. Some were supposedly already dying from illness (although, who could be sure?) Some were ‘criminals’ who’d been sentenced to death, (although, basic needs sometimes necessitated crime). And then there were those who were offering themselves willingly in exchange for erasing their children’s original debt. Which was most of them.

I’d turned them all down. I did it easily. I made up excuse after excuse and things were going fine.

Then my father brought me him.