Page 66 of Demon Food

I nodded.

What he said next was not a language I’d ever heard. It was more like a beautifully timed musical score—too delicate to be Vultaen, too poetic to be Novithish, and old. I could nearly see an arrangement of symbols pressed into the side of some relic.

“I love it,” I whispered, squirming in tighter, whimpering from his tongue on my neck. “But I don’t know what it means.”

“Yes, you do.” He splayed his long fingertips over my neck and jaw. “Think, darling.”

A trickle of something warm dribbled onto my shoulder.

“I don’t know,” I breathed, cutting my eyes to my shoulder and the bright red dots that had fallen there.

“I’ll bleed for you,” he whispered and pressed a kiss atop my shoulder. “I’ll fucking bleed for you, human.”

I finally twisted to him, and I gasped.

I hadn’t noticed it before. The red staining his lips.

“Alek.” My eyes grew large when I smoothed my thumb over his lips, and blood smeared across his cheek. “Y-you’re bleeding.”

Something was so horrifying about his smile. It was stretched wide across his face, but his teeth were stained a jarring red. Then blood. So much blood began to pour from his mouth, trickling in streaks of dark crimson down his chin, soaking his white shirt.

I screamed his name, but he wasn’t trying to fight it. He was doing nothing but continuing to smile as blood gushed past his lips.

No one answered my screams. No one came to help us, and I couldn’t even get him to stand. He was unmoving and unfazed as I pulled at his clothes in useless yanks.

“Shh, darling,” he whispered, pulling me to the ground where I stumbled onto my back, and he smiled as he crawled on top of me, spilling blood over my chest. “You cannot say a word.”

Everything was suddenly too bright, too burning, like the sun was closing in on us. I could barely even see him.

He leaned into my ear and whispered, “It is a secret.”

I startled awake, clawing my fingertips into something firm—a chest, muscled and dense. The cotton swill of fabric.

My vision came into focus the same time he grunted, and I realized too late that I was pulling Alek into me by fistfuls of his shirt.

On top of me in his bed.

His body was muscled and so heavy, even as he held himself up to not crush me. I parted my lips to speak, but the words snagged in my throat—Alek, You’re alive. You’re ALIVE.

He blinked down at me with his eyes bright and captivated, and for one far-too-long second, I couldn’t budge. Neither could he.

Then my senses rushed back into focus. A virgin was on top of me.

“Get off!” I shouted and kneed him in the ribs.

He clutched his side, his face crumbling in pain as I scurried backward until I collided with the headboard. Oh, no, no, no, no. His stab wound. The streaks of red. The infection.

“Fuck,” he wheezed, collapsing onto the bed each time he tried to sit up, teeth clenched tight.

“Shit, I’m sorry,” I breathed. “Alek, I didn’t mean—what were you doing? Why were you on top of me?”

He muttered a string of colorful language as he gripped his side, finally able to push himself up. His words were weak and wretched as he said, “I wasn’t ‘doing’ anything. I was trying to wake you. You were screaming in your sleep.”

I blinked for a long time. “Screaming what?”

His gaze darted to mine. The last time I saw him, he’d been red-eyed and filled with fury. This morning, the red had receded from his irises, returning them to their sparkling golden copper.

“You know, it was the strangest thing,” he said, his lips curling in a grin. “You were screaming my name.”