Page 81 of Demon Food

“Feloré, was it?” The smoke swirled around him as he winked. “Well, you sleep tight now.”

I bit the inside of my cheek hard enough for it to bleed. I had nothing to respond. Because he was right.

“You and I both know you would’ve tried to stab me in my sleep, my fanged fox—you still might, and I can’t even say I’d blame you. But I lied because I had to. I lied to protect your sanity.”

I didn’t want it to be true. I didn’t want to be standing here with nothing to say.

“Not to mention, protect you from the wrath of this crown.” He tipped his chin toward the knife still clutched in my palm. “I understand, Snow Fox. But my father sure wouldn’t.”

“Why do you care about protecting me?” I asked, the fight draining from my voice.

“Why? It makes no sense.”

He chuckled a little, but there was no humor in it. “It’s that difficult to imagine, huh? There’s no part of you that can look at me and see anything other than the cruelty of my kind.”

I didn’t know. I didn’t know what to see or how to feel.

“You’re alive, not because it’s easy for me, but because I want you alive.”

Gooseflesh pebble down my arms at the same time my heart fluttered, and I struggled to tamp either of them down.

“I am not lying when I say I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to hurt any human.”

My eyes narrowed. Wait. “Wait, that is why you haven’t eaten? Because you don’t want to harm a human?”

“Oh, if only,” he said, shaking his head, sighing like he was weary. “If only it was just harming.”

Chills scattered across the back of my neck.

“I cannot do it—no, I won’t,” he said, reaching a hand out, then letting it fall. “I won’t be the reason the life drains from a human’s strange but impossibly lovely eyes.”

As if I wasn’t already shocked silent. As if everything I learned tonight had not been contradictory to a whole lifetime of intuition. My tongue was barely able to wrap around the words rolling over it.

I wanted to shake him as hard as I could for some reason. “But you’ll die, Prince. The life will drain from your eyes. Do you not realize that?”

He shrugged a shoulder, like that wasn’t news. Like he’d already resigned. Then he said, “What is the point of living, if that is what I must live with?”

My heart. It melted.

It melted inside my chest so profoundly, so devastatingly, that when I looked upon his sick face, I suddenly saw the weight of each freckle, the pain underscoring each crease, and the sorrow behind the purple smears beneath his eyes.

I didn’t have the words. I didn’t even have the thoughts. What I had was a paradigm shifting inside my body in real time.

Here stood a vultus. Here stood the enemy. Here stood the future king of this realm, and his heart was possibly as pure as the angel bone still clutched in my palm. Furthermore, I believed him.

The knife fell from my fingers, clattering onto the floor with a clank. I couldn’t be so sure why I did it. Why I rushed to him. Maybe, I just wanted to show him some mercy as I pulled his body into mine.

His arms hovered in the air around me as he tensed, like he didn’t quite know what to do. Then the future king hugged me back.

23

ALEK

Iawoke to something tickling my nose. My head jolted backward as I blinked my eyes open.

Oh, shit. Oh, my fucking gods, it was Feloré. His hair was in my face. He was in my arms.

Hunger slammed into my stomach as I tried to orient myself, but it was impossible to think with how quickly my cock was swelling.