PROLOGUE
Zephyr
I fell from grace like an angel cast out of heaven.
The plummet was endless—then came darkness. Unconsciousness. Death.
Still, I descended. Deeper than the grave where they buried me, I dropped into a hot, black void, a room without walls. A cage.
Others were with me. Packed tightly in a writhing mass of bodies where people were crushed and trampled, but they didn’t die.
They screamed and sobbed and survived the pain, so the sounds of suffering were eternal. I moved through it, my naked flesh slicked with sweat, my hair in my eyes as tears leaked from them.
My heart thundered and thrashed, but how could it since I was dead?
I dragged myself through the panicked mass, dodging hands and sharp snapping teeth. And when I was too tiredto squeeze between them, I crawled. Striving to go anywhere away from this. To find an exit or escape.
I found bars.
I was pinned there, shoved against the iron that seared my skin and left burns on my hands. But I could see outside, into the black beyond, where horned creatures prowled. Demons, with cloven hooves that clattered against the stone floor and tails that cracked like whips in the air.
They stabbed them through the bars, those cruel, barbed things, finding bits of vulnerable flesh and puncturing it, spilling blood in streams.
And all around, the noise rose. Not words. Never words.
Only cries. Futile and bereft.
Eventually, a face emerged from the shadows. A man stood outside the cage, peering in.
He had no horns or tail. No weapon to cause pain.
I didn’t know what madness drove me, what desperate thought seized hold, but I reached for him. I thrust out a weak, blistered hand, and pressed so hard against the bars that my skin hissed and smoked. If it burned me down to nothing, if it tore me apart, I would be grateful so long as I could touch the other side.
The man didn’t take my hand. He only looked at it, then tilted his head, faintly amused. His gaze slid over me, cataloging every inch. Assessing.
“That one.”
The words barely made sense. After so many screams, a sentence felt like gibberish.
I blinked, still straining, still reaching as if he hadn’t spoken at all, as if I couldn’t understand.
The demons understood. They followed the man’s command and the pointed finger he aimedat me.
Around me, the wailing swelled. Other hands joined mine, thrust out, waving and grasping at the empty air.
But the bars yielded only for me.
When they melted, I thought it was me who was melting instead. I feared I’d been cut into pieces and dumped on the floor when I toppled through and landed on all fours at the man’s feet.
Breaths shuddered in and out, and I shook, head hanging between my braced arms.
Then I saw shoes, shiny black and stepping close. They pushed in until I drew back, rising onto my knees and looking up.
At him. My rescuer.
He studied me again, from my greasy scarlet hair and filth-smeared skin to every inch of my body so lewdly on display. Then he reached down, seized my jaw, and tipped my face back until the entirety of me was bared to him.
“Open your mouth,” he said.
