Page 49

The trap changes shape instantly.

Not attack me.

Threaten them.

My hunger answers before thought can catch it.

Heat tears through my chest so violently that the world flashes white-gold at the edges. The demon in my grip stiffens as the current under my skin surges into my hands, and I feel its essence behind the borrowed flesh, a greasy, writhing knot of appetite and obedience and minor cruelty. It is not strong. It is not ancient. It is not even particularly clever.

It is available.

“Corin!” someone shouts from the lane, but the voice is not Isolde’s, and it reaches me from too far away to matter.

The demon digs its claws into my forearm.

Pain opens the door.

I pull.

I do not mean to. Gods, I do not mean to, but instinct moves through the wound faster than restraint. The demon’s essence tears loose with a sound like wet parchment ripping, flooding up my arm in a rush of infernal heat. Its borrowed body collapses inward, skin smoking, eyes going wide with the first honest fear it has shown since it started following me.

The hunger drinks.

Power slams into me.

I stagger back, dragging air through my teeth as the demon disintegrates into ash and red-black sparks that scatter over the wet stones. For one glorious, horrifying instant, every injury in me closes, every weakness burns away, and my senses sharpen until the whole lane becomes a feast of pulses. The cart driver scrambling away. The mule shrieking in its harness. The two girls pressed against a wall. The vendor with a bleeding hand. The lesser demons still moving. Every life around me glows at the edge of perception, fragile and bright.

Too bright.

The hunger lifts its head.

“No,” I say, but the word barely sounds human.

The rooftop demon freezes halfway toward the girls.

It sees what just happened. It sees me breathing smoke, sees the gold flooding my eyes, sees the ember lines crawling under my skin and the glamour around my horns flickering like cloth held too close to flame.

Then it smiles.

“There he is.”

The second demon grabs the cart driver by the back of his coat and hauls him upright, claws pressing near the man’s throat. The driver flails, boots slipping in broken crockery.

“Show us function,” the demon croons. “Show us what Vaerith fears.”

I turn toward it.

The hunger surges again, not merely toward the demon this time, but outward in a wider wave that catches on every pulse nearby. My mouth floods with a copper-sweet taste. My fingers flex, and black-gold flame crawls between them, hungry for direction.

The cart driver sobs.

The sound cuts through me, but not enough.

His fear tastes too close to the demon’s, and that is what terrifies me. The hunger does not care about guilt or innocence once the surge rises high enough. It wants energy. It wants release. It wants the nearest seams it can split open and drink from.

I take one step toward the demon holding him.

The girls whimper behind me.