Page 16 of Thane's Demon
The demon’s voice rumbled through me with a ferocity that made my jaw clench until my teeth ground together. The taste of iron flooded my mouth as I fought the urge to track her scent immediately. I forced myself to breathe, to move, begged for my legs to carry me out of the alley even though every instinct screamed for me to chase after her. To pull her back into the shadows, to keep her close enough that her warmth could soothe the hunger thrashing inside me.
I walked fast, pushing through the crowds on Nanjing Road as if the bodies around me were nothing but smoke. The roar of the city rose and fell like a tide. The sound of laughter mixed with arguments, the pulse of life that usually fed me so well, was swirling around my steps. This place had always kept me steady. The anger in the air, the frustration, the bitterness…
But every emotional thread I pulled from the passing crowd felt thin, diluted, dull.
The demon growled with dissatisfaction, recoiling as if every emotion I touched was the wrong kind. The wrong flavor, missing the sweetness it craved. I could sense its irritation like pressure building behind my ribs, claws scraping against my insides. Each scratch forming her name in a language older than this world.
‘The girl.
The Electus.
She is calm.
She is peace.
Only her.’
I snarled under my breath, earning a few startled glances as I stormed through a crowded intersection, my hands shoved deep into my pockets to keep them from trembling. Fear fed me. Anger fed me. Sorrow fed me. I had lived for years off the darkest parts of humanity, sucking the poison from the air and lettingit quiet the wild thing inside me. But now, after one encounter, after one look in her soft, frightened eyes, the poison tasted bitter.
I stopped at the edge of a busy crosswalk, letting cars roar past in a blur. My breath steamed faintly in the cool night air, and for the first time in years, I felt a pang of unease. The demon did not want the city. The demon did not want the crowds. The demon did not want blood, or fear, or violence for the sake of violence.
It wanted her.
It wanted her heartbeat.
Her warmth.
Her scent.
Her presence.
I cursed under my breath and tried to shake her from my thoughts. But even as I stalked through the streets hunting for another emotion, another taste that might ease the demon’s fixation, I could not stop remembering her. Remembering the moment she looked at me with gratitude instead of terror. That single breath of thanks, trembling and sincere, had lodged itself like a blade between my ribs.
I fed off the anger spilling from a drunken argument outside a club. It tasted thin. I pulled at the jealousy radiating from a couple fighting beneath a streetlamp. It tasted stale. I absorbed the fear of a teenager running from a gang of older boys. It tasted muted, barely enough to spark a reaction from the demon.
‘She has changed us.
She is needed.
Find her.
Take her.
Stay near her.’
I dug my nails into my palms until I felt blood trickle between my fingers, returning home only when my frustration grew toosharp to ignore. The apartment was silent, the shadows heavy and familiar, but the usual comfort of the place did not settle inside me.
I moved through the room like a stranger, pacing, trying to ground myself in the stench of stale cigarette smoke drifting up from the floor below. The quiet groans of someone arguing in the hallway, the frayed anger of a woman crying in the apartment next door. These emotions should have steadied me. Instead, they flickered like weak flames in a storm.
Her absence gnawed.
I stripped off my jacket and lay back on the bed, closing my eyes, though I knew sleep would not come. It rarely did. But tonight something dragged me under faster than usual, something soft and strange that lulled me into a dream so vivid I jolted when it began.
She was standing in the middle of a dark street, her hair glowing faintly in the neon light. Her eyes were wide and searching, her small hands clutching her notebook against her chest like it was the last piece of herself she had left. She looked lost, afraid, but not of me. When I took a step toward her, the demon trembled inside me, not with hunger, but with longing, a primitive ache so deep it stole my breath.
Her name was a whisper on my tongue, though I had never heard it spoken. I woke with a harsh gasp, and then I dressed in seconds.
After that, I finally gave into the nagging impulse.
