The boy fell back lifelessly. Feeders piled onto the body, tearing at it. The demon swung its bloodied muzzle toward the other two, showing all its teeth. The girl was screaming now, and the older boy was cursing and shouting and brandishing the knife more as a talisman than as a weapon. They might have made a run for the open doorway while the demon was engaged in killing their companion, but they had failed to do so. Or even to try. The girl was on her knees with her arms about her head, keening. The older boy was standing his ground, but it seemed to the demon that he was doing so because he could not bring himself to move.

The demon advanced on the older boy, stiff-legged, alert. When it was close enough, it waited until the boy lunged with the knife, then hurled itself under the gleaming blade, jaws closing on the hand that wielded it. Bones crunched and muscles tore, and the boy screamed in pain. The demon knocked the boy backward against the wall and tore out his throat while he was still staring at his ruined hand.

Feeders sprang out of the darkness in knots of black shadow, falling on the dying boy, lapping up the life that drained away from him, feeding on the raw feelings of terror and despair and pain.

The girl had begun to crawl toward the open door, a futile attempt to get free. The demon moved quickly to intercept her. She crouched before it in a shivering heap, her arms clasped over her head, her eyes closed. She was crying and screaming and begging—Don’t, please, don’t, please, don’t—over and over again. The demon studied her for a moment, intrigued by the way the madness had enveloped her. It was no longer in a hurry, its hunger appeased with the killing of the boys. It felt languorous and sleepy. It watched the girl through lidded eyes. There were feeders crawling all over her, savoring the emotions she expended, licking them up anxiously. Perhaps she could feel them, perhaps even see them by now, with death so close. Perhaps she sensed what death held in store for her. The demon wondered.

Then it closed its jaws almost tenderly about the hack of the girl’s exposed white neck and crushed the slender stalk to pulp.

Abruptly, the screams faded to silence. Nest froze, staring into the mist and gloom, into the faint pools of streetlight, listening. She couldn’t hear a thing.

Ariel drifted close. The tatterdemalion hung suspended on the air, spectral, barely a presence at all. “It is over.”

Nest blinked. Over. So quickly. Her mind spun. “What was it?” she asked quietly.

“A creature of the Void.”

Nest stared into the tatterdemalion’s eyes and knew exactly which creature. She felt a chill sweep through her body and settle in her throat. “A demon,” she whispered. “Its stink is in the air,” Ariel said.

“What was it hunting?”

“The humans who live under the streets.”