Page 174 of Demon’s Snack

Its hollow chest flares open, drawing in rain, ash, and loose ward sparks. The pull rips across the courtyard, but Corin’s channel catches the force before it spreads. The force drives him to one knee. I go down with him, refusing to break contact, my palms still locked over the pounding infernal heat under his ribs.

The bond burns so bright I can hardly see.

My bloodline response floods through me, hotter now, less like a tool and more like a choice made by every breath I refuse to surrender. I push that stabilizing current into Corin, not to contain him for anyone else, but to help him hold himself while the devourer’s strength crashes against him.

“Now,” Rhazek commands.

Corin’s hand covers mine.

His voice drops low enough that I feel it through my bones. “Together.”

I nod once.

He pulls.

The invading strand tears backward through the channel, and the devourer’s body fractures from the inside. Gold cracks race across its ribs, through its antlers, down its long arms and into the claws buried in the summoning circle. It screams as pieces of its half-formed body collapse into black ash and sparks, drawn inward along the tether Corin controls.

The courtyard erupts in light.

Corin does not devour the creature whole. He masters the point of contact, forces the devourer’s own attack to consume the unstable bridge it used to enter, and burns the tether clean from both ends. The hollow chest caves inward. The antlers split apart in branches of gold fire. Shadow-sinew unravels into smoke that funnels back toward the breach instead of spilling into the crowd.

The veil shrieks.

The summoning circle buckles.

Vaerith staggers as the backlash tears through the last of his control marks. His guards scatter from him now, openly, leaving him beside the ruined dais with rain and ash streaking his face.

Corin remains on one knee with my hands beneath his, breath ragged, skin blazing, horns crowned in black-gold flame. He looks monstrous in the stormlight, magnificent and terrible, and every person in the courtyard can see exactly what he is doing with that power.

He is holding the line.

The devourer’s form fragments above us, piece by piece, as Corin forces the tether to burn itself into nothing.

The crowd watches a hybrid master the hunger that Vaerith insisted would enslave him.

I keep my palms against Corin’s chest and breathe with him until the last gold fracture reaches the devourer’s hollow heart.

27

CORIN

The devourer screams through me.

Not around me.

Not at me.

Through me.

Its fractured essence claws along the channel I locked around the tether, tearing against the infernal architecture under my ribs with the desperation of something ancient realizing it can die. Gold fractures race through its collapsing form above the courtyard, but pieces of it still remain inside me, hooked deep where my absorption channels meet the contract rewrite.

The pressure slams against my consciousness hard enough to blur the world.

For one disorienting instant, the courtyard disappears beneath alien memory.

I see vast black plains lit by infernal storms. Towers built from fused bone and obsidian. Rivers of soul-energy moving like glowing arteries through ruined kingdoms. Hunger large enough to become geography. Endless feeding. Endless taking. Endless hierarchy carved into existence by stronger predators devouring weaker ones until only the biggest appetite remained.

The devourer tries to force that structure onto me.