Mask of Poison (Fall of Under Book 1) by Kathryn Kingsley (great novels to read txt) 📕

Wriggling and fresh and savory.

He ate it. Swallowed it whole. She had stopped screaming. Good. It was so noisy. Now she was twitching beneath him. She was in shock. It meant she might not feel it as he began to peel the skin from her face with his teeth and eat it, bit by bit.

This is profane.

This is a sin.

But, oh, it is so good.

Because with every piece he swallowed, a little bit of the pain began to go away.

If this was what it took to send it away…he’d eat every ounce of living flesh he could find.

It was when he had dug his fingers deep into her ribcage and ripped it apart, cracking it open like a sea crustacean, that he began to be able to think clearly.

Clearer.

Ish.

Give or take.

He had buried his head into that beautiful flesh of hers, tearing out her heart and eating it like a ravenous animal. He was swallowing her very lifeforce. Everything she had grown hung off a branch like a ripe peach, and it was his to devour. And the juices of her fruit flowed down his face and his neck and his chest.

He pulled in a shuddering breath. He had lungs now. That was a distinct improvement.

The woman beneath him was dead, but she had so much more to give him.

He was a king.

He would take it all.

With two eyes, he gazed up at the heads that stood poised over the great pool of blood that he had worshiped for so long. He knew them, even though he did not know himself. They were mocking him with their terrible, twisted grins. Blood poured from their maws, just as it oozed from his. He was as they were.

Swiping up some of the blood, he licked it from his fingers and stuck them deep into his mouth to savor every drop. This woman beneath him would give him everything she had.

For he was her king.

The marks of white upon her flesh said so.

His fingers grazed a tongue in his mouth, and he wriggled it against his digits, testing it out. Oh, yes, that was his tongue. Oh, and it was glorious.

Like a rabid wolf, he tore into the flesh of the woman again, carelessly ripping sinew and tendon away from the bone. But before long, he had devoured her. Everything worth taking was gone. He had even snapped some of her bones to suck the marrow out from the centers. But now she was only gristle and cartilage.

He leaned back against a stone dais that stood in the center of a circular platform and gazed up at the stony visages of the Ancients. The ones that mocked him.

They had mocked him his whole life. Everything he had known had been a lie. One atop another, atop another. He had believed himself to be their chosen son. Their protector—their keeper—the one who held the chains that kept them safe inside their prisons.

But when it had all come to blows…he had been abandoned. Left to sink into the nothingness that awaited them all.

You abandoned me.

You abandoned me!

It wasn’t until he had screamed it a third time that he heard it with his own ears. That was his voice. His voice! He could speak! He was not like poor mute Edu. He cackled and stuck his fingers in his own mouth to feel his tongue once more. It was there—wriggling, hot, and his.

He fell over on his side, looking at the decimated remains of the woman he had devoured. He reached out and stroked the carcass lovingly. The poor girl had given him everything.

He reached out for her, and her head detached from her neck. Oh, well. He cuddled it close to his chest. He had taken everything from her, so he could hold her for a little. Her jaw had fallen away somewhere. No matter.

He looked up at the Ancients from where he lay in the puddle of blood and ichor that he had made.

Distracted by the smell, he turned his head and licked a trail of the blood up from the stone. It was already going cold. Cold blood is terrible.

He had drunk blood before. Frequently. He pressed his fingers into his mouth again and found the sharp fangs that he had for canines. Good! They had not taken his favorite weapons from him, at least.

But what about the rest?

Slowly, piece by piece, it was coming back to him. But what was it? It was still a shattered, broken mess. Pushing to his knees, he dropped the woman’s head. It landed with a wet thump against the stone, forgotten and abandoned as she was.

I could fly.

He pressed his hands to his shoulders. There were holes in them. Deep trenches in his flesh. He could watch his own muscles move and bend where there was no skin. He could see bone pushing through, flashes of white in a sea of sticky red.

He shoved a finger into one of the wounds and howled in pain.

Well, that was stupid, wasn’t it? What did you think was going to happen?

Flying. Wings! I had wings!

He tried to summon them, but he fell onto his face with how much it burned. He screamed and sobbed, slamming his palm into the stone, likely breaking one of his fingers. It didn’t matter. Anything but that feeling at his back! It went away as he willed it to stop, and he crawled back to the remains of the woman. She had been wearing a white gown. It would serve him. He began to rip it to shreds, tearing off long strips of fabric. He began wrapping it around himself. Wherever he could see a gaping wound where his body was missing, he bound it in fabric.

Soon he was covered in more strips of cloth than not. It was already seeping through with crimson.

Wavering, he pushed up to his feet. He fell flat to the ground. He tried again and fell again. A third, fourth, and fifth time he tried, before he managed to