The morning started like every other morning in hell. I woke up in the abandoned doorway I'd claimed as territory for the night before, my body stiff from sleeping on stone and my stomach cramped with familiar hunger. Three days since I'd managed to steal anything worth eating, and my strength was beginning to fray at the edges like an old rope under too much strain.
But hunger was just the baseline now, the constant hum beneath everything else. What really mattered was staying invisible, staying small, staying one step ahead of the boys who made sport of hunting children like me through these narrow streets.
I'd gotten careless yesterday. Desperate enough to try stealing from a baker's cart in broad daylight, clumsy enough to get caught. The baker had chased me three blocks before giving up, but not before screaming about "dirty nomad thieves" loud enough to draw attention.
The wrong kind of attention.
Tommy Brennan and his pack had been watching from the shadows, cataloging my mistake, planning their response. I knew it the way prey knows when predators are circling. That prickle of just knowing something is wrong, that sense of walls closing in even when you're standing in the open street.
So I'd spent the day moving, trying to put distance between myself and the inevitable reckoning. But the slums in this city are only so big, and there are only so many places a boy like me can hide. Eventually, geography and mathematics conspired against me, herding me into this narrow alley like a sheep into a slaughterhouse.
Seven of them emerged from the shadows as I ran into a dead end. Tommy in the lead, his pale face split by the kind of grin that only a person who genuinely enjoyed violence and suffering would wear. Behind him, six others whose names I didn't know but whose faces I recognized from previous encounters. Boys who'd learned that the world rewarded them for putting boot to flesh, fist to bone, for finding someone weaker and making them pay for the crime of existing.
"Look what we found," Tommy announced to his audience, his voice carrying the theatrical confidence of someone playing to a crowd. "The little thief, all alone in the dark."
I backed against the alley wall, rough brick scraping through my thin shirt. No escape routes. No witnesses. Just me and them and the certainty that I had absolutely no chance.
"I didn't steal anything," I lied, because sometimes lies buy you precious seconds even when everyone knows they're lies.
"Sure you did." Tommy's grin widened, showing teeth gone crooked from malnutrition and poor care. "Saw you running from Murphy's cart yesterday. Saw him chasing you, screaming about his missing bread."
"I was hungry," I admitted. They'd have their pound of flesh regardless of what I said. Might as well meet it with honesty.
"Should've thought of that before you decided to steal from our territory."
Their territory. As if they owned these streets, as if poverty gave them some kind of patent on suffering. But even through my hatred for him, I understood the logic. I also used it. When you're drowning, you'll push anyone else under water if it means another breath for yourself. Except I had no one.
"Wouldn't have to steal if you didn't take everything I manage to find," I shot back, and immediately regretted it when Tommy's expression darkened.
"Ungrateful," he spat. "Here we are, teaching you valuable lessons about the natural order, and you're complaining about our methods."
Natural order. I'd heard that phrase before, usually from the mouths of people explaining why some children deserved food and shelter while others deserved fists and boots. The natural order that said my dark skin and sharp features marked me as something less than human. The natural order that built itself on the premise that suffering was a competition, and the winners got to inflict themselves on the losers.
They moved then, spreading out in a practiced formation that spoke of experience. This wasn't their first hunt, their first time cornering prey in a narrow space with no escape routes. They'd refined their technique through repetition, learned how to maximize fear and minimize the chance of their quarry slipping away.
I should have kept moving instead of stopping to rest in this dead-end alley. I shouldn't have stolen in the first place. But hunger and exhaustion makes you stupid, makes you take risks you know you shouldn't take. Makes you think maybe this time will be different, maybe this time luck will favor the desperate instead of the vicious.
I knew begging wouldn't help. Had learned that lesson the hard way in previous encounters. These boys fed on fear, on the power that came from having absolute dominion over another living thing. Showing weakness only made them hungrier.
But I couldn't help the way my voice shook when I spoke. "Please. I'll leave the territory. Won't come back. You'll never see me again."
"Oh, we won't see you again anyway," one of the other boys laughed. "That's rather the point."
They rushed me then, all seven at once, and whatever small chance I might have had evaporated in the face of their coordinated violence. I tried to fight back, threw myself at the biggest one with a wordless snarl born from desperation and the fury of someone who had nothing left to lose.
I landed one solid punch to someone's nose, felt the satisfying crunch of cartilage breaking, saw blood stream down pale skin. Then the others were on me, fists and boots and elbows finding every vulnerable spot on my body with practiced efficiency.
I curled up on the ground, trying to protect my head and vital organs while they worked me over. Each impact sent fresh waves of agony through my already battered frame, but I held onto consciousness through sheer stubbornness. If I was going to die in this alley, I wanted to be awake for it. Wanted to meet death with my eyes open.
The beating went on forever and not nearly long enough. My ribs cracked under their boots. Blood filled my mouth from where my teeth cut the inside of my cheek.
I didn't cry out for help that would never come.
"That's enough," Tommy said finally, breathing hard from the exertion. "Hold him up."
Rough hands grabbed my arms, hauled me upright against the alley wall. My legs wouldn't support my weight, and only their grip kept me from collapsing back to the stone. Through swollen eyes, I watched Tommy approach with the knife held low and ready.
"You know what you are?" he asked, his voice conversational despite the circumstances. "You're a reminder. A walking, breathing reminder that some people don't deserve the air they breathe. Your parents knew it when they ran away from whatever hole spawned them. Your mother knew it when she started spreading her legs for anyone with coin. And now everyone else is going to know it too."
The blade caught what little light filtered down from above, gleaming with promise. I closed my eyes and waited for the end.
Instead, darkness fell across the alley like a curtain dropping across a stage.
The temperature seemed to plummet in an instant, and suddenly the air was thick with something that tasted of fear and violence and ancient hunger. The boys holding me let go, stumbling backward with wordless gasps of terror.
I opened my eyes to see massive wings spread wide against the narrow strip of sky, blocking out what little light had been reaching us. Something dropped from above with predatory grace, landing in the middle of our small group with barely a sound.
The killing started immediately.
I'd never seen anything move so fast or with such lethal precision. The boy she attacked dropped dead almost immediately. The others, including Tommy, turned to run, she quickly reached one of them and shoved him onto the cobblestone. He tried to crawl away, whimpering like a hurt animal, but she ended his life by biting his neck. The rest of the boys ran onto the main street, but she let them go.
Then it was just me and her and two cooling corpses in pools of spreading blood.
She turned toward me. A demon. An actual demon, standing in this alley like something torn from a nightmare and given flesh.
That's when the shock finally hit me. When my consciousness finally registered what had just happened, what was happening now, and what might happen next. My vision got blurry, the alley spinning around me like a child's top.
I fainted.