The ground split open and the world ended, not with a war, not with a plague, but with teeth. They came from below. Massive. Endless. Creatures that shrugged off bullets like rain and tore through cities before the sirens even finished screaming. For years, humanity bled. Governments fell. Every weapon ever built proved to be little more than an insult. It took everything mankind had just to slow them down, and it was never enough. Until one man changed the rules. He stood where others ran. He took what the demons carried, their strength, their brutality, their power, and he bent it into something new. Something human. The world called it magic. Every person born after that day carries an ability inside them, sealed until their twelfth birthday, when it surfaces and defines everything they will become. Alec Ashworth's surfaced on schedule. He wishes it hadn't. Devour. No strength. No speed. No protection. Just a darkness that settled into his bones the moment it woke, and voices, low and patient, that have been whispering to him ever since. His family looked at what he became and made their choice. His new school made its position clear in the way only cruelty can. He survived all of it by holding onto one thing. One person. One reason to keep the voices quiet. They're gone now. The leash is off. And Alec is very, very hungry.
