It was always going to end this way. He's been dead since the beginning.
No amount of psychic visions from his half-witch sister can surprise Jonathan Carlisle with the fact that he's going to end up dying young ─ well, younger than most vampires w...
Separate me from my own two hands / I've killed so many times / But I can't save the world from the creatures that don't die. / I kinda like the way you tell me, "Baby, please come home, / I need you here right now, / I'm crying in the water so you don't hear the sound."
Pierce the Veil, Props & Mayhem
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Stevie Leung was somebody, once. Someone with promise. Someone with the spotlight at her back and the crowd at her feet, always holding their breaths when she danced. Now, she's a ghost. Now, she can hardly recognise herself. Fresh out of in-patient care, Stevie is forced to return to London, her hometown, where the heaviness sitting inside her grows limbs and a face and nothing ever happens, and there is her mother in the house she grew up in. A place she'd been so desperate to leave a long time ago. A place she had almost left behind entirely.
At twenty, forcibly unemployed, and without hope for her future, Stevie knows she's a disappointment to her mother. Just last year, she was the star of the Royal Ballet Theatre's production of Swan Lake, the Swan Queen. Now, she's just any other depressed, burnt-out, anorexic castaway. These long months at the mental hospital have proven to her that she's yet another fluke. Without a purpose or direction, Stevie knows that this is it for her. That she's just another failure to add to the pile of women fallen victim to madness in her bloodline.
The reality is that she's not the perfect daughter her mother has always wanted her to be. The pursuit of perfection has ruined her, and she's slowly learning how to let go. But without something to work for, something to obsess over, Stevie's going insane. Her life is empty, and she's bored. She's back in her childhood home, caught in the storm of her mother's madness, and regressing into her high school self. Thing is, Stevie's always been a good girl, a master of control, a study in discipline and obedience. But there's always been a crack running through that image, so tiny at first, slowly spreading outward. Like every woman, there's a secret part of her that's always wanted to rage. A part of her curious as to what it would be like if she gave into the sick urge to destroy, to be free of perfection, of the need to be small and polite, and ruin everything she touches instead.
And what if there was someone out there who could help her? Someone who enabled her to become the worst version of herself, but also the happiest she's ever been? The most free? And isn't that something? Isn't that the most monstrous thing of all?
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A long time ago, Jonathan Carlisle walked away from his family and never looked back. When asked where he'd come from, he'd simply flash a toothy, menacing grin and say, "hell." And, without a doubt, that's also where he'd forged his band. Jonathan's fate is tied to the music, and when he sings, people listen, transfixed. They cannot help it. It's a cursed power, to be able to command the will of a crowd. If he wanted to, he could order them to their deaths and they'd do it. Like lambs to the slaughter. Blood has been shed this way, countless times. Since he'd founded them, The Devourers has skyrocketed to shocking levels of rock-stardom, and haven't seen a single chance at slowing down. As vampires, the laws of life cannot touch them, and so there will never be another law that does.
