Berserk Hunger

“Empty night,” she cursed. She crouched over him, peeling back one of his eyelids, and then his lips. His gums were swollen and blotchy with dark stains.
“What’s happening?” I asked her.
“He’s sustained too much trauma without feeding,” she said. “His Hunger needs life energy. It’s taking his. It’s turned on him. It’s killing him.”
White Court vampires led a bizarre symbiotic existence: They were born bound to a demon that existed in immaterial tandem with them, called a Hunger. It was the demon who gave them their strength, their speed, their long lives, their capacity to recover from injury. In exchange they had to feed on the life force of others, to sustain the Hunger. My brother was, I knew, a rather potent example of the breed. That meant that his Hunger was strong, too.
And now he was paying for it.
“What can we do?”
She shook her head, her face hard. “This is how White Court vampires die. How my father will die, sooner or later.”
“Justine,” I said.
That word got through. Thomas lifted his head, mirrored eyes on me. He reached out a weak hand toward me in a gesture that died of exhaustion halfway.
“No,” Lara said, her eyes intent on his face. “By the time a Hunger turns on one of us, it’s mad, uncontrollable, insatiable. Even if we could redirect the Hunger, it would kill her and the child, and he’d die anyway.” The muscles in her jaw tensed.
“There’s still part of him in there. I might be able to reach him if we get him out of here—if we hurry.”


Peace Talks Chapter 27, Page 262-263