His voice was a velvet whisper stretched over something feral.

“I have been waiting for your arrival for ten thousand years.” The smile widened. The fangs caught the fractured jungle light. “Drop your shield.”

Serena froze.

Her eyes flashed pink. Then gold. Then unfocused, the sharpness dissolving into something glassy and vacant.

Her shield fell.

The gold dome flickered, destabilized, and collapsed.

Seven people stood in a jungle clearing with nothing between them and the creature in obsidian armor.

“SERENA!” Dex roared.

Too late.

The creature moved.

It crossed the distance at Alpha speed. Faster, maybe. The space between where it had been standing and where Serena was standing disappeared in a blur that registered as motion only after the motion was complete.

His hand wrapped around her throat as he slammed her against a tree. The bark splintered on impact, the trunk cracking outward from the point of contact, her body pinned against the wood by a hand that was grey and wrong and carrying a strength that had nothing to do with muscle and everything to do with something else.

He leaned in. Razor-sharp fangs bared. His mouth angling for her neck, the angle precise, targeted, the geometry of a predator whose bite placement was practiced across millennia.

Fin was closest.

He didn’t think. Thinking was a luxury that required time, and time was a resource that had been exhausted the second that hand touched his mate’s throat.

His sword was out.

One clean, merciless stroke.

SHUNK.

The head hit the ground before anyone saw the blade move.

It rolled twice. Stopped. The black eyes were still open. The smile was still on the face, frozen mid-grin, the fangs still bared.

The body collapsed a heartbeat later.

Dex was already grabbing Serena. His hands found her shoulders, her waist, yanking her free from the splintered tree before the corpse finished falling.

He pulled her against his chest, arms wrapping around her.

She stared at the headless body. Horrified. Her consciousness snapping back into her skull with the jarring reentry of a woman who had been gone for eight seconds and had returned to find a decapitated creature at her feet and blood on the jungle floor.

Dex cupped the back of her head, pulling her face into his chest, his chin resting on top of her hair.

“It’s alright. He’s gone. He is never touching you. Ever.”

Fin was still holding the sword. The blade dripped. His breathing was controlled, steady, the breathing of a man who had just executed a killing stroke at maximum speed and whose speed had saved his mate’s life and whose life-saving was going to sit in his chest for days as the moment he almost failed and didn’t.

His eyes found Serena. Found her against Dex’s chest. Found her breathing. Found her alive.

His jaw unlocked by one degree. The degree was relief.

Gavriel was already scanning the shadows. Sword drawn. His body had pivoted outward the second Fin’s blade landed, his positioning shifting from offensive to perimeter, the instinct of a Gamma who understood that the immediate threat was down and the next threat was the one you couldn’t see yet.

Rook: There are more. I can smell them.

“If that is what I think it is,” Aeron said, “then we are in some deep shit. They live in packs similar to wolves. More will come.”

Dex’s eyes snapped to him.”You know what these are?”

“In theory. I’ve read about them.” Aeron’s gaze was on the corpse, cataloguing, his brain already writing the entry, the entry already four paragraphs long. “Vampires. Thought to be extinct. Every text references them as myth. One bite is fatal to wolves.”

Hyran nodded. “Confirmed. That was my hypothesis as well.”

“Why the hell did they call her Moon Princess?” Fin said through his teeth. “That’s not random.”

Serena swallowed against Dex’s chest. Trying to steady her breathing. Her eyes were still tracking the corpse on the ground, the body and the head and the space between them where the neck had been.

“Unknown,” Hyran replied. “Serena. Shield around us. If another drops, do not look it in the eyes. That compulsion was ocular. Eye contact is the vector.”

A gold dome materialized around the group. Humming. Solid. Stronger than the first one because the first one had been instinct and this one was fear and fear was a better fuel source.

Gavriel kicked the corpse out of the shield’s radius. The kick was sharp, vicious, his boot connecting with the obsidian armor and shoving the body, then the head across the jungle floor.

The head rolled with it. Still smiling.

“Do you know the direction?” Dex asked Serena. His voice had shifted registers. The warmth was gone. The protective tenderness was shelved. What remained was command. Pure, operational.

“Yes,” Serena replied. Her voice was thin but steady. The steadiness was costing her something visible in her hands, which were shaking, but the voice held and the holding was the metric that mattered.

“Blades up,” Dex ordered. His eyes swept every person in the shield. “Serena, push flame into everyone. Maelor, center formation with her. Now.”

The group snapped into formation. Instantly. Completely. The rubber-band tension of seven people whose professional training had been activated by a threat that eliminated all ambiguity and whose elimination produced the specific, lethal efficiency of the best-trained unit in Skardos moving as a single organism.

This was the serious version of the group. The version that existed beneath the fruit wars and the truth pollen and the mage bickering. The version that had walked into temples, fought through lakes, killed things that were supposed to be unkillable, and walked out carrying artifacts that predated civilization.

The version that wasn’t fucking around.

Flaming swords materialized. Serena pushed gold fire through every blade in the formation. The flames caught, ignited, wrapped around steel in ribbons of burning magic that turned five swords into five torches.

Maelor moved to center formation beside Serena. His green magic was humming at his fingertips.

But before anyone could take a step, a sound rose from the jungle floor.

Low. Wet. Gurgling.

A chuckle.

The severed head, lying in the dirt outside the gold dome, twitched.

The mouth split into a grin. Slow. The lips peeling back from the fangs with the incremental reveal of a creature whose facial muscles were operating independently of a body they were no longer attached to. The black eyes blinked. Once. Twice.

The head laughed.

“Did you think that death applies to me?”

Serena jolted and a high-pitched, panicked scream escaped her before she could stop it.

Her hand flew to her mouth. Dex’s hand landed over hers. Too late.

The scream had already done its damage.

He kissed her head once. Fast. Firm. The kiss of a man whose mate had just announced their position to every hostile creature in earshot and whose announcement was done and whose done was irreversible.

“Guess they know we’re here now,” he said lightly.

Then the body moved.

The headless corpse, lying in the dirt outside the shield, twitched. Its hands groped blindly over the ground, the slow tactile exploration of a body operating without eyes and whose operation was producing a visual that was going to live in Serena’s nightmares for months.

The hands found the head.

The head laughed harder. The torso lifted the head. Both hands. Shoved it back on.

Flesh knitted. The sound was wet, crackling, and absolutely disgusting.

In under three seconds. The neck was whole. The head was attached. The creature was intact.

He rolled his shoulders. Straightened his spine.

He smiled. Wide. Too wide.

Then he did something worse. Something none of them expected.

His jaw unhinged, his mouth opening to a width that was three times what any humanoid jaw should accommodate. The opening revealed rows of fangs that extended backward into a throat that was dark and deep and lined with teeth.

He held the gape for two seconds.

The jaw snapped back into place.

He raised one hand. Black magic coiled around his arm like smoke.

His attention was singular, absolute, locked onto the woman behind the dome with the focused devotion of a predator who had identified the only thing in the room worth consuming.

“Your birthright,” the vampire whispered, “was stolen once. But never again.”

His black eyes held Serena’s through the gold light.

“You belong to the Night Throne, little Moon Princess. To me.”