Aurelia: Green.

One word. The word contained: surprise, recognition, a question, and something deeper that Aurelia did not elaborate on because Aurelia’s elaboration would have required context that she was not going to give her human at this point in time.

The three wolves hit the vampire line.

Dex’s wolf tore into the first vampire at full speed.

His jaws closed around a grey arm and ripped it from the socket. The arm hit the ground and started crawling. He bit through a second vampire’s torso, the force of his jaw cracking obsidian armor. A third lunged. He pivoted, caught it by the throat, and shook until the head separated.

Fin cut through the line at a diagonal, his body a black streak, each pass producing a dismemberment. Leg. Arm. Head. The pieces fell and started reassembling but the reassembling took time and the time was the resource Fin was buying.

Gavriel’s wolf was in the middle and he was fighting with a savagery that was disproportionate to his rank.

Gammas were powerful. Gammas were trained. But Gammas did not fight like this.

His jaws were producing damage that belonged to an Alpha.

Serena stood between the three mages. Her bow was up. Arrow drawn.

“Drop it,” a vampire commanded.

Her bow lowered.

“Serena,” Hyran snapped. Without a single fuck given, Hyran shook her by the shoulders, jolting her out of whatever she was just in.

She blinked a few times dazed.

Hyran took the arrow from her and put it back in her quiver.

“Move forward. Fabricate. Don’t look at them in the eyes,” he said, voice calm.

She gave a single nod.

Gold magic erupted from both palms. She fabricated walls. Barriers. Cages. Gold constructs appearing around individual vampires, trapping them in boxes of solid magic, each box buying seconds, each second buying distance.

A cage formed around a vampire mid-lunge. The creature hit the gold walls and sizzled. Serena threw another cage. Another. Another. The cages were temporary. The vampires inside them would break free. But the free was later and the later was survival.

She fabricated a gold net. Threw it over a cluster of four vampires. The net pinned them. Held them. They thrashed and the thrashing was producing cracks in the construct.

Nothing she tried lasted.

A vampire broke through Serena’s cage on her left. Hyran cut it down.

The chaos was total. The formation was cracking. The jungle was full of grey bodies and black eyes and the full was producing a pressure that was exceeding the group’s capacity to hold.

A vampire tackled Aeron from behind. He went down. His blade skittered across the dirt. Maelor fabricated a wall between Aeron and the vampire’s fangs, the green construct appearing an inch from Aeron’s throat, the inch being the difference between alive and dead.

Serena lost sight of Dex.

The realization hit her stomach like ice. One second his black wolf was visible, fighting, tearing, killing. The next second the trees were too thick and the vampires were too many and the many had swallowed him.

She lost sight of Fin.

Same. The black wolf vanishing into the chaos, the chaos consuming him, his position unknown, his status unknown, the matebond fogged by the necklace and the fogging was the worst thing the necklace had ever done to her. Right now she needed to feel them but the feeling was muted.

Gavriel was next.

The green wolf. Gone. Consumed by the jungle and the grey and the chaos.

“WE NEED TO MOVE!” Hyran grabbed her arm. His voice was raw, his throat bruised, his eyes carrying the specific urgency of a man whose tactical assessment had concluded that standing and fighting was producing attrition they could survive for minutes and minutes was insufficient.

They ran.

Serena ran with three mages through a jungle full of vampires without her wolves, without her mates, without her Gamma, her bow on her back, her magic depleting, her shift locked behind an Alpha command she couldn’t give herself, her body human in a fight that required wolf and whose requiring was the failing she had tried to fix and whose fixing was incomplete.

She was human. In a vampire jungle. Running.

Aurelia: We need to shift.

Serena: No shit. How?

Aurelia: We learn. Right now.

The jungle erupted.

Another lunged for Serena.

She ran, but this one was faster.

It hooked an arm around her waist, talons locking like iron, and in the next breath she was ripped off her feet. The ground left her. The canopy blurred.

The air cut at her face as the vampire carried her into the jungle at full Alpha speed, branches whipping past, leaves tearing at her arms, the world dissolving into a violent streak of green and dark and the cold, rotting grip of the thing that had her.

The vampire’s grip was iron and the iron was cold and the cold was the temperature of something that had stopped producing body heat centuries ago.

Serena reached for the flame.

Velkaris’s fire. The dragon fire that lived in her bloodstream, dormant until summoned, hotter than anything mage magic could produce. She pulled it from the place it lived, from the deep furnace between her ribs, and pushed it outward through her skin in a single, desperate eruption.

Her body ignited.

The vampire shrieked. The grey skin of its hands blackened, cracked, the dragonfire eating through the surface faster than the creature’s regeneration could repair.

But the burning was surface-level. The fire scorched and damaged and peeled and the peeling healed and the healing was happening in real time, the creature regenerating through the flames.

It was enough.

The loosening was a window. She hit the ground. Rolled. The momentum carried her through undergrowth, her burning body scorching leaves and vegetation in a trail of small fires that hissed and smoked behind her.

She ran.

Full speed. Alpha speed. Every muscle in her legs firing at maximum output, her boots tearing through soft jungle soil, her arms pumping, branches whipping past her face. The bow bounced against her back. Her lungs were already burning from the fabrication magic she had spent during the fight and the spending had depleted reserves she could never replenish fast enough.