Finnick Shadowclaw had killed a lot of things in his career. Wolves. Dark mages. A training dummy that one time by accident. None of those things had reattached their own heads and laughed about it. This was new goddamn territory and the territory was bullshit.

The trees around them bent inward. Branches groaned, the wood creaking under a pressure that was invisible and deliberate, the jungle itself folding toward the clearing like fingers closing around a throat.

Black eyes opened in the dark, and every wolf in the formation arrived at the same conclusion at the same speed: we are fucked.

Pairs. Scattered through the canopy and the undergrowth, blinking into existence at staggered intervals, each pair appearing in a different position, a different height, a different angle. The opening was coordinated. Rehearsed. The specific choreography of predators who had done this before and whose before was measured in centuries.

Dex’s voice cut through the clearing on the mindlink. Clean. Cold. Command.

Dex: Move out. Formation Delta. Keep eyes up. Nobody looks directly at any of them.

His voice was steady. Controlled. Pure military command, the register that lived beneath the prince and the mate and the man who had just watched his mate get grabbed by the throat. The register that ran wars.

They moved. Quiet. Fast. The formation tightened, seven bodies moving as one unit through the jungle, blades out, magic humming, the gold dome traveling with them as Serena held the shield from the center.

The vampire who attacked Serena tilted his head. His smile softened into something intimate, conversational, the smile of a creature addressing prey it intended to enjoy.

“Run,” he called after them. “I enjoy the chase.”

He vanished into the canopy. One second he was standing in the clearing, black magic coiling around his arm, and the next second he was gone, dissolved into the shadows above with the fluid silence of smoke leaving a room through a crack in the ceiling.

Branches rustled. A hush fell.

Then hundreds of black eyes opened in the dark.

The canopy exploded.

Figures dropped from the trees in sync. Dozens of them. Grey-skinned, black-eyed, fangs bared, each one grinning with the identical, rehearsed grin of creatures who had practiced the grinning.

The unit continued to move, but their pace was slowed.

“Ahh,” one hissed from the left, the sound sliding through the foliage like a blade through silk. “Hunt-and-seek.”

Another giggled from above. The giggling was wrong. High-pitched, childlike, produced by a mouth that was old and rotten and whose rotten was using a child’s laughter as camouflage. “We like games.”

Games. The undead creatures that smelled like rot and smiled like children wanted to play games. Gavriel had played games. Gavriel liked games. Gavriel did not like games where the other team was immortal and the stakes were his goddamn jugular.

Hyran mindlinked.

Hyran: Nobody gets bitten. One bite is fatal. The venom is faster than any healing factor. You get bitten, you die. There is no grey area.

Gavriel: How do we kill these fucks? Because decapitation is currently zero for one.

Aeron: You must behead them, remove all limbs, burn the remains into ash, then scatter the ashes across the ocean. Any intact piece will regenerate.

Dexmon: Problem with that. We aren’t near any goddamn oceans.

Aeron: They cannot cross sacred thresholds. Temples. Find shelter if you can.

Fin: Do you see any temples around, Aeron?

Aeron: No. Oh and direct sunlight will burn them. Before you say it, I know that it’s goddamn cloudy.

Gavriel looked up at the sky through the canopy. Clouds. Thick ones. The kind of clouds that made it look like it was about to start pouring.

A hiss echoed through the jungle. Close. Multiple directions. The hissing was layered, overlapping, the acoustic signature of a pack communicating through sound the way wolves communicated through mindlink.

A female vampire dropped down in front of Dexmon.

Skin peeling. Jaw crooked. Half her cheek missing, the flesh hanging from the bone in strips that exposed muscle and teeth on the left side of her face. She pressed herself against the gold shield dome and leaned close, her rotten mouth inches from the barrier, her breath fogging the gold magic like condensation on glass.

She whispered directly to Dexmon.

“Tell her to drop your shield.”

“Drop,” Dexmon commanded in an Alpha tone.

Serena’s gold dome collapsed instantly.

The magic stuttered, flickered, and died. The shield that had been protecting seven people disintegrated because the woman holding it had been compelled by a voice that bypassed every conscious defense and reached the part of her brain that obeyed before it could refuse.

Hyran immediately threw up a replacement dome. Less than a second was still enough for three vampires to surge forward, testing the gap, their bodies hitting the new barrier and recoiling.

“What in the flying shit…” Gavriel muttered.

Serena gasped and grabbed Dex’s arm. Dex blinked, confused.

Fin was already two steps ahead.

Fin: They understand Alpha command mechanics. Dexmon in the center with Serena and Maelor.

Dex glanced around, still not understanding.

“You get used to it,” Serena said with a sigh.

Dex looked at Serena. Looked at Fin. Looked at the vampires pressing against Hyran’s replacement dome. Then looked back at Serena with the expression of a man who had just been moved to the center of a formation like a liability, and whose liability status was new and deeply fucking offensive.

Another vampire dropped. Female. Rotting worse than the first. Skin grey-green, eyes solid red, teeth exposed through a mouth that had no lips remaining. She leaned over Hyran’s dome and whispered directly into the gap at his ear.

“Drop your shield.”

Hyran gave her a flat, unimpressed look and ignored her.

The vampire looked very offended, like he had hurt her feelings.

Aeron: How long do you think it takes for them to figure out he is gay as the day is long?

Seven people moving through a jungle full of immortal predators with flaming swords under a gold dome that was contingent upon the other side figuring out that Hyran was gay and with the collective understanding that one mistake, one bite, one second of exposed skin would result in a death that no healer, no mage, and no amount of gold magic could reverse.

No pressure.