The six of them had blades pressed to their throats while Serena was on her back, a disgusting vampire standing over her producing a shadow that smelled like a thousand-year-old corpse had gargled sulfur and lost.

“I am King of the Night Throne and you shall yield.”

“Creative,” Serena said. “Did you come up with that yourself?”

The King blinked. The blinking was the blinking of a creature who had been delivering that line for ten thousand years and had never once received editorial feedback.

“You will yield to me, Moon Princess.”

“You already said that. The repetition isn’t strengthening the pitch.”

His jaw twitched. The twitching was unprecedented. Ancient vampire kings did not receive notes on their monologues from women lying in dirt.

“I have waited ten millennia—”

“Ten millennia and that’s the opener?” Serena’s voice was flat. Conversational. The voice of a woman lying on her back in a jungle surrounded by undead predators and choosing to critique the delivery. “Yield is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. You might want to workshop it.”

“SILENCE.”

“See, that one’s better. Direct. Punchy. Lead with that next time.”

His jaw unhinged. The triple row of fangs extended. The threat was clear, ancient, and entirely wasted on a woman whose survival instincts were currently being overridden by the compulsive need to tell this dude to fuck off.

She used this second to shove flame into everyone immediately with everything she had. Her heart was pounding. Her hand shot up, aimed directly at the vampire standing over her.

“Stop with the flame,” the vampire commanded before any flame came.

Her hand fell, and the flame she had been pushing into everyone stopped.

The vampires who had started to burn a moment prior went still. A few laughed as their bodies regenerated tissue. The laughing was the laughing of creatures who had been on fire and found the experience amusing, and the amusing was the most disturbing sound any of them had heard today, which was saying something, because today had included a screaming severed head.

The King hunched over her, fangs out.

Fin roared, lunging, but the blade at his throat bit down. “GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM HER!”

His voice was pure Alpha command. Every wolf in formation felt the frequency in their bones. The vampires felt nothing. Alpha command bounced off the undead the way sunlight bounced off the dead, which was to say: completely, uselessly, and with zero fucking effect.

The King’s head turned toward Fin with the slow, theatrical rotation of a creature whose patience had expired three centuries before anyone in this clearing was born.

“I said quiet!”

SLICE.

The blade moved.

In one brutal move, a vampire slit Finnick Shadowclaw’s throat open.

Or so that’s what should have happened.

But before steel could kiss skin, Fin vanished.

Gone. Erased from the jungle floor mid-execution, his body vanished so fast the vampire holding the blade stumbled forward into empty air and nearly stabbed itself in the thigh.

The gold bracelets on all seven of them vibrated.

Aureus Catenes cuffs. They wore them so they could all mindlink because Fin, Aeron, and Maelor belonged to different packs. None of them expected the cuffs to work. Mindlink didn’t function at all in the Temple of Vyramar, and the cuffs didn’t activate when Dexmon and Fin were dying under the surface of the lake.

But they were in the jungle, not a temple, and the cuffs worked. A failsafe that had just ripped an Alpha King out of a death strike and deposited him elsewhere entirely.

✦✦✦

DRAKENFELL — CHAMBER UNDER LIBRARY

Fin reappeared in Drakenfell where Serena had carved a rune months ago. He was still on his knees, in the exact position he had been in.

Fury exploded through him.

“NO. NO, NO, NO! FUCK!” he roared, slamming his fist into the ground.

He tried to mindlink.

Fin: Serena.

Nothing.

Fin: Aeron. Dexmon. Can anyone hear me?

Silence. Dead, worthless, absolute silence.

He tried again harder. The cuff vibrated once more. It was either malfunctioning or enforcing a forced time-out he couldn’t break.

He tried a third time. A fourth. Each attempt produced the same vibration and the same silence, and the silence was converting oxygen into violence at a rate his body could barely contain.

Xeon: It put us in timeout.

Xeon was slamming against the walls of Fin’s skull with the focused, relentless fury of a wolf whose mate was thousands of miles away surrounded by undead and whose separation was producing a howl inside Fin’s head that had no off switch and no volume control.

Tiberon Drakenfell appeared at the bottom of the stairs, also wearing a golden cuff bracelet.

He assessed Fin in one second. Bloody knuckles. Gold eyes.

“When the wearer is within one second of fatal injury,” Tiberon said. His voice carried zero surprise. Zero warmth. The pure operational frequency of a king whose emotional range started at tactical and ended at classified. “It was activated.”

“Send me back.”

“The rune is one-directional. It pulls. It doesn’t push.”

“Then find me a mage who can open a portal—”

“To where?” Tiberon’s voice cut clean through the sentence. “We don’t have a location.”

Fin stood. His fists were bleeding. His jaw was locked so tight the tendons in his neck were visible from across the room.

✦✦✦

THOUSANDS OF MILES AWAY — VOLCANO ISLAND FROM HELL

Back in the jungle, everyone kept their expressions neutral. Every vampire looked confused. The confusion was comprehensive. One second their Alpha captive was kneeling with a blade at his throat and the next second the kneeling was empty and the blade was cutting air and the air didn’t bleed.

The vampire who had been holding the blade stared at his own hands. Then at the ground. Then at the empty space where an Alpha King had been. The staring was producing a malfunction in his ancient brain that ten thousand years of existence had failed to prepare him for.

The vampire hovering over Serena with his fangs extended froze.

Serena used this window.

She fabricated a gold net.

The construct materialized around the King’s upper body in a single flash, gold threads wrapping his arms, his torso, his jaw, pinning his fangs shut with a mesh that tightened every time he moved.

He thrashed.

The thrashing was immediate, violent, and deeply, catastrophically undignified.