Gavriel didn’t have time to process that an Alpha command had come from his mouth and that it worked. The light faded fast and a white wolf was running. But in the wrong direction. Aurelia wasn’t heading toward Gavriel.

Her wolf was confused, disoriented, her golden eyes wild with the specific panic of an animal that had been shifted mid-crisis into a body that was mid-sprint in a corridor she didn’t recognize, and the recognition failure was producing a flight response that was pointed the wrong way.

The white wolf turned a corner and Gavriel lost sight of her.

“No, no, no. SERENA!”

Gavriel: Serena. Wrong way. Other direction.

Silence.

Fin: Gavriel, do you have eyes on her?

His voice was steady. Controlled. The steadiness was costing him something that Gavriel could hear in the spaces between the words, the micro-silences where a roar was being compressed.

The reply came fast, tight with tension.

Gavriel: I just lost her.

Hyran’s voice cut in next.

Hyran: Serena, can you hear us?

Gavriel’s blood ran cold. Dexmon had mentioned that when she shifted, Serena wasn’t always conscious, which meant mindlinks may or may not work. That meant she may or may not be able to hear them.

Gavriel: She shifted into her wolf.

Dexmon and Fin spoke at the same time.

Dexmon: How?

Fin: By herself?

The questions collided on the mindlink. Two Alpha Kings asking the same thing from two different locations, both questions Gavriel didn’t understand either.

Gavriel: I yelled for her to shift and she shifted.

Silence.

Aeron: She picked one hell of a time to shift without an Alpha command.

Gavriel didn’t correct it.

✦✦✦

DRAKENCREST – LIBRARY CHAMBER

Minutes stretched like hours.

Fin was pacing.

The mindlink was a graveyard of static and silence. Every attempt to reach Serena produced the same nothing, the same empty channel, the same void where her voice should have been.

Then Aeron’s voice cut sharply through the fractured mindlink, controlled but urgent.

Aeron: I’m opening a portal beneath the library, Alpha.

He didn’t wait for an answer.

A portal snapped into existence beneath the library like a rubber band.

Black shapes surged from the other side, half-formed horrors stitched from shadow and bone, clawing and writhing as they lunged for the opening.

Aeron reacted instantly, blasting them back with a violent surge of magic, light colliding with dark as grasping limbs scraped against the portal’s edge, desperate to follow.

“DON’T SAY I DIDN’T WARN YOU, ALPHA!” Aeron shouted.

Fin was already sprinting through at Alpha speed. His body punched through the portal threshold before the sentence finished, his trajectory a straight line drawn by a wolf whose mate was on the other side and whose other side had been unreachable.

Aeron slapped a gold shield bubble around them both.

For a few precious seconds, it worked.

Then a spear dropped out of nowhere.

It punched straight through his shield and shattered against the stone inches from his face. Arrows followed, shrieking past them in a lethal storm.

“What the hell is this place?”

“A hole your mate jumped down and we all followed,” Aeron stated. “It gets worse.”

At that moment, small shapes peeled from the wall resembling infants. They were screaming. Their mouths opened too wide, screams shrill and unbroken as they hit the floor on all fours.

Then they crawled.

Fast.

Too fast.

“What the—” Fin started, staring at them in disbelief. They were real. They were wrong. “What are those things?”

One lunged with its teeth bared.

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Aeron said, kicking it hard and sending the stone-skinned infant flying down the corridor. It shattered against the wall in a spray of rock.

More kept coming. It was disturbing.

Their movement blurred, bodies skittering impossibly fast as they swarmed, biting, clawing, crawling up legs and torsos with stone teeth snapping inches from flesh.

Their screams layered over each other, drilling straight into the skull. The sound was designed to disorient. The sound was working. The frequency hit the inner ear and scrambled spatial awareness.

“They bite, Alpha!” Aeron called as he punted another one.

“Get it off!” Fin shouted, ripping one from his shoulder and hurling it into the wall with enough force to crater the stone. Two more latched onto his calf. A third was climbing his back with the enthusiastic determination of a creature whose entire purpose was to make Alpha Kings deeply, profoundly uncomfortable.

Gold magic exploded from Aeron in a concussive wave, blasting the infants back into the walls. Stone cracked. Bodies broke apart.

The screaming continued anyway. The screaming always continued. The screaming was the corridor’s background music and the background music was hellish and there was no volume knob.

Aeron threw the shield back up instantly without a word.

They ran.

And then Fin caught it.

Serena’s scent.

Sharp. Real. Close enough to hurt. His heart slammed against his ribs as he spoke into the mindlink.

“SERENA!” he yelled. The yell bounced off every wall and came back empty. The coming-back was the corridor mocking him, returning his own voice without the one he wanted to hear.

Fin: Serena. Can you hear us?

Silence.

They rounded a corner and nearly collided with Maelor and Hyran, who both skidded to a halt. Maelor’s eyes were wide and his hair was half-singed.

Relief flashed across his face, brief but unmistakable.

“Thank the gods,” Maelor said, breathless, just as another distant scream echoed through the stone. “It keeps trying to separate us. We are staying together. All of us. Everybody in sight at all times. I am done with corridors that eat people.”

It was the most un-Maelor thing Maelor had ever said. No one commented.

Hyran’s eyes locked on Fin. “Mindlink is spotty at best. Serena is in wolf form.”

“Where is Dexmon?” Fin asked.

“We don’t know,” Hyran replied. “Both him and Gavriel have been silent.”

“I know where Serena is,” Fin said. “I can smell her.”

Xeon: Close. Very close. RUN.

Then he saw her.

Serena stood at the far end of the corridor.

Whole. Upright. Alive.

Relief hit him so hard his knees nearly buckled. He broke into a run, kicking another stone infant aside without slowing.

“Serena!” he called again—

And stopped dead.

Something was wrong.

Her face was blank. Her posture was too still. Her breathing was too even.

“Serena?”