For every one killed, five more climbed over the ash to replace them.

The math was bad. The math was aggressively, insultingly bad.

Fin slashed a head clean off with a strike that should have ended anything with a pulse. The body hit the ground, twitched once, and the head rolled back toward the neck like a magnet finding iron. Tissue stitched itself together, wet and wrong, tendons reknitting with a sound like someone chewing leather, and the thing lunged at him again before the blood had finished drying.

“DISGUSTING in the jungle. Disgusting here. Hasn’t changed,” Gavriel said.

“Form up!” Fin barked.

One of the men called it every time their triangle loosened, which was inevitable when you were fighting a horde that bred faster than you could butcher it. The formation snapped tight around Serena, shoulders closing rank like a gate slamming shut, and another gold shield slammed over the group hard enough to rattle the air inside it.

At this point, they were a well-oiled killing machine with a warranty that was about to expire.

Serena was still pulling from Dexmon’s magic. Her own reserves were dead, drained dry, scraped to the goddamn bottom like a barrel with nothing left to give. The sensation was exactly like her own magic, same warmth, same weight, same current running through her veins. She kept forgetting it wasn’t hers. Only when the shield cracked with a sound like a frozen lake splitting and Dexmon grunted through his teeth did she realize she was borrowing.

The guilt hit her sideways. She shoved it down and kept firing.

Her arrows passed through the shield like it was water, gold light rippling around the shafts as they punched clean through to the other side. She fired twice more, each arrow detonating on impact, taking out whole clusters. Ash erupted in thick clouds that tasted like sulfur and regret.

But they kept coming.

They crawled over each other like roaches pouring from a drain, screeching, drooling black saliva that hissed when it hit the stone, eating through rock the way acid eats through paper.

The group ran.

There was no strategy left except velocity and violence, and they were running low on both.

A wave of them slammed into the shield from above, dropping from a ledge like a pale violet avalanche of teeth and hunger. The shield cracked again. This time Gavriel grunted, a sharp exhale punched out of him like he’d taken a fist to the solar plexus.

Serena looked at him and blinked.

Was she pulling from him too?

When the hell had that started?

She didn’t get time to ask, because one of them sank its claws into Dexmon’s arm, puncturing through his training suit like the fabric was a suggestion. He grabbed its skull with his free hand and smashed it into the cliff face, magic flaring white-hot from the impact, bone crunching wet against stone.

Another bit down on Gavriel’s shoulder. Fangs sank deep, silver venom hissing against his skin. He tore it off by the spine and hurled it into the lava below without a word, without a flinch, without breaking stride.

Nobody saw. Gavriel Sterling kept going and didn’t say a word.

Serena fired again, the arrow screaming toward a cluster of six tangled together mid-charge.

KRA-THOOM!

They exploded in a violent burst of purple fire, bodies shredding apart in a starburst of ash and viscera that painted the mountainside black.

But she was breathing hard now. Every inhale cost her something, every exhale took more than it gave, and the shield was starting to flicker at the edges like a candle in a hurricane.

Gavriel’s eyes flashed green.

Fae magic. The color was unmistakable, electric and ancient, burning through his irises like emerald fire replacing the green hue his eyes normally had.

Dex shot him a sideways glance, clocking it instantly, but said nothing. That conversation could wait until they were all alive enough to have it.

“We shift and move,” Gavriel said, his voice carrying the calm authority of a man who has already decided what happens next.

“Agreed.” Fin wiped black blood off his jaw. “On my mark.”

A vampire latched onto Serena’s ankle and yanked. Her knee buckled, stone shredding her palms as she caught herself, the creature’s claws hooked deep enough to scrape bone.

Dexmon roared, the sound ripping out of him like something feral had reached up through his chest and grabbed the steering wheel. He slashed it off her, the blade of the First Dragon King severing the arm at the elbow in a spray of violet ichor.

“SHIFT, SERENA!” Fin shouted using an Alpha command.

All four shifted at once.

Serena’s shift detonated in a flash of white light so bright it turned the mountain into a negative photograph, every shadow inverted, every vampire frozen mid-lunge in the blast radius.

Fin’s massive black wolf landed first, paws cracking stone, a snarl rolling out of his chest like thunder dragged across gravel. Dex’s black wolf crashed down beside him, equally enormous, equally furious, teeth bared in a promise that had zero diplomatic intentions.

Gavriel’s forest-green wolf hit the ground third, hackles raised, muscles coiled, eyes still burning with that impossible emerald light.

Serena’s white wolf stood in the center of the three of them, smaller but luminous, her fur catching the volcanic glow like snow holding firelight.

Three apex predators. One glowing wolf. A volcano full of starving vampires.

The odds hadn’t improved, but the fucking energy had.

Aegon: We run with mate. Yay!

Dexmon: Act like an apex predator. There are vampires.

The vampire’s shrieking grew louder. Sharper. Hungrier. Every violet head on that mountain swiveled toward the white wolf like she’d rung a dinner bell made of moonlight.

Several of them actually pointed.

Bony, crooked fingers extended toward Aurelia with the enthusiasm of customers spotting the last item on a clearance rack.

One shrieked at another, jabbing its claw in her direction like it was calling dibs. A second one shoved the first, hissing, apparently disputing ownership of a wolf that belonged to absolutely neither of them.

Aegon: Those are uglier ones than earlier.