The jungle tried to kill them at mile three.

The first portal ripped the ground apart in front of Nicholas. He banked left on instinct, his wolf’s paws barely clearing the portal’s edge before it widened.

Two more opened behind it. Then four. Then ten.

Sterling saw it from above. The pattern was textbook isolation tactics. The portals were forcing three corridors. Each one wide enough for a single body and too narrow to regroup.

Sterling: They’re herding us. Three channels. Do not separate.

The canopy above them detonated, dark fae pouring from the trees. They dropped through the branches in a swarm that hit the jungle floor between the ground team and the dragons above.

Maddox shifted into his dragon, and his flame hit the swarm center-mass.

Then his flame abruptly stopped working. His muscles burned, and his vision doubled.

Sterling: I am losing my shift.

Ryker: Same. My fire is gone.

Griffin: I was just force-shifted and am on the ground. Three fae on me.

The formation collapsed. Dragons who had been providing air cover force-shifted in clusters, human bodies crashing through the canopy.

Maddox’s shift broke last. He hit the jungle floor in human form hard enough to drive his boots six inches into the mud. His sword was out before his vision cleared.

Sterling’s voice came through the mindlink, fragmented by the dampening.

Ryker: I have fourteen accounted for. We were cut off northwest.

Sterling: Copy. I was cut off to the south. The portals are driving us away from her position. This is a deliberate split.

Maddox stood in a corridor of green with four dead fae at his feet and no formation, no fire, and no dragon. But for the first time in fourteen hours, he could feel her heartbeat pressing against the void behind his sternum.

Then the connection opened in a flood. Her fever hit him first, scalding, the temperature of a woman whose body had been burning for days without relief. Her terror slammed into him so hard he staggered. The kind that comes from running for your life and knowing the distance is closing.

Every protective instinct in his body ignited at once. He tore east through the corridor with his blade out.

Behind him, three separate groups fought three separate battles, the jungle swallowing all of them.

✦✦✦

Consciousness came back the way it always did now. Too fast and too late.

Guinevere’s eyes opened to green blur and motion. Her body was horizontal, being carried. She counted four hands on her body, gripping her shoulders, her legs, her waist.

Dark wings above her. The humming. The clicking.

She twisted. The motion was violent and sudden and fueled by the specific panic of a woman who had woken up in the arms of these things before and remembered exactly what they wanted to do with her.

Her elbow connected with a jaw, and her knee drove upward into a chest. The grips loosened for a fraction of a second.

She ripped free and ran.

The jungle swallowed her. Vines whipped across her arms and one cut her face. The canopy above was so thick the light came through in broken shafts that turned the undergrowth into a maze of shadow and steam.

Behind her, the clicking started. Then the chanting. Then the sound of wings folding and unfolding as they dropped to the jungle floor and pursued on foot, because the canopy was too dense for flight and the prey they wanted was running at a speed that meant they could not catch her from the air.

She tried to shift.

I can’t.

Her wolf’s voice was thin. Barely there. A whisper where there used to be a howl, the voice of an animal that had been burning and seizing and running on empty for days and had hit the wall that existed past exhaustion.

Please.

There is nothing to give. I’m sorry.

She kept running. Fast for a wolf in human form, but the advantage she usually carried, the blur that sat between wolf and dragon and belonged to neither, was gone.

Tears came. She couldn’t stop them. They blurred the green into streaks. She was running blind, batting vines with shaking hands, her body burning from the fever and her chest burning from the breathing and the dark fae were so close she could hear individual footfalls behind her.

This was not her day. She was okay admitting it.

Her breathing came apart. She tried to hold it together, tried the rhythm that Kael had given her in the cave, in through the nose, out through the mouth, but her lungs had their own schedule and the schedule said panic and the panic said faster and faster meant more oxygen and more oxygen meant more noise and more noise meant they could hear her.

The clicking was louder. Three of them, maybe four, closing the distance in the undergrowth.

Arms grabbed her.

A hand clamped over her mouth. A chest pressed against her back. She was pulled sideways off her trajectory and into the shadow of a massive trunk, the undergrowth closing around them in a curtain of green.

Her scream died against the palm.

"Don’t move."

The voice was low. Male. Commanding in the specific register that her wolf recognized before she did.

Three dark fae ran past. Their wings were folded, their feet clicking on the root system, their heads turning left and right as they tracked the trail she had been leaving. They passed the trunk without stopping.

Her body was shaking. The tremor ran through her in waves so violent that the man holding her tightened his grip to keep her upright. The hand stayed over her mouth. The chest stayed against her back. She could feel a heartbeat through the contact, steady and slow.

She looked up, trembling.

Nicholas Shadowfell was staring down at her.

Her brain stalled. The processing delay was significant and justified. She was in a jungle on a continent she had never visited, being chased by dark fae, running a fever that had knocked her unconscious three times in two days, and the man standing in front of her was the wolf king from the auction. The one who had claimed her as a fated mate and told her to remember his name.

She remembered. But she could not remember how a wolf king from Nyros was standing in a jungle on a continent that was neither of theirs.

Her wolf stirred. The movement was barely there, a tired head lifting from the floor, ears forward, eyes open. It pressed toward Nicholas’s presence with the instinct of an animal finding a den after days in the open.

Him.

One word. Weak. But certain.

She looked past Nicholas. Behind him, half-concealed in the undergrowth, was a wolf. Large. Dark-furred.

She blinked. Blinked again. The wolf was still there.

Her brain, which had been operating on fumes and terror for the better part of two days, offered a helpful analysis: there are wolves in the jungle now.

He moved his hand off her mouth.

"You’re real." Her voice was hoarse. Wrecked. A ruin of dehydration and screaming and the residual damage of a fever that had been cooking her throat from the inside.

"I’m real."

She stared at the wolf. Then at Nicholas. Then at the wolf again. Her mouth opened. Nothing useful came out. This was a level of surreal that her processing power could not accommodate.

Her legs buckled.

Nicholas caught her. One arm beneath her shoulders, the other behind her knees, the motion fast enough that she was off the ground before her body finished deciding to fall. The contact was wolf-warm.

The fever noticed.

Gold light reached for the heat the way it reached for Maddox, the way it reached for Kael, looking for the mechanism that would pull the temperature down. It found wolf blood instead of dragon blood, and the recognition was different, confused, a flame pressing against a door that was the right shape but the wrong key.

It didn’t transfer. The fever stayed.

Nicholas looked down at her. His amber eyes held something she had seen once before, across a throne room, on the night he told her to remember his name.

The expression that she hadn’t been able to identify then and could not identify now, because the vocabulary for what Nicholas Shadowfell felt when he looked at Guinevere Lunaris did not exist in any language she spoke.

"I’ve got you, Guinevere. You’re safe."

Her hands flew to her face. A sob broke through. Her body had been holding it together on adrenaline and stubbornness and was releasing it now because a familiar voice had just told her she was safe, and her wolf believed him even if the rest of her didn’t know what to believe anymore.

She was falling apart in the arms of a man she had met once at an auction where her father sold her.

"I need Maddox," she said into her hands. The words were broken. Hiccuped. Barely audible.

His jaw tightened. The words landed in the center of his chest and stayed there.

"I know," he said. "We’ll get you to him."