"Would you prefer I’d negotiated? Maybe offered it a scholarship?" Kael rolled his good shoulder once. "Juvenile scouts are faster than adults, which is why they use them. That boy was thirty seconds away from handing them a map, menu, and seating chart."

The strike team behind him processed the sarcasm at different speeds. Sterling was the fastest. Griffin was still on "negotiated."

Kael sheathed his blade and started walking.

Maddox stood, Guinevere in his arms. Her eyes were closed again, the water and the exhaustion pulling her back under. She had not seen the fae boy, and Maddox was grateful for it.

They made it ten minutes before Kael raised his fist. The column stopped.

There was a large clearing where runes covered the ground in concentric circles, pulsing with a faint violet light.

Without touching Guinevere, Kael’s hand pressed flat against Maddox’s chest, pushing him back into the treeline. The gesture was familiar and commanding in equal measure, the motion of an older brother who had done this before and expected compliance.

Maddox opened his mouth but Kael cut him off at the knees.

"Don’t move. Whatever happens in that clearing, you watch and you learn and you stay hidden, or we all die. Every single one of us."

Kael had seen this ritual once before. Once. Keyword. That was enough.

A portal formed in the center, and dark fae poured through in formation, arranging themselves around the outer ring of runes in rows, wings folded.

More figures were pulled through it, stumbling, bound. Regular fae. More rare than dark fae. All were completely bare. They assembled in a circle, faces down, rears raised with him at the center.

The figure who stepped through last was taller than any fae in the clearing. Once he cleared the threshold, his wings spread at full extension, wide enough to shadow the entire circle.

Nyxar. The Eclipse King.

Every fae in the clearing pressed their foreheads to the stone.

Nyxar walked to the center of the rune circle. The fae in the outer ring began to chant. Their voices braided with his, dozens of harmonics layering into a sound that vibrated the ground.

Maddox’s jaw tightened, and he met Ryker’s eyes. There was nothing they could do here.

The look between them contained an entire tactical briefing.

Summary: we are outmanned, outmagicked, and watching a sex ritual performed by a king who wants to breed our unconscious "concubine."

Nyxar’s robes came off so he was completely nude.

Ryker: Well that’s... all of him.

Maddox: Focus, Ryker.

Ryker: I’m focused. It’s in the vault forever now.

Sterling: Stop looking.

Ryker: I can’t. It’s like a carriage wreck.

Nyxar lifted his hands and looked at the sky. "Ancient Eclipse, witness these offerings. Let their pleasure become the arrow that finds the golden one."

Dark fae began chanting.

Nyxar took two steps forward and buried himself in the central fae, thrusting in a brutal rhythm.

Dark tendrils snapped from his wings, exploding outward in the circle, each impaling every other sacrifice, thrusting at the same rate. His black magic pulsed into them, and their bodies began to change to dark.

Ryker: Those tendrils are... are those...

Maddox: Yes.

Ryker: All of them. At the same time.

Maddox: Ryker. Shut up.

"Listen. Their screams are sweetest when they turn. Let the darkness rewrite your voices. Sing for her. Sing for the one we will claim."

Their screams tore through the jungle, then fractured into raw, broken moans. Nyxar’s tendrils swelled, pumping harder.

Ryker: Respectfully not shutting up. What the fuck.

Guinevere woke up at the worst possible moment. Her head turned towards the sounds. The thing happening in that clearing was the most disturbing thing she’d ever seen.

Nicholas saw, and moved in a blur, his hand covering her mouth. Her hand flew to her mouth a second after his, on top.

Two hands on her mouth. Between them, they had the situation handled. The situation being: do not scream at the nightmare happening fifty feet away.

Nicholas waited until Guinevere met his gaze. When he had her attention he motioned for silence. She wasn’t offended. He was being thorough, which she understood, and this was terrifying.

Maddox’s glare could have leveled a building. Nicholas absorbed it without flinching, because the woman in Maddox’s arms making a sound right now would kill all of them, and Nicholas’s priorities had a very specific order tonight.

Maddox adjusted her as soon as Nicholas let go and whispered in her ear. "Close your eyes, baby. Don’t look until I say."

She buried her face against him before he finished speaking.

Black cum shot into every tendril. The dark corruption took hold and the sacrifices began begging.

"More, my king."

"Use us until we break."

"Make her feel this when you take her."

The gold light under Guinevere’s skin started to pulse, syncing with the runes. If it got any brighter it would light them up through the treeline like a lantern in a tomb.

Nicholas moved first and didn’t ask for permission. He tucked her hair into the back of her zip suit as gently as he could while being quick. There was no time for civility.

He pulled down her sleeves covering her hands. Maddox’s hand went on the back of her head, covering as much hair as possible.

Immediately his hand started pulsing gold in tandem with her hair.

Kael: Give her to the wolf. You’re glowing.

Maddox handed her to Nicholas with no emotion. She opened her eyes again when the heat surged back in her body, just in time to see the tendrils pump them full until their wombs ballooned. Then they retracted back into the Eclipse King’s body. The fae started laying soft, leathery eggs directly onto the runes.

Her mouth opened with a mix of terror and disgust.

Nicholas adjusted, pulling her attention away from it. She turned her head into his chest just like she had with Maddox, and his hand covered the back of her head.

The symmetry was not missed by anyone.

Next to him, Damon pressed two fingers against the bandage on his neck, already bleeding through, and started counting backwards from one hundred. He made it to ninety-three before a sound from the clearing reset him to one hundred.

When Nyxar reached down to take an egg just laid and shoved it into the central sacrifice’s mouth, Kael looked away and gagged.

The sacrifice swallowed it whole, and her stomach immediately began swelling again.

Ryker: She just... ate it.

Sterling: Yes.

The others started pushing their own eggs into each other’s mouths, feeding the corruption in a grotesque loop.

Ryker: Now that’s just plain old disgusting.

Sterling closed his eyes. Opened them. Closed them again. The visual was still there. He was going to need a stronger method. Alcohol and a concussion.

Nyxar’s voice rose above the chanting, and a column of violet light shot from the center of the circle into the sky.

Then it stopped and the circle went silent.

The dark fae started moving into the trees, clicking.

Nyxar stood at the center, his wings folded, his hands at his sides, and his obsidian eyes turned slowly towards the treeline where they were hiding.

He inhaled for three seconds that lasted a year, then his focus moved past their position, scanning the jungle beyond.

The miss was not skill. It was luck, and every man in that treeline knew the difference.

"The Vessel’s flame is close. Tighten the perimeter. She does not leave this jungle."

He turned. The portal reopened. Nyxar stepped through and vanished. The fae bound figures were carried through behind him until the clearing was empty.

Nobody moved for sixty seconds.

Kael was the first to speak. "I can see at least four of you trying to process this. Don’t. Save it for when we’re not standing in the afterbirth."

Maddox’s focus hadn’t moved from Guinevere in Nicholas’s arms. Irritation was bleeding through his mask of indifference.

The second he reached for Guinevere, Nicholas stiffened, his wolf surging. He swallowed his wolf down, then stiffly handed her to Maddox. She had passed out again at some point during that and her body was limp in Maddox’s arms.

Maddox pressed his lips to her forehead, followed by her ear. Then he stiffened. Goddamn muscle memory.

Kael’s nostrils flared. The first tell he’d had the entire night.

"So he knows she’s here." Sterling delivered catastrophic news with the same vocal range he used to order breakfast that morning.

"Our exit window closed ten minutes ago." Kael was already moving. "There is one path left. A ravine two miles northeast that will be unguarded."

Maddox studied Kael for a moment longer than comfortable. "And you know it’s unmanned how, exactly?"

"Because I’ve used it before, dipshit. Dark fae hunt by echolocation and they avoid it because of its acoustics. "

Maddox held Kael’s stare long enough to make the silence expensive. But he had a woman burning alive in his arms and exactly zero better ideas.

"Fine. You heard him."

Ryker exchanged a knowing look with Sterling that said, by fine, he means ’I don’t trust you, I don’t like you.’

They moved. Two miles of jungle passed in silence before the trees gave way to rock.

Kael entered first. "Single file. Mouths shut. Step where I step. This ravine carries sound the way rivers carry bodies."

Sterling fell in behind Kael. Then Maddox with Guinevere pressed against his chest, Ryker at his back, Nicholas and Damon behind them, and the remaining Drakencrest warriors strung out in a line that stretched thirty feet through the passage.

The first hundred yards were navigable. Kael placed each step with deliberation. Sound was currency here and he was spending as little as possible.

The others matched his footwork.

The ravine narrowed. Ten feet wide became eight. Eight became six. The walls pressed in, wet stone brushing Maddox’s shoulders on both sides, and the ceiling dropped until the tallest men in the line were ducking.

Everything about this ravine was designed to make wolves claustrophobic, and Nicholas’s wolf was taking it personally.

But Nicholas himself barely noticed. His mind was elsewhere.

Behind him, Damon kept one hand pressed against his neck. The bandage was more blood than bandage now.

Everyone was too focused on their footwork and balance for mindlinks. The roar of wind grew louder, funneling through the tighter space with a velocity that pulled at clothing and hair and made whispered communication impossible.

Which meant Ryker couldn’t narrate, Sterling couldn’t strategize, and Kael couldn’t insult anyone. The ravine had accomplished what six hours of jungle warfare couldn’t: silence from all three of them.