The queen’s chamber was a cathedral of carnage.

Bones lined the walls—thousands of them, stacked in macabre pillars that reached toward the darkness above. Silk draped from every surface, thick as rope, pulsating faintly with some inner light. The air was thick with the smell of decay and something else, something old, something that had been down here for far too long.

And in the center of it all, Caelus fought the queen.

The pure blood vampire moved like smoke, his red eyes blazing, his hands dripping with blood—not his own. Blood manipulation. He had turned the queen’s own ichor against her, pulling it from her wounds, shaping it into blades that spun through the air like saws.

But the queen was faster than she looked.

Eight legs. Four arms. A body the size of a carriage, covered in chitin that deflected most of Caelus’s attacks. Her eyes—dozens of them—tracked every movement, every feint, every flicker of his crimson gaze.

Caelus thrust his hand forward. A spear of congealed blood shot toward the queen’s main eye.

She tilted her head. The spear glanced off her armored forehead with a screech of metal against stone.

"Annoying," Caelus muttered.

The queen lunged forward.

Her four arms came at him from four directions—two high, two low. Her hands were humanoid but oversized, fingers tipped with claws that could shred steel. She moved with a grace that belied her bulk, each limb acting independently, each strike aimed to kill.

Caelus dodged the first two—the high strikes passed inches from his face, the wind from their passage ruffling his dark hair. The third clipped his shoulder, tearing through his shirt and drawing a line of red across his pale skin. The fourth he caught with his forearm, redirecting the blow into the stone floor.

The ground cracked. A spiderweb of fissures spread from the impact.

Caelus leaped back, putting twenty feet between them. His shoulder throbbed. The wound was already healing—vampire regeneration knitting flesh back together—but the queen’s claws carried venom. He could feel it spreading, a cold numbness creeping down his arm.

"She’s superior up close," he realized. "Too many limbs. Too much reach."

He changed tactics.

Blood manipulation flared. He ripped a stream of ichor from the queen’s own leg wound—a deep gash he had opened moments ago with a blood blade—and shaped it into a net. The net flew toward her, expanding, glowing dark red like a constellation of liquid rubies.

The queen didn’t dodge.

She caught the net with two of her hands, her claws sinking into the congealed blood. She pulled. The net stretched, thinned, and tore apart like wet paper. She threw the shreds back at him.

Caelus sidestepped. The blood shreds embedded themselves in the bone pillar behind him, sizzling and dissolving the old calcium.

"Fine," Caelus said, rolling his shoulders. "Hand to hand it is."

He rushed her.

Close combat was suicide. He knew it. But he also knew that blood manipulation required distance—time to shape, time to direct. Up close, he could drain her. Touch her skin, pull the blood directly from her veins.

It was risky. It was desperate.

But desperate times calls for desperate measures.

Caelus slid under her first swing—a massive downward chop from her upper right arm that would have split him in half. He felt the air pressure change as the claws passed over his head. His knees scraped against the stone floor.

He came up inside her guard, between her lower arms, and pressed his palm against her abdomen.

"Pull."

The queen screeched.

A torrent of black ichor erupted from her chitin, flowing into Caelus’s hand, up his arm, into his body. The liquid was hot—scalding—and disgusting. He could taste her age in the blood, centuries of hunting and killing and nesting.

But the queen did not collapse.

She was too large, too old, too strong.

She swung her other three arms at once.

One caught him in the ribs—he felt something crack. Another smashed his shoulder, dislodging his grip on her abdomen. The third raked across his chest, opening four deep gashes from collarbone to hip. His blood—red, human-looking—sprayed across the queen’s chitin.

Caelus flew backward, slammed into a pillar of bones, and crumpled to the ground.

The pillar collapsed on top of him—femurs, ribs, skulls clattering down like morbid rain.

The queen advanced to finish him off.

Her wounds were already sealing. The ichor he had stolen regenerated within seconds, pulled from some deep reservoir of vitality as she had grown stronger. Her dozens of eyes gleamed with something that looked like triumph.

Caelus pushed himself out of the bone pile. Blood dripped from his chest, his shoulder, his mouth. His white shirt was now a wet rag of red. His regeneration was fighting the venom, but it was losing. The gash on his chest was closing slower than it should. The numbness in his arm was spreading to his neck.

"You are strong," the queen mimicked speech.

Her voice was not a sound. It was a vibration, a scraping of mandibles, a whisper that crawled directly into his mind. It was patient and hungry.

"But you are alone."

Caelus spat blood onto the floor. He straightened his spine. His red eyes never left hers.

"Not alone," he said.

The queen paused. Her head tilted—a predatory gesture, curious.

He clearly wasn’t talking about Jason who watched the fight in awe, this was something he never thought he would see in his life.

From the tunnel behind her, a new presence emerged.

-

The ant king walked on two legs.

Upright. Deliberate. His red chitin gleamed in the bioluminescent glow of the silk that lined the chamber walls. Eight arms now—four on each side—ending in three-fingered hands that flexed and relaxed with each step. His mandibles clicked softly, a rhythmic sound like a ticking clock. His black eyes, flecked with gold, scanned the chamber without urgency.

The queen turned.

She recognized him. Not as prey. Not as child. As something else. Something *other*.

"What?" she hissed, the word dripping with venom and something else—something that might have been fear.

The ant king did not look at her.

His gaze swept past her, past Caelus, past the pillars of bones and the hanging silk. His black eyes fixed on a figure standing at the entrance to the chamber, half-hidden in shadows, his skin pale with exhaustion, his chest heaving, his hands empty.

"YOU!" A disgusting grin plastered across its face.