I lifted my head.

No wonder I’d dreamed about that night, because this one looked just like it. Just writhing, indistinct movement in a spine-chilling mass of darkness.

Trees surrounded me—tall, sparse, and narrow, with only a few long needle-tipped branches near their tops. The ground beneath my palms was rough and sandy. Rocks piled everywhere. All of it—the dirt, the rocks, the trees—was black, moonlit outlines rendered onto shades of dark-ash gray. Plumes of smoke rose from the ground, hot and gritty. When a gust of wind rolled a puff of it over me, I gasped in pain and shrank away. It burned my skin like acid.

I grabbed my blades and had them at the ready. Movement punctured the forest—too distant for me to make out what I was seeing at first, but the sound was unmistakable. Wet, heavy breathing, and high-pitched shrieks, and the nauseating sound of flesh tearing open.

My mind was addled, maybe from the smoke or from whatever magic had brought us here, but I forced myself through the haze to put together what was happening.

This was the Crescent trial. It had to be. We weren’t in the colosseum—we weren’t even in Sivrinaj, at least not any part of it that I’d seen—but the timing lined up, and the Crescent trial was often the most unique.

But what was the objective?

Footsteps. I turned, and immediately, something slammed into me, knocking me back to the stones. I couldn’t make out the face of my assailant—not with everything so dark and blurry and the smoke pumping up from the ground, each puff bubbling my armor. I struck wildly with my blades, hitting flesh.

Normally, the poison would be enough to at least slow them, but my attacker seemed utterly unconcerned with pain. Bloodlust? Some of the worst I’d ever seen, if so, to be so disconnected from one’s own body.

I drove my blade hard into my attacker’s side, and that, finally, made him falter. He staggered, falling to the ground like his wounds had caught up to him simultaneously, and I pressed over him.

He wasn’t dead yet. And soon he would wake up. I stabbed him through the chest, barely avoiding the wild flail of his limbs as I finished the job. Like a starving wolf lashing out one last time. They really did become animals when things got this bad.

I yanked my blade from his corpse with a wet crunch, just as a wave of that toxic smoke rolled towards me. I had to lurch away, leaving his limp body to be consumed by it.

I needed to figure out where I was. I needed to—

Movement rustled the brush behind me. I spun around. My eyes groped in the darkness. I could only see silhouettes in the distance. Vampires, fighting. And something four-legged. Demons? I’d been so trained to expect the worst that my mind immediately went to threats. When I crept closer and realized that they weren’t predators, but prey—deer, thrashing against the shadowy figures of the vampires that pinned them—I was relieved.

Good. Deer were perfect. The ideal meal to distract the starving vampires. The starvation had gone on long enough that they wouldn’t have a choice but to leap on whatever blood they smelled. And I was glad that these ones had smelled the deer first.

I needed to get away from here, and fast. Then, when I was alone, I could figure out what my objective was, find Raihn, and—

I stopped myself, swallowing a sad pang. Raihn’s name had flitted through my head without my permission. But we had separated. The Halfmoon trial was over. I certainly wouldn’t go out of my way to fight him, but—

I wasn’t quite out of the clearing yet when a repulsive sound rang out behind me. It was something between a groan and a gurgle—an uncanny, unnatural blend between animal and vampire.

I quickly lowered into the underbrush and watched the creatures in the distance.

My eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and the moon had reappeared from behind a misty cloud. The cold light illuminated the scene of bloody ruin behind me—the two vampires crouched between jagged rocks, the deer carcass now open before them. One of them was trying and failing to stand, their limbs spasming wildly. The other seemed to be trying to reach for their companion and failing, as if their muscles refused to cooperate.

The first, in strange, lurching movements, jumped on the other. Feral shrieks cut through the night.

I shrank back.

This… this wasn’t hunger. Bloodlust made vampires sloppy, but it didn’t turn them into mindless beasts. These people looked like they didn’t even have control over their own bodies anymore.

The two vampires wailed as they tore each other apart. Unhinged, senseless, animalistic. Fuck. They just went at each other, not like warriors, but like animals, the deer carcass forgotten at their—

The deer carcass.

Realization snapped into place. I looked around in horror. Looked around at this place that reeked of death, and yet held such a strangely abundant amount of soft, easy-to-catch prey.

Poisoned, trapped prey.

Nyaxia had starved them, and now she offered them tainted gifts they would be powerless to resist.

Raihn.

My head emptied save for his name. Everything I had told myself, every lie I’d hid my concern beneath, withered away.

I didn’t think anymore. I just ran.

It wasn’t hard to find the vampires. We had been scattered throughout the forest, but they were loud—bloodlust made them careless, and whatever poison was in these animals turned them into something even worse.

I found Raihn not far from the clearing. I recognized him immediately, even in the dark, even from such a distance. I’d learned the shape of him so well that every angle was a native language.

Yet, for all his familiarity, something was also foreign about him right now. The way he moved wasn’t the deliberate poise of the man who shared my home. It was feral, uncontrolled. Still graceful—that was the only thing that made me exhale in relief, because there was nothing of that toxic, lurching insanity—but the movement of a predator released from its cage.

His wings were out. A limp body slumped against an overturned tree trunk—a Shadowborn man, whom, apparently, Raihn had just finished killing. Now he soared through the trees and debris in hunt.

And then, a moment later, saw what he was chasing: the deer, crashing through the rocky brush.

No. I dove after him before I could talk myself out of it.

He moved impossibly fast, weaving through the trees like a leaf caught in a gust of wind. He was swifter than the deer, which darted through the sparse forest in a blind panic.

It was only the panic of the animal, which practically ran in circles, that saved us both. It came too close to an impassable pile of rocks and had to veer left. I tracked the movement to cut it off, putting myself right in Raihn’s path.

I heard Vincent’s voice in my head: You’re about to get yourself killed, you stupid child, throwing yourself in front of a vampire in bloodlust.

But I moved anyway.

“Raihn!” I shrieked as I leapt in front of him, hoisting myself up on one of the rocks, arms spread. “STOP!”

It was a stupid plan for so many reasons. First of all, any other vampire would have gladly replaced the deer with me. And secondly, he had wings—he could have just soared over me, whether I was standing on top of a stupid rock or not.

But Raihn did neither of those things. Instead, his gaze fell to me, and he faltered. Just for a second. And for that moment, I thought I glimpsed my friend there.

But otherwise, he looked so different. His stare was hard and glassy. A streak of harsh moonlight fell across one side of his face, and his eyes were even redder than usual, the pupil narrowed to a slit.

The hairs stood on my arms. Every instinct screamed at me to run, run, run.