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My shoulder meets the stone wall, and pain flashes down my arm, but the key remains in my hand. I unlock the cabinet, wrench the door open, and throw the key down the steps. His eyes follow it.

Mine do not.

The manual release is beneath the controls, and I hook my fingers under the metal catch and pull.

The winch does not move. The restraint drum does.

Chain screams through the floor ring as the infected charges up the stone steps.

Pike turns back as the infected reaches him. He fires once, taking a piece out of the cellar wall, before the creature hits him hard enough to send both of them to the floor.

I move toward the stairwell while Pike screams behind me, the sound brief and ending in a wet grunt as the infected tears into his shoulder. He is still alive, although infection will take him in minutes if blood loss does not manage it first.

The restraint chain runs out before I reach the first stair. It snaps taut, dragging the infected backward and leaving me six feet beyond its reach.

That was the margin I allowed.

I take one more step.

Metal grinds behind me. Not chain. Masonry.

The restraint drum is pulling away from the wall, its mounting plate bowed under the combined weight of the infected and the man trapped beneath it. One bolt tears free and skips across the floor. A second follows.

I move.

The stairwell is eight paces away. I make five before the sound of the chain changes from dragging metal to running metal.

I turn on instinct. Pike lies against the stone lip with one hand clamped over his ruined shoulder. He follows the infected’s gaze to me and begins to laugh.

There is time to protect my throat.

I bring my left forearm up as it reaches me.

Pain.

1

ORIEN

Ithink humans are entertaining. While my prince only has eyes for one of them—and always will thanks to our genetic predicament—I’m determined to surround myself with as many as possible before I potentially find my match, the one female meant for me, her biology the other half to mine. It helps that Kairen has departed with his Tara, leaving only a handful of us in our future princess’s outpost. The humans surround me like a pack of Kireth.

One of the women asks me if Avaren men age at all, and I tell her the truth, which is that we don’t.

“So you’ll look exactly like this in a hundred years,” she says with awe.

“Longer,” I reply, winking. “Try not to hold it against me.”

Her friend snorts into her cup. “He’s going to be unbearable if you keep feeding that ego.”

“My ego requires very little sustenance,” I say. “A compliment here. Undivided attention there. The occasional look that suggests you’ve reconsidered your opinion of me.”

She narrows her eyes. “I haven’t reconsidered anything.”

“Give it time.”

The third one, quieter, has been watching me like most of Tara’s people watch us—half wonder, half calculation, trying to decide whether the universe handed them saviors or something worse wearing a friendly face. I catch her eye and hold it a beat longer than necessary, and the calculation in her expression softens. That’s the job. Earning their trust.

Behind me, someone in the kitchen doorway makes a small, disgusted noise, and I don’t have to turn around to know it’s one of the human males who has decided I’m a problem. I let him think it. Competition sharpens a man, and these three have earned better than boys who scowl instead of speak.