Daivad lifted a hand, and a vine whipped down around it and hauled Daivad off his feet. He found his footing on a branch that arced over the ravine and the Hunger stretched across it.

In a heartbeat, as branches and vines wrapped around every limb they could reach, the Hunger began to thrash, two dozen different voices shrieking with rage. Daivad scanned the twisted bodies, looking for patterns—the beast’s first priority would be to protect itself, to hide its vulnerable little body inside the flesh of all its victims.

There—where all the rest of the flesh was stretched out to hold onto a hundred different branches, there was still a large mass at the center, the stretched head with the particularly long neck that Pait had described protruding from it. With all the thrashing limbs and moving plant-life, it kept disappearing from view. Daivad had to creep along his branch to keep his eyes on the thing.

Daivad stepped past a body that was lashed by its hands to the branch beside him, its teeth snapping on open air not three inches from his leg as it strained against its binds. He had just taken his eyes off it to locate the center mass of the flesh again when he heard a strangely dry pop. Like a lizard releasing its own tail, the body parted cleanly from its hand and lunged.

It was pure instinct that had Daivad dancing along the branch out of range of the snapping jaws. The free arm, now with a bloody stump on the end, hooked its elbow around his ankle and he stumbled over it.

Pop, pop, pop—all below him, hands and feet and whole limbs were being shed, and then the Hunger was moving with that shocking speed Pait had described.

A hand, then another, seized Daivad by the leg, gripping with bruising strength. He yanked his leg free, only for two more hands and another jaw to clamp down on his other leg, and finally he was yanked off his branch.

“Shit!”

He snatched at branches and vines on his way down but couldn’t get a grip, until—

A thick vine whipped around his torso, stinging him and squeezing the breath from his chest, but it stopped his fall. More hands reached for him, only to be caught by more vines. Daivad kicked at the flesh gripping him with his free leg, putting enough magic into it to snap bone, and the hands finally withdrew. Daivad was yanked back out of reach by the vine around his chest.

When he was dropped off on yet another branch, he had to take a second to breathe. His hands were shaking. His heart was pounding so loud in his skull that he could barely hear anything else. This wasn’t like fighting Kure or tearing through the guards at Duxon. This was a whole forest of limbs closing in with the singular purpose of catching him, restraining him, controlling him. This was his worst nightmare. And he had to dive right back into it.

The Hunger began to retreat, down lower in the canopy away from Daivad, but the Wolves were waiting. They circled, striding across the ravine easily and snapping at any bodies that tried to slip by, though never breaking skin. They hadn’t been given the order to do damage yet—Daivad was going to do everything in his power to avoid further injuring the victims, but—

(I know they wouldn’t have wanted to stay in that fleshy hell a second longer, living or not.)

—he would if he had to. He was ending this now.

Daivad dropped to a lower branch, eyes locked back on the center mass that was quickly growing. The Hunger was shedding every limb that was tied down with Ben’s vines and gathering itself into a ball of writhing, multi-colored flesh. Daivad knew the monster that was the cause of all of this was hiding deep at its center. And he had no idea how he was going to get to it without either ripping the whole mass apart, or letting himself get drawn inside.

That head on the too-long neck snarled at him as he dropped to an even lower branch, its mismatched eyes bulging and saliva trailing from its hanging jaw. The mass wound itself up, and Daivad knew what was happening half a second before it sprang right for him.

How something with that kind of bulk could move so fast, Daivad would never know. He slashed claws humming with magic at the tangle of body parts that came at him, spraying blood and shredding sinew, but the Hunger ate the damage like it was nothing. A hand seized his left wrist, another two his right bicep, an arm went for his throat—

No.

He slashed and thrashed and roared, and every gut that he tore through, every bone he broke, every muscle he severed had ten more to replace it. He was completely slick with blood and gore, and still the hands closed around his legs, yanking them out from under him. Fingers squeezed his shoulders, tried to crawl inside his mouth. He bit down, snapping bone, and foul, rotting blood filled his mouth.

He couldn’t breathe. His vision went dark and he didn’t know if he was losing consciousness or if flesh had just blotted out the world—

“FUCK YOU, SIR!”

Oddly, the irritation that Julius had disobeyed his direct order brought Daivad out of his panic and back to himself. His senseless, panicked thrashing was doing nothing but getting him tangled deeper in the limbs. Daivad did not panic. He did not lose control. The worse things got, the calmer he got.

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He would not die like this. And he would not let that impudent, foul-mouthed, booger-eating little demon die like this either.

It took all his strength, but Daivad pulled his head back, feeling like his face was going to peel off his skull, and freed it from the flesh. He spat out two severed fingers and a mouthful of blood.

“JULIUS,” Daivad bellowed. “GO HOME.”

“Fuck you!”

A flurry of flapping leathery wings smacked Daivad in the side of his face, and he couldn’t see what was happening as he called every bit of magic he had into himself to try to wrench one of his arms free. The hold on his limbs was crushing, and as he hauled his right arm back, yelling with the effort, he felt his joints being pulled apart. He felt a series of rapid pops in his hand and then fire shooting up his arm, but he didn’t stop. His elbow gave next, and he howled—but then his shoulder was free, and then his elbow, and the instant there was an opening, three different vines snapped themselves around his upper arm. With Ben’s help, soon his torso came loose.

Black smoke swirled around Daivad’s head and the Hunger shrieked. The head on the too-long neck reeled, its eyes once again reduced to bloody pulp. This head—though it shed other body parts without a thought, this head seemed to have some importance. It recycled other eyes to repair the damage done to it, and the skin had an old, grayish cast to it, more so than the rest of the bodies. Was this the oldest body in the mass? The first body the Hunger had taken?

Daivad wrenched his left arm free, managing to come out with only a few dislocated fingers, and drove his claws into the flesh where the too-long neck disappeared. The head, full of mismatched teeth, clamped down on his bicep, blood bubbling around its mouth.

He just had to follow the spinal cord.

Julius materialized again to scratch and shriek at the head until it released Daivad’s arm. He sank his claws deeper.

All of a sudden, the Hunger rejected him, the flesh rolling to spit him out as quickly as it could. He was close. His lower body slid free, but Daivad kept a fierce grip with his left hand, digging, feeling along spine and ribs until he felt something small squirming against his fingers. He gripped it and yanked.

Just like that, everything fell apart.

Flesh rained down, smacking against branches with thick, wet sounds, rustling leaves and smearing them with gore. And Daivad rained down too, the blood and sweat and Mothers only knew what else that was covering him loosening the vines’ grip on him until he was falling. He hit one, two branches before landing in a pit of gore—that bounced. It tossed him about a foot back into the air before gravity dragged him back down.

Daivad scrambled to get upright, ignoring the shock of pain up his right arm and keeping a firm, firm grasp on the wiggling monster in his left hand. It took him a second to realize that the bouncing was from a web of vines beneath them. Ben had thought to weave a safety net.

“Daivad!” The undergrowth parted for Ben, his normally stoic eyes wide and wild.

“Here,” Daivad croaked, unsure if Ben would be able to tell him from the mess of bloody bodies around him.

Most of them were dead, unmoving—whether they’d been dead before this battle started or they had died the moment Daivad pulled the Hunger off them, he didn’t know. But he heard a few thin, frantic heartbeats and several low, tortured moans.

Daivad fought his way to the edge of the vine-net and crawled off, taking a second to make sure his wobbling knees would hold him up. When he looked down, he realized he was completely naked—except for the gore coating him. At some point when he was inside that ball of flesh, his clothes had been ripped away.

At least it was clear that his cock and balls had made it through intact. How, he had no idea. His delirious brain suggested that maybe they had retracted to safety inside his body throughout the ordeal. Was that possible?

“You good?” Ben asked as the Wolves crashed out of the undergrowth around them.

“Get the healers,” Daivad said to Ben, who nodded and dashed off. Then Daivad called out, “Ori!?”

He didn’t hear a reply, but he hadn’t expected one. Then, Kadie was at his side, buzzing with healing magic, her med bag at the ready.

“Where are you hurt?” she asked, but he waved her away.

“Go. Some of them are alive.”

Ben’s vines began to slowly, carefully lower the bodies to the forest floor. The undergrowth parted itself and wove into a little bridge across the ravine so the healers could wade into the bodies and begin their work.

Daivad looked around and called, “Julius?!”

“Huge Man!” the beast squawked, hanging upside down directly overhead. He too was smeared with every bodily fluid possible, his pale fur sticking up in wet, reddish-brown clumps all over him.

“You were supposed to go home.”

“Good boy Julius go home!” he agreed. “Good boy Julius come back!”

A fierce, furious affection for the beast swelled in Daivad’s chest so intensely that he had to look away and focus instead on the wriggling in his hand. His hand shook with the effort to keep his fingers clenched so tightly around it, considering two of his fingers were dislocated and swollen. He tried to lift his right hand, but his arm wouldn’t move. The adrenaline was still rushing through him, but in just a minute it would fade and this was going to hurt.

“That it?” Ben approached him, eyes on Daivad’s fist.

“Yeah.”

They both watched it for a moment, marveling at the fact that something so small had become that. The conductor of dozens and dozens of bodies. How many lives had this little creature ruined? How many people had it tormented? How long had it been riding that body with its too-long neck—and how many bodies had it ridden before that?

Nyxabella was right, it was all mouth. Daivad could see the little bloody teeth all along its body, chewing at his palm as it struggled to free itself. It made little, pathetic squeaking sounds—he could almost imagine it was begging for its life.

“Not so fun when it’s happening to you, is it?” Daivad said.

And he squeezed until bloody, toothy pulp burst between his fingers.