Giant was perhaps an inadequate word to describe the monster closing in on us. Enormous? Gargantuan? Colossal? None of those words captured the horror of staring down a spider twice my size. As black as tar, it glistened and gleamed like a pool of oil in the rising moonlight. The wind was agitated, buzzing, rustling. When the beast moved, it sounded like the sharpening of a hundred knives at once.

“That is a highly poisonous spider,” Nero told me.

Of course it was. As though I’d ever doubted it. This place was hell on Earth.

The spider rushed us, slashing out with its pointy-tipped legs. Each slash whistled through the air like a steel sword. They cut like a sword too.

“That spider moves really fast for a beast its size,” I said, ignoring the throbbing pain in my left shoulder where the beast had cut me.

We struck at the giant spider with our swords. Our blades scraped against the beast’s belly, hardly scratching the hard shell. It was like hitting a shield.

The spider reared back and ejected a white bundle of goo. I ducked out of the way, and the web shot past me, splattering against a nearby building. It stuck right where it had hit. I couldn’t afford to let the spider trap me in its web. Or poison me with those shiny silver pinchers.

I considered going around the beast to get to the Magitech generator building, but another spider jumped into my path—and this one was even larger than the first. Nero went to greet the new arrival, leaving me to battle the first spider.

My spider rushed forward, slashing with its hard, armored legs as it ejected another sticky white bundle. I ducked low to avoid the web. Then I grabbed the beast’s leg with both hands and heaved with as much power as I had. The leg crunched, cracking into two in my hands. The spider fell.

It tried to get back up, but with a leg missing it was a circling, panicking, horribly uncoordinated mess. It snapped and hissed at me, shooting out bundles of stinking white goo, one after the other. The damn thing was a machine gun.

I rolled under the spider and jumped up, shoving my sword through its open jaws. My blade sank into the soft inner flesh of its mouth and pierced the top of its head. The lights went out in those hellish eyes, then it dropped dead to the ground. A moment later, Nero’s spider landed on its body. It was dead too. I looked at the pile of spiders, and I had to admit I was feeling pretty damn badass.

That victory song died in my head when I saw the stream of giant spiders flying down every building in sight. There were dozens of them, and every single one of them was determined to eat us alive. Nero blasted one of them off the building with a psychic spell. The spider fell dead to the ground. So they were weak against magic. Unfortunately, Nero and I were a bit short on magic right now. His spells weren’t nearly as strong as they used to be.

A cold, foreboding flash shook my body, a silent tremor that warned me of the larger quake to come. Soon my vampire powers would leave me completely, and then I would be as weak and slow as a human. I wouldn’t be able to fight off the spiders in that state. I would be a liability. I hated being a liability, especially to Nero. He wouldn’t be strong enough to kill them all alone if he had to worry about saving my human ass.

Nero pummeled the spiders with psychic energy, one blast after the other. He didn’t slow down, but I could see the strain in his face. He was weakening. His magic was not as potent as he needed for this battle. I’d always thought Nero was a bottomless well of stamina, but watching him fight those beasts now, I could see his limits. He wouldn’t hold out for much longer.

The quake came—and it didn’t come gently. It tore away the last of my magic, leaving me weak. Mortal. Beside me, Nero groaned in pain, my loss magnified by his own. I could feel his anguish, like a hammer had slammed down on him, shattering him. A tear slid from my eye. And at that moment, I realized that I wasn’t just carrying his burden; he was carrying mine. He felt everything that I did, and it hurt him.

So I bottled up my thoughts, my pain, everything.

“So that’s what it takes for you to reel in your thoughts,” Nero joked, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes.

We looked up at the sky of spiders. His psychic magic gone, he waved his hand to create a lightning whip. The most powerful Legion soldiers didn’t even need a weapon. They could form one out of pure magic.

“Wait,” I said as he prepared to strike out at the monsters. “I have a better idea. Right now the spiders are on tons of buildings.” I pointed at the ugly concrete building in front of us. “But if we could lure them all to one place…”

“We could get them all at once,” he finished for me.

“Exactly. Once they are all on that building, you need to electrocute the whole thing.”

He looked at the building, then at me. “You are not drawing them to that building. You will get electrocuted too.”

“I’m tough. I’ll be ok.”

“No,” he said stubbornly. “I’m not using you as bait.”

“I have no magic, no supernatural strength. I can’t take down even one of them. I can only be bait. That’s the only way I can help.”

He stepped in front of me. “I will take care of them myself. I have enough magic left for that.”

“You probably do. But these aren’t the first monsters we’ve faced here, and they won’t be the last. If you burn out now, you won’t have enough magic left later. This is a marathon, Nero.” A sick, deadly marathon orchestrated by the gods. “You have to pace yourself.” I set my hand on his arm. “We can do this. Together. You have to trust me. This isn’t the time for prim and proper fighting. To survive this, you’re going to have to fight a little dirty.”

When Nero opened his mouth to protest, I grabbed a handful of sand from the ground and threw it in his face. Then, not looking back, I ran toward the building.

“That wasn’t funny, Pandora,” he called out between coughs.

I kept running. My lungs burned, my feet felt like lead—and I was hardly moving at all. I’d sure taken my supernatural speed for granted.

“Come and get me!” I screamed at the spiders as loudly as I could.

Their heads all turned toward me, frozen for a moment in time. Their red eyes shone like hundreds of little lights. I slashed my knife across my arm and flicked it, sprinkling the sand with my blood. The spiders unfroze and stampeded toward me.

I ran into the building and slammed the door shut behind me. The walls shook and trembled. The spiders were crashing their hard, armored bodies against the building. They tore at the windows, the door, the holes in the walls—anything to get inside. Bits of glass, concrete, and brick rained down on me. Noxious green smoke, smelling of burning metal and acid, rose from the webs they splatted against the building. The noise of it all was awful, simply wretched. It sounded like a metal workshop, a power saw, and a horror house—punctuated with the sound of someone’s head hitting a gym mat over and over again. The spiders were almost inside. Parts of their legs had already broken through the walls.

Ribbons of purple lightning blasted across the building, shooting up level by level. The magic covered every wall, spilled through every window. The stink of burning flesh overwhelmed the blend of metal and acid. Spiders dropped dead to the ground like black rain.

I ran for the exit, grabbing a wooden board from the ground. I slammed the board against the door, but the spiders’ web had sealed it shut. I kept hammering the door, but it wouldn’t budge.

I tossed the useless board aside. There was a broken window nearby. I sprinted toward it and jumped through. I landed hard on a dead spider on the other side, slipping over its sleek body.

I peeled my face off the dirt. Nero stood over me, the last remnants of lightning fading from his hands. He shook off the magic, then extended his hand to help me up. He looked from the damaged building, to the piles of dead giant spiders.

Then he looked at me and said, “Don’t you ever do that again.”

I smirked at him. “I told you it would work.”

A dead spider fell off the roof of the building. Nero picked me up and swept me out of the way. Had he moved a second later, the monster’s corpse would have crushed me.

“Bringer of Chaos.” He tucked a stray strand of hair behind my ear.

I grinned at him. “Admit it. Your life was boring before me. You’d always yearned for a healthy dose of chaos in your life.”

Nero fell to his knees, his face contorted with pain. Through our bond, I could feel his magic fading.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“I’ve lost my ability to shift.”

I wiped black spider blood from my sleeve. “That’s ok. We can practice Shifter’s Shadow later.”

As soon as I said it, I realized how stupid it was. I shouldn’t have been worrying about my training for the fifth level right now, when we were in a fight for our lives. I didn’t even have magic right now. Ronan’s potion hadn’t just taken out my magic; it had muddled my mind. I guess that was kind of the point of the trials: to strip us of everything and set us loose in this fallen city.

Nero set his hand on my arm. “Come on. The power building is just next door.”

I followed him inside. The building looked mostly intact. Old, but mostly intact. There wasn’t even much rust, certainly not as much as you’d expect to find after two centuries of neglect. Several of the nearby buildings were nothing but rust. The laws of nature were way out of whack here.

We stepped into darkness. Nero pulled out a Witch Lantern, a potion-powered lamp. The golden light shone out like a star, illuminating the tall, open hallway. As we followed the path, I could have sworn I saw things moving in the shadows. Maybe I was imagining things, but I didn’t think so. This city had been overrun by monsters. They were everywhere. That didn’t mean whatever was watching us right now would attack. There were all kinds of monsters, including timid ones.

“Here we are,” Nero said as we reached a cylinder the size of a barn.

I wondered how they’d gotten it into the building.

“I’m going to see what we’re dealing with.” He lifted the lamp up to the Magitech generator.

As he looked it over, I kept an eye out for beasties. A few minutes later, he stepped around the generator, his expression masked.

“Is this the point where you tell me you have good news and bad news?” I quipped.

“There’s a small amount of magic left in the generator,” he told me.

“That was the good news?”

“There is no good news, Pandora. We have a much bigger problem. The magic in the generators has been corrupted by the monsters’ wild magic. And the city’s barrier isn’t broken. It’s perfectly intact. In fact, it’s still connected to the continent’s barrier system.”

“And that’s bad?”

“The corrupted magic is bleeding through that connection, into the larger grid. The city’s generator is very slowly infecting all the others. The barriers that protect the cities of humanity from the plains of monsters are breaking down. If we don’t fix the problem and purge the wild magic, every barrier on the continent will come down, opening the door for monsters to flood the cities.”