Thackery awoke choking for air, shuddering brutally, the pads of his paws slick with sweat and his usually slow and measured heartbeat rocketing into painful rapidity within his breast. It felt as if someone’s jaws were crushing his lungs, fangs piercing the soft tissue and gnashing it between merciless teeth until there was only pulp between his ribs, only a heavy viscous bag of fluid and mashed organs that could not pump his blood or breathe his air, and he was writhing on the cold stone floor of his den and hacking out gobs of saliva and mucus, and his pulse throbbed so hard and so loud in his ears that it was if someone were detonating TNT within the cavern—each savage impact a burst of stars in his vision. The red glow of his hellish eyes flashed in time with his squeezing heart, reflected upon the smooth surfaces of his cave. The sounds of his own pitiful gagging echoed back a hundredfold—disgusting mockery. Something was wrong. The world had tipped on its axis, and the flap of a butterfly’s wings had sent Thackery spiraling into the pits of some impossible torment. One moment he’d been sleeping away the sun’s killing light, and the next this terror had gripped him, so dark and deep and profound it felt as if the emotion itself were devouring his flesh and replacing it with congealed fear . . .

No. Another quaking cough, the sound of Thacks struggling to inhale like claws raking against brittle wood. It was not fear that had awoken him so abruptly, so mercilessly. The blond vampire struggled to his paws, leaning on a chilled wall for support, feeling each hair on his pelt standing upright. His fangs had extended to their total length, jutting like needles from his gaping jaws. This was not the same as being scared. There had been no nightmare, nothing in his bleak dreams to shake Thackery like this. As his racing thoughts caught up to their goal, a seismic growl grated at the back of his larynx. He knew this emotion. He’d felt it when Draven treated him as a female plaything, and when the bastards of his former pack had hunted him. Talons clenched and unclenched as his growl sank into a monster’s snarl. Hatred. The thing ripping him to pieces inside—molten hot and sickeningly powerful—was hatred.

Instinct pulled him through the cavern’s halls toward one of its many concealed entrances. Thackery’s senses told him that daylight should still pour over the land . . . and yet not one of the sun’s rays danced along the entry’s edge. Even when storms shaded the heavens, a silvery glow played upon the rocks—warning Thacks not to step too close. But not now. He could not accurately describe the illumination sneaking its way into the darkness . . . he knew only, somehow, that it was safe for him to touch. So he did. Step by step, the leech stalked from his den and into the openness of day, his gleaming crimson eyes going wide at what lay before him.

No sun hung in the sky. Where he would expect the sun to be if hidden by thunderclouds, he saw an unbroken tapestry of twilight . . . no faint disc where one should have hovered. He had no name for the color of the atmosphere. The sleepy mauve-lilac of dawn . . . the velvet blue of evening . . . somewhere between night and day? Impossible. But there. And no dream, either. And that overwhelming tsunami of loathing within him only whorled and grew as Thackery realized what this meant.

If there was no sun . . . then vampires could hunt. None could hide from the hunger that ruled his every waking moment. “Did I do something to please the gods?” Thackery’s voice grated from him with the texture of rusted nails and steaming bullets, hard and sharp and dangerous, and the sound of his own tone made his hatred rear upward like a cobra ready to strike. This was the voice of a devil read to commit atrocities, his true self peeling free of its confines, thirsting for violence. And violence he would have. Blossom Forest would weep in the wake of what Thackery wanted to do, now that his blood sang with the music of the Hunt and he foresaw a way to exorcise the illness of antipathy raging throughout himself. He laughed once . . . and again, until the diabolical rhythm had him shaking where he stood. “I think it’s time to play.”

The butterscotch brute lunged into a full sprint. He let his ravenous energy guide him like a compass, a preternatural force pushing him this way and that. Paws flew over the terra seemingly without touching it. The sinuous grace given to all vampires poured like liquid fire down each limb. He could hear the heartbeats of many wolves drumming in the distance—he was closing in—drool leaked from the corners of his open maw as he galloped, as if he could already taste the sweet heat of their blood trickling down his throat . . . there. Up ahead. Gathered in a clearing within the swamp like entrees on a platter, unknowing of the beast that raced towards them all with fangs bared and the intent to murder an inferno in his brain. He unleashed a guttural roar from the deepest part of his abdomen. And without breaking stride—without slowing down or pausing or thinking twice—Thackery arrowed toward the eldest center male with jaws gaping and knives on full gleaming display. His cranium was angled slightly so that he could slam his teeth around the upper portion of the dragga’s neck, just under his jawbone. If the stranger backed up, Thacks could collide lower down his throat or even his chest; if he dipped his muzzle downward, trying to protect his throat, then he’d catch a mouth of cutlery to the face. Thackery could give two shits what he actually hit, if anything. All he desired was blood, blood, blood—and there were a million ways to make somebody bleed.

Attacks: lunged for Kalgalath, aimed directly for this throat.
Mentions: the group as a whole, Kal.