Vithra runs on all fours, loping forth like the spawn of the Devil and the meanest wolf in the woods. His long limbs spring him forward, leech mouth squirming and gnashing. Claws clicking on concrete.

He’s going to kill them. Whoever is here, he’s going to rip them into so many ribbons. Then decorate himself and the walls. The idea thrills him. To make something pretty out of so much blood.

He hates humans. Disgusting things. The hairless apes crawled out of the trees and claimed dominance over the land and sea and sky. And he and his brothers and sisters were forced to stay down in the dark with the earthworms and voles and eyeless crickets. It was the daemons – daemons like Candlefly – who forced the Hungry Ones into the deepest pits and would do so again given half a chance. And it was the humans who kept them there. Millennium after millennium.

But with the city gone, they will have a kingdom once more to call their own.

He’ll find a way to dispatch Candlefly. The man is arrogant. He oversteps his bounds. He will leave an opening, and Vithra will crawl through it.

But first, the end of this tunnel. The blast didn’t work. It won’t matter. He won’t need dynamite. He’ll use his claws. His teeth. The whole of his body. He’ll launch himself into the rock and tear through it like he’s tearing through some poor fool’s belly to get to his guts.

The tunnels will break and the water will flow and he will swim in it as the city above goes thirsty. As the men are moved out. As the monsters move in.

Ahead is a haze of smoke. Whirling like a sideways cyclone.

He hears the thrum of distant fans.

He cares little for the machinations of man. He continues forward.

Hungry. Always hungry.

It’s then he sees something ahead–

Something smaller than him. Racing forward with equal speed.

A beast of the Great Below, he thinks.

But then he sees. It is no beast.

It is a machine. On four wheels.

Vithra howls at it in rage.

Nora presses the walkie-talkie button, holds it to Mookie’s face. He clears his throat. Tries to get his growl on, sound as much like Sorago as he can manage.

“Detonate,” he says. “Over.”

Candlefly hears it and laughs.

He punches the button.

Vithra leaps over the quad. It passes underneath as he hits the ground again.

Trailing behind are a dozen sticks of dynamite. Connected to the braid of det-cord.

There’s a sizzle. The cord burns.

The man that was once Konrad Zoladski is caught in a wave of fire. Hot white heat hits him like a tractor trailer. But there’s something else, too – an intricate cage the color of bronze. It breaks apart, spears of metal tearing through him–