What the fuck? King thought. He followed the spear up expecting to see someone standing above him, but the weapon’s source blended into the stone wall. A second lizard, fueled by bloodlust exited the tunnel. With a quickness King didn’t think possible, a second spear shot through the sandfish’s skull. Again, the spear appeared to have come from a living wall. For a moment King thought he might be witnessing some kind of golem.

Then it moved and he saw the awful truth. The creature was speckled brown, perfectly camouflaged for the brown stone found throughout the region. Standing still, it had been all but invisible against the wall.

This was the presence he had detected before: a ten-foot-long, nearly eight-foot-tall praying mantis—a desert mantis to be exact.

It turned its triangle head toward him. The tilt of the head looked freakish, rotating almost a full three hundred degrees. Its two oval eyes, impossible to escape, honed in on him. He could feel the thing analyzing him. Its head twitched to alternating angles. Then its gaze rolled back toward the tunnel. The remaining two sandfish had arrived, and they were still hungry.

As the mantis flung one of the impaled sandfish away, a second oversized lizard clamped down on its leg. But the giant insect showed no reaction. It simply shook off the impaled lizard, took aim, and pierced the skull of the newcomer while it was still clamped down on its foreleg.

The fourth sandfish had eyes only for King. It charged beneath the praying mantis, intent on capturing its prize even while the massive insect turned its brethren into shish kabob. But it wasn’t the only one with eyes on King. It was swatted to the side by a second mantis. The sandfish toppled and rolled, smashing into a far wall. The impact seemed to knock some sense into the lizard. It righted itself and took off running down one of the side tunnels.

The mantis swiveled its head toward King. He could see the tension in its dangerous forelimbs building for a strike. The strike of a mantis was one of the quickest, most violent acts in the natural world. Quicker than the human eye could perceive, the limbs could snap out and ensnare pray between its femur and tibia, both of which were lined with needle-sharp spikes. To a human, those small spikes are normally an insignificant threat. Right now, the smallest were three-inch-long blades. The longest matched King’s seven-inch KA-BAR knife. If just one of those arms caught him, he’d be pierced upward of twenty times, perhaps even lopped in two. He had no intention of letting that happen.