A Taste of Frenzy

Hajnalka

A single drop of bright crimson arterial blood rolls off the tip of my brass cannula and strikes the shale.

The needle nicked the lining of the cervical artery on the way out.

The scent of hot arterial blood hits the air, instantly nullifying every trace of dormant calm.

The Great Matron’s six-foot front scythe cuts through the gloom with the screech of grinding millstones. The violent wind of its descent hits my cheek, freezing the sweat against my skin.

I throw my weight backward, tucking my elbows tight against my ribs to shield the fragile glass flask against my sternum.

I do not scream. A scream wastes oxygen and advertises meat.

A heavy shadow slams into me from the left.

Two hundred pounds of muscle and hardened plate tackle me cleanly out of the killing arc. We hit the stone hard. Vencel's armored arm clamps around my waist like a vice, rolling us across the jagged floor as the serrated scythe strikes the limestone where my neck stood half a second ago.

The impact shatters the rock into a spray of razor-sharp shrapnel.

Stone chips slice across my cheekbone. My back crashes against the shale, knocking the breath from my lungs. The inward-facing iron spikes of my collar jolt, biting viciously into the hollow above my collarbone.

A single bead of warm blood wells against the cold iron and trickles down my throat.

The scent of my fresh blood reaches the beast.

The matron screeches, a sound so shrill and concussive that my ears ring with white noise. Her lateral armor plates fan open, black caustic venom spraying from her mandibles in a boiling hiss. Across the cavern, the surrounding nesting hollows erupt with hundreds of blind, skittering limbs.

The blood frenzy has taken the hive.

"Stay down!" Vencel snarls into my ear.

He does not run. He does not hesitate. He plants his heavy boots against the shale and steps directly over me, raising his left forearm to meet the second descending scythe.

Bone-cracking thunder shudders through the vault.

The matron's serrated blade crashes full-force into Vencel’s occult chitin graft. The sheer kinetic impact drives him down to one knee, cracking the flagstone beneath his boot. Violet sparks spray across the dark as the beast's barb carves a jagged trench through his blackened carapace, splintering the graft down to raw, bleeding muscle.

He grunts, teeth bared in a feral grimace, but he does not yield an inch.

With his right hand, he draws his heavy broad dagger and drives eight inches of tempered steel straight up into the leathery joint beneath the matron's primary eye-stalk.

A torrent of corrosive green bile erupts over his knuckles.

"Get to the archway!" he roars, wrenching the blade free with a brutal twist.

I scramble backward on my hands and knees across the wet rock, keeping my left hand clamped securely around the sealed venom flask.

Three lesser burrowers, whipped into madness by the copper reek of spilled blood, drop from the ceiling stalactites ten paces ahead of me. Their blind jaws snap like iron bear traps, drawn directly toward the scent trickling from my neck.

I reach into my chemise hem, pulling a palmful of crude sulfur salt crystals.

I fling the powder across the stone between us.

The dust hits the caustic bile puddles sizzling on the floor, igniting into a curtain of sharp blue chemical flame. The blinding flash and sulfur fumes choke the blind scavengers' sensory antennae, sending them thrashing back into the darkness with frantic shrieks.

Simple chemistry beats mindless gluttony every time.

Vencel lunges back toward me. He rips the heavy queen-pheromone lantern from his belt, smashing its brass regulation valve against the nearest stone pillar.

A thick, suffocating cloud of sweet queen-musk bursts into the cavern air, drowning the scent of my blood in concentrated territorial command.

The matron reels. Her massive segmented head thrashes in violent confusion, torn between the frenzy of fresh blood and the absolute dominance of the pheromone fog. She hisses, dragging her front scythes through the shale as she retreats six paces back into the black crevasse of her nesting pit.

Vencel grabs the iron chain at my collar and hauls me around the corner of a colossal basalt pillar.

We collapse together into the shadow of the stone arch.

The cavern floor shivers as the distant swarm slowly retreats, subdued by the heavy pheromone mist settling over the hollows.

I press my shoulder blades flat against the cold basalt, my breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps. The glass flask of living neurotoxin is warm against my palm, completely intact.

My fingers come up to touch the wet graze along my collarbone. A tiny smear of red.

Vencel kneels two inches from me, his chest heaving like a forge bellows. His dark hair is plastered to his forehead with sweat and bile. His left arm hangs limp at his side, the black occult chitin cracked wide open, oozing dark human blood alongside black ichor.

"You drew blood," he rasps, his gaze locked onto the cut at my throat.

"The cannula slipped a millimeter when her spiracle twitched," I say, keeping my voice deadpan despite the trembling in my knees. "Your subterranean hospitality leaves much to be desired, Szilágyi."

"You almost died."

"I am aware."

He reaches out with his uninjured right hand, his rough thumb wiping the smear of blood from my collarbone. The touch is burning hot, rough as sandstone, and entirely too possessive for a man whose arm is split to the bone.

His fingers linger on the cold iron of my collar, curling around the chain.

"I told you," he murmurs, his voice dropping into a dangerous, ragged register. "Your life belongs to me."

I look from his bruised face down to the fractured chitin of his arm.

The occult armor is terrifying, but it breaks under blunt kinetic trauma. That is a concrete fact, and one I intend to remember.

A broken glass flask could be replaced in an afternoon. A dead slave could be scavenged from the next surface raid. Yet he had thrown his own flesh into sixty tons of crushing force, determined that nothing in this dark would destroy what he claimed as his.

The realization settles in my chest like liquid ice.

My captor is completely insane, and I am locked in the dark with him.