She ran right past him.

Not to him. Past him. Like he was a lamppost. A slightly inconvenient one.

Astarion had exactly one second to process the insult before the lead spider phased into existence directly in front of him, its chitinous body crashing down where the girl had been standing a heartbeat ago. Mandibles the length of his forearm snapped shut on empty air, and eight glassy eyes swiveled to fix on the next available target.

Oh, wonderful. Phase spiders. Because this night wasn't miserable enough.

Instinct took over. Not the vampire kind. The older one. Two hundred years of fight or die. His daggers sliced through the first spider's legs with a viciousness that had nothing to do with charm. Ichor sprayed across his shirt — the imported linen shirt — and he mentally added that to the list of tonight's casualties.

The second spider phased through the shadow behind him.

He felt the mandibles before he saw them. Pain, white-hot and immediate, as the creature's fangs punctured deep into his shoulder. The venom flooded in. Phase spider venom, the magical kind. It burned.

He twisted, snarling, and buried his dagger in the thing's cluster of eyes. It shrieked, a sound like metal scraping on glass, and dissolved back into the Ethereal Plane, taking the remaining spiders with it in a chain reaction of crackling, static-charged disappearances.

The clearing went silent.

Astarion collapsed against a mossy log. His dagger slipped from his fingers. He pressed his right hand over the wound. The venom was spreading: dark, greenish-black veins crawling outward from the puncture. Visible even through the shredded linen.

Phase spider venom. Delightful. Burns like hellfire, smells like a chemical accident, and ruins every piece of clothing it touches.

He let his head fall back against the log. Breathing helped. In, out. He didn't need to breathe, hadn't in two centuries, but the rhythm grounded him. In. Out. Don't think about the woman who used you as a barricade.

You didn't save her. She ran past you and the spiders chose the easier target. Don't make this into something noble. It wasn't noble. It was geometry.

From somewhere in the dark, the soft crunch of a careful footstep.