Page 13 of Voidwalker (Beasts of the Void #1)

“How fucking dare you!” Fi spat. Cussing tasted beautiful. She’d never take it for granted again. “You think you can get rid of me that easy? Think again, you frost-hearted…”

Dizziness struck her. Fi caught herself before toppling sideways. Though she could move, could speak, her limbs dragged, relics of tea in her system.

The daeyari rose with menacing grace, clawed feet whisper-quiet as he circled the patio. He looked down at Fi with ember-hard eyes. His voice came out harder.

“This sacrifice doesn’t seem so willing, Milana.”

To her credit, Milana held her ground. Never run from a daeyari , she’d told Fi. They were about to test if that was wise counsel.

“Of course.” Milana said. “The truth is…”

“The truth is,” Fi interrupted, “you’re a scheming—”

“This woman is responsible for the explosion at the capitol!” Milana pointed at Fi, who could only gape in response. “My apologies for deceiving you, Lord Antal. We wished to give her this final dignity. To focus on rebuilding.”

“Bullshit!” Fi shouted. “You hired me to do it!”

Milana clapped a hand to her chest, aghast. “How dare you make such an accusation. We are faithful servants to the daeyari!”

“Faithful servants who paid me to smuggle a bomb into the capitol building.”

“You claim to bring me a criminal.” The daeyari’s tone snapped both mortals to silence. He stood between them, eyes locked on Milana, taut as a panther stalking prey. Even his tail fell motionless. “Where is her sentence?”

Milana twisted her hands. “There… hasn’t been one. We wished to act swiftly. Please, this is a difficult time for—”

She didn’t get to finish.

Static laced Fi’s tongue as the daeyari vanished.

A blink later, he reappeared in front of Milana.

Innate teleportation ranked among the more impressive and terrifying of immortal tricks, and though Fi had heard of the ability, she startled to see the swiftness of it firsthand.

Before Milana could bolt, the daeyari snared her head in both hands.

He could have skewered her, could have gone for her exposed throat.

Instead, red energy bloomed beneath his fingers, sinking into her temples.

Milana didn’t move. Hardly breathed. A glassy expression filled her eyes.

“Are you lying to me?” the daeyari asked.

His attendant spoke as if in a trance. Even then, the answer quivered.

“Yes.”

The daeyari tensed, subtle, but compared to his previous stoicism, he might as well have recoiled. “ Who told you to lie to me?”

Before she could answer, Erik slipped a hand into his robes. He hadn’t said a word since Fi regained her tongue, had drifted so wraithlike at the edge of the patio that she could have forgotten he was there.

The daeyari didn’t.

Static pricked Fi’s tongue again. Erik stabbed a silver energy dagger at the daeyari’s heart—slicing air, when the creature vanished again.

Overhead, a bough creaked.

Fi looked up, and there was the moment of terror from every folktale, every children’s rhyme: a daeyari crouched upon a branch, tail swaying, red eyes a smolder in the dark as he glared upon the witless humans who’d come to his shrine—upon the fool who’d fight a creature centuries old, its teeth sharpened on sinew and bone.

There weren’t many folktales about fighting daeyari. None where the human won.

“Erik…” Milana breathed in horror.

The daeyari leapt, hitting the ground with effortless poise.

Erik swiped with his dagger, but the immortal struck faster.

For as long as humans remembered, they could draw on the energy in their bodies, but their early forms were raw.

Crude. Then daeyari, as part of their deal, taught mortals more refined Shaping, energy conduits and more stable external forms. He Shaped an elegant shield of red energy along his forearm, deflecting Erik’s blade.

His claws curled fiercer than before, sheaths of crimson sharpening the points.

He grabbed Erik by the throat, severing arteries with a single slash. The human fell in a spray of blood, gurgling as he clutched the rent flesh of his neck.

Fi watched the body fall limp. Watched blood pool across the stones.

She couldn’t get to her feet fast enough.

The vertical motion punched her with dizziness, limbs heavy, but this would be her only chance.

Milana said not to run, but Fi wasn’t the one who’d betrayed an immortal.

The daeyari faced away from her, blood slick on his fingers, focus elsewhere.

Void spare her from that focus a moment longer.

He grabbed Milana. She shrieked as claws pierced her robe, digging into her shoulders. Though guilt pitted Fi’s stomach, she needed the noise, masking her footsteps as she stumbled off the patio and into the forest.

“Please!” Milana’s voice cracked. “I’ve been a loyal servant!”

“Then you should know better ,” the daeyari snarled back. “Tell me the truth.”

Fi didn’t look back. Her steps didn’t falter, even as the screeches began, a spine-numbing echo through silent trees.

On the other hand, hard to muster sympathy for a woman who’d betrayed her and blew up a capitol building full of innocent people.

Any hesitation, and Fi would be the next one screaming.

The odds stacked against her. No weapons. No energy capsules. Her legs were putty as she fled the shrine down frozen slopes. Her head spun with lingering tendrils of twilight sorel.

A Curtain. Fi only needed one Curtain. She harbored no hope of outrunning a daeyari, much less in his home terrain, much much less considering the blatant trail her boots dragged through the snow.

She could only hope the creature’s preoccupation with Milana bought her enough time to escape.

Through tea-rattled thoughts, she wracked her memory for Curtains on the outskirts of Thomaskweld.

A green aurora swirled overhead. The energy of lost souls, those too restless to find the afterlife, left to drift in the Void. Tonight, Fi heard them calling in the dull pop of each wave, a warning of what end awaited if the daeyari caught her.

Ten years since Verne’s shrine, and still, all she could do was run.

Fi skidded down a ravine draped in snow-heavy firs.

Caught her boot on a fallen trunk. Cursed the Void and the daeyari and everything in between as she scraped her hands stumbling through a patch of thorny bracken.

At the base of the slope, a creek cut through the forest, babbling pools crusted with ice.

Upon the bank, a Curtain shifted beneath starlight. Fi sobbed at the sight and sprinted toward it. She pulled energy from feeble arm muscles, only needing a tiny current to slice the Curtain open.

Nothing came. Only numbness, stubborn in her bones.

“Fuck me. This is not the time !”

Fi swiped her hand through the Curtain. The ethereal chill washed her skin, but reality didn’t part.

Her internal energy faltered, blocked by twilight sorel like detritus in a stream.

She gritted her teeth and dug deep, deep into the muscles of her chest, her abdomen, grasping for any flare of heat.

There was no time. Every second of delay meant teeth closer to her neck.

At last, she Shaped a feeble current of silver at her fingers. Little better than when she was a child, flailing her arms through Curtains for weeks before she finally learned to touch them. A small pulse was enough. Fi split the Curtain and staggered through.

A Shard lay on the other side, a dust of snow upon rocky ground, a mirrored crimson aurora twisting across the black of the Void. Fi limped toward the nearest exit Curtain she could see, eager to be far away, drugs and energy exhaustion pulling her toward the ground.

Static prickled her tongue.

The daeyari struck her back.

Fi hit the ground. Stone scraped her arms as she twisted to Shape a shield, but when that failed, she resorted to kicking.

A woefully ineffective strategy. Gone was any gentleness the immortal had shown at his shrine.

His weight pinned her down like a lame hare.

Claws raked her skull as he pressed her head against the ground, cheek crunching gravel.

A stupid plan, in retrospect. The Void was more this creature’s home than any forest. He hunched over her, resolute from claws to tail as Fi shook with ragged breaths beneath him.

He smelled of blood. A red smear marred his cheek, and when he extended a long black tongue to lick it clean, some frantic part of Fi threatened to laugh.

A strange relief, knowing he probably wasn’t hungry anymore.

Or maybe it was the cruel irony of dying by daeyari teeth after all this time. After all the lives she’d ruined through her cowardice.

He glanced at the starless sky. The black of the Void had never seemed so depthless as it did now, contrasted against his eyes.

“You can see Curtains,” he said. “How convenient.”

At the moment, that hardly seemed the case.

Fi gasped as a current of energy pushed into her temple. Not sharp. A dull creep of heat flooded her skull, clouding already muddied thoughts, the same as he’d done to Milana.

“What part did you play in this?” The daeyari’s question brushed her ear, cold as ice.

“I smuggled a bomb into the Capitol.”

The words escaped without Fi’s permission. Panic followed, a distant flutter in her chest as she drifted beneath the daeyari’s magic. She couldn’t think straight. Couldn’t lie.

“Why?” he pressed.

“They… hired me…” Her words fell to mumbles. The lull of his touch, the remnants of twilight sorel combined to make her eyes heavy. Sleep sounded blissful. A quiet nap beneath the Void…

“ Speak , human.”

“I think… I might have a concussion,” Fi slurred.

The daeyari gave an aggravated huff.

His energy severed. Clarity snapped back like a slap to the face, the bite of cold on Fi’s arms and stones digging into her cheek. The daeyari pressed harder against her head, urging her with claws rather than magic.

Claws were pretty damn convincing.

“I’ve heard Milana’s side,” he said. “Now, I’ll have yours.”

Fi was supposed to be good at this: haggling, standing her ground, wearing that confounding cape of confidence. All useless now, when she couldn’t piece together a single reasonable argument to stop this daeyari from splitting her open.

“I didn’t know their plan,” she said. The truth, but a flimsy excuse.

“You smuggled a bomb for them.”

“They told me they were stealing a vase!” Fi wasn’t normally one to beg. This seemed a fine time to try—not that it did Milana any good. “Please. I never meant to cross you. You’ve caught the ones who did.”

Fi’s heart thundered hard enough to chisel the stone beneath her. She assumed the daeyari sensed it, that his long silence was intended to strain the muscle to its breaking point. He leaned closer, knee digging into her back, breath raising the hairs on her neck.

“Our business isn’t finished, mortal. I honored your request. You owe me payment.”

The demand settled over Fi like a noose of thorns.

She’d asked the daeyari to kill Milana and Erik. He’d ripped them to pieces. For centuries since the pact, their races had agreed upon the price for such an exchange.

“You already have plenty to eat!” She hoped. She begged .

“There are other ways to pay a debt.”

No. Fi would rather he flay her. She’d rather—

Another surge of energy hit her temple. Before Fi could cry out, her thoughts blurred, a swift tumble back into unconsciousness.