Page 20 of Voidwalker (Beasts of the Void #1)

Don’t make this more awkward than it has to be

They emerged from the teleport in a flail of limbs and snow.

Fi collapsed to the frozen ground, breathless and disorientated by whatever cold black sorcery immortals used to blink from one spot to another, vaguely aware of Antal sprawled nearby. Her arm throbbed where Astrid’s sword had struck.

The forest lay silent. Fi’s ears rang at the calm, the absence of snarls and crackling energy. For a long moment, she held still. Listened past whispering shiverpine needles for any signs of Verne. That Beast. Astrid.

Nothing followed them. A clean escape had never felt so hollow.

Fi curled into a ball in the snow. As adrenaline ebbed and the cold sank in, her breaths stayed shallow.

Astrid.

She’d left Astrid behind again.

Fi had spent ten years trying to forget that day. That harrowing walk to Verne’s forest shrine. That panic that stopped her from thinking straight. That moment when her cowardice betrayed not only her.

“ I changed my mind! ” she’d shouted. “ I don’t want to go. Take someone else! ”

She hadn’t wanted Verne’s attendants to take Astrid in her place.

But they did.

Astrid wasn’t a Voidwalker, but vavriter were equally prized as Arbiters by their immortal kin.

And the best crossbow shot in town? Astrid was fiercer.

Braver. Longer lived than a human. Far more likely to survive the encounter.

She’d marched to Verne’s shrine with all the courage Fi lacked.

And she wasn’t eaten. Verne had accepted her as Arbiter, earning Astrid the gratitude of their town. The power of a daeyari at her back.

But Fi couldn’t have known that would be the outcome. Not for sure.

The guilt had eaten her raw, until all she could do was run.

She ran away before she could tell Astrid she was sorry.

Fi had always meant to go back, once she was less broken. Then a year passed. Then two. Then five. Until no amount of “sorry” would ever be good enough.

Ten years later, Fi didn’t want to be that flimsy girl who ran away. She wanted to be fierce. She wanted to be unflinching. A decade as a Void smuggler had made her very good at pretending. A defense mechanism, masquerading as courage.

And Fi wasn’t safe yet.

Beside her, Antal shifted in the snow.

She forced herself to sit upright. Pulled on her bristles, bottling every insecurity where they’d fermented for ten years, burning a hole in her stomach.

Fi couldn’t afford a slip of weakness with a predator nearby.

She couldn’t wallow in this cold. Void be damned, how much longer would she have to limp by without proper clothing?

Fi mustered a silver energy current to warm her hands, rubbing them for good measure, idle motions to keep her fingers busy until they stopped trembling.

Conifers loomed overhead, night sky beyond, a flicker of green aurora through dark needles.

No landmarks. This could be any forest on the Winter Plane.

Fi’s pulse picked up again. This could be any forest on the Winter Plane. No telling where Antal had brought them, whether she could find a Curtain home before freezing in a ravine. Beside her, the daeyari rose into a crouch, eyes like late-night embers as he surveyed their surroundings.

He tensed, subtle.

“Don’t you dare!” Fi shouted.

She tackled him before he could teleport. He snarled as they hit the ground, a writhe of muscle and lashing tail. In what might prove to be Fi’s stupidest decision to date, she held on.

“Let go of me!” Antal said.

“No! You can’t leave me here!”

Fi locked her legs around his waist. After failing to find handholds on shoulders or arms, she grabbed the base of his antlers. He rolled like a crocodile thrashing snow, knocking the wind from Fi’s chest, but she flattened against him and held on for dear life.

Antal came to rest on his back, panting.

Fi lay atop him, breaths equally hard.

A strange smell wrinkled her nose. As Fi gathered her senses, she startled at the claw marks shredding Antal’s shirt, his Void-black blood drenching the fabric—she’d never seen daeyari bleed, but that explained their grayscale complexion, no rosy hue like humans.

Her cheek pressed a surprisingly warm chest. She felt energy simmering beneath his immortal skin, as restless as his heaving sternum.

Around them, the silence of the forest returned.

“You promised I’d be safe,” Fi said.

Antal lay silent a long moment, gaze molten on the mortal hands clutching his antlers. His chest rose and fell at an indignant tempo beneath her, tail swishing the snow.

“I misjudged,” he said.

“No shit . What just happened?”

“It would seem I’ve been deposed.”

An infuriatingly mild way to put it. Verne had orchestrated the Thomaskweld attack to overthrow him? Had a Beast at her command strong enough to fight a daeyari? In all Fi’s years of benefitting from this lax territory lord, she’d never considered how his immortal neighbors viewed his policies.

And Astrid helped make this happen. That parting look was seared onto Fi’s retinas, the kind of gut-twisting vision to keep her up at night. She should have seen it coming. She’d run away, abandoned Astrid with Verne.

Was it any surprise to find her friend had turned equally vicious?

Now, here was Fi, stuck in the middle of Void-knew-where with a daeyari.

She shifted her grip on his antlers. The lacquer black was slick beneath her fingers, roughened by carvings.

“You’re supposed to protect this territory from other daeyari,” Fi accused. Whether lax or strict, all daeyari territories demanded the same human sacrifices for their services. “So what are you going to—”

She yelped as Antal tried to buck her off. Fi barely held on as he flipped her sideways, rocks and snow digging into her shoulders. She held on , even as the livid daeyari pinned her back against the ground, her legs locked around his hips, hands achingly tight on his antlers.

“ Release me ,” he hissed through clamped teeth.

Pine and ozone filled Fi’s lungs as the daeyari mantled over her, a cage of lean muscle, iron-taut forearms bracing her head and black claws splayed against the ground. Fangs bared above her throat. Any one of those weapons could dislodge her, if he used them.

But he didn’t.

“Take me home,” Fi countered. Never squander a chance to negotiate a better price. She had no idea if the same bartering tricks worked with immortals, but they were all she knew.

Antal’s eyes flared with fury. “You have the gall to ask another favor of me?”

Gall seemed a misleading word. Fi had been a coward since she’d abandoned Astrid, ran away from home, let her father wither in their old house without ever returning to say goodbye. But she could act tough for difficult clients.

“You can’t leave me here in the middle of nowhere,” she said. “Take me home.”

“You’ve no place giving me orders.”

“Take me home. Then we never have to see each other again.”

“I could flay you alive!”

“Do it, then!”

They both fell silent. Antal stared at her, eyes wide with depthless black, back to his unnatural stillness. Daeyari were supposed to be sly. Vicious. Shadows who could rip a mortal throat out before their prey had time to gasp. Antal could kill her in a single snap of teeth.

But Fi had helped him escape Verne. He had no one else on his side.

A bluff ? This, she could work with.

“That’s what I thought.” Fi fought the quiver in her voice, trying to bluff past her own racing heart. “Take me home.”

Antal gritted his canines. “Release me. And I’ll consider it.”

“Home first.”

His head tilted to contemplate her hands locked around his antlers. Next, the compromising position of her legs around his waist. “You can’t be serious.”

“Try me.”

Each word came with greater confidence. Fi didn’t let herself think of this as a game between prey and predator. A contest of stubbornness, she stood better chance at.

Antal let out half a growl, half a beleaguered mutter of, “ Veshri’s fucking teeth …”

He stood.

A cumbersome prospect, with Fi wrapped around his front like a burr.

She stiffened when he braced an arm around her back—startled at how easily he lifted her.

His only sway came from her grip on his antlers, tipping his head to an awkward angle.

As a show of good faith, she tucked her hands around the back of his neck.

Fi repressed a shudder, pressed so close to a flesh-eating beast.

Antal’s exhale brushed her cheek, eyes smoldering crimson beneath dark lashes. She tried not to think of the fangs behind his scowl. Her stomach squirmed at the heat off his chest, the firm wrap of his arm around her waist, steadying her against him.

A predator, made to hunt hares like her. Only civil to get what he wanted.

“I need directions,” he said.

Fi mulled the words, alert for another diversion. “What do you mean?”

“I can’t just appear wherever I wish. I can only teleport to places I’ve been before, or where I can see.”

There came a small reassurance amidst this trainwreck: the knowledge that daeyari had some limits to their abilities.

“Two miles northeast of Nyskya,” she said. “On the ridgeline. There’s a cabin in a clearing below the summit.”

He nodded. She held her breath.

The world snapped black then back again, leaving Fi colder and dizzier with each teleport.

Mortal flesh wasn’t made for this kind of transit, but her misery eased at a welcome sight: a familiar snowy ridge, the village of Nyskya glowing like gold dust on the valley below.

Fi tipped her chin to a clearing in the firs.

“Down there,” she said.

One more time. The quick jumps passed easier, yet Fi’s stomach rioted as they lurched to a halt. They emerged in a clearing, quiet in the moonlight.

At the sight of her cottage, she toppled off Antal, eager for the crunch of familiar snow beneath her boots, the shelter of familiar conifers. Three days away from home, yet Fi might as well have stress-aged a decade.

Within the dark trunks, a shadow shifted, horse-shaped.

Fi made a pathetic, high-pitched sound.

She ran to Aisinay as the horse trotted forward, finned ears perked and a snort in greeting. Fi hugged her scaled neck. Aisinay nibbled her shoulder.

“You beautiful girl! I’m so sorry I left you.” Fortunate, that Fi had left Aisinay safe on a Shard while the building exploded. And that Void horses were as good at navigating Curtains as Fi was. When she didn’t return, Aisinay must have wandered home for a more comfortable wait.

The horse snorted, ears flat as she pulled away and pranced back into the trees.

Reluctantly, Fi faced the source of her agitation.

Antal stood like a wraith, clothes and antlers pitch-dark in the meager moonlight. His red eyes held Fi like a hand around her throat.

“Thank you,” she said, backing toward her cottage. “This has been the opposite of fun in every way. I say we call it even.”

A growl rumbled his chest as he stepped toward her. Sleek movements. Arms tensing as he flexed his claws. “Our business isn’t finished.”

Fi was on her porch. Hand on the door. “Well, that’s strange. Because I think our business is absolutely finished.”

“Fionamara—”

She dove inside and slammed the door on his face.

Fuck. What good would that do, against a teleporting immortal?

Back braced against the wall, Fi surveyed the dark interior of the cottage, cataloging weapons. A couple of energy capsules sat on her bedside table. Some knives in the kitchen. Nothing suited for heavy combat, much less against a daeyari.

She’d have to improvise. Fi snatched an energy capsule then waited for Antal to appear.

Nothing happened.

No red eyes by her bathtub. No footsteps on her porch. Fi glanced out a window, but spied no sight of her unwanted visitor.

Nothing happened, as she backed away from the door.

Nothing, as she circled her dining table, within reach of a kitchen knife.

A moan of wind against her shingles made Fi jump clear off the floor, slumping against her counter and hand pressed to her racing heart as she hissed an emphatic, “Shit, shit, shit… ”

This was going to be a long night, wasn’t it?