Page 21 of Voidwalker (Beasts of the Void #1)

As long as you’re still here

When Fi eventually collapsed into bed, she never expected to fall asleep. Alarming, how several consecutive brushes with death could exhaust a person. She woke in the morning to panic, jolting upright amidst her nest of rabbit and aurorabeast fur, scanning her home for red eyes.

A single room formed the interior, wooden panel walls and exposed rafters, no bother for divisions. Fi lived alone, and she had a strict policy of keeping intimate dalliances to hotel rooms or secluded bar corners, preserving the anonymity of her safe house.

Now, she’d broken that rule for a daeyari, of all things.

Yet she found no intruder lurking on her sofa, nor the dining table with legs of gnarled ironwood.

Nothing amiss upon her slate kitchen counter, the cabinets closed, pots of herbs tidy beneath a growing light that had lost its charge in her absence.

Her cedar bathtub sat empty. A screen stood beside it, pine panels carved into trees against a paper sky.

Fi crept across the room, bare feet padding cold wood and fur rugs, wary as she peered behind the barrier.

Nothing.

She touched a metal plate on the wall. Energy leached from her forearm into a copper conduit, turning on the glass light panels beneath the rafters.

Still nothing.

Fi hissed as her shoulder throbbed.

She wrestled out of the crimson sweater she’d donned the night before, revealing a tattoo sleeve on her right arm, a matching swath down her left hip, flowers of several dozen varieties.

The gash from Astrid’s sword clipped petals of a honeysuckle on her arm.

Cauterized, thanks to the energy blade. Still angry red with inflammation.

Her torso ached from collarbone to core, muscles fatigued from too much energy draw. An empty stomach didn’t help.

Fi Shaped energy from her healthier left bicep, accepting a muscle cramp as payment to feed the current into her injury, fuel to speed her body’s natural healing. With steady supplement, the slash could heal in a week.

Astrid did this to her. That wound would take longer to heal.

What other lows had the Arbiter sunk to in the decade they’d been separated?

Leading sacrifices to Verne’s shrine? Silencing dissent to her Lord Daeyari’s rule?

Astrid might be descended from daeyari, but she grew up alongside humans, ought to empathize with her fellow hares rather than sharpening the teeth of a lion.

If Fi had become an Arbiter, would she have done any better?

She had more immediate danger to settle, embers of fight or flight rekindling in her belly.

Fi smeared numbing twilight sorel ointment onto her arm, fighting nausea at the familiar spiced scent.

She donned her sweater and a wool coat. Stashed an energy capsule in a pocket.

Mourned her sword, lost somewhere in Thomaskweld.

Warily, Fi peeked out her door, floorboards squeaking beneath slippers.

Fresh snow lay upon the clearing, pillowy upon the boughs of the firs and the shingles of her cottage.

The purple dawn, normally calming, threatened beasts lurking in shadows.

Fi appraised the distant trill of a lark, the slick then thump of snow sliding off a burdened limb.

Nothing amiss. Void have mercy, maybe her rotten luck finally ran its course, and that wretched daeyari left during the night.

Wrapped in her coat, she stepped onto her porch.

Contrary to the horrific folktales Fi’s father told to keep his rebellious child inside the house at night, she found no red eyes among the trees waiting to devour her.

Only a suspicious mound of snow in her yard. Two black antlers poking out.

She shrieked as the shape stirred, a small avalanche uncovering pale skin and dark clothes. The daeyari had been coiled like a cat, blanketed by snowfall. He surveyed the clearing with slow blinks, eyes the smolder of old coals.

“ The fuck ,” Fi said. “Did you sleep out here?”

His slitted gaze snapped onto her. “Where else?”

A shake of antlers freed the final bits of snow, frozen crystals catching on his hair and tumbling down bare forearms. He appeared unphased.

“But why ?” Fi groaned, as much to the pitiless Planeverse as to him. He’d dragged her to a rival immortal, had their asses handed to them, barely escaped Verne’s nightmare creature with their lives. What more could he want?

Antal rose with feline grace, all svelte limbs and silent footfalls as he stalked the yard. Onto her porch. Fi backed away, but the hunter yielded no space, pushing until her back struck the wall and ozone teased her nose.

“I told you, Fionamara.” He spoke with the rumble of a storm. Flat ice in moonlight. “Our business isn’t finished. You still owe me a debt.”

Fi held excruciatingly still, wary of bolting like a startled rabbit and very distracted by fangs lurking behind parted lips.

His clean jaw tilted without compromise.

He loomed over her like a midwinter chill, the most ageless thing she’d ever faced, the depthless Void framing his eyes and hands curled with claws that could rip her throat out.

“So…” she breathed, “you let me slam a door in your face?”

He huffed, but while Fi’s breath fogged against the morning chill, his left nothing. “Would you prefer I be less gracious?”

She appraised the warning snap of his tail. Despite their harrowing escape the night before, his wounds had healed, pale skin showing through ripped cloth and crusted black blood. That blood had no copper tang. He smelled of… emptiness. A night sky in winter.

Cowering hadn’t gotten Fi anywhere. And for all this daeyari’s honed exterior, he seemed a little less imposing after watching Verne drag him across the floor.

In their standoff, Antal and Verne had bristled against each other, a contest of power as two daeyari pressed their personal space. Just as Antal pressed Fi’s now. In any Plane, any culture, no strategy gifted a greater edge than speaking the local dialect.

So Fi forced her chin up. She pushed closer , the space between them dwindling to inches, his ice and ozone scent heady on every inhale.

The daeyari yielded no ground, only a furrow across his brow.

“Graciously,” she said, “you look like shit.”

He growled so deep, Fi assumed the next five seconds would involve her heart ripped from her chest. Claws, teeth—either tool would suit the task.

Instead, he turned away, tail nearly lashing her face as he stepped off the porch.

Fi spent a moment remembering how to breathe. Another, hissing several curses at the Void and the fickle immortals it spawned. Once her thoughts achieved a semblance of collection, she lurched forward, eyeing the daeyari as he crossed the clearing toward the river.

Aisinay waded in the current, silver scales shimmering as she snapped at trout for breakfast. The Void horse perked her ears, greeting the immortal with an intrigued snort. Useless guard horse hadn’t even warned Fi about their lingering visitor. Antal acknowledged the animal with a wary glance.

Fi’s mouth dropped open when he stepped, unflinching, into the water.

Wider still, as he gripped his tattered shirt, yanking it off his shoulders with a wince, fabric unsticking from skin.

The Season-Locked Planes had endless stories of these creatures: how they once stalked humans from shadowed treetops, how easily energy-laced claws sliced mortal arteries.

Nothing that made daeyari seem so… tangible as the sight before her: his scowling mouth, the flush of cold on his cheeks.

He undressed to the waist, his shoulders and back all stark lines of lethal muscle, arms taut, a lean form built to pursue and carve.

High-waisted trousers framed narrow hips.

A belt of fabric buttoned over the root of his tail, long and swaying in the current.

Antal plunged beneath the water then rose with a sigh, nimble fingers sweeping over the shaved sides of his head, combing between antlers to dislodge blood from his longer hair.

Against all better judgment, Fi drifted closer, arms folded in her coat, gaping like a toad.

“Isn’t that… cold ?” she asked. In this Plane’s perpetual winter, a single toe in that creek would leave her screaming.

The daeyari cut her a look dry enough to crack bone. Scalding as boiled oil.

“Yes,” he said. “It is.”

He dragged his shirt through the water then held it up, scowling at the ruined fabric. Clearly, immortal flesh was woven as differently as the stories said, to not succumb to hypothermia. But clearly, he still noticed the cold, if his grumbling was any indicator.

Fi bit her Void-damned tongue. She couldn’t. She shouldn’t .

“Come inside,” she blurted.

The daeyari cast her a barbed look. “What?”

“Come inside. I have a bath. As long as you’re still here… you might as well use it.”

His tail flicked like a panther appraising a trap—or calculating how fast his prey could flee. Fi hoped for the former as the daeyari climbed out of the creek, frigid water dripping down his bare torso, ice-drenched trousers molded to his thighs.

This was a stupid idea. A reckless idea. Fi’s thoughts blared chastisement as the daeyari trailed her, wary, back to her cottage. She held the door open as he stalked across the porch.

He paused on the threshold, scowling at every detail from floor to rafters—at Fi, keeping her distance, as she would for any feral animal that stumbled through her door. He padded inside on the balls of his feet, that inhuman rise to his ankle, soundless as a cat.

Maybe she could still salvage this. Maybe a show of hospitality would urge the beast on his way—since ignoring him hadn’t worked.

Fi touched the heater beside the tub, Shaping energy out of the capsule in her pocket instead of tired muscle, warming the water cistern until it came out of the tap steaming.

She guessed the pomegranate bubble bath on the shelf would push her luck.