Page 30 of Voidwalker (Beasts of the Void #1)

That’s not supposed to be visible

Fi collapsed onto her back in the snow.

As she gasped, no claws closed around her throat.

She lay still, skin a swarm of ants after transport stones and teleportation in swift succession, treetops swirling in her vision.

Tatters of silviamesh fluttered on her stomach.

Beneath that were stinging claw marks, skin exposed to cold.

A familiar cold. Not that biting, piercing kind from Tyvo Territory.

At the sight of her cottage, she half laughed, half groaned. Another narrow escape.

A wet cough jolted her back to reality.

Antal hunched on his knees, cradling his neck. What remained of it. Fi’s stomach lurched as black blood slicked his fingers, gaping from a hole of stripped flesh, muscle, and a glimpse of honest-to-Void spine . Like Tyvo had tried to take Antal’s head off with his bare teeth. He should be dead .

“Antal?” Fi hurried to his side, ozone sharp on the air, the smell of that copper-less blood.

He could have run. He could have left her behind and suffered none of this.

Before she could touch him, Antal snatched her wrist. A lashing motion, swift as a frost asp. The daeyari held her at arm’s length, fangs bared in a growl, his uninjured eye sharp like a cornered animal.

Almost as if everyone he knew had recently betrayed him.

Fi could do the same, leave him bleeding in the snow.

“Let me help,” she asked. Ordered. She couldn’t tell, her voice hoarse and lip split.

Antal searched her with some tangled expression. Was it confusion? Worry?

Fear? From a daeyari?

He collapsed against her.

Fi wrapped an arm beneath his shoulders. “Inside?”

His nod was weak.

They limped to her porch, Fi wincing at the slashes across her stomach, Antal leaning most of his weight against her.

In the brief moments they’d been this close, he’d sometimes seemed cold, sometimes warm.

Now, he burned . Energy hummed through his skin, warring to keep him upright, prickling static everywhere she touched.

Daeyari could bleed. They could die. Antal might still be dying.

But he’d saved her.

She dragged him to the bathtub. They collapsed together, his back propped against the cedar, black blood spattering floorboards. He reached a trembling hand to his throat.

Fi watched in equal horror and fascination as tendrils of red energy laced Antal’s neck, thickening, then firming into muscle and sinew. Building flesh out of nothing—or whatever odd flesh immortals were made of.

Too soon, the energy faded. The wound looked less revolting, but far from healed.

“ Oyzen yzri ,” he rasped, voice a smidge more decipherable.

Not in imminent danger of collapsing, at least. Fi groaned to her feet and pressed a current to the water heater. Opened the spigot.

Antal could have let Tyvo eat her. She already owed him her life, spared upon his altar. But sparing a life wasn’t the same as saving one, risking himself the way he did.

Keeping her barbs up proved too exhausting.

For a moment, Fi let slip her defensive bristle, kneeling with weary shoulders and weary knees at Antal’s side, fumbling to peel off the bloody remnants of his shirt.

He winced as she unstuck ruined fabric from ruined skin, his torso gouged with claw marks that only looked less severe when compared to the mess of his throat.

“Do daeyari… feel pain?” Fi asked.

“ Fuck! ” Antal spat as she pulled a strip of shirt off his shoulder. “Oyzen yzri, kasek aza—”

“All right, sorry! I’ll try not to…” She freed his other shoulder with less cursing, hands brushing his bare chest. Down his heaving ribs. Down the taut muscles of his abdomen.

Fi halted at his trousers. Her fingers hooked the fabric, settling warm against his waist.

Uncertain.

She shouldn’t be. Medical care was more pressing than propriety, but her bravado faltered for a creature with claws.

“So modest.”

Antal’s voice scraped like gravel. His cheek was flayed where Tyvo’s antler had struck, his eye a socket of Void.

“I can assure you,” Fi said. “I’m not.” Only well-warranted caution around daeyari. Their brush with death, responsible for the heat flushing her cheeks.

“Why am I not surprised?”

“Do you want me to take your pants off or not, daeyari?”

When Fi let her guard down, the back-and-forth came easier. No barbs. Fewer teeth.

She tensed when Antal touched her shoulder, not claws, but knuckles pressing her coat, the weapons on his fingers curled away.

Fi’s blood-spattered thoughts puzzled a moment before registering the non-threatening intent of the gesture.

A nudge urged her away. His remaining iris dimmed nearly black, drained of energy.

Fi gave him space to finish undressing.

With rustling fabric behind her, she inspected her slashed stomach.

Not too deep, thanks to… Fi didn’t want to think of her shredded silviamesh.

A loss to mourn later. She splayed fingers over flesh and pulled energy from the muscles of her core, teeth gritted as she cauterized.

A finer current she Shaped from trembling biceps, weaving silver-light stitches to sew the gashes closed.

She finished with numbing twilight sorel ointment and a slim energy chip held against the wound with gauze, fuel to speed the healing.

A splash sounded from the bathtub.

Then, silence.

“Antal?”

She rushed over and plunged her arms into scalding water, grabbing the daeyari’s antlers to haul him to the surface. He emerged with a wretched cough, water thrashing as his tail settled.

So much for modesty. Fi averted her gaze as Antal sank against the tub, a scowl her only protest at having to prevent an immortal from drowning himself, of all things. Her eyes did wander, though not to anything scandalous. She couldn’t look away from the cavern of his throat.

“You healed before,” Fi said, only a little frantic. “Why aren’t you healing now?”

Antal spoke between gasps. “Needs… too much energy… will… take time.”

“Are you sure? I’ve never heard a story about a daeyari injured like this.”

“Why the fuck would we let mortals tell stories about how to hurt us?”

Fi stared at him. She stared at this creature she used to understand in such vicious simplicity, opening before her like a splay of viscera. Valuable, to know her enemies could bleed, could die.

But what was she supposed to do with the knowledge of how his voice cracked when he felt pain?

Of how he’d reached for her before saving himself?

Antal pressed a palm to his ruined eye socket, trembling, breaths hissed, a creature in exquisite agony.

Red energy sizzled at his touch, the smell wretched with ozone and burnt flesh.

Every inch of him tensed. Shuddered. With a labored exhale, he hunched over the bathwater, hand slumping away from his face.

Revealing a reconstructed eye, where a gaping hole had been. Talk about a wicked party trick—suffering aside. No human flesh could regenerate like this.

He squinted, blinking as black blood caked his lashes.

Someone should clean him up. As Antal had to focus on literally putting himself together… Fi grabbed a puffy face towel, dipped it in water, then raised it to his gore-spattered shoulder.

Antal snatched her wrist a second time, pinning her arm against the tub. His growl spiked that instinctive fear in her belly.

Then, Fi was so very over it.

“Will you calm your cranky teeth? I’m trying to help!”

Antal bared his fangs. Fi didn’t budge. She had no time for this nonsense while he bled all over her house with a third of his Void-damned throat missing.

She set to work, Antal’s claws still threatening on her arm, but not stopping her. She’d met house cats less dramatic. Fi did try to be gentle as she dabbed the cloth around the rent sinew of his neck, not enjoying his wince.

Softer, she wiped blood off the tapered edge of his ear. A careful brush over his cheek, along the tense line of his jaw. He had hair only atop his head. Not a speck of stubble, more smooth planes across his chest. Fi dared not pry any lower, though damn if she wasn’t curious.

“If you’d died,” she said, “would you turn into one of those beasts?”

A red current ran up Antal’s neck, closing a section of flesh. He swallowed, the motion labored. “Not for decades. Centuries. Some take longer to return than others.”

“But they always come back… different?”

“It varies. Some derived daeyari return immediately as beasts. Some hold themselves together better, only a few features lost. But each iteration becomes more animalistic. Verne’s Beast has probably been through multiple rematerializations. A fate worse than death.”

Yet he’d risked his life by staying here in opposition to Verne. By confronting Tyvo.

By saving Fi.

He blinked again, his repaired eye half open against a crust of blood.

“Hold still,” Fi said. “Let me…”

She cupped Antal’s chin and raised the cloth to his face.

When he refrained from biting any fingers off, Fi mustered her courage, leaning closer for a feather-soft wipe of the daeyari’s eye.

Wary, at first. She didn’t know what to expect of immortal healing, whether the wound would be tender, but beneath the grime, his features seemed fully repaired.

His skin wasn’t steel, like the folktales said.

Not stone or ice. Beneath the press of Fi’s fingers, this man-eating beast was alarmingly…

soft, his eyelids pale, cheeks flushed with energy instead of blood.

The daeyari were mortal, once. Chiseled anew by the Void.

Just not as sharp as she’d expected, up close.

Antal’s fresh eye snapped open, pinning her with black sclera and a dim red iris.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked, low.

His exhale feathered her wrist. Fi scowled and focused on her work. “Tyvo would have eaten me. You stopped him.”

“He would have killed me,” Antal returned. “You stopped him.”

Fi scoffed. “You were my only way out of there. Of course I had to save you. But you . You could have left. Why didn’t you?”