Page 45 of Voidwalker (Beasts of the Void #1)

A dance with claws

Trust didn’t bloom overnight. But in the following days, Nyskya’s advisory council grew to regard Antal with less open spite—aside from Kashvi, the stubborn ice toad.

Under Savo’s direction, Fi and Antal paid nightly visits to the village’s energy conduits. Antal was, Fi had to admit, impressively good with his hands, his improvised engineering enough to get most of the system running again.

With Mal and Boden, they met in the general store after hours, strategizing supplies and shelter for Nyskya’s residents who didn’t want to fight when the time came.

With Yvette, they toured the metal smithy, taking inventory of what metal they’d need for new crossbows and sword hilts. Yvette brought villagers to meet them in small groups, those willing to fight, and who could be trusted with knowledge of Antal’s involvement.

Kashvi, they avoided. Though Fi had to listen to Boden groan daily about the tavern keeper’s complaints.

Fi started out sympathetic. By midweek, she was thoroughly over Kashvi’s stubborn spite.

Warranted spite, but the greater enemy they faced required cooperation, even if forgiveness was out of the cards.

Exhausted, Fi dragged herself through meetings with Boden and his council, grumbling an internal monologue on how this was why she’d always left politics to her brother.

Give her a Void sky and an empty horizon.

Her latest meeting—discussing vulnerabilities of upcoming metal shipments with Boden and Kashvi—ran late.

Antal, for the sake of productive conversation, didn’t attend.

When at last she trudged back to her cottage, the forest was dark, a green aurora whispering overhead.

The lights were on ahead of her.

Fi, accustomed to dark windows and a quiet sofa to sprawl on after a draining day, still found this homecoming strange. Though not unpleasant.

She entered to find Antal cross-legged on her cushions, tinkering with a disassembled crossbow.

He appeared fresh-clothed and freshly-bathed, lingering drops of water glinting on his antlers.

Still an upsetting number of buttons undone, baring a wide view of smooth chest, the clean lines of his clavicle.

Fi never seemed to adjust to that first sight of him: the predatory tilt of his head, the glint in his eyes when he looked up to greet her.

“Welcome ba—”

She groaned and collapsed onto the sofa. Handsome immortal visitors or not, Fi had every right to relax in her own home.

“I see.” Antal’s smirk teased a fang. He returned to his tinkering, giving Fi time to wrestle out of her coat and kick her boots off. Dressed down to a more comfortable sweater, she sprawled anew.

“How’s Yvette treating you?” she asked.

“They only joked about impaling me twice today. An improvement.”

“That’s nice.”

Exhausting work, but welcome progress. Fi had less kind things to say about Boden’s tight scheduling, which made her miss lunch. She ought to eat something before—

Fi sniffed, noticing the warm, nutty aroma.

She rose, following the smell to her kitchen. A mug waited on the counter, still hot.

“What’s this?”

“Coffee,” Antal said, not looking up from his work.

Fi squinted at the offering. “Is it poisoned?”

A scoff. “I have far more direct means of ending you, Fionamara.”

“Salted, then?”

“Now, that’s just rude.”

Fi sipped the drink, annoyed to find it prepared immaculately, frothed and sugared exactly how she liked. Was it her glower that drew Antal’s chuckle? Or simply his game of constantly shifting the ground beneath her?

“Thank you,” she conceded quietly. A sigh through tired lips, tired hands too used to always taking care of herself.

Antal said nothing. His grin was more treacherous than claws. And the way his neck craned over his work, the easy slope of muscled shoulders…

Enough of that . Fi selected a record and set it on her gramophone.

The song opened with a piano solo, filling the cottage with soulful keys.

She settled on her sofa. Closed her eyes.

The day’s tension fled as she tapped her fingers to the rhythm, the joining accompaniment of snare drums and bass stirring beats through her ribs.

The brass joined next, quick and deep, lifting the song to a new height.

Then, a low swish swish she didn’t recognize.

Antal’s claws stilled on his work, the metal fixture settling against his knee. His eyes went half closed. Unfocused. His tail swished her sofa, moving in time to the music.

“You shouldn’t stare at a daeyari’s tail,” Antal said, clipped. “It’s rude.”

Fi stiffened, torn between defensive and embarrassed that he’d caught her looking. “Sorry! I just thought, your tail seems to change based on what you’re feeling, and…”

Antal gave her a dry look, his tail coiled defensively around one leg.

“Oh.” Now that Fi thought of it, she wouldn’t be keen on someone reading her emotions so openly, either.

“It’s a valuable skill,” Antal said, softer. “Noticing these things. Just do it more subtly.”

“Sure,” she agreed, because he had made her a nice cup of coffee. “You… like music?”

Antal’s tail uncurled—Fi noticed from the corner of her eye, not staring. When the horn solo started, his gaze slipped soft again.

“This is Old River Infirmary,” he said. “A Spring Plane recording.”

He was spot on, the record picked up at a canal-side music house while Fi unwound after a successful barter of contraband copper. She’d seen that gramophone in his home, but never thought more of it.

“I’m surprised,” she admitted.

“That I know music?”

“That you’d bother with such small things.” Surely, music solos must seem like trivialities to an immortal from the Void beyond Planes.

Fi watched the quirk of his mouth too closely. The scrape of a fang across his lips. He reclined against her sofa, entrancing, the way his toned torso shifted beneath his shirt. Inhumane, how tightly his trousers showed the spread of his thighs.

“Some daeyari lose interest in little things,” he said, “letting time become a haze. Others seek small moments that make each day different from the last. Each year, each century different from the last.”

Here was that abyss again, a view into something so beyond her. Fi couldn’t resist teetering on the edge.

“And you?” she asked.

“Immortality seems wasted, if every day becomes the same.”

A new song started, the roll of a horn into deeper bass. Antal set his metalwork aside. Let his eyes drift languid beneath his lashes. He was so much handsomer with that softness on his brow, that careless part of his mouth.

A flutter brushed Fi’s stomach, recalling the press of his forehead against hers in the tavern yard. His breath against her cheek.

“I snuck into the Thomaskweld music hall sometimes.” Antal spoke low, not overpowering the sound. “Listened to the symphonies, the ensembles. Up in the rafters, where no one could see me.”

Fi scowled over her coffee. “In the rafters? I know those box seats are hard to get, but, surely, when you rule over an entire city…”

“Most people aren’t comfortable around daeyari, Fionamara. I’d rather stay out of sight than cause a panic.”

So blunt. So defeated. Fi scowled deeper. “You don’t have to lurk all the time. Go out into your city. Let people get used to you.”

“And how would I do that? I offer a hand, and they flinch at the claws. A smile, and all they see is fangs.”

Fi strummed her nails against her mug. Hadn’t she been the same, when they first met? Before he saved her life. Before he pledged to save her home.

“You had a human friend before,” she said. “He wasn’t afraid of you, was he?”

Something sharp flicked over Antal’s eyes. A twitch of the tail almost too quick to spot.

“No. He wasn’t.”

“And I don’t think you’re so bad,” Fi said. Dismissive, lest it go to his head.

“You’re unusual,” he returned, frustration roughing the words.

“Am I?” she pushed, just to hear him sound like that again. To snack on how it stroked her ego. “Maybe you’re right, Antlers. Maybe you’re insufferable, and I’m just starved for company.”

He narrowed his eyes at her. Fi ruffled at the weight of it.

Then, a smirk. A laugh . “Vicious woman. You can’t say anything nicely, can you?”

Maybe she could. Maybe it was the fight she enjoyed. She set her coffee aside, leaning back to match his aloof posture. Comparatively, she must look a hot mess in her day-old curls, no bra beneath her sweater.

Antal’s gaze scraped over her, a tug in his throat as he swallowed.

That look veered precariously close to hunger: whether for ripped clothes, or ripped flesh. Or some mix of the two? Fi still didn’t know exactly what game they were playing, staring at each other like this. Only that she was tired, after plotting rebellion all week.

And there came that treacherous whisper again: would it be so bad, to be devoured?

“What would you want to do?” she asked mildly, despite the pulse in her throat. “If you didn’t have to worry about people being afraid?”

Antal’s wicked grin heated her cheeks.

“Do you dance, Fionamara?”

She appraised his smug words, the swish of his tail to the music. “Do you ?”

“What a strange picture you’ve formed of my last two hundred years. Do you imagine I spent the entire time cloistered in a cave, emerging only to devour flesh and order governors?”

Well, when he put it that way. But dancing ?

“What kind of dance?”

Antal stood and perused her records. With delicate claws, he swapped a new one onto the gramophone. The room filled with another Spring Plane recording: an opening blare of horns, joined by bass and drums in an eight-count. A dancing song.

He offered his hand.