Page 59 of Voidwalker (Beasts of the Void #1)

Better than the rafters

Fi woke to sweet ozone in her nose. Coating her skin.

She shifted, groggy muscles reaching for a pleased stretch.

Her naked body was draped in pre-dawn light, a mess of fur blankets, and something else, a warm weight she wasn’t used to.

Antal lay atop her like a panther possessive of his quarry: his arm and head pillowed on her chest, leg wrapping her waist, tail curled around one ankle.

The Plane’s fiercest predator looked surprisingly docile as he slept, his breaths deep, claws light against Fi’s side. And how had she never pieced it together? He slept on his stomach to avoid bumping his antlers. The revelation made her chuckle.

At her stirring, the daeyari woke. A sigh rumbled through him as he rolled the muscles of his shoulders. His head tilted, hooking her with one eye of drowsy, half-lidded crimson.

“I thought you preferred the rafters?” Fi said.

His gaze narrowed, a lazy drift across her dawn-lit face, swirls of bed-mussed hair, the swell of her breasts beneath him.

“This is acceptable,” he mumbled.

As temperamental as a house cat. Fi tried to move, but claws tightened on her waist, holding her to the bed. He shifted against her, brushing his nose along her neck. Heat kindled up her thighs. Not sharp like the night before, but deep, lulling.

“Stay,” he entreated, the word warm and heavy with sleep.

“Can’t say you struck me as the cuddly type,” she teased.

“Small moments,” he muttered back.

He’d used the same phrase when they’d danced together, that simple moment she’d thought would be a passing triviality to an immortal.

Small moments to differentiate one day from the last, one century from the last. Fi wasn’t so ageless, but it had been a long time since she’d woken up alongside anyone.

Longer still, someone she wanted to linger with in the morning.

She settled against him, drawing in deep breaths of warmth and ozone.

“This is an elaborate plan of yours, daeyari. All this effort of getting on my good side, just so you can eat me in the end?”

Antal chuckled, a rumble through her heart. “A long game. I might have to keep it going a little longer, if you don’t mind.” He traced a claw along her collarbone, voice dipping low. “You were brave last night.”

“You were holding back.”

“Human bodies are more fragile than daeyari.”

His hand brushed the dip of her waist, a swirl around her hip. At the rise, teeth marks showed against pale skin, blushed red imprints and purpled bruising, tender to the touch. The pain had been sharp when he’d bitten her. Fi loved the shock of it, the jolt of adrenaline.

“Just as hard next time,” she said.

Antal’s brow tipped up. “Next time?”

“If you remember how to ask nicely.”

His smirk could spear her through the lungs. She ought to feel vulnerable, laying naked against him, all her soft parts exposed. But there was soft to him, too. The soft hollows of his throat beneath her fingers. The soft rise and fall of his abdomen with each breath.

Fi trailed her fingers along his jaw, perfectly smooth, no hint of stubble.

“You really don’t have any hair on your body? Not even…” Fi glanced down.

Antal’s gaze followed hers. Then, a laugh. “Neither do you .”

Fi pressed her thighs together. “Sure. But that’s a war between me and my energy wax strips. Yours is natural, isn’t it?”

She studied his other features with the benefit of this new proximity: the blush of his mouth, the tapered ears, the rim of black sclera gazing back at her like an abyss to slip into.

As he leaned into her touch with a contented sound in his throat, she slid her hand over the shaved side of his head, through the thicker blue-black hair on top, landing on the roots of his antlers.

The designs adorning them were works of art—lines so thin, so precise, they must be energy carved. Though the antlers glinted lacquer black, the grooves were painted in contrast, a gradient from midnight blue to aurora green.

“What do they mean?” Fi asked.

Antal’s gaze fell bemused upon her bold hands. “The marks of my life. Added each century.”

Fi ran her finger over the ridges. Two wider bands divided the antlers into sections, two centuries fully filled, the third ongoing. At the base, nestled against the ink of his hair, carvings of flowers bloomed with tight swirls of petals.

“Midnight dahlia,” Antal said. “The flowers have grown on my family’s lands for five millennia. Petals crisp as ice. Deep blue as a moonless night.”

Surprisingly poetic, for a daeyari. Fi shifted her thumb to the next designs, a set of sigils she didn’t recognize.

“The Planes I visited during my travel years,” Antal said. “During the end of their first century, any self-respecting daeyari must travel, experience life among the shattered worlds.”

His haughty tone made Fi suspect the words weren’t his.

“Not a fan of far-off horizons?” she teased.

“A glorified field trip. All Planes within daeyari control. Not far enough abroad to risk derived daeyari or other immortals.”

Fi stilled. “There are… other immortals?”

“There are many dangers across the far Planes, Fionamara.”

A world so much larger than her. Too large.

Though a Voidwalker would have no trouble venturing beyond the Season-Locked Planes, the vast unknown of Shards and Planes beyond had always daunted Fi.

Give her an adventure on a snowbound rail line, an Autumn-kissed glade.

She looked forward to the quiet comfort of returning home.

Antal’s second section of carvings began with teal lines like waves, paired with… were those lines of energy conduits?

“A short time at an academy by the sea. I had aptitude as an engineer, I was told.”

“An engineer ?” Fi jabbed his chest, giggling as he dug his leg tighter around her waist in retaliation. “You’ve been holding out on me, Antlers.”

“It wasn’t much,” he said. “Basic conduit design. Energy theory.”

“That’s how you’ve known how to repair the conduits in town? How you fixed my gramophone?”

“Conduits are simple circuitry. Gramophones, even more so.” His grin wavered. “I… haven’t worked on anything more complicated than that for a while.”

“Why not?”

“My father insisted on loftier aspirations.”

Well, look at that, another daeyari to add to Fi’s slap-worthy list. Not a new development, considering what little Antal had mentioned of his parents. He tapped a claw to the next design: a constellation of stars.

“The Daey Celva. The… Dusk Council ,” he said, translating the name to seasonspeak for the first time.

Fi logged her growing list of words. “Daey means dusk ? So daeyari, are…?”

“People of dusk,” Antal said.

How fitting.

“The Daey Celva is the governing body of the Twilit Plane,” he went on. “The center of daeyari administration across the worlds. My family helped found it. My father has served for over six centuries. He set me on an apprenticeship. Until…”

The image was hard to picture. Antal, the brooding raccoon who’d haunted Fi’s rafters, apprenticed to the governing council of his species? He sounded equally dismal about the prospect. As for what ended that career, Fi could guess.

Upon his antlers, the latter half of his second century had no carvings. Utterly blank. Fi touched the smooth, Void-like space, struck by the emptiness. The grief.

“This is for the friend you lost?”

Antal’s arm tightened on her waist. “Yes.”

Half a century. Longer than Fi had been alive, vanished in one chunk of blank antler.

“A long time to grieve,” she said.

“My father didn’t want me to forget.”

The pit in Fi’s stomach deepened. The same father who’d slaughtered Antal’s friend in front of him, no better than an animal.

“Is it such a bad thing?” she asked. “For a daeyari to care for a human?”

“I’m my parents’ only child. All their expectations laid on my back.” Antal’s scowl showed fangs. “I’ve long been a disappointment.”

A disappointment? May the Void stop Fi from strangling his ungrateful parents if she ever met them.

Not a wise proposal. They’d killed their son’s friend, sent Antal to this Plane as punishment.

Beyond the blank patch on his antlers, the first mark into his third century was a carving of Winter Plane conifers and aurora. His story up to now.

Antal could have kept this from her. Instead, he offered honesty.

Vulnerability. The night before had been intimate, yet this was something else, a glimpse behind the icy mask.

On the other side was an entire person .

Not a creature of folktales or a ruler upon a throne, but a man.

One who could have been an engineer, who’d suffered loss and betrayal yet still held his ground here, working toward a better future.

Fi didn’t know what to say.

That was a lie. She knew words that would be kind, supportive. She didn’t know if those were the right words, whether they’d push a step too far.

“I don’t suppose your parents would approve of how you plan to rule your territory?”

He laughed, humorless. “No.”

“Or of me?”

Fi meant it as a tease. Antal refused to look at her, tail twitching against her ankle.

“One time, maybe,” he said. “Not… this.”

He didn’t say what this referred to. Fi could only infer: the way he’d purred against her last night, waking up tangled in her bed.

She wanted to live in blissful simplicity a little longer, concerned only with how her heart raced when Antal’s claw swirled her hip, not the deeper question of what this meant.

The plan had always been to set things right. Antal back in Thomaskweld. Fi here with Boden. A simple plan, growing blurrier. The line between them, somewhere buried in snow.

His claw circled her stomach, leaving gooseflesh in its wake. “It doesn’t matter. I stopped caring what my father thinks of me long ago.”

“Sure.” Fi traced the tattoos down her arm, focusing on her own dahlias and bellflowers so she wouldn’t have to look at him. “Except parents… you always care a little about what they think. Right?”