Page 74 of Voidwalker (Beasts of the Void #1)

Bait and switch with an immortal beast

Fi woke before dawn. Starlight and aurora filled the window of her borrowed room as she lay on her side, knees pulled to her chest, dreading the cold that waited beyond this bed.

Reassured, though, by warmth at her back.

Antal curled around her like a shield. His tail wound her calf, a knee anchored between her thighs, an arm draping her ribs. He was awake, too. She felt it in the subtle press of his hand against her chest each time she stirred. In the uneven tempo of breath against her neck.

“Everyone comes back today,” she whispered to the dark.

Antal clutched her tighter against him.

Now came the toil of rising, of untangling his arm from around her waist. Scratchy sheets aside, she wished they could stay.

She wished she had a hot bath, a chocolate pastry waiting on her kitchen counter, and nothing to do all day except pester Boden and his aurorabeasts.

She wished her coat didn’t smell of wood smoke.

But Fi had a job to do. And what was step one of any successful job? Looking fierce as shit. She forced herself tall as she tied back her hair, stripped out of sleeping clothes.

Antal’s arm wrapped around her bare waist, drawing her against his chest… though, not for the reason she assumed.

He handed her the hilt of her energy sword. Fi brightened at the unexpected gift. He must have retrieved it from Nyskya while she was recovering.

“You need to stop losing this,” he said.

“Do I?” Fi taunted. “But then you’d have to come up with a real gift for— What is that? ”

She gasped at his second offering: a folded suit of slate gray silviamesh.

“Not as tailored as your last piece,” he said, quiet. “But no rips in the stomach. I’m sure you’ll look just as vicious in it.”

He laid the silken armor in her hands, cool material drinking her heat. Fi had been moping for three days, and he’d been up to this? Gifts to help her fight. To remind her she could be strong.

She shoved Antal against the wall and kissed him. Hard .

Fi pressed herself to every soft and rigid piece of him, bare chest to bare chest, memorizing the curves of his mouth against hers.

She hoped her desperation wasn’t too obvious, this gnawing in her heart that anything could go wrong today.

The bruising reply of his lips said her worry wasn’t alone.

Antal pulled her against him, claws dimpling the skin of her hips nearly firm enough to carve.

Then, a slower drag of fangs across her lip, relishing the shared breath. Antal nuzzled his nose to her cheek. Fi looped her arms around his waist, holding him for just a moment longer.

“I’m glad you’re here with us,” she breathed into the curve of his neck.

He hugged her tighter. “Everyone comes back today,” he murmured back.

Fi would hold him to that promise.

Outside, all was silent. Wind brushed the tops of the shiverpines. An owl hooted in the pre-dawn. Aisinay flicked her ears not at the forest sounds, but the hum of the aurora, green reflected in her blind eyes. Fi stroked the horse’s scaled neck.

Then came a crunch of boots on snow. Kashvi arrived with crossbow in hand, followed by the rest of Boden’s advisory council.

Mal, the general storekeeper, his crossbow comically small in burly arms. Yvette the smith, their pale complexion turned paler since Boden threw himself at a Beast’s claws to save them, a cut still angry red on their cheek.

Not as big a force as they’d hoped for, but unmatched in motivation.

No greeting passed between them. They knew the plan. They knew they only had one shot at this, to take back their home and avenge Boden’s memory.

Fi and Antal led the way, guiding the others through a Curtain.

The group emerged on a snowy ridge, the first light of dawn touching the mountains. Above the shiverpines, the minarets of Verne’s chateau loomed like black teeth in the distance.

They’d arrived far enough away that the resident daeyari wouldn’t smell them. She wouldn’t taste the static of Antal flitting through treetops, scouting the terrain.

Astrid was off the board.

Which made Verne’s derived Beast the next target, attacking the queen only once her pawns were toppled. Antal had caught the creature’s scent here, distant from Verne’s abode, like a dog chained in the yard. Twisted, everything Verne touched.

Fi kept a hand on Aisinay’s side, steadying herself against memories of forest shrines and claws at her neck. This time would be different. This time she came as a hunter, not a hare.

At Antal’s signal that all was clear, they set off walking through the trees.

He kept to the higher vantage point of the canopy, a shadow amidst dark branches, an occasional flash of crimson eyes. Below, the human troupe made slower progress, hiking against deep snow in grim silence, their labored breaths the only break in the morning quiet.

Fi dug a couple of daeyari energy capsules from her pocket, more gifts from Antal, offering them to her fellow rebels. Yvette and Mal considered, but shook their heads.

Only Kashvi grabbed a capsule, cradling the orb of glowing red in her palm.

“How are you handling the daeyari energy?” Fi asked.

“Burns like shit if you aren’t careful,” Kashvi said dryly. “But at a lower dose… it’s not so bad. Hurts less than Shaping my own energy, even. Because it’s a different kind of current?”

Fi had never considered: that silver sickness was a mortal body’s adverse reaction to its own energy, that non-mortal energy might elicit a milder response.

“Maybe that’s what you should ask the daeyari for,” Mal teased. “Once this is all settled. More of those fancy capsules.”

Kashvi huffed. “Let the bastard fill his first promises, then we’ll see what else he’s good for.”

That was, possibly, the least like a death threat Kashvi had ever spoken about Antal. A true moment of camaraderie, as they marched toward possible doom.

They reached the foot of a cliff. Halfway up the snow-crusted face, dark rock opened into a cavern. The edges were chipped, scarred by claws. When Antal dropped down beside her, Fi cut him a dry look.

“What is it with you Void-damned daeyari and heights?” she hissed.

Antal appraised the cliff with a tail flick. “Instinct. We used to hunt from the trees.”

“Now your prey come on their knees.” Kashvi joined them, a squint on the cavern above. Then, back the way they’d come. “You saw that clearing we passed? With the hemlocks?”

Fi nodded.

“We’ll set up there. Give us half an hour.”

Kashvi, Yvette, and Mal slipped into the forest like phantoms. Fi and Antal crouched in a copse of firs to wait, hidden by dark needles pillowed in snow. She shivered. Antal wrapped an arm around her, a warm chest to lean into.

Aisinay stood with them, alert like a prey animal, ears perked toward the cavern overhead. Her soft snort spoke of perplexity, her nibble at Fi’s coat asking what in all the Shattered Planes they were doing waiting outside the lair of a Beast.

The Beast who took Boden from her.

“The derived daeyari,” Fi whispered, “do they know what they were?”

Antal’s tail swayed against her leg. “It varies. Reincarnation degrades cognition at different rates, depending on how well daeyari can maintain their energy within the Void before re-materializing. But in that Beast’s state, it likely remembers little of what it once was.”

Perhaps slaying the creature would be a mercy. Fi’s breath came out as a shudder of mist.

“Are you all right?” Antal asked.

Of course not. They could all die today, more bones for Verne to feast upon.

“In all my life,” she said, “this is the first time I’ve come for a daeyari of my own will.”

The silence beside her was so pointedly thick, she could taste it. Antal scrunched his mouth.

“To a daeyari,” he said.

“What?”

“The first time you’ve come to a daeyari. You’ve come for one. Several times.”

Fi swatted him. “This is a life-or-death situation, Antlers.”

“A shame to waste it dwelling on the death part.”

His grin was insufferable. Delicious. Despite Fi’s best effort to keep a stern face, she shared a laugh, quiet as snow off a pine bough, pruning the dread from her joints.

Half an hour passed. Time to move.

She climbed onto Aisinay. Antal mounted behind her, his chest a steadying presence at her back, an arm wrapped around her waist. What a sight that must make, a Void immortal upon a Void horse, though Aisinay adjusted fine to the weight.

She offered a fiercer prance of protest when Fi lay a hand on her neck, urging her toward the cliff.

With swiveled ears, the horse complied, carrying them out of the trees and onto an open scarp.

Not as prey. Never again.

At the base of the cliff, Fi looked up. The cave loomed like a hungry maw—the den of a predator, an immortal Beast from the depths of the Void.

“Hey!” she shouted at the top of her lungs. “Anyone home?”

Her voice echoed off the rockface, thunderous in the silent morning.

Antal stiffened behind her—not in the fun way. She felt his arm tighten first, heard him sniff the pine-laced air. Beneath them, Aisinay fidgeted.

Then came the eyes: two motes of pupil-less red, glowing at the mouth of the cave.

That wretched survival instinct knotted Fi’s stomach as the Beast slunk to the edge, claws like knives and pale skin camouflaged against snowy rocks.

A growl rumbled over stone. The sound reverberated through Fi’s aching ribs, this creature that took her brother from her.

All their hard work in Nyskya, the lives lost, yet not a scratch remained on its healed hide.

They couldn’t let it escape a second time.

“Teleporting would have been safer,” Antal grumbled in her ear.

Safe wasn’t what they needed. “Daeyari enjoy the chase, don’t they?”

The Beast’s skeletal horse head cocked to view the intruders below, dim light pooling shadows in smoldering eye sockets. As horrific as the first time she’d seen it in Thomaskweld. Aisinay’s impatient hooves churned the snow.

Then the daeyari lunged, and everything set in motion.