Not a hint of that broke her facade.
“Do you often need partners to tell you when they’re coming?” she asked, aloof.
Antal’s grin curved wicked. “How unkind of you, Fionamara. If I’d wasted over two centuries without learning how to satisfy a lover, I’d have to throw myself into the Void.”
“Bragging, now? How unbecoming.”
“You’re right. I prefer demonstration.”
Fi hardened. “You promised, Antlers. One time.”
“I agreed you’d only let me fuck you once. Not that I wouldn’t talk about it. You ought to be clearer in your terms, mortal.”
Three days of suffering this. Three days of doing everything in her power not to stare at his stupid mouth, at his wretchedly tight pants, at that treacherous spot where he’d shoved her against the wall and… why did Fi already feel like she was losing?
“I think you’re enjoying yourself too much,” she said.
“Tell me to stop, then.”
Fi fell quiet.
Definitely losing. Antal hummed in her silence, and it was the most smugly insufferable sound she’d ever endured.
She shoved the binoculars at him. “We have a job to do. Take a look.”
He smirked at her deflection. Pride told Fi she ought to shut him down. A slicker part of her treacherous heart liked the game too much to call quits. Like holding a match, watching how close the flame could burn before searing her fingers.
Antal crouched beside her, too close, the heat off his skin brushing Fi’s cheeks. A familiar taste of ozone laced her tongue. As he lifted the binoculars to view the approaching train, shedidtrynot to stare, but the bare muscles of his forearms were right there. Hard not to imagine those hands pinning her down. The twist of his tongue against her mouth.
One time.Fi couldn’t break this easily, or she’d slip headlong into the abyss. And with a creature like this? She had no idea what lay on the other side.
“We’ve got time before the train hits the first Curtain,” Antal observed.
“So we wait,” Fi agreed.
They settled upon the ridge, watching their target approach. Antal seemed half attentive, his gaze drawn to the abyss of Void overhead. He breathed deeper here than on the Plane, as if scenting something on the cold, empty air that she couldn’t.
Since she’d learned to cross Curtains, since her earliest ventures off the Planes where her species evolved, Fi felt that undeniable pull from the Void. Impossible, to explain the feeling to other humans. Like that stomach-scooping allure of staring off a cliff, imagining the jump, how the fall would feel.
Antal looked upon the swath of black with the fondness of home.
“What was it like,” she asked, “coming back from the Void?”
He tilted his head at her.
“That’s where daeyari come from, isn’t it?” Fi said. “The stories say your mortal forms died, then your energy returned from the Void.”
Antal indulged her a chuckle. “That’s how thefirstdaeyari became immortal. When Veshri died, his energy refused to cross to the Afterplane. He wove a new body from the ether of the Void, returning to walk the physical Planes, taught other daeyari to do the same. But that was millennia ago. Since then, we propagate the same as any other species. I was born. Like you.”
“You were born”—Fi swept a hand over him—“likethis?”
“Our eyes changed when we became immortal, red irises and black sclera, the most noticeable relics of the Void. Our skin, colorless, from the Void ether. But the antlers, the claws, we had before, a body built as Veshri remembered himself. Now, all immortal daeyari are born with these traits.”
“So you get immortality, and you didn’t even have to die for it?” She huffed. “Unfair.”
“Perhaps. Though, our subsequent deaths prove more… problematic.”
Fi tried to picture a squirming baby Antal, claws scratching furniture and head crowned in nubby antlers.
