“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 doyou.”
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…otherimmortals?”
“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.
