“Are you lying to me?” the daeyari asked.
His attendant spoke as if in a trance. Even then, the answer quivered.
“Yes.”
The daeyari tensed, subtle, but compared to his previous stoicism, he might as well have recoiled. “Whotold you to lie to me?”
Before she could answer, Erik slipped a hand into his robes. He hadn’t said a word since Fi regained her tongue, had drifted so wraithlike at the edge of the patio that she could have forgotten he was there.
The daeyari didn’t.
Static pricked Fi’s tongue again. Erik stabbed a silver energy dagger at the daeyari’s heart—slicing air, when the creature vanished again.
Overhead, a bough creaked.
Fi looked up, and there was the moment of terror from everyfolktale, every children’s rhyme: a daeyari crouched upon a branch, tail swaying, red eyes a smolder in the dark as he glared upon the witless humans who’d come to his shrine—upon the fool who’d fight a creature centuries old, its teeth sharpened on sinew and bone.
There weren’t many folktales about fighting daeyari. None where the human won.
“Erik…” Milana breathed in horror.
The daeyari leapt, hitting the ground with effortless poise. Erik swiped with his dagger, but the immortal struck faster. For as long as humans remembered, they could draw on the energy in their bodies, but their early forms were raw. Crude. Then daeyari, as part of their deal, taught mortals more refined Shaping, energy conduits and more stable external forms. He Shaped an elegant shield of red energy along his forearm, deflecting Erik’s blade. His claws curled fiercer than before, sheaths of crimson sharpening the points.
He grabbed Erik by the throat, severing arteries with a single slash. The human fell in a spray of blood, gurgling as he clutched the rent flesh of his neck.
Fi watched the body fall limp. Watched blood pool across the stones.
She couldn’t get to her feet fast enough. The vertical motion punched her with dizziness, limbs heavy, but this would be her only chance. Milana said not to run, but Fi wasn’t the one who’d betrayed an immortal. The daeyari faced away from her, blood slick on his fingers, focus elsewhere. Void spare her from that focus a moment longer.
He grabbed Milana. She shrieked as claws pierced her robe, digging into her shoulders. Though guilt pitted Fi’s stomach, she needed the noise, masking her footsteps as she stumbled off the patio and into the forest.
“Please!” Milana’s voice cracked. “I’ve been a loyal servant!”
“Then you should knowbetter,” the daeyari snarled back. “Tell me the truth.”
Fi didn’t look back. Her steps didn’t falter, even as the screeches began, a spine-numbing echo through silent trees. On the other hand, hard to muster sympathy for a woman who’d betrayed her and blew up a capitol building full of innocent people. Any hesitation, and Fi would be the next one screaming.
The odds stacked against her. No weapons. No energy capsules. Her legs were putty as she fled the shrine down frozen slopes. Her head spun with lingering tendrils of twilight sorel.
A Curtain. Fi only needed one Curtain. She harbored no hope of outrunning a daeyari, much less in his home terrain, muchmuchless considering the blatant trail her boots dragged through the snow. She could only hope the creature’s preoccupation with Milana bought her enough time to escape. Through tea-rattled thoughts, she wracked her memory for Curtains on the outskirts of Thomaskweld.
A green aurora swirled overhead. The energy of lost souls, those too restless to find the afterlife, left to drift in the Void. Tonight, Fi heard them calling in the dull pop of each wave, a warning of what end awaited if the daeyari caught her.
Ten years since Verne’s shrine, and still, all she could do was run.
Fi skidded down a ravine draped in snow-heavy firs. Caught her boot on a fallen trunk. Cursed the Void and the daeyari and everything in between as she scraped her hands stumbling through a patch of thorny bracken. At the base of the slope, a creek cut through the forest, babbling pools crusted with ice.
Upon the bank, a Curtain shifted beneath starlight. Fi sobbed at the sight and sprinted toward it. She pulled energyfrom feeble arm muscles, only needing a tiny current to slice the Curtain open.
Nothing came. Only numbness, stubborn in her bones.
“Fuck me. This isnot the time!”
Fi swiped her hand through the Curtain. The ethereal chill washed her skin, but reality didn’t part. Her internal energy faltered, blocked by twilight sorel like detritus in a stream. She gritted her teeth and dug deep,deepinto the muscles of her chest, her abdomen, grasping for any flare of heat. There was no time. Every second of delay meant teeth closer to her neck.
At last, she Shaped a feeble current of silver at her fingers. Little better than when she was a child, flailing her arms through Curtains for weeks before she finally learned to touch them. A small pulse was enough. Fi split the Curtain and staggered through.
A Shard lay on the other side, a dust of snow upon rocky ground, a mirrored crimson aurora twisting across the black of the Void. Fi limped toward the nearest exit Curtain she could see, eager to be far away, drugs and energy exhaustion pulling her toward the ground.
