Not if she had any-fucking-thing to say about it.
Fi ripped the hilt from her belt. Cracked an energy capsule into the pommel. The blade Shaped silver, tongues of energy rippling off the edge. Lethal against mortal flesh, but immortal? Her school teachers didn’t cover fighting immortals. They never coveredregularfighting. Fi ran drills for heating tea kettles or Shaping kitchen knives ad nauseam, but she taught herself swordplay on trade wardens and black marketeers and even a few things with teeth.
Never anything with black eternity in its eyes.
But Antal—Plane’s worst negotiator—was on the ground again, and she couldn’t leave him.
Fi didn’t shout. The snap of energy must have given her away, or the crunch of snow beneath her boots. Tyvo looked up, black blood slicking his chin.
She swung.
A moment of resistance. A spark on her tongue. By the end of the arc, Fi’s sword cleaved empty air. Tyvo reappeared several feet away.
A single antler fell to the snow.
Fi and Tyvo stared at it together. He raised a slow hand, claws clacking against the severed base. The casualty rested upon the ground, black lacquer glinting, snow clumped in carvings of stars and prey fleeing through trees.
“You…” Tyvo began as a hiss. “Youfleck of dust.” Rose to a rupture. “By Veshri’s teeth and sharpened antlers,I’ll crack your marrow while you still breathe!”
Fi had wondered how Verne’s twisted Beast could be a daeyari. Yet here stood Tyvo with that same devouring blaze in his eyes, that feral swish of tail. She looked to Antal, bloody and unmoving in the snow. Too far to reach.
Static spiked her tongue.
Fi swung at nothing. Everything. She’d volunteered to come as backup, not a solo act, shouting through a wide arc of her energy sword as the daeyari reappeared. She only saw claws. Teeth. So Void-damned fast. He came at her like a winter gale, slashing for the soft flesh of her stomach.
She angled her sword to parry. Claws shrieked off silver.
Tyvo swiped for her neck. She raised to deflect.
He came for her ribs. Fi brought her sword down like a shield.
What the fuck was happening?
Fi swayed on unsteady steps, fingers strangling the hilt, yet she kept moving. Backing up. Parrying energy-coated claws. She ought to be flayed to pieces by now. She ought to be on the ground with her ribs cracked open and a daeyari ripping her heart out, like every human who’d dared raise a weapon to an immortal in the stories.
A claw glanced off her sword. The sickle tip carved across her lips. Blood red—notFi’s preferred lipstick shade.
In her flinch, Tyvo grabbed her sword. The son-of-a-bitchgrabbedthe blade in his bare hands, a shriek of red and silver as he shielded his palms with energy. A shiver ran up Fi’s arm. Her energy blade flickered against the rival current, and fighting immortal energy…
Her sword shattered with acrack.
Claws struck Fi’s abdomen. She hunched, gasping as her wool coat shredded, but her silviamesh held. At first. A deeper press of claws, of destructive daeyari energy, and the armor-like fabric popped its threads. Fi staggered back in time, taking several gouges across her skin rather than losing her bowels.
All she had left were energy capsules. Fi cracked one to detonate and Shaped another into a shield. Tyvo retreated from the blast with a snarl, his seared skin repairing itself before her eyes in a flash of red.
“Fionamara.”
Her name came to her as a rasp.
The syllables mixed with gravel, filtered over broken glass. Across the clearing, Antal dragged himself to his knees, dripping blood. Reaching for her.
Reaching.
Forher.
Fi ripped her carnelian transport stone from her pocket and cracked the fossil into its two halves. One half, she hurled toward Antal. A pulse of energy activated the second half in her palm, a heartbeat before Tyvo’s claws came for her. She lurched. Not nearly as smooth as a daeyari teleport.
Out the other side of the jump, she staggered, skin hot and prickling from dematerialization. She scooped her thrown transport stone from the snow, retrieved the severed antler—or elseno onewould believe this—then grabbed Antal’s hand.
