A snarl closed behind her. Then the black of a teleport.
Black like the Void, she realized. Too cold and empty to be anything else.
Antal had called her not a true Voidwalker.
He would know, wouldn’t he?
17
That’s not supposed to be visible
Fi collapsed onto her back in the snow.
As she gasped, no claws closed around her throat.
She lay still, skin a swarm of ants after transport stones and teleportation in swift succession, treetops swirling in her vision. Tatters of silviamesh fluttered on her stomach. Beneath that were stinging claw marks, skin exposed to cold. A familiar cold. Not that biting, piercing kind from Tyvo Territory.
At the sight of her cottage, she half laughed, half groaned. Another narrow escape.
A wet cough jolted her back to reality.
Antal hunched on his knees, cradling his neck. Whatremainedof it. Fi’s stomach lurched as black blood slicked his fingers, gaping from a hole of stripped flesh, muscle, and a glimpse of honest-to-Voidspine. Like Tyvo had tried to take Antal’s head off with his bare teeth. He should bedead.
“Antal?” Fi hurried to his side, ozone sharp on the air, the smell of that copper-less blood.
He could have run. He could have left her behind and suffered none of this.
Before she could touch him, Antal snatched her wrist. A lashing motion, swift as a frost asp. The daeyari held her atarm’s length, fangs bared in a growl, his uninjured eye sharp like a cornered animal.
Almost as if everyone he knew had recently betrayed him.
Fi could do the same, leave him bleeding in the snow.
“Let me help,” she asked. Ordered. She couldn’t tell, her voice hoarse and lip split.
Antal searched her with some tangled expression. Was it confusion? Worry?
Fear?From a daeyari?
He collapsed against her.
Fi wrapped an arm beneath his shoulders. “Inside?”
His nod was weak.
They limped to her porch, Fi wincing at the slashes across her stomach, Antal leaning most of his weight against her. In the brief moments they’d been this close, he’d sometimes seemed cold, sometimes warm. Now, heburned. Energy hummed through his skin, warring to keep him upright, prickling static everywhere she touched.
Daeyari could bleed. They could die. Antal might still be dying.
But he’dsavedher.
She dragged him to the bathtub. They collapsed together, his back propped against the cedar, black blood spattering floorboards. He reached a trembling hand to his throat.
Fi watched in equal horror and fascination as tendrils of red energy laced Antal’s neck, thickening, then firming into muscle and sinew. Building flesh out of nothing—or whatever odd flesh immortals were made of.
Too soon, the energy faded. The wound looked less revolting, but far from healed.
“Oyzen yzri,” he rasped, voice a smidge more decipherable.
