Fi

“Good morning,” Fi announced in a businesslike clip. “Thank you for joining me.”

Antal blinked groggy crimson eyes with the enthusiasm of a catatonic lizard. His flummoxed expression dragged over her. Then the hall to the bedroom she’d roused him from less than five minutes ago. Then the sitting room where they now stood, the view from the cliff looking out over a snowy valley, the city of Thomaskweld draped in pre-dawn far below.

“I . . . live here,” he said.

“And now, so do I. Since you, oh wise Lord Daeyari, have entreated me to live here with you, to volunteer my peerless negotiations skills toward helping you reform your capital city and win over the hearts of your human citizens—”

Antal blinked slower. Groggier.

“—I have requirements for my services. Which brings us to today’s presentation. Here, I’ve prepared supplementary materials.” She handed him a piece of paper.

He took it. His flash of fangs was meant to intimidate—entirely undermined by the poofy bathrobe he was currently wearing, stolenwhen Fi had relocated some essentials here from her cottage in Nyskya. The most terrifying apex predator across all the infinite Planes, carved out of immortal ether from the Void itself, armed with fierce black antlers and lethal claws . . . ensconced in pink terry cloth. She needed to get him a proper robe, with accommodations that didn’t leave his tail draped like a tent. But first—

“If I’m going to live here,” Fi said, “I need a bathroom.”

Antal frowned at the paper, a diagram of proposed renovations to his home, currently just a bedroom and sitting room carved into the cliffside. Sufficient, for a spooky forest beast lurking above his populace. Severely lacking, for her human needs.

He glanced to the city below, his long tail swaying beneath the robe. “I could just—”

“No. Antal. You are not personally teleporting me to a bathroom in Thomaskweld every time I need one. This entire week has been inconvenient enough.”

“Svyelk . . .” he muttered. He frowned deeper, eyes narrowed as he held her diagram too close to his face.

“I’m going to regret asking this,” Fi said. “But to clarify: Daeyari . . . don’t need bathrooms? At all?”

“Our food combusts,” he said simply, still scowling at the design.

Fi lifted an eyebrow.

“Humans digest your food,” he said. “Incompletely. Daeyari combust our food completely, with the higher energy concentration at our cores. Did you draw this?” He rotated her diagram upside down, brow pinched in consternation.

“It’s legible.” Fi huffed. “I’m not the engineer here.”

“I wasn’t this kind of engineer. The energy conduits will be easy. But plumbing . . .” His voice lowered. “I’ll need a consultation from Thomaskweld. Not an easy ask. I have so much to do to earn my people’s trust, to prove I’m not another monster on their doorstep.”

Fi had spent a lifetime crafting herself into the fiercest snarl in any room. She’d battled ferocious immortal beasts. She’d survived the cold abyss of the Void. She was still learning how to cry when she thought of her dead brother, how to clutch this fragile grief in a way that let it breathe, without destroying her.

Yet she had no defense for the pathetic thing her heart did, when Antal used that defeated tone, his tail brushed low to the floor like a beaten puppy. This beast, afraid of his own people. Afraid of failing them and his promises to build a freer territory.

Fi was uncertain, too. She and Antal had fought together. Skirted death together. Defeated Verne and returned to reclaim Thomaskweld together. Survival was one thing, that adrenaline rush that kept her standing against the hardest odds.

It was another thing entirely, this new task of … living. Waking up every morning in Antal’s arms. Figuring out how they fit together now that the blood had dried, looking out over a city full of opportunity.

Fi’s best offering was a soft smile.

“Hey.” She looped her arm with his, a shoulder bump urging the gloom away. “I know we have a hundred things to do. We’ve got to repair all the broken energy conduits in the city. Organize an election, before Kashvi taps out as interim governor. Set up this new system for post-mortem body donations—”

Antal made a more distressed humming sound.

“So we focus on those big things first,” Fi said. “Renovations would be . . . nice. When we can find time. Until then, you can pop me over to Thomaskweld when needed. I’ll survive.”

The grogginess had cleared from Antal’s eyes. Now, he looked at her too intently, concern etched into the soft lines of his face.

Gently, he unhooked his arm and stepped to the wall she’d indicated in her schematics. He pressed a hand to the stone, red energy Shaped into molten sheaths around his claws.

With a crack, a palm-sized chunk of rock fell to the floor.

“The stone is hard here,” he observed. “Carving a new room will take time.”

Fi considered the sitting room with fresh eyes, the rough chiseled edges. A hushed, “You carved all this? On your own?”

“The Lord Daeyari before me lived farther north,” Antal said. “He made his attendants travel through the forest to reach him. I wanted to be closer to my city.”

The fiercest predator on the Planes — so soft, when he looked out over Thomaskweld, his mouth parted and eyes like warm embers. Those lethal claws — clenched at his sides, as if all he wanted was to not be hurt again.

And this pinch in Fi’s heart, that she still wasn’t sure what to do about.

“We’ll work on it together,” she announced. “You handle the carving. I’ll figure out . . . plumbing.”

* * *

The first month passed in a blur.

When Verne had tried to oust Antal from his territory, she’d flooded the markets with inferior metal, a ploy for weakened energy conduits and desperate people. As interim governor, Kashvi’s first monstrous task was sourcing new metal, inspecting every inch of Thomaskweld’s power grid for weak points, donations of heaters and energy capsules to the hardest hit districts.

Fi called in every favor and merchant contact she’d accrued in ten years of Void smuggling, to gather the resources they needed.

Antal went wherever Kashvi ordered, repairing conduits piece by piece.

After working in the city all day, Fi and Antal spent their evenings chipping away at home renovations. She found a plumber willing to draw a schematic—despite several concerned scowls at the logistics of installing pipes on a cliff. Fi contributed her own scowls, watching Antal scale said sheer, icy cliff that would have killed her ten times over, daeyari claws and teleportation making the work slightly less precarious.

The finished bathroom was small, simple, but blissfully functional.

For Fi’s next project, she pointed to the back wall of Antal’s sitting room, brandishing another paper. He appraised the diagram, tail flicking in agitation.

“A kitchen,” he muttered. “Of course. Humans do so much cooking . . .”

Fi tipped a finger beneath her daeyari’s obstinate chin. She leaned into him, a purred:

“Make me a nice counter. Then you can fuck me on it.”

A growl rumbled Antal’s chest. He fixed her with smoldering eyes, tail swaying.

“I could fuck you anywhere in here,” he said.

“But on a counter?”

Fi meant it as a tease. Antal’s tail brushed her calf, his nose pressed warm to her temple as he breathed her in—but there, in his exhale, an edge of frustration she couldn’t pick apart.

With a soft nip to her jaw, Antal broke away, then got to work carving the back wall.

* * *

Merciless Void. There were so many energy conduits to repair.

Two months into the work, they’d avoided crisis, but still had far to go to get the system back to full efficiency. The faulty metal had found its way into the central power factories, and dozens of conduits that distributed energy throughout the city. Fi didn’t understand the technology enough to help with repairs.

She guarded Antal’s back instead, never straying more than a few feet behind him.

Most humans of this city had never seen their reclusive Lord Daeyari on the streets. They’d never seen one of these beasts vulnerable, down on his knees, sleeves rolled to his elbows as he cut faulty conduits and welded new ones. The power workers kept their distance, but their hard looks kept Fi wary.

Antal noticed, too. He said nothing, accepting the ire of his citizens with head bowed and tail coiled on the floor, working through repairs as fast as Kashvi supplied the metal.

Fi tried to convince him to rest.

When he refused, she propped herself on the counter he’d carved for her, legs swinging idly, keeping Antal company as he finished the connections on an energy-capsule powered stove.

“Cinnamon is the most versatile,” Fi explained. “Nutmeg, you have to be more careful. And don’t get me started on cloves, just a pinch, or it ruins the whole thing. But you put them all together and it’s magic.”

Antal, whose entire diet consisted of raw flesh and the occasional black coffee, and who’d apparently never had to dissect the nuances of cooking, baking, or seasoning in his entire immortal life, listened with a silence that was becoming uncomfortable.

Fi didn’t like his persistent frown. It reminded her of when they’d first met, that wariness of two circling beasts.

“Antal,” she said softly. “You can sleep. You don’t have to finish this tonight.”

“It’s not a problem, Fionamara. It’s nearly done.” He stayed focused on his work, tail brushed too low to the floor.

* * *

Fi woke the next morning, entirely too early.

She groaned and burrowed deeper into Antal’s bed, warring against consciousness within a cocoon of warm mink and fox fur. After thorough testing, she could now grudgingly confirm: this was, in fact, a very nice bed. Maybe even better than her bed. Mostly because it smelled like him, a tease of ozone and pine on her skin, a safe nest to hide away from the world. Fi stretched an arm beneath the covers, reaching for Antal.

The bed was empty.

She sat up with the slow, muddied half-awareness of a midday owl, blinking far too many times in her attempt to process the vacant space beside her. Was that what had woken her up?

Wait. No.

She probably woke up because her lungs were burning.

Fi hunched into a hacking cough. When she inhaled, the burning only got worse. She coughed deep enough to scrape her throat raw, a sting on the air making her eyes water.

Holy fuck.

Smoke.

Why was the room full of smoke?

Alarm jolted her fully awake— the thready survival instinct of any flammable creature confronted with fire, and an enclosed space, and . . . oh shit, shit, shit. Still coughing, Fi clawed out of bed, stumbling down the hall in flannel pajamas, barely able to breathe through the smoke-thick corridor. In a house carved of stone? What could possibly be burning—

Fi froze in the doorway to the sitting room.

It took her a stupefied moment, to process it all. The acrid haze filling the room. The new energy stove, humming almost cheerfully as it worked. Antal, staring at a skillet with something blackened inside.

He faced her with wide eyes, as panicked as a child caught misbehaving.

“What are you doing?” Fi rasped around another cough.

Antal’s tail fell to a nervous swish. “I thought . . . I could cook something for you. But . . .” He looked dismally to the cremated remains—which were still smoking.

Fi shoved past him, holding her breath as she smacked the stove off then grabbed for the skillet. The far wall of the sitting room was an open ledge, bordered in energy conduits to keep the heat in. She thrust the skillet outside, into the cold, the stiff wind off the cliff enough to smother the smoke. Even with a lungful of fresh air, Fi hacked against her burning lungs.

Timid claws clacked the floor, as a predator joined her at the ledge, his tail swaying low by his ankles.

“I should have tried something simpler,” Antal said. “When you showed me pancakes, they didn’t look hard.”

“These were pancakes?” Fi stared, horrified, at the blackened disks in the skillet.

“I was careful with the cinnamon, like you said. But I wasn’t sure, how to tell when they were finished—”

“Are you not aware of the smoke?”

Antal—currently not coughing his lungs out—frowned at her. “Daeyari lungs are a relic of our mortal bodies. They’re not as sensitive to . . .” His eyes widened as Fi coughed again, a mortified, “Oh. Veshri vavrae, yzi aidz’mt . . .”

He moved swiftly, tossing the skillet to the floor, grabbing Fi tight around her waist. Static slaked her tongue, a lurch into black as he pulled her into a teleport.

They reappeared atop the cliff. Wind sighed through the shiverpines. Dawn had yet to break the mountains, leaving the valley in twilight, the early lights of Thomaskweld glowing along the river far below. Fi sank to the ground, snow cold against her flannel, drawing in deep breaths until her chest stopped aching.

Antal sat on his knees, staring at the snow.

“I’m sorry, Fionamara.”

Fi stopped coughing. For a lifetime of folktales, daeyari had always been vicious hunters, shadows stalking from the trees. This beast still caught her off guard with his head hung low, tail wrapped tight around his legs. Too tangible. Too raw.

“I know this arrangement must be difficult,” Antal said, hushed over his fangs. “Even more difficult than you’d expected. I’m grateful for your help defeating Verne. But if you’ve changed your mind about this. About . . . me.” His tail flicked at the tip. “I’d understand. I could find you better accommodations in the city. Or return you to your home in Nyskya?”

He looked at her with bone-splintering eyes.

Not in anger or threat. Not in any of the ways daeyari were meant to look at humans.

Antal’s glowing crimson eyes were wide and worried.

Fi sat up slowly, to face this creature, this immortal who’d walked the Planes for centuries longer than she’d been alive. She drew a steadying breath.

Then laughed so hard, she hunched double again.

Antal’s tail flicked fiercer. “Why are you laughing?”

“I’m laughing at you.” Fi brushed a tear from her eye, fingers frigid from the snow. “Is that all you’ve been sulking about? Void alive, I was worried it was something important!”

“Of course it’s important. You agreed to return with me to Thomaskweld, yet I can’t meet your most basic needs—”

He stilled, when Fi cupped his cheeks in her hands.

A low, almost pained growl, as she brushed her thumb across his mouth.

“Silly beast,” Fi purred. “I came here because you’re kind, even when the world wants you to be cruel. Soft, with your fiercest fangs. Obnoxiously handsome, when you smile. Not because of your expertise with baking powder.”

His eyes narrowed. A murmured, “What’s baking powder?”

Fi laughed louder than before. All of Thomaskweld could probably hear her, cackling from the clifftop.

It felt good to laugh.

She settled beside her daeyari, head resting on his shoulder. Shivering a little—she wasn’t dressed to sit in snow, but this beast of hers was pleasantly warm to lean against. They sat silent, looking over his city—their city.

“There’s so much to do,” Fi admitted. “More than I expected. But I’m glad to be here, doing work that means something, instead of hiding away in the mountains.”

Antal’s head still bowed, his tail a pensive sway against the snow. “The people here fear any daeyari. They don’t want me in their city. I see the way they look at me.” Lower. “And the way they look at you, for standing with me.”

He wasn’t wrong. Thomaskweld had no reason to trust him—yet.

“The humans here have probably never seen a daeyari repairing his own energy conduits. They’ve definitely never seen a daeyari take orders from his governor, or stop eating live sacrifices. Keep showing them that they can trust you. Actions speak louder than words.”

“And you’re sure you want to be here?” Antal whispered. “With me?”

“I don’t, historically, give a lot of shits about what random people think of me.” Fi traced a finger down his jaw. “Winning over a city is hard work. But I’m proud of you.”

Antal caught her hand.

He held her fingers against his face, as he exhaled. Shaking.

“Can you . . . say that again?” he rasped.

Fi’s brows rocketed upward. “About not giving a lot of shits?”

“No . . . that you’re . . .”

Her smirk was devious. Delighted. She leaned close, a murmured, “Antlers. Do you have a praise kink you haven’t told me about?”

His growl could have made an entire city cower. His tail curled timid in the snow. A lifetime of fearing beasts like him, at odds with the soft, desperate way he brushed his thumb across the back of her hand.

“I’m proud of you,” Fi said, and he shuddered beneath her touch.

She kissed him. First, on his cheek. Then his mouth, slow and warm, a haven from the cold around them. Antal breathed relief against her lips. He pulled her into his lap, sinking into a deeper kiss, mouths molding to each other’s curves with softly bruising fervor. Claws carved furrows into Fi’s shirt, as he held her tight against him. Gentler, when he bushed the lethal tips over a sliver of bare skin at her hip.

She lay against his chest, rewarding him with a contended purr as she traced his lip with her tongue, endlessly surprised by such a vicious, tender beast.

Now, this perplexing creature was hers.

Her duty, to make sure he’d never hurt again. To make this city a home for them both.

“I want to be here,” Fi whispered against his mouth. “With you. That doesn’t mean you have to cook for me. There are plenty of other ways I can appreciate you.”

Antal pulled her tighter, his exhale hot and rough against her throat. “Involving counters?”

“You’ve been so generous, Lord Daeyari,” Fi returned, deliciously breathless. “Let’s clear the smoke out first. Then, we can investigate how to properly use that counter.”