Synopsis
Fi has carved out a career as a cross-dimensional smuggler by sticking to simple rules: keep your routes secret, always draw your energy sword first, and – at all costs – avoid the daeyari, the carnivorous immortals who have ruled for millennia.
When she’s hired to smuggle a bomb into the capital, instinct tells her the risk isn’t worth the pay, but the entreaty of a long-lost friend guilts her into accepting. Until the heist goes terribly wrong, and Fi is thrown at the feet of the daeyari lord, Antal, as payment.
Antal is a hunter – cold and cunning and furious at Fi for her part in the attack on his city. Her saving grace is a common enemy: he’ll spare her if she helps him uncover who masterminded the scheme. To save her life, her family, and the village she calls home, Fi must join Antal on a new hunt with far higher stakes than she’s ever faced before, bartering with neighbouring immortals who might offer an alliance – or tear their throats out in the snow.
She’s always known the dangers of her trade – and of the power she’s wielded since childhood, allowing her to see the secret doors between realities, to walk the Void itself. But nothing could have prepared her for meeting Antal. For the deal she’s been forced to make, and what that deal might ignite. A revolution. And a temptation – for how sweet the monster’s fangs might feel.
Review
Am I now obsessed with monster romantasy?!
I was giggling from the get-go. I was in my feels – the funny, the deep, the painful. This was soft and sharp and vicious all at once.
Fi is a rainbow haired, spunky 32-year-old in the lucrative business of cross-Plane smuggling, able to travel across huge differences by cutting into doors most humans cannot see.
When her job goes wrong, she is offered as a sacrifice to the daeyari – carnivorous immortals who rule the humans and offer protection in exchange for sustenance. When Lord Antal and Fi discover betrayal, they strike up a bargain to help each other.
A cool magic system, protection, antlers, a tail, biting play…
Would it be so bad, to be devoured?
The middle of an argument with a carnivore: not the ideal time for discovering kinks.
Fi is very good at pretending, a defence mechanism, masquerading as bravado. Aka my favourite kind of traumatised, sarcastic and biting heroine.
‘Strength is easy to fake, Fionamara. Vulnerability is hard. Yet here you sit.’
Antal is scary until you find out he’s actually soft and tender and he needs to be hugged. Or to have a spunky human bite back. Figuratively… literally?
An amazing older brother. Hurt and comfort scenes. Easy queer normative rep. A Void Horse with a punny name. Hilarious chapter titles…
You will have a Void damned good time.
‘Yet how odd, you assume all your folktales of devoured mortals end in death? There are other ways to enjoy flesh, Fionamara. Types of devouring that don’t work well as cautionary tales for misbehaving girls.’
‘I want to know you aren’t going to eat her,’ Boden said. Fi saw the response coming a mile away. Too slow to stop it.
‘Well,’ Antal drawled, ‘not unless she asks me to.’ Fi wondered what he’d look like reincarnated. After she murdered him, of course.
I will stop gushing now,
P.s. this is pretty different from The Phoenix Keeper, the author’s debut book, so go in knowing that!
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