Days of Blood & Starlight (Daughter of Smoke & Bone, #2)

by Laini Taylor

Once upon a time, an angel and a devil held a wishbone between them. And its snap split the world in two.

Kaz made Zuzana wish that beauty were something that could be revoked for bad behavior.

“You can hoard your bladder tea. I’ll make do.”

“Are you saying you don’t love me?” Hazael asked Liraz. “Because I love you. I think.” He paused in contemplation. “Oh. No. Never mind. That’s fear.”

“Comfortable down there, are you?” “I could sleep,” Akiva said, and felt the truth of it.

It was one of those dreams that invade the space between seconds, proving sleep has its own physics—where time shrinks and swells, lifetimes unspool in a blink, and cities burn to ash in a mere flutter of lashes.

perhaps Fate laid out your life for you like a dress on a bed, and you could either wear it or go naked.

There is intimacy in pain. Anyone who has comforted a sufferer knows it—the helpless tenderness, the embrace and murmur and slow rocking together as two become one against the enemy, pain.

Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love and dared to imagine a new way of living—one

He should be called the White Siberian Husky, Karou thought pettishly.

It is life that expands to fill worlds. Life is your master or death is.

How, with swords clenched in both hands, could one hope to keep blood from spilling?

“Don’t try her,” said Hazael. “Please? I think she’d enjoy having a finger collection a little too much.”

“As long as you’re alive, there’s always a chance things will get better.” “Or worse,” said Liraz. “Yes,” he conceded. “Usually worse.”

“That’s it?” she said. “I tell you I’m not human, and you’re all tra-la-la?”

“Sorry,” said Mik. “I think you neutralized our capacity for surprise. You should have started with that, and then told us you raise the dead.”

Once upon a time, a girl lived in a sandcastle, making monsters to send through a hole in the sky.

“What are you more afraid of: them, or me with low blood sugar?”

Because it was not Akiva beside her. Of course it wasn’t, and what ran through Karou’s mind in that instant was bitterness, a double pang: one for when she thought it was him. And one for when she realized it wasn’t.

“I don’t know why, Karou,” he said. “But I think the angel saved my life.”

“We didn’t have the chance,” Hazael reminded her. “There were too many damn birds in the way.” “Yes, well, I hoped he’d been suffocated or pecked to death or something,” she replied.

“No, not like you. Not pretend assassins. Real assassins. They slit angels’ throats in their sleep.”

“Yikes.” Zuzana grimaced and grabbed her throat. “But the angels are the bad guys, right?”

“And I suppose Thiago is a peach, too.” “Eww,” said Zuzana with a shudder. “No. Nonpeach. Wormy peach.” Well, at least they agreed about that.

“Yes, Igor. You can help. And thanks for earlier. You were awesome.” “Me? You were awesome. Holy. Karou. You’re my hero.” “Yeah? Well, you’re mine, so we’re even.”

“I thought you were dead.” Akiva’s voice was choked. “And… I wanted… to die, too.”

“The message is clear. Please enjoy this lovely fruit while contemplating all the ways we might kill you in your sleep.”

What was at stake? She felt balanced on a precipice and buffeted by gales. What wasn’t at stake?

Now I’ve seen everything. The Shadows That Live, doing chicken impressions.

“I think they breathe at least half their air out of each other’s mouths.”

There was a ferocity in the tiny Zuzana that had started Virko calling her neek-neek, after a growlsome breed of shrew-scorpion known for facing down predators ten times its size.

Her courage was a guise. She wondered if courage always was, or if there were those who truly felt no fear.

What had she done, really, but fall in love and dream of peace?

Akiva was fire veiled in light. They couldn’t hope to stop him.

“That’s your objective, to leave a legacy of nightmares when you die? Why not? Why wouldn’t it be all about you? The great White Wolf, killer of angels, savior to no one.”

Heat poured over Karou and it was blood. Thiago’s hands abruptly forgot her hips. And when she did open her eyes, he wasn’t smiling anymore.

“You are a goddess of air circulation,” he said. “And you are a specimen of glistening maleness.”

“I don’t want to go,” Zuzana admitted in a small voice. “Back to tourists and angel cults and puppets and real life?” She was whining and she knew it. “I want to make monsters and do magic and help Karou.”

am one of billions. I am stardust gathered fleetingly into form. I will be ungathered. The stardust will go on to be other things someday and I will be free.

Had Ellai wept? Had she bathed in the sea and tried to feel clean again?

Had Ellai stabbed the sun in time, she wondered, or had the sun had his way?

“I know who you are,” she said in a fierce sweet whisper. “I know. And I’m with you. Ziri, Ziri. I see you.”

Good-bye. The word hurt. Good-bye was the last thing Akiva ever wanted to tell Karou.

“We can fight them together. I have an army, too.”

They are creatures grasping at life with stained hands.

Tomorrow they will start the apocalypse. Tonight, they let themselves look at each other, for just a little while.

“Oh god. What if she’s in there?” “In there? You mean dead?” “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“She set up this whole elaborate goose chase, then climbed into the coffin and died? I kind of don’t think you have to worry about that.”

“Want to go meet some monsters?”