...the air seeming to gather around her like held breath. As if this whole place were a story about her.
Laini TaylorA thousand things might have stopped me from being here right now, but instead, a thousand things brought me here.
Laini TaylorBeautiful men and women with distorted shadows came and scorched their handprints onto doors before vanishing skyward, drafts of heat billowing behind them with the whumph of unseen wings. Here and there, feathers fell, and they were like tufts of white fire, disintegrating to ash as soon as they touched the ground.
Laini TaylorBe your own place of safety, she told herself, straightening. No crossbar in the world could protect her from what lay ahead, and neither could a tiny knife ticked in her boot - though there her tiny knife would most certainly remain - and neither could a man, not even Akiva. She had to be her own strength, complete unto herself.
Laini Taylor