Be 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.

Zuzana arched an eyebrow. She was a master of the eyebrow arch, and Karou envied her for it. Her own eyebrows did not function independently of each other, which handicapped her expressions of suspicion and disdain.

...wings—-vast shimmering wings, their reach so great they swept the walls on either side of the alley, each feather like the wind-tugged lick of a candle flame.

So, you wouldn't marry me." "Ridiculous question. I'm eighteen!" "Oh, it's an age thing?" He frowned. "You don't mean wild oats, do you? We're not going to have some stupid break so you can experience other---" Zuzana put a hand over his mouth. "Gross. Don't even say it.

This is the story of the curse and the kiss, the demon and the girl. It's a love story with dancing and death in it, and singing and souls and shadows reeled out on kite strings.

The choice I mean is to protect our own innocents from the seraphim, instead of slaughtering theirs." "There are no innocent seraphim, said the wolf." "That's what they say when they kill our children.

Take up a weapon and you become an instrument with as pure a purpose as the weapon itself: to find arteries and open them, limbs and sever them; to take what is alive and deliver it unto death.