Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor

was real enough.
    He raised his sword, and she just watched him do it, her attention catching for a moment on the bars of black ink tattooed across his fingers—they were fleetingly familiar but then not, the feeling gone as soon as it registered—and she just stared up at her killer and wondered numbly why . It seemed impossible that this was the final moment of her life. She cocked her head to the side, desperately searching his features for some hint of… soul … and then, she saw it.
    He hesitated. Only for a split second did his mask slip, but Karou saw some urgent pathos surface, a wave of feeling that softened his rigid and ridiculously perfect features. His jaw unclenched, his lips parted, his brow furrowed in an instant of confusion.
    At the same moment, she became aware of the pulse in her palms that had made her curl her hands into fists at her first sight of him. It thrummed there still, a pent-up energy, and she was jolted by the certainty that it emanated from her tattoos. An impulse overcame her to throw up her hands, and she did, not in cringing surrender, but with palms powerfully outthrust, inked with the eyes she’d worn all her life without ever knowing why.
    And something happened.
    It was like a detonation—a sharp intake, all air sucked into a tight core and then expelled. It was silent, lightless—to the gape-jawed witnesses it was nothing at all, just a girl throwing up her hands—but Karou felt it, and the angel did, too. His eyes went wide with recognition in the instant before he was flung back with devastating force to hit a wall some twenty feet behind him. He crumpled to the ground, wings askew, sword skittering away. Karou scrambled to her feet.
    The angel wasn’t moving.
    She spun and sprinted away. Whatever had happened, a silence had risen from it, and it followed her. She could hear only her own breathing, weirdly amplified like she was in a tunnel. She rounded the bend in the alley at speed, skidding on her heel to avoid a donkey standing stubborn in the middle of the lane. The portal was in sight, a plain door in a row of plain doors, but something was different about it now. A large black handprint was burned into the wood.
    Karou flung herself at it, hammering with her fists in a frenzy such as she had never unleashed on a portal before. “Issa!” she screamed. “Let me in!”
    A long, awful moment, Karou looking back over her shoulder, and then the door finally swung open.
    She started to dart forward, then let out a choked cry. It was not Issa or the vestibule, but a Moroccan woman with a broom. Oh no. The woman’s eyes narrowed and she opened her mouth to scold, but Karou didn’t wait. She pushed her back inside and shoved the door closed, staying outside. Frantically she knocked again. “Issa!”
    She could hear the woman shouting and feel her trying to push the door open. Karou swore and held it shut. If it was open, the magic of the portal couldn’t connect. In Arabic she hollered, “Get away from the door!”
    She looked over her shoulder. There was a commotion in the street, arms waving, people shouting. The donkey stood unimpressed. No angel. Had she killed him? No. Whatever had happened, she knew he wasn’t dead. He would come.
    She pounded on the door again. “Issa, Brimstone, please!”
    Nothing but irate Arabic. Karou held the door closed with her foot and kept pounding. “Issa! He’s going to kill me! Issa! Let me in!”
    What was taking so long? Seconds hung like scuppies on a string, vanishing one after another. The door was jumping against her foot, someone trying to force it open—could it be Issa?—and then she felt a draft of heat at her back. She didn’t hesitate this time but turned, jamming her back up against the door to hold it closed, and raised her hands as if to let her tattoos see . There was no detonation this time, only a crackling of energy that raised her hair like Medusa’s serpents.
    The angel was stalking toward her, head