Days of Blood & Starlight by Laini Taylor

be called the White Siberian Husky
, Karou thought pettishly.
    “Aegir can’t be spared.” Ten’s voice was getting tight.
    “I’m surprised Thiago can spare
you
.”
Who will brush his hair for him?
    “He considers this very important.”
    Ten’s words were hard and clipped now, and it began to dawn on Karou that she might not win this, and also that her arguments against Ten’s help weren’t sound. She could seeThiago’s point; she was no Brimstone, that was sure. The Wolf was trying to mount a rebellion, and there were still a score of flightless soldiers awaiting their walk to the pit, not to mention the landslide of thuribles in her room that had barely begun to diminish.
    And the patrols had not yet returned from the first wave of the rebellion.
    If anything had happened to them… Just the thought made Karou want to sag down and weep. Of those thirty soldiers, half were newly wrought—hard-earned flesh-and-blood bodies, her arms still blooming with bruises to show for them.
    Of the rest, one was Ziri, the only chimaera in the company who, Karou was reasonably sure, had not cheered at her execution.
    Ziri.
    As Thiago said, it was early yet. Karou sighed and rubbed her temples, which Ten took as assent, her jaws doing their wolf version of a smile.
    “Good,” she said. “We’ll start after dinner.”
    What? No.
Karou was trying to decide whether to retrieve the threads of the argument when, peripherally, she saw a large figure enter the room and stop hard. She knew that shape, even at the edge of sight. She should; she’d just made it.
    It was Razor.

24
A NGEL -L OVER
    All talk in the hall ceased. Heads swung to look at Razor, poised on the threshold and staring straight at Karou.
    Her gut twisted. This was the worst part, always. There were the ones like Amzallag who walked to the pit and woke knowing where they were, with whom, and all that had happened in Eretz. And then there were the souls from the thuribles: the soldiers who had died at Cape Armasin and didn’t even know that Loramendi had fallen, let alone that they were in another world.
    Without exception they blinked at Karou dully, not recognizing her. How could they? A blue-haired girl without wings or horns? She was a stranger.
    And, of course, she never heard what was said later, when they were told the truth. She liked to imagine someone speaking on her behalf—
She’s one of us; she’s the resurrectionist; she brought you back, she brought us here, and look: food!
—butthought it was more likely something along the lines of:
We have no choice; we need her.
Or even, in her darker moments:
Much as we’d all love to, we can’t kill her.
Yet.
    Though, by the look of things, no one had given Razor that message.
    “
You
,” he snarled.
    He leapt.
    Fast—faster than Ten, who stumbled—Karou was on her feet and clear of the table. Razor landed on it just where she’d been sitting. It gave way under his weight with a powerful
crack
, its two ends shooting up in the air as it collapsed in a V beneath him. The water drum tipped, spilled, hit the ground with the warp clamor of a gong, and bodies were in motion, everyone a blur but the Heth, who was poised, focused. Vicious.
    “
Angel-lover
,” he spat, and shame lit Karou like a flare.
    It was a term of utter degradation; in all Karou’s human languages, there was no insult so loaded with disgust and contempt, no single word that cast such a pall of filth. It was that bad even when it was figurative, a slur.
    Never, before her, had it been literal.
    A flick of his tail, and Razor spilled forward. That was what the motion looked like. His body was reptilian—Komodo dragon and cobra—and even big as he was, he moved like the wind over grass.
    Karou had done that. She had given him that grace, that speed.
Note to self
, she thought, and leapt clear. She was graceful, too, and fast. She danced backward. Her crescent-moon blades were in her hands. She hadn’t been conscious of drawing