Page 14 of Revels on an Angel’s Grave

But her tongue was too heavy, her throat thick as tar. Words slurred in a jumbled, hoarse cry.

Emmeline ripped a triple dagger from her thigh and threw it at him. The silver blades were a shooting star in the night, soaring toward her target and⁠—

Missing him.

She blinked rapidly, knees weakening. She was seeing double, and she’d thrown two feet to the left of where he actually stood.

“Fate’s tits,” she slurred, and she thought she heard him chuckle again, the sound ingraining itself in her drugged memory.

“You want to tempt the Fates?” he cooed. The words pulled at a string in her blurry mind, but she couldn’t place them.

The man tucked the oiled cloth into his cloak with a casualness entirely disjointed from the panic gripping Emmeline’s chest. The residue still dripped down her neck, seeping into her skin and making her dizzier.

Readings thrummed through her blood, all as jumbled as her vision.

Stone towers wrapped in dancing silver threads.

Blood spilling over lips and crimson-stained smiles.

Her attacker took a step forward.

Emmeline pulled another dagger from her boot. She’d never get away if she tried to run, not in her state. Her only option was surprise.

This time, she didn’t let the weapon fly. Instead, she charged.

He caught her wrist and bore down, pressing her into the wall. Emmeline shoved a knee between them, connecting with his groin, and he doubled over in pain.

She slammed her dagger into his wrist.

Readings burst forth as his blood spilled—forges in inky oil and feathers morphing into arrows, Valyrie rising among it all.

Emmeline gritted her teeth, pressing the blade deeper. Her pulse reverberated through the steel, the force of her readings desperate and consuming.

Silver light flared.

Warmth gushed across her hand as she pulled the blade out, crimson splashing over her favorite boots and staining the street. The sweet floral scent was tinted with iron, and Emmeline couldn’t help but grin.

It may have been the drugs warping her vision, but she swore, for a flash, beneath his hood and with a bleeding arm cradled to his chest, her attacker smiled back.

The door to Angel’s Brew swung open. Light splashed over the ground at his feet, and Emmeline froze.

On the cobblestones, darkening as the rain flecked it, was a very familiar symbol.

“Next time, Fateblessed,” the man said as he fled.

Emmeline didn’t notice which way he went.

Her attention was locked on the wings imprinted on the stone, roses in bloom on one half and withered on the other. A mark that had been at every murder scene on Lyra, scattered on the walls in Dryvius’s secret cavern near the Silventa house.

Emmeline’s knees weakened.

“What? How?” she wheezed out, wings fluttering in her blurring vision.

So many pairs of wings, she couldn’t keep track.

Emmeline stumbled forward onto the main avenue, her fingers crawling to the feathered tips. They weren’t burned or carved, not a slip of paper soaked into the ground by the rain. They were simply there, glittering in her drug-dazed vision.

As her eyes closed, all she could think was, The Warders of Selene.