For one cold, terrible moment, Seraphiel believed she had been seen by the abomination.
The abomination itself had turned in the sky three hundred feet above the threshold of her own sanctuary — turned with a dancer's impossible pivot, that fluid grace, that sudden wide dazzling smile flashing in the dark like a blade unsheathing — and spoke into the still night air with the clarity of a bell struck in an empty chapel.
"I see you now. Sneaky bitch."
Seraphiel's heart, which had not raced in eons, now thundered.
Her wings seized and her flame compressed so tightly that for an instant she became little more than a pinpoint of cold starlight, a coward's faint suggestion of a seraph. Every ancient instinct in her immortal frame screamed the same coherent terror.
