Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor

Just then, lit only by the flicker of his wings, the sight of him was so… right, somehow. They would have been practically under his nose when he woke. He set them where he had found them, where she had left them, in their case, atop the nesting tables. But even as she adjusted her grip on it, ready to stab, Akiva was backing away, lowering the knives. Her pencil was still in her hand, and the thought struck her: always with the ridiculous weapon, where this angel was concerned. Karou sat up with a suddenness that sent sketchbooks skidding off the bed. They were wide, his orange irises ringed around in white, and he was holding, one in each hand, her crescent-moon knives. He was standing over her, and his eyes were molten. She was in her flat, of course, on her bed, and the sound that had awakened her was Akiva. Only the wings on the wall over her were not, and gave her a surge of pleasure, and then it all slid away as dreams do. She fell into dreams, and when she woke just before dawn-something woke her, a quick, bright sound-the room around her was, for a blink, entirely unfamiliar. Karou didn’t plan to sleep, but some time after midnight she subsided, still half on the landslide of her sketchbooks, to “rest her eyes” for a moment. She drew and painted for a long time, and he didn’t move except for the soft rise and fall of his chest and the glimmer of his wings, which cast the room in a firelight glow. She grabbed a watercolor box and painted.

She tried to capture the precise shape of them she used charcoal for the heavy black kohl that rimmed them and made him look so exotic, and she couldn’t take leaving his fiery irises colorless. She got out her sketchbook and a pencil, and she drew Akiva asleep at the locus of his vast wings, and then from memory, with his eyes open. His wings were sufficient illumination, even for drawing. She got up and took the water glass from his hands.

Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor