What happened in Days of Blood and Starlight by Laini Taylor - Recaptains

The basics

Title: Days of Blood and Starlight

Author: Laini Taylor

Series: Daughter of Smoke and Bone #2

- Daughter of Smoke and Bone (September 2011)
- Days of Blood and Starlight (November 2012)
- Dreams of Gods and Monsters (April 2014)

Add it: Goodreads

Goodreads Summary:

Art student and monster's apprentice Karou finally has the answers she has always sought. She knows who she is—and what she is. But with this knowledge comes another truth she would give anything to undo: She loved the enemy and he betrayed her, and a world suffered for it.

In this stunning sequel to the highly acclaimed Daughter of Smoke & Bone, Karou must decide how far she'll go to avenge her people. Filled with heartbreak and beauty, secrets and impossible choices, Days of Blood & Starlight finds Karou and Akiva on opposing sides as an age-old war stirs back to life.

While Karou and her allies build a monstrous army in a land of dust and starlight, Akiva wages a different sort of battle: a battle for redemption. For hope.

But can any hope be salvaged from the ashes of their broken dream?

in short

Lots of angel and chimaera die and stuff. You know, there’s still a war going on.

Karou is the new resurrectionist, acting under Thiago, who she doesn’t like. She brings back Issa (yay) and finds out that there are chimaera alive trapped in thuribles in the cathedral. By the end of it Karou is sick of Thiago and his bad ways, so she kills him and stuff some other soul in his body so the chimaera don’t make her bring him back.

Meanwhile, Akiva has been trying to do good by saving chimaera from being murdered. He ends up deciding he’s going to kill his father Joram, and does so. Unfortunately for him, that was all part of his uncle Jael’s plan (which also includes invading the human world). Oh, and Hazael dies in the process.

Looks like the Misbegotten and the chimaera are going to have to team up to fight bid bad Jael in book three. Watch out!

what happened in Days of Blood and Starlight?

• Akiva heads to Eretz to find Karou, but cannot find her anywhere. He eventually finds a thurible with her name on it in the caves where she grew up, and assumes she is dead. Akiva heads back home to Liraz and Hazael, depressed.
• Zuzanah freaks out because she cannot get a hold of Karou and is worried that she is dead, until there are news reports about someone going around stealing teeth from museums. Interesting… Shortly after Zuzanah receives an email from Karou saying she’s not dead but is princess of a sandcastle. At first Zuzanah thinks the email is just weird, but then realizes it must contain a secret message as to Karou’s location. She starts searching through travel blogs at a possible location where Karou might be.
• Meanwhile Karou is working on putting new bodies together for Thiago. Each chimaera has to be remade with wings because their new hideout is in the human world. Thiago seems to sincerely be trying to help her by offering to tithe for her, but it’s Thiago. You know something is up. He has fellow Wolf Ten be her assistant.
• The aftermath of the war is continuing with seraphim killing innocent chimaera and the Revenants responding by cutting smiles into dead seraphim faces. Akiva tries to limit the murder by glamouring himself invisible during the night and scaring off nearby chimaera.
• New characters are introduced. Sveva, Sarazel, and Rath are chimaera slaves who escaped after an attack from the Revenant and attempt to avoid being caught from Seraphim. Ziri is the only remaining Kirin alive (the same species as Madrigal) and had a crush on her when he was little.
• Karou thinks the Revenants she is creating are being sent to Hintermost to protect innocent fleeing chimaera from the angels, but really they are being sent on counterattack missions to kill innocent seraphim. Ziri is sent on one such mission with a group of Revenants, but they break away to do the right thing and attempt to help at Hintermost. Unfortunately they die, and Ziri is caught and almost killed as well, but Akiva rescues him by calling out birds from the sky to distract the seraphim while Ziri escapes, badly injured. He is followed back to the chimaera hideout by Akiva, who is shocked to find Karou still alive. After being healed, Ziri tells Karou the truth about how his group defied Thiago’s orders.
• Zuzanah and Mik travel to southern Morocco and risk their lives traveling to a spot in the travel blog that they think Karou might be. Fortunately for them, they are right, and before they die from the heat Karou spots them and takes them back as her “guests”. Karou fills Zuzanah and Mik on the situation, including Brimstone’s death and Akiva’s part in it all. Zuzanah and Mik fit right in with all the monsters. It’s quite a gay time.
• Jael, Captain of the Dominion, is noted of the appearance of a “creature” that his men have found. The creature is Razgut, and Jael uses him for information. (This can’t be good. Razgut is never good.)
• Karou is confronted by Akiva while off on her own. She says mean stuff and whatnot, and Akiva runs off. But first he gives her the thurible he found with her name on it. Karou hopes it is Brimstone, but alas it is Issa. She tells Karou she was saved to give her a message.
• Joram, the seraphim emperor, throws a fit one day when a fruit basket shows up in his room. None of the guards know how it got there, so he has them all killed (including the poor naked girl he slept with, gross). Find out the basket was sent from the Stelians declining a war because they’re preoccupied.
• Thiago is outraged when he finds out Issa is there. He wants to know where her thurible came from, but no one will tell him. Instead, Karou tells him she no longer needs Ten’s help because she has Issa. Thiago isn’t happy with this because he was hoping Ten could learn everything so they could kill off Karou. Instead, they have to rely on threatening the lives of Zuzanah and Mik to get Karou to do what they want… until Karou helps them escape (much to Zuzanah’s unhappiness).
• Akiva called to meet Joram for “heroic service to the realm” and decides he will use the meeting to assassinate Joram, with the help of Hazael and Liraz, after finding out about Joram’s fruit basket outburst and murder of the poor naked girl. Akiva is let in while Joram is bathing and has little trouble killing him, and holding back the other guards. Akiva, Hazael, and Liraz are about to leave afterwards when the Dominion arrive led by Jael. They have cut off chimaera hands with the hamsas that they use to hold Akiva, Hazael, and Liraz at bay while Jael kills all the other witness/guards that were there. Jael talks, as all bad guys do, about how he was the one to kill Akiva’s mother and is planning on invading the human world. Hazael is killed during this time and Akiva’s response is to magically scream so loud that the place falls apart killing people.
• Issa tells Karou the message she was saved for: that thousands of chimaera decided to save themselves during the war by going to the cathedral beneath the city and being put into thuribles, to be retrieved later. Karou confronts Thiago with this news, saying the killing must stop and instead they should work on saving the thuribles, but doesn’t receive much support. Thiago instead says he’ll consider it, and shrugs Karou off.
• Karou finds out that those few who decided to support her during her outburst at Thiago have been taken to the pit to be killed. She heads that way to find out what happens. Once there, she is confronted by Thiago who tells everyone to leave them. He then proceeds to beat the crap out of Karou and try to rape her. She manages to reach the small knife she has hidden in her boot and kills him, much to his shock. Of course, she freaks out because they’ll only make her resuscitate him. Luckily, Ziri magically arrives and offers to kill himself and take over Thiago’s body so as to fool everyone that he’s still alive. The same is done with Ten’s body, who was killed by Issa, and taken over by an old friend of Madrigal’s, Haxaya.
• Akiva and Liraz show up in Karou’s room with Hazael, hoping she can revive him. Unfortunately, they didn’t have a thurible to save his soul and it’s already gone, so there is nothing Karou can do.

how did it end?

Akiva tells Karou that he is going to close down the portals between their world and the human world so Jael cannot invade. Unfortunately, he doesn’t do it in time. Zuzanah and Mik come running to Karou to warn them of the news that the angels are at Earth. The chimaera and the Misbegotten have no choice. They decide to team up to fight the common enemy of Jael, much to the displeasure of both. (Oh boy, we’ll have to see how that all works out in book three.)

Other recaps for this series:

• Daughter of Smoke and Bone (Daughter of Smoke and Bone #1)