TWT: LIBERTY OR DEATH YA Historical Fantasy

Query:

Boston, 1777— The British left because something worse arrived.

By day, seventeen-year-old Amity Somerset is an obedient daughter. She perfects her needlework, learns French, practices the minuet, and just like her parents, studiously ignores all that has gone wrong in their world— such as the deaths of her three siblings at the claws of gargoyles. Yet at night, in the company of the Nighters, she rallies against the bloodthirsty supernatural creatures that hunt the citizens of Boston as their favorite prey.

Upset with her parents over the announcement of her arranged marriage, Amity breaks the Nighter's number one rule: Never go on shift alone. She nearly meets her demise by spiked gargoyle tail until an outsider named Patrick saves her life. Desirous of becoming a Nighter, he's quickly inducted into their ranks. But Patrick has his own reasons besides vengeance for joining up— reasons that have the potential to change the future of the newly formed United States of America.

Because as Amity soon discovers, not all gargoyles are mindless predators...or fully grown.

250:

The coal chute is rather what I imagine a snake’s belly to be like— cold, cramped, and dark. I slide through the soot-tainted air and land with a dull thump upon a goose-down mattress. A gargoyle’s high-pitched scream vibrates the metal overhead, along with several loud metallic clangs.

Scrambling up, I look quickly ‘round. My favorite knife had made the descent ahead of me, knocked from my hand as I’d dived for the chute. Before I can spy it, my partner shoots out in a blur of dark clothing and pale skin— and lands with an audible hiss of pain.

I grimace down at Benjamin, hoping some soft, vital part of him hadn’t found my knife in landing. My concern abates as he clambers off the mattress, his head bent over his hand. Set in the soft pad of his palm is a small hole. Though Nighters often incur injury over their nail-studded shields, the occasional puncture wound is inevitably better than being taken by a gargoyle.

Puncture wounds can heal; a caught and carried means certain death.

“Would this be yours?”

The cellar guard holding out my knife isn’t one I recognize. As word of us has grown, the Nighters have swelled in rank, drawing others with a desire for vengeance. I take the knife with murmured thanks and return it to my pistol belt.

Below the leather, my hip bone aches; there's nothing comfortable about landing on pistol butts and unforgiving knife handles.