Hammered (The Iron Druid Chronicles, #3)

by Kevin Hearne

I’ve smelled far worse, but it wasn’t exactly fragrant either. There’s a reason Bath & Body Works doesn’t have a line of products called Huge Fucking Squirrel.

“But, look, it is good to have a dream so long as you do not let it gnaw at the substance of your present.

Your dream should be like a favorite old bone that you savor and cherish and chew upon gently. Then, rather than stealing from you a wasted sigh or the life of an idle hour, it nourishes you, and you become strangely contented by nostalgia for a possible future, so juicy with possibility and redolent of sautéed garlic and decadent slabs of bacon that you feel full when you’ve eaten nothing. And then, one fine day when the sun smiles upon your snout, when the time is right, you bite down hard. The dream is yours. And then you chew on the next one.”

If you’ve got some hopelessly overmatched heroes fighting evil and some Imperial types marching, John Williams is your guy. You need a song to make people reach for a box of Kleenex, talk to Randy Newman. But if you want creepy atmospherics and spine-shivering chords to back up your casual death threats, you gotta bring in Danny Elfman.

Vampires inspire screams, not squees.

I make noises when I stretch, because it feels ten times better than stretching silently.

Logically it must be so. Vampires exist, werewolves exist, and faeries exist. If all those impossible creatures exist, then so do bacon lattes! We could go get one at Starbucks right now.

We ordered the insanely expensive stuff, seventy-five dollars for a 1.75-ounce pour of premium Irish whiskey, because if you’re doing a shot with Jesus, you don’t buy him scotch.

“You build and do not destroy; you sow goodwill and reap it; smiles bloom in the wake of your passing, and I will keep your kindness in trust and share it as occasion arises, so that your life will be a quenching draught of calm in a land of drought and stress.”

Shakespeare’s genius was that he had something to say about almost any situation—even fleeing from a Roman god in a Mustang.

I reflected on the paradox of nature: Some people wanted to escape it and others couldn’t wait to get back to it, never realizing that it said more about their nature than about nature itself.

I have salted my hatred and cured it, stored it in a dark cellar of my mind against the day when I could let it be my only nourishment. The day is finally come, and I will tear into this meat and savor its taste.

Wisdom eludes me yet, but foolishness I captured long ago and to this day it is my constant companion, though many people consider me wise.

rule number one of committing naughty shit is that you don’t take ID with you.

“I should like to take this opportunity to name you Sherlock and point out that there is no shit.”