Grave Peril (The Dresden Files, #3)

by Jim Butcher

‘Holy shit,’ I breathed. ‘Hellbounds.’ ‘Harry,’ Michael said sternly. ‘You know I hate it when you swear.’ ‘You’re right. Sorry. Holy shit,’ I breathed, ‘heck-hounds.

The married thing. Sometimes I look at it and feel like someone from a Dickens novel, standing outside in the cold and staring in at Christmas dinner. Relationships hadn’t ever really worked for me. I think it’s had something to do with all the demons, ghosts, and human sacrifice.

One thing about intimidation is that people can always think up something worse that you could do to them than you can, if you leave their imagination some room to play.

Truly, nothing you can describe will ever be scarier than what people can imagine to fill in the blanks themselves.

‘Okay,’ Bob said, meekly. ‘We have now left Reason and Sanity Junction. Next stop, Looneyville.’

There should be some kind of rule against needing to kill anything more than once.

Ghosts. Shades. Haunts. Whatever you want to call them, they were dead as hell and they weren’t going to take it anymore.

‘Blood of the Dragon, that old Serpent,’ Michael said, quietly. ‘You and yours have no power here. Your threats are hollow, your words are empty of truth, just as your heart is empty of love, your body of life. Cease this now, before you tempt the wrath of the Almighty.’ He glanced aside at me and added, probably for my benefit, ‘Or before my friend Harry turns you into a greasy spot on the floor.’

Fear has a lot of flavors and textures. There’s a sharp, silver fear that runs like lightning through your arms and legs, galvanizes you into action, power, motion. There’s heavy, leaden fear that comes in ingots, piling up in your belly during the empty hours between midnight and morning, when everything is dark, every problem grows larger, and every wound and illness grows worse. And there is coppery fear, drawn tight as the strings of a violin, quavering on one single note that cannot possibly be sustained for a single second longer – but goes on and on and on, the tension before the crash of cymbals, the brassy challenge of the horns, the threatening rumble of the kettle drums.

Fear and anger always come hand in hand. Anger is my hiding place from fear, my shield and my sword against it.

Reason. Reason was my next line of defense. Fear is bred from ignorance. So knowledge is a weapon against it, and reason is the tool of knowledge.

Applause, listless and somehow sinister, came out of the dark around us. There should be some kind of law. Anything that is so bad that its applause is sinister should be universally banned or something.

I reached for fire – and fire answered me.

I’d hate to find out that the universe really wasn’t conspiring against me. It would jerk the rug out from under my persecution complex.

Some words have a power that has nothing to do with supernatural forces. They resound in the heart and mind, they live long after the sounds of them have died away, they echo in the heart and the soul. They have power, and that power is very real.

‘For the sake of one soul. For one loved one. For one life.’ I called power into my blasting rod, and its tip glowed incandescent white. ‘The way I see it, there’s nothing else worth fighting a war for.’