Summer Knight (The Dresden Files, #4)

by Jim Butcher

In the ruins of my office stood a woman with the kind of beauty that makes men murder friends and start wars.

Phenomenal cosmic powers be damned. I have a lease.

Fear can literally feel like ice water. It can be a cold feeling that you swallow, that rolls down your throat and spreads into your chest. It steals your breath and makes your heart labor when it shouldn’t, before expanding into your belly and hips, leaving quivers behind. Then it heads for the thighs, the knees (occasionally with an embarrassing stop on the way), stealing the strength from the long muscles that think you should be using them to run the hell away.

And the fae have a way of making sure that further bargains only get you in deeper, instead of into the clear. Just like credit card companies, or those student loan people. Now there’s evil for you.

Maybe I’d been shut away in my lab too long, but Spenser never mentions that the Faerie Queen has a great ass.

‘Well, I was going to settle down with a porn video and a bottle of baby oil, but I really don’t have enough for two.’

‘Gosh, Morgan,’ I said, ‘my cat might be a dangerous subversive. Maybe you’d better interrogate him.’

‘Here’s where I ask why don’t you spend your time doing something safer and more boring. Like maybe administering suppositories to rabid gorillas.’

Monsters are born of pain and grief and loss and anger. Your heart is full of them.’

Sometimes the most remarkable things seem commonplace. I mean, when you think about it, jet travel is pretty freaking remarkable. You get in a plane, it defies the gravity of an entire planet by exploiting a loophole with air pressure, and it flies across distances that would take months or years to cross by any means of travel that has been significant for more than a century or three. You hurtle above the earth at enough speed to kill you instantly should you bump into something, and you can only breathe because someone built you a really good tin can that has seams tight enough to hold in a decent amount of air. Hundreds of millions of man-hours of work and struggle and research, blood, sweat, tears, and lives have gone into the history of air travel, and it has totally revolutionized the face of our planet and societies. But get on any flight in the country, and I absolutely promise you that you will find someone who, in the face of all that incredible achievement, will be willing to complain about the drinks. The drinks, people.

There's a lot of truth to this. We often take the wonderous accomplishments of our time for granted simply because they've become a commonplace part of life.

The noise was deafening, and no one could have heard me anyway as I let out my own battle cry, which I figured was worth a shot. What the hell. ‘I don’t believe in faeries!’

I caught it, stuck my tongue out at Aurora, yelled, ‘Meep, meep!’ and ran like hell.

Toot blew another little blast on his trumpet and shouted, voice shrill, ‘In the name of the Pizza Lord! Charge!’