Night of Cake & Puppets (Daughter of Smoke & Bone, #1.5)

by Laini Taylor

I will never forget the perfect clarity of terror that thrilled through me as, in an instant, my long-dead belief in magic flared back to life.

Me, sweep him off his feet? I know. The laws of the jungle and romance novels would have it the other way around,

it’s just that there’s something direct and real and electric and pure that hasn’t been lost, the intense, undiluted emotion of childhood. Most people lose it.

his eyes are fully open like something awesome might happen at any time and he doesn’t want to miss it.

There it is, this sound that rises out of the music like a beam of light cutting through darkness. It’s as sweet as love, so goddamn beautiful I could cry,

Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.

I have an instinct about Zuzana. I think she’s not good or evil, but both—the perfect mixture of the two, a swirled ice-cream cone of good and evil—and she wouldn’t have led me here for no reason. There’s something I’m not seeing.

In adolescent fantasyland, the kiss is the happy ending. On the planet of grown-ups, I am fully aware, it’s only a beginning.