Burned (Fever #7)

by Karen Marie Moning

But when you fight evil every day, stare it in the face, engage it, learn to think like it, you face a choice: Be defeated by the limits of your own morality, or summon a beast in yourself that obeys none.

Fear of the power you believe someone or something has over you is nothing but a jail cell you choose to walk into. By obsessing over freeing yourself from the Book, you become more certainly its prisoner.

What no one tells you is that when someone you love dies, you lose them twice. Once to death, the second time to acceptance, and you don’t walk that long, dark passage between the two alone. Grief takes every shuffling, unwilling step with you, offering a seductive bouquet of memories that can only blossom south of sanity. You can stay there, nose buried in the petals of the past. But you’re never really alive again. Spend enough time with ghosts, you become one.

You only know who you are in opposition to something, what you choose to fight for and against. The rest doesn’t matter.

I’ve never been able to fully block the emotions of others because I didn’t know what silence felt like. I found it impossible to strive for a goal I couldn’t fathom, to re-create a thing of which I’d no knowledge, like a blind man trying to paint a picture of sky and clouds and sun.

“She threw her head back and laughed. The kid fucking laughed, eyes shining. Like there was no greater adventure she could possibly be on. Like life was turning out to be the most exhilarating, fantastic roller-coaster ride she could ever have imagined. Fuck the pain. Fuck the misery. In the middle of the hopeless, brutal hell her short existence on this Earth had been, that girl laughed,” he finishes on a near whisper.

Then again, maybe I’ll never see a trace of her, but I still feel her. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s as if she’s only a slight shift of reality away from me sometimes, in what I think of as the slipstream, and if I could only slip sideways, too, I could join her. And one day I think I will slip sideways and get to see her again, if only as ships passing on our way to new destinations in the same vast, magnificent sea.

I don’t know that I believe in souls, but I believe in something. I think each of us has a unique vibration that’s inextinguishable, and when we die it translates into the next phase of being. We may come back as a tree, or a cat, perhaps a person again, or a star. I don’t think our journey is limited. I look up at the sky, ponder the enormity of the universe and simply know that the same well of joy that birthed so much wonder gave us more than a single chance to explore it.

I know a simple truth: mercy killing doesn’t hold one fucking ounce of mercy for those that live.

Death is the final chapter in a book you can’t unread. You keep waiting to feel like the person you were before that chapter ended. You never will.

When one feels threatened, one clears the house before going to bed, but when one feels safe—a foolish thing to ever believe—one doesn’t compulsively check all windows and doors, or is perhaps busy celebrating what one perceives as a victory over one’s enemy. And that’s precisely when the enemy strikes.

When someone hurts you—and I’m not talking about forgivable offenses, some things are irrevocable and demand recompense—you have two choices: slice them out of your life or slice them into delicious, bloody pieces. While the latter would be infinitely more satisfying in an immediate, animalistic way, it changes you. And, although you think the memory of the battle won will be a pleasure—if it is a pleasure, you’ve lost the war. They raped me. I survived. I moved on. I wanted someone else to be the animal I didn’t want to become.

The aria of choice is joyous, the cacophony of force brutal, ugly, and cold.