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If Paris was the boudoir of Europe, then Lapérouse was everything that had given it that salacious reputation.
“The more you stack against the door you’ve locked against whatever is inside you, the more it will burn you out from the inside, until all that’s left is that door, and then it will define you. Trust me, I have been down this road before. You do not want what’s at the end of it.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you, Sam,” Hel said sharply. “And you don’t need old men to tell you who or what you are. You decide that. No one else.”
Trust wasn’t something you decided—it was something that simply was, or wasn’t.
Normal, she’d forgotten to be normal.
I remember thinking how nice he smelled earlier in the evening—like evergreens.
“Je sens Les sapiens “ - I sense the pine trees. It wasn’t an idiom it was literal!
“No one was ever safer for being kept in the dark!” Sam argued. “The darkness doesn’t mean the monsters are gone—it only means you can’t see them coming.”
Sam shivered, feeling oddly like she’d stumbled into someone else’s story. Except, for perhaps the first time in Sam’s life, the story wasn’t anyone’s but hers, the darkness and delights and death included.
You couldn’t just ask a murderer how they killed someone. That was a good way to invite them to show you.
Hel was brilliant at things involving monsters and bullets and biceps. But Sam’s biceps were almost entirely decorative.
Van Helsing was the kind of man who looked at wild things like they existed to be conquered, as if conquering them somehow made him more of a man. The kind of man who was content to murder the monsters, and let live the man who’d made them. Which would only ever create more monsters.
“as a wise woman once told me, men are entirely too quick to call a woman mad or monstrous just because she can do something they can’t. Don’t do it for them.”
If everyone else thought you were mad—did it matter that you weren’t? Reality was built on a foundation of stories, everyone’s interwoven together.
when he reached out his hand magnanimously, as if he truly expected her to take it, Sam couldn’t help but feel that he was, at that moment, perhaps the greatest ass on the planet, which was saying something.
He took away your whole world to account for his sins, and I hate that he could.”
There was something unimaginably freeing about seeing your greatest fears come to fruition, and finding yourself on the other side, still here.
Hel looked down at Sam, surprised for perhaps the first time, as Sam knotted her fingers in Hel’s wet curls and pulled her close, as she kissed her.
First kiss!
all the evidence to the contrary wasn’t enough to make him see how he was wrong. God save the world from people like him.
Fury that she had to live in fear that someone would uncover what she could do and imprison her for the sin of having a power that didn’t come from them.
Fury that the world forced her to choose between being herself and being safe.
