More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Only later did her mother say that not all sins were boulders, that most in fact were more like pebbles. An unkind thought. A hungry heart.
MegsChaosLibrary liked this
The widow seems to consider. “And how is a miracle different from a spell? Who is to say the saint was not a witch?”
Even though they were several strides apart. Even though she never saw the widow move. She is there now, a head taller than María, one gloved hand circling her wrist. “Careful. In nature, beauty is a warning. The pretty ones are often poisonous.”
And for once, she does as she’s told. She nods, holding out her hand, and Andrés de Guzmán’s mouth splits into a haughty grin, like he’s the one who played the game, and won. And as he bends his head to kiss the bare skin of her knuckle, where the wedding ring will go, María imagines the road curving away beneath her feet, and smiles, too.
VES has a thing for bygone marriage practices and women's freedom, e.g. Addie LaRue
He takes María’s arm and guides her down, into the crowded hall, and as he leads her through the house, the heads all turn. They stare, outright, the many guests, expressions ranging from the curious to the appraising, the approving to the greedy. And yet, she thinks darkly, I could not ride my horse.
But Sabine has found she far prefers the taste of other women. Just as their skin is softer, she finds their life tastes sweeter, too. More earth than metal. Like burned caramel, perhaps? Hard to say.
“Those grown in the midnight soil are never alone.” “The midnight soil?” she echoes. It is an odd choice of words.
“Bury my bones in the midnight soil,” he begins, infusing the words with the air of theater. “Plant them shallow and water them deep. And in my place will grow a feral rose.” He leans down to Renata and cups her face, running a thumb across her bottom lip. “Soft red petals hiding sharp white teeth.”
“We are the roses that grew in the midnight soil,” he says, eyes bright as candles now. “Our thorns are sharp enough to prick. We are watered by life, and with its bounty, our roots grow deep, our blooms unmarred by age. In fact, for us, time fortifies, renders us more noble. We are no monster, no mean thing. We are nature’s finest flower.”
That the simple act of having a teenage body, no matter how it’s dressed, has always been enough to justify a man’s attention.
She knows these things, but there are no memories to go with them, and the few she has are like tea bags used too many times, all the flavor fading till it’s just tinted water.
Where others rot without, we rot within.” He raps his knuckles against his chest. “We are hollowed, bit by bit, as all that made us human dies. Our kindness. Our empathy. Our capacity for fear, and love. One by one, they slough away, until all that’s left is the desire to hunt, to hurt, to feed, to kill. That is how we die. Made reckless by our hunger. Convinced we are unkillable until someone or something proves us wrong.”
At first, it looks like dirt. Fine as sand, but twice as dark, and Alice doesn’t understand, even as El tells them for the hundredth time that she’s not trying to replace their mum. It’s not until she says, “This way, wherever you go, she’ll be with you.”
Chekhov's gun
He snorts. “Exactly. But normal people, too. After all, if I only catered to a certain clientele, I’d be out of business. There’s not that many of us.” Us. The word feels like an ill-fitting coat. She resists the urge to shrug it off. Instead asks, “Why not?” Ezra exhales another plume. “Fickleness, I suppose. And folly.”
Foreshdowing
You are the kind of bloom that thrives in any soil.
With that, she pulls back, drops into a brief but elegant curtsy. “My name,” she says, “is Sabine Olivares.” Sabine. That name. Charlotte does not know, then, how many times over the years it will spill out of her, as a longing, or a plea, or a curse. In that moment, all she knows is that she finds it strange and beautiful and fitting.
“Never be sorry,” she said, “for who you are.” Charlotte understood then that burning the pages of her journal had done nothing. Her mother already knew. She looked back at her husband and son, standing on the steps. “Some people keep their heart tucked so deep, they hardly know it’s there. But you,” she went on, turning back toward Charlotte, “you have always worn it like a second skin.” She ran a hand down her daughter’s arm. “Open to the world. You feel it all. The love and pain. The joy and hope and sorrow.” She pulled Charlotte close, carrying the scent of the garden. Of home. “It will
...more
How easy to forget the way time wears on other people when she is with Sabine, the two of them preserved like insects inside amber. How easy, and then how hard, to see the proof of it, that life races on, relentless in its pace.
This is why the past is left behind. Why they can only move forward, like Eurydice and Orpheus, never glancing back, lest they be trapped among the dead.
“Promise,” she says, soft and low, “that you will never hurt me.”
A small gold pendant on a matching chain. It is lovely, but the longer Charlotte studies it, the more certain she is that she’s seen it before, though she can’t remember where or when. Not until she sees that the small letter etched into its front, which at first she took for a C, is in fact a G, and that the pendant is in fact a cuff link, hammered flat.
Charlotte stares at the pendant, torn between amazement that Sabine has kept it all this time, and horror at the fact, and the idea that Sabine, who knows her mind so well, would ever think she’d want it.
Alice lies there, pressing the pendant against her chest until she can feel her pulse beating through the metal, pretends it’s the other end of their shared rope, that it won’t break, no matter how far Catty goes.
The pendant givng life
but she finds herself hooking the gold chain with her fingers and drawing the pendant from beneath her hoodie. The pendant, which isn’t a pendant but a locket, a vial. Her little piece of home. A bit of glaur, Catty called it—dirt, but not just any dirt. Her mother’s, taken from the grave, a gift from Eloise on that blue-tinted wedding day. She unscrews the hidden lid and tips the smallest bit into her palm, and the moment it touches her bare skin she is back in the cemetery plot, and all the strength is rushing out of her, the life leeching backward, her limbs shriveling and her heart drying
...more
Oh yeah this is how she kills sabine
didn’t know that, back when I found Penny. I wish I had. And it wouldn’t work if it had been a year, a month, even a week, but you’re newly made,” says Lottie, eyes alight. “Which means you’re still connected to her. Your blood. Your life. It’s like a rope that runs between you.” Alice’s hand drifts to her collar, the pendant cold against her skin. “If you kill Sabine, you’ll sever it. And you’ll go back to being what you were before.”
She'll get her life back; rope; pendant
