More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Curran walked in behind me and took in the living room. His thick eyebrows rose. “What?” Roman asked. “No altar?” Curran asked. “No bloody knives and frightened virgins?” “No sacrificial pit ringed with skulls?” I asked. “Ha. Ha.” Roman rolled his eyes. “Never heard that one before. I keep the virgins chained up in the basement. Do you want some coffee?”
Only two kinds of people drink their coffee black: cops and serial killers. Sit, sit.”
“It can’t be that bad,” I told him. “Oh, it’s bad.” Roman nodded. “My dad refused to help my second sister buy a house, because he doesn’t like her boyfriend. My mother called him and it went badly. She cursed him. Every time he urinates, the stream arches up and over.”
What am I, a heathen?” Technically, he was a heathen.
“So why did your father mess with the convoys?” Roman asked. “No reason. He does it to aggravate me. He’s an immortal wizard with a megalomaniac complex. He doesn’t understand words like ‘no’ and ‘boundaries.’ It bugs him that I have this land. He can’t let it go, so he sits on my border and pokes it. He tried to build a tower on the edge of Atlanta. I made him move it, so now he’s building himself ‘a small residence’ about five miles out.” “How small?” Roman asked. “About thirty thousand square feet,” Curran said.
“Parents.” Roman heaved a sigh. “Can’t live with them. Can’t get away from them. When you try to move, they buy a house in your new neighborhood.” “That’s one thing about having both of your parents murdered,” Curran said. “I don’t have parent problems.” Roman and I looked at him.
Although lately Mahon had been unusually nice to me. It was probably a trap.
He put his arm around me. “The Conclave is only a dinner.” “Don’t say it.” “How . . .” I glared at him. “I mean it! I want a nice quiet night.” “. . . bad could it be?” “Now you ruined it. If a burning giant busts through a window while we’re at the Conclave and tries to squish people, I will so punch you in the arm.”
They looked at him and thought of sex. Then they looked at his better half and decided that he wasn’t worth dying over. Especially lately, because Andrea was nine months pregnant and communicating mostly in snarls.
“You can’t let people insult your wife, Curran. One day you’ll have to choose diplomacy or your spouse. I’m telling you now, it’s got to be your wife. Diplomacy doesn’t care if you live or die. Your wife does.”
“You look like you want to murder somebody,” Derek said. “Don’t I normally look that way?” “Not like this.” “It’s probably because I have one nerve left and my father keeps jumping up and down on it.”
“How go the preparations for the wedding?” “Very well. How goes the world domination?” “It has its moments.”
Barbarism usually produces swift death. Cruelty is the mark of a civilized human.
Anyway, we have bigger problems. The Witch Oracle wants to see you.” “No.” When the Witch Oracle had something to tell me, it was never anything good, like You’ll live long, grow fat, and be happy. It was always, The world is ending. Fix it!
I’d met his father. He was a rail-thin, dour man. If Grigorii ever smiled, his face would crack and fall off his head.
Great. Come down to the witch forest, enter a deep dark cave. What could go wrong? Just once I would like to have an important meeting in a happy little meadow or an orchard.
“What?” “I love when you bare your teeth at me. All the shapeshifter living has been rubbing off on you. You’d make such a cute shapeshifter.” “I will fucking throw you off this tower.”
“I’m trying to decide if I really heard what you said or if somehow my brain quit on me and I hallucinated.”
“Did you run any of this by Curran?” “I told him I was about to do something idiotic and dangerous, and he told me to go ahead and let him know if he could help in any way.” “I don’t understand your relationship.”
“You know how paranoid Jim is. You know what he does to potential threats. He is proactive. Why did you have to screw with him?”
“My father told me that he has a warning system set up in Mishmar. The moment I walk in there, he’ll drop everything and rush over there by some mysterious magical means. He didn’t tell me how, but I think whatever method he’ll be using will be damn fast.” “Why?” Barabas asked. “Because he doesn’t want me talking to my grandmother.” Barabas looked at Curran. Curran shrugged. “It’s a family thing. Sometimes your father puts your semidead grandmother into a really bad place and is ashamed of it.” “Yeah,” Barabas said. “We’ve all been there.”
“Old ladies come in two flavors: sweet or mean.
There were four main incentives that moved people to do things: power, wealth, knowledge, and emotion.
Baby B opened her mouth and cried with all of the despair her little heart could muster. I got up and took her to Andrea. “I see how it is.” She squinted at me. “While she’s quiet, everyone wants to hold her, but when she cries, give her back to her parents.”
“You have something that belongs to me.” Control. Zen. Screaming in ancient languages would not be zen.
“Father, you are sending mixed signals. You dispatched a woman to murder me today and now you’re upset about my wedding reception?” “It’s not my fault you decided to marry a pauper. Besides, you enjoy a challenge.”
Julie dashed out of the house. “Sienna called.” Damn it all. “What did she say?” “Beware the dragon.” Well, wasn’t that a cherry on top of my morning.
FLYING WAS OVERRATED. Heights were very overrated. Flying with wings was probably less overrated when said wings belonged to you, but when you were dangling in a swing that bopped up and down every time the angel of death carrying you beat his wings, you reached a new level of appreciation for walking. Walking was amazing and awesome, and I really wanted to do it again as soon as possible.
“You’re not a wedding planner, you’re a menace. Stop planning my wedding.”
“It’s my wedding. It’s for me.” “No, your wedding night is for you. The wedding is for everyone else.”
“It’s not that I’m that evil, really. I’m just beloved by evil things.”
So far I had the god of evil and the god of terror on my side. My good-guy image was taking a serious beating. Maybe I should recruit some unicorns or kittens with rainbow powers to even us out.
theosis,”
“Did you . . . ?” Teddy Jo let it trail off. “Absorb the essence of Deimos? Yes.” Teddy Jo shook his head. “It’s not apotheosis. Apotheosis implies reaching the state of rapture and divinity through faith. It’s not an appearance avatar.” “No,” I said. “That would imply the deliberate voluntary descent of a deity to be reborn in a human body, and from what I understand there was nothing voluntary about the process. Deimos wasn’t reincarnated.” “There is no word for it,” Christopher said. Teddy Jo rocked forward, his hands in a single fist against his mouth. “That’s because it goes against the
...more
Just another night in Atlanta. Sitting on my porch between a Greek god who was really a human and an angel of death who was having an existential crisis.
Theophage,”
“You’re the nicest angel of death I know.” “Yeah, yeah. Get in the damn swing.”
Life had tried to kill me in all sorts of ways lately, but falling off of a flying horse was a new and unwelcome development.
I had acquired a lovely reddish-purple color. Both of my shoulders had turned raspberry red. The edges of my wounds were puffy. Irene must’ve had something nasty on her blades, or maybe Mishmar wasn’t the most sterile environment to get cut in. My left hip, my knees—and probably my back, judging by the lake of pain that pulled in my trapezius muscles—were a deep blue, too. “My impersonation of a peacock is proceeding as planned.”
“Curran, where are you going?” “To make breakfast.” Sleep evaporated. My eyes snapped open. If I didn’t get downstairs in the next ten minutes, he’d smoke out the kitchen again with bacon. I made it down in time to save the bacon from a terrible fate.
“This is Mary Louise Garcia,” Roman said. “She is the head baker for Clan Heavy’s Honey Buns bakery.” Mary smiled at me and waved her fingers. “Mary very kindly agreed to bring over samples so you could select a wedding cake.” “I did.” Mary nodded. “Mary turns into a grizzly. A very large grizzly.” “I know who Mary is,” I told him. “I met her before, at Andrea’s wedding.” “If you don’t pick a wedding cake, Mary will sit on you and stuff all this cake into your mouth until you make a selection.”
Crocuta crocuta spelaea.
“If you remove adversity, you remove ingenuity and creativity with it. There is no need to strive to make something beautiful or better if it already is.”
You’re like a crazy cat lady, but you collect killers instead of fluffy cats.”
“I don’t collect killers.” “Yes, you do, and those who aren’t killers turn into killers by the time you’re done. You made Julie into a maniac. That child has more knives on her than a squad of the PAD. Christopher was the only stray who couldn’t fight, and now it turns out he’s a god of terror. Why am I not surprised?”
“You make me want to stab you.” “I have that effect on many people.”
“You remind me of me.” Erra groaned. “You are the punishment for all my transgressions.”
People go through the trouble of lying to get something they want.
“Erra?” I said softly. She appeared next to me. “I cannot tell you how disturbing this is,” Ghastek said. “You’re telling me. You know she killed my favorite mule?” “You killed me,” Erra said. “I think we’re even.”
