It was disturbingly close to the way we’d always looked at things. It bore a striking resemblance to my family’s expectation that one day, you’d go on a job and come back with a fiancé, someone who’d seen how bad things could get, someone who would understand. And of course we’d raise our children with smiles on their faces and knives behind their backs, because the Covenant was out there, lurking, a faceless, amorphous monster in the night. We had to be prepared to defend what was ours.
