Strange Practice (Dr. Greta Helsing, #1)

by Vivian Shaw

the longevity and lack of aging were a dead giveaway,

I don’t, he had said. I don’t know for a fact. But I know that I know how to do this job. I trust in my own skill and experience to help me make good decisions. When it comes right down to it, you must be able to trust yourself, before asking your patients to place their trust in you. If you cannot do that, do not pursue medicine as a career.

They had been quite ordinary, if intense in their devotions to a particular view of God.

taking on the role of these people’s very specific image of God had posed no challenge whatsoever.

“Imagine you’ve prayed all your life,” he continued, “that you’ve been taught to pray, taught to believe that you must give praise in prayer and that you are not to expect the blessing of hearing anything ever answer back—that expecting anything to reply to you is hubris and wickedness—but one day there’s this little voice, this still small voice, that does reply. And you believe it and you love it and you worship it, just as you have been taught to all your life … and it shows you wonderful things inside your head, and takes away your fear and pain. And it tells you how to make things … and where to go … and what to do to people with those things, once you get there.”

claiming to be the Voice of God when you are not, in fact, the Voice of God is something upon which Heaven frowns. The job’s taken, you know.”