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Not to be outdone, her eldest daughter, Cassandra, had blithely added, “Besides, we don’t think even you can turn a karaoke party into a bloodbath.”
“We’ve been here for three hours and you ain’t had to bleed on nothin’.” His grin was broad enough to show his back molars. “If we can make it another hour, you and I set a new personal best, and Quentin owes me twenty dollars.”
“That’s the Luidaeg, singing ‘Poor Unfortunate Souls.’ In a karaoke bar. In front of other people.”
“Sometimes the places that should be home aren’t,” he said. “Sometimes there’s no one we can blame for that, and so we blame ourselves, because aren’t we the easiest targets? It’s not like anyone will come to our defense when all the loathing and finger-pointing is happening in the privacy of our own minds.”
but that’s the thing about parents: they’re never simple. They’re never straightforward. And try as we might, we can never quite be free of the shadows they cast over us.
“Ahhh.” She smiled knowingly. “You triggered the sentries. Got yourself ensmallinated. Fun times!”
People are complicated. That’s the problem with people. It would be so much easier if they could all be put into easy little boxes and left there, never changing, never challenging the things I decided about them.
“But we’re well sorry now, honest we are,” said Poppy brightly. “Can’t make an omelet without killing a few chickens.”
The Luidaeg is a sledgehammer in a world of scalpels, and when she gets involved, it leaves a mark.
Some wounds never really heal. They just scab over enough to let you keep on going.
Language is an invasive species. Let it take root in new soil, and you’ll never beat it out, no matter how hard you try.”
“Putting eggs and—is this sausage? Fascinating—in a tortilla shell is a relatively new idea. It speaks to a shortness of time. People never roll an entire meal up into something portable when they have time to linger.
Because sometimes the best intentions could lead to some very dark places, and once you were there, it could be almost impossible to find your way home again, unless there was someone willing to help you.
“If you hurt her, I’ll rip your throat out with my teeth, and nobody will punish me, because the Queen in the Mists loves me more than she loves almost anyone else in the world,” said Madden pleasantly.
Nothing entered on our company servers was a secret to me, although I allowed my employees the pretense of privacy—when someone slipped and admitted they had called in sick to attend a concert, or spent a little extra time on their social media accounts, I did not intervene. A certain amount of relaxing naughtiness seemed required for them to continue operating at peak efficiency.
I had a great deal of respect for his straightforward nature, and for his willingness to pick people up by the throat. It seemed efficient.
