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May the snake that doesn’t bite me live a thousand years.
Comfort was the drug she hadn’t understood until it was too late and she was hooked on cups of tea and book-lined shelves, nights uninterrupted by the wail of sirens and the ceaseless churning of helicopters overhead.
Calista?”
Omnia mutantur, nihil interit. Everything changes, nothing perishes.
this was what real magic looked like—indecent, decadent, perverse.
She read paperbacks too, one after the next like she was chain-smoking—romance, science fiction, old pulp fantasy. All she wanted to do was sit, unbothered in a circle of lamplight, and live someone else’s life.
A single word. Darlington’s voice. Desperate, demanding. Wait.
Alex did her best to look innocent, but she hadn’t had much practice.
You want to open a door that isn’t meant to be opened. There was nothing to do but keep going.
Darlington’s hair had always been kept tidy but not too tidy, as effortless as the rest of him. Now it curled around his neck. Apparently there were no barbers in hell.
The monster demanded that I do his bidding! He bade me select reading material for him!
someone singing an old song about Bette Davis’s eyes.
It sounded foolish, childish—I’m special, I have a quest—
Death isn’t just a place you visit.
“Darlington was. He’d go to hell for me, for you, for anyone who needed saving.”
“I’ve gone through every moment that led up to the party so many times. What I wore, what I said. Why did he pick me that night? What did he see?”
Forgive yourself for going to the party. Forgive yourself for assuming the world isn’t full of beasts at the door.
“We keep going,” Alex repeated. To hell and back.
“This is what your magic is for, isn’t it? This is what it does. Props up the people in power, lets the people with everything take a little more?”
In those moments, she felt something deeper than the mere need to survive, a glimpse at what it might mean if she could simply learn and stop trying so hard all the time.
had no idea what it meant to hurt so much to live you might wake up one morning ready to die.
You suggest that we, creatures born of God and made in His image, are the lowliest of beasts, timid rabbits trapped in a snare, made not for great study or high achievement, but to be consumed? This is the purpose and fate of humanity?
Our bodies are food for worms. Why should our souls not be made meals too?
That was the problem with love. It was hard to unlearn, no matter how harsh the lesson.
“Galaxy Stern,” Darlington said, his eyes flashing gold, “I have been crying out to you from the start.”
Take then this lesson: “When faced with death, better to dance than to lie down for it.”
The people who were supposed to protect you didn’t really do the job, did they?” And they never had.
we all amount to nothing in the end and there is nothing more terrifying than nothing.”
“Like a hell heist.”
She’d never liked that phrase, diamond in the rough. All that meant was they had to cut you again and again to let the light in.
She spent every day afraid, of saying the wrong thing, asking the wrong question, humiliating herself.
“You found me once, Stern. You’ll find me again. Now go.”
This is my home, she vowed, and nothing will take it from me.
That was all there was in this world. No heroes or villains, just the people you’d brave the waves for, and the ones you’d let drown.
They knew everything about each other. They knew nothing at all. He had a sense that they had entered into an uneasy truce, but he couldn’t quite name the war. She was more beautiful than he remembered.
“I’m bound to you, Stern. To the woman who brought me out of hell. I will serve you ’til the end of days.”
he’d felt like a stranger in a place he’d once known he belonged.
He’d been a knight, and what was a knight but a servant with a sword in his hand?
Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.
I think I’ve been waiting my whole life for the moment someone would see something in me that wasn’t ordinary.”
A little magic. A talent for taking a beating. A demon at her side. That was all she had, but maybe it was all she needed.
