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Push her worry and anger aside, and try to solve this puzzle, even though she didn’t want to complete the picture emerging with every new and nasty piece.
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.
Think of the Gauntlet as a secret passage that appears when you say the magic words. But in this case, the magic words are a series of steps, a path you have to walk. You take your first steps in the labyrinth, and only then does the path become clear.”
What had he imagined? Some muttered words, a voice from the beyond? Had he thought there would be dignity in this? But this was what real magic looked like—indecent, decadent, perverse.
a little too much like a fairy tale, a cruel one where once she left the enchanted castle, she’d have no way back.
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.
Alex struck a match and held it to the note, then tossed the flaming paper into the nothingness where the table had been. It seemed to float there, edges curling, and before it could fall, she threw a handful of iron filings into the blaze. The words began to peel up from the paper and into the air. Good luck you’re dead
armory for more salt, and they’d brought the silver chains. They seemed silly and useless, toys for children, old wives’ tales.
too caught up in her own storms to be any kind of an anchor.
“A little revenge can be good for the soul,
Dawes seemed to close in on herself, the concerned friend receding, the mother hen emerging.
Magic was transgression, the blurring of the line between the impossible and the possible. There was something about crossing that boundary that seemed to shake loose all the morals and taboos people took for granted. When anything was within your grasp, it got harder and harder to remember why you shouldn’t take it—money, power, your dream job, your dream fuck, a life.
they love me until they hate me.”
“Fuck me,” she muttered. “Maybe a drink first.” Alex choked back a scream and whirled, her feet tangling. A man stood behind her in a spotless white suit. She checked herself, nearly toppling. She couldn’t make out his face in the darkness.
The things she thought no one would ever know about her. She felt fear crowding in and she had to push it away. There was no point waltzing with old partners when her dance card was already full.
I’m not here because I want to wear a cloak and play wizard. You all think the world beyond the Veil is something special, but that’s just because you haven’t had to look into that particular abyss your whole life.
Why raise children on the promise of magic? Why create a want in them that can never be satisfied—for revelation, for transformation—and then set them adrift in a bleak, pragmatic world?
The problem wasn’t books and fairy tales, just that they told half the story, offering up the illusion of a world where only the villains paid in blood, the ogre stepmothers, the wicked stepsisters, where magic was just and without sacrifice.
“You didn’t turn away. Even when you didn’t like what you saw in me. You kept looking.” Darlington’s gaze shifted and flickered like firelight. Gold and then amber. Bright and then shadowed. “Maybe I know a fellow monster when I see one.”
You tampered with forces far beyond your understanding or control. Do not think to paint yourselves the heroes when you broke every rule intended to protect—” Dawes gave a long sniffle. “Your rules are shit.
What if this wasn’t a punishment or a trial? What if, for once, luck was running in her direction instead of away? What if this was her prize for so much hurt? What if, this time, magic had worked the way it was supposed to, the way it did in stories?
Maybe because Mercy was so sweet, so smart, so kind—Alex forgot how much fight she had in her.
