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You have forgotten magic and the shapes that lurk at the fringes of the well-lit places. My people do not forget. We live here, beneath the playground of gods, far from the thrum of electric wires.”
Death was a threshold made of fire, she discovered, and though great comforts lived on either side, Aina now understood that it hurt to move through it, whether going forward or back.
for the first time in her life Aina felt no fear, because the most dangerous thing in the world had already decided in her favor.
“How many drugs you think that guy was on?” “All of them,” Kessler said.
Yes, I am a bitch. You don’t get to be a program manager without being a bitch. It’s on my résumé. I underlined it twice.”
They lived like a man forced to walk, never stopping, until he died.
“I am from the black places and the Long Ago. I can kill anything that can die, and a few things that cannot.”
Look now at me. The dark is terrible, surrounds you, and is never empty as it seems. Though monsters lurk, know this: none is hungrier than me.
She became a ribbon, caught the music’s pulse, and Ryn couldn’t look away.
“Krav maga? Ninjitsu? Do you do lessons? Do you need a sidekick?”
Walking into an emergency room after midnight was like wandering past a plot twist in other people’s lives.
She’s not hurting those men to get closer to the Bradford girl. Hate that pure and clean isn’t instrumental.” “You sound impressed.” “I tell people my idol’s Sherlock Holmes, but not really. I didn’t read Arthur Conan Doyle as a kid. I read Batman.” Kessler snorted. “You’re jealous of her.” “Incredibly.”
“She died.” Her body hadn’t yet cooled, though. “Her spirit was gone. It is… difficult to drag a spirit back through the gates. Your God doesn’t like us poaching her works, but I do as I please. It’s difficult; your souls are small but heavy as worlds. Pulling her back into ours nearly broke me.”
“Progress is always a little destructive, a little painful. Building new things always breaks down the old things.
“Do you want to go back?” Naomi asked. “There is no ‘back’ for me. My home is gone.” “What do you mean ‘gone’?” “Changed. Time makes us all homeless—eventually.”
There were times she believed pants to be humankind’s most worthwhile achievement.
An ache worked through Ryn, her limbs burning with the need to climb trees of hard bark, to sink into snowy litterfall and disappear into the wind that wove between trunks. She wanted to smell sap and lick it and hold the bitterness on her tongue, to drink the forest and be swallowed by it.
“Why are you panting? Thought she was tiny.” “There was also a bag of gold.” “The fuck?” “Look, I dunno, she had a bag of gold, it’s heavy. What do you want me to say?” “Ask her about the batarang.” Now it was Kessler’s turn to ask what the fuck. “Just do it.” A moment passed and Kessler muttered, “It, uh, was a gift from her date. She said.”
“There is a chance… a small one… that I may be slightly less straight than I thought.”
The stars couldn’t change and neither could Ryn.
The growl came softly from under his bed. It surged from the gap between the mattress and floor, made from wet ink and hatred.
