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“What are you doing?” he asked. “Sweeping the floor,” I replied, guileless as a newborn. “This is not a matter for levity,” he said. “No amount of it will save your life.” “You grossly underestimate the power of laughter,” I said.
“Whenever you’ve got a choice, do good, kiddo. It isn’t always fun or easy, but in the long run it makes your life better.”
Harry told me once that you can always tell when you’re about to rationalize your way to a bad decision. It’s when you start using phrases such as It would be wrong, but … His advice was to leave the conjunction out of the sentence: It would be wrong. Period.
“The Rack is more than just boobs, Justine,” I told her soberly. “It’s an energy field created by all living boobs. It surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.” Andi started giggling. “You’re insane.” “But functionally so,” I said, and adjusted myself to round out a little better. “Just let go your conscious self and act on instinct.” Justine stared blankly at me for a second. Then her face lightened and she let out a little laugh. “The Rack will be with us?” I couldn’t stop myself from cracking a smile. “Always.”
Harry’d always been a good source of advice about problems. He dealt with them on a continuous basis, after all, and in his studied opinion, if you had one problem, you had a problem. But if you had multiple problems, you might also have an opportunity. One problem, he swore, could often be used to solve another, and he had stories about a zombie tyrannosaurus to prove it.
“You know who I am. You know what I can do. Let her go.” She rolled her eyes and spun a finger through fine, straight black hair. “Why should I?” “Because you know what happened the last time some vampires abducted a little girl and I decided to take her back.”
“Butters,” he said. “Look. I know it’s hard. But there’s one way you deal with fear.” “How?” I asked him. “You stand up and you kick it in the fucking teeth,” he said, and there was a quiet, certain power in his voice that had nothing to do with magic. “You’ve forgotten the most important thing a Knight needs to remember, Butters.” “What’s that?” I breathed. “Knights of the Cross aren’t afraid of monsters,” he said. “Monsters are afraid of you. Act like it. Commit to it, hard. And have faith.”
“What if … I don’t know. What if I set something on fire?” “Maybe we’ll roast some marshmallows,” I said. She didn’t laugh, and she kept her face down, but her cheeks rounded up with a smile.
Nothing is truly safe in this world—and that being the case, why worry about threats that have not yet appeared? Far wiser to make what preparations one could, face trouble as it arose, and be happy in the meantime.
