Shattered (The Iron Druid Chronicles, #7)

by Kevin Hearne

“Then they must be pretty stupid, am I right?”

<I think life is like a ham bone if you live it right. You enjoy it and then you bury it when you’re finished. If you don’t enjoy it and you let it go to waste, you still have to bury it, so you might as well savor everything you can.>

Hal’s house is perched on a hill of granite and sandstone that the locals call Camelback Mountain. Big sprawling place with a swimming pool in the back. He talks to the house as he walks through, and lights come on even though it’s not dark outside yet, then strange music plays, using instruments I have never heard before. He gets me a cold beer in the kitchen and leads me to a room with couches and a large-screen television.

relationship. It’s flashy and indicates that he might belong to a tribe of modern men that Siodhachan told me about called the Douchebags.

This is reassuring to me. Amidst all the fancy plastic and unnatural materials of the modern world, some things still endure. Goat shenanigans are still fecking funny.

(null)

We return to the sitting area and spread ourselves around. Farid brings around glasses of whiskey, and I enjoy the sound of ice clinking against glass. Greta sits next to me on a couch and answers my questions in a low voice, and I keep asking them so that she will keep talking. Laughter swirls around the room like the ice in me drink,

It is decorated in earth tones, and the furnishings are all of natural wood, aside from the occasional cushion. The floors are hardwood too.

“What do the Druids believe about death?” “I don’t know what you mean. I mean, it happens.” “Right, but what happens after death?” “Feck if I know, Greta. I haven’t died yet.”

I suspect that many of us, if given the chance to make one person in our lives love us more, would have no trouble in choosing where to point a finger. We are all needy, all vulnerable, all terrified that perhaps that person has an excellent reason to withhold affection. We shape our purposes to make ourselves worthy and often do not see until much later how it was love—or perhaps the lack of it—that both picked us up and dropped us off at crossroads.

Yes, it is by our loves and hatreds that we are shaped and manipulated.

a room she calls the Iron Hall. It’s a grand name for a very small chamber, not much more than a closet, but it has a beautiful round table, a pair of stools, a cask of dark beer, and two glasses waiting inside. The walls, door, floor, and ceiling are all covered in solid black iron.

“An ignoranus,” Manannan explains, “is someone who’s both stupid and an arsehole.”