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I’ve loved him through worse. I’ve loved him hopelessly.… So what’s a little less hope?
Baz fell in love with what I was—power and potential unchecked. Nuclear bombs are nothing but potential.
All Baz has been able to focus on for the last year is Simon; he can’t see past the hearts in his own eyes.
Lesson learned: Relaxation is the most insidious humdrum.
But it was a mistake thinking of that as an end. There is no end. Bad things happen, and then they stop, but they keep on wreaking havoc inside of people.
I’ve told her to text me like a normal person. (I texted her to tell her.) “But you don’t reply to my texts!” she replied. “Yes, but at least I read them, Penny. When you leave a voicemail, I just recoil in horror.”
she’s holding on to the past as desperately as I’m trying to run from it. I was there before things fell apart. But my coming home won’t put anything back together.
don’t really fit in here,” she said to me one night. We were sitting on the sand, with our toes in the surf. At the edge of the party again. Ginger was wearing a peach tank top and holding a red plastic cup. “But I don’t fit in any better anywhere else.” It was like she’d pulled the feeling right out of my heart.
We still felt strange and lost, I think, but it was good to be strange and lost together.
He’s lovely. A bit of a sad mess. Dull and pale and rough round the edges. But still so lovely.
it hurts to look at you when you’re this happy. And it hurts to look at you when you’re depressed. There’s no safe time for me to see you, nothing about you that doesn’t tear my heart from my chest and leave it breakable outside my body.
Penny is sitting across from him; I’ve seen zombies with more spirit.
Simon’s never said it, but Baz has: “You think you’re always right, Bunce.” So what if I do? I usually am right. It’s just good sense to go through life assuming that I am. It’s the law of averages. Better to assume I’m always right and occasionally be wrong than to fiddle about doubting myself all the time, saying to everyone, “Yes, but what do you think?”
I look around. There are a few Normals walking by, inexplicably dressed like fairies. (Not like real fairies; they’re not wearing cobwebs. They’re dressed like fairies from Normal fantasies. With costume-shop wings and glitter on their faces.)
He’s coming into himself. And I’m coming apart.
“En garde, you knave. You reprobate scapegrace.”
You have witchcraft in your lips,’” Baz says. “Is that more Shakespeare?” “Yeah, sorry.
The vampire impaled on my axe handle has already started to wither. Like it was the magic in his heart holding him together.
Magicians have to live amongst Normals because their language is the key to our magic. But if they knew about us … If Normal people knew that magic existed, and that someone else had it … We’d never be free.
We do see actual pixies an hour later. Spinning in a tall field, a dozen in a circle, with clouds of fireflies in their hair. “Those are magic,” I say. All Simon can see are the lights.
He told me to avoid America at all costs: “Every kind of magician and magickal creature has made its way there. There’s old magic and new. Hybrids and twists you can’t anticipate. It’s the most dangerous place in the world.”
Bunce is staring up at the goat’s face, like she recognizes him from a film. “Are you one of the Fomorians?” He sneers at her. “You are, aren’t you.” She’s so curious, she’s forgotten to be scared. “Chaos demon,” she says excitedly to Simon and me. “Droughts, blight, deaths at sea.”
I’ll be damned and drawn and fucking quartered before I watch some devil-eyed goat feel up my boyfriend right in front of me.
I give him the thumbs-up, which is our personal code for “Everything’s fine.” (It’s a very obvious code, but you only need a sneaky code for when you’re not fine.)
Welp. I screwed that up. I was supposed to charm her. Some people do find me charming, believe it or not. When I was 18, I got a creek dryad to tell me her life story. She gave me mulberry cakes and dandelion wine. It’s the first time I ever got drunk.
How did I learn so much about magic? My strategy is simple: I tell the truth. I always use my real name (even though fairy tales tell you not to). I always say exactly what I want from a situation and exactly what I mean.
It’s not worth trying to charm something truly dark. And sometimes you can’t tell if they’re truly dark. Sometimes you give them your real name, and they never give it back.
“I know Agatha. She’d rather kiss a troll than call and talk to me on the phone.”
Simon was like a nuclear missile with self-esteem issues; it was exhausting.
“Do you believe us?” Bunce asks. Margaret shrugs. “Believe you are malformed outcast tourist trash.”
Penny’s still staring at Shepard. “The mountains are dragons?” Shepard nods. “Isn’t it incredible?
He tugs on my hand. Crowley, we’re bad at this. I can’t ever tell what Simon wants. Does that tug mean “I like you”? Or is it “Take care”? Or “Give me my hand back”? I swear what it feels most like is “I’m sorry.” We can’t even hold hands without exchanging apologies. If we knew how to talk to each other, it’d be over, wouldn’t it? If either of us ever found the words …
He keeps touching me, and I keep letting him. And I haven’t felt, I don’t know, that static that I usually feel, like what’s happening between us is a building I have to run out of before it collapses on me.
America changes every time you look away from it.
I touch Simon Snow like he’s made of glass. Like he’ll explode if I cross the wrong wires.
“Come on.” His voice was gentle. “You can drop the artifice. There are no secrets between
“It’s perfect,” Shepard says. “Vampires are always way over the top.” Baz shifts his evil eye over to Shepard. “No, it’s perfect because it’s perfect.”
Baz didn’t blink when we walked into this hotel, the theme of which seems to be What if Dracula opened a hotel and didn’t care whether everyone guessed he was Dracula?
“For snake’s sake, Basil.”
When Shepard looks up, we’re all staring at him. You could hear a gnome whisper.
people.” “I don’t chase people.” I clear my throat and raise my eyebrows. “I usually don’t chase people,” he says. “I just pursue … their acquaintance.” “And their secrets.”
“People offer up their secrets,” he says. “You don’t have to chase them. There’s nothing people—and nixies and trolls and giants—would rather tell you than their secrets.”
“I can’t decide if you’re more like a starfucker or more like a big-game hunter.” “Neither! I’m a scientist, like … an explorer.” “Oh, good, that always turns out well for the explored.”
He has objectively nice hands. I notice this because mine are objectively subpar. My palm-to-finger ratio is too high, and my fingers are chubby. There’s nothing for it.
I had the most powerful mage in the world as my best friend. Together we were invincible. Oh, hell … that was never true, was it? I was never invincible. I was just in the vicinity.
Surviving monsters doesn’t make you monster-proof. Escaping once doesn’t enhance your odds of escaping again.
They never listen. And now here we are again. Here we are, finally. Fresh the fuck out of luck.
How have I lived through so many happy endings without ever learning how to save the day?
