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I just like liminal spaces. They’re important in literature—in all branches of culture, really. But in story and folklore, they’re where the impossible happen. The spaces between.”
Wellington is not often dead. One of the things that had drawn me to it was how unrelentingly alive it was. It’s difficult to walk down the street without people waving at you, music from buskers grabbing your attention, the wind tearing at your clothes to make sure you know it’s there. At eleven at night on a Sunday, even the weather was quiet.
“You’re here. Ready for some breaking and entering?” “Hopefully just entering,” Charley said. He must have seen my face. “Not breaking.” “Oh, something’s bound to break tonight,” Millie returned. “A law. A window. The foundations of reality.” “The day,” Charley suggested with a smile. “That will break. Eventually.” Me. I didn’t say it, but I thought it. I was going to break.
“I don’t know who he is in your world—only who he is in ours, and that we can’t tell you. I know his voice, and his face, and the feel of him in my head. I know he’s taken possession of me, and twisted me. I know he means to destroy everything. I know he’s been in your world for such a long time, waiting. I know he’s coming, right now. Go.”
“Whoever comes down,” she said to me quietly, “don’t try to fight them off with a hardcover or anything. Just demand to talk to the summoner. He’ll want to talk to us, I’m certain.” I thought she was being a little optimistic, but I nodded. “All right.” “I mean it. I saw you try to take on Heathcliff.” “That was not typical for me,” I said. “I’m really far more likely to demand to talk to somebody, I promise.”
My brother, who used to be afraid to jump into the deep end of a swimming pool, was suddenly in his element. And I didn’t know how to get him out of it before he drowned.
connected to it. It called to me, the way it called to the others. And… you know when you read a book, sometimes, and you suddenly realize that you’ve been missing something your whole life, and you weren’t even aware, and all at once you’ve found it and are just a little bit more whole?”
“I wish one of us were a Wentworth, or a Colonel Brandon,” Darcy Three said, with a touch of bitterness. “Instead of so many Darcys. A war hero would be a lot more useful than a gentleman with ten thousand a year.” “I notice you don’t wish you were a Wentworth,” the White Witch said dryly.
“And we do extraordinary things for the people we love, do we not?” Frankenstein said. His wild eyes shone. “We pit ourselves against death itself in their names. We sell our very souls.”
She was not a monster. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Charley, after all, is her rival summoner, and I couldn’t quite see him as a hero at this moment. He was in pajamas.
“I’m sorry I let you do this,” I said. “I’m sorry I let you be scared, and worried, and hurt. I’m sorry I let you think I didn’t want you. I’m sorry for reading you the way I wanted to see you, all your life. That’s enough to be sorry for, okay? I refuse to be sorry I lost you.”
