The Last Graduate (The Scholomance, #2)

by Naomi Novik

Maleficer relationships tend to go Bonnie-and-Clyde or Frankenstein-and-Igor: not very appealing.

She sat there eating them and reading a book, making a picture straight out of the freshman orientation handbook, with tiny petals drifting across the scene like pink snow. Living as much as she could, because she wasn’t going to get much more of a chance.

I wanted to sob for Mum, for Orion, for anyone at all to save me, and there wasn’t anyone. There was only me.

He didn’t even make it sound appropriately martyr-like; just threw the idea out there as if that were a perfectly reasonable option for us all to consider.

so get back over here and kiss me again, and if you do try to drain my mana, I’ll tear off one of the doors and beat you senseless.”

“You’re the only right thing I’ve ever wanted.”

“There’s no such thing as normal people,” I said, a desperate flailing. “There’s just people, and some of them are miserable, and some of them are happy, and you’ve the same right to be happy as any of them—no more and no less.”

“I know it’s not fair, El. But I just need to know. I never had a plan except to go home and kill mals. I never wanted anything else. But now I do. I want you. I want to be with you. I don’t care if it’s in New York or Wales or anywhere else. And I just need to know if that’s okay. If I can—if I can have that. If you want that, too.

I’m not going to play it safe if you say yes, and I’m not going to do anything dumb if you say no.” “What you mean is, you’ll do an enormous number of truly stupid things no matter what!”

It had stopped pissing down snake-things,

I can’t be that girl. I can’t be the smart girl. I can only be me.”

Seduced by her own spreadsheets, probably.

He looked over and caught me watching him and smiled so blithely that I immediately wanted to run over just to punch him in the mouth, or just possibly kiss him one last time,

Orion landed in the full churning current still whirling off the detritus, and the mals actually split to go around him as he just stood there, bright-eyed and not breathing particularly hard, and cracked his neck to one side like he’d just got warmed up properly. He even gave me a quick infuriating grin before he plunged back into the fray.

I didn’t know those normal kids and maybe I’d never know them, but each one of them was a story whose unhappy ending hadn’t been written yet, and in its place I’d inscribed one line with my own hand: And then they graduated from the Scholomance.

you couldn’t help but feel, watching it, that he was doing what he was meant for—something so perfectly aligned with his nature that it was as easy as breathing.

I was glad, so glad, even pinned down in this room with all the monsters in the world trying to come at me, at Orion, because it wasn’t despair in his way after all; it was just the clumsiness of learning. He could want other things. I wasn’t the only thing he’d ever want; I was just the first other thing he’d wanted.

Or maybe if you only gave someone a reasonable chance of doing some good, even an enclave kid might take it.

I’d been ready to go through the door and boast to Mum of what I’d done, to wait with queenly grace for my knight in shining armor to come and receive my hand, his reward and mine, and set out on our crusade to save any tarnished bits of the world that still needed to be polished up.

if anything in the universe wanted killing, it was that thing, that horrible monstrous thing; it needed to die.