Muse of Nightmares (Strange the Dreamer, #2)

by Laini Taylor

Sometimes the limits of understanding shift too quickly to track, and it felt like being swept out to sea by a rogue wave and having to swim back, against riptides, finally staggering ashore to a landscape made unfamiliar by cataclysm.

“There’s the kind of guest who’s honored to be invited, and the kind who believes he’s bestowing honor by accepting.”

She had seen horrors hidden in a biscuit tin and planted under a seedling so the roots would grow around it and hold it fast. The mind is good at hiding things, but there’s something it cannot do: It can’t erase. It can only conceal, and concealed things are not gone. They rot.

His smiles had been pickled things, as though they’d been preserved in vinegar on some earlier occasion, to be pulled out to act as garnish to his artfully plated expressions.

A bold young queen in that distant world was even now training a legion of angels and chimaera to battle the darkness and hopefully destroy it. But that’s another story.

Once upon a time there was a silence that dreamed of becoming a song, and then I found you, and now everything is music.

It wasn’t even an alternate version of his life. He hadn’t gone back in time and done everything differently to get to this place. It turned out that sometimes it’s enough to start doing things differently now.