The Gifts That Bind Us (All Our Hidden Gifts, #2)

by Caroline O'Donoghue

Telepathy is the trouble you go looking for and have no one to blame afterward but yourself.

But if you want to change how someone thinks, you have to know how they think and why they think it.”

That is what makes spells so powerful, not the words themselves but the focus and consciousness you put on them. You understand?”

Nuala always says she has no real magic of her own, but then the wind gathers around her and her eyes turn silver, and I know that something deep and cautious lives inside her. Something so wild and powerful that it frightens me.

Now this is another part of Roe’s life that I’m not a part of: another happy memory made without me, a living relic of his unhappiest ones.

for the first time I get why my mother said that it was important to understand the people we hate. To understand that everyone was someone’s child once, and that something dreadful must have happened to make them so sick.

I know that spells cast in cruelty only pay in kind, and that every piece of magic you call on has to be done for the right reasons.

“Magic loves sex,” she says. “What? Why?” “Because it’s natural. Because it’s the opposite of control. Because it drives men crazy. Because it gives women an income. Because everything that hates magic also hates sex.”

It strikes me that a witch, a minor god, and a former zealot all living together for two weeks is a reality show I would pay to watch.

That this is one of those memories that you know is a memory as you are making it, and that it will always be known to me as some kind of end, some kind of beginning.