Paladin's Hope (The Saint of Steel, #3)

by T. Kingfisher

“Well, if you want my professional opinion, this great goddamn hole in his chest is probably what killed him.”

Doctor Piper dealt with corpses and for the most part, he preferred them to the living. He didn’t mind living people, he was perfectly happy to meet them and talk to them and even work with them, but corpses never, ever asked stupid questions.

The one advantage police had over paladins was that guards had no problem believing that someone would randomly shove pointy logs into other people. Paladins generally took a little longer to get there. Piper suspected that their sense of innocence and moral outrage kept regrowing, possibly through divine means.

“I’m amazed you can think of dinner,” muttered Galen. “Or fish.” “The dead are dead,” said Piper, not bothering to mention that he definitely wouldn’t be eating fish. “The living still need to eat.”

Generally it takes longer for me to make a fool of myself in front of good-looking men. I’m getting more efficient.

Granted, Piper’s dating history was not particularly extensive and he had always been terrible at pursuing other men, but he was still pretty sure that the morgue wasn’t the place where you were supposed to start.

The world was full of misery and you had to learn eventually that it wasn’t your job to fix all of it. Even when it came in attractively built packages.

The thing that no one warned you about insanity was how incredibly tedious it was. You were always having to explain yourself and apologize, over and over, and you got so tired of being crazy.

You couldn’t hurt the dead. You never had to second guess yourself. Nothing you did or didn’t do could make it any worse. (Tell people you wished you were dead, though, and they thought you were suicidal. It was too much trouble to try to explain that you were fine being alive, you just envied the dead their composure.)

There was something about having gigantic sharp objects slamming down close enough to cut your hair that really focused the mind on the here-and-now.

All I want in life is to have a sexy man make passionate love to me, eat a nice meal together, and then I’ll leave to go chop up corpses. Is that really so much to ask?

“It’s a noble sentiment, but you can’t ask people to pour themselves out for something that doesn’t care and can’t be fixed and at the end they’re empty and nothing changes.”

Maybe a hero is just what we call someone who doesn’t have the sense to stop before they destroy themselves.”

“How many times a day do you think about Piper?” Galen swallowed. Just once, but it lasts the whole day.

Eventually, he went to prayer and the bottle, the two great comforters of humanity since the discovery of gods and yeasts.