Don't Fear the Reaper (The Indian Lake Trilogy, #2)

by Stephen Graham Jones

If you’re a shark, though, you keep moving, don’t you? Keep moving or die. That’s been Toby’s mental bumpersticker ever since the massacre—a strict policy of constant movement means that bad night in the water gets farther away with every day, with every swish of the tail.

The booth he sits in day after day on top of the dam, it’s not a vantage point, it’s not a job; it’s a cell. He’s serving his sentence, doing his time.

“Now you’re the adult who doesn’t believe this is really happening. And, what always happens to that adult? Do you still remember, or do you forget all the true things when you grow up, Peter Pan?”

Pater noster, qui es in caelis in a rhythm Jade can almost clock, and he keeps on saying it, but the words are hardly making it past his lips now. All Jade can tell of them, it’s that it’s an apology. The kind you make when you’re… afraid? Of dying?

what she left with was the feeling that there was a wildness in Ginger Baker now. That she’d gone into the woods, but she hadn’t come all the way out yet, and maybe never would.

If you wind a toy up and it crashes into a vase, then you’re responsible for breaking that vase, not the toy, the toy is innocent, the toy is the victim, here—another v—never mind the breakage all around it.

Because she’s Jade fucking Daniels. And a thousand men like you can’t even reach up to touch her combat boots.