The Record Keeper (Murphy Shepherd, #3)

by Charles Martin

I, as much as anyone, knew that hope is what feeds us. It’s the currency of mankind. The fuel of the soul. Without it, we wither and die.

when a kernel of wheat falls to the ground, it dies alone. But if it is buried, watered, and fertilized, it puts down roots, spirals toward the sun, blossoms, and produces fruit. And what comes up is never the same as what was buried. It’s exponentially more.

Whose you are matters more to the soul than who you are or what you are.

People in darkness don’t know they’re in darkness because it’s all they’ve ever known. It’s their world. They navigate primarily by bumping off things that are stronger. Immovable. They don’t know darkness is darkness until someone turns on a light. Only then does the darkness roll back like a scroll. It has to. Darkness

can’t stand light. And it hasn’t. Not since God spoke it into existence.

The problem comes when you turn on a light and find those in darkness who, having seen light, prefer the dark. Who retreat into the shadows to do their deeds in secret. They are the ashen-skinned, amber-eyed, fork-t...

From the beginning of time, light has shone into the darkness, and since that first spark, darkness—no matter how hard it tries, no matter what sword it wields or scheme it perpetrates—has not been able to overcome it. Ever.

Those of us who stand in the light wonder sometimes, How much longer can it last? This onslaught. How much more can we take? This constancy. Those of us who walk in the light grow weary. Our hope wanes. Fades. Darkness rages and threatens to drown us. We look around and wonder what happened. Where’d it go? Where’s the light?

Yes!

“When light walks into a room, the darkness rolls back like a scroll. It has to. Darkness can’t stand light. And while we live it in real time, it happens too fast, so we watch it in memory. To know the joy, we shut our eyes and remember having seen it.”

In Bones’s kingdom one man walked into the slave market and said, “What’s the price? For all of them.” And when the slave master quoted the price, Bones never flinched. He paid it. With his life.

Sometimes, given their depth, we become little more than the sum of our wounds, and it takes someone else to see what we can be instead of what we are.