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All she wanted to do was sit, unbothered in a circle of lamplight, and live someone else’s life.
How easily he speaks of magic, as if it is not forbidden, as if it does not always ask a terrible price.
“I’ve got it,” he said. “You always looked like you had trouble chasing you.” Alex jabbed the door-close button. “So?” “Now you look like it caught up.”
“I didn’t drag you anywhere.” “I didn’t walk barefoot across New Haven in the dead of night for kicks.
“Stories exist in all worlds. They are immutable. Like gold.”
Power could become too easy. There were too many opportunities to try just because you could.
“Darlington was. He’d go to hell for me, for you, for anyone who needed saving.” “Alex,” Michelle said, dusting off her skirt, “he’d go to hell just to take notes on the climate.”
“I like expensive things.” “He’s not a cashmere scarf, Mercy. He has horns.” “I have a birthmark shaped like Wisconsin.” “I’m leaving.”
If it is, we’ll have to wake the Gauntlet by anointing the first passage with blood.” “Why is it always blood? Why can’t it ever be jam or blue crayon?”
Magic was transgression, the blurring of the line between the impossible and the possible.
Things you love, things you need, they don’t stop taking.
“This is what your magic is for, isn’t it? This is what it does. Props up the people in power, lets the people with everything take a little more?”
That was the problem with love. It was hard to unlearn, no matter how harsh the lesson.
“When faced with death, better to dance than to lie down for it.”
“Because we all amount to nothing in the end and there is nothing more terrifying than nothing.”
“Dress for the job you want.” “What job do you want?” “I don’t know,” Mercy said. “But if magic is real, I want to make a good impression.”
The problem wasn’t books and fairy tales, just that they told half the story, offering up the illusion of a world where only the villains paid in blood, the ogre stepmothers, the wicked stepsisters, where magic was just and without sacrifice.
“Life is cruel. Magic is real. And I’m not ready to die.”
To pay your debts, you had to know who you owed. You had to decide who you were willing to go to war for and who you trusted to jump into the fray for you. That was all there was in this world. No heroes or villains, just the people you’d brave the waves for, and the ones you’d let drown.
I think you well know that one can be both a murderer and a good man. Or at least a man who tries to be good. If only the evil did terrible things, what a simple world it would be.
That knowledge ate at you every day. You lived on a tightrope, waiting for the moment the rope would vanish. It was its own kind of hell.
A little magic. A talent for taking a beating. A demon at her side. That was all she had, but maybe it was all she needed. “Come on, Darlington,” she said. “Let’s give them hell.”
