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would have hard work and harsh lessons and learn to forge the steel her parents had slid so smoothly into her heart into a weapon that she could wield, not merely a spike to impale herself upon. The Wolcott twins had started from the same place. They had never once been the same.
Weakness is always easier to perceive from the outside, and every good predator knows how to pick out the most vulnerable members of a herd.
Sweet Jack, who was so brutally sour in self-defense, who would one day meet the wind that whispered through the cracks in her walls and learn what it meant to soften, he could no more imagine handing her over to a monster than he could fathom slicing off his own arm for a werewolf’s supper.
He was happy to build the foundations of his own principality’s future on the narrow shoulders of a fair-haired girl who hyperventilated when parts of her meal touched one another.
Jack might not notice looking at anyone differently than anyone else, but that was at least in part because she seemed to be one of those lucky few who found beauty everywhere she looked.
gentling his voice as much as he possibly could, so that it was less the rumble of thunder and more the rattle of bones in a forgotten crypt.
The lightning, like the hungry hand of the Moon, reached down and grasped it tight, and everything was brilliance and the burn.
Her kindness was as intrinsic to her as her loveliness, if not more so, for beauty can be spoilt, can change with the times, but kindness is eternal.
“The balance,” she said. “A vampire hunts us in the night, and our survival hinges on the patience and charity of a man everyone refers to as ‘mad.’ If there was ever balance in these Moors, it died long before either of us was born.”
she was happy, because she was finally allowed to decide who she was and what that meant.
Jack didn’t know the phrase “family estrangement,” but if she had, she would have been forced to admit that it sounded uncomfortably like the family she and her sister had left behind, a world where little girls had existed to be seen and not heard, where the only thing Jill could ever have done right was somehow transform herself into the little boy their father so desperately wanted, and the only thing Jack could do right was nothing at all.
They had been shadows in their parents’ haunted house, and if that had made them vulnerable to a world filled with more literal hauntings, well, no one could have guessed that before they had been claimed.
The idea that some parents couldn’t love their own children was too foreign to her, too impossible and unwanted, and so she pushed it away, refusing to consider it further.
Then she stepped back, and Jack felt her sudden absence as an aching, unforgiving void.
“The Moors spin on stories, and this is a classic one: the formerly dead maiden and the mad scientist’s beautiful daughter.”
“Who told you that there’s only room for one person inside a story?” Alexis demanded. “That isn’t true. That’s never been true. You don’t have to take things away from others if you want to have them for yourself! You have a heart, don’t you?”
Jack blinked, confused. “My anatomy is standard for a human woman of my age and stature.”
If we can all exist, and have hearts, why can’t two people share the shape of the same story? Why does your sister being beautiful mean that you’re not allowed to be? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Do you want me to dally with you? You don’t know me. I could be dreadful.”
There was still rain. There was still laughter. Sometimes, that can be enough.
