In Mercy, Rain (Wayward Children, #7.5)

by Seanan McGuire

“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.”

The other children at school had been envious when she told them how little she’d been expected to do, but expectations had been low because no one had believed she was capable of anything. Here, she worked tirelessly every day, made her own clothes, and slept on a bed that was only marginally softer than a stone slab—and sometimes she slept on the slab, when the sky was clear of clouds and no lightning loomed—and she was happy, because she was finally allowed to decide who she was and what that meant.

Bleak asked her to be useful. As long as she was that, she didn’t need to be anything else, and if she had been incapable of being useful to him, he would have found her somewhere else to be, someplace safe and comfortable and far away from the Master’s machinations.

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.

“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?”

Why does your sister being beautiful mean that you’re not allowed to be? That doesn’t make any sense.”