In Mercy, Rain (Wayward Children, #7.5)

by Seanan McGuire

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.

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.

who would one day meet the wind that whispered through the cracks in her walls and learn what it meant to soften,

As the summer of her fifteenth year in the world and her third year in the Moors broke across the horizon like a blood-specked egg,

she seemed to be one of those lucky few who found beauty everywhere she looked.

her laughter, wild and bright and very close to inhuman,

could hear the strange hesitation in Jack’s words, the places where the syllables didn’t quite line up with the tone, but couldn’t understand them. 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.