In Mercy, Rain (Wayward Children, #7.5)

by Seanan McGuire

Jack Wolcott was not particularly inclined to view herself and her choices through rose-tinted glasses; the veils over her eyes were more likely to be bloody than reassuring.

Jill would have her beautiful dresses and her jewels and her doting vampire lord, and Jack 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.

Dr. Bleak knew he was ill-equipped to treat maladies of the mind. More importantly, he knew that sometimes treatment was better done through support and accommodation.

She learned to heal by learning to harm, and under the watchful eye of the Moon, they were both the same. The land would prosper in her keeping.

denied the calm communion of the body and the blade.

Once she was convinced that she was neither dying nor ill, and had been lectured by several of the local women about how a natural biological function couldn’t make anyone unclean, had Dr. Bleak given her that impression, they’d smack that patriarchal attitude out of his head if he had, Jack had begrudgingly, grumblingly accepted this as a new aspect of her reality and set her attention to improving it, as much as could be done.

Dr. Bleak would have had a great deal to say about apprentices with wandering eyes and well-controlled hands, who gathered bouquets of poisonous wildflowers for Gideon in the Abbey of the Drowned Gods, who sighed and swooned when the shepherd girls cast sloe-eyed looks in her direction. 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. He doubted she’d ever act on any of the things she was feeling—she was too disinclined to view the human body as anything other than a field to be harvested or a machine to be repaired—but he also doubted she would ever realize she was missing anything, as that would require her to admit that she wanted to do things she would otherwise view as revolting.

there was still kindness behind the bright, analytical surface of her eyes; she was learning to break the world down like a carcass, but she had not yet forgotten what it was to be merciful.

Efficiency was sometimes its own reward.

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.

she was happy, because she was finally allowed to decide who she was and what that meant.

“The dead are almost always cleaner than the living,” said Jack. “The process of decay is natural and predictable, and if your corpses are off getting into things you didn’t ask them to, that’s necromancy, not science. We practice science here.”

“I gave up being beautiful a long time ago. That story belongs to my sister, not to me.” “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?”

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.”