Prison of Hope Quotes

“You go find Hera and warn her that there’s a reckoning coming. Because Cronus is single-minded at the best of times, and once he gets within arm’s length of killing her, there’s nothing that’s going to stop him short of his own death.” I stood and realized I hadn’t touched my tea. “It’s okay,” Pandora said, noticing my gaze. “Go save the bitch; make sure she’s nice and secure. Because we want her healthy for when we get our own chance to tear her fucking head off.”
― Steve McHugh, Prison of Hope

“Geek,” Sky coughed into her hand. I turned to Sky. “If I remember correctly, you cried when Spock died.” Sky stopped laughing. “We need to keep an eye out for Pandora. This is serious stuff—no time for joking around.” She walked to the window while Tommy tried to stop himself from laughing and failed miserably, earning a glare from Sky. “He sacrificed himself for his friends, damn it,” Sky said. “It was heroic.” The three of us started to laugh,”
― Steve McHugh, Prison of Hope

“That’s not why you took his hands and cauterized the wounds to ensure they could never be reattached.” I looked at my old friend, and I knew he wasn’t going to let it go until I’d told him why I’d done it. “He used those hands to hold his family while he told them he loved them, to wipe away their tears and share their joys. Then he used those same hands to murder them all in one of the worst betrayals imaginable. He doesn’t deserve to keep them. That’s why I took them.” “Kay wasn’t happy.” “Kay once flayed a man alive in front of his family and forced them to eat their lunch while he did it. Kay can go fuck himself.” “That was pretty much my response too. Still, he was less than happy about the use of Hellequin. I assume Kay knows you and Hellequin are one and the same.”
― Steve McHugh, Prison of Hope

“Look, Tommy,” Kurt said, “let Kasey learn how to deal with what she’s going through. Let her make her own mistakes. You can hate boys from afar, and when she brings one home, you just explain that if he hurts her, you’ll make him vanish. That’s how I did it for our daughter.” “And now she lives in Canada,” Petra said. “Okay, maybe don’t tell him that you’ll make him vanish,” Kurt conceded. “Turns out daughters don’t like their dates being threatened.” I laughed again. “This is the oddest conversation I’ve ever woken up to. Tommy, just let Kasey figure it out. You’re there for when she can’t. And if anyone ever does hurt her . . . well, you’re a werewolf—you’ll figure something out.” Tommy smiled. “I love my devious-minded friends.” “ ‘Never has there been a more wretched hive of scum and villainy,’ ” Kurt said. Petra practically launched herself on her husband, kissing him on the cheek. “You quoted Star Wars. I love you.” Kurt looked down at his wife and, without smiling, said, “I know.” Petra’s smile lit up her face like a firework.”
― Steve McHugh, Prison of Hope

“Tommy, Ewoks suck. They’ve always sucked and they always will suck. Four has Peter Cushing in it. If in doubt, always go with a film that has Peter Cushing in it.” Petra appeared to be very smug in her victory. Tommy looked mortified. “But six has Jedi Luke and that awesome bit with the Emperor at the end.” “And Ewoks,” I said. “Who, I’m pretty sure I pointed out, suck.” “And to think I was going to get you your own lightsaber,” Tommy said in mock outrage. Petra’s face lit up like a child’s on Christmas morning. “You have your own lightsaber?” Tommy nodded. “Two of them.” “Why?” Kurt asked. “Why do you need a lightsaber? What can you possibly use it for?” “I think the question is,” Tommy said, “why wouldn’t I need a lightsaber? And as for what I can use it for, I use it to look awesome. Really, really awesome.” “You just don’t understand, my dear,” Petra told Kurt. Kurt didn’t appear to want or need to understand anytime soon. “So, you got beat up by some humans and a witch,” Tommy said, barely containing his laughter. “Do you have CCTV?” he asked Petra, who chuckled. “Are you both done?” I asked. They nodded in unison. “This witch used a huge amount of magic on me,” I informed them both. “To use runes to drain my magic is one thing, but an effete curse is a whole other league of power. That’s a decade of her life, right there.” “I don’t understand why anyone would ever use a blood magic curse,” Tommy said. “It’s not like it’s fun for the person casting it either.” “What do you mean?” Petra asked. “There are several different blood magic curses you can cast on another person, and a few you can cast on yourself,” I explained. “All of the curses do various things to the person they’re cast upon, but the caster has to take some of the curse back onto him- or herself. So, in this case, Sarah cast the effete spell, making me exhausted and utterly useless, but a small portion of that will bounce back onto her. How long was I out?” “Six hours,” Kurt said. “If I’d cast that spell, I could have expected maybe three or four hours of exhaustion. Witches are basically human, so she’s going to be about as much use as a chocolate teapot, for the best part of a day. It was a huge decision for her to make.”
― Steve McHugh, Prison of Hope

“Boys are bad, Kurt. Bad, nasty little evil fuckers, who need to be stopped at all costs.”
― Steve McHugh, Prison of Hope

“That’s not reassuring, Hades; that’s the opposite of reassuring.”
― Steve McHugh, Prison of Hope

“And how exactly should he do that?” Tommy asked. “By the cunning use of bad language?”
― Steve McHugh, Prison of Hope

“Sometimes there are moments when someone says something so offensive that those around them tend to wait, even if only for a nanosecond, for their conscious brain to catch up with what they think they might have heard.”
― Steve McHugh, Prison of Hope

“And then I was falling very fast, from a great height, toward a fight with a god. When this was done, if I survived, I was going to get so fucking drunk.”
― Steve McHugh, Prison of Hope

“I’m a werebear; the only way I could be more dangerous is if I were juggling flaming chainsaws.”
― Steve McHugh, Prison of Hope

“Why do you need a lightsaber? What can you possibly use it for?” “I think the question is,” Tommy said, “why wouldn’t I need a lightsaber? And as for what I can use it for, I use it to look awesome. Really, really awesome.”
― Steve McHugh, Prison of Hope

“Well, I considered burning this place down as a warning, but that was counterproductive as it’s in the middle of a forest. So I was going to threaten you to leave, but I don’t have the time to go around checking that you’ve actually done anything.” I stood and folded the chair, placing it over by the rest. “No, I figured I’d come here to tell you that, while no one has any proof of your wrongdoings, we all know what you did. This coven has been marked because of your actions, and Avalon will be keeping a very close eye on you. Not because we believe you’re doing anything wrong, of course, but because you were involved in a traumatic event in Germany, and they want to make certain you’re all okay. “There will be site visits, probably at random, maybe in the middle of the night. There might even be interviews with all the members, just to verify that everyone is happy and healthy.” “You can’t do that,” Mara said with barely contained rage. “I’m not. Avalon is—well, technically, Lucie is, but she helps run the place, so she’s probably qualified to tell whether people here are happy and healthy. Did I mention the random visits?” “You think this is funny?” Emily asked. I shook my head. “I think it’s deadly serious. A group of witches used by Demeter and Hera broke Cronus out of Tartarus, witches who used the coven leader’s own daughter to get the job done.” My stare could have bored holes in Mara. “Emily, I’m not going to underestimate you again. I promise you that. And Mara, dear sweet Mara. Your daughter is a delight. If you remove her from school, if you hurt her, if anything happens to her in any way that results in my friend’s daughter telling me of her unhappiness at your parenting, I will come find you. And I promise, once I’m done, no one will ever find out what happened to you.” I made my way toward the door, my piece said. “You think that you can threaten me, Mister Garrett?” Mara said, her body shaking with anger. I continued walking and opened the door before pausing for a second. “You can’t come into my coven and demand things,” Mara continued. “You’re a thug, a man with no vision who does what his masters tell him. I’m not afraid of you. You don’t scare me.” I didn’t turn back toward the two women as I spoke, “Then clearly you”
― Steve McHugh, Prison of Hope

“You used the same chameleon potion you brewed in your hotel room to cover yourself. The one you gave to Cronus. It was obviously a good potion.” “How’d you know it was me?” she asked. “Because you just told me.” Emily’s smile faded.”
― Steve McHugh, Prison of Hope

“Hera had no option but to agree to the terms. Everyone left happy. Well, not Hera, but I didn’t give a shit how happy she was.”
― Steve McHugh, Prison of Hope

“The sadness I felt that they had decided not to like me was, obviously, overwhelming, and for a second I did consider throwing myself upon their mercy, but then I remembered they were all nasty little fuckers and decided I couldn’t be bothered.”
― Steve McHugh, Prison of Hope

“Maybe he’s mellowed with age?” I suggested. “It only took him, what, a millennia to get over being beaten in the Titan Wars?”
― Steve McHugh, Prison of Hope

“I explained very nicely that I was fine and that the next time Tommy had the idea to make me jump out of a helicopter, I was going to use him as my parachute.”
― Steve McHugh, Prison of Hope

“The big difference between sorcerers and elementals is that sorcerers use a magical version of the element they’re throwing around. We create it from nothing, and it molds to our will. But once we’ve created it, it’s as real as any other element. Elementals are one with the element. They’re part of it, the real thing. And that means any sorcerer who throws an elemental’s own element against them is basically pissing in the wind.”
― Steve McHugh, Prison of Hope

“I won’t be beaten by a child.” He spat the final word, as if the notion that someone as young as sixteen hundred years could possibly better him was unthinkable. I aimed to prove him wrong.”
― Steve McHugh, Prison of Hope

“You ready?” the agent shouted. Am I ready? Am I fuck! Instead, I raised my thumb, although the middle finger almost popped up too.”
― Steve McHugh, Prison of Hope

“I have another idea,” Tommy said with a grin that meant it was not an idea I would enjoy. “And that would be?” Olivia asked. “I noticed you have a helicopter,” Tommy said to the LOA agent. “I’m not jumping out of a helicopter,” I told everyone. They all completely ignored me and instead started working out exactly how I was going to jump out of said helicopter. I’m sure I’ve said it before, but my friends suck. They suck hard enough that when I was getting fitted with a parachute and loaded onto a helicopter, no one listened to me as I pointedly reiterated the fact that I did not wish to jump out of the fucking thing. I watched as the second part of Tommy’s glorious plan came to fruition, namely the part where the agents stood well back and shot at the Vanguard from the relative safety of being on the ground. “You done this before?” asked an agent who was sitting in the rear of the Eurocopter with me. “Once or twice. Not in one of these, though.” “The EC145 is excellent. Loads of room back here.” Indeed there was tons of room in the back of the helicopter, plenty to put five or six people without too much trouble. He glanced out of the window and then turned back to me. “We’re just over a thousand feet high, got a bit more to climb. You’ll be jumping at fifteen hundred feet.” “Screw you, Tommy,” I whispered, which caused the agent to laugh as he heard it through my microphone. “Not a fan of heights.” “Mostly I’m not a fan of hitting the ground at speed from a great height.”
― Steve McHugh, Prison of Hope

“Merlin would turn the fucking bint to molten thundercunt. And Hera knew it.” She paused while Tommy and I stifled a chuckle. “It was ‘thundercunt,’ wasn’t it?”
― Steve McHugh, Prison of Hope

“She came to me first and asked me to help her. I told the hag to go fuck herself with her own broom, and she left.” “You have a beautiful way with words,” I confessed to her. Eos smiled. “I’m not done yet. Hera tried the same trick with Helios and Selene, each of them telling her which short pier to take a long run off.”
― Steve McHugh, Prison of Hope

“The book fair,” Aphrodite said, managing to make the words “book fair” sound sexy, a feat that had probably never before been achieved in the history of humanity.”
― Steve McHugh, Prison of Hope

“You know people say that if your heart is filled with evil intent, your face will start to reflect that evil. Well, Demeter looks like she wraps herself up in that shit and never wants to leave.”
― Steve McHugh, Prison of Hope

“I glanced at Aphrodite, who sat next to Hera and could have easily graced the front cover of every magazine and newspaper in the world ever. Hell, Gardeners World would have put her on the cover to sell a few copies.”
― Steve McHugh, Prison of Hope

“It’s an old dwarven word. It means ‘he who brings death,’ although it was probably a lot less cliché at the time.” “Nice name to have,” she said dryly. “Merlin wanted a name that people would sit up and pay attention to. It sort of fits.” “But isn’t the Hellequin also a French character?” “Ah, the play? Yes, a few hundred years after I started using it. A French writer, who’d seen me fighting a group of soldiers, wrote a play using the Hellequin name. He dressed the character in black and red with a black mask and wrote that I took the souls of the evil to hell. At some point in the fifteenth century, that changed to become ‘harlequin.’ Which was, I guess, more of a comedic character who flips and flops around the stage.” “Must have been odd, seeing people dress up as you, in a way.” “That whole century was weird. Seeing people dressed in a manner that was based on me took some getting used to. Although I didn’t take it personally.” “So, you’re responsible for one of the most recognizable characters ever.” “I think I’d rather not see it like that. I don’t think wearing tights and prancing around a stage is something I’d be very good at.” Lucie’s chuckle was good to hear.”
― Steve McHugh, Prison of Hope

“Every time we passed soldiers at a checkpoint, she handed over fake identification that someone Kurt knew had created, and took great delight in telling them how much of an idiot I was, which, if I’m honest, probably helped us. More than once I got a glance of sympathetic understanding and was let through before they’d even seen her papers.”
― Steve McHugh, Prison of Hope

“Lucie and I climbed into a newly stolen 1935 black and red Audi Front. Lucie wore a military officer’s uniform, while I was meant to be her driver, something I think she enjoyed a lot more than was probably considered normal.”
― Steve McHugh, Prison of Hope