Pact

“A little more education can go a long way here, when we’re relying on educated guesses,” Rose said. “Hell, we could find a Tesla coil or something, spit out electricity. Or get a neon sign maker to do a diabolic circle. We could have better resources, too”
“That sounds marvelously tacky,” Fell said. “I’d be offended on behalf of practitioners everywhere, if you tried it and it actually worked.”

"...my common sense is telling me something is wrong."
“I just dealt with an imp, a crazed goblin-beast and a practitioner with a vendetta, all in the span of two and a half days. If things were right, that’d be a pretty good sign something is pretty damn wrong.”

I was brimming with a sick kind of nervousness. The sort of nervousness that went beyond the nervousness of ‘what if I get fucked/hurt/ruined’ and into the ‘when‘.

I’m basically one step below a starving artist. I’m the guy who lives off the generosity of the artists.

By and large, asking an American how far away something was tended to get an answer in terms of miles. The gas station is a quarter mile that way. Ask a Canadian? Time. The highway is a ten minute drive thataway. Or so the idea went, with exemptions for more civilized areas of the States and less civilized parts of Canada.

Congratulations, Blake Thorburn. You’ve successfully reverted two or three million years. You’re an ape in a tree, hiding from the scary things.

“What if I shot you?” he offered. “You could stop worrying about being used. You’d be dead.”
He said it in such a friendly, casual way. Like he was offering me a ride.

“You expect me to share details with you, diabolist? For nothing?”
I almost protested against the label, but it was accurate. “An alternative is that I share my life story, filling the endless minutes or hours in the car with personal details, either boring you to tears or getting you to sympathize with me.”

Maggie is an ally. This doesn’t necessarily make her trustworthy.

I’d shoot you right here, but you look bad enough it might be a waste of a bullet.

God damn it, I’d been lower than this before, and I’d fought my way back. I was not going to diminish my past triumphs before by giving up now.

“A good rule of thumb is to assume that people aren’t nearly as fussed about anything you’re doing as you think they are.”
“I keep hearing that, but that doesn’t make it easier.”

“I find it interesting, to see what is revealed of people, when they are broken down,” the Lord said. “With things relatively stable here, it’s been some time since I had the chance. You’ve defaulted to scheming, impertinence, then aggression. But it’s only when the pressure is increased, your very being challenged, that we’ll see who you truly are.”

A kind of horror hit me, right in the gut.
Not cold horror, not a chill. Horror as in a horror, a nightmare, a beast that might lurk under a small boy’s bed, wrong and disgusting and bad, as a feeling, slithering around my insides.

“What do you need, to summon a dark power to my realm?”
I thought, hard. Not about what I actually required, but the nature of the question.
“A hell of a lot more courage,” I said.

Can we return to the days when you ignored us and we could ignore you?

A new driver needs to crash to learn a healthy respect for the road. The same is true for one who practices.

My surface impression was that she was the least ‘Tiffany-ish’ Tiffany I’d met. Shy, awkward, quiet. I usually associated Tiffanies with blonde cheerleaders.