Pact

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.