Guilty Pleasures
His eyes gleamed but not with warmth, more
with pleasure. There is something measuring,
obscenely knowledgeable, about Bert's
smile. As if he knew the darkest thing you had
ever done and would gladly keep silent -- for
a price.
The Laughing Corpse
The older the zombie, the bigger the death
needed to raise it. After a few centuries the
only death big enough is a human sacrifice.
They rot. Personality and intelligence goes
first, then the body. It's always that
order. God is not cruel enough to force anyone
to be aware while their body decays around
them. Something had gone very wrong with this
one.
Circus of the Damned
He waited at the top of the stairs, still
pretty as a picture, but the air of energy
contained in too small a space, like his motor
was on high idle, shimmered around him.
His eyes were neutral, but wary, like those of
a wolf I'd seen once in California.
I'd just walked around a tree and there it
had been, standing. I froze. I had never
really understood what neutral meant until
then. The wolf didn't give a damn if it
hurt me or not. My choice. Threaten it, and
the shit hit the fan. Give it room to run, and
it would run. But the wolf didn't care; it
was prepared either way.
The Lunatic Cafe
I hadn't thrown up yet, but I was keeping
it as an option for later.
I looked out over the room, and realized why
it felt so tight. It wasn't just the
crowd. A majority of the happy, smiling people
were shapeshifters. Their energy burned in the
air like the weight of a thunderstorm. I had
thought the crowd was boisterous, too loud,
but it was the shapeshifters. Their energy
boiled and filled the room, masquerading as
the energy of any crowd.
The Rat King's lips may have seemed
kissable, but this man seemed made for
nefarious deeds done in dark places.
I tried to think how to say a couple of
years' worth of pain in one mouthful.
There was something about him that was
different. A waiting tension like water just
before it spills over the edge. When I looked
into his brown eyes, something slid behind
them. Some furred shape was inside there,
waiting to get out.
Bloody Bones
There was something horribly personal about
disfiguring a person's face. If it had
been humanly possible to do all this, I'd
have said check their nearest and dearest. As
a general rule, only people who love you will
cut up your face. It implies passion that you
can't get from strangers. One exception is
serial killers. They're working through a
pathology in which the victims can represent
someone else.
But no elephants, I promise. Besides, can you
imagine trying to slit the throat of an
elephant? The logistics of just getting one to
hold still while you killed it were
mind-boggling. There's a reason most
sacrifices are our size or smaller. Makes it
easier to hold them down.
He [Jason] shrugged, and slid onto a bar
stool. "What do you want me to say?
I've seem some weird shit since I became a
werewolf. If I got hysterical every time
something went wrong, every time someone I
knew died, I'd bee in the loony bin by
now."
"I'm not an alpha anything." ...
"You don't have to understand
it," he said. He couldn't have been
more than twenty, but the look in his eyes
wasn't young. It was the look of someone
who'd seen a lot, done a lot, and not all
of it nice... what had people been doing to
Jason to give him such jaded eyes?
He shrugged. "Sorry; I just couldn't
get anybody to bleed on me tonight."
Surely vampires had no souls -- that was part
of the point -- but I'd felt something
leave. If not a soul, what? If a soul, where
did it go for the daylight hours? Who watched
all the vampire's souls while they lay
dead?
She was the newly risen, empty, waiting for
her "personality" to rebuild, if it
ever did. I'd seen vamps that never
recovered. Never became close to the human
being they'd once been.
The Killing Dance
I thought you guys could heal anything short
of a death wound.
Not if you shove burning metal into it. Fire
purifies and stops the healing process, unless
you reopen the wound.
It is too damn early in the morning for
furball politics.
She'd have probably been just fine if the
vampire had tried violence, but he'd just
stood there and rotted at her. What do you do
when the onsters start being piteous?
Burnt Offerings
Angel-fangs. [Willie's name for his
lover.]
Real leopards don't sweat who's in
charge much. They don't have a pack
structure, but shapeshifters aren't
animals, they're people. Which meant no
matter how solitary and uncomplicated the
animal form, the people half will find a way
to screw things up.
There was something underneath the cynicism.
It was fear. Fear that I'd be like all the
rest. A user who didn't give a damn about
them. Raina had been that, and now Sylvie. The
pack was supposed to be their refuge, their
protection, not the thing they feared most.
For a thousand years, he [Damian] was a baby.
A dangerous, carnivorous baby, but still
Damian had acquired all the power he might
ever have. He could live untiil the sun
expanded and swallowed the earth and he'd
be no more powerful than he had been at dusk
today.
Jason sat leaning against a stone wall. It was
his lap I'd woken up in. He gave me a very
watered-down version of his usual come-hither
smile, but it left his eyes cold and tired. He
wasn't up to leering at me tonight. Things
are rough when Jason stops teasing.
Richard gave it a name apart from himself, his
beast, but is wasn't separate. In that
moment I realized why Richard ran so hard and
so long from the power. It was him. Just as
the furred shape of him was pulled from the
matter of his own human body, so the rage, the
destruction, was pulled from his very human
psyche. His beast was formed of that part of
our brains we bury, only dragging into our
consciouslness in the worst of our nightmares.
Not the dreams where we are hunted by the
monsters, but the dreams where we are the
monsters. We raise bloody hands to the sky and
scream, not from fear, but from joy. The pure
joy of slaughter. The cathartic moment when we
plunge our hands into the hot blood of our
enemies and there is no civilized thought to
stop us from dancing on our graves.
He looked at me, and suddenly his eyes
weren't just dull with illness. I realized
they were dull with experience. It went beyond
jaded, as if Nathaniael had looked into the
lower rungs of hell. He'd lived to tell
the tale, but he hadn't really survived
intact.
I knew that if I allowed it, we could sleep in
one big communal heap like a litter of
puppies, that touching was part of what kept
the pack together, like the mutual grooming
that primates do.
He had that casual tension that victims get
when they are slapped too often for too many
different things.
Obsidian Butterfly
Edward:
Your problem, Anita, is that you wouldn't
know an uncomplicated fuck if it bit you in
the ass.
Ulfric of Los Lobos:
"Humans are fun," he said.
"Sex and a meal, and you never have to
leave your car."
Anita:
If you think love makes you happy, Hernando,
you've either never been in love, or never
been in love long enough to start
compromising.
She couldn't read things she didn't
have inside herself. She wasn't a goddess.
She was a vampire, not like any vampire
I've ever known before, but that was what
she was. Yet she believed she was Itzpapalotl,
the living personification of the sacrificial
knife, the obsidian blade. She was lying to
herself, and thus she couldn't see a lie
in someone else.
