Patricia Briggs

“Adam has always had . . . heroic tendencies.”I touched Adam’s arm. “He’s my hero.”There was another pause. . .“That is the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard you say,” Bran said. “Be careful, Adam, or you’ll turn her into a real girl.”Adam looked at me. “I like her just the way she is, Bran.” And he meant it, greasy overalls, broken fingernails, and all.”

“Coffee or orange juice?”“Water is fine.”His eyebrows went up.“Uh-oh,” Auriele said, but she was smiling.Darryl was not. “Are you implying that my coffee is not the best in four counties? Or my fresh-squeezed orange juice is less than perfect?”

“You are a sick, sick man,” I told him.“Thank you,” Ben replied, looking modest.”

“Kelly looked at the cop, then sighed. “What a cluster. I take it you haven’t been killing young women and leaving their half-eaten bodies in the desert?”Adam was ticked. I could tell it even if he was looking like a reasonably calm businessman. Adam’s temper was the reason he wasn’t one of Bran’s werewolf poster boys. When angered, he often gave in to impulses he wouldn’t otherwise have given in to.“Sorry to disappoint you,” Adam told Kelly in silky tones. “But I prefer rabbits. Humans taste like pork.” And then he smiled. Kelly took an involuntary step backward.Tony gave Adam a sharp look. “Let’s not make things worse, if we can help it, gentlemen.”

“Hey, Zee,” I said. “I take it that you can fix it, but it’ll be miserable, and you’d rather haul it to the dump and start from scratch.”“Piece of junk,” groused Zee. “What’s not rusted to pieces is bent. If you took all the good parts and put them in a pile, you could carry them out in your pocket.” There was a little pause. “Even if you only had a small pocket.”I patted the car. “Don’t you listen to him,” I whispered to it. “You’ll be out of here and back on the road in no time.”Zee propelled himself all the way under the car so his head stuck out by my feet. “Don’t you promise something you can’t deliver,” he snarled.I raised my eyebrows, and said in dulcet tones, “Are you telling me you can’t fix it? I’m sorry. I distinctly remember you saying that there is nothing you can’t fix. I must have been mistaken, and it was someone else wearing your mouth.”He gave a growl that would have done Sam credit, and pushed himself back under again, muttering,“Deine Mutter war ein Cola-Automat!”“Her mama might have been a pop machine,” I said, responding to one of the remarks I understood even at full Zee-speed. “Your mama . . .” sounds the same in a number of languages.“But she was a beauty in her day.” I grinned at Gabriel. “We women have to stick together.”

“He left the key in the ignition. No one was likely to come up here and steal the truck- and if anyone did... well, he could deal with Charles”

“Anna: “I thought Indians built fires with fiction.”Charles: “I can do that, but I'd like to eat sometime in the next day or so. Sterno and Bic are much faster.”

“And thus Charles found himself wandering around a hotel, trailing federal agents as he held a cardboard coffee cup holder in each hand, instead of out killing misbehaving werewolves.”

“Taking out werewolves, I gather and surmise, is akin to taking out a SEAL team.”

“It is the way of mortals. They fling themselves at life and emerge broken.”

“There isn’t a person in this city more dangerous than a wolf whose mate is in danger.”

“They staggered and stumbled, wounded but triumphant, singing the old Welsh folk song “Ar Lan y Môr.” And if there was something odd about returning from battle singing about lilies, rosemary, rocks, and—for some reason he’d never fathomed—eggs, of all things, by the sea, well, then the three of them made it sound pretty good and only he and Beauclaire knew Welsh.”

“What do you mean?” Leslie’s voice was cool, as if she questioned witches who were flat on their backs being threatened by werewolves every day.”

“If she kept wondering about how much of her life Bran engineered, she’d end up on a funny farm knitting caps for ducks.”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to be able to get at that information,” said Leslie.“Don’t look,” said Goldstein, peering over Charles’s shoulder. “We don’t know anything about illegal hacking.” He whistled cheerily.”

“See you tomorrow,” he said, instead.“All right.” Then, impulsively, I asked, “Do you have a place to sleep tonight?”“Sure,” he said with a smile, and started off as if he had somewhere to be.I could have bitten off my tongue because I pushed him into a lie. Once he started lying to me, it would be harder to get him to trust me with the truth. I don’t know why it works that way, but it does—at least in my experience.”

“Want to play some Battleship?”I wasn’t leaving him alone with that thing in there.Chad armed himself with a notebook, and we went to war. Historically, war has often been used as a distraction for problems at home.”

“Tis the gift to be gentle, ’tis the gift to be fair,’Tis the gift to wake and breathe the morning air,To walk every day in the path that we choose,Is the gift that we pray we will never never lose.”

“Reincarnation?”He shrugged. “I’ve never seen any evidence that it’s real. But I’ve never seen anything that disproves it either. I believe the afterlife is better than what we have here—and it would take something extraordinary to make someone willing to come back.”

“She was comfortable enough that she was beginning to suffer from the most chronic condition of slavery— boredom.”

“Fortunately, he'd found that most people were easy to locate at five thirty in the morning.”

“This was not a man who wanted to give up his mate. This was a man trying to do the honorable thing—and give her a choice, no matter hiw much it cost him.”

“She, human and wolf both, craved him like a junkie just as she craved all the things he seemed to promise: safety, love, hope—a place to belong.”

“I thought it would be quieter here.” [Anna] hadn’t meant to say anything, but the noise startled her. “The wind in the trees,” Bran said. “And there are some birds that stay year-round. Sometimes when the wind is still and the cold is upon us, the quiet is so deep you can feel it in your bones.”

“Heart turned to me, his face thought­ful. “Yes­ter­day morn­ing. Yes, that means that Daphne hadn’t been home for two days be­fore that.” He smiled at me. “You were sup­posed to be the Al­pha’s eye can­dy.”Adam laughed.“What?” I asked him. “You don’t think I’d be good eye can­dy?” I looked down at my over­alls and grease-​stained hands. I’d torn an­oth­er nail to the quick.“Hon­ey is eye can­dy,” said Ben apolo­get­ical­ly. “You’re . . . just you.”“Mine,” said Adam, edg­ing be­tween Heart and me. “Mine is what she is.”

“Anna gave Charles a shy kiss on the cheek and strolled out of the room without a backward glance. Until she reached the doorway, and then, in full view of the curious who'd had the courage or discourtesy to linger in the auditorium after he'd dismissed them, she kissed her palm and blew it to him.And despite... or because of their audience, he caught it in one hand, and pulled the hand to his heart. Her smile dropped away, and the expression in her eyes would feed him for a week. And the expressions on the faces of the wolves who knew Charles, or knew his reputation, would make him laugh as soon as no one was watching.”

“His brother maintained that what sent people backing away was neither his size nor his mother's blood, but solely the expression on his face. To test Samuel's theory, Charles had tried smiling - and then solemnly reported to Samuel that he had been mistaken. When Charles smiled, he told Samuel, people just ran faster.”

“Knowing someone desires you is the greatest aphrodisiac”

“We brought death to our enemies, and I loved the power of it. And that final love, one I shared with my father, frightened me more than any battle ever could.”

“I think it's the eyes. No one expects brilliance out of a man with eyelashes like that.”

“Honey, ... When a wolf watches a lamb, he's not thinking about the lamb's mommy.”

“Never accept the blame for what evil people do. We are all responsible for our own actions. She was lecturing him, so she stopped. "Sorry. Hang around with Bran too long, and see if you don’t start passing around the Marrok’s advice as if he were Confucius.”

“Don’t lick the guests, darling. Bad manners.”

“Americans in particular are oddly innocent in their faith that science holds explanations for everything.”

“We’d spent years as adversaries, two predators sharing territory and a certain, unwelcome attraction. Somehow, during all those years I spent outwardly acquiescing to his demands while making sure I held my own, I’d won his respect. I’d had werewolves love me and hate me, but I’d never had one respect me before. Not even Samuel. Adam respected me enough to act on my suspicions. It meant a lot.”

“Just as I’ve always known there are monsters in the world, monsters and things even more evil, I’ve always known that it is God who keeps evil at bay.”

“I could hear him laughing. Son of a bit*h. I would kill him. I didn't care if he was coyote or the son of Satan.He was a dead man walking.”

“Some people will tell you werewolves can only shapechange under a full moon, but people also say there's no such things as ghosts.”

“Anna looked at Brother Wolf. ‘I’d like to see someone try to put a radio control collar on Charles. It might be fun to watch on YouTube.”

“Then again, maybe you couldn't have killed me," he said, crawling out of the stairway. He moved very slowly, like a lizard who had gotten too cold.I heard a whimper from behind one of the closed doors next to the bathroom, and sympathized. I wanted to whimper, too."I'm not hunting you," I told him firmly, though I stepped backward until I stood in a circle of light at the end of the hallway.He stopped halfway out of the stairway, his eyes were filmed over like a dead man's."Good," he said. "If you kill Andre, I won't tell-and no one will ask."And he was gone, withdrawing from the hallway and down the stairs so fast that I barely caught the motion, though I was staring right at him.I walked out of his home because if I'd moved any faster, I'd have run screaming.”

“To make great art, you had to expose your soul, and some things should be left safely in the dark.”

“Happiness is German engineering, Italian cooking, and Belgian chocolate.”

“All change brings bad things and good things to replace the bad and good things that were before. It is natural to look back and say it was better before—but that does not make it true. Different is not worse. It is just different.”

“I liked Lost in Space,” Stefan said.“The movie or the TV series?”“The movie? Right. I had forgotten about the movie,” he said soberly. “It was better that way.”

“I would slay dragons for you,” he told her. “I suspect that finding an unoccupied bedroom will be easier.”

“Mercy?”“Just a minute,” I told Adam. “I'm in the middle of a revelation.”

“I was in the middle of a dream about garbage cans and frogs - don't ask, and I won't tell.”

“I give you Mercedes Athena Thompson, our newest member."Much awkwardness ensued.”

“Charles preferred his deer to taste like meat and his pancakes to look like pancakes. Brother Wolf thought he was too picky. Brother Wolf was probably right.”

“She had no idea who the dagos were. Her racist vocabulary obviously needed work. What would a racist call werewolves? Wargs? She kind of liked that one, but suspected that racist bastards didn’t read Tolkien.”