“Nothing would surprise him. Nothing could anymore. But it didn’t matter. Even if it meant the most painful, hideous death a human being had ever experienced, they weren’t getting the baby, and they weren’t getting her. Twenty yards… He gripped the handle of his sword tightly…​breathed deep of the desert air. Okay, Balthazar…let’s die.”

“Nothing else ever mattered to me, and you weren’t even real. All I ever wanted was you.”

“Weren’t human being full of surprises?”

“To hell with ideas—if people always did what, on careful consideration, was in their most selfish interest, there would be nothing with the world, there would be nothing wrong with the world. Who wants to die and starve? Nobody. If people weren’t driven crazy by ideas and their God, nobody would, for instance, go to war in order to starve and to die a beastly death.”

“But the cry of a baby the minute she yanked open the front door tightened her chest so hard she could scarcely catch her breath. Her baby was dead. Theirs weren’t.”

“When I said you weren’t getting kissed tonight, I meant it. But dammit, Sky. I had no idea how fucking difficult you would make it.”