heatherslibrary | #0065: Meredith Gentry Series #2: A Caress of Twilight, by Laurell K. Hamilton (Reply)

Meredith Gentry series #2: A Caress of Twilight
by Laurell K. Hamilton
p.30 I started to laugh. I laughed so hard, I had to sit down on the floor. I held the bloody knife and watched the two guards gaze down at me, worried looks on their faces. Rhys wasn't glowering anymore. Kitto touched my arm, gently, as if afraid of what I'd do. I wrapped my arms around him, hugged him to me, and the tears streaming down my face stopped behind laughter, and I simply cried. I held Kitto and the bloody knife and cried.

p.33 He crossed his arms over his chest, flashing the gold of his Rolex, and looked at me. Among the fey it was impolite to ask why a person was having hysterics. Hell, sometimes it was even considered impolite to notice they were having hysterics at all. usually that was for ruling royalty, though. Everyone had to pretend that the king or queen wasn't bug nuts. Mustn't admit that centuries of inbreeding had done any damage.

p.81 "She tasted like sunshine. And until this second I didn't know that sunshine tasted like anything."

p.104 "...All the bright shining throng knew. My own cousin was kept because she was part brownie. You didn't throw her out, because brownies are Seelie--not court, but creatures of light. But when the sidhe themselves breed monsters, the pure, shining, Seelie sidhe, breed deformities, monstrosities, then what happens, where do they go?"
     She was crying now, soft, silver tears. "I don't know."
     "Yes, you do. The babies go to the Unseelie Court. We take in the monsters, those pure Seelie monsters. We take them in, because we welcome everyone. No one, no one is turned away from the Unseelie Court, especially not tiny, newborn babies whose only crime was to be born to parents who can't study a genealogical chart well enough to avoid marrying their own fucking siblings." I was crying, too, but it was anger, not sorrow.

p.113 I turned away from Galen, back into the room. The rest of the men were watching us. If they'd been human, they would have pretended not to watch, been reading magazines, or pretending to, but they were fey. If you did something in front of the fey, they watched. If you wanted privacy, you wouldn't be doing it where they could see you; that was our culture.

p.151 "My skin began to glow like I'd swallowed the moon."

p.238 I had made the terrible mistake of taking entomology in college. I hadn't understand that you had to kill insects to pass the course. I remembered a carousel of butterflies trapped in a killing jar. It was one of the most lovely things I'd ever seen. Alive, they were magical; dead they were like tissue paper and sticks. I'd finally asked how many insects I had to collect for a D, and I'd collected that many and no more. There had been no point in collecting the insects when the college had a complete collection of almost everything the class was killing. It was the last biology class I ever took where you had to collect anything.
     I stared at the little butterfly-winged man on my knee and couldn't find an argument that didn't make me feel like a hypocrite. I wouldn't kill someone for collecting butterflies, but if I had butterfly wings on my back and spent most of my life among them fluttering from flower to flower, maybe I'd see the death of one butterfly on a different scale. Maybe, if you were the size of a Barbie doll, killing the small creatures was every bit as horrible as killing people. Maybe. Maybe not. But I didn't feel sure enough of my ground to argue.