Your heart is not wrong. Your heart is your strength. You don't have to be ashamed.

I will do just as you wish,' said no cat ever.

...the air seeming to gather around her like held breath. As if this whole place were a story about her.

It's like all my life I've been this tower standing at the edge of the ocean for some obscure purpose, and only now, almost eighteen years in, has someone thought to flip the switch that reveals that I'm not a tower at all. I'm a lighthouse. It's like waking up. I am incandescent.

The choice I mean is to protect our own innocents from the seraphim, instead of slaughtering theirs." "There are no innocent seraphim, said the wolf." "That's what they say when they kill our children.

As long as you're alive, there's always a chance things will get better." "Or worse," said Liraz. "Yes," he conceded. "Usually worse." Hazael cut in. "My sister, Sunshine, and my brother, Light. You two should rally the ranks. You'll have us killing ourselves by morning.

Better to be the cat gazing coolly down from a high wall, its expression inscrutable. The cat that shunned petting, that needed no one. Why couldn't she be that cat?