She had been innocent once, a little girl playing with feathers on the floor of a devil's lair. She wasn't innocent now, but she didn't know what to do about it. This was her life: magic and shame and secrets and teeth and a deep, nagging hollow at the center of herself where something was most certainly missing.

He actually listened, rather than pretending to listen while waiting a suitable interval before it was his time to talk again.

He wanted to tell her that everything he had done he had done because he was broken, because watching her die had destroyed him, but there was no way to say it that didn’t sound like he was trying to pin the blame outside himself

She could smell the boy spice beneath the thrift-store aroma of his jacket, and the rubbing and the smell began to work to soften her -- like butter before you add sugar, in the first steps of making something sweet. It was her first experience of how bodies could meld together, how breath could slip naturally into rhythm. It was hypnotic. Heady. And she wanted more.

Follow me," said Karou. As if he could have done anything else.

They were tower stairs, a tight corkscrew down. The spiraling descent made Karou dizzy: down, around, down, around, hypnotic, until it seemed as if she were caught in a purgatory of stairs and would go down like this forever.

As long as he had life, who deserved it so little, he would use it, wield it, and do whatever he could in its name, even if it was not, was never, enough