James often wondered at the chain of flukes it must have taken to bring him through with his own life and limbs intact. Once he might have believed it to be the work of Providence but it seemed to him now that to thank God for his life would be to suggest God had shrugged off all the others flicked them away like cigarette butts by the thousands and that seemed like abominable conceit. James Dorsey took no credit for being alive. His higher power these days was Chance.

Just then, lit only by the flicker of his wings,the sight of him was so..right somehow. He was right. It made no sense at all, but the feeling flooded through Karou

When a street musician lowered his violin to inquire, 'Hey lovely, what you got there?' she said, 'Musicians who ask questions,' and kept on dragging.

Was there another life she was meant to be living? At times she felt a keen certainty that there was ― a phantom life, taunting her from just out of reach. A sense would come over her while she was drawing or walking, and once while she was dancing slow and close with Kaz, that she was supposed to be doing something else with her hands, with her legs, with her body. Something else. Something else. Something else.

What a lovely display of personhood. He's like a good book cover that grabs your gaze. Read me. I'm fun but smart. You won't be able to put me down.

There are other ways of showing someone you love them, such as fetching them out of Hell.

The thing he wished for most was a thing he had never wished for at all, not until he had discovered her. And it came true that night, and many nights after. A brief and shining span of happiness, it was the pivot point around which his whole life spun.