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alex and darlington quotes from ninth house

[ً @darlingsternbot]

He’s here shifting from one step to the next until she realized she was praying: Be here, be here, be here.

[ً @darlingsternbot]

“How was Spain?”
Darlington cleared his throat. He was human again, but the shape of the demon seemed to linger over him, a memory, a threat. “Hotter than expected.”

[ً @darlingsternbot]

Tell me to fuck off, he thought. Open that vulgar mouth and tell me I’m wrong. Tell me to go to hell.

[ً @darlingsternbot]

Alex made herself enter. Why the hell was she so nervous? This was Darlington—scholar, snob, and pain in the ass. No mystery there. But she’d held his soul inside her. She could still taste him on her tongue.

[ً @darlingsternbot]

But enough people had abandoned them both. She wasn’t going to be the next.

[ً @darlingsternbot]

“You killed them,” he said. “All of them. Leonard Beacon. Mitchell Betts. Helen Watson. Hellie.”
But all she said was, “Not Hellie.”

[ً @darlingsternbot]

All he had wanted was to serve her, to be seen and desired by her. He hadn’t known he was looking into the future.

[ً @darlingsternbot]

But what was Darlington to Alex? A mentor? A protector? An ally? None of those words seemed sufficient. Had some soft-boiled part of her fallen for the golden boy of Lethe?

[ً @darlingsternbot]

“I will serve you ’til the end of days.”
“And love me,” she said with a laugh, bold in the dream, unafraid.
But all he said was, “It is not the same.”

[ً @darlingsternbot]

Darlington would have believed her. He always had. Except Darlington was gone.

[ً @darlingsternbot]

"You sound like him."
Had Alex been doing her Darlington act?

[ً @darlingsternbot]

He wasn’t sure what he expected: Laughter? Tears? A heroic demand that she take his place in hell? He had lost track of who was Dante, Virgil, Beatrice. Was he Orpheus or Eurydice?

[ً @darlingsternbot]

“What are you?” he whispered. But he didn’t care. He went to his knees. This was what he’d been waiting for.
“Ah,” said Lan Caihe, approaching. “An acolyte at heart.”

[ً @darlingsternbot]

If Alex could have told Darlington anything, it would have been, Come back. She would have said it in English and Spanish. She would have used the imperative.

[ً @darlingsternbot]

“These marks mean I am bound in service. Forever.”
“To hell? To Golgarot?”
He laughed then, the sound deep and cold, the thing at the bottom of the lake. “I’m bound to you, Stern. To the woman who brought me out of hell. I will serve you ’til the end of days.”

[ً @darlingsternbot]

He tasted like honey. But she knew better than to get used to a drug like this. She could only hope she wasn’t too late.

[ً @darlingsternbot]

A predilection for first editions and women who like to lecture me about myself. A joke. Nothing more. But that word kept sticking in her thoughts—predilection, precise and filthy at the same time.

[ً @darlingsternbot]

In the mirror, he saw himself, a knight with bowed head, offering his service, a sword in his hand, a sword in his back. He felt no pain, only the ache in his heart. Choose me. There were tears on his cheeks, even as he felt the shame of it.

[ً @darlingsternbot]

Most times Black Elm felt like a dark island, one that had somehow ceased to appear on any chart. Not on Halloween night.

[ً @darlingsternbot]

Darlington spent the early-evening hours with the windows of Black Elm lit, handing out candy, jack-o’-lanterns lining the driveway. He loved this part of Halloween, the ritual of it, the tide of happy strangers arriving on his shores, hands outstretched.