21
" Helen’s secretary’s phone was ringing off the hook as Clavier and I passed through the antechamber and into the hallway. Once we were outside, I rounded on him.
“I’m not going to apologize. What you did to me was unconscionable, and now that Alexa is sick—” The urge to strike out at him welled up in me like a flash fire, and I braced my hand against the wall so as not to give in to the impulse. “I want access to everything. And your full cooperation. I am going to make this right, damn it, whatever it takes.”
He stared at me coldly. “Save your self-righteous invectives for someone who will be moved by them.”
I took a menacing step forward, despite my determination to remain poised. “Hoping for a repeat performance? You must get off on asphyxiation.” At the spark of anger in his eyes, I laughed. “The first thing that’s going to happen is that I am going to talk to Sebastian. And you are going to call whoever you need to call to make that happen. Right now.”
Without waiting for a response, I turned sharply and headed for the stairwell. "
― Nell Stark , nevermore (everafter, #2)
23
" Magic comes from the heart, from your feelings, your deepest expressions of desire. That's why black magic is so easy—it comes from lust, from fear and anger, from things that are easy to feed and make grow. The sort I do is harder. It comes from something deeper than that, a truer and purer source—harder to tap, harder to keep, but ultimately more elegant, more powerful. My magic. That was at the heart of me. It was a manifestation of what I believed, what I lived. It came from my desire to see to it that someone stood between the darkness and the people it would devour. It came from my love of a good steak, from the way I would sometimes cry at a good movie or a moving symphony. From my life. From the hope that I could make things better for someone else, if not always for me. Somewhere, in all of that, I touched on something that wasn't tapped out, in spite of how horrible the past days had been, something that hadn't gone cold and numb inside of me. I grasped it, held it in my hand like a firefly, and willed its energy out, into the circle I had created with the spinning amulet on the end of its chain. "
― Jim Butcher , Fool Moon (The Dresden Files, #2)