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Scent of Darkness QUOTES

Scent of Darkness QUOTES

21 " By 8:30 the sky was dark red, as if we were driving toward a bayou on Mars.
"They call it a bloodscent," said Roger. "When the sky turns that color insects and animals come out in droves, especially the ones that lust after the smell of blood. The mosquitoes, the biting flies, chiggers, gnats, gators, and wolverines and wolves- rougarous, they call them around here. "

― Margot Berwin , Scent of Darkness

22 " Michael's house was on Magazine Street across from a little diner called Johnny River. It was a local, homemade-looking place with a screen door and dishes that didn't match. The kind of place tourists never find unless they're visiting a friend in New Orleans who happens to live in the neighborhood.
The eggs came three on a plate, over easy but still hot in the center, perfectly done, with two biscuits, gravy, sausage, grits, and hot sauce on the side, and because of them I liked Michael just a little bit more after breakfast than I had before.
I walked across the street listening to the screen door slam behind me. His house was the second in from the corner. A narrow Victorian painted lilac on the outside with cream-colored steps, chipped and sunken in the middle from who knows how many years and how many footsteps. "

― Margot Berwin , Scent of Darkness

23 " The scent had left a red mark on my neck like a boy had been sucking there.
He put his finger on the mark.
"Does it hurt?"
It didn't, but I felt the liquid inside of me as if I'd drunk it down instead of putting it on my skin. Warmth spread through my limbs like the poison might from a scorpion's tail, branching and branching until it was trapped against the edges of my body, pooling in my fingertips and my toes, with nowhere to go.
As the moments passed a definite scent came up through my pores. It began slowly. First from the inside of my arms, and then from my palms. It rose from my legs and then my thighs and then my breasts. Yes. It was coming from everywhere. Fire and jasmine, leather and rose. I was a repository for Louise's life's work, alive, and inside of me.
"Can you smell it?" I asked Gabriel.
He put his face so close to my body I could feel the moisture from his breath.
"I can."
Gabriel and I faced each other on the bed. We sat there for hours, I had no idea either of us possessed that kind of patience. Slow as time the scent ripened and deepened, growing more remote and strange with each passing minute. Hot and dark and sweet, my fragrance was as mesmerizing as looking up and seeing a fire on the moon.
It was not like any type of perfume that I knew but like nature itself, organically beautiful, as if the scent had been made from the inside of my body and hadn't come from the vial at all. As if it had been sitting inside me for years, a wine that had finally found its perfect moment.
Gabriel breathed in this new part of me. He seemed unfocused and unable to stand up or let go of my hands.
"What's it like for you?" I asked him.
He leaned closer, closed his eyes and inhaled.
"Like sweetness," he said, "with a little bit of poison that makes the sweetness, sweeter. "

― Margot Berwin , Scent of Darkness

24 " I could hear her telling me that a good scent would make a person irresistible to everyone around them; that it should make people feel intimate toward someone they did not know, and in fact had never seen before. It would draw people in, she said, in an animal sort of way. "

― Margot Berwin , Scent of Darkness

25 " Is he from New Orleans originally?"
"Born and raised."
"The people here are born below the sea level and they spend their whole lives wanting to go back to where they came from. My own theory is that everyone from here was a mermaid in another lifetime and they are all trying to swim back to the bottom of the ocean. That Michael of yours will drag you down to the depths if you let him. It's not his fault either. That's where he's most comfortable. "

― Margot Berwin , Scent of Darkness

26 " He opened the door to the freezer and picked up the ice-cube tray that Louise had used to make the bloodsicles so many years ago, now melted red and watery. He held up the bloody washcloth that she had saved and put next to the ice tray when I was ten years old and I immediately touched the scar on my forehead where I had cut it open sleepwalking.
"When we left for New Orleans they turned off the electricity in the house. The ice cubes thawed out in the freezer and that's what I smelled when I came into the house. I knew the truth about you then. The truth was in your plasma and your cells, your escinophils, neutrophils, and platelets. It was in your blood. Louise didn't make the scent, she only collected it and then gave it back to you inside the ruby vial."
"She took it from me when I was just a little girl," I said. "A healer on the bayou told me, in her own way. "

― Margot Berwin , Scent of Darkness

27 " Brushing past me on his way out he smelled like musk. Like something Louise called an animalic, the scent from the gland of a male deer.
He turned around in the middle of the hallway.
"My name's Gabriel, I thought you should know since I've been inside of your grandmother's house."
Like the archangel, I thought, the impact of Loretta's Catholicism making a rare appearance in my mind. I made a mental note to look up the angel Gabriel and see what deeds he had done to deserve his angel status.
When Gabriel was gone his glandular scent, earthy and sweet, lingered in the room. I remembered Louise telling me that a good scent should not smell like a perfume, but like nature itself, including all aspects of the natural world, dark and animal as well as light and floral. "Love includes the bad as well as the good," she'd said, "the evil as well as the kind, and so should the scent that induces it. "

― Margot Berwin , Scent of Darkness

28 " I stood under the arch and absorbed the image.
Rose and blue and ancient oriental rugs held pale pink loveseats with curved arms and perfectly faded silk upholstery. Sheer white-winged angels floated on a ceiling of baby-blue sky with clouds of spun gold. And eastern-facing windows of blue stained glass held paler blue stained-glass crosses in the middle. Daylight and streetlamps were obliterated by thick velvet curtains with gold tasseled ropes, and a small, dusty beam of faded light managed to seep past the heavy drapes, making it look like the tail end of the day instead of the early part of the afternoon.
His home was lavish and seductive, and I thought it rare that a man living alone could create a thing of such intensity. For the second time in two days I found myself having to adjust my opinion of Michael Bon Chance.
It was a marble fountain that ended my reverie and brought me back down to earth. It was the true centerpiece of the room, with water slowly seeping from a cracked jug and dripping over a statue of a nude couple, bathing. I cringed at the sound.
Michael looked at me.
"Something wrong?"
"It's the dripping."
He went over to the bar and poured me a glass of wine.
"You're tense. Maybe this will help."
I took a sip from the glass and put it down on the fireplace mantel. I caught a glimpse of Michael and myself in the mirror above the fire and felt trapped by how beautiful we looked in the rose glow of the dragon's-head lamps with pale pink bulbs. "

― Margot Berwin , Scent of Darkness

29 " I remembered reading that if you have a cat in heat you have to lock it up and make sure it can't escape otherwise it will be gone for days, returning only after it has mated and conceived. I hoped Gabriel had read the same thing. I hoped that he would lock me up and hide the key.
The cats outside were telling me what I couldn't tell myself. Stay inside, they said in their eerie growl, stay inside. I'd always had a great affinity for cats. I believed in them, in their intelligence and their sheer beauty, and I considered them enviable creatures to be reckoned with. "

― Margot Berwin , Scent of Darkness