Sublime

Mercy’s mother was sheathed in a violet dress and wore silver chains in her hair and around her neck, all set with amethysts. Her hair drifted like part of the shadows, and she tapped black lips with fingernails of purple crystal as she walked.

She has what writers like to describe as a hint of sadness around her mouth and is the sort of woman whose family, centuries past, would find after her death a journal of poems that no one knew she’d been writing her whole life, or a perfumed packet of fading letters from an ill-fated love who’d been dead for decades.

I’m supposed to make you call me Conductor Cheery, but if you ask me, that sounds even stupider. So let’s just agree on Miss Cheery, all right?”

“She and her sister are meeting with the countess.” “Ah, what a magnificent old dragon,” St. Vincent mused, drawing Lillian through the doorway.

“I am Dulcinea Dearborn.” Morrigan swallowed a small sound of surprise.